In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Marie-Elizabeth Mali
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Marie-Elizabeth Mali
Your poem, “Mirror,” studies the fascination with underwater life—particularly brain coral—during a first dive. What prompted you to set this poem down on paper?
Since that initial dive in Bonaire, in December, 2000, I’ve wanted to describe the wonder I felt at directly experiencing the underwater world at depth for the first time.
Visiting a world that doesn’t center around the human helped me put my typical hang-ups into perspective. It felt liberating to be reminded that there’s a whole world out there beyond my daily concerns.
To witness directly how certain shapes and colors, like the lobes and folds of the brain, are replicated in nature, further freed me.
This felt like something worth attempting to put into language!
You use a wave-like structure throughout the lines of this piece, in what mimics ocean waves. When did this develop in the poem’s creation?
As I revised the poem and broke it into stanzas, something still didn’t feel quite right about it.
It felt like the structure looked too static for the subject.
In later drafts, I experimented with how the poem flowed on the page.
When I hit on this wave-like structure, it finally felt like the structure supported the poem’s ability to convey the direct experience of being underwater, gently rocking in the depths.
You capture the feeling of this landscape with the phrase, “I peered through a mask/at the alien and familiar world,” and there are ties to objects familiar to the reader (broccoli, lightning bolts) that help us understand this world many of us have never seen. What is it like to write about animals and places that exist, but at the same time feel so distant from what we know? Do you find that you tend to be more descriptive for the reader’s sake?
When I went underwater for the first time on that dive, I was struck by the way nature repeats certain colors and patterns across worlds.
It felt both familiar and unfamiliar, personal and utterly impersonal.
I wanted to bridge that experience for the reader by describing the experience of seeing the macrocosm of nature operating in the fractal microcosm of shapes and colors by linking what happened in my mind in that moment to common metaphoric leaps we make on land when we encounter one thing that resembles another, but is also completely different.
Ultimately, I believe everything is connected.
While the underwater world can feel distant and different from our daily lived experience on land, by describing it in the way I did in this poem, I hope to subtly influence the reader in experiencing that oneness and connectedness, since, “We protect what we love,” as Jacques Cousteau so brilliantly observed, and the ocean needs protecting at this time.
You also use ocean analogies and settings when writing other pieces. What draws you to the ocean in your writing?
On land, it’s easy to forget that other worlds exist right here, on this planet, including living creatures that have personalities, desires, and fears just like us.
As someone who is fascinated by the underwater world, I naturally gravitate toward creating metaphoric connections between the experiences I have there and our life on land.
In this way, I hope to expand my, and the reader’s, perspective to allow life to be more mysterious and complex than our typical black-and-white thinking tends to have us believe.
What other themes do you discover you return to in your writing? What themes do you want to still explore?
In a world fixated on difference, separation, and categorization, I return again and again to themes of connection and relatedness that, on further examination and inquiry—as happens when probing the unknown in a poem—can dissolve our differences at a deeper level than we typically perceive with our conscious minds.
I still want to explore themes around how to allow the full range of emotion and experience—light and dark, good and (apparently) evil—to coexist and inform one another, since our tendency is to privilege one over the other and negatively judge what we don’t like and what doesn’t feel good or comforting to us.
It is in understanding and allowing contrasts to exist that we can open our minds and develop more compassion.
What authors have influenced your writing? Are there books you return to for inspiration?
Mark Doty has hugely influenced my writing, especially his ability to keep expanding a description until the deeper revelation offered by his initial draw toward that image or subject is revealed. I just love the way his mind works and how he perceives the world.
Kim Addonizio’s work has also been a big influence on me, as I relate to her quest to fully face life, and her own—often conflicting, sometimes self-destructive—drives with compassion and humor.
I return to Mark Doty’s Atlantis, and Addonizio’s Tell Me and What Is This Thing Called Love, for inspiration, and other poems I find gorgeously descriptive, as well as deeply feeling and human, that hit me in the heart and guts, or open my mind in some new way.
