bye bye

—after “American Pie,” sung by Leslie Cheung, a Cantopop star who died jumping off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong

boys always

haunting the gas

stationed at

the kum & go

come around yelling

happy july, all

these lives you haven’t filled

in all these teeth

a faith so deep you can

die in it, like a boy so

high up he thought the

swimming pool was full

and god willing, he

dived in it. in a

preemptive strike, patriotic, partirons

and party on! miss 中国

in 中西部,

i dismiss

their existence, a flotilla

with more in common

with a root beer vanilla

concoction than the

spanish armada, though

that too was a whipped

cream loss. dq stands

for disqualification—three

strikes & the cup is half

mosh pit half military

campaign—god is in the

good fizz—& the bottom

(beyond the caffeine &

fresh sugarcane) is concrete.

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Garbage Day

Out the window a squirrel’s noshing on a quesadilla,

paws clasped around a tortilla shard as if mid-prayer

its prayers were answered. I’m making dinner again:

salmon filets like flagstones made from moon,

a cube of butter in the skillet spreading its skirts

while on the cutting board an onion heretics the air.

The truth is sometimes I call your name because I need you

to come look at this, look at how alive I am,

and sometimes how alive I am can only be seen
by what’s happening around me: two people cheering

for a dumpster-diving tree rat, one’s hair

waterfalling onto the other’s shoulder, joy

like a school of minnows swimming overhead—

another glorious day where we have nothing to bury

besides our appetites. Listen:
the dishes in the sink aren’t going to elope

tonight. Let’s admire the sky’s tablecloth,

its chorus of spilled salt. Let’s clasp

our bodies like two hands praying

and crisp the edges of grace.

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The Night My Number Tripled

in my recent bloodwork chart, I saw it and I fled.

Panic ripped through me like sallow gas

and as an animal would,

I must have believed

I could hide from my own leaking math. Pregnancy

or tumor—those were the options

and I wasn’t sure which one I wanted

less. Around and around I went

in my apartment parking lot as if pursued

through carmine alleyways. Oh, my blood

and its mutable omens. My brain and its end

of days. It didn’t matter

that the dusk was beautiful in the early

rainy season when the sky takes

on the plush and tropical hues of stone

fruits so I could remember that I lived

in a place far but not too far

from the ocean. Magnolia flowers sat

primly in their teacups. Gray and white

birds shone where they flew like lights

off moving water. It started to get dark.

My parents couldn’t find me.

My boyfriend was asleep

halfway across the world. I walked as if to leave

behind my body, though I understood

I had to receive what it offered me.

So this is what it means

to be alone, I said inside myself

and to myself as a violet wind pushed through

the palm fronds above me, initiating a sound I recognized

like the rustle of dry grasses

before a storm, as the first

stars opened their eyes to nightfall

the way an apocalypse can mean

to reveal.

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Person of Interest + Sad Boy Public Relations

Person of Interest

山旮旯 or san ka la—a cantonese phrase meaning a place in the middle of nowhere

that’s where we met

千里眼 & 顺风耳 are two folkloric figures in china—together they’re unstoppable

顺风耳 can hear the subtlest of sounds, carried over great distances by the wind

i’ll be discreet, the coast is clear

千里眼 can see over great distances, span thousands of 里

confuse oresteia with osteria, smooth me over royal jelly

a 里 is a unit of measurement also found in korea & japan

conquer me royal navy, come here my possibility tuna

a metaphor for an impossible distance is 十万八千里 (108000里)

state college is an hour & a half from harrisburg. that’s the distance i would go for you. you drove 5

hours to see your ex

in mandarin, li (里) sounds like li you (理由)—or reason

a commie obsessed with me, commie eye candy, who wudda thought

给我一个理由忘记

hey, low sperm count

kiss me open mouth, swift like taylor

the critics have spoken: i’d rather be alone than settle for the bare minimum

rejecting you seems like the easiest thing in the world (you want to be discarded)

you play too much but seduction is a game for two

i hope one day , we are merit ,

young buck , home skillet ,

Sad Boy Public Relations

1. CONSISTENCY

u type immaculate to me—do u hate me

2. NONCHALANCE

untangle urself for a moment & cheer me up

3. CHARM

ur prodigious

a savant

ur gf’s so dumb she thinks contemporary music means the beatles

4. DRINKING

u obfuscate

cling onto flimsy girl

5. EFFORTLESSNESS

i kiss two fingers pinched together

pretend it is u

6. ATHLETICISM

the closest u got to sports was athlete’s foot

i feel u hard as pear

7. DISCIPLINE

hold me down

tell me u don’t like boy

8. PUBLIC SPIRITEDNESS

seel me like a hawk

i can be tame if u give me what i want

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That’s Often the Hardest + Diva

That’s Often the Hardest

Now and then I turn a corner in Brooklyn
and I see something lovely.
A cherry blossom, a blush-red brick,
children frolicking and finding something
to fight about. Unsuspecting, I’ll be
wearing my headphones, noise-canceling,
quite loud, listening to Donna Summer. A joy thunderous

will wake me from my wakesleep. A laugh,
a shout, a story told in excitation, coming
from one gleaming face or many with
the amber light of late day making the whole wide earth

look young.

When I see these stirring, affirming things

I cannot help but think you’d love them

were you here to see them, too.

Then I remember that you’re still alive

and all that I must do is call.

Diva

I’ve long dreamt of being Beyonce, waking up
to a view of the Alps in a pink silk robe.
I pick up the phone by my bed to let my
stylist know I’m awake to be draped in full glamor.

Traipse along marble floors to a kitchen filled with

peaches just ripe. My children would come greet me,

all smiles, having slept soundly. No radiator hissing

like a violent cat to keep them up at night.

I’ve long dreamt of the gas tank always full and
a driveway so that I never have to circle the block.
A pool when I need to cool off. A chef when I don’t want to cook.

But most of all, I want to sing
like someone beloved
in an outfit like a hymn.
To have people who love me
cheer just for standing before them.

To be celebrated. To be queen.

And after all that, I’d get to fall asleep
right when I lie down. That’s what I imagine it’s like.

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Full Moon to Monday

College cracked the fantasy wide

open. All our Pretty Woman dreams

flatlining in the bottom of some frat guy’s

basement. Memories of the “talk” and how

she left out the part about surgery. The stitching

and staining and then, there’s recovery.

Came home for break still soaking through

the gauze of this girlhood and all our moms

could tell. But no one spoke the truth.

That you can be six shots in and his hands

won’t reek of meat. That his toothy grin won’t

be dripping with blood and shit. All the songs

he’ll play in the dark corner or the back seat

of his car will be foreshadowing. But you won’t

remember a thing. You won’t ever know it

happened. Cause molly is the new pick-up line

and he’s got those for days. Nothing mom said

about chivalry and not putting out on the first

date prepared you for date rape drugs and scalding

hot showers to rinse the blood off.

Vanishing after you texted and told him

you were pregnant, and the shame slut-walked

all over Facebook. That innocence we knew is gone

like hope the RA isn’t hooking up with freshmen.

Somewhere between t-ball and toga parties

the rules changed from checking yes, no,

maybe, to him marking his criminal territory.

At least then you had the right to choose

or feel like you had options. But here, now,

you’re left to break and mend, stitch the wounds

to not spill the secrets, sober your sorrows

and be back before Monday’s 8 a.m. exam.

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Autumn Evening at the Laundromat

If you want to feel

like a winner for once

put a ten dollar bill

into the change machine,

hear the jackpot jingle

of cheering quarters

pouring into your

empty empty hands.

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Bug$ R Crawlinggg ↑ The Wall or iz That Me???

It’s not winter/it’s now spring/what is outside wants to come in/buds glow fuzzy like buckskin/
your classic pacifier your bottle of booze/cayenne anger/yellows the bruise
watch
me
sink
into the mattress/between my legs you’ll stroke the sadness/I black my eyes like Cleopatra/the
closer you get/I’m a charming disaster
shut
the
curtains
neighbors can see/you’re snorting white powder off your key/Cupid push the arrow
through/watch your lips strobe red to/blue/house/hardcore/trance/electro/6am put on early
techno/let sound pulse you away
never
let
the
beat
decay
days are melting into days/your life goes missing at the rave/go out searching for who you
were/recycled hipster/identity blur/sadness breaks the drug numb surface/your body now an
despair circus/stop/pill-pop/24-packs/Molly/cocaine/panic attacks/
newspaper
searching
my
zodiac
for
a
sign/consult the Ouija one last time/down on my knees/begging stars to align?/should I leave my
strung-out VALENTYNE???

