DONNA STONECIPHER in conversation with CAMILLE GUTHRIE

Poet Camille Guthrie had the following conversation with poet and translator Donna Stonecipher over email in the fall of 2024. Camille writes,

 “One of the pleasures of being a writer is having close friends who are writers. I don’t know how I deserved the luck of meeting the writer Donna Stonecipher on my first day at Sarah Lawrence College in 1989. We discovered that we were both from Seattle and have been dear friends ever since.

 In Stonecipher’s recent book The Ruins of Nostalgia, in which the poems all conclude with the phrase: “the ruins of nostalgia,” the poems are recursive, organized by the repetition of a word or phrase, which returns with a difference as the poet considers how nostalgia affects our understanding of one’s origin, travels, and present life. Set in Seattle, her hometown, and Berlin, her current home, the poems examine the records of memory in museums, objects, and architecture—while they mark the erasure of history through gentrification, language, and war. Stonecipher’s distinctive prose poetry enacts how nostalgia puts the speaker and reader, simultaneously, in the past and present—evoking sweetness, pain, shame, and discomfort.”

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

One of your epigraphs in The Ruins of Nostalgia comes from the anthropologist Raymond Williams: “Only other men’s nostalgias offend.” You have lived in many cities—Seattle, New York City, Athens, Georgia, Prague, Paris, Iowa City, and now Berlin—and you travel extensively. So many people, histories, languages, nostalgias. Was there a kernel idea or moment when this book—focusing on nostalgia in Seattle and Berlin—announced itself to you? And, did one idea or poem lead to the form of The Ruins of Nostalgia, or did the poems accrete separately and eventually turn into the book?

DONNA STONECIPHER

A couple of years before I began this manuscript, I wanted to write about nostalgia. I was surrounded by it in Berlin, and I was beginning to feel it in myself for Seattle, my hometown, which was drastically changing. I made a long list of possible titles, and then set it aside. A couple of years later, in 2016, my father was ill in Seattle and I was on a train to Munich with my husband. I drank too much of the Deutsche Bahn’s very strong black tea, my husband was busy condensing a score with his headphones on, and I was about to explode with caffeine, which works on me like how I imagine speed must work, so I grabbed my notebook and bam—one, two, three, ruins wrote themselves then and there. The first one was what became no. 63, and it was about fetishizing ruined façades in Berlin—a common pastime—and so ruins and nostalgia became intertwined in the title, and that felt right to me.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

I’m teaching Shakespeare’s sonnets right now at Bennington, and in #64, he writes, “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, / That Time will come and take my love away.” Helen Vendler, in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, comments that in this poem he invents a new verb: to ruinate. In The Ruins of Nostalgia, you describe aesthetic experience as self-inflicted and unstable: “We might love the beautiful images because we can’t apprehend them, ‘the beautiful’ always relocating itself, unrecognizable as the city outside, which is why we keep trying to rebuild the city in our minds.” That’s one way we “ruin the ruins of nostalgia,” (#15). How did you come upon this concluding phrase—which resounds and increases in power as it ends each poem—and, thus, the title of your book? For me, the repetition enforces both the entropy of ruination and nostalgia’s backward push.

DONNA STONECIPHER

That’s beautifully put. So, yes, the first poem of the manuscript was about ruins literally, but I understood immediately that ruins are about nostalgia and nostalgia is about ruin, and I knew I’d found my title and repeating phrase. Nostalgia has both positive and negative aspects, of course, and one of the latter is the way it can induce claustrophobia; I liked the mild feeling of claustrophobia engendered by bookending each poem with that phrase. I like to work with repeating phrases generally; I love the propulsive and hallucinatory qualities of repetition and find it generative.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

Your poems give me a similar pleasure I get from reading sonnets, which, of course, have a volta—a turn of mind, a change of feeling or idea. The volta appears in your poems as a consequence of your precise meditations upon a topic of nostalgia (or a word, event, or phrase) as you embrace and inspect it. The poems may have one long sentence or sentences separated by asterisk, and they always contain that voltaic shock of meaning. You’ve long preferred the prose poem line over the lyric line. Why is the sentence preferable over the poetic line (enjambed or end-stopped) and conducive to the voltaic insight, particularly in this book?

