Mary Gilliland’s poems first began appearing in Slant in the Summer of 1990. She has also published widely in other print and online literary journals and most recently anthologized in Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice; Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose; and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands. She is a past recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and a Council on the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University, where she created and taught seminars such as “Ecosystems & Ego Systems” and “America Dreaming.” Her latest collection, The Devil’s Fools, was published in November of 2022 and won the Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award. Infused with eco-logic, informed by feminism, and taking cues from Eve, Cain, Proserpine, Ulysses, Parsifal, and selves past and present, the fifty poems of this new collection question and illustrate myths of nature and the nature of inherited myth.
Slant editor Michael Blanchard recently had the chance to visit with Mary and talk about her life and her writing.
MB: Mary, thanks for carving time out of your schedule to visit with me. I want to begin by congratulating you on the release late last year of your newest collection of poems, The Devil’s Fools, by Codhill Press and for earlier receiving the Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award for the manuscript prior to its publication. On what basis was The Devil’s Fools selected for that honor?
MG: Michael, I am thrilled to be engaging in this conversation with you. I directed your first question to James Sherwood, my publisher at Codhill Press, and feel both humble and proud by his response:
The Devil’s Fools was chosen as the winner out of a field of over 250 submissions because it was a superb collection of poems that, in important ways, hews close to Codhill’s mission to “aid the serious seeker,” and “To serve our memory of what is truly important: that the writer should be a guide.” Moreover, whatever rubrics or heuristics one might use for evaluation tend to crumble when applied to poetry. It’s fine to consider whether individual poems are “good,” (artful? technically proficient? well-constructed? meaningful? complex? multi-layered?) or if a collection is well-organized, if it coheres—but how does one measure transcendence? At the end of the day, the criteria distill down to a gestalt—what the reviewer feels. Emily Dickinson is instructive, here. She once wrote in a letter, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” Similarly, an internal lodestone pulls me in a direction, and I listen. Here, the lusciousness of the language, the mythic scope, and the attention to the natural world all contribute to the overall feeling of the work and allowed it to rise above.
MB: What a wonderful commendation of you and your collection, Mary. Congratulations once again. I want to make sure we save lots of time to talk about “the lusciousness of the language, the mythic scope, and the attention to the natural world” in The Devil’s Fools before we conclude this visit, but first tell me a little more about yourself and your background.
MG: Just as I was to start kindergarten, my family moved away from our roots in Philadelphia. Shallow roots, really: my grandparents were first in their families born in the United States. So I was a child in the 1950’s white suburbs as these were being constructed and it seems I always wanted to live in a world larger than that, a world beyond that. At the public library I found books about history and geography of individual countries all over the world, inspiring novels, and European myths, American folktales. In the other direction was the natural world; beyond newly mown lawns and granite curbs, sunlight filtered through tall trees, minnows and tadpoles darted a pond. I walked into that wonder and tranquility from a busy household where I had a lot of chores as well as a lot of love.
MB: It seems that where you did most of your growing up was positioned well enough for you to enjoy some of the amenities of city life, such as the public library, but also be within reach of the natural world. I can see evidence of both influences in many of the poems in The Devil’s Fools, the myths and folktales as well as the affinity for nature. Were there other influences in your early life?
MG: Physical education (which by the way my grade school lacked, formally; the resources weren’t there, though we did have civics courses and music) teaches the importance of distributing your weight to all four corners of the foot. School and home, natural world and library were my four corners as a child. And I had a deep spiritual life. Over and over I’d recite many different prayers. Did I bring that devotion to being an early reader? Or did it go the other way: was it my devotion to reading that transferred to the prayer books and missals? Probably the latter: the voice box linking head and heart.
MB: I see hints in some of the poems in The Devil’s Fools that your early spiritual life was framed by Roman Catholicism. Were you raised in the Catholic church?
MG: Yes, and that was both strenuous and inspiring. Pre-Vatican II, the shared vivid ceremonies held such mystery. Joy, sorrow, glory — as the poem “Lit with Radiance” recapitulates. The choir raised our voices in Latin, frankincense permeated the air as the priest tapped and swung his silver censer, and occasionally someone kneeling in the pews would faint from the fasting required in order to receive Holy Communion. I sometimes introduce “My Dirty Yes to Life” with its mentions of “purloined Hebrew metaphor” and “faith in miracles” as a reply to that strict upbringing.
