In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Judy Kaber
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Judy Kaber
Your poem that appears in Volume 27, “Cracking the Lid,” is after Lois Dodd’s painting “Lifting the Lid.” What drew you to that painting, and what sparked this piece from it? Do you often find inspiration from art?
I love Lois Dodd’s work and often write ekphrastic poems. I was drawn to this particular painting because of the mystery in it, the way you could only see part of the figure emerging from (or entering?) the box. It left me with a lot of interesting questions. Answers concerning constraint and failure filled my mind.
The repeated lines help set the rhythm of the poem. What connected you to this form for this particular work? What other forms do you usually work in?
I’m not sure what led me to this particular form for the poem. Maybe it was the idea of the echo you would hear inside the box. The rhymes and rhythms seemed to match the painting well. I live beside a stream and the images and sounds from the stream have entered this poem.
Usually I write in free verse. However, I do like some forms and will use them when they seem to fit the work. Some of my favorites are abecedarian, Golden Shovel, duplex, pantoum, and ode.
I love the line “failures I think I’ve finally fled.” It gives me the feeling that the freedom the speaker of the poem is seeking is really an illusion. Can you speak more to this line, and how you see it influencing the rest of the poem?
I think that’s a key line in the poem. In the image, it seems like the figure is attempting to close herself off from the world, which is something we might do when we fail, particularly if we fail in a public way. But failures are part of who we are and help us grow, so rather than trying to escape them, I believe it’s better to embrace them.
What themes do you return to in your work?
My husband died this past year, so death and loss have invaded my writing in a way I can’t seem to escape. They were always there, but never so strongly. Nature also is a constant theme.
What books or paintings influence your work? What stories and authors do you return to?
Poets are my strongest influence. The ones that come to mind most readily and that I return to again and again are Dorianne Laux, Ocean Vuong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Kaveh Akbar. There are so many talented poets! What excites me is that I am constantly finding new poets to fall in love with. Lately I’ve taken up with Natalie Diaz. Her use of language is exhilarating.
What are you working on now?
I just finished a chapbook honoring my late husband and have my first full length book coming out in the fall, so I don’t have a specific writing project that I’m working on now. I have been taking a deep dive into the life and writing of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was born and grew up near where I live so she holds a particular fascination for me. I appreciate her use of language and am absorbing the musicality of her work. I love her free spirit. Right now I am reading concurrently six books: her letters, her journals or diaries, two biographies, a young adult biography, and an annotated book of her poems. I’m not sure where this will lead me, but I’m guessing it may be at the heart of my next project.
Judy Kaber taught elementary school for thirty-four years and is currently retired. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently A Pandemic Alphabet (The Poets Table, 2020). She has published in a number of journals, both print and electronic, including The Comstock Review, Pleiades, december, Atlantic Review, and Quartet. Contest credits include the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest in 2009, the Larry Kramer Memorial Chapbook Contest in 2011, and the Maine Poets Society Contest in 2021 and 2023. Recently, her poem “Sword Swallowing Lessons” was featured on “The Slowdown.” Kaber is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Main (2021-2023).
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Marc Nieson
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Marc Nieson
Your story “American Standards” involves a man balancing his daily corporate job, his aging mother, and his newish relationship. What sparked the creation of this story?
Aptly, this story’s ‘spark’ began in a public bathroom when I took note of the manufacturer’s stamp on the toilet’s ceramic rim—American Standard. What a great title, I thought. I keep a list of such possible titles, that sit around waiting for their respective stories. Most never get developed. Then, years later while on an airplane flight, I happened on an article in its airline magazine about an engineer who was working on toilet designs. At that point a main character started to emerge, but a story typically won’t engage for me until three things bump into one another. This third element arrived one morning when I pictured him in the bathroom of his mother’s rest home, standing before the mirror crying.
Harit’s dream is to do more than simply create self-cleaning toilets, but his path forward is blocked, so to speak; partly because he feels beholden to being near his mother, and partly because he’s fallen into a pattern. How did you create and develop the character of Harit?
Love your double entendre with ‘blocked.’ Harit’s pattern/rut was key to both his character and the overall tale. Starting out, I knew I wanted to explore certain aspects of what’s not only ‘standardized’ in America, but what we’ve also exported globally, for better &/or worse. The given elements of toilets and waste also offered me a vehicle to weigh in on the economic, ecological, and moral consequences of our rampant consumerism and proliferation of products (not to mention armaments).
