Take Risks, Rejoice: An Interview with Shelley Armitage

Interview by Beth Haymond

Shelley Armitage grew up in the farming community of Vega, Texas, in the panhandle. As a university professor in Texas, New Mexico, and Hawai’i, Armitage has spent most of her life away from where she grew up outside of summers returning to Vega. Armitage has worked across the globe in Portugal, Finland, New York, Oregon, and many other places. She’s authored eight books and over fifty articles, including her recent memoir Walking the Llano. Her work explores the philosophical connection we have to landscape. She is a professor emerita at the University of Texas at El Paso and currently lives in Los Cruces, New Mexico.

You've had an extensive career as a university professor, and you've published eight books along with 50 articles. But on a personal level, you've moved back to Texas, to the Texas Panhandle where you operate your family farm, Armitage Farms. I feel like this informs your poetry, and I'd love to hear how that does that.

SA: Well, it's interesting about the so-called farm; about half of it's grassland. One attraction to me about the farm is it had native prairie. When I got old enough to realize what native prairie meant—I felt like we had a treasure. Of course, it's been overgrazed at different times and things like that. But as I hold on to it, cause I'm the last family member here of the immediate family, I don't want somebody else to have it who's going to develop it or plow it under or do something like that. For a long time, the farm has had a kind of evocative meaning for me. As I get older now and don’t go there as often, I have a more imaginative relationship with it. I visualize it in my mind and I feel like I can go there in an imaginative way. I saw these poems that I wrote were in some ways an homage to the idea of having a place like that, a place to go to, a place where you have a family history, but also you have the history of the land, which is very ancient.

Yeah. Like you mentioned, it has native grasses and foliage, and I'm not an environmentalist or naturalist, but I have seen a few people, like on social media who are in those spaces, and they talk about plants that are native to America, and how we're losing them because of development. It sounds like you're more focused on your land on the restoration side of things.

SA: There's all the turbines around out there. And I support green energy, but when you do that, you break up habitats, and it has consequences for some birds and bats. There’s improvement, but people are wild about it because it makes money and employs many people. We're just covered up there in the panhandle with turbines now. Your neighbor might have gotten rich with forty turbines on their land and then you're next door with nothing. But that doesn't matter, because I think some of us still have to be part of the ecological reality of the place. In some ways, the ecological is pragmatic, but it's also very creative. So it informs my poetry.

We've talked about the number of your professional achievements, but are there any specific projects coming up that you want to talk about?

SA: I'm spinning a chapbook next, and I think I've grown some as a poet. I think there are better poems in this collection. The other collection had some very youthful poems, ones that I've done years and years ago, and then some recent ones. You probably can tell the difference.

That's a nice mix, though, where it's poems from different stages of your life and almost like a photograph of that?

SA: Yeah. I'm working on that, and I was going to title that Blue Highways, but then I thought of William Least Heat-Moon, who had that book years ago of the same title. I didn't want to use that, although I like the idea of blue highways because it's rural, the back roads kind of thing. But I re-titled it, which sounds very stiff From a Sandstone Ledge, indicative of perspective—kinds of perspectives. Then I've been asked to give a talk at a sustainable water conference on the Ogallala Aquifer.

That sounds great. 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?

SA: I think when I was a girl I was more interested in narrative. I tried to write a detective work, kind of like the Hardy Boys or something. It was based on an old house in Vega that we'd sneak over there in the middle of the night to see if any blood was coming down from the upstairs tub. I was interested in trying to write stories. Of course, I had watched Western films, so I had some very funny things that I wrote as a third grader about a boy and girl combo who are out in the West and were Western kids and all this is corny is, as you can imagine.

I don't remember writing poems exactly, but then, when I started my first teaching job, I was teaching contemporary poetry.

Bill Moyers had a whole series on American poets, and it included people like Joy Harjo, who were in their infancy; they were just starting as poets. Those recordings I used in my classes, and they influenced me. There was Lucille Clifton, a black writer who's now deceased, but she was a younger person then, and these people read so well. They read their poetry so well. That got into me…something about your inner voice, the rhythm of those poems, the drive of them, and the subject matter too. Mostly the sound they made influenced me. I became enamored of Maxine Kumin. She was a friend of Anne Sexton's. After Sexton died, Maxine Kumin wrote two stunning poems about her. I happened to teach at a college in the Dallas Fort Worth area that brought Anne Sexton to the campus. I started listening to these poets live, including N. Scott Momaday.

So their performances are kind of what inspired you. I love that. 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?

SA: I often use walking as a walking meditation. Often lines come to me when I'm walking like an opening line or an end line. The same happens with dreams. At about 4:00 in the morning, if I wake up sometimes there will be lines in my head. I put those down and then I follow their lead and then it grows into a poem. Then I go back and I read them over and over out loud to myself. That's how I can hear where to change things, where to add, and what to do. That becomes a process. And then the last process would be editing, which is so easy on the computer now. You can see the work, but also see it changed. And that makes such an impact on you as you're trying to listen to it.

In your poem “Llano Estacado” you invite the reader to truly notice what the landscape has to offer by the shape of the poem. This contrasts tourists and explorers complaining that the Llano Estacado is “featureless.” What do you recall about the inspiration for this poem? How did this influence the shape and lines of the poem?

SA: There's an area west of where I grew up on I-40 where you go off what they call the caprock; off that plateau that's called the Llano Estacado down into a shallower area and it's very dramatic. People will drive like the devil through the air. They go over the edge going off because you can see the canyons to the north, the canyons of the Canadian River Valley. This is just right on I-40. It's the main tribal highway. You get the sensation of the height of that plateau when you go off of that area. The Spanish called it the Ceja, which is eyebrow.

