Wade, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on your latest publication, a poetry collection Songs of the Sun Amor (Blaze Vox Books: New York, 2019). Songs of the Sun Amor can be purchased directly from BlazeVox.
SG: Your work has previously been described by critics as ‘emotionally satisfying’ and ‘profound’.
I found myself very moved by a number of the poems, perhaps, I feel, the most personal in the collection, and, at the same time, the most universal.
In ‘About My Mother’ and ‘The Map of Elsewhere’, the early loss of your mother is explored and in ‘Black Sheep’, and ‘Sun, No Son’, the difficult relationship with your father. Could you talk about the placement of these poems in Songs of Sun Amor. They sit, almost as beacons, in between tones of humour and angst.
WS: You are right: my poems are meant to be complete in themselves and to have an immediate emotional impact. The reader may experience them as I wrote them: with the shock of recognition. There is a certain sadness of course, a lingering melancholy, but there is also the humour and the joy. My editor had suggested that my book be organized thematically. He said he found three main themes: the mother/father/child relationship, the lover/partner/wife relationship, and the relationship of the search for a going beyond or transcendence. However, I thought it would be more interesting for the reader to experience My Sun Amor poems as a progression, with certain poems as you say acting as beacons and lighting the way forward. One of the poems you refer to ends with the line: “Real Amor was on the map of elsewhere.” That marks the separation from the mother and father and the beginning of the poetic journey to find that “Real Amor.” Ultimately it leads to the conclusion or illumination if you like, of the last lines of the book, the conscious coupling with the “Sun Amor immensity.”
SG: Much of Songs of Sun Amor is concerned with the search for and hope of finding the self, and, at times, escaping this self. In “The Map of Elsewhere” we learn that ‘I discovered love in strange places/Real Amor was on the map of elsewhere’ and in “Bio Poem” the past is linked to the future
‘with a simple ampersand/Ghost floating through the hourglass of your life/Longing to break the glass, rise in the air, free’.
Can you tell us about these themes – did they emerge as the collection formed or had you those themes in mind?
WS: Let me share a secret with you: I didn’t write my “Sun Amor” book. It wrote itself. The themes emerged by themselves in an organic way. One of my first memories as a child was that of being trapped not only in my own family but in my own body. I didn’t want to be a prisoner of myself or of the accident of my birth. To do that I had to recreate myself, “to find the promise of a life reborn.” How to escape the limitations of the self, of the language that defines you? I did it from an early age by a process of carefully organized revolt. I did it through literature and poetry, I did it through travels and encounters, I did it through learning and assimilating other languages and cultures that were not my own. I made my own “elsewhere.” My Sun Amor book is the result of that search. The reader can explore that geography and find some really interesting things that will help them in their own relationships.
SG: I think that journey of escaping through immersion elsewhere really comes through in the collection. I’m also interested in the title of the collection, as on reading it for the second and third time, I found myself wanting to read many of the poems aloud and it occurred to me that they were almost hymn-like, particularly with the sparing use of punctuation. I’m thinking here, for example, of “Mirror Man”, after the great line ‘I’m the tossed back of my father’, the poem comes at the reader with each line, almost like listing off the anger points. I’m also thinking of “Amor Belief” and “The Language of Sunflowers.” And, of course, the striking “A Question of Pain”. Can you talk a little bit about this?
WS: All my books are about pain and loss and recovery and the quest for transcendence, for finding a way to heal and go beyond. As I wrote in one poem, “The good doctor Amor will repair all the broken/ With threads of solar gold.” It’s true that the collection could have been titled “Hymns to the Sun Amor.” It’s also true that the lines are constructed in such a way that they almost cry out to be read aloud. When I write them, or rather work on them, it’s as if I had another deeper voice in my head reciting them. Poetry from the beginning was an oral tradition. And it’s regained some popularity today due to the performance poetry readings. One of my favourite poems is “My Amor Belief.” In these dark times, when there are so many forms of hatred and intolerance, it would be amazing if we all could just “learn how to breathe and to be/ Relieved of belief, of religion free.”
SG: Yes, it is a beautiful line, Wade, and I wonder how we can do that, learn to breathe and be relieved of belief and religion. But God, nature, landscape and beauty also feature in Songs of the Sun Amor. They seem, to me, to be intertwined, as if a dialogue between them is running concurrently with the narrator’s life, and, at the same time, with the continuum of time – the back and forth between past, present and future. Could you tell us a little bit about your use of time in the collection? I’m thinking, specifically, of “Big blue beautiful you”, “The Language of Sunflowers” – ‘Seize the special moment that comes/Between the breathing in and the breathing out’ and ‘Spend an hour lying in the summer grass/Listening to what the yellow flowers say.’ This speaks to me of recapturing childhood. Irish writer Desmond Hogan once said that writing is about ‘keeping childhood alive’.
WS: I’ve made many trips to Japan, spending some time in a “ryokan” in Kyoto, and I feel a great affinity with the deep spiritual essence of Japanese culture. They have an obsession with nature and an obsessions with perfection in even the simplest things, like a bowl or a shadow or a cherry blossom. The Shinto religion is based on a reverence for nature. It’s interesting that in a Shinto shrine, there is no decoration, none at all. There is only an image of the sun. The sun is considered to be female, a goddess and the supreme deity (Amaterasu). And I think today, perhaps more than ever, we are all looking and thirsting for some illumination in our lives, for “the flash that stuns/ Awake from the sun god’s gun.”
SG: That is fascinating. I hadn’t connected your work to the deity. I shall have to have another read, with new eyes! After I had read the collection I found myself thinking about the stories within the poems and I wonder if you would ever return to the form of fiction again?
WS: Each poem in My Sun Amor book tells a story, and that story, like those Russian dolls, is imbricated in and part of a larger story, and it all leads back to Amor. And I have written fictions and a memoir, all about Amor with a small A by the way, in my books “One Tine in Paris” and “The Electric Affinities.” And there may be one more to come.
SG: That is lovely to hear that there may be another novel to come. Lastly, Wade, some fun questions:
- City or countryside? I was born in the Big Apple but I would to live in the countryside with wild horses and apple trees.
- America or Europe? When I am in Europe I miss America. And viceversa.
- Coffee or tea? Japanese green tea.
- What writing project are you working on now? A book of poems entitled “Going Head to Head.” It’s about my head and your head and how we can escape from our heads and move into some other dimension.
SG: Well, Wade, thank you so much for participating in my Writers Chat series. It has been wonderful chatting with you and I wish you well with this collection and your forthcoming one Going Head to Head.
Songs of The Sun Amor can be purchased directly from BlazeVox.
Shauna Gilligan Writer 