As well, I pictured the main character as a recent immigrant—someone who’d have an outside perspective and initially be drawn to the mythos of the American Dream. For some reason, Indian felt right. I also keep a list of potential character names, which included Hazmat. Then it became a matter of finding an Indian name that approximated it, and Harit won.
The character of Drew is a lovely addition of levity with his puns. Can you talk a bit about this character and how he acts as a foil to Harit? Was he an original part of the story or a later addition? Can you talk about how you use and weave comedy into your writing?
While humor is instinctual in my day-to-day life, it doesn’t naturally enter my writings. Since Harit is very serious, I figured I needed some comic relief. Plus, toilets are funny, or at least there’s that tendency toward bathroom humor to consider. I also needed someone who might use ‘Hazmat’ as a nickname. Drew grew out of all that. And puns strike me as the worst kind of humor, something that could further frustrate Harit. Drew is harmless and innocent, yet also complicit. As Harit says at one point, “Drew the jokester…the jester…the company man.”
At the end of the story, Nareen has started to change Harit’s mind about the static nature of things. How did this ending come about? Did you always end the story like this?
Nareen emerged as the story developed. I sensed Harit’s domestic life should be dealing with more than just his mother’s cognitive deterioration. Another character with whom he’d actually interact and who’d challenge him. She adds complication and complexity, as well as an element that didn’t only relate to his past and present situation, but also the potential of a future. Nareen, too, is smarter than Harit. She can see further and wider than he can, and calls him out regarding his rut, his righteousness. Ultimately, I don’t think he’d be capable of making the change without her.
Nareen also offered the opportunity to bring another culture and immigrant into the mix. Her motives for coming to the U.S. differ from Harit’s, and while he’s directly bullied as a boy in England, the discrimination she’s faced within the U.S. is more nuanced. It’s not specified whether the company is withholding her promotion because of her ethnicity or gender.
As far as the ending, Harit seeing the “Royal Flush” port-a-san always played a part. A bookend for Drew’s opening dialogue reference. And then it became natural that Nareen was present, too.
What was your editing process for this piece like?
The older I get, the more I enjoy revising. The initial conception and drafting of stories are still intriguing, but the real reward comes through making sentences work. As Andre Dubus said, “Success and failure come to a writer each day, a word or a sentence at a time.” The first iteration of this story was well over ten years ago. I wait a long time before sharing work. One of my last revisions was changing the title from American Standard to American Standards.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
‘Theme’ always feels like such an academic term—that thing your high school teacher once asked alongside “What’s the story about?” We do all have our leanings, though. Our given lives and subject matters, our obsessions, our questions. And these, too, can change over time. For me, it’s increasingly become a question of what’s worth saying today. What’s worth putting out there in a world that’s so overrun with media, words, imagery. A world that most probably won’t read this little tale, and yet . . .
I knew I wanted to say something regarding climate change. But how to do so without it feeling like agenda? How to keep it about humans bumping into one another? Again, strangely toilets offered me an organic entry point. And as far as broaching the question of standards in the United States, clearly the story’s elements regarding waste and profit and corporate influence; immigration, refugees, and displacement; political division and partitions, even health care have all become far more crucial than when I first put pen to paper on this tale.
Who are some authors who inspire you? What are some of your favorite texts?
So, so many authors are influences on my writings, my days. Often who I’ll read and re-read depends on what I’m working on. Of late, I’m studying works by Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, Juan Rulfo . . . as well as biographies on Harry Houdini. Yet mainstays on the shelf are Antoine de St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham and The Sneetches. Alessandro Baricco’s Silk, James Galvin’s The Meadow, James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait, Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping.
What are you currently working on?
A novel called Houdini’s Heirs. Steeped in magical realism, its parable revolves around the lives of the cast of a Coney Island sideshow, who are physical marvels and possess rare abilities. Set during the last summer of the 20th Century, they’re desperately struggling to make ends meet for at least one more season. The tale also circles back to the early 1900’s and a particular ‘water torture cell’ performance of Houdini himself. As we come to learn, Houdini’s connections to the founding of this sideshow play a mysterious and crucial role in whether it will survive into the next millennium.
Meanwhile, recently an article appeared in the New York Times business section about these Japanese bidets ‘flooding’ the U.S. market. First designed back in 1982, they offered a small wand that extended from the back of the rim to spray water upwards. Succeeding models added automatic lid opening and flushing, and of course now there are smart toilets with heated seats, motion detected flushing, voice activation . . .