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To answer

your question, Mr. Hughes

it explodes

flings its syrupy shrapnel

beyond the neighborhood walls

hot with the day’s oppression

But later

much later

it locates its fragments

to weight itself against the night

It becomes

Mr. Hughes

the promise of every dream dreamed

It becomes

in the blackness

its own shining sun

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Metaphorical Ghosts

There are so many ways to describe

the fact that we die and are reborn

countless times: the New Year’s resolution list,

the myth of a phoenix rising from ashes,

the box of hair dye and the scissors, the poets:

dying is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

But no one ever talks about the ghosts.

The dead ones that that turn your bones

into a creaky, old haunted mansion.

And no one talks about how frequently girls die

in a lifetime. Girl after girl after girl after girl.

Some of them are mischievous and hopeful,

frolicking in your ribcage like a child who thinks

everything will turn out all right.

Yet some of them are screaming.

And when you hear the way she cried out,

again, it keeps you up at night. You don’t know

how to escape her, banish her,

remove her like a threatening mass. But some of them

you encounter in the night like lost strangers.

That girl that walked the pier barefoot

in a fluorescent bikini with other girls,

that girl who hated herself so much

she had no understanding of the power

of her body. But the water’s rhythm, hungrily

tonguing the sand, spoke its subliminal language:

the eros that promised it would erupt in waves

within her body underneath a boy’s body. So that

when the boys came along, sunned and shirtless

in their glistening madness, and told the girls

to jump off the ledge, chanting, do it, just do it,

don’t think about it, and the idea of drowning

passed briefly overhead like the shadow of a seagull,

she leapt in. And the boys laughed, caught it all on film.

And you know she made it to the surface again,

gasping life more forcefully than ever,

and the water droplets on her body

were proof of her glittering courage,

toweled off a beat too slowly by the boys,

and you know it was fine—it was, yes, it was fine—

she survived, she giggled, she gave the boys her number,

so who then is this young girl that just coughed

salted sand onto your poem with seaweed in her hair?

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Sun & Air

Sun

In Oregon once, the acolytes in saffron

sweatshirts and idolatrous medallions

made a vow to grow roots and change

address, to elect the man with the sunset

sport coat to serve as mayor and recast

community codes, to pull a nail here,

an ordinance there, the streets signs

of their Christian neighbors taken down

to make way for the Sanskrit of their master.

At last, the real estate of consciousness

was growing. Less in communal rapture

and rage that climaxed in bewildered tears

than the watchful stillness that came after.

Surely there was nobility in this.

The lotus of their suffering flush, effulgent.

Somewhere a ribcage cools in a field,

stoned on love, that kind that lifts the fog

above its place on earth, but after that,

what? The new human, the archetype

their teacher promised, what they were hoping

to become, what they feared the locals

in hunting gear and office would destroy?

And can you blame them. Say a torch

broke the glass of your hotel in Portland

or a long sleeve poisoned the salad bars

of your town cafés. Who would not feel

some shadow of their partisan nature fall

into the arms of your frightened kind.

I have been that child, that prideful victim

of my own outrage. Call it the fitful

cleansing of a birthmark, the forever

failed extradition of histories of abuse.

Call it shell-shock; or war; or call it

what it is, salmonella and kerosene

and the scarlet seam of the unclean

lesion breaking, but do not call it new.

Puritans of permission raise their cries

as Christ does at the altar, disseminating

wine with a bitter summons to forgive.

Submission and refusal. How better

to survive the next ice age or spiritual

contagion: a thicker coat, warmer meal,

a feast day between tribes; how better to live

and let live than deep inside a system

of guards to wave friends and family through.

The body of the chosen is a body

after all, and so in need of water, harbor,

seasonal fire and the couriers of sleep.

It shrouds itself in skin, as Bibles do,

and great redwoods, and the new human

laid beneath their limbs, a child of heaven

awakened from a scare to find herself,

transfixed, in a crystal of estrangement,

christened in the amber of dusk and dawn.

Air

The holier the stone the more like stone

the power and resolve that laid it, there,

in the heart of the contested common.

The last of the temple King Solomon built.

So say the faithful in their signature black

though doubtless they understand: to build

a wall is no king’s work, but that of servants

who will go nameless, and if another god

claims his prophet hitched here his horse

with wings, there is little to say to make

a god recant, revise, or otherwise move,

to abandon a place like that. The prayer

whispered or tucked into a hole in stone

might be, in installments, one long prayer,

incanted under the breath, and if it helps,

it helps, it mortars, mends, transmogrifies

the dullness of loss that makes a stone a stone,

a holy land a calf whose gold is blood.

Every comic dies now and then, but then,

if called, they rise, and folks remember best

the deeply wounded ones who made them

laugh like friends. I am thinking of you,

Greg Giraldo, who told Joan Rivers once,

You used to look your age, now you don’t

even look your species. And then her face—

wounded, tightened, paralyzed, stitched,

healed and babied with the finest lotions—

gave way, and I saw a little white light in

her teeth, a bit of joy, however nervously

touched, beyond the scalpel of this affront

or that desire to be young, I saw her death

in the arms of your addiction, the one

that took you too damn soon, to sit in heaven

and roast God, as your best friend put it,

as if nothing were sacred where everything is,

and each cold mask crumbles into laughter.

When I think of idols that have died,

I think of the toy my father saved from

his childhood, how it reddened his shelf.

Beside his picture with the governor,

a small truck with no one in it. It served

as proof of the boy I never met, never

understood. He had so little child

in him, let alone the sentimental kind.

You should always keep one reminder,

he said. I always did, always thought

he loved me better when I was small.

Look at me, said all the rusted places.

And when he left us, they said it again,

look, but what they revealed remained

an empty promise. But I could see it,

touch it. It had wheels. Hollow places.

When I think of death, I think of this.

And it flew into walls and drove right through.

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The Murder Hornet

can fly sixty miles in a day

& decapitate its prey

quicker than licking

honey off a thumb.

Size has its advantages.
& its costs. My mom
told me early I’d pay

for the size of my heart.

You feel too much, she said.
You want too much.

In the Love Addicts Anonymous

meeting, a white man in a gold ascot

said, I need to be devoured by love.

Devastated, I added, swallowed whole.

Murder hornets are efficient killers,

but is any torture more elegant

than chasing what you’ll never catch?

There was one time in my life

my heart felt right-sized,

quiet, & I was so at peace

I was invisible. The robin

thought I was a chair or tree

the easy way she cleaned

her feathers near my feet.

More often my feelings swarm,

a storm surge, how water alone

can warp metal, level a village.

When I keep feelings at bay

I appear okay, recalling

how Gulliver’s giant size

made him too dangerous

to keep.

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Tomorrowland & Man’s Dominion

Tomorrowland

I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on land.

—Wernher von Braun on humanity entering space, Los Angeles, 1955–1957

Some days after work, I’d rent a speedboat

from Long Beach and hop it out to Catalina

for an evening dive. What a thrill every

time, the chill of sliding through blue skin,

descending down the long teal folds of fulgid

kelp. A bright humming brain of gold baubles

lifting braids to the sky like a praising willow

swaying in the sugared light. I was almost lost,

weightless and wondering through the ocean

with no one following me but the moon as it

rose to look upon its navel. Omphaloskepsis: to

consider the divine inside the belly. When Jonah

was ankle-sunk in stomach acid, he was learning

the volcano’s wrath that gave birth to land. I could

spend hours floating in the whale constellation,

that dark, starry sea of seas. The umbilicus of space

that ties us to the womb of ocean. I wanted a rocket

to break through the egg with its tooth, dislocating

heaven and earth’s denotations. When we first

fumble around in the moon’s cratered belly, what will

we call our new lexis? How will we learn to be in

the universe but not of it once we leave behind our

world? The mystical isn’t in the ecstasy of floating

through space, our fragile bones eroding, but in

bearing the burden of our attachment toward a

center. Peter met Christ on the water because

he wanted to be like him. I designed Lunetta to churn

out gravity for the future to meet the cosmic Christ.

Man’s Dominion

And don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there [space]. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and

he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.

―Wernher von Braun, 1958

Standing at the edge of the Yucatan

jungle, I felt an urge to just run

blindly into it. The adrenaline was like a

timpani drum roll, paving the entrance

for the brass. I hired a guide, and as we

pushed through curling palms, ferns, and

snagging vines, I swear I could smell the jaguar’s

urine on the trees it had sprayed, hear

echoes of the animals that had fled before it.

I could hear a mosquito filled with a pyramid

of blood. When we saw the jaguar,

I became quiet as space, holding every

sound against the butt of my rifle.

Like when I held the liturgy candle,

planning each step so I wouldn’t spill the wax,

trying to pretend no one was watching.

