I first heard Jude Nutter read her poetry at Banfill Locke Art Center, one evening last October. In her light but firm Yorkshire accent she recited pieces with such intensity they seemed to create a vacuum in that small, crowded room. After a poem about her father being wounded in World War II I looked around and saw more than one person weeping. Imagine that—in our age of webcams and hundred-million-dollar films, people can still be brought to tears by the simple power of words.
Jude Nutter’s poetry reminds me in many ways of Emily Dickenson’s; many of the poems in her first collection, Pictures of the Afterlife (Salmon Publishing, 2002) explore nature and death, and the uneasy ground where the two intersect. For example in "The 14 Movements: A Prayer for Robert Lee", she describes an autopsy with disturbing beauty:
And in the end there’s nothing but the history of the heart’s miscalculation: the hard-won beauty of all that is broken. In the end, every shred of muscle, every fragment of bone, was thrown in a red hazard bag and placed inside the chest and then the ribs were laid down, the skull- cap replaced and his face rolled back and the soul is just the body’s cargo, a brief difficulty we carry everywhere.
Originally from Leeds, Nutter has lived in various locations, including a stint as a homesteader in Alaska and a student in Eugene, where she received her MFA from the University of Oregon. She now resides in the Twin Cities, where she teaches classes at the Loft and the Weisman Art Museum, and works with adolescents at an alcohol treatment center. She recently spent six weeks in Antarctica on an NSF program. Her book The Curator of Silence (winner of the Ernest Sandeen prize) will be published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2006. I recently met Jude for some cordial conversation at the Coffee Gallery on Washington Avenue.
Joel Van Valin: You write poems about people dying, about autopsies and people killed. Why the obsession with death?
Jude Nutter: The autopsy poem was from when I was training to be an EMT, and I got to attend one. I think Freud was wrong in saying that sex drive determines everything—it’s the finiteness of life, which we can’t really grasp. Since I was a kid I’ve been interested in mortality, in death. When I was a girl I really did use to collect roadkill, the way I describe in "Raising the Dead with Words"—I believed certain words could resurrect the dead. The first book was just exploring that idea. What is death? What is an afterlife? I don’t think of it as morbid—it’s an interest. It motivates me in my work, first because it inspires me to do things, and second because it fascinates me—the ego can’t doesn’t compute death.
JVV: In "Directions to the Lady Lever, Port Sunlight", you write that art is generous. How do you employ this generosity in your own work?
JN: I think being willing to share and explore our own interests and obsessions is generous. And I think all art is generous at heart, that people will go away from it taking something away—emotion, permission to think certain things. When I was a girl I read poetry and felt not so lonely—the reader becomes part of a larger community.
JVV: The cover of Pictures of the Afterlife is based on a painting of Blake. Are you much influenced by Blake and other writers?
JN: Yea I was very influenced by Blake—because he brought the word and image together, because he had visions and lived in his own world. It fascinated me. My mother used to read Tennyson and Walter De La Mare, Keats, Byron, and Wordsworth of course. Wordsworth particularly influenced me because he was from my part of the country.
JVV: So you were very influenced by the Romantics...
JN: Yes. I could never write like that though, with such formal stanzas. Ken Smith has also influenced me—he wrote a lot of poems about Eastern Europe and South America, about borders. I also love Rilke, Lawrence, Brecht, Elizabeth Bishop.
JVV: You work with adolescents, at an alcohol treatment center. Do you use poetry or other art in your job?
JN: I do a writing group for them every week. They get regular lessons. It’s usually open, but I do give assignments for kids that need focus. I’m a recovering alcoholic and writing was therapy for me. And I think it is for these kids.
JVV: Last, because we’re doing a travel issue here—tell us about Antarctica!
JN: It was beyond all my wildest expectations. I only got six weeks there. My project was to do a book of poems and images, about the land and also about the metaphor of Antarctica and what it means now, how it’s changed. I could call my boyfriend from there on a cell phone...in the days of Shackleton they were cut off completely for six months. I was at Palmer Station, where all the scientists go. It’s the warmest station. It was around 0 degrees, but it got as warm as 30 or 40—warmer than here! Lots of penguins, albatross, seals, sea lions. I didn’t have time to draw all the landscapes, though, and the book isn’t finished. I’m applying to go back!