Linda Smukler is the author of two collections of poetry: Normal Sex (Firebrand Books) and Home In Three Days. Don't Wash.,a book and cd rom. (Hard Press). She was also co-editor, with Susan Fox Rogers, of Portraits Of Love (St. Martin's Press). She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and studied the visual arts at the Yale School of Art and at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Her work has been widely anthologized, and she is the recipient of numerous awards in poetry and fiction, including the 1997 Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry. She has received fellowships in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Foundation. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona and has work forthcoming in The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal and The World in Us The World in Us (St. Martin's Press).

January, 2000
Linda Smukler
by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
© 2000 Gerry Gomez Pearlberg

Editor's Note -- The poem "Stations" has been provided for the reader in pdf format, in order to accomodate the form of Ms. Smukler's poem. You will need Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to open the pdf file. Depending upon the way in which you have your browser configured, it will open either within your browser, or download to your desktop.

Gerry Gomez Pearlberg: Before discussing the content of your poem "Stations" let's begin with a basic observation: this is a prose poem and in fact, you work primarily in prose poetry and have for many years. Why have you chosen this form as your own?

Linda Smukler: The form I have taken has several origins: The keyboard and the song. The breath and then the phrasing from beginning to end. I studied piano when I was a child and then I learned to type. When I gave up the piano at age 17 the typewriter became my only keyboard. I always have written through the typewriter or some other kind of keyboard. I find that words come through my mind down through my body into my hands and arms and into the keyboard. It is a very physical experience. I never learned to wait for periods or commas. In the physical performance of writing the space bar became my only means of phrasing and to this day still functions as such. A paragraph is like a song. The momentum from beginning to end is extremely important. Where one takes a breath and where one continues to sing. This form comes closest to how I hear and see language forming in my mind so I try to stay true to that. Early on I would play around with different forms, adding periods and commas to a piece originally written without - and the result always sickened me. Suddenly there seemed to be unexplained and sudden stops and stutters. The punctuation served to break the flow of the energy of the original poem.

Pearlberg: Who are some of your favorite practitioners of the prose poem?

Smukler: There are many writers who fall into a land between what is considered "prose" and what is considered "poetry". The writers who have influenced my work (not by any means a complete list!) are: Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, James Schuyler; Michaux, Baudelaire Rimbaud, Verlaine; Dodie Bellamy and Kathy Acker; Tony Morrison and William Faulkner and James Joyce; Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Ai. Maureen Seaton and Denise Duhamel (who have written prose poems collaboratively), Virginia Woolf, Carolyn Forché, Gertrude Stein, Paul Monette, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson. Who are the poets and who are the prose writers? I am interested in writers who invent a voice that makes sense because it is so much what it is. A voice that defines its own physical rules and its own world. I'm tired of trying to fit into one camp or another.

Pearlberg: Does the use of the prose poem have any special relevance in terms of your poem "Stations"?

Smukler: As in many of my poems I have chosen to write a first person dramatic monologue - in the case of "Stations" I imagined myself into the voice and body of Matthew Shepard - or someone like him. I researched what happened that night and used the events (some true and some imagined). Each section of the poem had to hold together like a song. Some sections are only a couple of lines. Some are an entire page.

Pearlberg: What were the circumstances under which "Stations" was written?

Smukler: Kevin Killian recommended me to Scott Gibson, the editor of what was to become Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard. Although I rarely write specifically for anthologies, I wanted to for this one. The horror of what happened to Matthew had shaken me terribly - as had other murders of gay and transsexual people. I wanted to write about what happened. To leap into the possibility. I knew I wasn't so far away from what happened. I knew I was like Matthew. I knew I had come close. I wanted to "see" what happened. Writing is often a way for me to know something.

Pearlberg: It's interesting that you don't mention Matthew Shepard by name, either within the poem itself or through a dedication. Why is that?

Smukler: Partly because the anthology was to be clearly about Matthew; in that context, it would be obvious who the poem was about. And partly because the poem is about a fictional Matthew or a fictional someone else who these things had happened to. Partly because it's not Matthew - it's me and you.

