Interview With Robert Sward By Maggie Paul

Nothing mystical. No magic. She’s forgotten the past, forgotten we’re married, forgotten who I am, forgotten my name, forgotten her children’s names, forgotten the dog’s name, forgotten we have a dog.

 

It is February 19, 2017, and Robert Sward has just returned home from teaching an Autobiography and Memoir workshop for Seniors at the Louden Nelson Center, as part of his duties as Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate. Through the picture window before us, winter rain pummels his deck and backyard.  The eucalyptus trees surrounding his home are drenched, bent over as if straining to hear our conversation. Mourning doves, blackbirds and blue jays from one eave to another in search of shelter from the wind-whipped rain. To our delight, at various moments, Gloria Alford, Robert Sward’s wife of 30 years and the muse at the center of his new book, joins in the conversation.

———————

Maggie Paul: First of all, congratulations on becoming Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz. Does this feel like an embrace from the small city north of Monterey Bay where you have made your home for more than 30 years?

Robert Sward: Embraced, yes. Honored, doubly honored.  Being named Poet Laureate is honor enough, but to serve in that capacity with widely respected figures like Gary Young, David Swanger, and Ellen Bass, before me, well, I’m bowled over. Grateful to be named Laureate, honored, too, to join their company.

MP: Knowing you as a teacher and a poet for some 25 years, I have witnessed first-hand how you demonstrate a persistent dedication and earnestness to the art of poetry and memoir. You elicit such dedication from others as well. Who were your models as a young poet?

RS: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg and the power, humor and sheer energy and verve of fiction writers like Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie March was an important book for me. I found poetry in that. Bellow was a fellow Chicagoan. I found poetry in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and many others. Among teachers, it was the community of writers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1956-58; and William Meredith at Bread Loaf, Middlebury College in Vermont, and Connecticut College, where I taught in 1959-60.

MP: What is it about Santa Cruz that won you over?

RS: I’m 84 and a 30-year resident of Santa Cruz and what stands out for me, apart from the natural beauty of the place, is the openness, the generosity of spirit I’ve found here. And by that I mean how we turn out and support one another. Born and raised in Chicago, I spent the first 15 years of my life in that city, and later 15 years in Canada, and then 30 years in Santa Cruz. In answer to your question I feel embraced by Santa Cruz’ s community of artists, poets, sculptors, painters, musicians, actors, and actresses. The way we turn out, say, for a local poet’s book launch, a musical event, and for our ongoing Open Studios Artist events. It’s how the community generally recognizes and celebrates achievement.

MP: What are your plans for performing the duties of Poet Laureate?

RS:  I consider the Poet Laureate someone who, steeped in the local and national poetry scene, celebrates and serves poetry and the cultural life in his or her local community. Working as I did in 2014 with Kim Fryer, Louden Nelson’s Coordinator for Programming, I look forward to picking up and continuing with the Memoir for Seniors class, using the Community Center as a  venue. I’m very grateful to Ellen Bass for suggesting I work with Seniors. After all, I am an octogenarian myself! And, in so far as possible, I’ll be doing all I can to “give voice to the voiceless,” to borrow a phrase from Ellen. Serving as Poet Laureate for two years, 2016 – 2018, I look forward as well to visiting and working with inmates in the Santa Cruz Poetry in the Jail Program. In doing so I’ll be joining Ellen Bass, Renee Winter, Ann Simonton, Rosie King, Nancy Miller and other volunteers in the Poetry in Jails Project. At present I’m looking forward to attending a poetry jam at the Rountree facility in Watsonville.

Santa Cruz’ s Lily Rich, a psychologist working with Seniors in Assisted Living facilities, reports many feel unheard; they feel as if  they don’t have a voice. It’s my contention, and I’m not alone in this, that there’s a close connection between peoples’ speaking voices, the rhythms of everyday speech, and poetry. Lily has generously offered to help coordinate and facilitate visits, I’ll be making to Assisted Living facilities.

MP: How might you say that your new book about your wife, Love Has Made Grief Absurd, [Gloria, A Monologue] is about listening?

RS:  It’s all about listening. Every word is Gloria’s. I didn’t imagine her saying these amazing things, I H-E-A-R-D her saying them.  I didn’t make it up. I listened like the long-term 30-year lover I am and wrote down what I heard. Or at least what struck me. She’s my muse, and over the past 30 years I’ve learned to pay attention to the muse.

I used to think I didn’t have to wait for the muse to speak, that I could hurry the poem along. That made for some shoddy work. With ‘Gloria, A Monologue,” I accepted the fact that my wife, this extraordinarily gifted, beautiful celebrated woman, had Alzheimer’s. I had a breakdown. I was clinically depressed. It took some years but at last I learned how to survive grief: listen, pay attention, manage in whatever way you can to keep your heart open. Listen, listen, to let the muse proceed at her own pace.

