All Instinct, Then Revise, Revise, Revise: The Suzanne Morris Interview
Interview by Katie Carpenter
Suzanne Morris, a recognized novelist, has ventured into the realm of poetry. With an impressive career spanning four decades, she has authored eight works of fiction, captivating readers from 1976 to 2016. Morris possesses a natural talent for crafting poetry, having achieved multiple publications without having any formal poetry training. Morris, a native of Houston, attended the University of Houston, majoring in English, and studied creative writing at Clover Park Community College in Tacoma, Washington. She currently resides in Cherokee County, Texas.
How would you describe your origin story as a poet? What are your first memories of reading and writing poetry? Which people, teachers, and poets were most influential to you in the beginning?
SM: Long before I began writing poetry, I was a novelist, with eight works of fiction published between 1976 and 2016. I had no formal training in poetry, and I do not recall an interest in writing poems until I was well into adulthood. Along the way, I admired Emily Dickinson, the Lake Poets, Longfellow, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and others.
I have an ear for music, an innate sense of rhythm, and a love of words, all of which I believe are fundamental to the writing of poetry. And, I have an instinct for building narrative, which is helpful. In my novels, I would occasionally include lines of verse, attributing them to the characters in the stories. And the narrator in my most recent novel, Aftermath, a survivor’s tale of the London School tragedy of 1937, becomes a poet over the course of the story. A selection of her poems appears as an appendix to the novel.
The transition into writing poetry as a major pursuit was gradual and seemed natural as I wound up my career as a novelist. By then I had come to admire a list of fine poets that is still growing, including Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall, Ada Limón, Langston Hughes, Sharon Olds, Claudia Emerson, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Mary Oliver, Natasha Trethewey, and most recently, Jane Clarke. I know that all of them have influenced the way I write poetry.
With a background of writing novels, I have come to think of a poem as the distillation of a theme into the most vivid and economical language possible. This is quite different from the work of the novelist to enlarge on a theme.
My novels have tended to tie up the loose ends in the final pages– or, at least, the important ones. So, I’ve slowly learned to recognize where to leave off in a poem, and hopefully provoke the reader to take it from there.
How would you describe your writing process when it comes to poetry? How do you know when you are ready to write a poem and how does the drafting, revising, and editing process work for you?
SM: The idea for a new poem often seems to come out of the blue, yet I soon realize it has been forming in my mind for a while. Maybe I see something unusual, or someone makes an arresting statement that stays with me and becomes a refrain. Usually, I sit down and draft the entire poem, rather than just pieces of it; though not always. Sometimes the closing lines are the first to grab me and find their way to the page.
I often work for weeks on a single poem, revising then letting it sit; revising again, and so on, endlessly trying out different words, adding, deleting, moving stanzas around, until the poem feels about right. Once in a while, I get a bonus: a poem that comes out well on the first or second try. But I have learned not to trust that very far. Often, after I have put aside a poem as “done,” I pick it up weeks, months, or even years later, and find there is room for improvement. My early poems were often made up of three- or four-line stanzas. Gradually, I began writing more often in couplets. I don’t know why this has come to feel natural.
One of the things that I love about writing poems is being able to make up so many titles!
A novelist may work for years on a book, and for all those pages of words, there is, finally, just one title to contain all of them.
What topics or issues frequent your poems? Have those changed over time?
SM: Most of my poems center around situations I find compelling, and/or people with traits I find interesting. (This was also true of my character-driven novels). I grew up in the suburbs of Houston and did not develop an ability to closely observe nature until after I moved to East Texas. I greatly admire poets who are knowledgeable in the many areas where I am lacking.
One type of poem I especially enjoy writing is the ekphrastic form. Most of the time, these poems call for some amount of research beyond the painting or other work of art that inspires them. Since I spent years researching each of my novels, conducting research comes naturally to me. I have always sought variety in the poems that I write, so topics and issues are ever-changing.
I have read your poem "Telehandler Ballet" on Texas Poetry Assignment. What do you recall about the inspiration for this poem? How does it reflect the choices you regularly make in crafting your poetry on the page? Were there any new craft choices you made?
SM: I am all instinct when it comes to writing poetry, with its rhythm and cadence and voice. I feel more than know what I am doing. My poem, Telehandler Ballet, was among the poems that came out of the experience of losing my husband of 59 years, back in January of 2023.
My husband was a business owner who had always wanted to retire out in the country. When his dream came true, he purchased a number of pieces of heavy equipment to cultivate the property where we built our home.
Before he became ill, I never really thought much about the equipment, other than what could be accomplished with it. After he died, the time arrived to sell what would no longer be needed. Watching from a distance, near the end of the day, as the buyer removed the telehandler from our property, was a profound experience for me. I couldn’t hear the noise of the engine; I could only see it slowly moving across the green pasture, never to return. It felt like saying goodbye to my husband all over again. I suddenly saw that it moved gracefully, almost like a ballet dancer. And there was something truly beautiful about his relationship to all the equipment he used.
The poem grew from there. I just kept trying to put into words how this great hulking machine could actually be a thing of grace, and so the poem had an elegiac quality. It was the closing line, occurring to me after many drafts, that finally clenched the poem for me, put all of its meaning into just those few words.
What advice would you give to young people who are interested in reading poetry, writing poetry, and publishing their work?
SM: I would advise young people who want to write and publish poetry to deeply respect the art, to work at writing every day, and to revise, revise, revise. Don’t think writing poetry is easy just because it’s short. It isn’t. Otherwise, be honest in what you write, honest with yourself, and with your reader.
If you had to recommend one or two Texas Poetry Assignment poets to other readers, who might you suggest?
SM: There is a wide range of poetic voices and styles to be discovered at The Texas Poetry Assignment. It has been a great pleasure for me to read examples from so many of them. I feel privileged that my poems are in such talented company.
How would you distinguish contemporary poetry from poetry from earlier eras?
SM: I honestly don’t know how to contrast poetry written in one era with that of another. Styles of writing come and go, but a good poem is timeless.
If you had a chance to ask a question to a poet you admire (living or dead), who is the poet and what would you ask?
SM: I have no questions, but I would like to say, to all the poets I have come to love and admire in my lifetime, thank you for all you have given me.
Katie Carpenter is currently pursuing her master's degree at Angelo State University. She earned her B.A. in Strategic Communication from Howard Payne University in 2020. Her aspirations include becoming an English professor in the future
