A Necklace of Bees
Danye Romine Powell

Q. Who in the world is this crazy Mrs. Caldwell whom you address in a number of the poems in A Necklace of Bees?
A. I fell in love with Mrs. Caldwell about 15 years ago when I read Nobel-winner Camilo Jose Cela’s novel, Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son. In the novel, Mrs. Caldwell, a narcissistic Spanish woman married to an Englishman, writes letters to her son, Eliacim, who died at sea. The fact that this woman is writing to someone who is dead and will never read the letters fascinated me. Her craziness. Her obsession. Her vanity and self-importance. Her suffocating, almost romantic, love for her child. And of course she was not in the least onto herself. To tell you the truth, she spoke to a part of my own unhealthy self -- a part I’m not proud of -- but a part nonetheless.

Q. What part was that?
A. The part of me that is obsessed with one of my sons -- a son who is an alcoholic -- now in recovery -- but for many years, I
feared for his life and that fear often made me crazy and bound me to him in a powerful and morbid way.

Q. In the poems, you often upbraid Mrs. Caldwell. Sometimes you sympathize with her. But always you seem drawn to her.
A. Oh, yes. Very drawn. My conversations with her are, in essence,
conversations with myself. And although I don’t think of poetry as therapy -- in fact, I hate that notion -- I must admit that my dialogues with Mrs. Caldwell allowed me to see myself and my obsessions more clearly. She was the perfect foil.

Q. How does your son feel about your using him and his drinking as material for poems.
A. Oddly, he doesn’t mind. In fact, my 2002 collection, The Ecstasy of Regret, is full of poems about his drinking, about his recovery, about his relapses. I dedicated that book to him, and he’s very proud of it, likes showing it to friends.

Q. You write a news column for The Charlotte Observer, and in it you often write about personal experiences. Do you ever reveal in the paper the intimate details of your life -- the details about your son -- that you’ve revealed in your poetry?
A. No. I guess I’d be afraid that I’d be judged harshly. Also, the newspaper is for news of people and events. Poetry is for the news of the human heart. As William Carlos Williams says, more of the latter should be in newspapers.

Q. Do you fear being judged by people who read your poetry?
A. If someone takes the time and effort to read a collection of poetry, they are welcome to my most private self. Maybe I’m deluded, but it seems that careful readers of poems are more accepting of human foibles. No matter. You write what you have to write.

Q. For seventeen years, you were the book review editor of The Charlotte Observer, and during those years you interviewed dozens of novelists about their creative processes. Those collected interviews you edited into a book, Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers. Did you learn anything from these novelists—Styron, Welty, Percy, Peter Taylor, Reynolds Price Kaye Gibbons—that you could apply to your poetry?
A. I did. But hindsight tells me that essentially I was seeking -- silly as it sounds -- permission to do my own writing. I had written poetry before I went to work for The Observer. Then for a dozen years I didn’t write a word except for the paper. During those years, I was asking other writers, on almost a daily basis, how they went about getting their work done. Finally, after all those years, I applied for a sabbatical at the paper and was able to write again. For some reason, I needed a group of mentors to tell me it was OK to spend time writing. Not that I ever told these novelists that I was also a writer.

Q. Did you take away any practical advice?
A. In almost every interview. I remember James Dickey talking about how he worked on the principle of refining low-grade ore, as if he were a gold miner. “I have several tons of dirt,” he said, “and I work with that and extract whatever gold is in it.“
And Walker Percy talked about going to his office over his wife’s bookstore every day and staring at the blank wall. “And you give up,“ he said. “It’s a matter of giving up, of surrendering, of letting go. You say, ‘All is lost. The jig is up. I surrender. I’ll never write another word again. I admit total defeat. I’m washed up.’”
And he goes on: “Oh, well, I’ve been cast up on an island. I’m a wreck. But here I am. Still alive. Here’s a pencil. Here’s the paper…
Since I’m here, why don’t I write something?”
I love that.
And Josephine Humphries talked about how when she turned forty, she gave up teaching and hosting dinner parties and having lunch out and coaching Little League and dedicated herself to two things only: Her two sons and her writing.
I, too, refuse to have lunch out. It takes the day’s energy.
And Eudora Welty described her perfect writing day, which consisted of no interruptions -- no telephone, no doorbell -- and stopping at lunch just to “slap together a tomato sandwich” and just writing all day and then having another day just like that one to follow it.

Q. Excuse me, but it sounds as if all this is still about getting permission for yourself.
A. I think you’re right. None of it is very practical, is it?