They call it the eyebrow of the plains because it was a hump—you went over and went off of it. I traveled that road for years and was aware of that. Then I met another New Mexican poet named Peggy Pond Church. She was old enough to be involved with the Santa Fe Writers Group in the thirties. When I met Peggy, I realized she too lived on a plateau west of the Rio Grande River and had that same experience of the plateau and then the shallow lands. I wrote a piece called “Two Plateaus,” which I used to introduce my book on her. The “Two Plateaus” was the idea of the writer working on another writer, but having these commonalities. That had to do with the Llano Estacado. Then, just as a scholar, I've done work on the sense of place and written about the West. I'm familiar with the expeditionary people's attitude about the sea of grass. I wanted to incorporate that into a contemporary form.

You grew up in Vega, Texas which is a farming community. Your recent memoir Walking the Llano touches on these roots. As an adult, you’ve lived in different parts of Texas, New Mexico, Hawai’i, and internationally, Portugal, Poland, Finland, and Ethiopia. Frequently, you touch on themes of the environment, restoration, and humans as part of the landscape. How have your travels influenced your poetry as it relates to the environment? Have these travels pushed you to reconnect with your home and how has that environment influenced your poetry?

SA: I think of Poland as a prime example when I had a Fulbright in Warsaw. When I flew in there, it looked like somebody had taken a giant shovel and gouged the earth out. It was the middle of winter. The land looked derelict; over-farmed, worked out, and worn out. And I thought, how am I going to live here? First of all, I'm going to freeze to death. Of course, my intention was to fit in and try to have a sense of that place. I got out and walked. I went all over Warsaw on my feet. It's a pretty big city. Of course, that's the home of many things that happened in World War Two. You had the double weight of the Holocaust and the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw and all that business I'll never get over. I have chills to this day when I tell you about it because of things that happened there. For example, there was a group of us who it was kind of like an international church that we met in, and we were meeting in one of the minister's apartments, and it was in the old Jewish ghetto.

We were having a kind of prayer upstairs because we were doing a path of remembrance and stopping at the different places where they loaded people into the railcars and shipped them out of Warsaw to the death camps. So, you look down into the courtyard and they said, “Do you see that olive tree?” We go, “Well, yes.” He said, “That was here during the ghetto and it survived all the things that happened.” That just pulls you into a place. Even though it's never going to be your homeland, you learn you can be home in it. I think those experiences also made me appreciate my farming and ranching background as well. I don't know if that answers your question.

No, it definitely does. I think you seem to meditate on the connection of a person to the land. Changing gears a bit, what advice would you give to young people who are interested in reading poetry, writing poetry, and publishing their work?

SA: Read, read, read, workshops, courses, events, listen, experience, take risks, rejoice.

That seems to be the most prominent advice from other authors. If you want to write, you’ve got to read.

SA: It’s true because those rhythms get into your head. You learn by just reading things and seeing how somebody works out the line and shapes the poem.

If you had to recommend one or two Texas Poetry Assignment poets to other readers, who might you suggest?

SA: Katherine Jones is a good poet. She's a feature writer and journalist, and she's newly come to poetry, but I think she's done some nice work. She's also a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

I think it's people who come from a variety of backgrounds—you're going to get all kinds of different poetry. Because her life is going to inform her poetry way differently than you would or just any other poet. So I think that's cool.

SA: That's true.

We've been touching on the landscape environment as these are prominent subjects in your poetry, but how would you say your poems differ from earlier poetry and those similar subjects?

SA: For some reason, there's a little bit of an edge in some of my poems. There's one poem that has to do with an old love affair with someone who was separated from his wife. It was not a happy thing that I reported on myself that I went out with this man when he still was not divorced. We were both crazy about the history of photography, and I had met him in graduate school. We both worked on photo things together. My point is the poem talks about a feather, implying the idea of “light as a feather” and the quill and a feather and writing. All this is connected to his love of ornithology. So the poem, unless you know me and know the background, you probably don't get all of it. But it's a torturous poem because it's about his death. He died from Alzheimer's. It incorporates landscape and natural images to work through these points as I was trying to make just a poem on a page. It's not a long-form, but I think that sometimes we talk about eco-poetry, and it's a celebration of the natural world. Certainly, I'm trying to do that too, but also I'm trying to be prickly about it and write about it regarding human nature and kinship issues. That edge or the turn that's in the poem sometime at the end is an effort to shift the focus a little bit.

I like that. And then this last question: Do you have a poet you admire living or dead? Who is that poet and what might you ask them?

SA: Scott Momaday. I've heard him read twice. Once when I was a young woman in Fort Worth and he was a much younger man, and then at the Taos Writers Conference a few years ago. He's a brilliant reader, and he has a way of reading and bringing you around to the poem with his introduction: it's just magic. It's amazing. Joy Harjo was there; of course, she knew him very well and was just in awe of his performance. So I would ask Scott, because he also was a nonfiction and fiction writer, “How does narrative inform your poetic work and how does lyric inform your narrative work? Because I, too, am a nonfiction writer largely, but I've gone into poetry because my writing was very lyrical. My other writing was lyrical, and I knew I had those kernels that I could work with some lyricism. But I'd like to see what he might say about those two seemingly different genres, which can overlap.

Beth Haymond became an English graduate student at Angelo State University after working in marketing for several years. She hopes to pursue her education even further and get a Ph.D. She moved to the United States at nineteen after growing up in Calgary, Canada, and she has lived in several states with her husband and two kids.