Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart
There is a picture of the moon that I like to keep on my phone. It’s not a great picture in terms of its quality, nor is the subject matter (the moon) anything unique. The photo was taken during a summer camping trip on a cloudy night hours before a storm ushered in heavy rain. In this picture, the moon appears grainy and subdued, partially blocked by the imposing limbs of a solid oak that would later drop what sounded like millions of acorns on our tent from the storm. The blunt juxtaposition of Earth and cosmos, and the proximal distance of two objects both close and far continues to bewilder me each time I thumb through photos on my phone and come across this image.
Long before maps were created, celestial navigation assisted the earliest humans traversing the globe by ship or by foot, or to track seasonal changes for when to plant and harvest food. Practicality aside, constellations also provided entertainment through oral storytelling, mythology, and some of the earliest forms of astrological predictions. Without the melee of the modern world we know now, the undiscovered aura of the cosmos made humans pay attention, to question, investigate, to confer with other humans about their witnessing.
That fine attunement to whittle something down from abstraction to singularity while succinctly conveying new meaning is often best tasked to poets. When churning in the mind of one as skilled as Matthew Olzmann, readers can expect to witness the most nondescript, overlooked, or unseen of things—a salamander, a rope bridge, a child’s school backpack—in the most liminal of words and spaces in his latest collection, Constellation Route. Through Olzmann’s imagistic lens, we are summoned to imaginative worlds where pigeons teach us that BLT sandwiches are extensions of climate change. We experience the callous audacity of carving one’s initials into one of the oldest pine trees in North America.
Like the earliest humans, we start from the beginning: Day Zero, as the opening poem’s epigraph notes, is the “date when the clock starts of service performance measurement” per the United States Postal Service. It is the day when
The old man in the old house yells, Let there be light,
then flicks a switch on the living room wall
to watch the house come to life.
There will be plenty of both light and darkness. When a collection of work like Constellation Route varies and veers among contemporaneous subjects including the natural world, gun control, or a Black woman’s sense of safety within her block of white neighbors, it needs an orienting guidepost, and the succession of USPS terminology in this collection serves as an innovative device. In service to the requisite work-place jargon of postal employees, the epistolary form is the real star of this collection, a technique that Olzmann dazzles in by creating distinctions that feel effortless to read. In “Letter to Bruce Wayne”, Olzmann searches for real men who share that name, manly men who might be superheroes with
an old flannel
to wear and a square jawline to smile at the world
before he pivots to presenting American society as violent and xenophobic, where men shout
Get out of my country,
from the window of a passing car.
This hypermasculine violence is interrogated again in “Letter to William Shatner”, a poem that bemoans Shatner’s regurgitated appearance with Priceline’s customer service among deftly woven montages from the movie Fight Club. Always, always, the speaker gauges his own proximity to things near and far (and with alarming acuity considering how David Fincher’s 1999 film version of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel has been more recently co-opted by far-right, angry white men):
And just like that: I’m part of the problem. I’ve punched my card and am back
in the He-Man-Spontaneous-Combustion-of-Wrath Society, pacing my
living room and shouting.
When Olzmann considers himself in the company of men “who holler into the wreckage”, he considers the legacy of the great Bengal tiger, best known for their aggressive rage,
their claws, and their fury. They rip things apart. They are beautiful,
but they spend much of their lives alone and are nearly extinct.
Just as the earliest humans viewed the stars with wonderment and wisdom, Olzmann uses them to play with reminiscence and speculation as a type of SOS, perhaps an apology, for how humans have treated our planet. Lead paint and sulfur dioxide stand in for an eon of industrialization, the bellies of animals lined with plastics and jet fuel our overzealousness for the comforts of modernity, all of which have overlooked the incurable consequences for future generations. In “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now”, Olzmann’s subtle bits of irony aren’t so funny when considering that speculation can easily shift into reality:
There were bees back then, and they pollinated
a euphoria of flowers so we might
contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,
Hey guys, what’s transcendence?
And then all the bees were dead.
