FORREST GANDER’S POETRY OF MEMORY AND PLACE
By Scott Edward Anderson Holiday 24
“The basic gesture of my writing is a listening,” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander writes in an essay. “The great capacity of language is to bring us into proximity with one another.”
Gander will read from his just-released book, Mojave Ghost: A Novel Poem (New Directions), in the Atrium of the Center for Science & Innovation on the MCLA campus in North Adams. The Tuesday, November 12, reading at 7 p.m. is free and open to the public. On Thursday, November 14, at 7 p.m., poet Brenda Shaughnessy will join Gander in a reading at the Poetry Society of America in Brooklyn, which also is open to the public and $10 for non-members.
The MCLA reading is part of the college’s Visiting Writers Series, with Gander spending the day with students in host Professor Zachary Finch’s classes. At the evening event, the poet also will read from his recent translations of poems by Jeanette Lozano Clarion, one of a generation of women poets in Mexico who came of age in the wake of the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City on October 2, 1968.
“There was a sharpening of political consciousness that converged with the rise of feminist theory and the advent of small press publishing in Mexico after the 1968 massacre,” Gander says. “Women writers whose work wasn’t published widely in the major journals or by the major book presses—all of which were edited by men—began to clamor for representation.”
The women poets started publishing each other, and several of them—Coral Bracho, Pura López Colomé, María Baranda, Tedi López Mills, Verónica Volkow, and Gloria Gervitz—began to emerge as major forces in Mexican poetry. “It’s not an exaggeration to say they changed the course of Mexican—and Latin American—poetry,” says Gander.
Gander was born in 1956 in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California. His interest in poetry began at an early age, ignited by his mother, Ruth Cockerille, who first read poetry to him when he was a small boy. When Gander was five, the family moved to the Maryland-Virginia border, where his mother taught elementary school.
Gander majored in geology at William & Mary and was heading to graduate school in paleontology when a doctor discovered stage three melanoma on his shoulder. While in the hospital, Gander turned his attention to writing poetry. Once recovered, he switched gears and pursued an MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University.
At San Francisco State, Gander met poet C.D. Wright, who influenced his writing and was the love of his life. Together, they edited the small poetry press Lost Roads, which was awarded an organizational grant from the National Endowment for the Arts under their leadership. They spent time in Mexico, where Gander learned Spanish and began translating. The couple returned to the United States in 1983, and Gander taught at several universities, including Harvard and Providence College. He and Wright also taught at Brown.
“C.D.’s work has had the most profound influence on my own poetry and my life,” Gander says. “I think of it all the time. Really, all the time.” Other influences included 20th-century poets Jack Gilbert and Lorine Niedecker, as well as Dylan Thomas during Gander’s high school years. In college, he discovered Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, and a book called Ten Japanese Poets translated by Hiroaki Soto. He began reading everything published by New Directions, which later became his publisher. But it was Wright’s influence that proved most important.
“She was the most ethically grounded, inventive, and hilarious person I’ve ever known,” Gander says. “In all the 35 years I lived with her, her conversation was not once less than fascinating.”
In 2016, Wright died of thrombosis after a long flight back from Chile. Gander’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Be With, deals with themes of loss and grief, particularly in response to Wright’s death and his mother’s lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s. (His mother passed away during the pandemic in 2021.)
“There’s almost no experience I have these days that doesn’t jump-start my recall of moments from my past that I shared with others who are no longer here,” says Gander.
Their son, Brecht Wright Gander, now 37, lives in upstate New York, near Oneonta, where he has a studio and creates sculptural furniture—pieces that marry function and form and straddle the industrial and conceptual. In many ways, his works evoke the erotic symbolism of his father’s early poetry and the formally inventive nature of his mother’s work.
Forrest Gander’s work ranges across genres, including poetry, novels, and essays. His writing often blends lyrical language with scientific precision, reflecting his background in literature and geology. Interdisciplinary collaboration has long played a significant role in Gander’s work, bringing new dimensions to his poetry and prose.
Over the years, he’s collaborated with artists and photographers, which pushed him to find new ways of describing visual phenomena in words, leading to more vivid, precise, and unexpected imagery in his poetry. Working with other art forms may also have inspired Gander to experiment with the structure and form of his writing. For example, collaborating with the Japanese dancers Eiko and Koma influenced the rhythm, movement, and appearance of his poems on the page that was part of their collaboration, Eiko & Koma (2013), which featured photographs of the dancers along with Gander’s poetry.
Through such collaborations, his poetry began to take on an expansive shapeliness, exploring the physicality of language and how words can educe a sensorial, almost somatic response in the reader.
“Collaboration enacts a kind of social relation to which I aspire,” Gander says. “Giving up total control, you find yourself prodded to explore trajectories you might never have attempted on your own.” A recent collaborator is now also his wife, sculptor Ashwini Bhat.
They were married in 2020 and live in California’s Sonoma County. Their interdisciplinary exhibit In Your Arms I’m Radiant, highlighting Bhat’s ceramic sculptures and Gander’s poetry, was featured at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles in 2023.
