In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Lisa Higgs

Your two poems, “About Nothing” and “Pandemic Dreams” are beautifully-worked pieces. Where sparked the creation of these pieces?

As one might imagine with “Pandemic Dreams,” I wrote this poem at some point during the lockdowns or soon thereafter. I don’t think I was alone in finding it difficult to sleep during the pandemic, and I often woke to really bizarre recurring dreams that shifted about in small and large ways. Among my recurrent dreams were ones set in that iconic Minnesota setting, the northern cabin. So really, the poem is a list of the parts of those repeating dreams I found difficult to forget and, over time, felt I should not forget. Recalibrating my sleep as we came out of the pandemic proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be, and “About Nothing” began one February morning following yet another restless night of sleep, where motion outside my bedroom window kept triggering a sensored light. Perhaps the thought of those night animals–which I am not, being a true early bird–is what drew me to the images of teeth and gnawing, though I also tend to clench my teeth overnight, so it is equally likely I had a sore jaw that morning, too. The connected title and last words create a circle if you instinctively try to finish the phrase–much ado about nothing. A reflection of the repetitive thoughts that seem to drive my insomnia, yet also a reflection on sleep itself. The act of being asleep takes on such heightened importance as you toss and turn in the throes of insomnia. Could it really be the unimportant part, and the dreams and fears that so often kept me awake were the essential elements I needed to breathe, to be. 

“Pandemic Dreams” opens with one of my favorite lines to start a poem, “My family wants dinner but a suitcase is not a cooler.” Can you talk about how that line came into existence and what made you start right there?

Now you’ve sent me back to my journals, as I know for certain that was not the first line of my first draft, which I can now verify was written June 24, 2020. The poem originally began with “I’m at the cabin again,” and had several lines about items I’d packed into a tiny red suitcase. The boring things: socks (unmatched), toothbrush (no paste). Because one does not usually go to a cabin by oneself, my family then intruded, hungry, and it was actually the perfect suggestion of one of my former mentors, Jim Moore, to begin the poem with that line, something that could only make sense in a dream. When you get good advice, you need to take it. I think I cut about a third of the poem during revisions, all with the intent of keeping the poem in an alien realm bordered by repeating details as if, sometime, they could recreate reality. They could make sense. How in the summer of 2020 could you find sense?

In “Pandemic Dreams,” there is a rattlesnake that features as another character. How did she come into the poem?

The rattlesnake was a dream companion on several occasions, so her presence was required on a literal level, yet she also embodied a sleeping threat. Is the rattlesnake a Covid stand-in? Does a suitcase offer security, both in what can be packed away and in where traveling might take you? I don’t know if I ever dreamed the rattlesnake bite, but I did for certain dream a silver fox carrying a dead rattlesnake across the road. Call in the dream interpreters, but make sure they’ve spent enough weeks near a lakeshore in Bemidji or Walker. 

“About Nothing” takes a Shakespearean tilt, and even is a sort of sonnet—or at least it’s 14 lines. Can you talk a bit about that? In what ways, if any, did Much Ado inspire “About Nothing?”

I write a lot of sonnets. Probably as an outgrowth of having an early teacher, Bill Pauly, who required attempting the form, but also because when I started reading poetry seriously in high school, my favorites tended to be in that form. From my paperback Immortal Poems of the English Language: Shakespeare, Keats, the other Romantics. I tend to pay more attention to meter than end rhyme, though once and awhile, rhyme just fits. I rarely sit down and think, today I’ll write a sonnet, but often I realize very early that the poem I’m drafting will end up as a sonnet, and the form becomes part of my drafting. Less often, I write a poem without realizing it is a sonnet, and revision becomes a matter of addition, subtraction, and cleaning up the meter, which always, always makes the poem better. I’ve already mentioned a little about Much Ado, but I would add that I often take from that play an idea that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously, for fear of becoming rather ridiculous. All the things that can keep you up at night lose a bit of their power if you can place them in the “much ado about nothing” category. 

Do you find that your writing centers around core themes?

At one point, I would have said that my writing is often centered around the tension between solitude and loneliness, but I’m not certain if that rings as true lately. I grew up in a very small grouping of homes on country-sized lots surrounded by farmland, so solitude was something I grew up with and something I crave when it’s in small supply. But how and when do loneliness and solitude rub up against each other, how and when do they overlap? I’ve always had an interest in place and where I fit into various landscapes, though this has grown to include how humanity fits, or doesn’t, into the rapidly changing environment. I also am curious about the tensions between science and religion, and by tension I mean less conflict and more the balancing of opposing forces. Yet I also have my “daughter” poems and my “dog” poems, and all those flowers budding and blooming, all those migrating birds…

What authors inspire you? What books do you keep nearby?

The lists we could make about authors we admire! In thinking back to a time when I was teaching, I would always bring Ada Limón and Tracy K. Smith to a class’s attention, along with Jim Moore, Eavan Boland, and Don Paterson. Wislawa Szymorska and Anna Akhmatova are often on my nightstand, as is Maryanne Moore. This year, I was glad to come across Melissa Kwasny, Marie-Claire Bancquart, and Vievee Francis. Speaking of Akhmatova, my most recent insomnia hack is picking up her biography and reading a few pages to lull me back to a point where sleep seems imminent. Luckily, my insomnia no longer happens with much frequency, but I have found plugging into someone else’s life allows me to keep my own recycled thoughts at bay. At least until the chapters on Akhmatova’s life in Lenigrand under Stalin. A bit too unsettling to induce drowsiness. 

What are you working on now?

I do have a full manuscript that I began to pull together in 2023 and tinkered with quite a bit last year, which I’ve been sending around. But despite sometimes being a semi-finalist or finalist, I have yet to be the bride of a poetry publication contest. In some ways I feel between the work of that manuscript and something new, outside individual poems on any given day. Though the project of America is on my mind, and our degrading planet. I would love to find an antidote to hatred, but I’m not certain if all the love poems and poems of hope in the world could make a dent at this moment in time. Perhaps I’ll give it a try anyway.

Lisa Higgs is a recipient of a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. She has published three chapbooks, most recently Earthen Bound (Red Bird). Her reviews and interviews can be found online at the Poetry Foundation, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, and Colorado Review.