His fur was glistening jet oil, his gaping mouth

a range of snowcapped teeth. The God who

framed his symmetry pitch-dark dared to

lock my limbs into their grooves

as well. He meandered through the lushness as a black

hole against a canopy of stars, his gold eyes

moving like jumpy flying saucers

in a child’s sloppy flipbook. I aligned

the crosshairs half a meter ahead of him

and pulled the trigger like a prophet

releasing a message before the people were ready.

My throat felt as if I had swallowed too

much water. I strode through the mist

toward my trophy, the graceful carcass already

hazy with flies. I had my guide put it in the jeep

and drive me into town to have it skinned.

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Long Marriage (Parable of the Skull)

Over years we lifted it sometimes
from its cardboard box, studying

the fifty teeth and gazing into the open
eye sockets, this possum skull we found

in our sixth year, half-buried in the dirt
behind the rental house. For decades, then,

we moved it everywhere we went,
and always it lay quietly, as patient as dirt,

and only now and then did I imagine it
dreaming that skin formed once more around

its body—the moon face and moon tail—
so it might waddle again along the river.

This poem was originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and was a runner-up in the Humboldt Poetry Prize.

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There They Are

my mother, my father. Her skinny
blue wrists, his ear caressing a cigarette.     In the beginning,
it is already too late,    but there is hunger & no time
to waste.    All they need are six hands, three mouths, a clockwork
yearning for locks of their own, windows square & fresh.    In the beginning,
my cry breaks my father, who flushes red at my fall, opens my face in search
of his mother.          Grasses, grasses on a country
road, hawthorn up to their waists,
aflame.     The crying of no mothers. Temple bells hung
by the wind.    An October without moons,
a feeling I’ve been here before. Dew on the page.
Windows billowing   wax paper.
Fall’s charred eyelids.     Toes pressing down my own wet
imprint.    Begin the world without a bang.
Water, air,   the Earth split into an egg,
elements halved for light.      No mothers, just two figures on a bicycle
for one.   A sweaty country road. Stoves that won’t start,
boxes of damp matchsticks.     Strain of a blue wrist
untucking cigarettes from his lips
prayer of hands inside the ashes of mothers,
single finger curving to a hush.    Careful,
hold the glass up to one eye, split the nucleus
with the other, explosions muted by winged lungs.
Put down my pen.    Unfold my eyes. Count backwards
before legs, before longing, until I hit a snag in the web,
open,   to find my palm full of tears.
Once, there were no mothers. Trace the outline,
one, two, build a family from hunger.                   Listen, a cry, mine,
dragging her mother’s last breath up the jagged washboard as he soaps
my throat clean, baptizing his mother’s blackened lungs.
My mouth opens       to wake their beginning & just like that
blesses our downfall.
There, stretch the canvas, spread oil thin-thin
into our crevasses, what’s that in the distance?       No mother,
not the moon,      just six hands bent over a clock face with no opening,
porcelain spoons    raised to another’s lips,    tap – tap we widen
our insides until ink forks our edges.        In the beginning,
an October without night. Windows torn
open with flashlights. Hawthorn dawning a mother’s last breath.
Let me begin   again,

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Two Writers at Alligator Point

Poet, essayist, and publisher Rick Campbell and nonfiction writer Bob Kunzinger have published a combined fourteen books. Campbell’s include The History of Steel, Setting the World in Order, and Dixmont, many poems in countless journals, and for more than twenty years he was the publisher at Anhinga Press in Tallahassee, Florida. Bob Kunzinger’s volumes include Borderline Crazy, Penance, and Fragments as well as hundreds of works in journals and magazines, including several notations by Best American Essays.

Now both have new books from Madville Press of Texas. Campbell’s Gunshot, Peacock, Dog premiered last fall, and Kunzinger’s A Third Place: Notes in Nature in August of 2019.

These two old friends—both writers and professors with a penchant for sharing their wisdom—sat down for a chat about writing:

Kunzinger:

I always found the relationship between poetry and memoir to be closer than either of those and fiction. That’s why I think you find many poets writing essays or other forms of memoir, but not too many fiction writers (though I can suddenly recall many) who bother with nonfiction, or even poetry. I have an easier time reading poetry than fiction because it sends me back into my own senses, and I like that.

Ironically, I’m as influenced by poets as I am prose writers. You’re both, so there’s that. In fact, I enjoy your poetry, for which you are known, but I’m especially fond of your essays—the two in History of Steel are among my favorite nonfiction prose. Who influenced you, do you think? Where are you more comfortable?

Campbell:

I have no interesting answer, no matter how many times I am asked. In poetry, Richard Hugo, James Wright, Philip Levine. I’ve read and liked, even loved, hundreds of poems, but those three poets influenced me the most because I read them first, when I was poetically young. It’s possible that I have been more influenced by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and so many song writers than I have poets. I am a listener. For years I have listened to music far more, for far more hours a day, a week, than I read poetry. I hear music and rhythm more than words. I am, I believe, more moved by songs than poems. I am a poet because I wanted to be a songwriter.

Kunzinger:

I think that’s why we are very much the same when it comes to influence, and even a bit with my short prose and your longer poems. We were both musicians at some point—you still are—and the music of our youth was as much our literature as Salinger or Hemingway. For me, early Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Dylan. If I’m screwing around with a longer piece and listen to Neil Young or Browne’s “Sky Blue and Black,” it’s like getting a hit of something that fires me up.

Campbell:

I suppose I am more comfortable as a poet, but identity is a strange thing for me. For many years I think I was better known as a publisher than a writer, and I kept wanting to tell people I’m a writer too. I spend more time thinking about and writing prose than poetry, even though I’ve published six books of poetry and not even one prose collection. I don’t think about poems—I get an inspiration and I write a poem. I never say I’m going to write a poem about ducks or love or something. Poems come quickly, and then it’s over. But I do think about and sketch prose ideas. I have about thirty essays that are finished or nearly so, and it’s taken about twenty years to get this far. If I start a poem, for whatever reason, I write it in a matter of minutes. I don’t bend it or play with it. I don’t even think of it as narrative, as if it’s going somewhere. It’s a bubble that rises over my head like in a cartoon. If I have a prose idea it usually takes longer to be born, but prose ideas go into one box and poetry into another. They don’t get mixed up. Sometimes I might take a finished poem and expand it into an essay, but rarely.

Your flash prose pieces and my longer poems often have much in common. I think your work and mine tends to move horizontally—sliding and leaping from subject to subject. I think it’s called accretion. We layer ideas, but more horizontally than vertically.

Kunzinger:

I am not sure the material is horizontal—maybe in as much as there is some recognizable narrative arc in many pieces—but I think of the tangents within a piece as the real work more than the apparent direction. What’d you call it? Accretion? I tend to think of what we both do in writing as “digression.” I like the digressive nature of some of the pieces—“Flip Flops,” for instance, where the direction of the piece turns out to be little more than a vehicle for the deeper purpose. I think Tim O’Brien does that best, but I think he stole the style from Ernie Pyle, or maybe Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal.

Campbell:

I think I mean that our subjects are layered in a way that one idea isn’t privileged over the others. No dominant idea with the others subservient. Not much hierarchical structure. Your essay “Sliced Bread” does that. When I still used to workshop my poems, I was often told that I had too many subjects. I think that’s not possible as long as I leap and land properly. You and I think in associations and see lots of connections. This might also be why I have trouble finishing essays. Why or when should I stop leaping? It’s a process of montage. a palimpsest, a highway built over a trail, a road that follows a river. Accretion and digression might be the same thing. Tangents, too, but they go toward the essential subject not away from it.

Kunzinger:

I had to look up “palimpsest.” But, yes, exactly. The tangent is the point to begin with. I guess we layer ideas. That’s why I like longer pieces. I can layer it to the point where people will find more to relate to. It is hard for me to do short work. My short prose was developed for the sole purpose of reading to an audience, and some of it has been published, but they were meant to be read in the amount of time it takes to read a two- or three-page narrative poem, so that when I read with poets we’d share the same amount of time. What that did, though, was teach me the art of diction. I reached back to my journalism roots for that and stole from poets like Tim Seibles and Richard Lax. But I’m still way more comfortable in weaving ideas in longer form. That doesn’t mean it always works! Can you tell? I mean, how quickly can you tell if something’s working?

Campbell:

If I finish a poem, then it works. If it fades out partway through, then it’s over. I don’t go back to it. We have music in common and probably also that we never intended to be scholars. I saw my college studies more as vocational school, and my vocation was to write poetry.

Kunzinger:

My vocation is still to be determined. Our “occupational hazard” being that our occupation’s just not around.

Campbell:

Did you ever hear of the JBACC—the Jimmy Buffet Air Conditioning Club? It’s cooler than a fan club.

