In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Anne Piper
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Anne Piper
Your poem, “Already all the ghosts,” is a beautiful and haunting look at pre-grief. The speaker compares their past to the present, and looks ahead into the future. What made you write this poem at this time?
I wrote this poem in February of 2023, when old age and Parkinson’s were getting the best of my dad, and when my mom’s memory was undeniably deteriorating. They were in their 90s, so their decline was not unexpected, but the anticipated loss of a parent hit hard, and the loss of any person is the loss of a whole world, and I suppose I was trying to brace myself for what seemed inevitable—and close. I realize that the healthier choice is to make my life into an open hand—accepting what comes and not clinging to things as they are—but in the poem I just keep grasping.
The stanza, “I dried a dozen sweetheart roses, hung them/in the corner of the doorframe,/forgot them until today” is cleverly written, and shaped within the poem like a corner itself. Its format is even mimicked later in the poem. When did that visual framing come into play in your piece? When in the process of creation or revision do you find the visual flow (like in the first to second stanza)?
In the first draft of this poem, all the lines are left justified. I write in notebooks and when I have something that feels promising and interests me, I type it up. I play more with the visuals in various versions of the typed drafts than I do in my notebook, although I do play around with shapes and configuration there, too. In this poem, the visual framing happened after I typed up the draft.
I love the line, “What were my intentions? My good/intentions?” implying that there may have been bad intentions along the way. It feels like the speaker is almost chiding themself for thinking about sad or negative things before they happen. Can you speak more to this idea of intentionality?
The speaker is definitely chiding herself! Her brain is making the same tired moves from beauty to fear, from what’s perfectly enjoyable in life to dread. I can hardly stand it, how I ruin things for myself. It makes me want to escape to the kittens in the next stanza, though they are mortal too. As for intentionality, I guess “Hardly thinking, hardly thinking of now” is my default, no matter how much I intend to stay present.
You evoke a lot of the senses within this poem, really grounding it for the reader in sight and smell, and even memory. How do you create something so universal from such specific details?
My mentor when I was an undergrad—the late Arthur Spring, who ran the St. Mary’s University honors program —would quote Carl Rogers: “What is most personal is most universal,” and that stuck with me. The MA program I graduated from in Human Development let you design your own degree, and mine focused on the concepts of shame and honor. Those most shameful, hidden things, they’re often universal, as you find when you let them out into the light. I wasn’t thinking consciously of trying to connect universally when I wrote the details of the poem, but Carl Rogers’ words are part of my belief system.
What themes do you return to in your work?
I suppose I write a lot about what I fear and what I find myself grappling with. I currently find myself writing the drafts of a lot of poems about my mom’s dementia, because she’s in the midst of that and I’m always trying to find ways for both of us to cope—compensatory strategies, shifts of focus, ways to help her fill her remaining time in Memory Care, a place that makes her very sad. I feel like I am always wrestling this big, heavy snake of existence, trying to understand it and feel safe in its presence. Plus, I truly believe Frost’s “No way out but through,” and have found I need to write about things to accept them.
What books and authors influence your work? Do you have favorite stories or poems you return to?
Marie Howe’s What the Living Do was an important book for me, as was Love, An Index, by Rebecca Lindenberg. (Talk about grappling with painful realities.) And I connect with much of what Ada Limón writes. Stylistically I love Anne Sexton and her wild metaphors. Bob Hicok is a hero, although the leaps he makes amaze me so much; reading him stops me and makes me just want to curl up in a ball. The way his mind works astounds me. Jim Moore and Deborah Keenan are my main poetry mentors, and their work has had a strong influence. As far as poems I go back to, I have “Spiderweb” by Kay Ryan and Ada Limón’s “How to Triumph Like a Girl” on my bulletin board at work, so I think about those two poems regularly. I have those there because walking into work drains the poet right out of me and I’m trying to keep my worlds connected. I work with good people, but I don’t think they care about poetry. (And in keeping with that, no one has ever noticed those poems on my office wall.)
What are you currently writing or working on?
I’m always playing with my manuscript and never sending it out often enough. I do take a lovely 2-hour poetry class every week and often write from the poems we read there.
