Kelly Cherry: "Music’s at the heart of all that I write"

Kelly Cherry is among those writers with whom I feel a special affinity. Her work affirms the written word as an avenue to the sacred and the higher reaches of human thought and emotion while delighting in the humor, joy, pleasures and pratfalls of our mundane daily existence. Proud of continuing the heritage of Southern literature, she like past Southern masters Robert Penn Warren and George Garrett excels in a range of genres, including poetry, essays, memoir, travel writing, criticism and the novel. As with our past Southern Bookman interview subjects, Tim Suermondt and Rosanna Warren (see below), I e-mailed Kelly five questions, and she sent back her responses. Our conversation follows.

 1. You’ve strongly identified yourself as a Southern writer. Is your generation the last that will do so? With the South becoming more and more urban and suburban and with its language homogenized with the rest of the country’s, will young writers born in the South ever again think of their work as having qualities unique to the region?

    

      What I love most about the idea of being a Southern writer is the Southern reader. Southerners who read do so with their hearts and minds — and without preconceptions about how characters should behave: This is good for the Southern writer, because a character is a complex construct, not a role model or simple representation, and likely to behave in surprising ways. Southern readers relish surprises.   

    I would like Southern readers to embrace my work, but though I am a Southerner, my work may not be Southern. I was an adult before I read very much Southern writing (Faulkner, Porter, and Williams were exceptions). My early influences were not often Southern. I did grow up on my parents’ stories about their lives in Louisiana and South Carolina.  I did have an English teacher who told me that I should move beyond my Southern accent, but I think I still have it.

     I don’t know what the future South will be like. The South has certainly changed a lot, mostly for the better, and presumably it will change more. But people are still attached to the land here, and to the climate and the flora and fauna. And some are attached to their history. And some to the attempt to confront that history.   

  Will future writers from the South choose to identify themselves as Southerners?  For a while, they will, but in the more distant future, I doubt it. At some point we may all be part of a global culture, even if nations continue to exist. Will this be good or bad?  Probably both.

  

2.Christ and his life have played a central role in your work. How has your conception of Christ evolved and what role does he have now?

 

     I sometimes say I believe in Christ but not in God; I don’t think there is a heavenly father, or an afterlife, or divine destiny. I also don’t think any of these things are essential to religion.  I see Christ as the symbolic nexus for humankind’s deepest fears and desires. “Symbol” may suggest an inert image, but Christ is a kinetic image, a narrative that helps us to understand the real world in which we live. I think, too, that religious language allows access to distinctions of meaning that are necessary to a full life.

    I don’t care whether there was a Jesus; I care that we are transformative beings, able to create heaven and, alas, hell on earth.  That is our glory and our shame. 

  

3. You’re successful as an essayist, poet, novelist and travel writer. Do you have a different approach to each genre, or do have the view of Gore Vidal, that writing is writing and there should be no difference in a writer’s approach to different forms.

    Vidal is wrong about this. Each genre has particular strengths and it behooves a writer to make the most of those strengths. Moreover, each genre has its own music, which is crucial to the shaping of an idea.

 

 4. You’ve written engagingly about your childhood with two parents consumed with their vocations as violinists. You’ve compared your language to music. How does music inspire your work, and does it inspire your poetry more than prose?

       Music’s at the heart of all that I write in every genre. That’s not necessarily to suggest I always succeed, though I hope I consign at least most of my failures to the wastebasket.

     In my childhood, Beethoven’s late quartets taught me about joy, transcendence, despair, hard work, determination, love and the miracle that is art.  In my adolescence I learned from my father’s understanding of Beethoven’s structures. At about 11 or 12 I also discovered that Shakespeare made a comparable music out of language and character.

      Beethoven and Shakespeare were not everything, of course, but they were for me the beginning of everything. (Along with the King James Version of the Bible, which angered me and made me want to refute it, because it was so beautiful and so mean.)

     I used to dream my way into work by listening to music — the ideas came to me out of the music and were rhythms and shapes, harmonies and dissonance, volume and texture and pitch before they were worded. But by now I’ve written many of those ideas, and sometimes I think I hear music even more intensely today because I can concentrate on its physical properties and patterns without feeling I have to corral it into a poem or novel or story or essay.  Nor do I listen to music while I’m writing, though once I did: that’s become like trying to listen to two pieces of music at once.

  

5. You’ve written about your travels in Russia and other countries. Do you agree with that Nobel official’s comments about the parochialism of American writers, and should American culture, particularly literary culture, have a more global outlook?

     I do think American literature tends to be parochial, and I think this is largely a fault of publishers. But publishers need to make a living if they are to continue publishing, so they publish what they think might sell. Their judgment about what will or won’t sell is wrong more often than right, but they try.

     Meanwhile, I think most serious American writers do make an effort to read widely, recognizing that if we want to understand our own country we need to know something about the literature of other countries. We do grow up on classics from around the world. Unfortunately, we are not as well-educated as we might be, and that is grievous.

    It would be great if readers in general made a point of reading at least one book from another country every year. Especially politicians, ministers, and corporate heads. We tend to pay attention to other countries only when a crisis arises, which is always too late.