Kunzinger:

Oh, shit.

Campbell:

Back to writing. I very much give a shit about being read. I like to publish, and I like to have readers. Maybe I don’t care as much anymore about being famous and making it. Does that make us defensive of our work? As in we might still think we have not received the recognition the work deserves? If any?

Kunzinger:

I used to wonder or worry where I fell in the scheme of writers. I’ve published a lot, but I usually feel that is the result of their being not a whole lot of nonfiction writers out there compared to poets and fiction writers. Also, it might be subject-related. I might be the only one writing about Siberia in short form. I don’t know. In the few workshops I have taken, my work was always slammed. I know there are some “subjects” which are going to work and some which I write just for me. But the pieces which get the most attention are the ones that have universal themes buried in some digression. That light went on about twenty years ago when I was at lunch with Tim Seibles and he happened to read something I wrote which I had with me, which is unusual since, like you and me, he and I generally never talk about writing, and he tossed it back to me and said, almost off the cuff, “Don’t show me your pain, Bob. Show me mine.” It was like he flipped on a switch. My writing completely changed then or, I should say, found some new level, and I started not worrying about where I fit in the writing world; I just wrote.

But I can’t avoid the comparison thing. Sedaris still pisses me off. We both did an identical themed piece, his about standing in line at Starbucks and his impatience, and mine—written a few years before his, I might add—about standing in line at a grocery store with no ability to make small talk (“Small Talk”). His stays in the impatient mode whereas mine digresses into memory and something else. How can I not look at the success of his and wonder what I can do differently so the work gets more attention? I simply prefer that first thing we talked about—a piece not be the point of the piece—if that makes sense.

For instance, I love your idea that it doesn’t matter how many “subjects” are in a piece so long as the leaps from one to the other work and the reader lands with us. For me, though, I’ll hit a dead end about, say, geese, but then a few weeks later—or a few months—I’ll be working on the fifteenth piece since the geese one and stumble upon a concept—say people who follow others without understanding where they are going, or the players on a baseball team who spend the better part of their careers on the bench, making a living but ultimately not doing what they planned to do when they were in Little League, and I’ll remember the geese and somehow marry the two.

Campbell:

Richard Hugo wrote about the triggering subject and the true subject; that we need to give up the triggering subject when the true subject shows up. Funny, I think he used geese in his example, too. But as for my insecurities, yes, I still have them. Now that I am older, I tend to worry about the lack of offers I get to headline conferences or compare myself to those who seem to have plum positions in MFA programs. I’m a working-class late bloomer who “chose” to spend his academic/writing life at a small college in a small town. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself, and then I hope I realize that I am doing that and try to get over it. That’s where music, baseball, and fishing come in handy. A poet friend once wrote that I was the best poet few readers had ever heard of. I guess that’s a compliment. All whiny shit aside, I think a lot of my poems and a few of my essays are as good as any other writer’s. I don’t want to be better than other writers, I just want to be good. At this point I should just say “so it goes.”

Kunzinger:

Vincent van Gogh is my inspiration for not worrying about what others think, which can be frustrating when I attend readings where people are paid thousands of dollars, and their work, in my not-humble-enough opinion, is not as good as ours, and our publishing record is so much deeper, and I wonder how the hell do I get gigs like that? Van Gogh painted for himself, completely and unapologetically for himself, to the point where other painters and critics called him a bum and a waste of space in the art world, but he persisted, confident he knew what he wanted to do.

But I still wonder if I’m too simplistic, the writing equivalent of knowing the three chords from which you can play any pop song. It is popular, but it has no staying power. And I fear I finish too soon, in the piece I mean, not time-wise.

Campbell:

Finished is a weird thing. I say a poem’s finished when I feel it’s as good as I can make it. Then I might let it sit a little while longer before I think it’s ready to send out. But the essays baffle me; they are harder to finish, maybe just because the more words, the more possibilities. My real problem is that I forget that I have essays to send to journals. Even if I spend the good part of a day sending out poems, I will forget to send out the essays. Is this some Freudian lack of confidence? Did Freud ever talk about this? My knowledge of Freud is just some shallow pop-culture reading.

I was never diligent about sending work out. I also know that I have never worked hard enough, never hustled enough, to garner fame. I don’t work as hard as you do. I respect how much you write.

Kunzinger:

Yeah, I am better than you. [Laughs.]

Campbell:

This is my virtual porch.

Kunzinger:

Seriously, I still hesitate a long time before actually sending something out. I’m always fighting the triteness. I have to go back and “get the trite out,” as I like to think of it. That reminds me of the idea that Rupert Fike told me once that an ending must both be a complete surprise and totally obvious at the same time. I’m okay with ending. No, for me, it’s when I start that I struggle to find something familiar but not at all trite. I can conceive an essay okay. It’s not unusual for me to stumble across one moment in my day, maybe in conversation with someone, or something I overheard in a hallway somewhere. “Flip Flops” started like that. The piece all hangs on one line the doctor said to me at a check-up: “It’s a good thing you whacked your ankle.” I had no idea where I was going in a completely separate piece about 911 until that line, and I joined a stale work with a new direction. Sometimes, though, the direction is so obvious.

Campbell:

When we are nonfiction writers, we promise to tell the truth as well as we can, given the limitations of memory and vagaries of time, given the influx of new information. I am thinking about when you found out that you had Italian ancestry and then saw your “new” family name on a building in Tampa. Actually, I think I saw it first. Discoveries like that change what we know and maybe what we have written. But poetry is neither true nor false, not fiction or nonfiction. I mean it is or can be one or the other, but there’s no rule, no category. There’s no nonfiction shelf for poetry. And yet readers, despite often having a high level of poetic sophistication, assume that a poem is “true.” They want poetry to be autobiographical. Most of my poems are, and I assume that lures readers into thinking that all of my poems are true. I guess that’s the readers’ problem not mine.

Kunzinger:

If I’m reading or writing journalism, I expect absolute adherence to some form of objective truth; that is, verifiable information. But as a nonfiction writer—which is such a huge term covering everything from personal memoir to documentaries, and as a term literally means, simply, “What I’m writing is not fiction”—I find a massive gap can exist between “truth” and “accuracy.” In my Siberian essays, I can guarantee—that is prove—the “truth” of the pieces in that I was on the train with my son heading east toward the other side of the country. The people I met are all real, the stories of almost missing the train, as well as the floods on the Amur River, are all real, but I can’t guarantee accuracy. I don’t remember the conversations word for word or if they were in the day or at night or sometimes exactly which station we were at when we bought dried fish, but the essential narrative, a father and son traveling across Siberia together, sharing these experiences, is true, because that is the point of the piece; I’m not writing a guidebook.

I was reading some of your unpublished essays and I was not concerned with how accurate you were as to which highway you were on—I’m never going there—or when it was, and even the details of what happened; my focus was on the truth of the “spirit” of the places, and the nonfiction elements of remembering. Poet JT Williams described my work as, “This is a bunch of shit that happened to you and how you best remember it all these years later.” I think that’s an accurate definition of the truth. Tim O’Brien still has the definitive explanation for “truth” in insisting something that “seemed” to happen is often “more true” than what really happened, even though the accuracy might be questionable.

Campbell:

What I find interesting is trying to tell the truth, to be honest, in nonfiction. I write a lot about how what I remember might not be exactly what happened. I try to be honest, try not to lie, but it’s clear to me that capital-T Truth is often not attainable.

You are more of a nonfiction writer than I, and you were trained in journalism, so how do you feel when accuracy and truth prove to be elusive?

Kunzinger:

I do my homework; I try and unearth the validity of what I’m writing, but if I keep reaching various “truths” because the foundation of what I’m writing is already subjective, I let “accuracy” go and just lean back on personal take.

My Siberian work takes place in Siberia, but it is about fathers and sons, about sacrifice and journey. It was the ultimate metaphor—my son and I on the same train going the same distance across an unknown wilderness, and his perspective is different than mine, which I tell through letters to my father. That isn’t a travel essay, I don’t think, nor is my work on the Camino or in St. Petersburg. If someone asks me what I write about, I don’t think of myself as a travel writer—the new book from Madville, A Third Place, is about nature, but it isn’t a guide. Ian Frazier and Colin Thubron both wrote extensively about Siberia and, honestly, their books aren’t guides either. That is why I left journalism. A journalist would write a guide; an essayist such as myself writes about the spirit of place, and a poet, well, they just ride the train into the distance and someone else writes about their death. That’s Russia.

Campbell:

I agree completely with your take on your writing: your memoirs are framed by travel. Travel is, metaphorically and spatially, your vehicle.