What are you working on now?
While I’ve been sending out the manuscript in which “Mirror” appears, seeking publication, I’ve been working more on honing my prose.
I want to eventually gather these scattered writings into a book of stories and essays that explore the themes I outlined above, in service of my work as a speaker and a mentor to high-achieving women who want to expand themselves, their minds, and their lives beyond the conditioning they were born into and raised with.
And yet, I find myself returning to poetry when I’m struck by an image or an experience that’s hard to encompass in prose. So, while the poems are coming more slowly these days, with longer gaps in between, they’re still my North Star.
Marie-Elizabeth Mali is the author of one book of poetry, Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) and co-editor with Annie Finch of the anthology Villanelles (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2012). Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, RATTLE, and the New Ohio Review, among others. She is the host of the Relationship Alchemy podcast and a two-time TEDx speaker who helps women communicate more effectively and transform patterns of thinking and behavior that get in the way of love, connection, and success in relationships and business. She is also an underwater photographer who has a thing for sharks.In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Joseph O. Legaspi
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Joseph O. Legaspi
Your poem, “Weeding/Wedding,” is a beautiful twining of etymology and gardening. What inspired this poem?
The poem was inspired by my actually gardening—weeding, to be more precise. I was at Space on Ryder Farm in Brewster, New York, and as part of the residency, residents were asked to volunteer a couple of hours working on the farm. So, I got down and weeded. While in the dirt, I did hum with a sense of contentment and contemplation. Not quite sure why my mind drifted to marriage, to “wedding,” most likely because of the singsong-y alliteration of the words and that I was missing my husband. The pulling of the weeds also made me think of extraction and growth; fecundity; cultivation and care; the tugging of those two words in terms of their definitions, the excision and the union.
There’s a wonderful order of events in the poem, where the narrator’s musing brings clarity at the end, rather than from the setup. How did the poem take this shape? What sort of revisions did you orchestrate in its creation?
I feel this poem exemplifies my poetics in that its movement is that of discovery. I truly did not know, nor even have a sense of where the poem was heading. That the initial draft of the poem sat untouched in my journal for months surely gave it time to enrich like tilled soil. When I revisited it, I simply turned hound dog and followed the trail. Since the action in the poem is mundane—weeding!—I infused the language with a certain heft, as in “descend,” “earthen loam,” “symbiosis.” Biblical, organic, scientific. By the last line of the fifth stanza, the poem transcended from the present setting into the past, from day to night, into a history of heartbreak and loss, eventually culminating in the speaker’s marriage.
You mention “a litany of coupling” and yet this poem is written in lines of three with seven stanzas—all odd numbers. How did you decide to craft this piece that way?
For me the poem is about the push and pull, the defining and redefining. It is preoccupied by notions of totality or wholeness, in turn, nothingness, emptiness, or removal. I often think of the tercet as prayer, as trinity—the father, son and the holy ghost. (Even though I consider myself lapsed, my Catholic upbringing pervades how I view and move through the world.) Paired with that I also hope that the poem evokes the Garden of Eden. Its meditation on coupling against the poetic form then creates tension and dramatizes the diametrical, opposing states. Ultimately, I intend the poem to queerify the biblical creation myth, the gendered coupledom of Adam and Eve, and even their eventual expulsion. Gay marriage is an act of transgression.
Plants and flowers often have particular significance (for example, some say that chickweed is a symbol for fidelity while nightshade is betrayal). Did you intentionally place certain plants next to each other within this piece? How did you decide on which specific plants to include?
I wish I could claim that I have such encyclopedic botanic symbolist knowledge with my placing of the plants and flowers in my poem, but I cannot. Oh, I did a bit of research on top of the little tidbit of horticultural knowledge I do possess, but the placing in “Weeding/Wedding” is primarily motivated by sound and rhythm. Purely lyrical, I suppose.
Who are some authors that you admire? What are some of your favorite texts?