Nothing mystical. No magic. She’s forgotten the past, forgotten we’re married, forgotten who I am, forgotten my name, forgotten her children’s names, forgotten the dog’s name, forgotten we have a dog.

But I love her, and we’ve been together for 30 years. In the past my former wives have complained “You never listen.  Why don’t you ever listen?” I’m a slow learner. It’s taken four marriages and 30 years, but finally, finally, I’ve begun to listen.

MP: How do you manage to keep your own voice and judgment out of the work?

RS: Inevitably, something of my own voice (and judgment) is going to slip through.

I think of the poet Mary Oliver and that line of hers “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

What is love? Love is paying attention. And for me, love, above all else – it’s about listening. In Gloria, A Monologue, the artist says:

“Everything I say is true. And I know you know it’s true. How do I know that?

Because I know you pay attention. You’re devoted to me. It’s like what that poet said, Mary-what’s-her-name?

‘Attention is the beginning of devotion.’”

MP: What is noticeable in the new poems is that tragic-comic stance that characterizes so much of your work. The book has been described aptly as “A tragic-comedy, a monologue in the voice of a SF Bay Area artist as she struggles with the gradual loss of her faculties and, indeed, the loss of ‘herself’ as she continues to live her life and create art.” What helps you to see humor in the midst of losing part of the Gloria you once knew?

RS – I wasn’t expecting that! Tears come to my eyes. Right now, today…

9 years after the neurologist’s diagnosis, I still see her, I still know her to be who she was, is and who I expect will always be. Gloria everlasting. The lady’s still authentic, no bullshit, no nonsense. I look into her eyes and feel as nourished by her as I did 30 years ago. I don’t flinch, I don’t back off, I just love being with her.

I love the Gloria she was, I love the Gloria she is. I have no intention of squandering the gift of whatever time we have left.

One thing that stands out is her frankness, and how that quality persists to this day. Missing any social filter, she’ll say straight out what she feels, sees and thinks. But what she’ll say is never ill intended, never meant to hurt, never meant to put someone down.

She’s entirely in the moment, and these days, a decade after the diagnosis, remembering less and less of the past, not knowing who I am, seeing me by turns, father? Brother? Lover? Husband? Former or Current husband?

MP: In the early 70s, you had a dramatic experience with temporary amnesia. Can you talk about that a bit? Do you think that your experience has given you a particularly empathetic view into the world of memory loss that Gloria is now experiencing?

RS: Yes.  Definitely. In 1975 I wrote a novella, The Jurassic Shales, which was published in Canada by Coach House Press. In answer to your question, after I was run over by a car in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I lost my memory and had amnesia for 24 hours. The book [The Jurassic Shales] combines the surreal nature and fictionalization of memory. Regarding the amnesia, it was essentially an overnight experience, well, maybe a day or two. Well… maybe longer… Truth is, I don’t remember. I was doing 14 readings for over a period of two weeks for the New England Poetry circuit.

The accident got me interested in autobiography and memoir. I began teaching these genres at UCSC (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Cabrillo College as well as at Esalen in Big Sur.

MP: Are you finding a discrepancy between what the medical research tells us about Alzheimer’s and your own personal experience with the disease as demonstrated by Gloria?

RS: My piece on Gloria was well received by the people from Life Span (the well-known all-inclusive home care and geriatric care services agency based in Santa Cruz). It’s a good organization. The piece sort of went viral there. I’ve included the topic of sex in the book, about wanting nothing back.

MP: That’s an aspect of Alzheimer’s we never hear about.

RS: I believe it’s relevant. I’m sorry if this sounds glib, but if one agreed-upon feature of Alzheimer’s is “short term memory loss,” what’s wrong if you have no memory of any or all of the other times when you did in fact engage in lovemaking? Memory loss could prove to be more of an advantage than a disadvantage. If you have no memory of having ever made love before, and, as a consequence, each “new” time you engage in lovemaking it’s as if you were making love for the first time… not so bad!

We’re speaking of mindfulness, of being there entirely in the moment, in the present moment.

Does thinking like that make one a Romantic?

While we are talking, Gloria comes to the kitchen table and sits down with us.

Robert takes a sip of Gloria’s coffee.  “Have what you want, dear,” she says.

I mention to Robert and Gloria that I had been swimming laps at the gym earlier that day.

RS: I love listening to the breathing of swimming.

Gloria: Did you swim today?

RS: Yesterday I swam.

Gloria: I’m going to start doing that. Do I have a bathing suit?

RS: Yes.

Gloria: Is it a two-piece or a one piece, dear?

RS: It’s a one piece. It fits you very well.

Gloria: Good.

We return to the question of when Robert knew the piece was finished:

MP: It is often said that a poet never “finishes” a poem, but rather, of necessity, abandons it. Was it difficult to know when the piece was finished?