When my essays overlap with my poems, it’s almost always that the poem came first. Sometimes years before the essay. Those poems are often more narrative than lyrical (though I don’t really believe in or understand a hard distinction). The poems are condensed, and the essays are expanded, but the subject is the same. Sometimes it’s a travel topic but more likely it’s about family. Family is such a twisted and complicated subject that the poem, even a series of poems, just sometimes does not allow me to say what I want to say. There’s an essay that was in The History of Steel (and first in Kestrel) about my father’s death that is clearly an expansion, or a gloss, of a shorter poem from some years before.

I like to make a distinction between true and honest. I want my work to be honest—either as true as I can make it, or an honest attempt at accuracy. And, yes, the spirit of the work is the most important element. Still, I do like to get the highway numbers right. I have an essay, “On Not Going to Vietnam,” in which I claim this guy I met got #2 in the Vietnam War draft, went to war, and might have died. I accidentally found out twenty years or so later that he did not do any of that. I was being honest, though, it turns out, very, very inaccurate. The last part of my essay explores how I might have come to believe these inaccuracies, but I can’t even explain that.

Kunzinger:

When we discuss memoir vs. travel essays, we both seem to lean toward the memoir side, and the sense of place is important, but only in as much as it serves as a foundation for something else we respond to. A Third Place is a compilation of short essays, mostly in nature, but not about nature; most of the writings—particularly the digressions—were not conceived together. I heard an interview with Billy Joel, and when asked about “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” he said the three different parts to that were written at three different times and none with any thought to being connected to the others. It was only later that he found a common thread and tied them together. I write like that. So if I “finish” a piece about missing a train in Russia, I already know in the back of my mind I’m going to write something else later, or maybe already have written it, that at some point I’ll realize would make a good fit for it, and then go back and tie them together or, sometimes, lace them. Often, I find the “truth” of the piece later, after the bulk of the “narrative” is complete. When you found the truth about the dude who didn’t go to Vietnam, it sounds like you thought you needed to explain yourself to the reader, like some Waltons epilogue—“Mary Ellen eventually moved to Richmond and is living as a prostitute.” I think what really happened to the guy not going to Vietnam is irrelevant—in that essay anyway. Maybe another one later will be solely about that. Tim O’Brien does that. I love reading his essays which later became parts of books—like those in “The Things they Carried.” If you read them carefully you see some significant differences between the original essay and the form it took when complied with other essays which he wanted to somehow connect. I see that in your work too.

Campbell:

Did I ever tell you my O’Brien story? It’s the late 1980s, and my friend and I drove up to Augusta, Georgia, to hear Tim read. We didn’t leave till after noon, so we had to bust through rural Georgia. We got there just as he was being introduced and made a commotion by trying to come in quietly. My friend Judith Ortiz Cofer was hosting the reading, and after Tim was done she took us up to meet him. I was worried about how road ragged I looked, but Tim, as always, looked just as ragged. As we were talking, a man came out of a room behind us, and Tim says, “This is my friend Kiowa.” I just stand there looking dopey and then say, “Man I thought you were dead.” Kiowa shakes his head and says, “It was fiction.”

O’Brien intentionally blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, and he certainly twisted me up. We have yet to mention the New Journalism. As in Norman Mailer quoting the inner thoughts of Gary Gilmore that he could not have possibly known. Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe changed what we can say in nonfiction forever.

I used to tell people that I didn’t write fiction because the only character I am interested in is me. Then I blew it and published a short story about a kid nailing his father to a cross. I didn’t like my father, but, God, I never crucified him.

Kunzinger:

I have no fiction DNA; it’s that simple. Tim first wrote If I Die in a Combat Zone, which is the nonfiction predecessor to the stories in The Things They Carried, which he wrote about twenty years later. I can’t even pull that off. I was in a fiction seminar once with Sheri Reynolds, and we had to write a fiction story—I wrote about a twenty-four-year-old who worked in an exercise club and the people he met, which is completely me. It sucked. When we went over my piece, the other people in the seminar crucified me!I left and drank something like four margaritas that night.

Like now. See, this is why I hate talking about writing. I just remembered just how bad I can be at it. Dammit. Let’s get some oysters. Damn. Let’s get some beer.

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Opening the Door

At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations by Robert Hedlin
Copper Canyon, 2017
Paperback, 220 pages, $18.00

Of all the books of poetry I’ve read this year—and I’ve read quite a large number—Robert Hedin’s At The Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations has pulled me most deeply into the depths of feeling, seeing, and being that I hope to discover in poetry. Each poem is a genuine experience, a small moment of grace, and the book as a whole is a series of revelations. Once I started reading At the Great Door, I couldn’t put the book down—and yet it is a book to savor. Its pleasures have renewed and reinvigorated my own faith in the power of poetry to matter deeply to us, to help us live by restoring us to wonder in this clamorous, narcissistic, cliché-ridden time. It is a book to be kept on that short shelf of favorites.

At the Great Door of Morning is divided into six sections, the first and last two comprised of Hedin’s own poems and the middle three of his translations of the Norwegian poets Rolf Jacobsen, Olav Hauge, and Dag Straumsvag. As masterful as the translations are, it is Hedin’s own poems that really sing. He is a master of clarity and of the kind of image that revitalizes the actual world—makes us look at an ordinary object or action with fresh eyes—as when, in a poem about teaching his sons to row, he shows the act of rowing as “keeping/the river moving,” making suddenly vivid what would otherwise be a common action barely worthy of our attention. In another poem he shows us owls that “glide off the thin/Wrists of the night.” These perfectly-observed/masterfully created moments of imagistic transformation achieve Pound’s goal of “making it new,” but they don’t just revitalize the art of poetry; in fact, they make new the actual world, showing us ordinary things in authentically fresh ways. And this is what Hedin does over and over here: makes the mundane miraculous again, refreshing our perceptions and thus our lives. We might even say that Hedin is a visionary poet, though a quiet and personally modest one. Reading these poems, we respond not to the poet’s brilliance (which is manifest) but to the world he shows us: This book shows little of Hedin’s autobiography or personal life. What it does show, in deep and trembling ways, is a vision and an immersion in the world of things and mind, the world of being and contemplation. One leaves Hedin’s poems with reinvigorated eyes. I was reminded of the experience of leaving an art museum after a particularly strong show of paintings—of walking around seeing the world through the lens of those paintings for a while. Hedin’s best poems have that effect on my sensibility: they refresh and reawaken my everyday world.

There is an ancient quality of folk-tale magic in many of Hedin’s best poems, a charmed and dreamlike quality of “seeing into the life of things,” which results from careful, lifelong craft and attention to clarity of detail. These poems remind us of how ancient the art of poetry is, how deeply a good poem can plumb:

This must be where the ravens turn to geese,

The weasels to wolves, where the rabbits turn to owls…

Where hunters have forgotten their trails and sunk out of sight…

Glistening with the bones of animals and trappers,

Eggs that are cold and turning to stones…

(“The Snow Country”)

It seems to me that the great majority of contemporary poems, even the best of them, are filled with clamor and self-regard. These qualities may be reflective of our time and thus fitting attitudes for our poetry. Sometimes it seems though that idiosyncrasy is a stand-in for originality, mere oddness a stand-in for genuine freshness. This observation is not meant to bemoan the state of our poetry, which is vibrant and challenging and forging new ground. But it is to point out one of Robert Hedin’s greatest strengths, and perhaps what moves and refreshes me most deeply in his work: the modesty that infuses every aspect of his art, a modesty informed of deep craft, genuine feeling, and transformative seeing. This is a modesty born of respect for the millennia-long art of poetry and the poets who have practiced before him. It is equally a modesty born of respect for the world of living creatures and energies with whom we live our lives, and a respect for the clarity of language. It is the grounded and self-assured modesty of a master:

Goddard Hot Springs

When you lie in these sweating streams

You are lying in the breath of your ancestors,

The old pioneers who sat here in these pools

Mapping trails to the mother lode.

You feel a fog drift through your body,

A voice that is strangely familiar

And still has stories to tell.

A poem like this, with its understated, carefully-modulated revelations, reminds us again that poetry, true poetry, needs to be savored—read slowly, listened to—then read again. Without such reading, the depths this poem plumbs might be missed or skated over. Hedin trusts his reader to breathe with his poem, to listen carefully for its news and subtle revelation.

Hedin’s best poems remind us that to read a poem, we must breathe with the breath of the poet who made it, thus reanimating it with our own breath-stuff.

Hedin’s book ends with a final “chapter” he calls “Field Notes,” a compendium of insights and assertions about the art of poetry, all of them wise, useful, and memorably written. Among them, this statement, which might stand as a kind of motto for all of Hedin’s work:

A good poem breaks through the numbing, stultifying voice of our mass

culture to successfully articulate, in all its breadth and meaning, a land-

scape of conviction, a deeper circuitry that helps give life its necessary

shape and substance.

and another:

Poetry is, in many ways, a sustained longing for home and reconciliation,

the inseparability of self and object, self and other.