Olzmann’s poetic connections are like the gloaming orb of the moon emphasizing one tiny acorn on the rain awning of a tent: always probing and questioning until the grandest concept is winnowed down. He beckons the reader to experience revelatory intimations. Will the bees be around in 50 years? What else might we lose in our lifetime? How am I connected to this potential collapse? It is moments like this, when Olzmann probes the depths of human emotion, that make this collection soar. Consider this passage from “Fourteen Letters to a 52-Hertz Whale” in which he writes:
Do you ever worry that because your voice is impossible to hear, maybe no one will make the
effort? That you can work really hard and try to be a good person and try to make a difference in
your community, but then—at the end of the day the waves will just swallow you whole? They
will take you under.
You’ll disappear from the world.
And you won’t even leave a ripple on the surface.
For those unfamiliar, the 52-Hertz whale sings at such a high frequency that no other whales can hear them. Dubbed as lonely animals, Olzmann writes a letter to one, speaking on both its intelligence and solitude, its existence as one solitary figure among a sea of others until, in one clarifying swoop, the you in the poem becomes the reader.
According to the Smithsonian, postal contractors were instructed to deliver the mail with “celerity, certainty, and security.” Tired of repeatedly writing the phrase, postal clerks designated new routes with asterisks, and these routes became known as star routes. Much like the state of the cosmos, the titular poem “Constellation Route” is a testament to making order out of chaos:
In moments like these, I want to believe
in a cosmic plan, a higher power orchestrating it all.
Incorporating poems written to him by other writers, including Cathy Linh Che, Jessica Jacobs, Ross White, Mike Scalise, and Vievee Francis, this collection is a richly textured cosmic journey through time and space. Like celestial objects producing light and heat, each poem dazzles into one brilliant cluster with Olzmann as the orchestrator creating a map with which to guide us into new directions.
Robyn Earhart lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and pets.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Prageeta Sharma
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Prageeta Sharma
The featured image is by Barnett Newman, Untitled (1945)
In your poem “The Restoration” in Volume 24, the speaker questions why they continue to “lurch into the structures of emotional hand-me-downs,” yet at the end there is a shift as the speaker describes “becoming an olive tree— / twice removed—supplanted and toughened.” I enjoyed the broad spectrum of emotion in this piece. What was your inspiration for this poem?
Thank you for reading the poem the way you describe it here. I think in this poem I wanted to examine a speaker who is trying to exorcize conflicted feelings; particularly a primary feeling of being haunted by the death of a spouse who was a complicated person and to examine the family (a stepdaughter) she helped raise. In this case, the speaker is me and I am trying to be accountable to how these stirrings impact my new partner. But I also wanted the poem to open up to the theme of hope in the present moment: where we live, walk and witness the landscape around us in real time. Ultimately, the poem “The Restoration” is trying to grapple with new metaphors immersed with old ones.
What was the process like for you with “The Restoration” from first draft to publish-ready. Do you have a particular go-to process, or does it differ poem to poem?
I think my process really differs from poem to poem, but I think in early drafts I’m just trying to locate an emotional or intellectual center of the poem. For me, poems are sketches of thinking and feeling in abstraction. Then I carve them into more rounded entities, into poems. Early drafts reveal conflicts or themes built with a base articulation that I need to get on the page and then I start to fiddle with it and shape it into a kind of a landscape that can hold description, emotion, and form in ways that surprise me. I think this might be an oversimplification, but I guess I’m saying that I don’t really build a poem from images to start it. I build my poems from feelings and theories in my head.
Your poetry book Grief Sequence explores the loss of your husband to cancer. Did you find writing these poems to be cathartic? Of course loss is very difficult to process, what types of responses did you get from your readers?
I did find this book cathartic to write because I didn’t know what these poems were going to be like when I was finished with them but while I was writing them I needed them to function like documentation. I wanted to track a period of grieving and recovery that felt incomprehensible. People did reach out to me that first year of grieving; particularly those who had lost spouses or grieved a complicated or unresolved loss. After many years I now realize that I was grieving a layered loss. Grief Sequence processes Dale’s quick death from a two month diagnosis of esophageal cancer, my journey finding myself and finding a new partner. I am grateful for the new friendships I gained in helping people to process similar circumstances.
As you mature as a poet, do you approach the page differently? What are the new explorations, or intrigues that guide you? Has your process or technique changed over the years?