Gander’s new book, Mojave Ghost, is unlike any of his previous works, in terms of its syntax and sentencing. “It’s much more sentence-based and not very acrobatic,” describes Gander. “In that sense, it’s distinctly ‘novel,’ like ‘new,’ but also there is this kind of a narrative trajectory and a consistent geographical trajectory—moving from Arkansas into California, into the desert.”
The Mojave Desert made a big impression on Gander’s mother, who talked about it frequently. “When I went back, it was terribly poignant because I didn’t go back until my mother was gone,” says Gander. His return to the Mojave conjured memories of his mother’s stories about the desert, especially the Rainbow Basin area where she collected fossils.
Reading Mojave Ghost, it is often difficult to determine who the poet is speaking about or to—his late mother or sister, C.D. Wright, or Ashwini Bhat. The pronouns and people are fluid throughout the book. “It may be, on the one hand, that I’m influenced by someone I translated—the Bolivian visionary poet Jaime Saenz, who writes all his poems to a ‘you’ that is, at once, his beloved, the city of La Paz, and the figure of Death,” Gander relates. “Science tells us that although we may feel ourselves as a unified, authentic self, we’re actually a collaboration of conflicting voices. That’s something I’ve come to intuitively feel.”
While hiking along the San Andreas Fault, Gander realized that, when looking at the landscape around him, he’s also observing past and present. “Physically and emotionally, I straddle a liminal zone,” he says. “Those two conflations of past and present—of the personal and the geological—form the currents in Mojave Ghost.”
Memory has long been an active part of Gander’s work. “As though memory needs a terrain/ for forgetting,” he wrote in a poem in his early book Rush to the Lake (1988). He writes in Mojave Ghost:
Is it odd that what we remember
is confined so often to particular moments
like still images ripped from a film?
“The life of our minds draws the past into our active present the way a chimney is said to draw,” Gander says. “My memory of my late mother’s face can be more real for me, more exact, more present even than the face of someone I’m talking with now. In our minds, whatever had once been possible can be so again.”
His 2011 book, Core Samples from the World, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, concerns what Gander calls “the way we are revised and translated in encounters with the foreign.”
“What’s outside of us influences our inside,” says Gander. “This is just the opposite of Descartes’ dictum, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ We can’t think unless we’re in a place and our thinking is already engaged with that place, and the place, I think, is much more active, soliciting our attention and influencing us with vibrations that we aren’t aware of that are part of who we are, is where we are.”
Although retired from teaching, Gander welcomes the opportunity to be a guest teacher at MCLA. “Teaching is a ridiculously privileged job assignment, to lead classes on subjects about which you feel passionate,” he says. As for what Gander will try to impart to students at MCLA, he says he’ll advise them “to take risks, to take the work of other classmates seriously, to start reading series, to form bands, to write reviews, to put energy into friendships, to read voraciously, and to take notes all the time. Sleep is for later in life.”
Zachary Finch, who started the Visiting Writers Series at MCLA a decade ago, is excited to host Gander at the college. Since its inception, the series has brought 19 writers to the North Adams campus, ranging from Kazim Ali and Ocean Vuong to Julie Carr and Brian Teare. “We are so fortunate to have Forrest with us,” Finch says, “not only because of how phenomenally breath-taking his poetry is, but also for the example he offers our students of a life interfused with such amazing commitments to others, plants, rocks, possibility, people, languages, the future.”
Indeed, much of Gander’s poetry demonstrates a deep ecological awareness, incorporating detailed observations of natural phenomena, geological processes, and the interconnectedness of ecosystems. In 2021’s Twice Alive, for example, Gander looked deeply at lichen as a community, a blending of more than one species, something that might serve as a metaphor for Gander’s poetry.
“These two forms of life—bacteria and algae—when they meet each other, are completely transformed into lichens,” Gander says enthusiastically. “They no longer have the properties of the organisms that they were. They become something else.”
Gander’s background in geology informs his poetic practice, bringing scientific precision to his descriptions of the natural world. This interdisciplinary approach is characteristic of much “ecopoetic” work. In Red Start: An Ecological Poetics, his 2012 collaboration with Australian writer John Kinsella, Gander helped to define and expand the concept, pushing for a more nuanced understanding of how poetry can engage with ecological issues.
What does Gander hope readers will take away from his writing? “Thought-feeling. Feeling-thought. That’s what I hope readers take away,” Gander says. “Western culture divides feeling from thought, but there are single words in Chinese and Japanese for heart/mind.” He agrees with 20th-century poet Ezra Pound that “only emotion endures.”
“No one cares about how much money some investor made in 600 BCE, but we do care about even the small fragments of Sappho’s poems,” he says. “We feel in them now a living emotion. They articulate psychological states and the complications of thinking about self, aging, and relationships. That’s about as much of a miracle as the world offers us.”
Forrest Gander, an Emeritus Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of The Academy of Arts & Sciences, has received numerous prestigious honors including fellowships from the Guggenheim and Howard Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship.
MCLA’s Visiting Writers Series events: https://www.mcla.edu/academics/academic-departments/english/visitingwriters.php
Poetry Society of America Reading Series: poetrysociety.org/events