Vivian Carroll is a 76-year-old poet whose work contains wisdom gained from a deep well of experience that includes years working in regional theater from Alaska to New York and teaching costuming to students at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. She says the key to writing a good poem is to let the ideas marinate and she often has several poems simmering on the back burner at the same time.
Vivian Carroll: Things come into my head. It’s like, if I’m thinking, or sometimes music, if I’m listening to music and maybe I like the person who’s recording it, or I’ve met a celebrity or whatnot. Things just come into my head. Mostly what I write about it my childhood, my culture which is Native American, or relationships and they’re mostly broken. But that sort of thing that I write about. And so, things come into my head and it, like, marinates for a while—da, da, da, da, da, da—and I finally put it down on paper and revise, and revise, and revise. Sometimes if I don’t even finish that I will work on something else and go back to that. So, I have several things in the poker, poker in the fire, as they say at one time. First of all, I hear it in my head and then I will read it out loud. It’s not Shakespeare but it has the rhythm that I want and so if some of the words don’t fit or they’re the wrong words I will shovel it out and get something in there that fits. I’m heavily into imagery—different words to connotate the thing that I want in my head to communicate to somebody else. I’m very picky, very picky about my words. When I write, it’s like there’s my life, I’m writing about my life but I’m not writing about it as a fact. It’s like, I have to divorce myself from that, knowing what I’m writing about, divorce myself, look back at it and write from that viewpoint. So, it’s not like I’m, oh they’re reading about my life and I don’t want them to know all about me. I don’t write word-for-word, fact-for-fact because it’s a poetic thing, it’s an artistic thing. They don’t have to know what’s behind this.
Laying a Breathless Body to Rest
Turtle shells pray
shhush-shhush-shhush-shhusha
pebbles in their bellies sing
shhush-shhush-shhush-shhusha.
When last breath-sshush-shhush-
escapes in sleep-shhush-shhushaaa-
does it dive deep,
slide down stalactites,
seek cellophane fire
that crackles and melts?
Does last breath-shhush-shhush-
burst high-shhush-shhushaaa-
a fireworks tail,
an asterisk winking,
pinwheel light sparkling,
raining soft gold?
After last breath-shhusha-
we bury body’s husk-shhush-shhusha-
hair washed in sun’s light,
to sleep without weeping,
to breathe like the wind blows--
shhush
shhush
shhush
shhusha.
About the author:
Vivian Carroll is a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her work has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Tribal College Journal, New Limestone Review, Taos Journal of Poetry and numerous other publications and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She Received her master of fine arts degree at the age of 72 from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her first poetry collection is called Talking Leaves Scrapbook.
About the host:
Steven Law is the co-producer of KNAU’s series PoetrySnaps! He is a poet, essayist, storyteller, and the author of Polished, a collection of poems about exploring the Colorado Plateau by foot and by raft.
About the music:
Original music by the Flagstaff-based band Pilcrowe.
Poetry Snaps is produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and airs the third Friday of each month.
