Valerie Harms is the author of 10 books and lives in Bozeman, Montana. See www.valerieharms.com She will soon be interviewed by James Strecker for this blog.
VALERIE HARMS: What made you bring out such a diverse collection books at this time: Song Lyrics, Who is Not an Animal? (Animal rights poems), and Creativity and Creators in the Arts (Poems Celebrating the Muse)?
JAMES STRECKER: Our house fire, I suspect. And the emphatic reality of death. I’d been working like a maniac for over a year on six manuscripts, and then on December 1, 2016 came so close to losing everything, myself included, to fire and smoke damage. Indeed, the fire chief said that if we’d been asleep, we wouldn’t have survived, and I still shudder at the memory of running about our basement in a constantly thickening and blinding smoke, trying to save our many cats. I wrote one long poem about the fire a week later, and have been able to reread it only once. Too painful.
Anyway, to your question, book by book. With the animal rights book – it includes humans as animals – I wanted to again to be a more public activist and again do public readings against our culturally-supported cruelty to all living beings. I needed a new book that included my unpublished works as well as poems from previous books. Also, because I tend to be an obsessive reviser and proof reader, I didn’t want to face these sometimes bluntly graphic poems of animal suffering again. I needed the book to be done.
As for the song lyrics, which I’d become addicted to writing, I wanted to use the collection as a means to seek out appropriate composers and singers to use them. Previous works had already been set to music, sometimes recorded by classical and jazz musicians, so I wanted the new lyrics to find a good home. I do love finding new possibilities through collaboration. One example is the composer-performer Barend Schipper in The Netherlands, who has always surprised me in how he used my words, and I always learn from such experience.
The reason for the creativity and creators book is twofold. I’ve always been a promoter of the arts – even became a publisher to do so – and my blog James Strecker Reviews the Arts also serves that purpose with loads of interviews and reviews. So, these poems bring attention to creators and how and what they create. The second purpose is to explore how a creator in one medium of words can respond uniquely and poetically to the arts in other, very different, media.
Moreover, I guess I was weary of uninspired, uninformed, uninvolved, and pompous writing that sometimes passes for criticism and does much harm There are fine critics around from whom one can learn a great deal, but too many others avoid an intense and complex inner world they must bring to an evaluation of art works by others.
VH: Regarding your Song Lyrics book, did you compose these for your guitar?
JS: In a word, no. I wrote the lyrics, in part, to achieve and support musicality in their performance. Because I live intensely in music in many ways, I went for the option of singability in a given lyric. You might say, I was thinking as much of John Gielgud and Bill Nighy as of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Shelby Lynne and Billie Holiday as I imagined the sound of these words set to voice and music. Also, I’d lost to the fire a number of musical instruments with which I’d established an intimate relationship over the years, so whatever tunes I imagined remained in my head, at least for the time being.
VH: Now your Animal Poems book: In this book, you really assault people who eat meat. Other animals eat meat. Is your message to people to stop the cruelty?
JS: The United Nations has recently officially declared that human carnivores eating meat significantly contribute to the devastation of the earth. Many, many humans don’t eat meat and the others now have a moral obligation not to. For the sake of animals who endure unimaginable suffering and for the sake of our planet, they should stop. But, of course, they won’t, whatever the ecological and moral price.
This book is also an expression of accumulated frustration and despair that many humans are too self-centred to feel compassion for others and that too many get away with being deliberately cruel. The book also deals with incest and wife abuse, for example.
VH: In your Creativity book you seem equally entranced with musicians, dancers, and actors. What moves you the most and makes you recognize the performer as someone with depth?
JS: I just watched a film on the great French ballerina Yvette Chauviré. Actually, when I was a teen, I discovered a very evocative photo of her as Giselle and I immediately sat down and did a huge pastel drawing of her. Years down the road, I did a book of poems on ballet with illustrations by Harold Town called Pas de Vingt. I was entranced, as you say.
Anyway, in this film titled Yvette Chauvire: France’s Prima Ballerina Assoluta, Rudolf Nureyev remarks that the greatness of an artist lies in the artist’s vulnerability, and that is so true. The depth of an artist involves addressing profoundly existential concerns. As well, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people in the arts and many confirm that the perceived depth of an artist is contingent on art’s witness. As you watch or listen, how deep are you willing to go into the rich and uncomfortable regions of yourself and let go of habits and comfort zone and work to understand the ineffable regions of being and existence? So, in truth it’s the artist who goes deep and asks equal depth of the witness.
VALERIE HARMS: How would you describe your work in the arts?