Anne Piper lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of her poems is stamped into a few sidewalks. She has an MFA from Hamline University and an MA in human development from St. Mary’s University. Piper provides quality improvement services for homes of people who have disabilities. Her poems have appeared in Water~Stone, Poetry East, Black Warrior Review, Sleet, The New York Quarterly, The Under Review, and other journals. She is working on a book.
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Christopher Gaumer
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Christopher Gaumer
It’s always wonderful to have a graduate of our MFA program in Water~Stone! What sparked the creation of your poem, “On a Farm in Iowa?”
Hi, Jenn! It’s wonderful to be close to Hamline again through Water~Stone!
My family lived in Perry, Iowa until I was nine. My mom took my two older sisters and I to a farm just outside of town. I recall this being a trip where we were being given a bag of corn from church friends. At some point, we all stood in the long gravel drive beside a field of corn and watched a snake slowly consume a rather big frog. What I remember clearest is that the frog’s head was inside the snake’s mouth, the frog was not totally dead, and it took a very long time to swallow the frog. We maybe even left before the meal was complete.
The line, “old gravel road corn field killing, church friends,” lingers in my mind with this sharp edge. Can you talk about why you placed these phrases beside each other, and about the layered relationships that appear in this poem?
This is a description of the literal action of the moment and also, I realize, an image that begs one to draw more associations. This type of layering is why I love poetry. I crave ideas that are clear on the literal level and deeply suggestive.
There’s a theme of consuming within this poem—the snake and the frog, the corn, Seth and the narrator. How did you develop this thread in your work? What other themes do you find that your work revolves around?
The honest answer is that I did not consider this theme during the writing or revising of this poem. This is how I like to work in general: revise until the poem is surprising and a bit beyond what I understand.
You teach at Randolph college. What is a piece of writing advice that you always give to your students?
Risk huge leaps of logic because they activate the reader’s imagination to invent narrative connections.
What stories or books inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
Bianca Stone, Diane Suess, Gary Dop, Karl Ove Knausgård
What are you currently working on?
I have a completed poetry manuscript titled M O N S T E R on submission. Writing wise, I’m working on a feature film script and ramping up, with a whole crew of people, to direct a music video for a band, New Boss, out of Charlottesville, VA.
Christopher Gaumer‘s poetry and creative writing appear in The Southern Review, Sugar House Review, No Tokens, The Cortland Review, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. Gaumer won the 2019 Poetry Society of Vermont’s National Poetry Prize and has fiction in the Best Microfiction 2019 anthology. Gaumer writes and directs films and music videos. He is a founding director of the Randolph College MFA and a graduate of the Hamline University MFA program.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Davi Gray
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Davi Gray
Your poem, “Caravan of Wounds,” crafts a dramatic setting and builds a world where pain and injury are clearly visible. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
I have consumed a lot of dread-inspiring media, more written words than anything else, but it does capture the imagination. I’ve especially relished, at times, the works of Clive Barker, Ted Chiang, N. K. Jemisin, China Miéville, Jesmyn Ward (more present-apocalypse than anything).
I wrote the first draft after waking up from a dream, which provided the storyline. The core images and idea, though, of traveling through a world where pain and injury are clearly visible to anyone looking—that’s what the world has been all my life.
I feel like the line, “Freedom is a longing / in every piece and part, duct tape a wonder // for holding selves together” really grounds the reader in both the world you’ve created, and our real world. Can you talk about this line and its significance in the poem?
I think that freedom, or what we (I) think of as freedom, is something most people want, or think they want, and sometimes conceive of as separation from “others,” as if a world with a single person in it were a paradise. In the poem, “every piece and part” (of a body, of a community) thinks/feels it would be better off away from the rest. As in life, that may not turn out to be the case. We hold ourselves together (as bodies, as communities) as best we can with materials at hand.
This work carries such distinct visuals that it could have been extended into a longer story. What made a poem the perfect vehicle for this piece?
My general inclination is more toward poetry than prose, in part because I deeply love poetry and have all my life, and in part because I’m better at completing shorter works. I can write prose, and have, but it’s a discrete set of tools with only some overlap. Perhaps someday a film….
The turn in the last stanza—towards a feeling of community and togetherness —gives hope to the reader, even though it is still honest in its vivid descriptions of desperation. What do you think this turn does for the poem? For the idea of humanity?