Or, better yet, turning again to one of Hedin’s poems:

The Tlingit on this island tell a story about fog.

They say in its belly

The spirits of the drowned are turned into otters,

That on cold nights when the lowlands

Smolder with steam

The loon builds its nest in their voices.

(“Ancestors”)

As deeply as I admire this book, I do wish that Hedin’s modesty had not prevented him from including a greater number of his own poems and (perhaps) fewer of his translations. As strong as they are, the translations do not strike me as quite as linguistically or imigistically fresh as Hedin’s own work. Though the three poets translated here are themselves masters of imagery and concision, and though it is clear that they all have influenced him, still I yearned for Hedin’s own language, his singular vision. Perhaps I am merely quibbling. Perhaps it is simply that I would have liked a longer book. What’s here is a treasure, a genuine contribution to American poetry and a gift to all who read it.

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Interview: Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly was born in New Jersey and grew up in Illinois, but has become a Southern transplant and is now the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, as well as teaching at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. She is the author of six books and recipient of numerous awards. Her three collections of poetry are: Unmentionables: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2008), Tender Hooks (W. W. Nortion, 2004), and Open House: Poems (Zoo Press, 2002). More recently, she has focused her work in prose. She published Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (W. W. Norton, 2006), then co-authored the novel The Tilted World (Harper Collins, 2013) with her husband, Tom Franklin. Most recently, she published Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton, 2017).

We caught up with Beth Ann Fennelly at the Miami Book Fair in 2017 shortly after Heating & Cooling came out. Just this week, Heating & Cooling has been released in paperback, and so it’s a good time for us to finally get this interview published.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I want to start with question about the wider context of your evolution as a writer. I’ve worked with a number of people over the past year—Brenda Miller and her co-author, Lee Gulyas, and Monica McFawn and Darrell Nicholson—who have been writing together. They’ve talked about how much they enjoy the co-authoring process, although I’m sure it has its challenges as well. I think this is a little bit new. It’s not that people haven’t done it before, but it’s something that people are really paying attention to now. And I guess I wanted to ask about you and Tom Franklin co-authoring your previous book The Tilted World. I also want to ask about how you started off as a poet. Can you describe that evolution from writing primarily poetry to adding work in prose, and then doing a co-authored project. How did all of that happen?

Beth Ann Fennelly:

It seems that every writing project I’ve taken on is never with foresight or part of a career strategy.

[laughter]

Everything is an accident and serendipity. I thought I would only be a poet—that’s really all I ever wanted because I think it’s such a beautiful art form. At first, I accidentally wrote a non-fiction book called Great with Child. That was a collection of letters that I didn’t write thinking they would be collected into a book. And so that was happy and lucky.

Then I wrote another book of poems. Then the novel with Tommy came about in just this bizarre way. We had been thinking a lot about the flood of 1927 after Katrina happened, and how if that story hadn’t been written out of history maybe Katrina would’ve been handled differently. That’s the problem when things get written out of history—we can’t learn from them. We thought this was a big Southern story that needed to be told. We ended up writing a short story about it—really as a lark, without thinking too much about it, except then it got reprinted in Best American Mysteries and a couple of other big anthologies. And Tommy’s editor called up and said, “You didn’t tell me about this story.” And Tommy said, “Well, what’s to tell?” And the agent said, “It’s your next novel.”

Due to that, we suddenly found ourselves writing a novel, although it might have happened anyway because these characters were still in my head after the short story. The research I had done for us to write the short story was really compelling to me, and I was thinking how much more there was. So, we wrote the novel, and then after that, there was a period where I felt I wasn’t writing. I wanted to write another novel, actually. But I was going through this long, slightly terrifying period of “not writing.” I kept saying to Tommy, “I’m not writing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Every morning, I’d get my notebook and write down a couple of weird, little thoughts, and nothing was adding up to something. I would write about a little conversation I’d heard or a little memory. I’d been doing that for a long time when one morning I thought how excited I was to get back to my desk. I recognized the feeling of writing before I recognized the product because that feeling, that excitement is how I feel when the writing’s going well. That morning, I went back and started paging through my notebook of all these random little bits of conversations and memories that I kept waiting to add up to something.

For the first time, I thought, “What if I stop waiting for it to add up to something? What if it is something, just a really small something?” And then I thought of the term ‘micro-memoirs’, and in a weird way coming up with the term freed me to complete the project. None of this was done with great forethought. And in fact, if I were the type of person who had forethought, I wouldn’t have done any of this, because it’s not really what one wants from one’s career, in a way. Because your publicist wants to be able to say, “Oh, she writes sonnets about her cat.” The expectation is that you just do the one thing.

TFR:

Right, right, very specific.

Fennelly:

Yeah. And so just to confuse things, now I’m the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, and I haven’t written a poem in three years. [laughter] Oh no.

TFR:

That’s hilarious.

Fennelly:

I know.

TFR:

That’s so funny. But you will. Do you doubt it?

Fennelly:

No, not really. For now, I’m just in love with the sentence, and I used to be in love with the line. I’m just waiting for the cycle to come back around to that.

TFR:

One of the things I am also curious about is your embrace of Mississippi. You mentioned how The Tilted World was a Southern story that needed to be told. It’s often difficult for those who are raised and educated in other regions, as you have been, to find a happy home in the deep South. And yet you seem to have done it and have embraced it as an identity. And so how has that happened for you as a person and a writer? I grew up in the South, in Tennessee. I was gone for a long time, and then when I got the job in Orlando at UCF, I had friends who wouldn’t speak to me. They were like, “You’re going back to the South? How can you do that?” And I was like, “Well, it’s a great job where I get to teach creative writing all the time and no composition.” [chuckle] There were those kinds of things. But there’s so often that attitude of hostility from people who don’t know the South. I just wonder if there was a transition for you, if it was difficult for you, or if you’re just the kind of person who embraces where you are.

Fennelly:

I grew up, as you say, in the Midwest. And the Midwest landscape and architecture, I understood intellectually why they were beautiful, or why I was supposed to find them beautiful. But when I moved to the South for the first time—for graduate school at the University of Arkansas in 1994—I just loved it. It seemed to suit my personality in a weird way.

I come from an Irish background, and there’s a lot I love about being Irish that also seems to be very strong in the South. I love storytelling, I love music. I like emphasis on family. All those things are interesting to me. But there is the bigger question of how a place becomes a home or how we can choose a home, and I also think there’s an element of mystery to it, because the South shouldn’t have felt like home.

But it did. I met my husband the first day of graduate school. And now we have three children with Mississippi drawls. And we’ve bought five plots in the cemetery next to Faulkner.

TFR:

Has it ever been hard for you? Has there ever been a moment where you thought, “Ooh. Who are these people?”

Fennelly:

No, but I do obviously struggle with a lot of the things in the South.

Part of me accepting the role of Southerner—which wasn’t something I claimed for myself, but something people eventually honored me with—part of it is also remaining clear-eyed about the problems in the South. And in Oxford, Mississippi, it was just fifty years ago that James Meredith integrated the school. And there’s still a bullet hole where people were shooting during riots. So, it is something I think about a lot. What does it mean to be from this region and embrace this region, and yet just be determined to be part of the people who are working to change it for the better?

TFR:

That makes great sense.

Heating & Cooling is a tiny book that is nonetheless deeply rich, I found, and certainly poetic. You can definitely see your background as a poet. What do you see as the connection between poetry and memoir in this book, and more generally?

Fennelly:

When I came up with the term ‘micro-memoir’ and started thinking, “Okay, look, what are these things I’m writing?” what I realized was I wanted to take the things I loved most from the different genres. From poetry, what I love is that extreme compression and abbreviation and that lyrical explosion of the release. And from fiction, I love narrative tension. I love a page-turner quality. I like the storytelling. I like beginnings, middles, and ends. And from nonfiction, I love truth-telling. I love facts. And right now, because we are in an era of alternative facts, and truth is so malleable to some, I found my own insistence on the facts as maybe a weird reaction to that. My facts are just coming from my life, but—after spending four years writing a novel in the heads of characters—my own life seemed interesting to me again.

TFR:

One of my favorite qualities of this book and your work as a whole is how humane it is. There’s an appealing humility but without obsequiousness, if you know what I mean. There’s humor balanced with poignancy. Reading Beth Ann Fennelly is like reading someone you would really like to know.

Fennelly:

Oh, how nice.

