Interview with Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of General Release from the Beginning of the World

In the life following the death of her father by suicide, Donna Spruijt-Metz has reinvented herself more times than Madonna.

“I’m the girl in the commune, braless and sitting in at moratoriums against the Viet Nam war,” Spruijt-Metz writes in her latest for Sari Botton’s Oldster, “the dazed immigrant studying flute at the conservatory in Den Haag… the flutist with cold fingers playing in churches and concert halls across Western Europe… the woman sitting alone on a bench in the Vondelpark reading Dutch poetry, translating it, trying to find my way into the Dutch culture.” The new mother, the professor of psychology and public health, the 72-year-old poet.

Shifting circumstances shifted her work–when her golden flute was stolen, and she was unable to practice with the rigor of a professional musician, her attention moved fully to research in psychology and public health, to teaching. Looking now at retirement and her responsibility for her late mother’s effects, it is natural that she would return to poetry to process–as Spruijt-Metz herself says, she gets restless.

Tell me about your debut collection! 

General Release from the Beginning of the World was a long time coming (also see the next answer). A few of the poems in it were published in 2018, which means they were written in 2015-2017, so six years of writing a few decent things every once in a while, until they coalesce into a thing, or start to look like they might. The book braids themes together that keep my heart busy—family, God (or holiness or however you might conceive of that), hauntedness, our troubled earth. Carl Phillips honored me by saying that the poems in the book “reinvigorate the metaphysical tradition for our still-new century.” 

What led you to poetry? What is it like to have your debut book appear after two other careers?

I have always written—since I was a child. Writing poetry was the only way I knew to deal with life’s vicissitudes. Sometimes I wrote seriously. Sometimes I was intent upon avoiding it. Poetry is so very hard, a most demanding mistress. I actually started an MFA in poetry at California Institute of the Arts in 1969, but then transferred into the music department to study flute.

I moved to Holland to study and play. The culture shock was extreme. Deciphering Dutch poetry before I really spoke Dutch was my main way into the culture. And then eventually I moved back to the states. I was writing more and more to help deal with the culture shock of moving back to the states after 22 years and the grueling day-to-day of my mother’s imminent death.

My husband was attending Otis College of Art and Design. Paul Vangelisti, the poet who directed (and founded) the writing program there, became a friend. He talked me into joining the program. But although I got my MFA in 2006, it took me another … what … nearly a decade to really turn around and face poetry. To embrace what had basically been there all my life. To give in. 

It is just joyful to have this book come out after two careers. I don’t know how else to put it. I was so worried that it would never happen. And now it has. I am grateful to so many people and organizations who have worked with me and made me feel a part of the poetry community. 

Your bio ends with “she gets restless.” How does restlessness, and the constant movement of your life, inform your work? 

In a way that is kind of a private joke—because I have changed careers so often (although this is becoming more and more common). But I do get restless, I need to see how things ‘work’—in the metaphysical sense—you won’t find me taking apart flutes or computers to see how they work—I mean I want to see how relationships work—our relationships to each other, to the natural world around us, and to the Holy. And all these relationships are forever in flux. Nothing stands fast—there is always a next level. I think one has to be restless to follow the bread crumbs, as it were—to want to know what’s next rather than deciding that ‘now’ has to be ‘forever’. I get claustrophobic—perhaps another form of restlessness.  

Does poetry ease the restlessness, or encourage it?

Poetry does ease the restlessness, but only when I am deep in the work of poetry, sunken into its quiet and inquiry. But when I am not—when I am pulled away by life or circumstances, I am restless to get back to it. Thus, poetry encourages restlessness, and poetry feeds also it—in a good way, even though it can be extremely uncomfortable. One has to keep up the inquiry, follow the chord as it unravels. It is relentless, and also fine, a darling companion. 

Does writing feel different now that your debut has been published? Any newfound freedoms or obstacles?

Oh, hard question. It does feel different—there is some kind of peace in having a full-length collection in the world. An affirmation. At the same time, I wonder ‘what now?’ I have this idea that I have to write about something entirely different, or at least have a ‘project’—many poets currently have books that are project books.

Victoria Chang, a poet I really admire, comes to mind. Almost all of her books are built around a theme—Obit, for instance, where most poems are prose poems formatted to look like an obituary, reflecting on the death of her parents. In her new book The Trees Witness Everything, all the poems are wakas (various short Japanese poem forms). So maybe I need to find a good constraint. Or a new theme. But I seem to keep writing about the same things—like death—even though I promised myself I wouldn’t write about them anymore—even though my form and craft are morphing as I go. Here, Carl Phillips, another poet I deeply admire, comes to the rescue. He just writes his books, seems to follow himself as his form demands changes, but his subject matter and syntax remain constant, and continues to fascinate. 

What women poets have inspired or informed your own work? How so?

Oh so many. Dana Levin for her freedom and bravery. Mary Szybist for her constant inquiry into the nature of God, Brenda Hillman for her wide-ranging mind and care for the planet, Ada Limon for her presence to the world. So many poets who are also my writing partners, especially Nan Cohen, Laura Reece Hogan, Flower Conroy, and Allison Albino for their charity and persistence, their craft and questioning. And then there is always Emily Dickinson. For so much. 

—
Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, a psychology professor, and a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She lived in the Netherlands for 22 years and translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations appear in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, the Tahoma Literary Review, the Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are ‘Slippery Surfaces’ (Finishing Line Press) and ‘And Haunt the World’ (a collaboration with Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). Camille Dungy (Orion Magazine) chose her forthcoming full length ‘General Release from the Beginning of the World’ (January 2023, Free Verse Editions) as one of the 14 Recommended Poetry Collections for Winter 2022. She gets restless.

GENERAL RELEASE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD

In GENERAL RELEASE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD, Donna Spruijt-Metz attempts to reconcile the death of the father, the lies of the mother, a hidden half-sister, and the love for a daughter-with the impossible desire to banish the past from the present. She examines shifting relationships with the holy, referred to in the book only as ‘YOU.’ She asks: “Do YOU hear/a whisper/in YOUR//constant night/-and then listen?” She breaks her own heart to touch yours.

What People Are Saying

“Stitched equally with wit, tenderness, and the grace of longing, the poems of GENERAL RELEASE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD reinvigorate the metaphysical tradition for our still-new century. Donna Spruijt-Metz riffs on the very Psalms that she also interrogates, seeking answers from a genderless, nameless deity here referred to only as YOU-answers to the question of hauntedness (“the endless repetition/of the first loss”), of what it means to be haunted by a father’s death, by a mother’s lies about that death. “[R]eel me through, catch me/on the other side/with YOUR hidden hands,” says Spruijt-Metz, addressing a deity as elusive as her father himself. These brave poems prove their own way forward to the difficult doubleness of truth: it can set you free, but, first, it’ll break your heart. These impressive poems will, too.” -Carl Phillips

The poems in this collection show it is possible for a poet to be in direct conversation with God, herself, and us, the readers, as if we were all sitting down at the same table, passing the salt. Intimate and holy, stripped down to their most essential moving parts, they bring us into their world of kinetic curiosity and restless grief. “The real work,” these poems proclaim, “is taming the whirring/ distance between us-/ Come close.” -Danusha Laméris

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Category: On Writing