Pearlberg: Your poem is structured to reflect the Fourteen Stations of the Cross which tell the story of Christ's crucifixion. I'm listing the Stations for readers who, like myself, may not be conversant in Christian imagery and symbolism - it helps to understand this background in looking more deeply at your poem.

So, for example, in Section IV of your poem, the narrator has a vision or dream of his mother, and you play quite clearly on the double meanings of "Father" and "Son" and "Mother" as they relate to Shepard, a contemporary victim of hatred, and to the story of Christ's martyrdom.

Section VI is really interesting as well. Here's where, in the Sixth Station, Veronica wipes the sweat from Jesus' brow - and in your poem, "someone is wiping my face hey it's a girl there are four of us now..." In Section VIII, the Matthew Shepard narrator makes a truly chilling God-like proclamation in which the violence and ugliness of these men is turned upon their own, upon their own families, becomes their own "normalcy." And this section corresponds to the Eighth Station where "Jesus comforts the women of Jerusalem." The parallels go on and on throughout your poem.

Smukler: Artists are always looking for structures and many have used the Stations of the Cross as the basis of a series. Many contemporary painters have done this - from Barnett Newman to Francesco Clemente (paintings from that early series are currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City). Since living in Tucson I have attended the ceremonies of the Pascua Yaqui who perform an elaborate Stations of the Cross every Easter. The biblical rendition of the Stations are deep with metaphor and connection. It made sense to organize a narrative of the fictional Matthew's night through such a device. On the most surface and obvious level - the image of Matthew stretched on a fence post suggested Christ and martyrdom.

I appropriated phrases from the biblical versions of the Stations at will....I found many appropriate. In the first Station, Jesus is condemned to death. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson apparently planned on entrapping Shepard (it is not know if they actually planned to kill him). It doesn't matter. They planned the event. As did Pilate. In many ways Matthew was condemned to die in that bar. By all biblical accounts, Jesus appeared dressed in a purple robe. And Pilate said "Here is the Man" or in other writings: "Look at the Man". A purple robe. As gay. I thought of Aaron and Russell. Flirting with Matthew. Knowing what they would do. Perhaps saying: "Look". There is that flamboyant man - that target who is clearly exactly what he is.

Each section follows the Stations - some closely, some loosely. In Section Three, I used the excuse of the first fall to remember that Matthew had been attacked before. In Section Four I called up the image of his mother. I used Station Five to remember Matthew's friends. In Eight, as you observed, I reiterate Jesus' words in the example of Matthew saying 'this is not just about me. This is about you and your children.' This horror is not only about the death of Christ or the murder of someone gay or transgendered. It is about your own death.

Pearlberg: I'm impressed with how you re-appropriate Biblical images to create your own allegory. And while one doesn't need to know the Stations of the Cross to follow the poem, it certainly deepens the experience. The blend of Biblical and contemporary seems almost alchemical.

Smukler: Structures [like that provided by the Stations of the Cross] are to poets like recipes are to cooks. One can be creative with them. Ingredients and events give depth and flavor, but are meant to be played with. Perhaps even changed. The echoes between recognizable events and literary references or structures add resonance and clarity and force. I have changed some things to fit what I needed to do. For instance, in my poem Matthew does not die on the cross. He dies in the 14th Station when he makes the decision not to live.

Pearlberg: One of my favorite parts of the poem is in the first section where you do a great riff on the constant tension gay people experience with the idea of "normalcy," and "fitting in," - things most straight people take for granted. I love your line, "for once I am just like everyone on TV nothing complicated nothing difficult" and then a few lines down "for once my life is just like...my best girlfriend who is dating a guy on the football team my cousin who is getting married next March and just bought a house with a big kitchen where she bakes muffins". That detail about the muffins is so poignant, the looking in on other people's lives and being told - knowing - you can't have it, at least not quite in that way. Yet being so young and open-hearted and wanting it - "I will bake muffins too for that big-eyed boy across the bar".