The religion’s iconic figures are still with me. Eve inhabits the final poem of The Devil’s Fools and the Biblical first murderer speaks for himself in “Cain.” That poem occurs in a set that also includes “ ‘to ashes…to dust’/The Cattle of the Sun,” bearing witness to a 2001 livestock pandemic when the deaths of millions of animals and not a few farmers could have been avoided had there been a more nuanced and less draconian response. We live with, and perhaps my poems live with, an inner paradox of good intentions and aggression, the helps and hindrances of our institutions.
MB: It’s easy to see how the mysteries and liturgy of the church could have such an influence on you as a young person. And, as you mention, they still resonate in your poems today. At what point in your younger life did you discover an interest in writing poetry? And were those early poems also shaped by your nascent spirituality?
MG: My childhood poems were secular. Somewhere I have the two-inch clippings, each of a poem with my name and age, of the four-beat four-line rhyming verses that I composed when I was five or six. My mother had me mail them to the weekly paper published in our town. The first to appear was about Halloween, others for the new baby, the pet canary…everyday household subjects. At Our Lady of Peace School I loved the blue hardcover that we called our grammar book, different each year, devoted to language arts. As a preteen I began to write free verse. I wrote when inspired, rather than prolifically.
MB: It sounds like poetry was a natural mode of expression for you from a very early age. What made it so appealing to you? Was it the structure, sound, and rhythm? The imagery? Or both?
MG: I’m sure all the formal elements of poetry, those elements that can be described and analyzed, appealed to young Mary Gilliland subliminally. The fact that a poem is words apart, intact, set off on a page especially appealed to me, for I sensed that in its concentrated form, a poem read aloud could get people thinking and stir their feelings.
MB: And were you starting to read a lot of poetry early on? Which poets were you particularly drawn to?
MG: For Roman Catholics, The Sixties really began with the election of the first U.S. Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, closely followed by the ecumenical Pope John XXIII opening up the church when he convened Vatican Council II from 1962 to 1965. The Civil Rights movement was growing, as was protest and resistance to the U.S. war against Vietnam. These were seismic developments in a country whose looks and voices had been patriarchal WASP. That’s the context in which I discovered Walt Whitman as a pre-teen, then the Beat poets at the public library where I worked after school ages 14 to 18. My gifted high school teacher Sister Moya Gullage, SHCJ, included in her American Studies courses Dylan Thomas and the work of living poets like Moore, cummings, and Wilbur. In one of her classes, on an overhead projector, I gave a presentation on Allen Ginsberg, particularly “Howl.” Rukeyser’s poetry would come to me later, including her Book of The Dead and her essays The Life of Poetry arguing for poetry’s ability to open the heart of compassion.
MB: Sounds like a great foundation was being laid for an emerging poet. Now somewhere amid the seismic shift within the Catholic Church and throughout the country, I’m guessing it was in your later high school years, you made the decision to attend Cornell University. What factors led you to choose Cornell? What other schools did you consider at the time?
MG: I was oldest of eight children; if we wanted to go to college, we paid our own way, winning scholarships and working double shifts. So while I’d like to tell you, Michael, that it was ideals and a plan, I chose Cornell because they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. The university is also strong in the sciences, and I applied to colleges in pre-med intending to find The Cure for cancer, which at the time was of a piece with the U.S. goal to land a Man on the Moon. (Another mentor to credit here: my 7th-grade teacher, who later left the convent to work as a chemist, had immersed me in higher math and the latest findings about cellular biology and assigned challenging essay topics.)
I’d been forbidden to apply to my first choice, UC-Berkeley, my mother fearing the student activism of the Free Speech movement there, or NYU, there also being a fear probably based in racism of New York City. So I applied to three colleges in Boston, viewed as safe, respectable (Irish?!) when a Cornell alumna invited us to lunch at her home, perhaps because I was the scholarship girl and top student in the class of ’69 at Oak Knoll School, whose reputation was, and still is, excellent. So I went from a class of 31 young women to an immense research university in a remote location that turned out to be breathtakingly beautiful and, the month I received my acceptance letter, to make the glossy pages of Life magazine in one of the era’s most famous acts of student activism — the takeover of Willard Straight Hall.
MB: And I’m sure the influences at Cornell were great also.
MG: Yes, they were. Next to a coffeehouse that served cappuccino, Father Daniel Berrigan, S. J., a nationally known poet as well as war resister, kept his office door open; he was Associate Director of Cornell United Religious Works. During and after college I immersed myself in Levertov and Rich, among others.
