On Alligators & Sea Shells: An Interview with Patricia Corbus
Patricia Corbus considers her life in poetry on the publication, by Blue Edge Books, of her third collection of poems, Woman with a Tree on her Head.
What in your early life lead you to poetry?
“I lived on Whitaker Bayou in Sarasota, Florida until I was nine. It was full of alligators. When huge turtles lumbered out of the water, my friend Jimmy and I (we were skinny and didn’t weigh much) would hop on for a ride, standing, wildly balancing as best we could. My mother read to me often (lots of poetry and old-fashioned novels). She read from A Child’s Garden of Verses, and would sometimes growl in mock anger, “Shake not thy gory locks at me. I didst not do it.” My father often slipped poems under my bedroom door.
After my father had a nervous breakdown which unveiled a vast obsession with shells, he began The Nautilus, a shell business which became successful. (Our little house was so full of shells that I remember crunching down on a tiny ceritheum shell in my mashed potatoes.) We moved to a venerable house on Hudson Bayou. My father had a congenital heart problem and was in a hurry to live. Every summer I’d sit, mostly reading, in the back seat of the Packard, being driven all over America and Canada. He drove my mother and me to Alaska in the early years of the Alcan Highway, while I read Robert Service’s poems. It was a difficult trip. He died of a heart attack soon after we returned.”
How did you become a poet yourself?
“At Agnes Scott College, Robert Frost arrived every year to be part of our lives for ten days or so. (I will never forget him reading “The Witch of Coos.”) I had lunch with Katherine Anne Porter and I talked to Randall Jarrell (so jolly, delighted with his Mercedes) at a party.
Years later, after my mother died, I felt a need to look around, to expand--perhaps we become more fully ourselves when our parents are gone. I wrote Donald Justice, then at Gainesville, asking if I could attend his evening class. I studied there with him for a few semesters (one with William Logan) which led to my winning a small prize in Jacksonville, judged by Stanley Plumly, to meeting Heather McHugh, to going to Bread Loaf where I met Ellen Bryant Voigt, and ultimately attended Warren Wilson’s Writing Program, where I fell slowly in love, like Lizzie with Darcy, with Wallace Stevens, whose work became more and more mesmerizing to me.”
How do you think about poetry?
“For me, poetry is a pang, a cry. In a roomful of cats it’s the dog. In a roomful of dogs it’s the cat. A scarlet ibis. Anything anti-gravity. A flying machine. A radiance that pierces and spreads. The vanishing point.
I love being with people who are prepared to like poetry, who get allusions, have a sense of irony, of sarcasm, who love being in the thicket of words, who feel them physically, and who are sometimes given words or phrases from who-knows-where. That’s what is addictive: the surprise of something having been given from the beyond, of looking at a poem I’ve written and thinking, Who the hell wrote that? The saddest thing is that one has to be a bit aloof when around those who are not prepared, who trust only the familiar, the ordinary. And yet they too expect a geyser, a waterfall, even a trickle of poetry at their weddings and funerals, at the beginnings and endings of wars, in telling the stories of their lives, so I am satisfied. Ecstatic really.”