I’m interested in the theme of maturity and poetry as it relates to style and form. I like to think that my ideas about lyric poetry were always changing and growing deeper. I know with Grief Sequence I became committed to prose poetry for the first time and I had to think about the differing relationships I have to the prose poem and the lyric.
I would say that my earlier books relied on a kind of unconscious conversation with my poetry community (or poetry tradition.) With Grief Sequence I wasn’t thinking about a larger world or speaking about literary forms or culture through a lyric voice. I was thinking about surviving and documenting feelings that felt slippery, complicated, and painful but that also taught me to think about what poetry could solve with its emotional registers and attitudes.
When you look back at the younger version of yourself, the poet just starting out, is there any advice you’d like to give her, perhaps advice that might pertain to other emerging writers?
I wish I could tell the younger version of myself as a poet just starting out to believe that what I want to say or describe or think about is of value. It’s just as simple as that. I think I have gotten so caught up in the past about what someone thinks of my work rather than what is the most enjoyable to write. Writing poetry is believing in the work as I’m writing it and not being too self-conscious about who thinks what. Don’t read your poems over your own shoulder!
You founded the conference Thinking Its Presence: an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. I understand that there will be an upcoming conference in 2023. Could you provide our readers with some information about the purpose of the conference?
Yes, I will have a website up in September which will have registration and the schedule. It’s going to be a pretty exciting lineup of writers, poets, scholars, and artists. I’m collaborating with the Benton Museum of Art and have tremendous support from the English department, Pomona College, and the Claremont Colleges. We hope that our various communities will register, attend, and enjoy the discussion. I would say that the mission of the conference is to host work, discussions, and innovations that might be too risky at more mainstream conferences and to celebrate the innovations in our BIPOC communities.
This year’s conference is called Thinking Its Presence: Racial Vertigo, BlackBrown Feelings and Significantly Problematic Objects, which will take place at Pomona College March 30 to April 2, 2023. We are looking at a very exciting list of writers. Several confirmed are Billy-Ray Belcourt, Myriam J.A. Chancy,Percival Everett, Ruth-Ellen Kocher, James Kyung-Jin Lee, Ishmael Reed, Danzy Senna, Sandy Soto, Brooke Pepion Swaney, Valorie Thomas, and Wardell Milan among many additional stellar people who I’m adding to the roster very soon. I can tell you that the programming is coming together nicely.
Thank you so much for your time, what projects are in your future that we can look forward to?
I’ve been working on a manuscript titled “Onement Won,” which explores ideas of abstraction in the Abstract Expressionist movement (particularly the art of Barnett Newman), racial grief, and the problem of the aphorism in Hinduism. Some are lyric poems that are more direct and function like “The Restoration” where I write with a new sense of purpose. There are some new poems which grapple with my current partner’s stage four cancer diagnosis (which we have been devastated by but are doing our best to negotiate).
The new poems are a place for me to articulate the pain of detaching from my past and being immersed in living fully in my present moment (especially now that we are facing such an aggressive cancer). I am finally registering that I have brought more healing into my life, and this has been activated through my love of poetry and consciously committing to deep reciprocity with those who can share it in love and friendship.
PRAGEETA SHARMA’s recent poetry collection, Grief Sequence, was published by Wave Books. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. She was a recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award and a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize. She taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—W. Todd Kaneko
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—W. Todd Kaneko
There’s a sweetness of presence in your poem “Horsepower” as well as a complexity in a singular moment which I found intriguing. You take us on a journey through the simple observation of a cluster of horses by the side of the road. Could you speak to the inspiration and the process of creating this poem?
I have been passing those horses on my way to work for years. They graze in their meadow in fall and spring and stand around under their blankets in the winter. It’s a quiet, lonely commute, particularly now that my wife and I drive separately in case we get called to pick up one of our kids early from school or daycare. But also, I worry about my kids a lot, particularly during the pandemic and particularly when I am stuck in the car driving to work. I would love to be able to say to my son, hey look at the horses like he’s in the back seat and everything is normal, but of course, he’s not and nothing is normal and that’s where the poem started.