DONNA STONECIPHER

My “desert island” book of poetry—do people use that expression anymore?––the one book of poetry I would grab if I could grab only one—remains Shakespeare’s Sonnets. One of the best things I was asked to do during my MFA at Iowa was to memorize poems, thanks to assignments Mark Levine gave us; and I memorized a number of the sonnets. Maybe I absorbed the voltaic rhythm that way, and then began reproducing it? I don’t know. I do know that I gravitate to complex, misunderstood subjects and that nostalgia certainly belongs to that category. There almost have to be voltas in any poetic thinking about a subject like that—wait, but then there’s this aspect, and let’s not forget that one … etc. As for sentences, as for the prose poem. I feel like the poems in Ruins of Nostalgia are really testing the boundaries of the prose poem, and sometimes I am not sure they really are prose poems—I don’t know what they are. I don’t want to credit myself with having invented a new genre, but I don’t know of many texts that operate quite the way these do. If I were a good marketer of my work, I would invent a clever name for them—poessays?—but I am not a very good marketer of my work.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

How does The Ruins of Nostalgia further engage and extend your arguments in Prose  Poetry and the City about the history of cities and the form of the prose poem? In this new book, the speaker lived in Seattle (embattled by gentrification) and now lives in Berlin (bristling with wars and change).

DONNA STONECIPHER

In Prose Poetry and the City, I followed my hunches about the rise of the metropolis and the breakdown of rhymed, metered verse. In Paris, whose organic forms of habitation were coldly normed and straightened in the nineteenth century by Haussmann, Baudelaire and others invented the prose poem. In New York City, where skyscrapers began their individualist ascent around the same time, we got Whitman and free verse. Baudelaire was also writing about gentrification—in both his prose poems and his verse forms—famously writing “Old Paris is gone (the face of a city / changes, alas! faster than the heart of a mortal)”; certainly, an exuberant Whitmanian free verse would have felt wrong for my subject matter. Most prose poetry is not explicitly about cities, and there are many great poems about cities written in verse, free or otherwise—but still, I think there is something pretty exciting about what I found. I’m deeply compelled by how changes in the built environment reflect themselves in artistic forms.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

Some of these poems are deeply personal and address nostalgia with love and grief; the book itself is dedicated to your father. Poem #47, one of my favorites, focuses on your memories of growing up in Seattle. You describe how saying “tennis shoes” reveals your provinciality, which has to be stamped out in order to “move smoothly through the sleek corridors of total mobility.” (I also still say “tennis shoes”—not “sneakers.”) That word contains nostalgia for childhood, family, one’s local discourse, all of which marks us. In the poem, you continue saying “tennis shoes” as a way to resist the “overwhelming sea we ourselves had invited to annihilate us” to keep “one islet of intactness in the ruins of nostalgia.” Did you experience the apparent shame of saying “tennis shoes” as a class marker at Sarah Lawrence? You’ve used this poetic strategy in many of your books, in which you think about, sound out, turn in all directions, or, Gertrude Stein might say, “caress” a noun. Did you first think of “tennis shoes” and intend to examine it, or is the associative process less intentional and more surprising?

DONNA STONECIPHER

I love the idea of caressing a noun. I experienced near-constant shame at Sarah Lawrence; it was a deeply painful, life-altering experience for me. Nothing about me was right—my clothes, my background, my cultural knowledge, my vocabulary, not even my home address: I remember once receiving a directory of students’ home addresses, and they were all like “Wisteria Lane” and “Vanderbilt Drive,” whereas my Seattle address was all numbers. I wish I could reconstruct how the “tennis shoes” poem came about. I remember that I wanted to address the complex phenomenon of class-passing: how some of us learn to adjust our vocabularies to conceal our class backgrounds, and how later, maybe even decades later, we can realize with a shock of consciousness that we gave something away we ought not to have. Which might lead to nostalgia for our earlier, less compromised selves. (By the way, I have since reintroduced “tennis shoes” into my vocabulary; but “pop” rather than “soda” has been more resistant.)

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

Many of the poems are about collections and museums: institutional methods to preserve the past and to encourage or commodify nostalgia. In the second poem, the delight of finding the “silvery clepsydras” or the “pink façades” in the museums of Berlin disintegrates into “the shreds, the shreds,” repeating like a clock seven times. (A clepsydra, I learned from your book, is a water clock!) Ah, that poem makes me cry. Would you say that including all these marvelous, and often vanishing, particular things (and their marvelous names) is one way of making modest monuments? I say “modest” because the force of the book is in the ruins.

