The Tiferet Talk Interviews
Melissa Studdard & Donna Baier Stein - Authors
The Tiferet Talk Interviews - Book Review by Ron Starbuck
Interviews by Melissa Studdard - Speaking with Twelve Writers & Special Introduction by Donna Baier Stein
Julia Cameron - Jude Rittenhouse - Edward Hirsch
Jeffrey Davis - Floyd Skloot - Robin Rice
Anthony Lawlor - Bernie Siegel - Arielle Ford
Marc Allen - Robert Pinsky - Lois P. Jones
Rare is it when a reader or listener gets to engage in an intimate dialogue with writers, thinkers, and poets on their creative work. Enabling them to see inside the workings of the human mind and heart, the soul and psyche, in communion with their words. The Word, invoked as a metaphor.
In the Tiferet Talk Interviews, author, Melissa Studdard interviews twelve writers on the creative process they each follow and practice. And through this practice the word and work that arises from the center of the self where this communion takes place.
Tiferet is a Hebrew word that comes out of the mystical tradition of Jewish spiritual thought and philosophy. In the teachings of the Holy Kabbalah, the Sephirot or Tree of Life, we find tiferet described as a force that integrates the Divine energies of compassion, mercy, strength, and justice, a balance of compassion with discipline and the pathways anyone follows to achieve a spiritual balance and awakening within their life. It is another metaphor for a spiritual consciousness that creates an internal living balance between heaven and earth.
Writers, especially ones celebrating life and the creative spirit, are defined by the voices they speak with through their works. Through the words they use that shape the gestalt, the wholeness of their thoughts and the way of life they practice through writing. Writing for most of them, the formation of their words as poem and prose or play, becomes a practice (praxis), a creative spiritual pathway they each follow.
Indeed, in many cases they are the spiritual trailblazers who guide others into the deeper mystery of the self, the human psyche - soul, and our relationship with the Divine Ultimate Mystery that is the source of their own creativity. Creativity, as an ongoing act of creation itself, found in an experience of the Divine that is seen and unseen, visible and invisible, hidden and yet clearly revealed, always present. This gestalt, this whole creative process, is something we get more than a glimpse of in these wonderful conversations, this dialogue on thought and creativity.
In the first interview the reader encounters Julia Cameron, the award-winning poet, playwright, filmmaker and novelist who has been pouring out work for over thirty years. Julia is the well known author of, The Artist’s Way, someone who helps others delve deeply into the source of their own creativity, opening them up to an actualization of their fullest potential as artists and human beings through very creative forms of prayer and meditation, simple practices actually.
I love how she describes the process of taking a whiskbroom to the corners of your consciousness and clearing out all the things that are troubling you. And then moving on to work with the intentions of a higher force as art, writing, music, painting, whatever you may wish to name it. Essentially, to listen and then respond to how this mystery touches our consciousness, and in that process yielding the right of way to a spiritual revelation within us that is at work. It is good advice and a good practice for anyone, writers especially to follow.
In the interview with acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky, who served three terms as the United States Poet Laureate, the conversation begins with a dialogue on memory. Quoting one of his lectures, in which he said that to “be born for death’ is to need to create memory that is larger than one generation,” and that “the treasure of memory can only be properly cared for if it’s transformed.”
I love how the conversation continues, pointing out that living poets act as a memory for humankind, a creative continuation of the poetic voices from whom all poets are descended. In remembering these words; “look for me under your boot soles” (Song of Myself, Walt Whitman) and “a copper of an 8 strip beaten lengthwise at right angles and lies ready to edge the coping,” (Fine Work with Pitch and Copper, William Carlos Williams), Robert Pinsky leads us into a deeper understanding of writing. Poets are the caretakers and keepers of these memories, passing on these memories as another poetic voice to our “literal and figurative descendants.”
As the conversation continues I find myself identifying with an idea of a poet as a “non-singing vocalist, trying to use the melodies and cadences of a poem as a musical element.” I have to agree; when a poet reads their poetry out loud it is just that, another form of music. A form of music that can be just as deeply moving as an opera, a symphony, perhaps a new interpretation of Mozart, Brahms, Ravel, or even the Rolling Stones. Poetry, each poem, has an internal music of its own composed by the poet.