Smukler: Of course I imagine that Matthew wanted certain 'normal' things in life, things he saw around him in friends and family. We've all at one time or another imagined the same, but as gay or transgendered have so much further to travel. Sometimes it's the simpleness that seems so attractive. I also wanted to explore Matthew's humanness - the person who was not perfect, the person who never intended martyrdom or sainthood. I imagined Matthew as getting drunk that night. I imagined him as someone who let alcohol convince him that he was 'normal' and that those boys were truly attracted to him. I imagined him as someone who let alcohol impede his judgement. This is a place I know intimately - I know that desire to let alcohol help ward off pain and difference and lack of confidence. I can seriously say that I've felt all of these imaginings. I've done all of these things. I've come out alive (so far) but I didn't (don't) have to.

Pearlberg: Let's take this question of identification a bit further. What was it like, as a lesbian poet, to make that leap into speaking in the voice of a young gay man named Matthew Shepard? Or was it a leap at all?

Smukler: Identifying with desire is never a leap. Imagining the forms of someone else's desire sometimes is. In this case I'm not sure I got it 'right' - if there is such a thing. What helped me were the physical descriptions of Matthew - his height and weight - which are close to my own. I say this because the physical imagination plays a huge part in the imagination of the poem. I could feel something about walking into that bar on that night. I think the parallels are also interesting to Brandon Teena's story - a story that also involved the desire to be a part of something 'normal,' that also involved drinking and bars and the collision of hate and so-called friendship. I thought of Brandon a lot while writing this poem, the similarities and the differences. He deserves his own poem. He certainly deserves his own anthology of poets. [Ed. Note: Brandon Teena was a biological female who passed as a young man in Lincoln and Falls City, Nebraska. In 1993, Teena was raped and murdered by two male "friends" after her transgenderism was forcibly exposed. Teena was twenty-one years old.]

I've often felt like an actor in writing my poems. Gender - not unlike the device of the Stations - is a particular structure. In writing I allow myself to assume a gender and flow between other genders. For the reader a dialogue is formed between what he/she knows and what is going on in the poem. A lot about gender is about advertising (look at the effort expended by magazines and advertisers in our culture to keep gender definable). Gender is a structure we all have to deal with. No one can escape it. However, we can play with it too. To say I am a man in a woman's body may be true. To say Matthew Shepard was effeminate may be true. To say that he was also a man is true. To say I am also a woman is true.

Pearlberg: How did it feel to be inside this mind-frame as you wrote this poem? It makes me furious and broken-hearted just reading it. Writing it must have been quite a roller-coaster.

Smukler: I spent a good two months working on "Stations" and nothing else. The experience was psychically devastating. When one takes on a voice so deeply one has no choice but to experience what happens.

Pearlberg: Let's move on to some of the "technical" aspects of your poem. The pacing is so fluid. That's partly the "quickness" prose poetry allows, and of course there's no punctuation dragging the poem down. Those spaces between phrases allow for a breath-pause but not a stop. So the poem has velocity. And that contributes so much to the tension, to the intensity of emotion, and to the apparitional or visionary quality that makes the poem ascend. Can you talk a bit about some of these issues - your use of punctuation, the page, lyrical yet conversation language, etc.?

Smukler: I always want a poem to anchor itself in the concrete. Worse than a period or a comma, the thing that stops me most often in writing is abstract language. I want to feel the ground as one's foot steps down into pile of mud or a pool of clear green water. Conversation and dialogue are simply concrete ways of letting the reader see and hear what is happening. My reference points are also a musical line and the human breath. If the poem does not sound through to the very end, it does not work. Here I hope that each section builds to the next. One has to read out loud to truly find out if it works. It is important to let the original energy with which the poem was written never be lost.

Pearlberg: What gave you the idea of pairing the murder of Matthew Shepard with the crucifixion? I mean, beyond what you've already said about structure and the manner in which Shepard was executed and - now that I'm thinking about it - the last name "Shepard."

Smukler: Is it a coincidence that his name was Shepard? That he was crucified? Perhaps something bigger was at play here. A grand metaphor in the minutiae of a name and a death. But then again I'm sure Matthew never meant to live or die in notoriety. I'm sure he wasn't thinking of symbolism in the slow horrific moment-by-moment agony of his pain.