DONNA STONECIPHER

I love the idea of the shreds “tolling” like a clock seven times; leave it to your beautiful mind to make that connection. I learned of the “clepsydra” from Baudelaire’s poem “The Clock,” one of my favorite poems of all time: “Le jour décroît; la nuit augmente; souviens-toi! / Le gouffre a toujours soif; la clepsydre se vide.” (Baudelaire is totally untranslatable on a poetic level, but literally it’s: “The day decreases; the night increases; remember! / The abyss is always thirsty; the clepsydra is emptying.”) Poets are often mocked for our love of unusual or pretty words, but I think we’re preservers; we’re makers of modest monuments in our stubborn refusal to streamline and Taylorize our vocabularies. Museums are also preservers of course; limited preservers, deeply biased preservers; but a museum is a place you can go to in the ever-updating and-futurizing city and take in the corrective ballast of the past. From time to time I decide I’m done with museums, but then I enter one again and start almost literally quivering with ideas and inspiration. For me it’s akin to reading something great, but even more intoxicating because of all the different voices in the museum. I’ve always been much more interested in the past than in the future. I’ve never seen Blade Runner, but I’ll watch any period film you set before me.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

I’m dazzled by how you capture the “representational friction” (James A.W. Heffernan’s term about the effect of ekphrasis) between representing reality and reality itself—and throw into that a mix of personal memories, recurrences in history, and knowledge of art. In poem #3, the passenger sees the four deer “poised” and “framed in the rectangular windows of the train.” Your poems enact ekphrasis as you show how cultural experience and aesthetics overlay the simple act of looking out a window. Nostalgia is grief and a division from the present. How is nostalgia also creative, productive, and against ruination?

DONNA STONECIPHER

We can absorb so little in the present, and carry so little with us into the future, and so most of life, be it our own lived lives or the lives of others transmitted through culture, falls almost immediately into oblivion. But oh, what riches are lying there awaiting their rediscovery! Nostalgia was creative and productive for me because I could see that it is a complex concept that it is profoundly misunderstood, oversimplified, and usually summarily dismissed. My thinking about nostalgia really changed when I read Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, where for the first time I learned about the history of the word; her brilliant ideas about it shifted it for me into the realm of Exciting Idea. She writes in that book a lot about the experience of exiles, and in my book The Cosmopolitan I had started to explore the idea of “voluntary exiles,” people who choose to leave their homes and families, of which I am one. We are strange creatures. For most of my voluntary exile I was not nostalgic, but when my hometown, Seattle, started to radically change maybe a decade ago, I found myself engulfed by it. This was not sweet, melancholy nostalgia—it was full of rage that had no real target, and the only thing I could do with that rage was write from it and through it. (I’m still enraged, though, about the greedy destruction and erasure going on there.)

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

Your poems about Seattle and how it has changed due to “progress” are painful to read; the speaker (you?) drives around the city, gets disoriented, and goes to the house where she was born, where houses in the neighborhood have been “wrecking-balled” in gentrification for the new, wealthy residents. Those new houses have “picture windows,” while the previous small windows were not “showcasing the picturesque mountain view.” I love how your father appears inside parentheses to explain that there were “(little windows because nobody cared back then about views).” Windows, are of course, metaphors for seeing. Are these poems “picture windows” or “little windows”?

DONNA STONECIPHER

First, I want to share one of my favorite ideas from Boym’s book: that nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde—the same thing, in different manifestations. If we are going to believe in something called linear “progress,” then we have to accept the consequence of nostalgia. The house on the ridge is actually the house my dad grew up in; I lived there for two weeks, until we moved down the hill into our family’s own house. (That’s why my dad appears in the poem.) I guess these poems are more picture windows than little windows. If they were little windows they would be better behaved and more modest and understanding of change. But they are hungry picture windows, and also helpless picture windows: they can’t help but see all that they don’t want to see.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

You also address the viciousness of capitalism: the empty “holes,” the empty lots in the Seattle of your youth are filled up with new condos: “Sites of projection and desire” for the “surplus people” moving in. I love the ending of #7: “Content, it turned out, was not synonymous with form; some forms of content blew some forms of form to bits.” Do you think of writing this way, too? In one way, the formal elements of the prose poems participate in what Shakespeare describes as a “distillation” of what will disappear, or poetry as the “miracle” in “black lines” to make his beloved immortal. Yet, they are also a method to slip into the nostalgia and climb back out again into present life: placing the content down, formalizing it, then writing another poem.