Your other poem in Volume 24, “First Person Shooter” is filled with references to our dysfunctional nation. It includes references to immigrant children separated from their parents at our southern border while the speaker in the poem rests comfortably in his home playing armageddon-like video games, one ear listening for his sleeping son. This juxtaposition between real tragedy and imaginary, as well as the need of a father to protect his child is visceral, creating a discomfort in the reader. What are your thoughts about how poetry can speak to societal problems, and can poetry, and art in general, work toward societal change?
I’m hesitant to say that poetry or art actually works toward societal change—that makes it sound like writing poems is equivalent to the labor that activists do to effect change in the world. But I do think that if you are a human being who is capable of empathy, you can’t go through the world and not notice the many fronts on which people are failed by the societies they live in. And for a lot of poets, particularly those who belong to populations that have been failed by the social structures to which they are bound, these things naturally find their way into the poems. How can they not?
On the other hand, poetry is meant to activate a reader, emotionally at least, and I suppose it’s possible for that emotional activation to spur a reader or viewer into action. I think that art can work toward societal change, but I think there’s a huge difference between making poetry or art that speaks to societal problems, and being out in the world, boots on the ground, to make things happen. Both are important in their own ways, but conflating the two is dangerous, I think.
Your poetry collection “This Is How the Bone Sings” explores the painful history and trauma caused by Minidoka, a Japanese concentration camp constructed in Idaho during World War II. I couldn’t help but notice the connection between that time period and the one today where immigrants are housed on our southern border, referenced in your poem “First Person Shooter.” Am I correct in assuming that these stories are personal? What does it say about us as a nation when we continue to repeat these atrocities against vulnerable populations? Is there a way to break these cycles?
Yes, those stories are personal—my father and his parents were incarcerated in Idaho during World War II, and it’s something I think about every day, especially now that they all have passed. My grandmother once said that if the United States were to put citizens in concentration camps again, she would protest on the front lines. In fact, there have been a number of Japanese American camp survivors who have worked as activists against the camps on our southern border.
Is there a way to break these cycles? I don’t know—I don’t really have those kinds of answers in me. I reckon probably not because the cycle of dehumanization and oppression is so ingrained into our country’s history and present, and maybe our future too. I do think that refusing to let people forget that the atrocities of the present day are connected to the atrocities of the past is important. I am currently raising a six-year-old and a pair of twins who will be two soon, and as much as I would like to follow my grandmother’s sense of duty towards those who are incarcerated, childcare pretty much kicks my ass every day. My wife and I try to make sure our kids know their family history with the hope that understanding where they come from encourages them to grow up into conscientious adults who live conscientious lives. That’s the extent of what I can manage, for now.
I noticed that you reference pop culture in your poetry, from Slash of Guns N’ Roses to the wrestler Andre the Giant. How does pop culture shape your work and what can you advise to artists interested in exploring pop culture references in their work?
I know a lot of writers struggle with this kind of thing on the one hand because we get pop culture trained out of us for the sake of trying to stand the test of time over being timely in the moment. On the other hand, it’s because pop culture is supposedly lowbrow and readers aren’t going to get all the references. But I think that poetry is best when it’s about the world we live in, the experiences and culture that surrounds us every day: the songs on the radio, the TV shows we watch, the covers of those magazines staring us down at the grocery checkout. It’s where we live most immediately, and yet, we often assign adjectives to the word culture so we can categorize and dismiss: high culture, low culture, pop culture, foreign culture: it’s all just culture worthy of writing about, for me. Sure maybe a reader doesn’t know anything about Black Panther, but looking at what’s playing at the movies or on Netflix, it’s ridiculous to pretend that super heroes aren’t a thing, you know? And it’s okay if some people don’t get the references because every poem doesn’t have to be for every person. And if you are still seeing pop culture in your poem as a reference and not the world, maybe the poem hasn’t fully embraced its subject matter. So this is my take on pop culture in poetry—I just write about the things that are in front of me because I think it’s worth writing about.
You collaborated with Amorak Huey for a few large projects, including the poetry book “Slash / Slash” as well as the craft book “Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology.” How did your collaboration originate, and what is it like to work on a book with another writer?