Q. OK. So tell me. Did you finally get the permission you needed?
A. There’s probably not enough permission in the whole world for me. But at last I’m at that place where I feel guilty when I’m not writing rather than when I am writing.

Q. How did you happen to become a writer?
A. I grew up a left-handed, only child. Both were handicaps and advantages for me. For instance, my mother couldn’t stand for me to help in the kitchen because she thought I did everything backwards with my left hand. So she’d say, “You sit at the table and read to me while I get supper ready.” And I did. She loved to hear poetry -- Emily Dickinson and Wordsworth and Poe and Keats and Shakespeare’s sonnets. And the two of us would practically swoon over phrases -- “I’ll tell you how the sun rose, -- / A ribbon at a time.“ Thanks to all this reading aloud, I fell in love with language, with poetry, with rhythm, with images, and, frankly, with the sound of my own voice reading poetry.
And my mother was so enthusiastic. “Oh,” she‘d say. “Read that line again! Isn‘t that marvelous.“ I was hooked. And we likely wouldn’t have had that luxury if there had been other children around.

Q. I understand you belong to a poetry group with other women -- Susan Ludvigson, Julie Suk, Dede Wilson and Lucinda Grey. How often do you meet and what do you do?
A. We meet once a week -- I think the continuity is essential (and so is dessert) -- and we bring new poems or revisions of older poems. We pass out copies of each poem, and we read the poem aloud twice. The poet tries to keep her mouth shut as the group responds to the poem. We don’t fix each other’s work, but we tend to hover orally over a part of a poem that doesn’t seem to be working. We may not always have the right words immediately to describe what we’re sensing. But if two or more -- or even one -- hovers at a certain spot, that spot probably needs attention. I might add that as a group of writers we’ve become less and less defensive over the years and, as critics, more and more exacting. Three of us been together for close to three decades.

Q. What are your current work habits and have they changed over the years?
A. They have indeed changed. I used to write by hand, for instance, and I did a lot of my writing in the public library because that's where I felt most energized. Now I can write anywhere, anytime, and I nearly always write even my first draft on the computer. Another thing that's changed is this: In earlier years, I could apply an absolutely blank (conscious) mind to the page and usually something would come. Now I tend more to go to the computer with a snippet of something already in my head -- a line or an image. And the process of writing the poem is to tease that snippet to its full size and color. Remember those rocks you used to drop in water as a kid, and they would get bigger -- am I remembering this correctly? -- and they would fill the water with color. It's like that. Rarely now do poems come to me whole cloth as they occasionally once did. I miss that exhiliration. My biggest thrills now are typically in the re-writing.

Q. How did you happen to publish with the University of Arkansas Press?
A. In 1993, I entered the Press’s annual contest -- it was called the University of Arkansas First Book Award. Miller Williams was the publisher then. Jo McDougall was the final judge that year. And, to my astonishment and delight, I won. That was the collection, At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home. I submitted my next manuscript to them about five or six years later, and at that time, Larry Malley was the publisher. He had sent the manuscript to Enid Shomer, who was by then the poetry editor. She didn’t feel it was quite ready, and she invited me to submit again another year. So I took out weaker poems, revised others, wrote new ones, and re-submitted in 2001. On Feb. 1, 2002, she called to say she’d like to publish The Ecstasy of Regret. And I have to say, it was a far better manuscript than the one she had turned down.

Q. Did the manuscript need further revision?
A. Enid was a genius at putting me right on the palm of her hand. She said, “We will publish the manuscript exactly as it is. But I have a few suggestions that I think will make it a better collection.” I have to say that her suggestions were excellent but some were also very difficult to execute. For instance, she asked me to go back into one poem and change the ending -- she didn’t think I’d come to the right ending yet. It was like taking a chisel to cement. I had to go out and buy a new lavender sweater to put on, and I sat there just sweating over these revisions.The manuscript got stronger again from these suggestions. I can’t praise Enid enough as an editor and the Press as a team dedicated to publishing the best, most accurate and attractive books possible. They are terrific and I’m grateful to each one.

Q. What do you read?
A. The New Yorker, the Georgia Review, Field, Poetry, The AWP Chronicle and a variety of other literary journals. I also devour individual poets—Stephen Dunn, Charles Wright, Jean Valentine, Mark Strand, Kate Daniels are old favorites. Christine Garren is a relatively new favorite.
My husband likes me to read aloud to him, especially winter evenings. A friend just recommended the non-fiction book, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersections Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Jo. My husband loves hummingbirds and I love scandal so this ought to suit us both very nicely.