Quilt poems and illustrations from Sandra McPherson's book, Beauty in Use, are featured elsewhere in this issue of Spark. The limited edition, handmade book features poems by Sandra and paper collages designed by Claire Van Vliet to represent quilt blocks.

Spark: Are these part of a larger group of poems you wrote about quilts? Or does this book contain all of your quilt poems?

SM: I wrote tons of quilt poems; some of them became good enough to be published, and some of them didn't. But I originally thought every quilt should have its own poem. That's a form of madness (laughs), to believe, in a sense, that every quilt would have a corresponding poem. So when I went to put together this project, I found some of the ones which had been left out of The God of Indeterminacy; that's where most of them that were reprinted [in Beauty in Use] originally went, and two of them were in Edge Effect. I sent all that I had to Claire Van Vliet, who put this book together. She told me which were her favorites and suggested an order, but some of these were never published, except in this book.

Spark: In some of the poems, such as "Esther Mack's Utility Quilt" or "Mrs. Longmire Builds a Picket Fence," did you know of an actual history that accompanies these quilts?

SM: Yes! I got the Esther Mack quilt in Chicago. I eventually sold it to the University, at cost, to the African American Studies department. It's there in their quilt room in an acid free box; you can go and look at it, and it would have a little bit of history on Esther Mack—the little bit that I knew—perhaps if she had come from Mississippi, where she was born, or about how old she was when I got the quilt (in the mid or late 80's). I would sleep under every quilt that I bought, at least once. That was part of the research I did to write about them, feel their weight, their specific warmth; they really don't feel alike, the different ways that they press on you. This was one of the first quilt poems I wrote. I was certainly worried about making them [the poems] work; I didn't know if I could.

Spark: So it's partly your imagination and partly what you may know about the quilt that go into the poem?

SM: Oh, I think of them as talking. If I see a quilt and it stops talking very quickly, I don't buy it. The Picket Fence quilt is a very thin one. Mrs. Longmire was a seamstress near Baltimore; I have two of her quilts. They're summer quilts with no batting and a wonderful array of fabrics. She sewed, and she kept all her scraps. Both of these quilts [Esther Mack's and Mrs. Longmire's] are African American quilts.

Spark: I know you admire African American quilts. Do you only collect quilts made by African Americans?

SM: I've broadened out a bit. As long as a quilt is improvisational, as long it goes beyond repeating the same old pattern, it's interesting to me. I like asymmetry; I like it when they run out of cloth and have to do something else that doesn't match. Recently I bought a quilt that has all the aspects I admire about African American quilts, but it was made by a Polish woman in the 1920's. Others that are anonymous I buy because they have that aesthetic—changing the pattern, not static—I'm not the quilt fancier who says, "Oh, look at the small stitches." I appreciate everybody's quilts, but the small stitches don't interest me at all. I'm more interested in the ones quilted with string, or large stitches going across as fast as they can.

Spark: So when you're looking at all these things in the quilts—the improvisation, how the quilters make use of different kinds of patterns or fabrics—what is it about all that draws you to the quilts?

SM: It's probably my conventional background (laughs).

Spark: That seems unconventional though. It would be conventional to be drawn to quilts that are perfect and use matching fabrics and perfect stitches.

SM: It's because I admire the minds of the people who were making these quilts. I admire the way they say, "I've got to change this." I think of a quilt as something that is being made. Even though it's done, I think of the quilter making it, saying "Well, I'll do this next. I'll make do with the scraps that I have." That relates to a conventional background in the sense that people make their own paths.

Spark: You decided to write poems about these quilts, instead of other things, for a while. As a poet, what made you go there?

SM: (laughs) You should ask Walter (her husband, the poet Walter Pavlich) about that. I don't know why; something takes you over, and you can't stop thinking about it. For a while it was "path" poems in the natural world, and I couldn't stop writing those—every little thing along the path—well, it's very similar to every little patch on a quilt. I was learning. I just felt the makers had a lot of knowledge I didn't have, and I was learning piece by piece. I suppose that will never end. I just keep finding things I want to immerse in. I really like the urge in anyone to make something. Somebody called himself the Button Man—a guy who just sews buttons on a board—and for him, that's very exciting. I can imagine he devotes himself to that the way Walter's friend in Honolulu, Stan Fuji, devoted himself to old license plates, especially ones with the number eight on them; (laughs) they became very important to him. Everything—you could learn the whole world through that particular discipline—picking up license plates.

Spark: What can you tell me about this poem, "Black Quilt from the 60's"?