MB: Did you ever have the opportunity to study with A.R. Ammons at Cornell?
MG: Although in college I took a poetry semester with Bill Matthews, I worked in a library and saw what most patrons borrowed, so had the notion that I should be writing fiction. But my first college friend began writing lots of poems, so I did send Ken McClane to Archie’s door. A few years later, when my husband-to-be was an MFA at UNC-Greensboro, Archie was on sabbatical at Wake Forest. So we’d drive over to Winston-Salem for lunch with him and his wife Phyllis. My course in poetry has mostly been autodidactic.
MB: And was it at Cornell that you met the poet Peter Fortunato?
MG: The circle comes round here: a mutual friend introduced us at a poetry reading Ken was giving in that cappuccino coffeehouse! And the rest is history. A lifetime relationship is a challenging and rewarding spiritual practice.
MB: And after you graduated from Cornell, you and Peter moved south to North Carolina. What was that experience like for you?
MG: That young couple began to learn who we were when we moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where Peter was the Randall Jarrell Fellow in the MFA program at UNC-G. The art department was a small graduate program then and hired me as the model. Professor Peter Agostini flew down each week from New York City. I worked the same classes all year. Modeling helped grow my rudimentary meditation skills: my first assignment was the four-hour sculpture class. The second year, Peter occasionally joined me on the stand. We had fun with the artists. Martha Dunigan, who helped found Artworks Gallery and taught at the North Carolina School for the Arts in Winston-Salem for many years, did her Master’s thesis on my back, in woodblock prints and sculptures. The kiln was in the sculpture studio. We still have small statues of ourselves weathering in our garden. My chapbook The Ruined Walled Castle Garden has a poem about a model who takes up the brush and becomes a successful artist.
MB: For a nature lover such as yourself, North Carolina must have been like heaven.
MG: Oh, the flora! The summer after I graduated, I started identifying plants on my walks. Greensboro was a new world! The glory of magnolia and jasmine blossoms is matched only by their scent! North Carolina has more varieties of plants than any other state in the lower 48. With a copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus in hand, I learned to forage for the edibles: purslane, chickweed, walnuts. Then kudzu arrived, began to prosper, teaching me about invasives, which have increased there and everywhere — the ecosystem is constantly learning to rebalance.
MB: And were you doing much writing of your own during that period?
MG: My very first published poem was in the Greensboro Review. We met Teo Savery and Alan Brilliant when they moved with Unicorn Press to Greensboro. The literary life was of course alive with readings. And a campus librarian must have shared our interests; acquisitions included a steady stream of newly translated Asian Buddhist works, especially Japanese Zen. I remember the thrill of finding Hakuin and Dogen on the new book shelves.
Some of our friends chose to rent in the country, where you could find a place with a cold-water kitchen sink and an outhouse. You might say that crucial period of time created the people who were ready for an invitation that came our way the following year.
MB: And that invitation led to one of the chapters of your life that I find most intriguing — the period you spent living and studying with Gary Snyder in California. How did that experience come about?
MG: Yes, a year and a half in the Sierra foothills, with a break to earn money shingling houses in Sausalito. We shared an address with Gary and his family: Kitkitdizze on Allegheny Star Route. At a wild party after he gave a poetry reading in Chapel Hill, Gary and I did a lot of dancing. He invited Peter and me to drive across the country in our Volkswagen bus in order to live with his family at Kitkitdizze, sit zazen in the morning, and be free day labor for the creation of Oak Tree School in North San Juan. This was a five-building project that residents in the backwoods, many of whom were still constructing their own homes, had secured by underbidding the Teamsters.
I’d been devoted to Gary’s poetry since high school, had introduced Peter to it in college, and we’d been practicing Buddhism and trying to learn carpentry. So this was a good fit all around, inspiration that lasted a lifetime. Gary suggested I study English itself, the origins and the development of the language — which was also a good fit because in college I’d all but majored in Anglo-Saxon; reading Otto Jesperson and other linguists and historians of language was a natural next step. Gary Snyder also introduced me to HD, and I cannot say enough for her accomplishment and inspiration, particularly her book-length works about World War II and the Trojan War. Even as a small child dreaming over anthologies of verse, I perceived poetry as not only representing the world but also changing it.