Amorak and I are in a writing group together, we teach in the same department (our offices are across the hall from one another), and his house is probably only about a mile away from mine. We both wrote a couple of Guns N’ Roses poems separately, so it made sense when he texted me to say that we should just write some Guns N’ Roses poems together and we ended up coming up with Slash / Slash. We had already collaborated on the textbook, which was a different kind of writing, so we already knew some of the basic parameters for our collaboration: relinquishing sole ownership of the poems we write, putting aside our egos where they interfere with the work, and having fun with poetry.
But like I said, I know Amorak and his work pretty well, and he knows me—so we had built up a lot of trust between us. It was easy for me to give him a draft of a poem to work on and it was fun to receive a draft of his, knowing I had permission to do whatever I wanted with it. There is a challenge on the TV show called Top Chef where one chef starts cooking and then a second chef has to come in half way through, identify what the first chef’s plan was and finish the dish. That was pretty much what our collaboration was like—you get a draft and can see what the poem is trying to do, what the poet was trying to do, and then you get to go in and try to make the whole thing work. Sometimes I served up some heaps of terrible poetry and he gave them back to me looking like real poems. It was like magic. And super fun. Everyone should try collaborating on writing poems. Maybe with your best poetry friend. Or with Amorak, if he’s available.
What are some projects that you are working on now, or planning for the future?
I have lots of plans but like I said, childcare is a problem for us these days. I have more projects than I can possibly work on at the moment. I have been playing with this sequence of prose poems about the video game Fallout 4 (the game I was playing when I wrote “First Person Shooter”), but then recently I decided that maybe they are really flash essays about America, contemporary and historical and hypothetical—or maybe it’s a long essay that is made up of short flash essays about gaming through post-apocalypse America—I’m not sure what it is yet, but this is the project that currently has my attention, partly because I’m interested to see where these pieces will take me, and partly because I just want to play and think about video games right now.
TODD KANEKO is the author of the poetry books This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies (New Michigan Press 2021). He is co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. A Kundiman Fellow, he teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Splendid Anatomies, by Allison Wyss, Reviewed by M. L. Schultz
Allison Wyss’s debut book, Splendid Anatomies, collects sixteen short stories that explore themes of physical and emotional boundaries, identity, dissolution, and dismemberment. But not in a grim way. More of a delightful, gently ironic kind of way (with a bit of gore included).
As a collection, the stories work in conversation with each other, both sharing in the overarching themes of the work and allowing the author to show off her versatility in the creation of a large number of unique situations and worlds. Wyss’s stories span a multitude of settings: the contemporary world, a laboratory running experiments on ghosts, plastic bubbles in space, a world made entirely of yogurt contained in a larger multiverse, and the “once upon a time” of fairy tales (the good, old-fashioned, pre-Disney kind of fairy tales, with all their inherent darkness).
Wyss is skilled at creating quirky, yet recognizable and sympathetic characters, like, for example, the main character in “You’re Perfect As You Are” who over-identifies with her Roomba: “I suppose it’s not bad logic, the Roomba. Go until you hit something, until your nose is pressed flat to a wall or a window or the flat palm of your lover’s hand. Then bounce back, adjust directions, and try again.” In several stories Wyss also revisits the theme of how our perceptions of other people, even imaginary people, can have a great amount of influence in our lives. For example, in “Roar” the narrator relates: “I was not pregnant then, not pregnant at all it turned out. But I thought I was. In fact, I was thoroughly convinced of it. My never-to-be-born child had already triggered the fight that had cost me my boyfriend and led me to live in a doublewide with my brother. Any kid with that much influence must be real, you know?”
Some standout stories from Splendid Anatomies include:
“Final Journal Entry of Dr. Francis Longfellow Hendrix, Lead Scientist at Laboratory 78,” which is written as a set of lab notes annotated with footnotes by a later editor. The story’s format invites the reader to read between the lines to determine the motivations of the doctor, the editor who wrote the footnotes, and the doctor’s numerous lab assistants (who are identified only by designations such as “lab assistant T-11”), as well as the truth surrounding the existence of ghosts in the world of the story (which might almost, but not quite, be our own world).
“Nutsacks in Space,” a tightly-written piece of flash fiction in which the protagonist begins with a meditation on the appearance of his nutsack in his zero-gravity space bubble, but which quickly builds to a surprisingly poignant conclusion.
