In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Amy Pence

Your poem, “Red Oak, Black Oak” blends nature and family into a real family tree. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?

Thank you for these questions, Jenn. I wrote the poem looking out a picture window in my previous home. I faced 100 acres of woods: in the spring, the trunks would glow with new growth. On winter mornings, the two trees closest to my window were stark and imposing against the dark. Getting up early for work, I also passed the black and white photo of my father’s college graduation ceremony: two grandmothers, my uncle as a boy, my elder sister–still a toddler–holding my father’s hand and my mother holding me as a baby. I suppose it was a metaphorical conflation: I felt surrounded by ancestors–the ones outside my window and those I lived with in my memories.

What prompted you to split the poem into two columns, or trunks, as it were, with the spacing mimicking bark?

Very much that visual tableau: I took quite a while with the poem, building it over the course of a month or two from the top down and seeing how the lines would read down each column and across from one tree to another and how spacing within each line might affect the appearance of the poem as well as the disjunctive or fluid pacing of each line. I remember savoring how long the process lasted because I felt so awed by those trees.

I had previously played with the contrapuntal form in my book Armor, Amour, (Ninebark Press, 2012) so using the form felt natural. For me, contrapuntals are often about a split consciousness, but also about recognizing a sympathy or coherence between contraries or dualities.

In the case of this poem, new data was just coming out, primarily from Suzanne Simard’s theories on plant intelligence, about how trees communicate through their roots. By writing the poem slowly, I arrived at that conjoining at the end.

You very economically describe a picture in the poem, but even with the specifics, there’s a sense that the reader knows the family. Can you talk about your use of language, how you choose your words for a piece, and how you built the connections between the picture and the reader?  

I’m pleased to hear that the photograph is vivid enough that you have a view of, and into, the family. I feel so gratified that this poem found a home. I don’t keep count, but I would guess that the poem was rejected more than 20 times; the spacing of the poem really has to be by hand which can be daunting for a publisher. Your excellent executive editor Meghan Maloney-Vinz got me in touch with Logan Myers who formatted the poem to fit the page so beautifully.

In terms of word choice, I’m probably too in love with adjectives when I’m writing a first draft and while a contrapuntal reins me in, the oaks definitely needed pruning, which I did quite a bit (with each rejection :). In terms of the connection between picture and reader, the poem’s form allows for gaps. There’s so much we don’t know about our family’s interior lives; hopefully those silences are suggested by the gaps in the poem.

What is your favorite book or author? What texts were influential to your writing career? 

Dickinson’s life and poems have been very influential to me– and I spent a few years immersed in both. My hybrid [It] Incandescent (also Ninebark Press) arose from that obsession. Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates was crucial to me as a poet, especially her essay on silence in poetry. There are so many good poets! These days I focus more on the book projects that move me. Just a couple I love:  Tyehimba Jess’s masterly contrapuntals in Olio as well as Franny Choi’s Soft Science. The books are of the moment, while looking forward and back. 

What are your current projects?

Just so happens that “Red Oak, Black Oak” will be the first poem in my forthcoming book We Travel Towards It due out this spring from Serving House Books. Weirdly–or maybe not–a couple years after writing the poem, and in a new home, a 90 foot oak tree destroyed my house after Hurricane Irma as I fled the premises! The poems chart my experience with that natural disaster and the nature of climate-change fueled disasters. I still love trees and that I lived to write about it was an act of grace. I’m at work on a new novel, and in 2026, Red Hen Press will release my debut novel Yellow. 

Thanks so much!

Amy Pence has authored two full-length poetry collections and the hybrid [It] Incandescent (Ninebark Press)—as well as two chapbooks. Her most recent is Your Posthumous Dress (dancing girl press, 2019). She’s a freelance tutor in Atlanta and has taught poetry at Emory and in other workshop settings. Her novel, Yellow, will be published by Red Hen Press in 2026.