In the last interview, with poet Lois P. Jones, I am especially drawn to their conversation on emptiness. Which is a concept we can find within nearly all the great contemplative traditions of humankind, and one that is often invoked by poetic voices of transcendence. Emptiness in this sense is a way of letting go and engaging in a “radical openness” where inspiration, the inspired words we seek, come flowing through. To quote the poet’s voice in this case, “Emptiness embodies a place to allow things to come in and not be afraid of silence. In our society we’re so inundated with stimulus that to be able to be empty is a joy. It’s a beauty. It’s something artists have been trying to do for centuries so that they can tap into their own voices.”
What I hope any reader will find in this collection of interviews is a discovery of their own artistic voice within the voices of all these writers. It is a rare opportunity to engage in a literary dialogue with their peers at many levels and with many different visions. But, one grounded in the Word, where words are uttered as a transcendent sound held in common, an echo, in memories that cross many generations who came before our own, in a spiritual testimony.
I like how the poet, Edward Hirsch, summed up his own feelings by quoting Randal Jarrel who wrote; “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he (or she) is great.” I wrote something similar once in a poem titled Storm Shadow that begins with these words.
“Every day of my life I want to be standing in the
shadow of a good clean storm, where the rain comes down so
hard and bright it washes the soul pure, to leave it gleaming
and polished in all its tenderness.”
The rest of this poem can be found here, but it is simply an echo, a memory of the poetic voices that I have listened to most of my life. Then there is this other wonderful quote used in opening the interview with Edward Hirsch where he has commented on the importance of poetry, of living the poetic life as a reader and writer of poetry.
“I am convinced the kind of experience—the kind of knowledge—one gets from poetry cannot be duplicated elsewhere. The spiritual life wants articulation—it wants embodiment in language. The physical life wants the spirit. I know this because I hear it in the words, because when I liberate the message in the bottle—a physical—a spiritual urgency pulses through the arranged text. It is as if the spirit grows in my hands. Or the words rise in the air. ‘Roots and wings,’ the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez writes, ‘but let the wings take root and the roots fly.’ ”
These are the literary voices that have led many poets to discover their own voice in the desert, whispering out of the wilderness, in a universe without end. An ever expanding universe where we are intimately interconnected to one another, in and with and through the Word. In and with and through the many voices of humanity that have echoed across the generations as a revelation, an unveiling, through time and human history.
When reading any good work there is a subtle spiritual memory at play, a sense of déjà vu perhaps, within the words these writers have written. The best writers invoke that memory, in the words they craft so carefully. The words enter into us as more than memory, they awaken us, they come to dwell in us fully, as we dwell in the Word, as being itself dwells within us all, grounded in the Word.
Ron Starbuck
Saint Julian Press
Copyright 2013
Interviews by Melissa Studdard - Speaking with Twelve Writers & Special Introduction by Donna Baier Stein
Julia Cameron - Jude Rittenhouse - Edward Hirsch
Jeffrey Davis - Floyd Skloot - Robin Rice
Anthony Lawlor - Bernie Siegel - Arielle Ford
Marc Allen - Robert Pinsky - Lois P. Jones
Rare is it when a reader or listener gets to engage in an intimate dialogue with writers, thinkers, and poets on their creative work. Enabling them to see inside the workings of the human mind and heart, the soul and psyche, in communion with their words. The Word, invoked as a metaphor.
In the Tiferet Talk Interviews, author, Melissa Studdard interviews twelve writers on the creative process they each follow and practice. And through this practice the word and work that arises from the center of the self where this communion takes place.
Tiferet is a Hebrew word that comes out of the mystical tradition of Jewish spiritual thought and philosophy. In the teachings of the Holy Kabbalah, the Sephirot or Tree of Life, we find tiferet described as a force that integrates the Divine energies of compassion, mercy, strength, and justice, a balance of compassion with discipline and the pathways anyone follows to achieve a spiritual balance and awakening within their life. It is another metaphor for a spiritual consciousness that creates an internal living balance between heaven and earth.