“The Vortex,” which includes some fascinating and poetic meditations on the nature of time. It also includes a fantastic description of a character who has the same first name as Wyss: “Allison was the bartender that day. She was an ordinary sort of person, though she didn’t think so. She thought she was artistic in an unnamable way and possibly destined for greatness. She didn’t expect to write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture but suspected she might inspire a poem or painting or perhaps a legendary heroic act which would be remembered for all time. She didn’t expect to perform the act, but for it to be performed in her honor or perhaps her defense.”
“Curse the Toad,” a story told from the perspective of a witch. This story speaks both to the ways that humans crave connection with each other and to the ways in which we change our behavior based on the judgements we imagine other people are making.
“Fast Dog Security,” a story that explores the way an unusual character manages his anxiety and his need to try to create order in the world while maintaining his relationship with his spouse. This story speaks to the ways in which our jobs and the tools we use become part of us.
While it’s hard to review flash fiction without giving away too much of the story, it should also be mentioned that the flash pieces in the collection (“Garden,” “Fishing,” “Sleep Birds”) provide some of the most vivid and jarring imagery in the book and are well worth reading.
M. L. SCHULTZ is a fiction writer and a Minnesota native. She enjoys reading works that are humorous, absurdist, and/or surreal, because they reinforce her belief that the world is an inherently ridiculous place. She is currently having way too much fun pursuing her MFA at Hamline University, as well as taking classes in web design. She is a member of the editorial board of Water~Stone Review.
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Kimberly Blaeser
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Kimberly Blaeser
This interview has been shortened. For the full interview, including information about Kimberly Blaeser’s activist work, please click this link: full interview.
The title of your poem in Volume 24 “Onaabani-giizis” means “hard crust on the snow moon,” which references the month of March when snow tends to melt and refreeze causing an outer crust. How does the Anishinaabemowin or Ojibway language inspire your work, and what does it signify for you to include the language in your poetry?
Like much of my Indigenous culture, the Ojibway language that is visible in the poems are like the peak of a landmass that rises to the surface in a lake, while the mountain of influence remains submerged. In my earliest years, I grew up in a household that included my grandparents for whom Anishinaabemowin was a first language as well as my mother whose first language was English.
The language dynamic from that time, and the repression of Indigenous languages in the boarding school era all find reflection in my work. Given the history of assimilation policies that included linguicide, reclaiming Anishinaabemowin in and through poetry becomes an act of resistance. For me, it is also a gesture of zaagidiwin—of love for those who carried the language through the years of trauma.
Your poem “Onaabani-giizis” refers to important and troubling current events: COVID-19, the Capitol insurrection, and “the year when the knelt upon die before our eyes.” How does poetry contribute to the dialogue about our ongoing societal troubles? What role can poetry play as a catalyst for change?
Of course, the idea of “speaking truth to power” is a longstanding way of explaining the role of activist poetics. Audre Lorde claimed, “Poetry is not a luxury.” I think we need poetry precisely because it is an act of attention and an agent of change. Poetry asks us first to look at and then to look through what we encounter in our world, to see it differently. Seeing differently, of course, is the first step toward acting differently.
I think of poetry as both “affective” and “effective.” It is aesthetically pleasing—beautiful as language, and simultaneously does something in the world.
In terms of the “doing,” I often wonder what is possible on an individual level. Can the intimate language of poetry offer an individual a new way of seeing? As it employs image and engages the senses, can it present a situation in enough vivid detail to make a reader/listener feel? By making persons or scenes recognizable, by humanizing the expected villain, poetry (if it succeeds) allows its audience to picture “otherness” as “sameness.” If they feel something new, or see from a different perspective, if they feel an-other reality, will that help to change their ideas? Perhaps.
Clearly the natural world holds significance in your poetry. Your poem, “Of Pith and Marrow” is a sensual example of that. How does nature inspire your work and what is it like to live in a cabin accessed only by water near the Boundary Waters?
I feel blessed to have the opportunity to make a home part of the year among the incredible beauty of the BWCA region. In the last several years, when as professors we were all teaching online, I was able to Zoom from the cabin. We could stay late into the fall and experience the dramas of color and migration, see the first sheets of ice covering the lakes. You can literally watch the landscape change before you.