Apprenticeship with Gary Snyder was partly about poetry but mostly about life: backwoods off-grid skills, studies of the great Dharma texts, trail-finding and maintaining with other households, taking communal Sunday saunas at KKD, building a community and its structures under the majestic Ponderosa Pines. Late one afternoon resting at our campsite, Peter and I heard musical silvery voices. We followed them into the woods; they were always the same distance away. Gary’s response around the fire pit that night was “Next time, try to hear the fairies’ words.”
MB: In the midst of what seemed like such a full and rich life, how and when did poetry come to play such a central role in it?
MG: As someone might deduce from poems like “Drenched” or “God of the Vine” or “Dionysus” in The Devil’s Fools, I’ve been affected by alcoholism. My father bore the disease and was also bipolar; in later life he was disabled, unemployed, and isolated. I had returned to Ithaca and was on the ad hoc circuit for teaching jobs. As everyone knows, this can be a pressured, too-full life, with little time to spare. One day I opened the mail and looked, amazed, at a check from my father. He’d written a brief note, something like “Have fun” or “Use this for something you like.” He’d never done this before, nor did he again. I was so touched. Money from a man who’d known what dreams were and could not realize them. Instantly I knew this was not to pay the bills, or take a vacation; this money was just for me — my dream. And that was poetry. I went to the Duke University writer’s conference, had sessions with Fred Chappell (who had taught my husband Peter at UNC-G) and Jim Applewhite. From other writers there, I found out about residencies, my main source of time and space for poetry once my teaching position was regularized. That summer week in North Carolina re-set my priorities; it was a crucial experience.
MB: Somewhere around 1990, you discovered Slant and made your debut in the Summer 1990 issue of our journal. How did you first learn about Slant?
MG: Serendipity, I’m sure! I may have discovered Slant via word of mouth or a notice in the Poets & Writers magazine that Galen Williams founded in the mid-1980’s. Or Slant might have come my way from another means of writers’ sharing in the pre-web world: notices tacked to bulletin boards, direct mail to your home address, ads for one magazine in the back pages of another, holdings at the library.
MB: Well, however, it happened, I am glad you came our way. And it’s amazing that the poem from that issue found its way into The Devil’s Fools, although with a different title. I suppose that fact is a reminder to return to a discussion of “the lusciousness of the language, the mythic scope, and the attention to the natural world” in that book. What was the impetus to write this book?
MG: Scotland! But let me backtrack: I schooled myself as a poet, in the 10,000 hours of mastery, thanks to the generosity of residency awards, opportunities I learned about as I was nearing 40. Protected silence and focused conversation with other writers and artists were the cloister, the religious order, I was made for! I took a rudimentary collection to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; the manuscript and I returned home seven months later — both much better off. Ten years later, The Devil’s Fools was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, which showed that the poetry mojo was working. Two thirds of those poems are in the published book — each one of them much better for the skillful means of editing and time. “Time,” the I Ching says, “is the means of heaven.”
About Scotland: I had two residencies, six years apart, at Hawthornden Castle, a literary retreat. On the first I fell in love; on the second I was utterly appalled. When I arrived at that little castle south of Edinburgh, I had never heard Mahler; the writers were treated to a concert in the city that included his 4th Symphony. For me, a realized poem is a world; that composer planted in me the desire to contain the entire world between the two covers of one book. During my second stay, when I’d planned to walk the Pentland Hills, we were confined to the castle grounds by Britain’s foot-and-mouth pandemic. What happened to animals and farmers during the government’s draconian response is described in the Notes for my book. It horrified me and inspired several of the poems.
Becoming able to make poems about society’s cruel and inhuman dimensions, as well as its kindnesses and glories, was I believe the game-changer that catapulted this manuscript to the NPS and other Finalisms along its way — the way of adding, winnowing, editing, and ultimately allowing some of my “stronger” and perhaps bleaker poems to wait for my forthcoming poetry book(s) in favor of gentleness, wistfulness, delight in herbal and sexual knowledge.
That brings me to your noticing that Slant’s “Spring Cuckoo” title changed to “Blackbilled Cuckoo” in The Devil’s Fools: I changed season to species when a nature center asked to include the poem in an anthology. “Learn the flowers” was as important a takeaway from Kitkitdizze as “learn the language.” I love discovering the names and characteristics of the flora and fauna in the world we inhabit.