JAMES STRECKER: I try to be profoundly and playfully engaged, sincerely open, hungry to understand, and wary of humanity. Making art for me is hard work, but a consuming thrill, and I try to be good at what I do to earn that elation. What people say and whether they take notice are peripheral issues, since you can’t work seriously if you’re looking around to check out reactions. You have to learn to know what your art can do and be able to do it.
VH: What prompted your beginning as an artist? Why primarily a poet?
JS: In part because, like most others, I was desperate for ways to endure the life-draining, uninspiring, and systematically applied, perhaps punitive, tedium of schools. So, I needed a creative outlet to keep my imagination and enthusiasm for living alive. The arts in many forms gave my spirit fresh air to breathe. I did have art courses in high school and was awarded a gold ring for art, and almost went to art college instead of university. I even started a folk music publication which I distributed to the coffee houses in Toronto and Hamilton
As for poetry, poetry for me is not a form or genre as much as it is a way of living and doing things, a way of being from which words ensue. Day to day conversation is poetry and many creators, like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Lhasa de Sela, and Janis Ian, to name only several, have told me that anything in life can be art.
VH: Let’s talk about development as an artist.
JS: The word development implies sequence and linear progression on a kind of uncluttered road to some, but much is also learned by simultaneity of energies and back-tracking. Being creative also involves unlearning too, and knowing what to throw away. Development is a complex unending process. I’m not aiming for an end, I’m aiming for now, especially after the fire.
VH: What important beliefs do you express through your work?
JS: We must “rage against the dying” of compassion and imagination. We must “rage against” the deliberate shallowness of our culture and always keep open the door that lets in awe. We must be very aware, we must give a damn, we must avoid our destruction by clichés of any kind.
VH: What achievements have been the most meaningful to you?
JS: You yourself have done many enlightening and challenging books, so you know that getting that absolutely right word that won’t prove a deceiver the next day, one that you worked so hard for and didn’t expect, is a kind of heaven. It can be one note as B. B. King told me, or a colour as Harold Town stated, or a gesture as Marcel Marceau remarked, or a way of phrasing as Judi Dench told me. Getting the “right” thing to happen through your efforts is why we breathe, isn’t it?
Other “achievements?” That as a publisher I got over 100 worthy writers into print and that I mentored author Diane Esther through her book on incest, which in turn is helping so many to have a voice in a society that wishes to hide its very dirty laundry. In some cases, my writings gave the reader no option but to be vegetarian. Sometimes I have pissed off a few. As a reviewer, to have the respect of artists like, say, Oscar Peterson, or Martha Henry, or Harold Town, all who have been quite outspoken about unqualified critics, has assured me that I’m reviewing from an informed and insightful level that each art deserves. Finally, that I’ve learned to live with fibromyalgia.
VH: What feedback do you get to your poems?
JS: In my new animal rights book I quote, among others, Farley Mowat who said he admired my courage for writing what I did, and Ingrid Newkirk who said that my animal rights poems were “true to the core.” But the three new books are really too new for much reaction yet, although one person said that she appreciated my telling undesirable truths about humanity’s cruelty, that she could read the painful poems only a few at a time, but also that there were beautiful poems in the book. Another, however, read all three books and said simply, “I have more hope than that.” I truly do not know what to say about that reaction.
VH: What did you learn being a professor?
JS: I’ve always felt uncomfortable about being designated a professor. My job, I’ve always felt, has been to activate learning. I’ve long held and written that “people learn by doing” and as an educator I’ve tended to put people into situations that juggled their preconceptions of how they should think or feel or what they should be. That said, what have I learned?
On one hand, a former student told me that she used to complain to the department head about my class. Another said that I and my class “were the only good things about the college.” The former was speaking three decades after her experience and, while I was surprised at such long-lasting effect, it troubled me that she hadn’t gone the route of introspection that my course had stressed and taken more responsibility for who she was, then or now.
I’ve learned that an educator – just as a creator of any kind in the arts must do – has to rethink everything he or she does, at least once a day. People are indeed different and an educator needs to find out how. Also, we must always question the praise as well as the criticism we receive of what we do.
VH: What prompted you to start your state of the arts newsletter, which you call James Strecker Reviews the Arts? Where is it distributed?
JS: For my as yet unpublished book on creativity, I did 300 interviews and, since I’d been reviewing and interviewing artists for publication since I was a teen, I knew I’d never lose the bug. So, I created my blog James Strecker Reviews the Arts where, to date, I have over 80 informative and provocative interviews and 150 reviews in order to inform readers about the arts and connect them meaningfully with those who make the arts. It’s always a good, informative and enlightening read, I’ve been told, and it’s online at jamesstrecker.com/words/
VH: Why do you like to go to London?