TFR:

I just really feel that way. I think people can over-claim that they know you when they read a book. We all know that when you write, it’s not all of us that’s in the . . .

Fennelly:

I do that sometimes. I read a book and feel like I know the author.

TFR:

Sometimes, that can be really obnoxious. [laughter] I don’t mean to be weird about it, but I just think that over the years, having read a variety of your work, I feel like there’s a friendly quality. How do you feel like you achieve the balance between different tonalities that you work with? And how does that come out of your approach to drafting and revising? You’ve talked about that a little bit already with this book in particular.

Fennelly:

I love that you found it a humane book—that’s really flattering to me. I would say one of the things I wanted was for it to be the me-est book possible, and to bring in all the parts of me, and even the ugly parts. There are some pieces in here where I don’t really look all that kind or maybe even sane. But I wanted the full range of human emotions, particularly my human emotions. I didn’t want to keep anything out even if it was slightly salacious or unsavory. Part of that for me is not keeping humor out, too, which is something that I did when I was younger. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more confident in my own voice. When I was younger, I wanted to be taken seriously. And I looked around and what are the big boys doing? Well, they’re writing poems about Greek myths. So, by God, here’s my Perseus poem. Take this. Ugh.

[laughter]

As I got older, I began to realize that what I want from a book is what I want from a friend, someone who accepts all of me. I began to realize that parts of the way I look at the world were not coming into my work. I think so much about being a human is funny. I think being a mom is funny. I think being middle-aged is funny. I think being in a long marriage is funny. What if I just stopped keeping that part out? All of these micro-memoirs are just ways of relaxing and knowing who I am and being less worried about being judged. I was taught to be a good girl. I was brought up Irish Catholic. It was pretty Victorian in some ways. And part of this book is about being less scared of someone thinking that I’m not being ladylike.

TFR:

I just laughed my head off when you were talking about having a large bladder. And I was like, “Yeah, me too.”

Fennelly:

That’s so funny. [laughter]

TFR:

But I also found more generally that I kept thinking, “Yes, me too.”

I loved a lot of the different ways that you talked about the body in the book. I don’t know how consciously you developed that as a theme, but there were some very poignant places, and there were some very funny places. I thought one of the resonances of this book was that it’s such a little book, but the complexity of the body that you depict in it was so profound. How consciously, when you were finally putting it together as a collection of pieces, did you think about those different, particular elements, but especially that body element?

Fennelly:

That’s a good question. It was hard to put the book together because they’re all stories from my life that are true with people that I know. I have myself as a child, an adolescent, and adult. I have all my major roles. I’m in there as a wife, and a mother, and a teacher, and a writer, and a human. And some of the pieces are short, and some are longer. When I first tried to put the book together, there was almost a problem of too-muchness. And I originally thought the book was gonna be a hundred pieces, because I know a couple of books that do a hundred short pieces, and I love them. But it just ended up seeming almost too exuberant.

My editor is the one who said I should cut it. She said, “Not because any of the pieces are weaker, but you need to strengthen the themes.” That inspired me to started thinking like, “Okay, this person comes in in more than one piece.” Or, “This role I have is in more than one piece,” and kind of cutting the outliers. It was a little challenging to figure out how to narrow it down. But narrowing it down did strengthen the themes. And I am really interested in the body, particularly the female body, and got that way through becoming a mother, actually, and writing about my body for the first time when it started to go south.

[laughter]

TFR:

We take it for granted. And then . . .

Fennelly:

Yes. Pregnancy and childbirth and all that made me inhabit my body and be intellectually engaged with walking around in a body in a way I hadn’t really noticed when I was younger, when inhabiting it was more thoughtless.

TFR:

I think many women writers, especially poets and nonfiction writers, are reaching out into this social moment that we’re having. With the loss of Hillary Clinton last year and the more recent revelations about sexual assault, it feels very much to me like women are saying, “We’re done putting up with this.” I thought that you also sometimes strike a feminist note, for example when you note that someone uses “pussy” as a synonym for weak.

Do you have advice for other writers who desire to address social issues without writing propaganda? How do you manage to bring such a light touch to that process?

Fennelly:

That’s interesting because I don’t think of myself as a political poet or a political writer, and I wanted to be when I was younger, and I failed. When I tried to write political stuff, it came out a little screechy.

TFR:

Pedantic, sure.

Fennelly:

What I realized is my best ideas don’t come out as argument—they come out as metaphor or narrative. In the narrative or in the metaphor, the politics sneak on through sometimes. I’ve always been someone who felt things strongly, but I would’ve been a terrible lawyer. I don’t have the ability to make that kind of logical argument. But the piece that you just referred to—it’s almost like the metaphor for calling a someone a pussy instead of a weak thing, was almost like a literary criticism. That’s a bad metaphor. The reason, of course, is clear in that piece, I think.

There’s another piece in the end of the book, “Salvage,” about my father-in-law who passed away, who I loved so much, who was a mechanic, and he worked so hard his whole life. And then in the end, he had to have his teeth pulled, and he didn’t have insurance to get new teeth. For me, what that piece is secretly about is my rage over unaffordable healthcare. How is it possible to be such a hardworking and dignified man working with his hands all day long, and at the end of his life, be abandoned? You know?

TFR:

Right, right.

Fennelly:

The politics is there, but kind of through the side door.

TFR:

How did you structure this book? You talked about having to pare it down from a hundred pieces. One of the things I noticed, of course, was that you have the three appearances of married love throughout the piece.

Fennelly:

Ultimately, I just tried to make sure I didn’t have two similar tones immediately together, or two pieces the same size. Because I wanted a lot of tonal variation, and that’s something that’s fun to do in short pieces. If you’re writing a novel, whether it’s literary or comedic or thriller, you can have small tonal variations. But with these short pieces, you could have one piece that’s funny, and then the next piece is super sad, and the next piece is bitchy, and the next piece is wry or nostalgic. And every piece can be its own thing, and the next piece can be completely different.

I wanted to move really rapidly through the emotions and to give the reader the thing that I feel like is a pleasure, where your heart is expanded a little bit through reading. And I tried to make sure I spaced the one-sentence ones throughout the book. And the married love sequence, I spaced that throughout the book. That was the kind of thing that guided me. But every time I cut a piece, it was like Jenga because I had to re-order the whole thing. It was so complicated.

TFR:

What is relationship between domesticity and art for you?

Fennelly:

My focus on domesticity here is in reaction to writing a very high stakes, deeply researched, historical novel [The Tilted World] where, if it failed, it would’ve been really bad for our marriage, and our egos, and our kids. After looking through a character’s eyes for so long, I started looking at my own life, and instead of doing research, just working with memory, which is really fascinating to me anyway. I think in a way when I was growing up, female novels were supposed to be centered in the domestic in a way that really was reductive. On the other hand, I’ve always thought that’s where so much of our important work as humans is coming from. It’s a pretty strange decision to say, “Well, this is a domestic novel,” and have that be a pejorative term. And so actually finding everything . . . love, and terror, and misery, and humor . . . finding everything that can come out of the domestic was really fun.

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Visual Haiku

Visual Haiku: Reflections II (Visual Poem No.60). Triptych, Archival Inkjet Print on Rag Paper.

The photographs in these “visual poems” were taken with a Holga toy camera in the Far East; they represent research undertaken into Chinese and Japanese aesthetic principles and traditions of representation. The elements and principles of art have been used to translate the characteristics of Japanese short poetry – such as economy and the linking of dissimilar things – into the syntax of visual language. As wordless artworks, however. the poems consist entirely of the associations and allusions suggested by the images; the viewer / reader decides the meanings as the poems are open-ended and meditative, having floated free of words.

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Five Poems from Atopia

I like to photograph old signs 
when I drive along the Emerald Coast.
“Florida Hotel: American Owned” and
“Rachel’s Restaurant” I dreamed 
a beautiful poem up by the sea but
forgot it by morning; Make America 
Great Again vs Occupy Wall Street.
We talked about extreme weather 
and the stock market in the Gulf,
the water fluctuating around the sun
and pelicans, text message alerts
for tornados and when I got home 
I googled sinkholes and clicked on
the interactive map—14 by 12 foot,
8 by 6, 1 by 1, and read the warning 
signs, maybe the doors to your house
don’t close, maybe there are cracks
in the walls, maybe there are depressions
in your lawn, now imagine a bed
and furniture instantly falling into
the lawmaker’s hand holding up a piece
of limestone talking about an amendment
which will outlaw fracking in Florida forever 
“I’ve changed positions,” she says, “Look
at this limestone. It’s fragile. It’s porous”
and wishing I remembered my dream
of the sea by the sea, the dream enclosed
in the bulb of the sun, my body
covered by seawater, “It was almost
like there were colored rings around
the sun” your dad, the archaeologist, said
and driving home, the eye-level pelicans
and their prehistoric flight, seemed
calm, the bridge both flowing into
and forged by the metallic clouds
—
Philomel, lost cause, not quite, operatic as doves
 the oatmeal is cooking this morning and it will be a long
hurricane season from June
 to October, that season of hell as we approach
 an apocalypse, as showers fill the heart unable

 to process what is happening.
 Alone in your cabin, the outside world
 has a tongue, has words, scrolled
 and scrawled along the ridges of the bleak sky. 