RS: Yes, it was. It would have been a lot easier if it were chronological, but that wasn’t an option. There’s no clear movement in time because she will remember some things better one day than the next.

I wouldn’t call them tangents, but the work goes off in different directions, past and present, as you might imagine. There’s also the dynamic… our very different personalities, the way Gloria’s mind works and the way mine works and interacts with hers. Still, it’s a monologue from beginning to end, the work is entirely in her voice; every word is hers.

Gloria: How come, honey?

RS: Well, the words are just what you say. I write it down.

Gloria: What is it about?

RS: It’s about our conversations, your state of mind. Just people talking. I like you, I like listening.

Gloria: That’s nice of you to do that. Really nice of you.

RS: I get a lot out of it.

Gloria: Well, I get a lot out of it too, to have someone listen to me.

RS: What do you get out of it?

Gloria: Well, it just feels good to know that what I think is interesting to someone.

RS: Well it is.

MP: And that’s really what we’ve been talking about – the power of listening. Because we know, in the world, a lot of people aren’t listening.

Gloria: They sure don’t. (She laughs)

MP: So it’s sacred. It’s a very special thing.

RS: I think it was Mary Oliver who said that the soul is in the voice. In the same way that we can look in someone’s eyes and really see who they are, with the language we get the voice, the real voice.

*

MP: Speaking of the soul in the voice, Robert, you and I have been talking about Leonard Cohen, and what an influence he was on you. What are your thoughts about Leonard Cohen’s death?

RS: It has really affected me….

Gloria: How come, honey?

RS: For one thing, I interviewed him years ago in Montreal, genuinely liked him and listen, listen, listen to his music. I can relate to his work. I’m pretty much the same age as he was – he died at 82 and I’m 83. He is a Canadian poet. I’m American, but also Canadian. Lived there for 14 years. And as I mentioned, I got depressed for a while, and we shared… he talked very frankly about his own experiences with depression.

He had a long career and reached a lot of people. Enormous audiences. When I interviewed him (1984) he spoke of his dream of waking up, waking in a state of grace, where everything seemed to make sense. There’s this balance where you seem to be in good shape with the gods and you’re being what you need to be and you know what you’re working for. BTW, the interview I did with Cohen is on my website, robertsward.com. There’s an interview I did with Saul Bellow there as well, and Margaret Atwood….

Three hour-long interviews for CBC Radio.

MP: What did you think of Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize?

RS: It’s great that songwriters have finally broken through. He’s the first songwriter to get a Nobel Prize and, yes, I think he’s a major poet. I think Leonard Cohen is also, and I can’t help feeling that my own preference would be Cohen.  I feel that Cohen is the better poet. But I’m just glad to see it happen.

In fact, I’m very impressed with the amount of attention Leonard Cohen’s gotten since his death. I mean he’s being recognized.

Gloria:  Since his death?

RS: Yes – he died – two days ago.

Gloria: Isn’t he awfully young to die?

RS: Well I think so – he was 82 – not awfully young. We have a DVD of a concert Leonard Cohen did in London – and I want to order the latest, “Make It Darker.” I read that he had serious back problems at the end and his son would bring a microphone to his bed and record some songs.  I don’t know whether that is what is on the new album but he sings very differently on some of those pieces. And I can imagine somebody making those sounds if he is in bed and making an effort; it would be very moving to be with him. Very interesting guy. And he is as important as Bob Dylan is as a writer and a musician.

*

Gloria: When I look at you honey, and you look back, I wonder if you know how much I love you.

RS: I do. You know, it’s both ways. It’s true.

Gloria: I just think I’m a better lover.

RS: I think women are generally better lovers – more capable of it. I think you’re right.

MP:  That’s why we need each other – men and women.

RS: Men are shallower.

Gloria: I don’t know if that’s true.

RS: No?

Gloria: No.

RS: I’ve evolved anyway, I think.

Gloria: You’re richer. I don’t mean richer in money, I mean in how you see the world.

Gloria goes into her room. Robert and I continue talking at the kitchen table.

MP:  Gloria asks these penetrating questions. I’ve always found that to be true about her. Her questions are challenging, refreshing, pointed. She’s honest and direct as an artist too. Why waste time on shallow concerns when we can address the deeper ones?

RS: She’s still Gloria. In many ways, she still is who she is. She knows who she is; there’s such a sense of presence there. The interesting thing is she knows who she is even though she doesn’t remember who she is.

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Maggie Paul is the author of Borrowed World, a collection of poems published by Hummingbird Press, and the chapbook, Stones from the Basket of Others (Black Dirt Press). Her work has appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader, Rattle, Hill Tromper, The Monterey Poetry Review, Poetry Miscellany, the Drexel University Journal, Porter Gulch Review, and Phren-Z. She teaches writing at Cabrillo College and is now at work on her second collection of poems. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA.