May 21, 1978
On Being a Poet: A Conversation With Margaret Atwood
By JOYCE CAROL OATES
The following is a transcript of an interview of Margaret Atwood by Joyce Carol Oates.
Q. Who influenced you as a poet? Are you interested primarily in a poetry of "music" or a poetry of "statement?"
A. Poe was my earliest "influence" back in high school, when I was beginning to write poetry and before I'd heard of anyone after, say, 1910. I don't think of poetry as a "rational" activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me. But like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems. For me, every poem has a texture of sound which is at least as important to me as the "argument." This is not to minimize "statement." But it does annoy me when students, prompted by the approach of their teacher, ask, "What is the poet trying to say?" It implies that the poet is some kind of verbal cripple who can't quite "say" what he "means" and has to resort to a lot of round-the- mulberry-bush, thereby putting the student to a great deal of trouble extracting his "meaning" like a prize out of a box of Cracker Jacks.
Q. After the spare, rather sardonic exploration of the relationship between the sexes in "Power Politics," "You Are Happy," your most recent book of poems, seems to have marked a radical transformation of vision. Could you comment? And what are you working on at the present time?
A. At the moment, and in my most recent poems, I seem to be less concerned about the relationships between men and women than I am about those among women (grandmother-mother- daughter, sisters) and those between cultures. I am in the process of editing a new volume of poems to be called "Two-Headed Poems and Others," and I'm working on some stories which I hope to include in the American edition of "Dancing Girls." I have two novels in my head, and I hope to start one this summer.
Q. What is your background? Did your family encourage your writing?
A. I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. I did not attend a full year of school until I was in grade eight. This was a definite advantage. My parents are both from Nova Scotia, and my "extended family" lives there. I have one brother who became a neurophysiologist and lives in Toronto and one sister who was born when I was 11.
I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do. My parents were great readers. They didn't encourage me to become a writer, exactly, but they gave me a more important kind of support; that is, they expected me to make use of my intelligence and abilities and they did not pressure me into getting married. My mother is rather exceptional in this respect, from what I can tell from the experiences of other women my own age. Remember that all this was taking place in the 1950's, when marriage was seen as the only desirable goal. My mother is a very lively person who would rather skate than scrub floors; she was a tomboy in youth and still is one. My father is a scientist who reads a great deal of history and has a mind like Leopold Bloom's. But as far as I know, the only poems he ever composes are long doggerel verses, filled with puns, which he writes when he has the flu.
Q. Have fairy tales, Gothic romances and other fantasies played a significant part in your background reading?
A. The Gothic; the supernatural fantasy and related forms have interested me for some time, in fact, my uncompleted Ph.D. thesis is called "The English Metaphysical Romance." This may or may not have something to do with the fact that in childhood--I think I was about 6--we were given the complete "Grimms' Fairy Tales," unexpurgated. My sister was terrified of it, but I loved it. These are, of course, not "children's stories"; they were originally told by adults to anyone who happened to be there, and there is quite a lot of material that we wouldn't consider suitable for children today. It was not the gore--being rolled downhill in barrels full of spikes and so forth--that caught my attention, but the transformations. "The Juniper Tree" was and remains my favorite, followed closely by a story called "Fitcher's Bird." The other interesting thing about these stories is that, unlike the heroines of the more conventional and re-done stories, such as "Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood," the heroines of these stories show considerable wit and resourcefulness and usually win, not just by being pretty virtuous, but by using their brains. And there are wicked wizards as well as wicked witches. I would like to write about this sometime. I have an article on this exact subject in a book which was just published by Harvard University Press. The book is called "The Canadian Imagination," and the article is called "Canadian Monsters: Some Aspects of the Supernatural in Canadian Fiction."
Q. You work with a number of different "voices" in your poetry and prose. Have you ever felt that the discipline of prose evokes a somewhat different "personality" (or consciousness) than the discipline of poetry?
A. Not just a "somewhat different" personality, an almost totally different one. Though readers and critics, of course, make connections because the same name appears on these different forms, I'd make a bet that I could invent a pseudonym for a reviewer and that no one would guess it was me.
If you think of writing as expressing "itself" rat[letters missing] said "the writer," this imagination sense. For me, reviewing and criticism are the most difficult forms, because of the duty they involve, a duty to the book being talked about as well as to the reader. Poetry is the most joyful form, and prose fiction--the personality I feel there is a curious, often bemused, sometimes disheartened observer of society. The "public speaking"--there again it depends on whether I'm reading poetry, reading prose, or merely speaking. Making speeches is not something I like to do. I suppose, like many fiction and poetry writers, I don't like being in the position of pontificating about the truth. When I taught in universities I was a great diagram-on-the-blackboard person, partly because you could draw arrows to indicate more than one thing at a time.
Q. I am often astonished, and at times rather dismayed, by the habit that presumably intelligent readers have of assuming that most writing, especially that in the first person, is autobiographical. And I know that you have been frequently misread as well. How do you account for the extraordinary naпvetй of so many readers?
A. As far as I know, this is a North American problem. It doesn't happen much in England, I think, because England, with its long literary tradition, is quite used to having writers around. And it doesn't happen as much (in my experience) in the United States as it does in Canada. And it doesn't happen as much to men as it does to women, probably because women are viewed as more subjective and less capable of invention.
I think it's the result of several factors. First, it may be a tribute to the writing. The book convinces the reader, therefore it must be "true," and who is it more likely to be "true" about than the author? Readers sometimes feel cheated when I tell them that a book is not "autobiographical," that is, the events as described did not happen to me. (Of course, every book is "autobiographical," in that the images and characters have passed through the author's head and in that he or she has selected them.) These readers want it all to be true.
Also, we have a somewhat romantic notion on this side of the Atlantic about what an author is. We think of "writing" not as something you do not but as something you are. The writer is seen as "expressing" herself; therefore, her books must be autobiographical. If the book were seen as something made, like a pot, we probably wouldn't have this difficulty.
But the idea is remarkably tenacious. I was talking about this at a reading one time. I explained that my work was not autobiographical, that the central character was not "me," and so on. Then I read a chapter from "Lady Oracle," the chapter in which the fat little girl attends dancing school. The first question after the reading was over was, "How did you manage to lose so much weight?"
After saying that, though, I'll have to add that I find it necessary, in order to write about a place, to have actually been there. I can invent characters, but I am absolutely dependent on the details of the material world to make a space for my characters to move around in.
Q. In recent years Americans have become aware, at times to their chagrin, that Canadian nationalists are extremely anti-American and very much resent American "influence" in Canada as well as American economic exploitation. Apart from your nonfiction writing, your novel "Surfacing" deals with this feeling most explicitly. When some particularly brutal hunters in the novel turn out to be, not American, as the heroine believes, but Canadian, the heroine nevertheless thinks: "It doesn't matter what country they're from, they're still Americans, they're what's in store for us." Could you comment on this statement?
A. It's dangerous to lift a statement out of context and take it as "the view" of the character and especially of the author. Cultural attitudes in novels are not usually invented by the novelist; they are reflections of something the novelist sees in the society around her.
But if you're saying that Canadians have no reason to resent to represent the foreign and trade policies of the United States, I'd have to disagree. No one likes being dominated to this extent, whether it's women, blacks, Quйbйcois, or Canadians. But each group--including Canadians-- should have a good look at their past and present behavior to see to what extent they have contributed to their plight. In the case of Canada I'd say the extent is considerable.
Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, poet and critic.