Writers, especially ones celebrating life and the creative spirit, are defined by the voices they speak with through their works. Through the words they use that shape the gestalt, the wholeness of their thoughts and the way of life they practice through writing. Writing for most of them, the formation of their words as poem and prose or play, becomes a practice (praxis), a creative spiritual pathway they each follow.
Indeed, in many cases they are the spiritual trailblazers who guide others into the deeper mystery of the self, the human psyche - soul, and our relationship with the Divine Ultimate Mystery that is the source of their own creativity. Creativity, as an ongoing act of creation itself, found in an experience of the Divine that is seen and unseen, visible and invisible, hidden and yet clearly revealed, always present. This gestalt, this whole creative process, is something we get more than a glimpse of in these wonderful conversations, this dialogue on thought and creativity.
In the first interview the reader encounters Julia Cameron, the award-winning poet, playwright, filmmaker and novelist who has been pouring out work for over thirty years. Julia is the well known author of, The Artist’s Way, someone who helps others delve deeply into the source of their own creativity, opening them up to an actualization of their fullest potential as artists and human beings through very creative forms of prayer and meditation, simple practices actually.
I love how she describes the process of taking a whiskbroom to the corners of your consciousness and clearing out all the things that are troubling you. And then moving on to work with the intentions of a higher force as art, writing, music, painting, whatever you may wish to name it. Essentially, to listen and then respond to how this mystery touches our consciousness, and in that process yielding the right of way to a spiritual revelation within us that is at work. It is good advice and a good practice for anyone, writers especially to follow.
In the interview with acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky, who served three terms as the United States Poet Laureate, the conversation begins with a dialogue on memory. Quoting one of his lectures, in which he said that to “be born for death’ is to need to create memory that is larger than one generation,” and that “the treasure of memory can only be properly cared for if it’s transformed.”
I love how the conversation continues, pointing out that living poets act as a memory for humankind, a creative continuation of the poetic voices from whom all poets are descended. In remembering these words; “look for me under your boot soles” (Song of Myself, Walt Whitman) and “a copper of an 8 strip beaten lengthwise at right angles and lies ready to edge the coping,” (Fine Work with Pitch and Copper, William Carlos Williams), Robert Pinsky leads us into a deeper understanding of writing. Poets are the caretakers and keepers of these memories, passing on these memories as another poetic voice to our “literal and figurative descendants.”
As the conversation continues I find myself identifying with an idea of a poet as a “non-singing vocalist, trying to use the melodies and cadences of a poem as a musical element.” I have to agree; when a poet reads their poetry out loud it is just that, another form of music. A form of music that can be just as deeply moving as an opera, a symphony, perhaps a new interpretation of Mozart, Brahms, Ravel, or even the Rolling Stones. Poetry, each poem, has an internal music of its own composed by the poet.
In the last interview, with poet Lois P. Jones, I am especially drawn to their conversation on emptiness. Which is a concept we can find within nearly all the great contemplative traditions of humankind, and one that is often invoked by poetic voices of transcendence. Emptiness in this sense is a way of letting go and engaging in a “radical openness” where inspiration, the inspired words we seek, come flowing through. To quote the poet’s voice in this case, “Emptiness embodies a place to allow things to come in and not be afraid of silence. In our society we’re so inundated with stimulus that to be able to be empty is a joy. It’s a beauty. It’s something artists have been trying to do for centuries so that they can tap into their own voices.”
What I hope any reader will find in this collection of interviews is a discovery of their own artistic voice within the voices of all these writers. It is a rare opportunity to engage in a literary dialogue with their peers at many levels and with many different visions. But, one grounded in the Word, where words are uttered as a transcendent sound held in common, an echo, in memories that cross many generations who came before our own, in a spiritual testimony.
I like how the poet, Edward Hirsch, summed up his own feelings by quoting Randal Jarrel who wrote; “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he (or she) is great.” I wrote something similar once in a poem titled Storm Shadow that begins with these words.
“Every day of my life I want to be standing in the
shadow of a good clean storm, where the rain comes down so
hard and bright it washes the soul pure, to leave it gleaming
and polished in all its tenderness.”