Aaahhh, too many to count, both authors and texts, hence, I’ll tackle this question simply by listing the books I’ve recently read that I’ve enjoyed and admired. During their National Poetry Month sale, I ordered a few titles from one of my favorite presses, Alice James Books, and dove into a couple of them quickly. Song of My Softening by Omotara James is a fierce tour-de-force by a debut voice who I’m certain will be around to continue to thrill readers with her language, vulnerability and bravado. Kevin Goodan’s In the Days That Followed was the best companion on a Metro-North train cross-states. Atmospheric, lyrical, contemplative, it was the escape and slowdown I needed. Lastly and currently, I’m devouring and savoring the delectable collection of essays Bite By Bite by my great friend, Aimee Nezhukumatathil. This book brings me such happiness by ways of nostalgia, wonder, humor, and Aimee’s irrepressible, infectious, joyful nerd-dom.
Joseph O. Legaspi is the author of the poetry collections Threshold and Imago, both from CavanKerry Press, and three chapbooks: Postcards (Ghostbird Press), Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts), and Subways (Thrush Press). His works have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Orion, and Best of the Net. He co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature.In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Catherine Pierce
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Catherine Pierce
You have two poems in Volume 26: “I Wonder if the Guy Who Catcalled Me in the Blockbuster Parking Lot When I Was 15 Ever Thinks About That,” and “Perfection™.” These two poems detail separate events, but there’s a kinship of perseverance in both of them. When crafting them, was there a connection between them for you, or were they created at different times?
That’s interesting—they were written at different times but they both went through a lot of revision before arriving at their final forms, so there’s perseverance in their creation as well as in their subject matter. Otherwise, though, any connection only came through later, as I was putting together a group of poems for submission and thought they might enjoy each other’s company.
“Perfection™” juxtaposes failure as a child playing games with the adult feeling of overwhelming responsibility for society’s failure. What inspired the braiding of these two times (adult and child)?
Poems for me are opportunities and spaces to sort through questions. I’d hated the game Perfection when I was a kid—so stressful! The time pressure, the buzz, the explosion of pieces… (I’d also hated Operation—a game that buzzes loudly at you if you make a mistake? Where the premise is that you lose if you botch a patient’s surgery? No, thank you!) But it wasn’t until a few years ago, after playing Perfection for the first time in decades, that I really thought about why the game had bugged me so much as a child, and, importantly, why it still did. It was stressful, sure, but so are other games that I enjoy. What was it about this one? Writing this poem from a place of questioning helped me to realize that “I was afraid to fail and so I failed”—and to see how that freezing up that can stem from fear of failure doesn’t necessarily stop in childhood.
“Fizz” and “buzz” are such accurate words to describe rage in “I Wonder if the Guy Who Catcalled Me…”. What prompted these descriptions? How did this poem take shape during creation and revision?
Ah, thank you—I’m glad you hooked into those words. To me, those verbs get at both the electric energy of rage and the thrill that can come with acknowledging and releasing it. I wanted to suggest the way that anger can feel almost seductive (I always think of champagne when I hear the word “fizz”).
This poem was one of those rare ones that happen quickly—or at least the language of it happened quickly. The form took quite a while. I’d initially drafted it as a conventionally lineated and punctuated poem—no blank space, no stanza breaks. But it just wasn’t working in that form—it didn’t have the sort of headlong, breathless feeling I wanted it to have. I ended up putting it aside for two years before revisiting it and deciding to play with the way it appears on the page. Once I began exploring the visual space of the poem, the whole thing opened up for me.
What’s your writing process like? For you, what makes a poem “done?”
My process is always in flux. I learned a long time ago that I’m not a person who is able to, or even who wants to, write every day. I go through productive times and fallow times, and I’ve become increasingly, though not entirely, comfortable with that ebb and flow.
