an interview with Sarah Klassen

This interview was conducted in November, 2004.

Sharon Caseburg: What role does the concept of forgiveness play in your own poetry?

Sarah Klassen: If you had asked me before this interview I would have said I hadn’t really written poems about forgiveness. A quick survey shows me that’s not quite true. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I never sat down thinking: now I’m going to write about forgiveness. But I guess as you write about life as it unfolds around you, all manner of subjects get included. A poem that could be said to touch on forgiveness would be “Tribute” (Dangerous Elements), which I wrote after hearing the BBC announce the death of Deng Xiaoping. In writing it, I may have been “trying out” a possible attitude toward tyrants, especially one who is newly dead. We tend to want to speak well of the dead. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Is it possible or necessary or advisable to consider forgiving them if they did truly awful things? Pinochet, for instance, who is still with us?

I don’t think I remembered, until after the poem was written, how Huck Finn, upon observing a pair of scoundrels in action, said it made him ashamed to be part of the human race. Huck was acknowledging his membership in a sadly flawed society. The doctor in Macbeth—referred to in the poem “Tribute”—seems to share this acknowledgement. This is an alternative to perceiving the evil to be out there, far away. It recognizes one’s own need for forgiveness.

In Violence and Mercy, poems like “Meadow” and “Mass graves” were written after Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were making headlines and the Soviet bloc was falling apart. So these poems were triggered by political oppression. I suppose they could be read as implying the need for forgiveness.

Writing about forgiveness on a personal level, my own experience or that of someone near to me, requires more risk. It’s easier to write about the transgression of political persons and systems. Or historical characters.

SC: Certainly, part of the difficulty with the act of forgiving is an acknowledgement of a transgression or wrong that has occurred. How does the concept of transgression figure into your writing?

SK: “Singing at the Fire,” the last section in Dangerous Elements, has as its context, and content, a particular transgression—religious persecution in sixteenth-century Europe. But I wasn’t consciously dealing with transgression and forgiveness; I was asking questions like, What’s worth dying for? Who can summon up the courage to become a martyr? Is martyrdom sometimes connected with some kind of morbid or hysterical death wish? Should those martyrs have been more willing to compromise? I was interested in these things and that’s why the poems in this series are really more about the martyrs than about the executioners. I didn’t make a conscious decision to go easy on the executioners, but I think the poems don’t paint them as monsters, although the work they did was ugly.

SC: What about in other poems and collections?

SK: I don’t see myself as a news junkie, but it seems I’ve often responded to atrocities reported in the media, because a response seemed necessary. Maybe I felt that way because I grew up in a culture where physical violence, especially going to war, was condemned (the community wasn’t always as diligent in condemning the subtler forms of violence). Anyway, I have responded, often it seems, to this kind of transgression in my poems.

I actually began composing “News” (Borderwatch) in my mother’s room in the nursing home she had just moved into. It was January of 1991 and I was sitting at her bed and her roommate was watching the TV news. Everyone had been fearing the outbreak of the Gulf War, many of us praying it wouldn’t happen. That night it was announced. With one ear I was listening to my mother read a letter she had received from a cousin somewhere in the USSR and with the other listening to the newscast, which my mother couldn’t hear because she was somewhat deaf. In war there’s always a heaping up of transgressions; it boggles the mind. Can that be forgiven?

I wrote Borderwatch after spending the summer teaching English in Lithuania. Our students, sometimes in very limited English, told stories of oppression, exile, and loss under an imposed regime. That was 1991 and they had already declared themselves independent of the USSR. I can’t recall asking them about forgiveness, but I sensed that this would not have been easy for them. Many of their parents or grandparents had lost property, opportunities, freedom, and even life. Lithuanians love their country, their culture, and their language, and all their loyalties had to go underground for such a long while.

At the end of that summer school, we travelled to Moscow and arrived there during the 1991 coup. As a Mennonite whose forebears travelled from Ukraine to Moscow in the 1920s to exit a country they loved, in order to escape a system they couldn’t condone, I was spellbound. This led to poems like “Arbat Street” (Borderwatch).

SC: Themes such as forgiveness and transgression can often become maudlin and clichéd. How do you avoid falling into clichés when examining issues tied into these matters?

SK: You’re very right. Humour is one way to avoid being maudlin. But how can you be light-hearted about cruelty? Developing the poem around concrete images and steering away from the abstract can be useful. Sometimes bringing together disparate details can create a sense of irony and lend a sharpness that counteracts sentimentality. Simply creating a narrative around the issue helps, because a narrative requires you to be concrete.

In general, I’ve tended to steer away from becoming too personal in my poems. I’m not sure that’s because I’m afraid such poems would become sentimental or whether I’m just not willing to take the risk. So I’ve most often chosen a subject I can be more objective about—Simone Weil or an east European tyrant or Leonardo da Vinci. In my first book I wrote about the Hebrew prophets and about my grandmother, whom I’ve never met.

SC: What do you consider to be the relationship between forgiveness and poetry?

SK: I’m wondering if fiction writers have tackled forgiveness more rigorously and more explicitly than poets. The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor and Atonement by Ian McEwan come easily to mind. And recently Richard Wright’s Adultery. Alistair McLeod’s novel No Great Mischief has this wonderful line: “All of us are better when we’re loved.” It would work, I think, to substitute “forgiven” for “loved.” Forgiveness is one facet of love. (Even though a movie once claimed, “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.”)

After I had agreed to be interviewed by CV2 on the topic of forgiveness and poetry, I began to wonder if I was qualified for this. I believe in both poetry and forgiveness, but I couldn’t recall thinking about their relationship, or hearing poets discuss it. I had to think of the projects linking peace and poetry that many of us have been involved in over the past decade. Poets have never shied away from the concepts, like love, freedom, war, fear. And forgiveness. All these involve human experience, human emotion, things poets are expected to write about.

The oldest poems about guilt and forgiveness I’ve read are Psalm 51 and Psalm 32, composed by David—shepherd, poet, king. He wrote Psalm 51 out of the anguish over his own transgression that included adultery, murder, and attempted cover-up; and Psalm 32:1-6 expresses the joy and relief of being forgiven. These poems are very personal and very moving. Between them they encompass a spectrum of moods, from depression to praise. The narrator is vitally present in these poem-prayers in which utter vulnerability gives way to joyful confidence.

Seventeenth-century poet George Herbert wrote a poem called “Love,” which is also about forgiveness and acceptance. (How do you separate out the various forms of grace?) He wrote it as a dialogue and it works wonderfully, since love or forgiveness involves two parties (or two parts of the divided self). Writing about concepts that are abstract requires the poet to bring the abstract down to earth. Herbert grounds the theme through simple actions like entering a room, sitting, eating, speaking, etc. (This poem, incidentally, triggered one of several mystical experiences Simone Weil describes having had. All of them were linked somehow to some form of art.)