Quick Six with Sue Ellen Thompson
Loss can defeat us or serve as the impetus for positive change. Here, Sue Ellen Thompson shows us how to mourn inevitable changes, tuck the memories away, then go on to see the possibility of a new and promising chapter in one's life. Ted Kooser (U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006) on Thompson's poem,
No Children, No Pets
Sue Ellen Thompson's poetry has garnered many accolades her book, The Golden Hour (2006), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and her poetry was selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2006 . She has been invited to read in New England , New York , Washington D.C. , and Galway , Ireland , in addition to appearing on Garrison Keillor's National Public Radio show, The Writer's Almanac. She recently edited The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry . She's new to the Eastern Shore, having moved here from Connecticut , and her husband is the president of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels.
What's Up? Eastern Shore : What inspired you to become a poet?
Sue Ellen Thompson : I became a poet because I loved the intensity of the experience of reading a poem its ability to convey profound emotion with just a few words or an image. I began writing it in my twenties, a period of great emotional turmoil. And nothing was more satisfying than being able to put some of that turmoil to rest by encapsulating it in language.
WUES : Which poets have had the most influence on you and your work?
SET: Having attended Middlebury College in Vermont , I grew up in the shadow of Robert Frost. I admired his directness and simplicity, his ability to use everyday language and to write poems that could be understood and appreciated by ordinary people. But I wrote my master's thesis on Wallace Stevens, another great New England poet who is the exact opposite of Frost in many ways. I do not pretend to have anything in common with either of these poets, but I think that as a young writer I was trying to find a place for myself somewhere between Frost's plain-spokenness and Stevens' wild imaginativeness.
WUES : I understand you recently moved here from Connecticut . Would you say a bit about your background: where you're originally from and what brings you to the Shore?
SET: I was born in New Jersey but spent my summers on Lake Champlain in Vermont , four years at Middlebury, and 13 summers at The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which was started by Frost and is still affiliated with Middlebury. I can't remember a time when I didn't gravitate to northern New England . After a particularly harsh winter in the 1970s, however, I decided I had to go "south" and find a more temperate place to live. I ended up in Mystic, Connecticut , near where my older sister was living, and really loved being near the water. I lived there for more than 30 years and never expected to leave. Then my husband was offered a wonderful job as president of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels. I had just published my fourth book and decided that if we were ever going to "make the break" and try something new, this was probably our last chance.
WUES : As a recent transplant to Oxford , what is most striking to you about the environs and the community?
SET: There are two things that have struck me from the very start about Oxford and its environs: the flatness and the friendliness. I'm so used to negotiating hills when walking or biking, and at first I couldn't believe there weren't any around here. But there are compensations: in addition to the great biking, there is all that sky, none of which is blocked by mountains. I've also been overwhelmed by how open and welcoming my Oxford neighbors are. I never really thought of New Englanders as being unfriendly, but I'm beginning to understand how they got that reputation.
WUES : Please tell us about your role as editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (a collection of more than ninety poems by respected poets, including Phillip Levine, Rita Dove, and Tony Hoagland) and the thought process behind your choosing particular poets, and how you decided which specific poems of theirs to include.
SET: I approached the editing of the anthology as a way of bringing together poets whose work I loved and poems that you don't need to be a poet or have a Ph.D. in English to understand. I was looking for a combination of surface clarity and emotional depth, although there were certainly poets I couldn't afford to include because I had a very limited budget for permission fees. There were also certain requirementsI had to include all of the poets whose work had been published by Autumn House Press, I had to have adequate representation of women and minority poets, etc. But beyond these few guidelines, I was free to select the poems that I felt best illustrated what poetry should be: honest, clear, and deeply moving.
WUES : Do you have a specific subject in your poetry that you are deeply connected to, that is your favorite?
SET: I'm certainly not a nature poet, nor a political one. I gravitate toward human subjects, especially marriage and family relationships. This puts me outside the mainstream as far as academia is concerned, but I do not write for an academic audience. I write about ordinary things, for ordinary people poetry for poetry-haters," as my husband characterizes my work.
Donna Whicher
If your interest runs more towards the visual arts, you’ll want to be in Grasonville at Prospect Country Club learn to meet nationally renowned artist Greg Mort who will be giving a lecture at 3:00 p.m. http://whatsupmag.com/maryland/events/Greg-Mort-to-Speak-to-the-Arts/event-42433.aspx
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