I think it’s far too easy to give up hope, and though hope by itself doesn’t do much, if anything, for some situations, it does open up the space of possibilities. For many people, the world is a desperate and dire place most of the time, and yet we go on. We do the best we can with what we have until we are no longer here. I want to acknowledge that, the good and the bad, and work with others to stitch together what songs we can.
What themes do you find you return to in your writing?
Nature is a constant presence, whether it’s directly visible or not. History, myth, religion. Race, class, money, and politics are deeply woven into much of my work. Trauma shows up a lot, in the form of childhood, memory, death, loss, incarceration, grief, self-harm, and the body. I also have a fair number of works about poetry itself (as Michael Torres thoughtfully pointed out).
What books inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
Some inspiring recent reads have been Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes), Ross Gay (everything), Billy-Ray Belcourt (A History of My Brief Body), and Danez Smith (Bluff). I’m really looking forward to the forthcoming memoir, “My Weight in Water,” by Michael Kleber-Diggs.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve got multiple poetry manuscripts for which I’m seeking publishers. I’m also working on a hybrid/cross-genre book of poetry, essays, and visual art. I have a one-person poetical play I hope to find a theatrical home for later this year. I’m producing a podcast with a possible summer or fall launch. I continue to work with the ReEntry Lab, which is an organization building bridges between formerly incarcerated writers and artists and communities ready to receive them. And, of course, there are always the poems.
Davi Gray (they/she) is a queer, trans, nonbinary poet, writer, storyteller, artist, activist, and abolitionist. Their work has appeared in Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, NonBinary Review, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. They received Honorable Mention in the 2023 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry contest and have won several prizes in PEN America Prison Writing Contests. They live in North Minneapolis (Bde Óta Othúnwe), on unceded lands of the Dakota and Ojibwe, and can often be found performing their poetry around the Twin Cities.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Samantha M. Sorenson
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Samantha M. Sorenson
Your work, “How to Eat an Elephant” creatively blends the idea of consuming both information and food. Can you talk about what sparked you to write this piece?
The journey of writing “How to Eat an Elephant” began when I started working toward recovery for my eating disorder. I found myself interested in exploring how deep the mindset of my particular relationship with food went and what other areas of my life that mindset was also influencing—turned out most of my life was driven from the same need for control and the same feelings of always being out of control. Much like moving into recovery is a slow process, so was the drafting of this essay—“How to Eat an Elephant” went through many iterations over the course of five years as I wrestled with the realities I have put on the page.
When did you start writing? What is your process for beginning a piece? How do you edit that work?
I started writing at eleven years old, although literary nonfiction came into my life much later. All of my work stems directly from curiosity and obsessions and a love for language. Though a paradox, I write what is on my mind to discover what is on my mind. One of the joys of crafting essays is the not knowing—not knowing what a piece wants to be or where it will end up. In my experience, it is only once a piece reveals itself to you that you can really start to think about revision. My revision process is different for everything I write, but it always begins by getting feedback from trusted readers and ends by scrupulously going line-by-line and word-by-word through the piece until I am satisfied. By that time, I have read my work out loud dozens of times over, and there is still always room for improvement.
Are there other phrases, like “how to eat an elephant,” that have stayed with you and had a profound effect on other areas of your life?
Yes, and perhaps I will write about those at some point as well. For now they flitter across my consciousness at the most inopportune times.
What themes does your work circle back to, if any?
I find that my work circles back to the human body a lot, as I mention in “How to Eat an Elephant.” We only experience the world through our individual bodies, and every body has limitations, biases, desires, etc. that I find fascinating.
What authors or texts inspire you? What are some of your favorite books?
Since my reading habits (like so many of my other habits, see “How to Eat an Elephant”) are on the obsessive side, my favorite books are constantly changing. Five of my favorite reads from 2024 were Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussions and Recovery by Annie Liontas, On Women by Susan Sontag, One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle (edited by David James Duncan), Holy American Burnout by Sean Enfield, and Let Me Count the Ways by Tomás Q. Morin. I found each of these works inspiring in their own right—both for my writing and my life, and I highly recommend them.
What are you currently writing or working on?
