Morning Edition’s Cathy Wurzer interviews Minnesota poet James Armstrong, who talks about his volume "Blue Lash." The poems look at the complex nature of Lake Superior. Armstrong also reads a poem from book.
Morning Edition’s Cathy Wurzer interviews Minnesota poet James Armstrong, who talks about his volume "Blue Lash." The poems look at the complex nature of Lake Superior. Armstrong also reads a poem from book.
CATHY WURZER: And I'm Cathy Wurzer. This is Morning Edition on Minnesota Public Radio. We're going to switch gears right now and immerse ourselves in the wild beauty of Lake Superior. Poet James Armstrong examines the complex nature of the big lake in his new collection of poetry, Blue Lash.
Lake superior, for Armstrong, roils with both beauty and foreboding, and was the primary source of inspiration for his poems. The collection, Blue Lash, connects the history of the lake to Armstrong's life, and some universal human emotions. James Armstrong will read from the book tonight in the Twin Cities. We get a sneak preview this morning. Good morning.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Good morning.
CATHY WURZER: Nice to have you in the studio.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Nice to be here.
CATHY WURZER: Can you explain how this collection came together.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Well, I guess, it's the-- first of all, the result of a lifetime of love for Lake Superior. I moved up to Michigan when I was 13. And the first thing my family did was drive up to the Upper Peninsula. And so we had been living in Indiana, Terre Haute, Indiana, actually. So we're used to this very humid summers and where you can't see more than 10 feet through the muck.
And we got up to Michigan, and wow, this is wonderful. And then, we drove up to the Upper Peninsula. And I'm a Midwestern boy, and I never realized we had an ocean in the middle of the continent.
CATHY WURZER: It's amazing.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Yes.
CATHY WURZER: What is it about the big lake that is so intriguing to you?
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Well, I think, like most people, I find it overwhelming. It is sublime. And it is so cold, and so other. It's beyond the human imagining, in a way. And I think those moments where we're taken beyond ourselves become spiritual for us.
CATHY WURZER: One of the poems in your book that I'm specifically interested in, because it really spoke to me, is September. So if you could, please, read the poem for us.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: I'd be happy to.
September.
I missed the tilt and racquet of your face, the collapsing factories of your anger,
The shoreline wearing your boas of foam, the steel mirror of your silence,
Your glass contingencies in the night's hold,
I missed the mornings coverlet of cloud, one gull flying east over the moving distances,
While closer in the same boulder is kissed again and again,
As the blacksmith plunges the bruised steel into the tub, erasing the heat of his industry,
I have cooled my brow with the ice of your disdain, I have held your cold hand in the rain.
CATHY WURZER: Tell me where that poem came from.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Well, it's kind of a sonnet. In other words, it's a 14-line poem, which it picks up some of the concerns of the sonnet. And the sonnet form is constructed to talk about an absent lover. And so I have a kind of anthropomorphic address that I'm giving to the lake. And it's a poem about how we feel when we're down-state, I guess, and we're thinking about the lake. So it has that Petrarchan feel of praising the beautiful, disdainful lady.
And I think that it works well for how we feel about natural objects because, of course, they're not human, and they don't really love us. Matter of fact, they're actually trying to drown us in the case of Lake Superior, but we love them all the same with this crazy love that the sonnet is particularly good at conveying.
CATHY WURZER: And She can be wild and vicious. And that's part of-- for me, anyway, that's what intrigues me about the lake. She can be so placid at times, and just this wildness at other stages.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Yes. 350 shipwrecks. That's pretty vicious.
CATHY WURZER: Talk a little bit more about the connections that you made between the history of the lake and your own personal history.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Well, I was a Michigan boy for a long time. And then, I moved to the East Coast to get my advanced degrees, and I was a long way away from the lake. And then, I got a position as artist-in-residence on Isle Royale in 1994. So I was taken from the East Coast and plunged back into the Midwest and onto Isle Royale, which was a pretty amazing opportunity. My wife and I spent two weeks on a cabin at the tip of Isle Royale.
CATHY WURZER: That's beautiful.
JAMES ARMSTRONG: So that's where a lot of the poems really begin. But it's been about 11 or 12 years. It takes me a long time to finish a poem.
CATHY WURZER: Does it really?
JAMES ARMSTRONG: Yes. And I had another artist-in-residency on Grand Island with the Hiawatha National Forest in Munising Bay in Michigan, so the project continued. And I did a lot of research, actually, because I had to learn about the lake and about the geology that underlies it, and the hydrological cycles, and being able to identify all the plants and animals. So it's been a long process.
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