Virtual Salon #2 with William Woolfitt

The season of cracking open, bloodroot,
egg strings. My grandmother chops the cloddy
ground. Many years without him. Onion sets,
new moon peas. 
          from “Chorus Frog” by William Woolfitt

It’s alarming to watch Netflix now: all those strangers in unconcerned proximity, sharing bread, shaking hands! Poor hygiene is not, I suspect, what those directors wanted me to focus on. So when I say that William Woolfitt’s lovely third collection is crowded with isolates, full of hungry survivors, am I distorting the book through a lens of present anxieties? When I notice that many of the landscapes he evokes are like the places I walk through daily–degraded, haunted, but beautiful–am I biased? I think a person always reads from where she is, and that’s okay, although that’s one of the reasons I like in-person, open-ended discussions about books, too. It’s helpful when someone else’s reactions knock your own perspective ajar.

Still, I feel sure that Woolfitt’s book is exceptionally musical, both in its references and in the sonic density of his own alliterative lines (you’ll find listening suggestions in the mini-interview below, to boot). Spring Up Everlasting gives witness to human hardship, vulnerable creatures, and environmental damage with love and compassion: the author sees fully and justly, and the poems he builds from those observances are beautifully weighted, crafty in rhythm and structure. And one last point: Woolfitt really does describe people washing their hands a lot, from Rulina who plunges an arm into “icy creek-water” that “chills her blood, needles her with stars of pain,” to the laborer in “Red Notes” who dreams of release and reunion:

Before they meet, he’ll wash with a bucket,
scrub the pulp off his hands, sing the notes
he’s strung for her, tomato lonesome, tomato blue.

1. If you were ordering thematically appropriate refreshments for this shindig, what would they be?

The food menu would include Rulina’s elk tenderloin, half-moon pies, sawhorse tables laden with bowls of potato salad, deviled eggs, and chow-chow. And also hulled corn soup, hardtack, porridge and fried plantains with daybreak sauce, tacos, and figs. The poems of Spring Up Everlasting wander from Appalachia to Mali, then back to Appalachia, then to Newfoundland, to California, and so on, visiting sacred grounds, desecrated wastes, reclaimed lands. The drink menu would include spring water, rain-barrel water, living water: it’s a book that looks again and again to creeks, ponds, oceans, and underground streams.

2. If, after your breathtaking reading and the subsequent standing ovation, a friend pulled you into a curtained window seat and asked, “How are you really?” or “Are you able to write these days?”, what might you answer?

Teaching and parenting are keeping me busy these days, and I’m okay with that. Maggie Anderson says that a poem comes from “persistence, devotion, and a sustaining hope that it was important to write and that it would, eventually, come around to its best shape.” I’d like to believe that I can practice the poet’s verbs—persist, devote, and sustain hope—in whatever task I’m doing. Richard Foster says that “our work becomes prayer,” and I’d like to believe that our work can become poetry too.

3. How can your virtual audience find out more?

Visit www.williamwoolfitt.com or www.mupress.org/Spring-Up-Everlasting-Poems-P1039.aspx. But I would also like for my audience to look through me to the sources that I’ve drawn from while writing Spring Up Everlasting: Jessie van Eerden’s The Long Weeping; Ida Stewart’s Gloss; Melissa Range’s Horse and Rider; Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light; Maxine Kumin’s The Retrieval System; photographs by Eudora Welty and Roger May; Ella Jenkins’ “The Wilderness;” Jean Ritchie’s “Black Waters.”