I am currently working on a collection of essays centered on relationships and censorship. I am interested in the way we censor language, experience, thoughts, and behavior, as well as how we ourselves become censored through illness, injury, disability, and grief. My current project explores these themes by looking at the dynamics and motivations in my personal relationships over time.
Samantha M. Sorenson is pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction at Brigham Young University. She currently serves as the managing editor for Fourth Genre. Her work has appeared in Under the Sun.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Albert Abonado
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Albert Abonado
Your two poems, “Romance” and “Beatitude for an Inventory of Roadkill,” are beautiful works of reclamation and loss. Where did the creation of “Romance” start?
I spend my summers helping out at my family’s blueberry farm. Each morning, a hummingbird would visit me at the stand, zipping around the petunias that hung over the stand. Sometimes, the blue bird would hover curiously close to my face, but most of the time, it would zip in and out among the flowers. I often begin a poem with a “what if?” premise, and see where the poem takes me. After watching that hummingbird every day, I asked myself what if two people decided to live as hummingbirds? It’s not the strangest or wildest idea, but I thought it would be interesting to see how a poem like that develops.
Humor is a gem in poetry, and you capture it with the phrase “hummingbird farts.” It greatly juxtaposes the previous two lines that mention “cancer” and “the end of history.” What was the impetus to lighten the poem at this point?
In this poem, I think humor is a useful way to speak to the desires of the speaker and their partner. The speaker’s list of concerns grows larger and more abstract as it progresses until it reaches a point where the poem needs to return to a grounded space. What’s more human and intimate than farting beside a loved one? Also, farts are just funny and not enough poems feature farts.
There’s a tenderness within the violence of “Beatitude for an Inventory of Roadkill.” What was the inspiration for this piece? When did the splits between the lines come into the formatting?
Summertime, I’m frequently traveling through rural areas where roads are often littered with every variety of roadkill. Death is a frequent visitor to my poems and this seemed like rich material to explore. I’ve tried different versions of this poem before, and it probably wasn’t until several revisions of the poem when I started experimenting with the spaces within the lines, playing with the fragmentation and the violence the absence imposes on the lines. The spaces also presented new exit and entry points within the poem, allowing me to pivot to new thematic territory.
The line, “How else should we discuss the countless silences / that gash us” is such a thoughtful way to bind this animal with human suffering. Can you talk about that theme within this text?
Maybe my poems are just a way for me to be more comfortable with mortality? The poem, I feel, wants to confront this daily reminder of mortality, that we are as susceptible, as vulnerable as any animal, that their suffering cannot be disentangled from our own. Death here is a fact, an inevitability, and it operates on its own time. This can make one feel helpless and small. Something gentle and generous feels necessary in the face of that, a declaration that we do not suffer alone, and this offers some small comfort.
What themes do you find recurring in your writing?
As I mentioned before, mortality and loss make frequent appearances in my writing. I’m often exploring and unpacking my sense of identity, my American-ness and Filipino-ness, and the experience of that hybridity. As a lapsed Catholic, the language of ritual and faith, that appetite for the spiritual, continues to inform my writing, seen in a poem like “Beatitude for an Inventory of Roadkill.” But all of these things intersect, mortality and faith, faith and cultural identity, loss and America.
What books and authors influence your work? What titles do you return to?
I often return to writers like Li-Young Lee or James Tate or Denise Duhamel. I deeply admire poets who can juggle tones. It always feels like magic to read work by writers like Chen Chen or Matthew Olzmann. More recent books that have been important to me include Poem Bitten by a Man by Brian Teare, Obit by Victoria Chang, and frank:sonnets by Diane Seuss.
What projects are you working on now?
I am finishing up my time as the artist in residence at SUNY Oswego where I worked on poems that interrogate the idea of naming, responding to name-based prompts provided by people within the Oswego community. That has been a delightful challenge. It was a project adjacent to the new manuscript, which is still in the very very early stages. I hope to have a clearer vision of the book within the next year or so.
Albert Abonado is the author of the poetry collection JAW (Sundress Publications 2020) and the forthcoming Field Guide for Accidents (Beacon Press 2024), selected by Mahogany Browne for the National Poetry Series. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in the Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Zone 3, and others. He lives and teaches in Rochester, New York.