DONNA STONECIPHER

There is definitely a memorializing impulse in some of the poems, a desire to honor both important losses—like that of a father—and unimportant losses—bits of life that have passed out of existence but that once meant a lot to the speaker—like answering machines, or that club in front of which everyone smoked clove cigarettes (named Skoochie’s, incidentally). Capitalism is intertwined with nostalgia, of course—its voracious appetite for the new leaves a vast wasteland of the old, where you can find millions of answering machines and rotary phones and the records the DJs played at Skoochie’s. I suppose the very act of honoring the dead involves the past and the present life—you dwell on someone or something that is gone long enough to convey that it or they mattered—is that a form of nostalgia? Maybe. Number 7 is about Berlin, by the way, though it can certainly apply to Seattle, too. It’s uncanny, how similar some of the affects in each city are. In 2018, when I was in the thick of writing this book, Seattle had the fastest-rising real estate prices in the U.S., and Berlin had the fastest-rising real estate prices in the world.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

Skoochie’s! I want to go there now. Having been your friend in the nineties, I wince when I read poem #9 about the bulldozing of the schools and cafés of your youth: “For the bulls never doze in the ruins of nostalgia.” What was the name of the café where you took me to drink mochas? When we were reading Anaïs Nin’s journals and Virginia Woolf’s novels and writing our first serious poems. Have you invented a new kind of pun: the very sad pun? Beloved writing never dozes.

DONNA STONECIPHER

The “very sad pun”—genius! You just invented it. I remember very clearly sitting with you in that café, which was on Capitol Hill and was called B&O Espresso. I think there were prints of Toulouse-Lautrec on the walls? That is definitely one of the cafés I was referring to in the poem—of course, you picked up on it. We felt so sophisticated there, drinking mochas under the Toulouse-Lautrecs. This was all, of course, well before you could get lattes on every street corner, before the world-domination campaign of Starbucks began. In fact, I remember going to visit you in Poughkeepsie not long after our visit to B&O Espresso, and bringing a package of Starbucks coffee as a gift, because you couldn’t get it in New York then. We loved the Melville reference in its name—it was a literary coffee; a coffee made for us. Ha! Yes, hearing about the destruction of B&O Espresso tore a tiny hole in my heart. It felt like it had been there forever, and would be there forever; instead, I learned that my city cared nothing for its history, for my history: our history. And so I channeled that rage into these poems.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

I admire how you use the current terminology of capitalism and anti-capitalism, such as “daylight” as a verb, referring to a local environmental activist group (in Seattle or Berlin?) who wanted to “daylight” a river that had been filled up by new construction. (Why does corporate discourse turn nouns into verbs, and verbs into nouns? Very annoying. Please don’t ask me to do something and tell me it’s a “big ask.”) Then, you give us this heartbreaking, ironic ending about the river: “Was it still flowing somewhere, under the luxury lofts, deliquescing in the dark, inhabited by our luxury selves, not yet subdivided, because not yet whole?” The book addresses how language is contorted, postlapsarian. Do you think poets attempt to daylight language or meaning? To deliquesce in language that is prelapsarian? Or, are we messing around with “the shreds, the shreds”?

DONNA STONECIPHER

I’m ambivalenting (heh) about that use case of language, because at least it betrays a hint of playfulness, despite its possibly mercenary aims. Wasn’t it Shakespeare who turned a lot of nouns into verbs, like “unhair thy head”? But yes, the language of real estate in particular is so pernicious, it’s such dead language, embalmed really. Like calling a house for sale a “home” for sale. When I see or hear that, I grind my teeth. I do think that most poets share an unusual attention to language, but what we do with it differs widely. Certainly poetry can also use language in a way that’s cynical and manipulative, and some poetry does. It’s always a temptation.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

There are seemingly straightforward moments in the book, such as, “We did not know anyone who had grown up in our neighborhood who could now afford to live in our neighborhood,” a line with a compressed chiasmus. And, you describe the return to your mother’s house as being “buried alive” and disoriented. The neighborhood is not “real ruins, and yet they were real ruins.” A paradoxical clarity. Do you use these “clear” realizations and common phrases (“buried alive”) to resurrect their original shock?

