In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Todne Thomas
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Todne Thomas
Your poem, “day of the dead,” tells a story within a multi-generational family structure. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
The inspiration for this poem came from my son. His grandfather died the year before he was born. One day in our apartment, he looked at family photos and asked who the man in the photos was. It was his question that made me contemplate the space between family–spatial and existential.
Can you talk about the title and how it weaves into the poem?
The title of the poem “day of the dead” speaks to the mundane ways in which we interact with our departed and bygone days. Mourning and nostalgia are kindred affects.
In the poem, there are strong ties between the women in the family, linked through blood, while the men have a harder time grasping a similar connection. There’s not a soft landing spot for them, but there’s an empathy that they don’t share that connection. How do you think that lack of generational ties plays out within the poem and within society?
That is an interesting reading of the poem that never occurred to me. The gendered aspect of familial connection is not intentional. It is incidental. The father of the narrator and grandfather of the narrator’s son is deceased. But death does not necessarily cancel familial connection. The inquiring boy is young and is questioning what counts as family. He and his questions are held by the narrator, his mother. His queries evoke an explanation, a conversation, a connection, and perhaps even a visitation of his departed grandfather. The call of blood between the living and the dead, across households separated by distance is felt and extended to all.
Generational ties are a complex thing, right? In our society, distance, conflict, death, social mobility, changed understanding of families, and other factors can shorten or mute generational connections. But then again, we also have a society in which people are using ancestry and other applications to find their family and forge broader family connections. In the poem, distance and death create some barriers to intergenerational connection as a matter of face-to-face communion. Yet, for my own part, I do not perceive a lack of generational ties in this text. Once again, just a figuring and working them out through questioning and feeling.
The phrase “Passed on” in the middle gives the connotation of gifting, of inheritance, and even of death and the lack of presence. Can you talk about the layered meaning, and how it influences the tone of the poem?
“Passed on” is a vernacular phrase in the South for the departed, of the dead who have moved to another realm. I like this term. It has momentum. “Passed on” replicates the movement that exists elsewhere in the poem like the descent of blood, or a person’s descent down a mountain trail. “Passed on” is also different than passed away, which connotes a movement away. A person that has passed on perhaps might return for a visit. I think this suggests the potential for presence instead of a perpetual lack of presence.
I am really intrigued by this other reading of the phrase, of “passed on” as gifting or inheritance. What do our ancestors, known and unknown, bequeath to us in the wake of their passing? What gifts, memories, presences or curiosities, in the wake of their arms around us? Passed on as inheritance opens up a beautiful questioning that I like very much.
As a professor of religious studies, how does your work come into play in your writing?
That is a great question. I think an abiding concern with the spiritual/ancestral and kinship informs a lot of the thinking, noticing, and writing I do. This is present in “day of the dead.” But in many ways, the economy of poetry, its imagery and visionary qualities, and its theoretical insights is very important to my work in religious studies. My first book’s title Kincraft is informed by an observation of poet Elizabeth Alexander on the work of the poetic work she analyzes and her professed “veneration of the sweat of the craft.” And Nikki Giovanni’s insight that “Black love is Black wealth” is very central to my thinking in my second book. So poets are some of my favorite theorists.
What themes do you find your creative work revolves around? What authors or works have been influential for you?
As I mentioned above, some of the themes I tend to write about are religion, spirituality, and kinship. I’m increasingly more interested in more amorous and oracular themes these days, as well as humor. So we’ll see where that goes. Authors that really inspire me (in no particular order) are Nikki Giovanni, Elizabeth Alexander, Lucille Clifton, Zora Neale Hurston, Sonia Sanchez, Kwame Dawes, Marla Frederick, Jericho Brown, Hortense Spillers, Maya Angelou, Ashon Crawley, Langston Hughes, Todd Ochoa, Octavia Butler, Deborah Thomas, Elizabeth Povinelli, Dianne Stewart, Jacob Olupona, Casey Golomski, Aimee Villareal, and so many others.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently finishing a book about a Black church arson in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Todne Thomas is an Affrilachian, mother, and anthropologist. She is an associate professor of divinity and religious studies at Yale University. This is her first poetry publication.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sheila McMullin
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sheila McMullin
Your poem “Thank You” blends the telling of past histories and the present conflict in a relationship, as well as imaginative statements. What was your inspiration for this poem? What was your process for blending history and imagination?
“Thank You” comes from my epic inner battle about how we write about personal histories as though everyone, unilaterally, has clean, verified access to them. I’m constantly stumped by how to speak honestly about something I feel I should know more or better about—my own family history, the inner workings of my brain. The medicine of writing this poem, for me, was to try to get to a point where that not-knowing isn’t perceived as a personal failure, when the not-knowing is often the result of systemic, often colonial, forces. With “Thank You,” the aim was to acknowledge that the stories I do have about family, my place in it, and how these experiences have shaped my decisions are stories made up of feelings as much as facts, shaped by the complexity of inheritance and the silence that sometimes protects, sometimes estranges.
In this poem, imagination is a method of self-permission. The spectrum runs from: what if I had access to everything I needed to know—a fantasy in itself—to what if I accepted that not knowing is its own kind of truth? Especially as someone who identifies as mixed-race, I’ve learned from community that liminality isn’t an obstacle—it’s a soft architecture. Ambiguity isn’t a problem to solve.
The poem establishes that there’s danger in not inheriting legibility and danger in seeking it. So, I want to ask, who is clarity for? Who is legibility for? And how do we gently hold the evolution of self-understanding to be better/responsible/more understanding toward those who come next in our lineage?