When I’m working on a new poem, I do a lot of reading out loud, a lot of staring into the middle distance trying to find the accurate word or phrase. Once I’ve got a draft done—either one that I think is close to finished OR one that I feel has something worth pursuing but that I just can’t seem to crack—I’ll email it to my longtime friend Maggie Smith for her take. Maggie and I have been exchanging poems since our grad school days almost twenty-five years ago; by this point she knows my work as well as I do, so her responses are not only spot-on, craft-wise, but are also wonderfully intuitive in understanding what a given poem is going for—or could be going for.
I’ve also gotten better over the years at being honest with myself. If I’m not sure about a poem—if it just feels like it’s not quite there yet—I’ll wait on it, return to it over months or years until I feel like I’ve gotten it right. And when I read my poems out loud, I stay tuned in to my own attention—if I feel even slightly bored by any moment of the poem, I know that’s a spot to revisit.
What themes do you return to in your poetry?
Someone else might be a better judge of this than I am, but: animals and death and apocalypse and wonder and parenthood and longing and carnivals and mountains and weather and boardwalks and memory and trees and insects and Skee-Ball.
What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on poems that explore ideas of elements—the classical elements of earth, fire, wind, and water; the elements of ancient humoral theory; “the elements” as weather; the periodic table of elements; the elements of language. I’m also working on some essays, on some revisions, and on successfully growing blueberries.
Photo by Megan Bean
Catherine Pierce is the poet laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems, most recently Danger Days (Saturnalia, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Jax Connelly
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Jax Connelly
Your nonfiction piece “Not So Soft,” which appears in Volume 26, weaves running, sisterhood, eating disorders, and loss together. Your work is uniquely descriptive—“The ground is violent with leaves,” and “I was a pressure cooker of a teenager.” When and how did this piece first spring into existence? How long did it take you to write and develop the precise language you use?
I didn’t know this essay was about sisterhood or even, necessarily, eating disorders until several drafts and months in. I wouldn’t have come up with lines like “the ground is violent with leaves” or “I was a pressure cooker of a teenager” until I had submerged myself in the themes of the piece and started developing a more intentional recurring image system related to food, the body, types of harm, the things we try to bury, etc.
This piece takes place while the speaker is on a jog—cycling through concentration on the task at hand in these loops of thoughts and memories. It’s a very clever way to be able to naturally return to themes throughout the work. What inspired you to write with this conceit, and at what point in the process did this become realized?
This piece originated in a travel writing class I took in fall 2020 (an ironic time for a travel writing class; it took place on Zoom, of course). At a time when we couldn’t travel in the traditional sense, our professor (shoutout to Patty McNair) used an exercise called “the writer’s road trip” to encourage us to rethink what “travel” could mean—i.e., a walk around the block, a trip to the grocery store. The exercise provided a structure for narrative movement based within a relatively short, ordinary trip that the narrator takes alone: 15 steps that switched off between “on the road” steps and “pull over” steps. “On the road” steps were about moving the story and journey forward through the external landscape, while “pull over” steps were about deepening the narrative through memory, reflection, and new understandings. The “conceit” is that the exterior landscape evolves as the narrator moves through it, and time passes which allows the narrator to move around their interior landscape, too.
I feel like the weather plays a character in this story. What was your process of developing weather in relation to the human characters?
Nothing has the ability to piss me off more reliably than the weather. It’s this natural (though it sometimes feels supernatural) force that we have to arrange so much of our lives around, and we have absolutely no control over it. We’re just at its mercy, period. And I don’t know if I made this connection while I was writing the essay, but now that you’re pointing out how prominently the weather features, I’m realizing that’s kind of what it’s like to be inside an eating disorder. A lot of people think eating disorders are about body image, but in my experience they’re actually about control. You start using these behaviors and you’re thinking “this is how I will achieve total control over myself and my life.” And then one day you wake up and you realize you’ve been completely swallowed.
You utilize beautiful repetition throughout your work, not only here, but in other pieces like The Spectacular Years, published in Hunger Mountain Review. What is the role that you feel repetition plays in your writing?