So, perhaps there’s an American Standards sequel?
Marc Nieson is the author of the memoir SCHOOLHOUSE: Lessons on Love & Landscape (Ice Cube Press). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School and his background also includes children’s theater, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. He’s received a Raymond Carver Short Story Award and Pushcart Prize nominations and has been noted in Best American Essays. He teaches at Chatham University, edits The Fourth River, and is at work on the novel Houdini’s Heirs. See more at marcnieson.com.In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—G C Waldrep
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!
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Carla Panciera
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Carla Panciera
Your poem “Smart Girls Always Have a Plan” blends math and myth in one of my favorite lines, “Math, after all, is one letter removed / from stories of the gods.” Where did this poem come from? What inspired it?
Speaking of myths, this is a bit of a long story. Sometime during my extended maternity leave from my job teaching high school English, I read an article in American Scholar Magazine about an educator who set up a poetry stand where his students wrote poems on the spot, for free. Today, we see these stands pop up at various events, but this was pre-2006. I’d never heard of anything like that and thought: Wouldn’t it be great if I could actually convince kids to do this? The idea seemed impossible. But I was fortunate to return to work in a school where arts are prioritized, and my students loved the idea. By the time I retired, over 200 students had staffed the stand at venues from literary fests to Boston’s Financial District to Whole Foods Valentine chocolate buffet (our personal favorite). As a writer, I’d never asked my students to do something I hadn’t done—until they staffed the stand. So, when I returned to writing poetry after a few years of writing prose, I decided to have people order poems from me, except I cheated in that I asked friends and acquaintances. The idea for “Smart Girls” came from a close friend and colleague who felt trapped in a difficult marriage. She also happened to be a brilliant and innovative math teacher. I considered the different ways in which she and I went about teaching problem solving in our classrooms.Then, because having to write a poem that didn’t derive from my own impulse, I did what all of these requests forced me to do: I began with research. I had never started poems this way before but this did open me up to ideas and subjects I’d never tackled. I looked up “math” and (full confession) read the Wikipedia entry where I came upon Galileo’s quote about the labyrinth, and where I also kept coming across the idea of math being connected to the arts. In fact, no one seemed to be able to say for certain whether math was art or science or both. Math, for me, had always seemed impossible, very much other. It made me feel trapped and filled me with dread and I admired anyone who could find their way through such a traitorous alphabet. But the research showed me the connections between my friend’s world and mine, and I had a place to start.
Ariadne, the daughter of the King of Crete and Theseus’ scorned lover, features heavily in this poem. What made you center her story of the labyrinth?
Once I had the idea of the labyrinth from Galileo’s quote, I felt the earth under my feet! Mythology! A subject, unlike trigonometry, that I LOVED in school! It was an easy jump to Ariadne, an early problem-solver. Theseus has no chance of defeating the minotaur if she doesn’t come up with a plan. At the time my friend requested this poem, she wrote that one of the things she wondered about was, if she did divorce her husband, would she find happiness on the other side? Ariadne’s myth has two possible endings. The more common one is that Theseus abandoned her, an unforgivable transgression. Yet, even in this version, she is rescued by Dionysus who loves her so much that, when she dies, he takes the crown he had given her and sets it among the stars. But there is another version of the myth where Theseus puts Ariadne ashore because she’s seasick and then returns to tend to the boat. When a storm erupts, he’s separated from her, and, in his heartbreak, forgets to unfurl his sails and dies. That’s another great thing about stories. They can have different endings. They have that over math. If Ariadne’s story had only had one tragic solution, I could not have offered it here.
Can you talk about the beginning of the poem’s lament that teachers didn’t teach how they should have?