One section of the poem speaks to my search for legibility. Earlier in my mother’s academic career, she wrote an article on being an “ambiguously brown” academic called “Beyond Lip Service” in the anthology Mentoring Faculty of Color. I’m struck by her language of “ancestral clarity” and the perceived requisite to achieve it within white society. Achievement is a type of currency as is becoming legible. This in and of itself is a blending of history and imagination. Perhaps “Thank You” was seeded in this article, and now, this is another way we keep evolving our ancestral clarity.
After each section, you have a statement that a percentage of the previous section was true; “50% of this is true,” for example. The percentages vary. Tell us about how this part of the poem developed.
The percentages emerged as a way to interrupt my (and therefore the reader’s) certainty. Thinking back on it, in an uncanny turn of events, the speaker became the most certain of the bunch. Why do we believe the speaker? Do I believe the speaker? Does belief depend on what type of truth I understand her to be qualifying; emotional, factual, artistic? Which parts are the true parts? If it’s not true, then is it automatically false? “Truth” seems to be something constantly renegotiated. “True” maybe is striving to be the revolving light in the lighthouse. The percentages can become a signal that what’s being shared lives somewhere between memory, fantasy, fear, and desire. Even when we feel we’re being deeply honest, in the form of storytelling—especially in confessional storytelling—we are still shaped by omission, pressure, self-protection.
I wonder when narrative instability makes the reader too uncomfortable to continue believing and when narrative clarity functions for the reader (and for myself) like the emotional caregiving as referenced in the poem. By naming the truth as understood, does the poem acknowledge the instability of that truth? Where can the beauty of language help to stabilize the reader to give the writer greater permission to play with ambiguity or difficult subjects? I’ve been learning about this from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
And then, even after all this theorizing and exploring, what if I’ve still gotten it wrong? What was there to get wrong in the first place? Does getting it wrong negate the feeling that shaped it, or the experience of living it or not living it? The constant questioning and doubting gets annoying.
In all this unknowing and destabilization, the medicine in the wound is that we always get to redefine and evolve. We can live the lifecycle of a plant again and again, each time stepping into what is being asked of us. Today, I am the leaf, yesterday I was the bloom, tomorrow I am the roots, and again I am the compost.
The end of the poem is a plea for a relationship. Can you talk about that within the framing of the poem?
Thank you for helping me gain greater insight into my poem! This question transports me to the moment I was generating the poem, and yes, I was making a plea for a relationship, wasn’t I? Although at the time, I think, I was trying to verbalize all the things that I felt were my fault but I wasn’t responsible for. Isn’t that why we’re all born screaming? Calling out for another to witness our hurt and help to soothe it?
Another way I understand the poem’s ending is as a conceit for wanting an accounting that we are unlikely to get at this moment. It’s a call to acknowledge what we need to be responsible for, who we need to be responsible for, and understand that no one thing or solution is coming to save us. We’re going to be the ones who protect us and make meaning of our lives.
In the same way the statements play with the meaning of “true,” the ending plays with concepts of choice. I want to still choose you. I want you to still choose me. Not because someone did the math—but because we decided it matters.
What prompted the title, “Thank You?”
Short answer: Adventure Time season three, episode seventeen—it’s one of my favorites and it’s titled Thank You. I saw it and thought, “Hey, that’s a cool title.”
Highlights from the deeper answer: It’s also a framework I’ve been working with—thank you as offering, as resistance, as daily practice, and as a kind of semi-autobiography. It shares a title with other poems in the manuscript including one about environment harm and injustice that was published by Air/Light Magazine. The manuscript’s working title is also Thank You.
What themes do you return to in your writing?
Recently, infertility and how to write about medical experiences, and environmental and intergenerational care.
What texts inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?
Do gardens count as text? They really inspire me these days. And compost too. I love the metaphor of compost–the catapulting into decay and fertile renewal. My dear friend, community poet, and children’s book author Michelle Andrea Bracken inspires me and reminds me of the importance of why we write for intergenerational knowledge. I’m celebrating the life and work of Andrea Gibson. The lectures of Michael Meade who “looks at culture through a mythic perspective” have been a north star. I regularly return to Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper, John Francis’s The Ragged Edge of Silence, and Rumi’s and William Blake’s works. Sarah Vap’s End of the Sentimental Journey is a stalwart. She is forever among my favorite authors–I understand my writing as a descendent in her lineage. JoAnn Balingit’s work has helped me access writing on my Filipino heritage. Joan Kane’s, who was the contributing poetry editor for volume 27, lyricism teaches me how the heart and mind always have greater capacity for expansion than we may have previously thought possible.
And new to me is the mind-bending and heart-stretching work of Stargazer Li, who pulls lessons from the stars and “rehydrates language.” Stargazer Li goes deep into etymology and lore and reminds us that the path to our thinking is often embedded into these early meanings. If we can spend the time building relationships with language on this level, we know ourselves more deeply and how culture has twisted itself into its current context. I remember to fall in love with language through Stargazer Li’s lectures and rehydrations.
And those also with important places in my heart are Mary Oliver, Chiwan Choi, Ross Gay, CA Conrad, Lauren Groff, Ursula K. LeGuin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mita Mahato, and on and on and on.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently sending out my poetry manuscript Thank You (wish me luck!) and am venturing into fiction. I’ve been playing in the romance genre through a story about a couple trying to conceive, reimagining what a happily ever after can look like—one that I think the Trying To Conceive (TTC) community may appreciate.
Thank you so much for spending time with my work and words!
Sheila McMullin is a poet, writing coach, and community gardener. She is the author of daughterrarium from Cleveland State University Poetry Center and proud co-editor of Humans of Ballou and The Day Tajon Got Shot, both written by teen authors and published by Shout Mouse Press. She teaches nature writing classes with Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation and sits on the board of the Contemporary Irish Arts Center of Los Angeles. She holds her MFA from George Mason University. For more, visit www.sheilamcmullin.com.
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!