The who and what you encounter on a daily basis alters you at a deep level, I’d like to suggest at a cellular level. I believe it impacts everything including artistic aesthetics. I honestly think it shifted my teaching.
How does the natural world inspire my work? I am telling only the bare truth when I say—in every way. It informs subject, perspective, aesthetic, ethic, and method. If we understand language as patterns of communication—signs, sounds, gestures, marks—embedding in place literally teaches us new language. Wave patterns. Animal calls. The complex layers of communication woven in any place expands our own literacy and that new literacy spills into our creative work, whether in recognizable ways such as image and metaphor, or in less traceable ways including language patterns or rhythms.
You have received numerous honors and achievements, author of five books of poetry, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas to name a few. When looking over these achievements, what is it that you find to be most rewarding in regards to the work you’ve accomplished?
Most rewarding for me are moments when what I send out into the world lands and keeps growing or comes back in some way. That can mean individuals literally telling me a poem or book has been important to them, or it can mean that a poem starts a conversation, inspires someone else to write, or finds an unexpected audience. Better yet, is to see the writing used in others’ efforts to make change.
Poetry especially is meant to live in the spoken. So I am humbled and happy when I hear my work performed. Recently, the slight poem “About Standing (in Kinship)” seems to have achieved a strong connection with readers and I receive many requests for its use or performance. Works or ideas having a life beyond me—that is the most rewarding element of this process for me. As a writer, I do my work in solitude in order to build community.
How did your childhood, growing up on the White Earth Reservation, inform your poetry? How does your culture inform your poetry?
Just as the natural world permeates my poetry, so too, does my experience as an Anishinaabe woman from White Earth Nation. My childhood, family, community, and tribe—our stories, songs and games, community experiences, tribal teachings, Anishinaabe language, seasonal activities, the character of places, creatures, plants, and much more simply make up who I am. I always say we become the people and places of our past. Ultimately, they are at the most basic level the lens through which I view any experience.
Sometimes these elements of culture appear in obvious ways in my poetry—place names, voices, history, etc., but other times only the perspective of Indigenous culture informs the poems. I believe, for example, behind anything I write lives an understanding of reciprocity, an acquaintance with injustice, a belief in animacy. The sound of the poems arise from the juncture of two languages. The forms may likewise emerge from differing or dual cultural origins. Sometimes the subject of a poem may consciously be attending to cultural issues, sometimes the stance of a poem may find its grounding in Anishinaabe reality without my ever thinking about it.
What projects are you currently working on?
I have a new manuscript, “Ancient Light,” that I am tweaking. It was a finalist and a semi-finalist in competitions—so close to ready. I also have a long-term project building a collection of what I call “picto-poems” which bring text and images together in a kind of palimpsest. Some of these have been exhibited or published, but I am still learning the technology that will help me achieve the internal vision I have for some pieces. The form is inspired by Anishinaabe pictographs and Native ledger art.
I also write short fiction, albeit slowly. I hope to use a residency in August to complete the last stories I need for a collection. I write across genres and have also been creating a series of what might best be termed flash memoir pieces. They are short, lyrical, with an almost prose poem feel. Though I have often been encouraged to write autobiographically, I have wondered how to do that ethically and with kindness toward others involved. I think the suggestive form of flash memoir might be the answer for me. Individual pieces have been published or are coming out, but that work is in the early stages.
Another non-writing project, but one in which I have been deeply immersed in, is the founding and building of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, a non-profit organization committed to mentoring emerging writers and essentially nurturing the growth of Indigenous poetry. Our models for this are organizations like Cave Canem and Kundiman. We held a wonderful inaugural retreat at the Library of Congress in April when Joy Harjo closed out her term as U. S. Poet Laureate. That kind of administrative work and fundraising involves a learning curve for me, but Native poets need a community space like this. We’ve had enormous support from both organizations and individuals.
KIMBERLY BLAESER, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and authored the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. A Professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and MFA faculty for Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Blaeser is also founding director of In-Na_Po—Indigenous Nations Poets. She lives in rural Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.