FF: That’s very sweet that you would communicate it. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing that with my parents, and they do speak English.

Starnes: But you’re absolutely right; the people who least understand our work are the people who love us, the people who are closest to us. The same thing still happens to me with my sisters, because they cannot but see me when they’re reading the poems. And so they’re all constantly trying to make the connection between the “you” they know and the words on the page. And sometimes that connection is not so obvious. That’s why I often say I write for myself and for a stranger. Only the person who does not know you can read the poem for what it is and what it wishes to say. At the beginning this was very frustrating. But I stopped being frustrated when I was able to say, “That’s okay. I can communicate with them in a way I cannot communicate with a stranger.” It’s a natural thing that our family may not be the first to understand our work.

FF: You’ve lived in multiple cultures. You’ve had to say goodbye to a lot of places, and you’ve had to adapt to a new life several times. Do you think that experience has affected your poetry or how you approach writing?

Starnes: Very much so. I often say that I started becoming a poet without knowing it. When I was sixteen years old, my father told us we had leave the Philippines and he gave each of us, his children, a medium-size suitcase. And he said, “Whatever you can put in there, you can take. That’s it.” So you have this first exercise of trying to find what is most essential, what is most important, what you can take and what you have to leave behind. That’s very much the process that I have in writing poetry, because when I’m writing a poem I want to narrow everything down to the essential emotional experience, even if sometimes that makes the poem a little difficult to understand. But that’s because I’m paring it from everything that I find superficial.

Also, because of all these departures, I’m more inclined to look at essential things. For example, I left the Philippines and then we went to Spain. And then I left and went to New York when I married my husband. Now we live in Virginia. Every departure means leaving behind people and things that you cannot consider essential to your life, at least not physically—while keeping the essence of those things and those people. As a result, for example, for me, the word “river” is more important than this or that river, and the word “bread” is more important than a specific type of bread. Some poets are wonderful about recreating a particular place, with a particular culture and the kind of food they eat, etc. In my case, I’m more likely to have the word “river” than “the James River” in a poem. This means that my crutch words, the ones I tend to fall back on, are words like house and door and window and river and food, things that I think every culture would understand. If the poem is picked up by somebody in Africa, they too know food or drink or thirst or house or family. So the experience of the poem becomes very essential. In a way there’s a challenge there because you want to have both the particular and the universal. The poem rises out of something that’s uniquely personal while at the same time being universal. Anyhow, all that to describe the influence of having to say goodbye on my poems.

One other thing, to clarify. Sometimes, you find that you use words that have become essential to you even if they’re not essential per se. For example, the word “piano” has become essential to me because my husband plays a piano, even though the piano does not exist in exactly the same way in other cultures. One can still hope that people will relate to it, even if they imagine it differently. Their own imagination will allow the poem to speak personally to them. So if I say the word “door,” you will see a door, and I will see another door, and somebody else will see a different kind of door. But the experience of something that allows somebody to come in and somebody to leave, that action of arrival and departure, of welcome and goodbye, which is essential to the word “door” is communicated to everybody.

Many years ago, I wrote a poem that had to do with why the language of scripture is so universal. Think of the images in the parables or the psalms. When I was growing up, I didn’t know anything about shepherds. There are no shepherds in Manila! Yet, a lot of these images became part of that poem and at the end came together to express the experience of my father’s imminent passing.

Something that has always fascinated me is how the language of the 23rd Psalm, which has been translated into every language in the globe, is universal because its emotion, its longing, is universal, because the sense of caring for sheep is universal, regardless of what herds you have in your culture. So that, to me, is fascinating, to find the words that can have a universal connotation without being specific. I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem that has, you know, the word “cornflakes.” There’s nothing wrong about having the word cornflakes, but I am much more likely to use grain or barley, a more universal term.

FF: On the topic of biblical language—you’re a Christian poet, and the topic of Christianity or faith in general comes up often in your poems, sometimes more explicitly, sometimes more implicitly. How would you say your faith has shaped your approach to poetry and how you write?

Starnes: I think it also has to do with the experience of departure. Faith was something that, no matter where I went, I could take with me, and I could find others who shared that faith. So I left the Philippines and went to Spain, and so many things in everyday life were different. Yet, I could go into a church and worship in that church and be connected. I was a Catholic then; I’m a Catholic now. So the rituals were mostly the same. There was a sense of belonging, even if it was a different community. The same thing happened in New York or here in Virginia. And I imagine it would apply to other Christian traditions. There has always been this sense that faith is “one of those essential things that I can take with me wherever I go that make me who I am.”

I’m of a mixed ethnic background. My mother’s Spanish, my father Filipino. And I have other Asian influences. As I was growing up in the Philippines I sometimes heard “you’re more this” or “you’re more that.” It was a conflict that bothered me tremendously, because I felt that whenever I said I was of one culture, it meant I was not of the other. And when we went to Spain, I experienced a similar inner conflict. And then I came to the United States, and my feeling was that here I could be both things and it wouldn’t matter. I was an American with several heritages.

If you profess a faith, you have a community of faith, and you have a language and a liturgy that comes with that faith—none of these have barriers. At least for me, the faith experience has no boundaries. It’s open to anybody who would embrace the tenets of that faith. Christianity is not connected to a particular ethnic group. It rose out of Judaism, but then spread to the world. So you are one with people of every background. In fact, right now, I’m on the editorial staff of Poetica Magazine, a journal of contemporary Jewish writing. And I’m honored to have this role because I value the Judeo tradition greatly. This is where my faith comes from.

As we get older, faith becomes more important. Your life proceeds, and you become all the more grateful for the things you’ve had. More thoughtful about a lot of things in general. I think that comes out in my poems. This next collection I’m working on is all form, as I think I mentioned. The form that I’m using is a dizain, which is a 16th century form. All the poems are composed of ten lines, with ten beats per line. I’ve divided the manuscript into three sections, and the last group of poems are coming-home poems. And they’re the most explicitly religious poems in that collection. I like poems that, even if they’re explicitly religious, are more about the emotional call to the heart, than they are about the theological reasoning behind it. Not because I don’t think reason or theology are important (they are!), but because poetry is not a venue to clobber somebody with as a means of persuasion. It’s a venue to share a deep, emotional experience. You can think in philosophical terms, which obviously influence your poetry, but once you write a poem, you have to let the language of the heart speak for you. And then you have to let go, you have to allow the poem its freedom, so that the reader can approach it from his or her own perspective. You can’t fret, “Oh, but this is what I wanted to say!” At least I couldn’t do it. It’s not the poet’s role.