MB: You definitely give Scotland its due in the book. The country and its spell on you play an important role in poems like “Midlothian,” “Scottish Roots,” and “Rosslyn Chapel’s Artisans.” And what you say helps us appreciate what James Sherwood noted as “the lusciousness of the language” and “the attention to the natural world” in his praise for The Devil’s Fools. Let’s not forget the third element he mentioned about your collection, “the mythic scope.” There is a wealth of influences at work here from world literature and folklore. We see appearances by Proserpine, Dionysus, Parsifal, Eve and Cain (whom you previously mentioned), and many others. Was there a particular well of inspiration you drew from for those references?
MG: A poet draws on the deepest experiences from which to create what could be called the mythology of their lives. This doesn’t limit a lyricist to writing about herself, per se, but rather allows an expansion of her imagination into many other areas. The poems in The Devil’s Fools touch on some of those areas as they relate to my own biography — and more. Reading is Experience. Presences—the life force of an identity — are very vivid to me, have always been, from my earliest reading of Greek Myths re-told by Charles Kingsley, and the Catholic Publishing Company’s Lives of the Saints for Every Day of the Year to sustained studies during college of Thomas Malory and Wolfram von Eschenbach, of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes, of the Mabinogion and the Icelandic sagas — the Otherworld in medieval literature. As a kid, I could see Andromeda or Perseus as vividly as St Lucy or St Francis. You might say that early on I became more catholic than Catholic, for my reverence didn’t discriminate between the saintly character and the pagan. Both were holy; my mind would rest in both realms.
MB: In addition to cultural history, you add a rich layer of personal history in poems such as “Drenched,” “My Dirty Yes to Life,” and “Your Mouth on Me.” And in the poem “’to ashes…to dust’/The Cattle of the Sun” you meld the two with the juxtaposition of your Roman Catholic past and the classical myth of Apollo’s cattle. Were you conscious or intentional at the time about that intersection of past and present, cultural and personal?
MG: The particular experiences melded in this poem concern mortality. Christ’s 40 days of fasting and prayer before his crucifixion is commemorated during Lent, and on its very first day “a priest thumb pressed our foreheads” — with ashes, reminding us that in future our bodies will be dust. In the story of Apollo’s cattle, Hermes acts as the smart new kid outdoing the older generation, coming into his uncle’s possessions and sharing talents —remember, when the cattle are returned Hermes also gives Apollo the lyre he’s invented, the poet’s instrument! And Apollo exchanges a golden staff: as the boy Hermes grows he becomes the psychopomp, able to move between the worlds, and with this staff to guide the souls of the dead. Now, sacrifice is an ancient, sacred human act. The poem turns on the line “Say we were redeemed from myth” — in other words, (imagine) we’re on our own in a secularized world that’s sloughed off these traditions — and soon after comes “ecumenical animal sacrifice.” Catholic fasting during Lent often meant refraining from eating meat. Cattle were being slaughtered, massively, uneaten, in Europe as well as in Britain. I’m sure that fact reminded my subconscious of the hecatomb, the burnt offering of 100 oxen that Odysseus and his like would make when they made a safe landing at the end of a voyage. I’m spelling out the pasts, the cultures, resonant in the poem’s questioning the course of action taken during the epidemic.
To answer your question about intersection: Yes! during the process of making, relating the intersections did become conscious. But how? Here we give thanks for tabs and margins! The poem’s flush left column holds a cluster of stanzas describing a religious ritual and, down the page, a cluster working the archetypal trickster figure into economics. Hermes was a baby cattle rustler; orders during foot-and-mouth were to round up the livestock for slaughter.
There’s a second visual column, set across the page at the four-inch tab, that begins the piece and, later, turns it; those stanzas handle the intricacy of talking everything all at once: myths Greek and Christian, modern commerce.
While composing, I didn’t outline the poem the way I’m describing it now. But during a poem’s development and revision, its parts often move about, seeking their best locations for conversation with each other.
MB: Mary, this has been such a great pleasure for me to visit with you. I’d love to continue the conversation, but it’s getting late, and I know you have a week and a half of travel starting in a few days. Perhaps we can make time to meet again.
MG: Here’s to more poetry, Michael! It’s a pleasure to know that Slant is in such good hands. The Devil’s Fools has been a great point of connection for our conversation about experiences that have inspired and motivated me. “What happens in the margins matters” — as one of its love poems says.
You can follow Mary Gilliland on her website www.marygilliland.com and you can find out more about her award-winning new collection, The Devil’s Fools, at https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Devil-s-Fools.
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