Cheryl Savageau
An interview with Cheryl Savageau by Jennifer Hill
In your writings, do you have an audience in mind, and if so, who are they?
My first audience is always myself. While I'm writing a poem, I try to figure something out. If there wasn't anything to figure out, I wouldn't write it. In another way, I want the largest possible audience. I want that reader of good will who's out there somewhere. I have also worked really hard to write poetry that's not inaccessible. I want the poetry to be in a language that's readily available to the community I'm writing out of. I like it when people say, "I never read poetry but I like your poetry." I like that as well as poets who can see I'm working, I'm doing something, and that my writing is not just an accident. Over the years, my audience has grown but I have always wanted the working class community I came out of to be able to read the poems and enjoy them without having to know anything about poetry. As a poet, my responsibility is to that reader out there. I want people to be able to read it without it seeming like some kind of a puzzle that only a Ph.D. can figure out. I want it to be something that is alive and for everybody.
Many critics write about the conflicting issues both of identity and of gender within Dirt Road Home, Yet, there is also a religious questioning in several poems including "Thorns," and "Leah," Does this represent a questioning that you had, or are currently going through?
I don't think that it's a questioning in the sense that I no longer believe in the religion I was brought up in. Now, I want other people to question it. There are some real problems in that world view, and I saw damage done within my family because people would sometimes believe without questioning. For me, the need to write about it is part of my witnessing role. How religion enters the picture when people are making decisions about their lives or seeing the world in a certain way is very important. Religious beliefs can be either something very nourishing or something very damaging.
In "Gifts," which is dedicated to your parents, you state beautifully that "Everything is a gift...this life received and given back." There is a great sense of love and hope within this poem. What do you hope for the world?
This was another one of those poems where I felt like this was a Christian holiday, but there seemed to be some aspect of Indian-ness to it in our family. Give-away is a tradition in North America and our parents did it very big with very little. Even though I came from a working class family that did not have as much as other families, I always thought I was in a world of total abundance. As I grew up, this shaped how I see the world in the sense that everything is a gift. The world is there and willing to share and give to you, although you have to give back. That's the reciprocity part of it. It is never just a taking of things. Hopes for the world...peace, justice. If we could have both, it would be nice. More than all that, for me it's balance. If people are living in balance with each other, with the world, with the universe, with some sense of respect, there is reciprocity that everything is a gift and a person must continually be giving back. That's how it works. As soon as you try to hoard something, you stop that flow and bad things start happening.
Dirt Road Home has many powerful poems about women and heritage. How do you view your own role as a woman and as a person with Indian/French Canadian ancestry?
When I started looking at it, I hadn't realized I had done quite that many portraits of women. I know growing up I was a real passionate reader, and it was very disturbing to me to realize how few of the books were about women. When they were, they were from very different cultures than mine. My people were never in the books, never in the stories, whether it's working class people, French Canadian people, or Indian people. We just didn't see that. If there were Indians in the book there were always people with headdresses and Tomahawks, or some other strange stereotype. My impetus in writing has been to put those people into stories, and of course being a woman, it seemed natural to me to write about myself and other women. My role as a women? I don't know. I think more just in terms of what I need to do as a human being on the planet. In adulthood, part of my whole journey has been to name and reclaim the Indian part of me and that became even more important to me when my father died eight years ago. He was real happy that I was telling the stories in my poetry. He had been taught by his parents not to tell, that it wasn't safe. In spite of this, he taught all of us who we were. It became clear to me that if I didn't continue what he did, if I didn't tell the stories, then the next generation wouldn't be Indian anymore. It would end with us. There's a process of culture genocide that has gone on in this continent for five hundred years and this is part of what happens. Part of my role in my own family is connecting those generations up, saying this is who we are and most of all, don't forget who we are.
How do you instill the love of poetry into your students?
First of all, I don't teach any poems unless I love them. I also let my students know that they don't have to love every poem because I'm a poet, and there's plenty of poetry out there that I don't like. I encourage them to act emotionally to the poem first, to let the poem work as a poem for them. That means they can dislike it if they want to, they can love it, or they can be angry about it. What often kills poetry for students is that it is made into a completely intellectual activity where they have to analyze it and dissect it and in the process often kill it. It's really the opposite of what poets are doing. When I'm writing a poem I feel like a magnet. I feel like there's an emotional kernel or there's a story or there's an image or there's a phrase I can't get out of my head. Then like a magnet, all these things come in, and it becomes a synthesizing process, bringing lots of things together, making leaps. I don't want to say we don't look at the poem beyond that level because I think that when the poem has worked on you, after you've reacted, after it's made a difference and it's done what a poem is supposed to do, then I think it's good to go into the poem and ask how the poet did this. When a poem works it's magic, it is important to try and find out how it happens.
Have you shown them any of your work?
I do bring my own work in, although I didn't at first. I felt it was awkward, but then I thought in a writing class especially, I'm asking people to take great risks with their writing. I don't think a great poem can happen without a risk. I need them to see that I do that. I need to put myself out there the way I'm asking them to. I don't bring in a lot of poems, but I think having been in a few workshops when I was learning, it's real helpful if you know where the poet is coming from.
What do you think of the support for the Arts in this country? Has anyone supported you in your work?
It's pretty much of a mess right now, and it is getting real scary to think the NEA might go away all together. It is tremendously important to have support for the Arts. I don't know if I'd have a book out if there wasn't, simply because I'm from a working class background where we had to go to work everyday and bring home money to support a family. It's real hard at the end of those days to also write, to have the kind of commitment and drive that it takes. This is especially true for a first book when you don't even know if what you are doing is worthwhile or whether anyone on the face of the earth thinks it's worth anything. The NEA tells you that somebody thinks the work you are doing is worthwhile. It gives you motivation to continue because it can be very lonely and very discouraging when you are a beginning writer. I personally have been supported in lots of ways. I won Massachusetts fellowship in poetry in 1990 which is a 10,000 dollar fellowship and that allowed me to finish my first book. It gave me the possibility of working less and focusing in on my writing. That's only the monetary part of it, the other side of it was having a group of artists, other poets who said we think your work is so important that we are going to support it. It was a tremendous gift, and again I think for people coming from working class backgrounds, people of color, women, anybody who is marginalized that kind of support is unbelievably important. It would be a disaster for the NEA to go away. I just don't see it working through the private foundations the same. The other thing that people outside may think is that it must be a good old boy network. I'm here to say that it's not because I knew nobody on any of these panels except as names I would see in a bookstore. I was able to be supported on the sole basis of my manuscripts. If you think in terms of the amount of money our government spends on things, they get a tremendous amount back for what they put into the Arts.