In “Not So Soft,” I think the overlaps in the transitions between the paragraphs are a technique for mimicking the rhythm and cyclical nature of being on a run, especially a run along the same route you’ve run a million times before.
In “The Spectacular Years,” I think the repetition is functioning more in relationship to the way memory and, especially, writing about the past can simultaneously expand our understanding of what’s happened and obscure it. I’m fascinated by the fallibility of memory, and the way that fallibility interacts with the act of writing something down, especially writing something down that we believe to be “true.” Every time I go back and try to tell a story, whether a true story or not, I’m changing it slightly, not because I was lying then or I’m lying now, but because I’m seeing it from a different vantage point, and noticing something I either didn’t notice before or wasn’t ready to acknowledge. There’s a lot of hand wringing around what constitutes the ultimate, singular, capital-T “Truth” in creative nonfiction. But memory feels true, even when it’s false. We can interrogate that on the page, but we will never be able to figure out the ultimate, singular, capital-T “Truth” of our lives. I don’t believe truth exists in such a singular form. The truth is always plural, partial, multi-sided, fragmentary. Contradictory, even.
That, I think, is why repetition interests me in general—it’s this very cool craft way to insist upon constant reimaginings and multiple truths.
For me as a fiction writer, approaching nonfiction feels very vulnerable, yet you’ve cultivated a frank, open style. What draws you to nonfiction? How do you decide what pieces of yourself you share with the audience, and which you don’t?
I think it’s all coming from the same place, really. I don’t think my process is all that different from a fiction writer’s. The more I write, the less married I am to the label of “nonfiction,” and at the same time I feel almost protective of it as a genre, because a lot of people, when they hear “creative nonfiction,” get confused—if it’s “nonfiction,” how can it be “creative”? Don’t those words cancel each other out? But nonfiction isn’t just glorified diary keeping: “This happened and then this happened and then this happened.” Whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction or something in between, we’re all always shaping the story, and we’re always making decisions about how much of ourselves to share in that story. That requires leaving a whole lot of stuff out. It requires picking and choosing and pulling things apart and rearranging them very carefully, playing some things up, others down. Whatever happened, there are a million ways to write it. I know I’ll never get it exactly, precisely right, but I think there is something uniquely powerful about applying literary and poetic techniques to the “facts” of your own life, using them to scrutinize and question the various “truths” you’ve had to swallow, and also uncover the ones which have maybe always been lurking underneath the surface.
(As a sidebar that’s more related to my own thoughts above than your original question, I will add that I believe this question of “truths” is also inextricably intertwined with queerness and transness, because part of what writing does, for me, is retroactive work to both stabilize and destabilize the liminalities inherent in queer and trans bodies and intimacies. Writing is an embodied act in itself, right? So we’re living in these bodies and we’re also writing in these bodies, about things that have happened while we’ve been living in these bodies. I think if we understand “true stories” as perhaps a broader, more complicated space than “This happened and then this happened and then this happened,” we might feel freer to abandon the idea of the fixed and static frame typically associated with capital-T “Truth,” and let ourselves fall deeper into the shiftingness that is necessary, not threatening, to the “integrity” of a queer and trans “I.” Especially a queer and trans “I” that creates.)
What themes do you keep returning to in your writing?
Unstable bodies, mental illness, queer and trans experiences, family trauma, the fallibility of memory, unreliable narration, “truth” in all its forms, liminal relationships, relational ruptures, constructions of language, and, importantly, my dog.
Do you have favorite books that have influenced your writing? What authors do you return to?