I’ll start with fourth grade where we did self-paced math. In other words, ten-year-olds sat at desks with our books open and talked with our friends. Every week or so, we’d take a chapter test and, if we didn’t pass, we took it over, our seatmates conveniently keeping their books open to a page with an example on it. Our teacher never even stood up from her desk. In sixth grade, we started the math lesson by correcting our homework according to what the teacher told us the answers were and calling our grade out loud. If you received a “C” or below, you had to re-do the assignment. Thus, I had two assignments each night and succeeded in understanding at least one mathematical truth: Most of the class was smarter than I was. But those experiences seemed borderline effective compared to trigonometry class, sophomore year in high school, which was, by far, my worst experience in academics, not only because the subject matter was so difficult, but because I had a teacher who believed (he admitted it at the end of the year) that shaming us would motivate us to work harder. He would, for example, call us up to the front of the class to sign our “deficiencies”, those hellish slips of paper (you had to really press down because of all the carbons) that alerted your family and, now, all of your classmates, that you were in danger of failing the class. One girl got excused from class to take her tests because she got so anxious, she passed out. This was 1979 when accommodations for students were unheard of. But one day, the teacher said, “Tomorrow, I have a story for you,” and, impossibly, I felt a surge of hope. The story was about Renee Descartes. I don’t remember what he said, only that it ended up being very brief and not particularly inspiring. Yet, when he promised a story, I considered it a lifeline. Something, finally, I could grasp. Obviously, this is my bias, but my math teachers never used enough words. Everything was a formula, a theorem, a symbol. They also didn’t seem to understand how some of us just could not get it. Good teaching can be defined as the ability to break complex tasks into manageable chunks. Oh, and not humiliating your students. Ironically, one of the ways in which the friend who requested this poem distinguishes herself as a math teacher is that she incorporates discussion into her class. She asks students to talk through problems. Teaching methods have come a long way since I was in high school. My former math colleagues often acknowledge some kids’ fear of their subject. Their classrooms and their approaches are much less intimidating than some of the experiences I had in school. I only wish they’d been my instructors.
What was the editing process for this poem? How did you end up with the couplets for formatting?
Here’s a little window into my (very drawn out) process. I began writing this poem in 2014. The content has remained relatively the same, but the initial form contained random lines and stanza lengths. It was messy, but I usually try to let the poem dictate what it’s going to look like on the page. Then, six years later, I turned it into couplets. I don’t remember the initial impulse, but my guess is that I wanted to neaten it and, at least on a craft level, to force myself to make some difficult choices for what material to cut. I grew up on a farm and, every spring, my dad would have to go into the same fields and clear out the rocks. It was as if they grew there. In the fall, the fields had been fertilized and planted with winter rye to protect the topsoil. Later that summer, they would produce acres of corn and alfalfa, but each spring, it was nothing but heavy, tedious work. The moving rocks part of writing poetry happens when the material is there but it needs to be picked up and moved, no matter how laborious. I will say that the poem in its original form must have, once I started playing with it, allowed for couplets. I just hadn’t seen them before. However, I’d like to think that, at play in any poem, are more subconscious impulses. There are dualities here: Male and female, tragedy and romance, math and English, numbers and words—even my friend and I. Finally, the idea of two ways towards a solution: unicursal and multicursal. Sometimes, you think you’re controlling the poem; more often the poem reminds you who’s really in charge.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
The publisher of my first book once described my work as deeply personal. That was a couple of decades ago, but that still strikes me as true. When I’m not writing based on a request, I’m more apt to be inspired by the stages of my own life or by the natural world. I’ve always lived near the ocean. I grew up on a farm and spent my childhood roaming through woods. I love birds. I take long walks where I come upon stranded snapping turtles, flocks of turkeys, baby snakes newly hatched and struggling to cross the road—so many things to wonder about. I also write about my loved ones and, quite often, their names appear in my poems.
Who are some of your favorite authors? Do you have texts that you return to, or that have shaped you as a writer?
I’m a prose writer who took a poetry class on the advice of a friend during my final year in college and was surprised how much I loved the genre, so my biggest inspirations for writing are actually the essayists, Joan Didion and E.B. White, especially his collection, One Man’s Meat. Their work taught me a great deal about the absolute necessity of the best details. I re-read their pieces often and am still awestruck at the lessons they impart.
I’ve always struggled to name my favorite color, my favorite song, my favorite anything, but I do have some things that I love and return to. Poems: Robert Hass’s “The Apple Trees at Olema”; “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly; Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Collections: Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec; Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf; William Dickey’s The Rainbow Grocery (the first poetry book I read); Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude; Poets: Jane Kenyon, Stephen Dunn, David Berman, Keats, Shelley, Byron. I’m sure I’ve left hundreds of poems and poets and collections out. Another miraculous thing about poetry is how often it is possible to fall in love with a poem. Unlike novels, even short stories, it only takes readers a few seconds to find a poem that can blow them away.
What are you currently working on?