JS: I’ve travelled many places, although of late, with life so busy with writing projects and 20 years of daily pain from fibromyalgia to work through, I find that London, which I know reasonably well, the easiest, while extremely rewarding, to negotiate. I’m sure to hear memorable music performances, see challenging theatre and ballet even in the musical-mad west end, and be spellbound anew by works of art I’d encountered for decades.
I used to go London for research, as I did many times also with New York, and enjoyed how each city was emphatically its own thing. But my impossible dream list includes return visits to a number of places that changed my life, like Vienna, Paris, Santa Fe, Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan, Amsterdam, Nairobi, and and and. Not all dreams come true, of course, but I hope some do.
VH: Have you felt patriotic to Canada?
JS: I love being in Canada more than in any other country, although I daily acknowledge our sometimes unforgivable past and present, like our brutal treatment of indigenous peoples and their cultures. I do worry about politicians who undermine our form of democracy and serve or cater to only select groups. They do much damage.
VH: Let’s have a question that you ask creative people in your blog on the arts. Please tell us about one or more projects that you have been working on or have recently completed. Why exactly do they matter to you and why should they matter to us?
JS: At present, I’m thinking now of pitching my huge book on creativity and my not as huge guidebook for writers to agents and publishers. I’m looking for a home for my collection of new poems, and am starting to outline several projects that are starting to take shape unintentionally in my mind. They matter to me because they are an extension of my human values and long-developing creative skills. For why they should matter to you, please read what others have said in the various endorsements in my books. All three are available on international Amazon.
VH: At the beginning, you mentioned that you decided to publish these three books after your house burned down. Would you describe more about what that was like and what was a significant realization you had as a result?
JS: This is going to be hard, and I hope not too long for each of us, but we’ll see. To begin, the house didn’t actually burn down, but it did have to be gutted down to the studs inside. Also, I saw a lifetime of things very dear to me or essential to my work go into the garbage bin outside, often so unnecessarily. But we were too much in shock – and maybe still are – to deal with the yahoos who were in charge. I’ve been working on an article about the experience, but I still get too angry to do it effectively. But I will.
Really painful was the loss of several cats. I’d been lying on the floor watching an old Alfred Hitchcock flick with Daisy our cat washing my hands, and twenty minutes later she stopped breathing, even with the use of oxygen to save her outside. In a poem some years ago when Dizzy Gillespie died, I wrote “I hate death” in a poem for Dizzy, and after many deaths over time that is still all I can say. Margaret also lost two of her rescued cats from the group in the basement, so many cats in our home went through the same horrible traumatic experience we did.
Yes, realizations that resulted because of that experience keep coming. That some people are profoundly kind, like friends Mark Powell and Regan Russell who themselves are professional house-rebuilders. They helped to guide us through the process of getting our lives back together and protected us from the smug ineptness, appalling ignorance, artificial concern, blatant indifference, uncaring greed, and outright lying of the “managers” from the construction company we had chosen from the list offered to us. Because our friends were themselves professionals of the highest calibre, they were well aware how the construction company was trying to take advantage of us when we were pretty helpless. Mark kept saying, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
Another realization was that I had changed and couldn’t return to who I was. I couldn’t have the same conversations with people I knew that I used to have, and with some who had kept their distance, I didn’t really know who they were anymore in order to speak to them from my present tense. Nor did I know what to say to those who took the unthinking “positive thinking” route. We had a difficult new reality to deal with and needed people who could speak meaningful language of that reality or of their own reality as well.
So again, I was deeply grateful for those who could share the language of pain or trauma or loss or sorrow or confusion, from knowing and acknowledging such in their own lives. And I was gratefully surprised at how many I still had in my life with whom I could be real. Real about happiness too, since happiness had become deeper..
As for writing, it took a turn into critical cynicism about people and their needlessly cruel behavior, and addressed a number of horrors or asinine ways that some humans initiate and perpetuate mindlessly. I tried my collection of new poems on two publishers and one said that the book was overall too “heavy” an experience. They both had said that the writing was quite good, so I wondered at “heavy” poetry not being acceptable.
Could or should I make the poems more palatable, whatever that means? After all, my basic belief, as a writer and a human development consultant, was that we have to know who we are, and thus live fuller lives, in order to progress from our pain and limitations. But, such is the life of any writer, and as Pete Seeger once told me, “We keep on going.”
But, everything considered, being in our own home again, hanging out with my wife in our own home again, I felt so lucky being able to look into the eyes of each of our cats and say, “Thanks for helping me though all this, we got through all this together.”
