RLR: You have attached importance to not just reading poetry, but to actually performing it for audiences in a way that inspires them to enjoy themselves. Do you find that the message of your work is more deeply understood and appreciated as well?
LH: I assume you may quote the website on the idea of performing; I’ll send you an attachment with that little essay in it.
The answer to your question is yes. For one thing, when a poet is performing, it’s clear that the poet is enjoying himself or herself so therefore the audience is more likely to do so as well. And performance takes a little time; it’s more like a drama, with pauses, facial expression, gestures, maybe pacing the stage; I even use different voices for parts of some poems (“Coffee Cup Café, for example”) which makes the audience listen more attentively. And that, I believe, allows them to appreciate and understand the work more completely.
RLR: You recently did a Mutual of Omaha “aha moment” commercial spot. Will you share another of your “aha moments” with us?
LH: There’s a good one in the little essay on performance; would that work? It would allow you to use part of that—maybe change the order of your questions.
Another “AHA!” moment for me was the 400th or 9000th time I participated in a reading with other poets and realized what happens. The person doing the introductions waxes eloquent, speaking of his or her love of the poet’s work, perhaps how they know each other, how glad they are to have the poet there. Then the poet gets up and, overwhelmed by all that adulation, thanks the presenter, maybe tells a little anecdote about how they met or how drunk they got onetime and makes a joke—and pretty soon 15 minutes have elapsed. Then the poet starts his reading, which he may have properly timed at 15 minutes, say, since each of us are supposed to speak for 15 minutes. But he doesn’t really realize that he’s already used a lot of time. And I’ve sat and watched the audience droop and begin to lose interest.
“AHA!” I thought. They came to hear poetry. So now I choose a poem with a lot of zip (“Make a Hand” is one of my favorites for this) and the instant the introduction is over I begin to bellow the poem from the side of the stage and march out waving my arm and imitating my father when he told us to “Make a hand!” Definitely gets the audience’s attention. Then, of course, I have to keep it.
RLR: In our correspondence leading up to this interview, we spoke about our dogs, and you wrote “It is not very convenient for us to have our two Westies when we want to travel, but we believe these relationships are for the life of the pet, and that life is not to be cut short for our convenience.” Does that thought translate similarly to your thoughts on how we ought to be responding to our land and physical surroundings?
LH: Oh yes. Just as I accept responsibility for the life and honorable death of the animals who live with me, so I have a responsibility to this land that the deeds say I own. My ownership of it has officially lasted only a few years and cannot possibly last more than a couple more decades, a scrap of its history, but I behave here as though I am the only owner this land will ever have. While I no longer own cattle, I write leases that specify how the land is to be treated. Naturally, this may all change when I die, but I will do what I can to be sure that responsible ownership continues.
RLR: You’ve shared that Mari Sandoz is your idol both for her writing and for the way she lived life on her own terms. Would you expand a bit on that for us?
LH: Mari Sandoz was the first writer I recall identifying as coming from the same area where I had moved, the western grasslands. I believe my father might have mentioned her work but I don’t believe I read much of it before I was in college. Then I took a course in Western Literature and recall complaining that most of the writers were men. Still, I’m sure we read something of Sandoz there.
Later, I was able to visit her home in the Sandhills of Nebraska, visit with her sister Caroline and even go through some of Mari’s papers and unpublished writings that Caroline had kept. I hoped to do a biography but circumstances didn’t allow it. I kept up with the work that was done on her after her death and I’m a member of the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society at Chadron State College.
In Letters of Mari Sandoz, p. xiv, author Helen Winter Stauffer writes, “Her determination to portray the West as she knew it, however, meant that this was only one obstacle she had overcome on her way to acceptance as an author if significance. Eventually she published twenty-one books, won a number of national prizes, and became a noted public speaker and a radio and television personality. Throughout her life she battled the misconceptions and stereotypes of the West held by those in the East.”
One of the most important aspects of her work, which I’ve tried to emulate, is that she wrote the harsh truths without analyzing them, without apology, because she was writing for the long term; she wanted readers to have a chance to understand the west. So modern feminists wail, “Why didn’t she realize Old Jules was such an abusive man?” and urge me to write about my father’s “abuse” of making me work hard. My job is not to analyze why those men were as they were; my job is to show what they did and the effect of it and I learned that from Mari. What some moderns call “abuse” instilled in me a work ethic, a respect for truth and a strong sense of right and wrong.
As Mari says, "Only I happen to disapprove of the whole process of infantilizing our citizenry. I like the strong things of life, the strong individuals whose passing Dr. Carroll [sic] bewails in his Man, the Unknown. I like bone and muscle in my literature and what passes for literature."
[Reference is to Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown (New York: Harpers, 1935). --Letter to Mrs. O. W. Adams, 12-30-35, pp. 93-4. (emphasis added).
As I began my own writing, I found those stereotypes still existed and I found much encouragement in the way Mari responded to her critics.
RLR: The Rural Lit RALLY project is dedicated to preserving rural-based literature (especially those works that were written prior to the digital age), and also to increasing interest in current authors and works of rural/place-based literature. As one of the most prominent authors in this arena, do you have any suggestions that might help us in that effort?
LH: Oh my. I’ve done similar work by mentioning other regional rural writers in every reading I do, every public appearance; by devising dozens of handouts that I distributed while doing these presentations. But how you might do it in the modern day—a website? Perhaps it could be designed so that the website came up pretty quickly when anyone looked for information about rural literature, or any of the authors you are going to be collecting.
One problem I foresee is that nature writing may be confused with rural writing these days in the minds of some readers and of course I suppose there are overlaps: me, for one. I’m considered both a nature writer and a rural writer. So sorting that out could be difficult. I wish I could be more help, but at the moment nothing occurs to me. I’ll sleep on it; sometimes that works.
RLR: Your website is an incredibly comprehensive, and, quite frankly, downright pleasant place to visit! It’s been difficult to devise questions for you that haven’t been answered. Is there a different/better question that you would have liked me to ask?
LH: No, but feel free to quote from any of those questions appearing on the website. I’ve kept a list on my computer of questions with my answers; at the moment it’s 100 pages long—without adding your questions!