My Body is a Book of Rules, Elissa Washuta’s first essay collection, was hugely influential on me back before I even started writing, as was Wendy C. Ortiz’s memoir Excavation. I’ve read Problems by Jade Sharma more times than probably any other book. The work of T. Fleischmann for a masterclass on the book-length essay. The anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, especially the work of Ari Banias, Oliver Bendorf, and Dawn Lundy Martin, for new ways of thinking about trans bodies in relation to bodies of text. We the Animals by Justin Torres is probably the book I recommend most often. Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy should be required reading for all. Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Melissa Febos, Jenny Boully, Maggie Nelson, Alexander Chee, Michelle Tea, and Eileen Myles are a few of the authors I return to again and again. A few books I loved recently: Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison, and Manywhere by Morgan Thomas.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a book-length braided essay that investigates forgiveness and cycles of abuse, and I’m trying to balance that by taking regular breaks to work on very short flash essays that have nothing to do with those topics. And I’ve got new stuff coming out soon in Off Assignment, Slag Glass City, and The Georgia Review.
Jax Connelly (they/she) is an award-winning writer whose creative nonfiction explores the intersections of queer identity, unstable bodies, and mental illness. Their essays have received honors including three Notables in the Best American Essays series, Nowhere Magazine’s Fall 2020 Travel Writing Prize, first place in the 2019 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, and the 2018 Pinch Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, among others.You can read more of her work in Fourth Genre, [PANK], The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, Ruminate, Pleiades, and online at jaxconnelly.wixsite.com/writer
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Elise Paschen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Elise Paschen
Your poem, “Divination,” is a gorgeous blend of imagery, myth, and spring welcoming. Where did the spark for this poem come from?
Thank you! During the pandemic, our family moved to a house in rural southwest Michigan. Spending days in isolation, I became fascinated by the birds outdoors. In another poem in this series, “Skywriting,” I describe living in our house as if in an aviary. When I drafted “Divination,” I had been inspired by the image of robins festooning a tree in the cold of winter. I then continued the trajectory of my beguilement by imagining the emptied nests around our house inhabited in spring.
I love the cascading effect of the lines. With layered poetry like this, I’m always curious if there’s another way this poem can, or is intended, to be read? How did you craft this format?
While working on “Divination,” I also was writing a long poem, “Heritage,” which employed a similar staggered stanza structure. In the past I’ve written contrapuntal poems which can be read vertically or horizontally. This one functions more as a concrete poem, mimicking spatially the robins on the branches. Behind the poem’s structure lies this notion of threes, inspired by a sense of divinity in nature.
So much of your work delves into the themes of relationships and nature. What draws you to these themes?
Throughout my life I’ve had an ineffable relationship with the natural world, a place which offers inspiration and sustenance. During our time of isolation, I rooted more deeply into realms outside the human one.
Your poems have the qualities of stories. What is your writing process? When you set out to write a poem, do you have a narrative, or do you work from imagery?
I try to catch the impulse of the poem when it arrives, allowing the music to carry its own momentum. I often will write the first draft quickly and then continue redrafting the original version. Poems have been inspired by many things—history, dreams, art, film, myth, memory, emotion, the natural world, to name a few. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on William Butler Yeats’s revisions of his female persona poems, and I am a relentless reviser. When working on a poem, I hope that the language will help to determine its particular direction. I also endeavor to surprise myself while writing—so, much of the time, I don’t know where the poem will travel.
Over these past years I’ve envisioned writing a book-length project. My previous books have been assembled through accretion, poem by poem. With my new book, “Blood Wolf Moon,” I’ve attempted to create a narrative which engages the reader from beginning to end. Within the dramatic propulsion of the narrative there is an intrinsic architecture, a sense of plot or even a five-act structure.
A new writing preoccupation is to create sequences of poems, in which one poem will lead to the composition of the next. As I had mentioned, “Blood Wolf Moon” opens with a long poem called “Heritage,” composed of hanging indent stanzas. The last line of the first poem becomes the first line of the next, creating a crown of fourteen poems. There are several other series in the book, including the avian poems and a botanic suite, which I’ve broken up and scattered throughout. In part four of the book, I’ve taken earlier prose fragments and created a prose poem memoir sequence.
Poetry is, in a way, a language unto itself. And you’ve written work that incorporates the Osage Nation’s language, including “́/Waléze/Stationery” and “͘ ́ ́/Máze Htáhtaze/Typewriter.” Can you talk about what your process is like when working with multiple languages in your writing?
