ZONE : ZERO

Stephanie Strickland (1942- )

An extended bio from the author

I come from a family where my father was an electrical and mechanical engineer, a designer, a builder, a plumber, a sound engineer, a sailor. He made his own car—this was Detroit—and it was not so uncommon. People did their own stuff. His father was the same, but a hunter and outdoorsman as well. Consequently, it has never occurred to me that a thing could not be done, if sufficient respect were paid to ‘the laws of nature,’ as my father would have called them.

His knowledge was primarily perceptual, sensing the depth of water by the color, navigating by feel. I was mystified by what he saw ‘in the air’—these laws of nature—for indeed he just ‘saw’ how things worked, the way I might ‘see’ a marigold. And he was frustrated, and I was frustrated, that I could not do the same. Later, of course, he acquired the book knowledge that supported his intuition, but he never trusted books, nor any ‘pencil-pushers’, lawyers, ad men, other nefarious workers in language.

This is a complicated heritage for a child who felt drawn to write.

We moved to Chicago where he was a great appreciator of the marvelous architecture of that city. He bought me books with pictures of buildings, and by fifth grade I wanted to be an architect. I loved math! In some respects, I have become an ‘architect’, an envisioner of digital poem structures. These I do ‘see’ in the air, somehow, and work to make them become real.

My grandmothers had a great influence on me as well. I lived near both of them in Detroit. One, even as an old woman, believed in fairies. These could almost be spied in the thick lilies of the valley growing beside her driveway, or skirting the Queen Anne’s lace that we would stop the car to go see in the field. She had married a German doctor during World War I and was harassed by the local authorities—was she hoarding food in her attic they wanted to know. My grandfather Voigt had been exiled by his mine-owning family in Silesia for helping to organize the mine workers there. [The poem “slippingglimpse” in Zone : Zero uses some language from a Silesian folk tale, “The Passion of the Flax.”] In this country he went from mining to medicine, and died, of blood poisoning contracted during a surgery he was performing, when my mother was 18 months old. Before antibiotics. A great unspoken emptiness at the center of their lives—my mother’s and my grandmother’s.

My grandmother Strickland had an attic that was a third floor of a house! So it was full of rooms and trunks and old books, old journals from the 19th century that were bound as books. She wanted to capture me, perhaps from my mother, certainly from my other grandmother. She was strict and formal and taught me games. She made superb cherry pies, using cherries from the tree in her garden, and hummingbirds came to her window.

My active, archivist grandmothers! The one who believed in fairies had been a suffragist (suffragette, she would have said) and a musician. The other grandmother, the archivist of journals, the Christian Scientist, a woman who had gone to teach on Indian reservations, a woman who had studied to be an opera singer, stayed home too. Imperially, but not happily.

And my mother? The center—so quiet. Not thinking she should speak. Not believing she had something worthy to say. She could serve. She could make others feel better. She could listen to them—and she did. To neighbors, to strangers. She was sought out. She did not seek. She did not speak.

This is a complicated heritage for a child who wants to write. Especially . . . because she wanted me to write. For her, it seemed, to my young confused self. And that made it hardest of all. Hard to know whether I wanted to write.

But I did—I wanted to build, I wanted to write, I tasted words, I loved poems. My ‘fairy’ grandmother had taught me songs and nursery rhymes. That is, she taught me formal structures. So on all sides, formal structures—musical or architectural or engineering—all mesmerizing, immersive, enchanting: structures that encode the laws of their making and their meaning.

In my poems, I speak in the vicinity of science, one might say, which I believe to be one of the juggernauts of the 21st century. I speak in forms—not only inherited literary forms, but forms the world is rich in. As well, I focus on what women know and their historical experience, in how they might come to say. I have been interested in the body, the sensing intuiting body of the engineer, the body of the nursing caretaking mother, the body of the woman who knows—and knows that she knows, even though the world does not affirm her knowledge. I have not ever wanted to claim one knowledge at the expense of another.

In my own life, I have raised children, cared for family members with long-term illnesses, held ‘day’ jobs, to pay for my MFA, my kids’ college, to subsidize my writing time. Only quite late in my life have I taught writing and digital literature. My mother died when I was 40. Simone Weil is the mentor of my adult life. I found her writings serendipitously and immersed myself in them in my thirties and after my mother’s death. Weil is a philosopher and a mystic, initiated in many forms of knowing and ‘unknowing’, interested in ethics, but interested most in a kind of spiritual knowing that is not possible in language alone. She was also awkward and difficult and exasperating and trying to do things in a world not at all ready to hear what, or how, she had to say. All of my books, after the first, have been affected by Weil and my relationship to her.

http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/strickland/strick land-bio.htm