I just sent the final edits of my third poetry manuscript to the publisher for a fall 2025 release date. (You might recognize the book’s title: One Trail of Longing, Another of String). I’m happy to say that, obviously, “Smart Girls Always Have a Plan” will appear in it. I am also awaiting notes from my agent on a novel-in-progress and will spend the bulk of my summer revising that book.
Carla Panciera‘s latest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press). She has published two poetry collections: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her short-story collection, Bewildered, received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts. A retired high school English teacher, Panciera lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jana-Lee Germaine
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Jana-Lee Germaine
“February at the Johnsons’” is about a woman going through a divorce. Where did this poem come from?
I was right out of college when I married for the first time. It was a disaster, an abusive relationship. That didn’t make leaving any easier, though, because I was still in love with the person he had been before he started to hurt me.
The end of a marriage is difficult regardless of the circumstances; when we were splitting in two what had been a whole unit, there was incredible pain. The physical act of dividing up joint property was a reflection of what was happening on the emotional level.
I found comfort in repetitive movement and routine—packing and repacking boxes, running the same circuit every day, repeating a scripted prayer for help. It was incredibly hard to stay still. I craved movement, but movement that didn’t require deep thought, because at that point merely existing took up all my emotional and mental energy.
Penelope showed up in a very early draft—she who is the literary symbol of the faithful wife, undoing all her work at night to postpone a forced marriage to someone else. I began thinking of the alternative Penelope, no longer a wife, unpacking and repacking the same few boxes every night as she sought to be faithful to herself, now, instead of to a philandering (or in my case abusive) husband.
There’s so much beautiful specificity surrounding the division of the kitchen items; why did you choose to focus on that part of the house in the first half?
I chose it for several reasons. First, for me, the kitchen was a symbol of his controlling nature. I was a vegetarian when we got married, but he didn’t allow me to do the grocery shopping and forced me to eat meat during our marriage. So there was a lot of emotional weight around kitchen items in particular.
There is also something so intimate about a kitchen and the importance of sharing meals together. As a picture of the excruciating nature of divorce, it works really well: you take something that had been a symbol of family and fellowship and start ripping every piece of it in two.
Then there’s the idea of “equitable division of property”—rigorously dividing everything in equal portions. It served as another tool of punishment for me, but there was also an element of the ridiculous in the midst of the sadness of dividing a kitchen full of tools. Counting out forks to make sure each person gets exactly half. Taking turns picking the unique or singular items: I took my favorite dish towels, he took the big, manly carving knife. Good riddance to the knife; I had gone vegan when I first left him anyway.
While there’s the tension between this woman and her husband, there’s also this looming Other Couple—the Johnsons. Can you talk about how you find that their presence influences the text?
In terms of the narrative, when I left my husband, I lived for six months with a married couple whom I had known since childhood. It was one of those incredible situations; I was living halfway across the country from where I grew up, and it just so happened that these friends had bought a house half a mile from my apartment. So it was a safe space—they had known me before the abuse but also knew the self that I had lost under the abuse. I trusted them in a way I couldn’t trust myself at that time. They were incredibly kind and loving. And yet, I was an extra in their lives—the long-term houseguest. I lived in the back spare bedroom, cooked in a kitchen that didn’t belong to me, and used their utensils and furniture while everything from my marriage was boxed in their basement until I figured out my next move. I was never completely at home because it wasn’t my home; it was their happy house and full lives, and I carried my brokenness around with me as I tried to figure out how to begin healing. Their life wasn’t my life, their friends weren’t my friends; I had to figure out who I was and what my life was going to look like now. I lived in fear, too, as a result of the abuse; it’s why I wouldn’t answer the door if I was home alone unless I knew the caller.
The use of couplets in the poem up until the end when the couplet is split have such a wonderful significance, punctuated with, “learning to divide a life.” When did this structure appear in your editing process?
Unless I have a specific form that I’m writing in, I tend to write my early drafts in one big block and worry about stanza lengths and breaks later in the process. I focus more on line breaks first. When I write, I allow myself to overwrite to begin with, adding anything that feels like it might fit into my early drafts, and then spend my revision process ruthlessly cutting out unnecessary lines, images, and words. Once I feel like my lines are set, then I start thinking about how stanza lengths and structure will deepen the poem, and where those breaks are needed to slow the poem down or add breath.
