“Why I Love Slate”
A Q & A with Jody Gladding
DD: Why slate? What about it draws you as a writer and as a person? Or does that distinction even apply here?
JG: It probably doesn’t apply. Because I have been, literally, drawn to and into the abandoned slate quarry in Sabin’s Pasture as a person, and I fell in love with it, with the slate there, as a writer.
DD: You told me in an earlier conversation that the abandoned slate quarry is a site where, for you, language may come into being. Can you explain how the quarry brings language into being?
JG: I’ve been thinking and thinking about that. On one level, it’s easy to answer. If you trace the etymology of the word, slate, you’ll find that it comes from Middle English, sclate, which comes from the Old French, esclate. Now when Old French metamorphoses into Modern French, the “s” (as in slate) is dropped from words that begin with “esc.” So the modern version of esclate is éclat, which means “splinter, sliver, or fragment,” but also “brightness, brilliance, shine, luster,” and ALSO, an in éclat de rire, ringing or resounding, like our phrase, “burst of laughter.”
Now here’s the really cool thing. Slates are part of a metamorphic sequence that begins with shale and progresses through shale, slate, phyllite, schist, and gneiss. And slate’s distinguishing features, what separates it from either shale or phyllite in the sequence are, get this: 1) it cleaves into thin plates, SPLINTERS; 2) a distinct, weak sheen is visible on cleavage surfaces, SHINE; 3) the rock will sound like a bell when sharply tapped, RING. !!! So the word slate is, wholly, the thing itself. No not wholly, but rooted there, emerging, it seems, from the very same source.
DD: I was going to ask you how your translating work affects your poetry, but maybe you just answered that.
JG: Well, yes. And I do translate French, so I spend a lot of time with my nose in French dictionaries. But oddly, the Modern French word for “slate” is entirely unrelated to this. It’s ardoise, related to the place name Ardennes, the slate-producing region in northeastern France. So in French, the name for slate comes from where slate comes from. This whole other history has dropped out of it. I love the geology of this.
DD: That’s on one level. And on other levels, how does the quarry bring language into being?
JG: It’s difficult for me to explain. The quarry is a kind of metaphoric space. It allows me to explore how a poem may operate in three dimensions, in physical acts, in the world at large. So the quarry enlarges the discourse of what a poem is. I’m not sure I’ve answered your question—maybe on the 13th….
DD: Slate strikes me as a modest sort of rock, without the status of, say, granite or marble. Few monuments; many driveways and basements and shingles and stepping stones (Wikipedia even says it’s the product of “low-grade” metamorphism.) Is its modest, utilitarian nature part of the attraction? Or is it a matter of how you find it in the wild?
JG: Both. Slate is ubiquitous in Vermont. In 1929, according to an article that appeared here in The Bridge in 2002, there were more than thirty-two slate mining companies in Vermont. The state’s natural geology made it second only to Pennsylvania in the United States in slate production. The slate quarry in Sabin’s pasture was active from about 1882 until the turn of the last century.
DD: I’m thinking about my driveway right now. It’s made of the slate material they call StayMat. It’s slate ranging from powder-size particles to stones the size of my big toe. When they first dump the stuff in the drive and spread it out, you can move it around with a rake, like gravel. But as it settles and compresses, the smaller particles sort of glue the bigger ones together, so my stone guy told me, and soon you have this wonderful driveway—solid and stable, but porous and, if need be—if you dig at it some—reworkable. Not unlike a poem or another piece of writing that goes well. I’m starting to see why you like this stuff so much.
JG: It’s very Vermont, isn’t it? Modest, utilitarian. Solid and stable. Gray. And in the right light, it can be incredibly beautiful.
DD: What slate do you have in, on, or around your house as part of the built or altered environment there?
JG: A few years ago, we redid our kitchen, and we bought an old slate blackboard from an architectural salvage place near Burlington to use for the counter. It had come from a school house, and it cost about $100. It’s a wonderful work surface, durable and forgiving.
DD: That’s another use, of course—less common these days, but once part of every schoolroom—a place to write and draw things that would soon be erased. Most stone you carve things into; slate you write on with chalk. It’s more provisional. As a writer I can see a real attraction there—always another chance to revise.
JG: Yeah, so instead of keeping a shopping list on the refrigerator, we just write it on the counter. No. Just kidding. Also, David Hinton, my husband, who is also a poet and translator, though of Ancient Chinese, not French, does stone work. So we have a walkway and stone stairs up to our house, and a stone terrace in back, and a beautiful landscaped garden with stone walls and steps. But it’s not slate. The stone he gets comes from two quarries, one in Plainfield, where he gets Waits River Phyllite, harder and with more mineral grains than slate, and one in South Barre, where he gets a softer stone, something between slate and shale.
DD: Indulge the notion that a passion or great interest, like yours for slate, would have to have a replacement if it didn’t or couldn’t exist. Like if I couldn’t write about brains right now, I’m not sure what would take its place. If you couldn’t have slate occupy its particular place in your heart and mind, what would take that spot? Or if that’s too silly a question, then try this one: What’s your SECOND favorite rock?
JG: You’re saying that if you couldn’t write about brains right now, you’re not sure what, but some other interest or passion would take its place? Maybe it’s a slightly different thing with slate. There’s a wonderful passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that describes how humans evolved from rock:
The stones started to lose their essential hardness, slowly to soften and then to
assume a new shape.
The parts of stone where liquid sap blended with the earthy substance were changed to flesh; the solid part that nothing could soften transformed to bone.
What had been vein in the rock kept that same form and name….
And so our race is a hard one, made for toil;
All that we are gives evidence of our origin.
If we take Ovid to heart, then one is not occupied by rock, one is rock, perhaps somewhere further along or further back in slate’s metamorphic sequence. That’s a notion I like to entertain anyway. In terms of writing, I’ve been operating from bedrock for a long time, I think. In college, my senior poetry thesis was called Letter to my Father on Plate Tectonics. And my first book was Stone Crop.
And I do have a second favorite rock! It’s limestone. It’s what you find everywhere in the part of France where I lived last year. But that’s another story…
To find out more about the “Why I Love What I Love” lecture series, visit. www.whyilovewhatilove.com.
