an interview with Hilary Clark

Clarise Foster: In your most recent collection, The Dwelling of Weather, you create just that: a house, so to speak, fashioned out of weather. What inspired you to this “construction”?

Hilary Clark: You’re right, a house or dwelling fashioned out of weather, pure flux. The ambiguous “of” in the title also suggests weather’s dwelling; that is, how weather dwells with us, shaping our experience. I wanted the title to suggest both rooting, homing and flux, change, with these seeming contraries passing into one another. That is, even as we tend to seek stasis or rest, it is change, paradoxically, that is our dwelling place. Those living, as I do, on the prairies would agree that no dwelling or home place (physical or emotional) is immune to the effects of weather (here, the hard winds and extremes of temperature). What inspired this “construction” or scaffolding for the book? Though I don’t always know my own motives, I think it’s living on the prairies and seeing abandoned barns and sheds slowly weathering, leaning into the ground; it’s living on the west coast and, as a child, imagining houses in rotting, mossy, old trees and in the caves and hollows of weathered sandstone; it’s aging and seeing the house, the rooms and furniture, wear down as the children grow up and finally step out the door for good. And it’s living, in my mind, between prairie and west coast and no longer feeling quite at home anywhere.

CV2: How has weather existed in your previous two collections, More Light and Two Heavens—and how did this momentum culminate in The Dwelling of Weather?

HC: Weather is not exactly a theme but certainly shapes the imagery in More Light and Two Heavens. In More Light (“A Garden”), for example, the seasons’ “unpredictable weathers” subject gardens, down to the smallest twig and bud, to constant change. In Two Heavens, the sequence “Mortal Beauty” is based on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s notebooks, which are full of detailed descriptions of the play of weather (cloud formations, light) over the English landscape. Hopkins was ravished by this feast of transient beauty, although, as a good Jesuit, he tried to check his excesses of looking.

I’m not sure this weather thread has “culminated” in The Dwelling of Weather. The title makes it more explicit, certainly. But I’ve always been intensely, electrically, attuned to weather changes through mood changes, so the thread isn’t played out yet.

CV2: The Dwelling of Weather is a two-edged metaphor, one that brings to mind the literal manifestation of a house, and dwelling can also mean “to be mentally preoccupied.” Both these meanings are explored in this collection—what did you want to say at the beginning of the process to write this collection? And, in the process, do you feel that this was what you accomplished?

HC: I usually don’t know—indeed, I avoid thinking about—what I’m going to say in a poem. When it comes to putting together a collection, a key or theme or central metaphor for me emerges only in shuffling the individual poems or sequences, arranging them this way and that. However, The Dwelling of Weather is a bit of an exception in that it did have a starting point, a couple of sentences from Anne Michaels’s novel Fugitive Pieces. These form the epigraph to “Life Stories,” the first sequence in Dwelling, and thus an epigraph to the book as a whole: “The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain....” (Actually, the sentence ends “like rain through karst,” which refers to limestone, or a topography of limestone—a good example of the something seemingly solid that is shaped and reshaped by weather.) I kept this passage in mind as a kind of background mantra for a while; its emphasis on permeability—the interflowing of past and “shadow past” (what could have happened but didn’t) and present—comes up in Dwelling in imagery of haunting and permeable dwellings.

In the end, however, I don’t think the book really fulfilled this initial impulse to explore the notion of “shadow pasts.” I’m still interested in how events that could have happened, but didn’t, nonetheless shape a life. It might be fun, or at least surreal, to write a memoir of this “shadow past”—all the seductive possibilities that were never explored, but also all the terrible things that never happened!

CV2: Nature abounds in The Dwelling of Weather, including the nature of poetry—which gives the foundation to the collection as the primary material of “construction.” In the poem “Dwelling: Prologue,” you write: “A poem is a shelter,/provisional—a little wobbly—a house whose rooms have no walls, whose windows are prairie sloughs/whose ceilings stream/with the clouds.” How did poetry give you a context to shelter those things you needed to broach in this collection?

HC: If you’re asking whether the book is partly “about” poetry, the nature of poetry, then yes. Of course a lot of poems tackle the nature of poetry. But to follow up what you say at the end, poetry does allow me to broach or handle material that’s perilous by reshaping it, giving it form—approaching it by indirection. Poetic form and language are, as you put it, “a context to shelter”—but as the lines quoted from “Dwelling: Prologue” indicate, the shelter is porous, thrown open to all weathers. Thus, to revise my own line, a poem both is and isn’t a shelter: it’s a haven that melts away as you enter it, a goal that recedes as you write it into being.

CV2: In Dwelling, there is a both a resistance and urgency at the same time to examine the past, often through seasonal imagery, a past that becomes accessible in sleep through dreams—which leads me to ask, how does poetic awareness come to you?

HC: Where does a poem come from? What brings me into poetic awareness or receptivity? Your question mentions the urgency of the past in connection with this coming-of-the-poem. Yes, for me at least, the poetic state of mind is that in which the past is pressing, returning, in some way. This could be the pressure of nostalgia; it could be a sense of ambivalence or even dread, an unwanted return of the past. In both cases, it’s the break in the present—the sense of an unseen presence or context, the pressure of another existence—that is, for me, one source of poetry. (That’s why I think a novel like W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is pure poetry.) I also find poems when reading other writers’ work: certain words, phrases, or situations will emerge, luminous, as uncanny others—again breaking into the present.