I also tend to write slowly—it can take several years, sometimes, to finish a poem. Most of my poems go through many, many drafts. This allows me the freedom to experiment without losing an earlier draft that may have something I want to return to.
This was one of those poems that took me a long time to get right. It wasn’t until draft 24 that I split it into couplets—prior to that I played with varying stanza lengths and with only the last line dropped down alone. But it never quite worked. Once I split it into couplets, though, the whole thing opened up for me—I saw the couplets as the married couple and then the split couplet at the end as mirroring the impending divorce. It took me a long time to see that in the poem. It’s why I’ve learned to trust my subconscious; it so often leads me to the right solution in a poetry problem before my conscious mind can figure it out. People call it trusting the poem or trusting your instinct, but what it really means is that your subconscious mind has been working away steadily on something—for days, or months, or years—and will provide you with the answer when it’s ready if you can get the part of you that wants to force things in a certain direction out of the way and trust the process.
What themes do you find that your work revolves around?
My first manuscript, which I’m planning to finish this fall, centers around the long road of healing and recovery from that abusive marriage. For a long time after I escaped, I thought I’d never be happy again, but I did heal; I found that I’d grown in ways I’d never expected. It was a horrible experience, but I don’t regret it. It’s shaped who I am today. However, it took me a good ten years to have enough emotional distance to be able to start writing about that period of my life. “February at the Johnsons’” is in that manuscript.
I’m also a mom of four, and so motherhood themes enter into some of my work, especially recently. Although I don’t write specifically about my kids a lot, my worldview is filtered through the identity of motherhood. I also have a relationship with God, and so spiritual issues find their way into my poetry. I love being outdoors; the natural world has a huge presence in much of what I write, particularly in the way it can layer meaning into our human experience and emotions. My husband sometimes rolls his eyes and asks, “another bird???” when he reads a new poem draft. Birds do seem to find their way into my poems. I love to feed the birds, too, but if I forget to bring in my bird feeders at night in summer, I discover I’ve been feeding the local black bear instead.
What stories inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
I love stories of hope, stories of redemption. Stories that make me remember what a gift our lives are. Stories of forgiveness—of choosing life over bitterness or hate. I love well-written novels because they are a counterpoint to poetry for me. I cried when I read Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country; it was incredibly powerful and beautiful. I love Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey Maturin novels—I read all 20 of them in the space of a couple months; I couldn’t put them down. The friendship between Jack and Stephen is one of the most inspiring and deeply true friendships I’ve ever read. My top books of all time include Middlemarch, War and Peace, Les Misérables, The War of the Rings trilogy and Watership Down. I’ve also got a bucket list of great classic novels I’m slowly working my way through. It’s about 5 pages long, so it’s going to take me years. When I need to laugh, though, to exult in amazing sentences and plots so twisted up it seems they could never untangle, to forget the seriousness of life for a while, I pick up P.G. Wodehouse. He’s my happy place.
In terms of poetry authors, I’ve too many favorites. Don’t we all? But who I return to over and over – that’s Marianne Boruch, Franz Wright, Lousie Glück. Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, Joanna Klink’s The Nightfields, and the anthology Joy: 100 poems edited by Christian Wiman. I recently finished Pablo Medina’s Sea of Broken Mirrors and have almost every poem in there starred as a favorite. I know that will definitely become one I return to often.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve been working on my first manuscript for ten years. As I said, I’m a slow—or as I like to think of it, patient—writer. I plan to finish it this fall. I’ve also started working on poems that I know will be in a second manuscript. Those are poems that fit in a different emotional space. It feels good to stretch out into new areas and energies of writing after spending so long focusing on the themes of my first manuscript. I have a triptych of peacock poems from the two years we lived in a tiny village in England—one was in Iron Horse last year, the other two will be coming out in Poet Lore this fall. I’m writing more about challenges surrounding my elderly parents. I have a goal to write a short poem—half a page or less—that really works. I find short poems so difficult to write well. I keep thinking each new poem I start might be the one, but recently everything I’m completing ends up in the 2-3 page range. I’ll keep trying, though.
Jana-Lee Germaine is senior poetry reader for Ploughshares. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bracken, Chestnut Review, Tinderbox, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, EcoTheo Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She earned an MFA from Emerson College. A survivor of domestic violence, she lives with her husband, four children, and four rescue cats in semi-rural Massachusetts. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for her local public library, and she can be found online at janaleegermaine.com.