About Chase Twichell: A Profile

Chase Twichell grew up in two geographies: One was New Haven, Connecticut, which she says had little effect on her, except perhaps to put the second in relief. The other was Keene, New York, in the heart of the high hills of the Adirondacks, "a rocky, rough, mountains-and-valleys, fast cold water, lakes-in-the-middle-of-nowhere place" her family had visited for generations and where she still spends over half her time. "Everyone thinks it's pretty when they first drive through," she says, "but my father says really it's a virus that gets you, and then you have to be near it or you die." Her infection appears serious: the place itself seems her inspiration, a touchstone not only for her poetry but for her perspective of the world. Perhaps, though, New Haven, where her father taught Latin and coached baseball at nearby Choate, a prep school, has had more effect than Twichell lets on; her poetry marries an urbane intellectual rigor -- a classical grace and distance -- to the passion of one who loves the world
outside the window.

Although both her father and mother were literary and Twichell was reading poetry early on ("At twelve, I loved Yeats; of course it was the bad Yeats -- all that Celtic twilight, broken hearts, and so forth"), painting was her first love. She was so fanatical about it, her parents feared she was becoming "socially abnormal." When she left for boarding school at thirteen, her parents and the school conspired to forbid her to take any art classes. "That's when I started writing poetry. I did it for revenge." Since then, she has received several prestigious awards and grants, published three books of poetry (
Northern Spy, The Odds, and
Perdido), finished a fourth, and co-edited
The Practice of Poetry.

After graduating from Trinity College in Hartford, Twichell, who now teaches at Princeton, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a choice determined by the opportunity to minor in typography and design there. While in Iowa, she apprenticed at Windhover Press for a year, and after receiving her M.F.A., she worked with illustrator Barry Moser for nine years at Pennyroyal Press in western Massachusetts. "I taught when I was in grad school," she says, "and it was what I always thought I would do, but I was appalled at how much of the energy I needed for writing it stole. . . . I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to teach and write in the same life, so I opted for manual labor, and it was great. I loved it." The time came, however, when she felt she should either start her own press or move on to something else. She found, after accepting a job at the University of Alabama, that in the decade between graduate school and teaching she had "acquired the discipline -- well, maybe not the discipline but the
habit -- of writing. I guess, too, I felt established enough as a writer to feel that teaching was not a threat to it." Teaching led Twichell to the idea for
The Practice of Poetry, a collection of writing exercises from more than eighty poets, which she co-edited with Robin Behn and which is becoming a standard workshop text.

Around the same time, she says she had to "pull my head out of the apolitical sand," placing the environment at the top of her list of causes. Whereas her third book,
Perdido, addresses individual mortality, the book she has just finished,
The Ghost of Eden, is the record of her confrontation with what she calls "Earth mortality." "I think our planet is endangered, not just because of the ozone and the rain forest, but because it seems that the human relation to nature has been changed forever in only the last ten or twenty years, and that this is of such profound significance we can hardly begin to understand it. I grew up in nature. It's been my solace and my teacher forever, and I see it dying around me. Looking out the window, I see that the beeches and the red spruces and the birches are all suffering heavily from acid rain. All the birch leaves have little blisters on them and discolored spots; there's a beech blight; the maples are threatened; they're all in stress, and I can't help but see all the things going wrong. I can't just say, 'Oh, isn't it a pretty day.' I look out the window and say, 'Oh, isn't it a pretty day. Look at those maples dying.' "

She had expected the book to follow the conventional form of mourning, that in the end she would feel more remote than at the height of grief, the way one sometimes does when a loved person dies, but she discovered something else: it was the world itself that was absent, making one's presence in it the painful thing. The title,
The Ghost of Eden, is a pun: "The ghost of Eden is the remnant world, on one hand," she says, "but the real ghost turns out to be me. I'm the one who's wandering around weightless, and that made fighting through these poems emotionally and intellectually difficult. But now that I've done it, there's another surprise, which is that there is a heightening effect where everything becomes more beautiful and valuable. Death is the counterweight, the same old theme.

"I probably shouldn't confess such things in public," Twichell says, "but I think about it at least ten times a day." Contrary to what one might assume, her obsession has given her tremendous vitality and the ability to laugh easily and often. "It's not all about tears and sadness and grief," she says. "It becomes funny; it becomes interesting."

One day, she and her husband, the novelist Russell Banks, decided to get a cemetery plot. "In the town of Keene, a plot for two in this beautiful cemetery up on a hill, with views of the mountains in both directions, sixteen by twenty-four feet, cost us one hundred dollars. We even got a little deed and everything. Michael Harper was visiting us one day, and we took him up there to see our new piece of real estate, our future home. There's something about being able to goof about it like that that makes it part of the continuum, that's not alien, and, I guess, that makes me feel less terrorized by world death and person death."

Twichell has melded her divided geographies -- both physical and psychic -- allowing her to bring the forcefulness and élan that have always been present in her poetry into her politics. She writes lots of crank letters to corporations, tells people to boycott L'Oréal for testing suntan lotion on mice, packs up a box full of catalogues from Barnes and Noble that continue to arrive, fifty a month, despite letters and calls, and returns them. "I sent them to the customer service manager," she laughs, "but I never heard a word, and I'm still getting catalogues, so I'm going to have to get even more radical."

--
David Daniel