DONNA STONECIPHER

A good poem, I find, is almost always a mix of clarity and mystery. That mix is a big part of the pleasure of reading poetry, because it can be just as joyful for us to be mystified as it is to be jolted into realization. I am writing a lot more prose than poetry right now, and one effect has been to make me appreciate—and miss—the beauties of poetry, the properties and opennesses that no other genre can really offer. For one thing, poetry offers the best home to profound and necessary ambivalence (which I might call my native state, if I weren’t going to call it melancholia), and paradox. Prose can offer them a home too, but things have to be spelled out more. Much of the world is very hostile to paradox and to ambivalence, and the internet, particularly, isn’t built to handle them. But they are a foundational component of the human experience, and poetry honors them. A paradox in a poem is just a fish happily swimming through its home water. I’m not sure exactly why that is—the poem’s brevity? Its quality of “cry of the occasion” (Stevens)? Its heavy emphasis on music and rhythm, which modulate thought, make it rock back and forth?

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

Another favorite of mine is your poem #54, in which the human need to organize anything—such as “the universe into galaxies” or the “encyclopedias arranged alphabetically”—collides with our “disorderly” minds. As do poems organize our experience of the world. I especially love “the AC/DC kids” in that poem, who are at the lake, no longer at the lake, always at the lake in one’s memory: “the boys with their turbulent hair, the girls in terrycloth tube tops will be at the lake, in their yellow or orange or hot-pink tube tops, the yellow or orange or hot-pink Slurpees, the blue Slurpees.” The blue Slurpees! At Green Lake! Such are the madeleines of your childhood. As a poet, you are enthralled by and skeptical of beauty and nostalgia. (The AC/DC kids are beautiful.) In the lake of your memory, do you tip towards enthrallment or skepticism? Are those responses inextricable? In poem #15, you write, “We kept walking through the beautiful city in our minds saying, Stay thou art so fair, but the city did not comply.” Stay, AC/DC kids! Are poems enough to “gold-leaf gold leaf,” or is that why you keep writing more poems?

DONNA STONECIPHER

The “That in black ink my love may still shine bright” urge—I wish there were a clever name for it: “elegiac” feels too formal and specific. A “black-ink” urge? A “shine-bright” urge? I bet you could think of the right phrase. But—of course, in Faust, “Stay, thou art so fair” are the words that Faust utters that turn into a curse. So, the desire to memorialize is never far from the understanding that memorialization has its hazards. This thinking was also, always, inspired by Berlin’s many memorials, which plentifully mark the streetscape. They’re necessary, but they can also feel a bit claustrophobic. Space in this city is never neutral, open—it’s always previously inscribed. That’s true of any space of course, but the illusion of uninscribed space in Seattle, for example, is incredibly seductive—I feel the difference the minute I step off the plane. Oh, the AC/DC kids! I wanted so much to immortalize them. I have built a strange relationship to Seattle over the years—returning annually or biannually to briefly dip my toe into the same spaces I was present as a baby, a girl, a teenager, a young woman, etc. My mother still lives in the house we moved into when I was two weeks old. I walk the dog to Green Lake, this beautiful park designed by the Olmsted brothers, which I have experienced (and loved!) at all phases of my life, as did my dad, who moved to a house near Green Lake from North Dakota when he was seven. So there’s this incredible continuity, that is at the same time totally broken, since I don’t live there anymore. And yet—I do, and I don’t, and I don’t, and I do. In my “voluntary exile” in Berlin, that type of continuity is totally absent, since I first set foot here in my twenties and settled here in my mid-thirties, and I feel it keenly. And yet in other respects, in the sense of a community of like-minded artist weirdos, I feel more at home here than in Seattle. So the poems in Ruins live in a murky space of simultaneous deep belonging and profound alienation, on both sides.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE

Dear friend, thank you for your answers. Stay thou art so fair!

DONNA STONECIPHER is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Ruins of Nostalgia (Wesleyan University Press), named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR; and one book of critical prose, Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017). Soon to be out are her translation of fleurs, the final volume of a trilogy by Friederike Mayröcker, as well as a prose book, The Secret Life and Death of Ornament in Berlin.

CAMILLE GUTHRIE is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent book is DIAMONDS (BOA Editions, 2020). Her first short story, "Dating Profile," appeared in The Sun (April 2023). She teaches critical writing and literature at Bennington College.