The rest of this poem can be found here, but it is simply an echo, a memory of the poetic voices that I have listened to most of my life. Then there is this other wonderful quote used in opening the interview with Edward Hirsch where he has commented on the importance of poetry, of living the poetic life as a reader and writer of poetry.
“I am convinced the kind of experience—the kind of knowledge—one gets from poetry cannot be duplicated elsewhere. The spiritual life wants articulation—it wants embodiment in language. The physical life wants the spirit. I know this because I hear it in the words, because when I liberate the message in the bottle—a physical—a spiritual urgency pulses through the arranged text. It is as if the spirit grows in my hands. Or the words rise in the air. ‘Roots and wings,’ the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez writes, ‘but let the wings take root and the roots fly.’ ”
These are the literary voices that have led many poets to discover their own voice in the desert, whispering out of the wilderness, in a universe without end. An ever expanding universe where we are intimately interconnected to one another, in and with and through the Word. In and with and through the many voices of humanity that have echoed across the generations as a revelation, an unveiling, through time and human history.
When reading any good work there is a subtle spiritual memory at play, a sense of déjà vu perhaps, within the words these writers have written. The best writers invoke that memory, in the words they craft so carefully. The words enter into us as more than memory, they awaken us, they come to dwell in us fully, as we dwell in the Word, as being itself dwells within us all, grounded in the Word.
Ron Starbuck
Saint Julian Press
Copyright 2013
Introduction by Donna Baier Stein
From the book's Introduction written by Donna Baier Stein:
"Imagine joining intimate conversations with a brilliant and eclectic bunch of writers, thinkers, and people eager to improve the world. That’s what this volume invites you to do. Here are twelve interviews conducted by host Melissa Studdard on our Tiferet Talk radio programs.
Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States; Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way; Edward Hirsch, chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and president of the Guggenheim Foundation; Robin Rice, spiritual teacher and internationally-published author; Dr. Bernie Siegel, inspiring author and global speaker; and more.
The interviewees share their thoughts on ways to tell the truth of our lives, access creativity, and balance magic and craft."
Melissa Studdard's books include the bestselling novel Six Weeks to Yehidah, its companion jounal, My Yehidah, and the interview collection The Tiferet Talk Interviews. Since its August 2011 release, Six Weeks to Yehidah has been the recipient of many accolades, including the Forward National Literature Award, the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and January Magazine's best children's books. It was also named a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards and the Readers Favorite Awards. As well, her poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and anthologies. Melissa currently serves as a Reviewer-at-Large for The National Poetry Review, an editorial advisor for The Criterion, and an editor for Tiferet Journal, where she hosts the journal's radio interview program, Tiferet Talk. Melissa received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a professor for the Lone Star College System and a teaching artist for The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative.
www.melissastuddard.com
Author of Six Weeks to Yehidah and My Yehidah
Donna Baier Stein's writing has appeared in New York Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner and many other journals and anthologies She has received a Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, a Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the PEN/New England Discovery Award, Finalist in Iowa Fiction Awards, Honorable Mention in Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, two Pushcart nominations, a New Jersey Council for the Arts grant, awards from the Poetry Societies of Virginia and New Hampshire, and more. Her chapbook Sometimes You Sense the Difference was published by Finishing Line Press. Her story collection Sympathetic People will be published in 2013 by Serving House Books. She was a Founding Poetry Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and is Founder and Publisher of TIFERET Journal.
www.donnabaierstein.com
www.melissastuddard.com
Author of Six Weeks to Yehidah and My Yehidah
Donna Baier Stein's writing has appeared in New York Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner and many other journals and anthologies She has received a Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, a Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the PEN/New England Discovery Award, Finalist in Iowa Fiction Awards, Honorable Mention in Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards, two Pushcart nominations, a New Jersey Council for the Arts grant, awards from the Poetry Societies of Virginia and New Hampshire, and more. Her chapbook Sometimes You Sense the Difference was published by Finishing Line Press. Her story collection Sympathetic People will be published in 2013 by Serving House Books. She was a Founding Poetry Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and is Founder and Publisher of TIFERET Journal.
www.donnabaierstein.com
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This arrangement does help to sustain the press and allow us to publish more books by more authors.