SM: That was the first quilt that I bought, and I wrote several poems about that one. "Finding the Quilter in her Quilt" is about the same quilt. It has big black and white canvas stripes going around it, and in the center there are four log cabin blocks made out of synthetics, mostly. It's a very powerful, fascinating quilt. I responded to it at first because I'd never been taught anything like that; I'd never been taught about that kind of power. It was what I call "beyond pretty." It wasn't interested in being pretty; it was powerful. It had this one little pink square in it, and I'd take it to class and ask, "Where's the woman in this quilt?" Everybody would point to the pink square (laughs). I'd say, "No, the whole quilt is the woman." That's one quilt I took when I went to see Reverend Small, a black minister in Sacramento. I laid it out in the sanctuary, and he got down on his knees to look at it. "That's my mother!" he said. He saw some strength in it that reminded him of his mother.

Spark: Some of the work you're doing now talks about items that were once useful but have gone out of use in this century. Do you see these quilt poems connecting to the work that you're doing now?

SM: Yes. I'm actually collaging the many historical items into several poems. I don't stay on one particular object as much as I did with the quilts. The items now are interrelating, and I'm very interested in where that's going. It's already produced several poems which have been published. Every time I get a new object, I want to say something about it. I bought a postcard from the 1920's; it's a picture of a Ringling Brothers woman, Londy, the world's tallest woman. She wrote on the back. It has her signature in lovely handwriting. Another recent item is from Irian Jaya, west of Papua New Guinea—wonderful, at least 100 years old—a shaman's bag woven of orchid fibers and all hung with rat skulls from the forest rats. (laughs) I had to hide it from Doc (her cat). I just know they all fit together some way. Some place the world's tallest woman, Londy, comes together with the shaman's bag.

Spark: How do you get from a shaman's bag with rat skulls and Londy to a poem? How do you find your way inside the poem from the objects? Do you wait for the things to tell you what to say? And how do you do that? Do you just start and see what happens?

SM: I make a lot of loose notes. They're diverse and sortable. Then something will come along that pulls things together. Sometimes the objects seem to talk to each other, and I wait to see what they'll say.

Spark: You've written about everything from being a mother and a wife to, more recently, these poems that seem to grow from these objects and how people have used them. What are you interested in writing about now? And has that changed from what was meaningful in the past?

SM: It would certainly be something beyond my personal life, except as I regard myself as I have always, as an experimental being. I like a lot of things outside myself. I have a lot of respect for other histories, and I'm trying to learn about other times in history—all kinds of spiritual traditions—and if rat skulls are part of it, I want to know about that; it interests me. I also like history as told through the objects. I thought years ago that I'd outgrow that, but I haven't; I've just gotten bigger at it. There's a chapter in Ted Hughes' Poetry in the Making—a good book for any poet to read—that talks about writing about objects, writing about things. I think of these things as meditational objects. I think Stevens says—I can't quote him exactly—something about it being easier to infer about the universe from a teacup than to start from the universe and infer from there; I think that was the sense of it. That always seemed a good idea to me, and for me, it happens to work well. Other people don't seem to need to work that way; they have their other ways. I'm quite attached to material culture, probably because I heard materialism railed against as I grew up. But I think real materialism is love, love for animals and plants and creation.

Spark: From what I know of you, it's a different type of materialism. It's more connected to the people who created or used these objects that's interesting to you, how the objects were useful versus just an interest or love of the object for the object itself. You're not an aesthete in the sense that you're looking for an object that's beautiful or perfect; you're looking for something that's interesting because of its history.

SM: Oh yes, yes. Something wayward sometimes, that reinvents its form.

Spark: Here comes the big question. How do you see yourself, your role, in the world as a writer? Gary Snyder sometimes talks about "the work to be done," and he has a strong sense , for himself, of what that is. Do you have a sense of what you'd like your work as a poet to accomplish?

SM: I think I'm becoming a little more like I noticed Gary was becoming years ago. I noticed that poetry was just one of the things he did. I admire that. In my teaching I want people to incorporate poetry into their lives, to say "Poetry is part of my life." I have people I meet over the internet through our business (an auction site for antiques) who don't have poetry around all the time, but they look at my website and say, "Hey, I read your poems. Gee, it means a lot to me." They might say, "I'm adopted, too." Or they'll pick a topic that represents an interest we share. That's been gratifying, outside of working here at the college, which is also wonderful. But these are people who don't expect to find poetry, and they're pleasantly surprised. It starts a conversation. I see it as speech and observation, and keeping language alive—keeping talk fresh, and seeing in ways that make people discontent with standard ways of seeing.