The stone house near Catskill, set back up a long snowy driveway, suggests a church with its peaked roof and leaded-glass windows. The sacrament practiced within is writing poetry.
Mark Wunderlich stands in the doorway, wearing a black jacket over a collarless shirt, jeans, and boiled wool slippers; a black cat slinks around his legs. The white room is impeccably neat, with a double row of antlers over the mantle, and the scent of unfurling hyacinths.
Despite the fire in the woodstove, the house is cold; Wunderlich has barely been under its roof. He flew home last night after reading from his just-published The Earth Avails (Graywolf, 2014) in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and spent all day at Sarah Lawrence, where he’s guest teaching this semester in addition to his long-term job at Bennington College. Tomorrow he’ll leave before dawn to continue his book tour in California.
If all this travel exhausts him, he’s hiding it well. Affable and articulate, he settles into a chair by the fire to talk about The Earth Avails and the home that inspired it, which he bought with his former partner James 11 years ago. They’d been living in subsidized artist housing in Provincetown, but found Cape Cod real estate prices “impossible.” Next stop, Hudson Valley.
Built in 1715 and restored by a former owner, the stone house had become derelict. Pipes had frozen, raccoons had moved in, and the snow-covered mound outside the front door was a midden of trash, including three Christmas trees still strung with lights.
Though the realtor urged them toward more upscale properties, they fell in love with the house’s good bones, and spent seven years fixing it up. When they split “very amicably” two years ago, Wunderlich stayed.
The Earth Avails was “born out of the renovation and restoration of the house.” As they removed literal layers of history, Wunderlich kept a box of vintage wallpapers, linoleum, blacksmith nails, old glass bottles, a straight razor. When they removed a wall, exposing insulation made from cow hair, “it released this animal smell from 200 years ago,” he marvels; a poem opens:
Dwell in my house. Take up your spot in the tightest of corners,
in the crumbling cow-hair plaster mending the wall
While researching the house’s lineage, he found a family will listing a weaver’s loom and two dependent slaves. Who had lived here in centuries past, he wondered, and what was the fabric of their daily lives? Among his findings was a folk-religious document called a Heaven-letter, which he describes as “a mix of prayer, admonition, and chain letter. They were printed as broadsides and framed for display, tucked into the family Bible, or folded and carried for luck.”
Other poems were inspired by a 19th century prayer book he found while visiting his parents in western Wisconsin. Although his ancestors settled the region in the 1830s, circa Little House in the Big Woods, Wunderlich grew up in a 1970s split-level ranch on the banks of the Mississippi.
He was raised in the United Church of Christ, “kind of a bloodless Protestantism” with roots in the Swiss Reformation; he spent summers at Bible Camp. His mother was a church elder—and an atheist. “When I asked if she saw any irony in being a top church lady and an unbeliever, she said, ‘This way, the Lord doesn’t get in my way,'” reports Wunderlich. “My father is a believer, but quite private about it.”
His father is a retired accountant; his mother taught nursing at Winona State College. They also farmed, keeping as many as 200 sheep, a herd of dairy goats, horses, and, sometimes, hogs; Wunderlich and his brother had daily chores. “I spent a lot of my childhood looking after animals,” he says, and many appear in his poems: sheep, crows, a wild boar, a mange-plagued coyote, an albino buck leaping like “a white tooth / in the closing mouth of the woods.” His language is precise, austere yet lyrical, with images that startle: overhead the dumb sky strips off / its wet shirt and tosses it to the wind’s hands.”
Wunderlich’s mother has read his books; his father has not. “They’re proud of me, but these are Midwestern German people. Modesty is appreciated. Doing things in the public eye is foreign and a bit suspicious,” he says, acknowledging that the homoerotic content of his debut book The Anchorage (U. Mass Press, 1999) may also be a factor. “My parents have never been anything but supportive of my work, but they showed their support by giving me space to do what I wanted and needed to do. They respect my privacy, they always have. That’s a great gift.”
