In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Anne Piper

Your poem, “Already all the ghosts,” is a beautiful and haunting look at pre-grief. The speaker compares their past to the present, and looks ahead into the future. What made you write this poem at this time?

I wrote this poem in February of 2023, when old age and Parkinson’s were getting the best of my dad, and when my mom’s memory was undeniably deteriorating. They were in their 90s, so their decline was not unexpected, but the anticipated loss of a parent hit hard, and the loss of any person is the loss of a whole world, and I suppose I was trying to brace myself for what seemed inevitable—and close. I realize that the healthier choice is to make my life into an open hand—accepting what comes and not clinging to things as they are—but in the poem I just keep grasping.

The stanza, “I dried a dozen sweetheart roses, hung them/in the corner of the doorframe,/forgot them until today” is cleverly written, and shaped within the poem like a corner itself. Its format is even mimicked later in the poem. When did that visual framing come into play in your piece? When in the process of creation or revision do you find the visual flow (like in the first to second stanza)?

In the first draft of this poem, all the lines are left justified. I write in notebooks and when I have something that feels promising and interests me, I type it up. I play more with the visuals in various versions of the typed drafts than I do in my notebook, although I do play around with shapes and configuration there, too. In this poem, the visual framing happened after I typed up the draft.

I love the line, “What were my intentions? My good/intentions?” implying that there may have been bad intentions along the way. It feels like the speaker is almost chiding themself for thinking about sad or negative things before they happen. Can you speak more to this idea of intentionality?

The speaker is definitely chiding herself! Her brain is making the same tired moves from beauty to fear, from what’s perfectly enjoyable in life to dread. I can hardly stand it, how I ruin things for myself. It makes me want to escape to the kittens in the next stanza, though they are mortal too. As for intentionality, I guess “Hardly thinking, hardly thinking of now” is my default, no matter how much I intend to stay present.

You evoke a lot of the senses within this poem, really grounding it for the reader in sight and smell, and even memory. How do you create something so universal from such specific details?

My mentor when I was an undergrad—the late Arthur Spring, who ran the St. Mary’s University honors program —would quote Carl Rogers: “What is most personal is most universal,” and that stuck with me. The MA program I graduated from in Human Development let you design your own degree, and mine focused on the concepts of shame and honor. Those most shameful, hidden things, they’re often universal, as you find when you let them out into the light. I wasn’t thinking consciously of trying to connect universally when I wrote the details of the poem, but Carl Rogers’ words are part of my belief system.

What themes do you return to in your work?

I suppose I write a lot about what I fear and what I find myself grappling with. I currently find myself writing the drafts of a lot of poems about my mom’s dementia, because she’s in the midst of that and I’m always trying to find ways for both of us to cope—compensatory strategies, shifts of focus, ways to help her fill her remaining time in Memory Care, a place that makes her very sad. I feel like I am always wrestling this big, heavy snake of existence, trying to understand it and feel safe in its presence. Plus, I truly believe Frost’s “No way out but through,” and have found I need to write about things to accept them.

What books and authors influence your work? Do you have favorite stories or poems you return to?

Marie Howe’s What the Living Do was an important book for me, as was Love, An Index, by Rebecca Lindenberg. (Talk about grappling with painful realities.) And I connect with much of what Ada Limón writes. Stylistically I love Anne Sexton and her wild metaphors. Bob Hicok is a hero, although the leaps he makes amaze me so much; reading him stops me and makes me just want to curl up in a ball. The way his mind works astounds me. Jim Moore and Deborah Keenan are my main poetry mentors, and their work has had a strong influence. As far as poems I go back to, I have “Spiderweb” by Kay Ryan and Ada Limón’s “How to Triumph Like a Girl” on my bulletin board at work, so I think about those two poems regularly. I have those there because walking into work drains the poet right out of me and I’m trying to keep my worlds connected. I work with good people, but I don’t think they care about poetry. (And in keeping with that, no one has ever noticed those poems on my office wall.)

What are you currently writing or working on?

I’m always playing with my manuscript and never sending it out often enough. I do take a lovely 2-hour poetry class every week and often write from the poems we read there. 

Anne Piper lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of her poems is stamped into a few sidewalks. She has an MFA from Hamline University and an MA in human development from St. Mary’s University. Piper provides quality improvement services for homes of people who have disabilities. Her poems have appeared in Water~Stone, Poetry East, Black Warrior Review, Sleet, The New York Quarterly, The Under Review, and other journals. She is working on a book.