I have always been fascinated by the Osage language. On my desk are two Osage dictionaries, the older one compiled by Francis La Flesche and the newer one by Carolyn Quintero. The La Flesche dictionary helped my work on a poem called “Wi-gi-e,” which is spoken by Mollie Burkhart whose family was systematically murdered during the Reign of Terror (1921-1926) in Oklahoma. A line from that poem, “During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tse-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon,” helped to inspire the title for David Grann’s book and Martin Scorsese’s film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
While working on “Blood Wolf Moon,” I began delving into Quintero’s dictionary. In “́/Waléze/Stationery” and “͘ ́ ́/Máze Htáhtaze/Typewriter,” I chose words in the dictionary at the end of the alphabet and worked my way forward. With regard to this process, I see the words in translation and the poem arises, tapping my past, my dream life, my unconscious, offering unexpected discoveries. Esther Belin accepted these poems for her special issue on Land Acknowledgment for “Poetry” Magazine. Right after the acceptance, I became aware of the creation of Osage orthography by the Osage Nation. Christopher Cote from the Osage Nation Language Department provided the translations in orthography for the poems.
Where do you draw inspiration from in your life? What authors or works inspire you?
I love balancing my work as a writer with my work as an anthologist. Reading and discovering poems by others continues to fuel my own writing. My most recent anthology, “The Eloquent Poem,” is based on writing workshops I’ve taught in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As I teach that anthology this semester, I continue to rediscover new aspects of the poems we study. How I love, for instance, Kimiko Hahn’s collage poem, “Things I Am Beginning to Forget.” Next week we’ll discuss January Gill O’Neil’s “Bloom,” along with other mirror poems. The book includes artist statements at the back, so you can learn from the poets (as well as from my general introductions) how to write an ekphrastic poem or an aubade or an ars poetica, for instance.
I’m a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets, and we’re talking to my editor, Gabriel Fried, about editing another Persea anthology comprised of poems by our In-Na-Po Fellows and Board members. The work of these writers continues to amaze me, and I can’t wait to get started on this project.
I look for inspiration in all the poems I encounter. I was struck by how Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ first and final poem in “Silver” mirror each other in reverse. I’ve written a couple of mirror poems but had never thought to begin and end a collection with one. Reading Monica Youn’s “Detail of the Rice Chest,” helped jumpstart a recent new poem. Joy Harjo’s “An American Sunrise” inspired the trajectory of “Blood Wolf Moon.” Another favorite is Timothy Donnelly’s “Chariot”—a multi-faceted jewel of a poetry collection. I look forward to reading Sophie Cabot Black’s collection, “Geometry of the Restless Herd,” and Kenzie Allen’s “Cloud Missives,” among many other books coming out soon.
You have authored several poetry collections, The Nightlife, Bestiaries, and Infidelities, among numerous other works. What project is at your fingertips now?
I just brought out a chapbook, titled “Tallchief,” (Magic City Books Press, 2023), a selection of poems from my first three books as well as new poems, inspired by my mother, the prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. She is featured on the US quarter, and her Osage name is represented in Osage orthography. When I was working with the US Mint on helping to choose the design for the coin, the Osage Nation Language Department suggested the Mint incorporate the orthography —hence my own realization of the need to include orthography in the Osage translation poems.
“Blood Wolf Moon” will be published by Red Hen Press in April 2025. The poet Rachel DeWoskin, after reading the manuscript, wrote a beautiful long email. Here’s an excerpt: “There are constellations all the way throughout, stars and birds and light and darkness and beauty and horror and nature and humans and history – multiple languages, bloodlines, meter.” I’m grateful to Rachel for these words.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Elise Paschen is the author of six poetry collections, including The Nightlife and Blood Wolf Moon, forthcoming in spring 2025. Her poems have been published widely, including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including The Eloquent Poem and The New York Times bestseller, Poetry Speaks. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.