In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—G C Waldrep

Your poems, “Night 410” and “Night 550” are from a work titled Plague Nights. What does Plague Nights entail?

As with every other writer and artist I know, the lockdowns of the pandemic (spring, summer, and fall of 2020 especially) left me with time and anxious energy I didn’t know what to do with. Plague Nights was one answer:  a poem-diary across the first three or four months of the pandemic, a successive lyric record of my engagements with that moment. At some point I came up with the idea that there should, of course, be 1001 “nights” (poems). I made it to 969 during the early days of the pandemic and then decided to wait for the pandemic to end to write the final 32. But the emergency has never really left us, and the cycle remains unfinished.

“Night 410” uses a lot of mirror and film images. Where did this poem come from?

It came from wherever all the other poems come from (!), meaning I don’t know. Just before my university’s library closed, I hauled away 60 or 70 books to get me through the spring and summer:  poetry books, works of theology and literary criticism, many art books. Sometimes I could draw a direct relationship between a poem and something I was reading on a given day, but I don’t have any notes in my poem-journal of 4/20/20, just the poem.

(My reading diary for that day says I was rereading Reina Maria Rodriguez’s wonderful Winter Garden Photograph, as translated by Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen).

“Night 550” uses some interesting dissonant sensory images; “O taste & see, bandage/to the heart’s lip/where music nicked it.” What was your inspiration for this sensory detail?

“O taste and see” is a Biblical reference, and I think I know who that “carpenter” is. In the poem the gesture of “O taste and see” is being compared to a bandage, something we use to bind up—to correct for—damage, harm, terror. Sometimes damage is psychic damage, damage to the metaphorical heart. Sometimes music speaks to those wounds much more directly than language can. In Christianity we often associate the figure of Christ with healing—among His many names and offices, He is the Paraclete. But how psychic or spiritual healing works remains obscure, at least to me. It seems we are apprenticed to a cycle of wounding and healing.

“Night 550” is dated 4/25/20, so only five days after “Night 410.” Yes, that does mean there were 140 other “nights” across those six days. I remember not sleeping much.

And again, “Night 550” feels very much like a journey. Can you talk about that? How did you craft this poem and what the editing process was like?

The entire cycle was a journey. Some of the poems have been revised many, many times over the past five years. But not 550. It’s almost exactly as I drafted it, with a few minor edits.

What themes does your work revolve around?

There is always a religious element to my work, and always a metaphysical element (these things are related but not identical). And nearly always a metaphorical or transformative element. When the Covid pandemic hit, I’d been writing for many years about chronic illness. Serious illness is something the (healthy) society does not like to discuss:  when it comes up in casual conversation, the listener will likely express sympathy in the most basic way, then rush the afflicted towards some narrative of recovery or healing, actual or anticipated. Chronic illness evades the second of these in ways frustrating to both the listener and the afflicted. After a point, nobody—not even one’s closest friends and family—wants to hear more.

My last three published collections (feast gently, The Earliest Witnesses, and The Opening Ritual) all circle my experience of chronic illness. Trying if not to solve my medical issues then at least to grapple with them in what I hoped were useful ways, to situate them, emotionally and spiritually.

What was strange about Covid, at least during those early months, was that suddenly everyone had been transported to Planet Illness, that place of ongoing, irresolvable medical uncertainty, with all the associated anxiety and horror. What was even stranger to me was how swiftly, circa 2022, with the immediate threat fading, most people shifted back to pre-Covid understandings: of illness, of the body, of what it meant to walk together in a shared world.

The thing is, human beings find it hard to live inside an emergency for any length of time. This is perhaps the most difficult lesson for those with chronic illness, and for their loved ones. For a little while, you and I and everyone we know were asked to join in that project.

What texts and authors are your favorite?

This is always such a hard question! Do you mean today, or six months ago, or six years ago, or six months or years from now, or when I was starting out? I like to think of other authors and their books as stars in a night sky. It’s a shared sky. But I form constellations from that field of stars that you don’t see—a bright star for me might be barely visible to you. And sometimes weather conditions obscure the view.

Whom was I rereading, while working on Plague Nights? René Char, who is one of the most important poets for me. I mentioned Reina Maria Rodriguez. Dan Beachy-Quick, Anne Carson, Tim Lilburn, Barry MacSweeney, Alejandra Pizarnik, Henri Michaux. I took deep dives back into Stevens, Williams, Jabès, and Oppen. I read Rilke’s Duino Elegies for the first time, also Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. Weil, Merton, and it appears Eliade, although I don’t remember rereading Eliade.

What are you currently working on?

I write…a lot. Whenever I can. I do this because I enjoy it—it is one way (for me, a primary way) of being in the world. I always have many, many projects going, some of which will find their ways into the hands of strangers, many of which won’t.

Tupelo has tentatively accepted two collections for future publication. One, Winter Constellation, is a lyric manuscript, sparer (and I hope more buoyant) than my recent books. The other is a long poem, Purton Green, about a bit of contested footpath in the landscape of West Suffolk, in England—also sparer, but also longer. It’s a walking-poem.

Right now I’m working on a poetics book. After years of thinking about it and taking notes towards it, I started drafting it…six days ago. I have no idea whether or how it will turn out!