Though Wunderlich’s mother read aloud at breakfast every morning (oatmeal with a side of Hardy Boys) and a beloved school librarian plied him with books, “I wasn’t one of those kids who was always writing poems. I didn’t know it was even an option—I thought all poets were dead. I’d never met one. I didn’t know that was a thing.” But once he took a creative writing class “by accident” in college, “I realized it was a conversation I wanted to be having all the time. It was a whole world of language I’d just stumbled into.”
He started college at a tiny German-immersion program in Bemidji, Minnesota, but chafed at its isolation. “I had grown up in a hometown of 700 people—I graduated high school with the same 68 kids I went to kindergarten with. I realized I was in another small place, where everybody would know me, again.” So he transferred to the University of Wisconsin. “Fifty thousand students,” he says, grinning. “I loved it!”
Madison’s larger community freed Wunderlich to come out publically, but telling his father was hard. “I feared I would be rejected, but actually the opposite was true—it was harder for my mother in some ways.” His father’s response still moves him: “We don’t get to choose what the Lord sends us. It’s a father’s job to love his children.”
In 1991, he moved east. “I was living in the East Village in the middle of the AIDS crisis,” he recalls. “I would walk down the street and see people my age in wheelchairs, who were skeletal, who’d been rejected by their families when they were dying. I could see the community, the chosen family coming together. I could also see the indifference, stupidity, and cruelty of political forces who were just cynical enough not to care that these people were dying.” He joined the crowd that carried the body of artist David Wojnarowicz through the streets. “I had this vision of moving to New York to be an artist and to be gay. I got there and found I was part of a group of people perceived as being disposable. That changed me.”
Wunderlich wrote most of The Anchorage in graduate school at Columbia; it won a Lambda Literary Award. His second book, Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf, 2004), also met with strong praise. The Earth Avails had a longer evolution, partly because of his duties at Bennington, where poetry readings can rally a campus-wide crowd (“It’s our version of a football game,” he quips) and partly because he kept these poems close to the vest.
The collection includes two “Heaven-Letters”; nine titles include the word “Prayer.” Wunderlich notes, “I realized I was writing a book that was religious, addressed to a god I don’t believe in. As a queer agnostic, it was kind of embarrassing to be writing these devotional poems. I didn’t show them to my usual readers, didn’t publish them in journals.” But the topic continued to fascinate him. “God’s sort of the big backstop against which you keep throwing the ball,” he explains; the first “Heaven-Letter” concludes:
With your brush of feathers dust away my footprints.
Stay with me, here in the house.
Urge, with your holy claw, the scratching of my pen.
Wunderlich’s current project is “a series of short prose pieces about cold places, and I think of it as something of a meditation on coldness.” He’s done winter residencies in Iceland and Finland, and joined a reindeer expedition in Swedish Lapland, “winter camping and traveling by reindeer sled north of the Arctic Circle.” He plans to travel to Greenland, northern Canada, and Siberia.
This winter, the Arctic Vortex brought the subject to his door. In sunnier climes, the poet maintains “an absurdly large vegetable garden” and keeps bees. In “Opening the Hive,” he writes:
Suited and veiled to see the queen
I bruise the air with smoke,
puff from a billow
the punkwood and cow horn sumac
I burn to stun the city
of sunlight that is the hive.
“I’m awed by bees, by their organization and their beauty. But they’re like roses; they sting. My whole front yard is wild purple asters—the last blooming thing in the fall. There’s not much nectar, but lots of pollen. You walk down the driveway and the whole yard is buzzing. In one square foot there might be four or five hundred bees.” Mark Wunderlich beams. “It feels like the world’s this miraculous place, and we get to look at it.”
Appearing 4/6 at Roeliff Jansen Community Library in Hillsdale. For more information: Roejanlibrary.org.
This article appears in March 2014.
