Meet Our January Massachusetts Poet in the Spotlight: Rosalind Pace

"I work slowly- a quick first draft in pencil or pen on plain copy paper– like the initial gestures on  canvas that are part of the vocabulary of an abstract expressionist painter and which I learned many years ago - - and then I step back, look at what’s on the page, and begin the long slow process of asking the hard questions- what do I really want to say?  what is the poem really trying to say? The other hard question to ask of the poem is wherein lies the music?  I tend to work with a four or five stress line; in earlier work the lines were longer to accommodate the rush of verbal spillage that was occurring then. Alan Dugan, with whom I worked for many years at Castle Hill. Truro Center for the Arts, said to me once, “My dear Rosalind, you are too much.” At the time I thought it was a compliment; now I know it was his way of saying, nicely, “you’ve got too damn many words in here.”   I also have come to know, through my own teaching, that for certain students – of any age- the best thing to do is to let them run their course, so to speak, trusting that sooner or later they will do the necessary and fierce work of honing their craft and listening to the sound of their own inner voice.  This I am still doing
 I have never worked conceptually. My mind doesn’t seem to work that way. A poem always starts for me with a word or phrase, a sensory image, an arbitrary “strategy” ( eg. write a poem that’s all questions), an intuitive gathering of raw material, such as a random list of words, or (see poem below) choosing three postcards from a pile and somehow putting them together. I never know how a poem is going to end or what it will reveal to me. After several additions and subtractions I transfer the draft to my laptop- and there I lose track of how many revisions occur before I let it be. Every so often I will print it out and go at it again with a pencil, notes in the margins, and so forth. The poem below happened fairly quickly- about three months and probably a few dozen revisions. Once I had made the basic connections, I looked up information about Franz Marc and about that painting in particular. At some point I realized that the poem was turning into a double inverted sonnet- mirror arguments about the dark side and the light side- it felt like the right container for what the poem wanted to say.
 
Each poem I make feels like a small miracle- some insight or connection I had never made before, even though after that happens it also feels inevitable, as if it has been there all along.  And each poem I make I could not have made without being who I am, knowing what I know, and being where I am.  No matter what I am writing about, my poems contain now both the sense of where I live- on a country road that leads to the sea, a place of contentment, and a sense of the wider world and all its beauties, confusions, horrors. Even though I may not be writing about these things directly, they are there, in the emotional heart of the poems.
"