 Oh Philomel, I have no pictures to post, no landscapes
 to paint, my song is sung in vain, and it is composed 
 of rubble. Fear not, Philomel.
			
Now the oatmeal burns inside its weeping pot
 and revenge is its own constellation of anguish,
 its own pattern of swallows moving across
 the luxuriant atmosphere.

 Personal history? What can we really
 make of it after so many years? 

 The metal bends, the apartment saturated with ash.
—
Our masters shift; this is the definition 
of domination
Still, Esmerelda, if you would like to take 
a dip in the filthy lake, I’m game 
and if you still have the impulse to be mesmerized by love,
I’m down for that too

I can even transform into a nude before your very eyes 
I promise
I can become just like a painting of paradise from the olden days

We could do this for a little while
before we have to go back to work again

inside the impenetrable flesh factory
where the meat screams

even though it is already dead
I’ve never known why this is 

Why does it scream night and day?
Maybe because it has no identity 

Esmerelda, they want our blood because 
they must know how sunny it is

how, long ago, we fed the horses and wept and sang 
by the fireplace; they must know

that we had such intense passions, 
that we thought the grasshoppers

eating the yellow fields were beautiful

and we looked at both the creatures
and the fields with a kind of awe

Our masters did not like this and our passions 
had to be held down
by a corresponding cruelty

the formal laws of the state
O the networks
of subjection are infinite
—
Read of an ICE raid:
men, women and children sent
to a detention center
in Crawfordville, Florida

Turn the page

Bought erasers, pencils and summer
workbooks for my children

This is a cell
All living things are made of cells

This is the earth
The earth is always changing

If lyric poetry is cruel, I am forlorn
at the loss of our wilderness

There really is an “anti-parks”
congressional caucus whose aim
is to shovel the plants and rocks
and trees into black plastic bags
and throw those bags into the sea

It is important to stay safe in Science
How do we stay safe?
Follow the rules and use the right tools 

The goddesses of Sunday welcome you
We bring you this bowl of peaches
and serve you with our porcelain fingers

Here is a napkin
Here is a knife

Your wife and children
are welcome too
— 
Glandular fever punctuated by tropical storm Cindy which
was a dud; many weeks of rain, the lymph nodes swollen, many weeks
of wind while my children play inside the supernova-like sinkhole,
Green tea and raw honey even though bees struggle for survival, Alex
searching for climate-controlled storage spaces, I yelled at everyone, the black
diamond and rattlesnake rattle fell upon me, I could tell you were trying
to communicate, I suspected it was your fault, seizure like substance
of air turned to current, maybe I blamed you for my illness, I knew
you were the one taking me down through this amber realm,
this dream space, fragile, filled with neurons, jammed with signals
signals from the dead, then the realm spilled into the black hole
of the summer solstice and out of the storm; O Angel, you were born.

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the crossing

we are building a viaduct

because we decided

this time,

we will not travel

underground, live in the great dismal,

drag our bodies through the marsh,

hide in the cattails.

in the plain view of daylight

above the gorge,

as high as millau in france,

our railway.

once we perfect the art of brick making,

you can decide how many are needed.

that woman over there, maybe she can

decide how many tons

our spillway can hold.

this old one with the braids

like a hive,

i hope she’ll teach us about

about steel.

she knows how to reduce

sulfur from iron to keep it strong.

look at her hands.

look at her crafted shoulders,

but do not touch unless you

are invited.

darlings, there is a job

for us too.

ours might be the gathering kind.

talkers sing like brave birds.

poets plow the top soil

dancers paint with perennials.

we will call all hands.

hurting hands are beautiful.

photographers shoot

for our annual day of remembrance.

we can alternate hosts. I’ll sign up for that.

we have all agreed, no borders. no borders. no borders.

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Sister/Brother Poems

My Sister Sings Reba at Forty-Three

for Shawna

To worship the earth, we barefoot down

to the water because we have never been

clean, and for this dirty mercy, my sister

kneels in her wet suit to the smell of surf

wax at 7 AM, kneels to the car key stashed

in the wheel well and the first open eye

full of ocean, and yes, Lord, no way around it,

my sister, today, will accept a broken nose full

of the granite reef handed down to her

by the gods of the southwest swell. By blood,

by green, by mud, by tide, my sister will be

held under by the world, but because she swans

back to the surface punched out of breath

but having survived, my sister kneels

to pray in the key of steel guitar and sunshine

to the ripped-down posters of old rodeos,

to the wet way of hay on a boot heel, to the tush-

push and the electric slide and the wide

mouthful of wild she finds while surfing

the hot highway home in the back of a golden

Ford F-150. My sister survives, and you could call

my sister the breeze these many July mornings,

but my sister does not soar like a sky on nights

when beneath the weight of the pistol

in her waist she serves with a police badge of shine

across San Francisco, for my sister must know

how a kid’s face caves in on the Fourth of July

after a firework has flown half-way through it,

and my sister must kneel to find a dead father

in the street on the double-yellow line,

to find a runaway daughter, to survive

a man standing in a creek at midnight, firing

a rifle at God. My sister knows the trauma

as water, the song as rugged, the body as sinking,

so, Lord, thank you for saving my sister who sings

with what it means to be the bull and the rider

and the war paint melting down the face of a rodeo

clown, what it means to chase a smile around

a filthy ring, yes, Lord, to chase the next wave,

or the next dance of tight asses in Wrangler pants,

or a next of kin, or the last long finishing note

of the evening before loading up the truck

with loneliness and heading home because, finally,

Lord, in the filthy bar, here we are, and, finally,

Lord, here before us rises my sister like an ocean

beside the microphone while muddy lights crumble

down dirty upon the black cowboy hats of the country

band, and by brown bottles of California mud, here, the filthy

chords are about to start, and my sister saunters up

in the armor of a leather jacket, of purple lipstick, of steel teeth,

of burgundy boots, and you who are listening should hold

your breath because my sister’s got a tattoo

of a bull on the wave of her back, and she’s going

to buck you off, and she’s going to elbow you down

deep because my sister knows how long to hold you under,

and how to save you, and how to kill you, and how to tell you

someone you love is dead, someone you love is still alive.

My Heart Is a Time Machine

Another brother’s funeral has ended,

and I must take my body back

to May of 1999

to stop the sunshine,

must begin again in our hotel room

with the girl

too drunk on Wild Turkey

to stand, the girl

hoisting a full keg

of Keystone Light

up onto her shoulder,

the girl grenading the keg

through the coffee table,

the girl leaping up onto the bed,

the girl taking three fan blades

to the face

that send her somersaulting all the way

through our hotel window

and onto the sidewalk outside.

I’ll forgive you for laughing

as my friend, Devon,

and I

and the whole room are now

because my friend, Devon, and I

are twenty-five

and high

on the same pills

which will in seven months

in a different hotel room

in a different town

whisper him into a permanent sleep.

Now that we are here,

I promise to tell you the truth—

on this night

in May of 1999,

you cannot tell anyone in this room

in these bands

with these ukuleles in their arms

and these floating festival feelings they have

put into their mouths

to stop. You can never tell anyone

to stop

anything, friends, so you must forgive us,

forgive them, forgive the drunk girl

who stumbles back into the room

and waterfalls down

another slug of Wild Turkey,

the drunk girl who only wants the drummer

to love her, and you must forgive

the drummer who never will,

forgive Devon and me

so deep into a conversation about Roger Waters

we don’t notice the anger

the drunk girl gathers in her elbow

which becomes the shining purple mountain

over the drummer’s eye,

forgive us for not noticing

when their story ghosts like a landscape painting

silently into the background

of darkness

inching toward light.

Forgive us for not laughing anymore

because is this hello or goodbye,

because it is almost morning, and I’m still

uncertain, because what do Devon and I look like,

now, leaving the broken window behind?

Dawn seems to have eased out of us

something as tender

as a full head of long hair,

and I believe we are whispering

about the opening guitar solo

of the Wish You Were Here album, now,

or the album is playing

somewhere, now, and we are

sneaking so quietly

through the courtyard, Devon

and I, as the soundmen

breaking down the festival stage

wind up their cables

like kind fathers

tying their daughters’ shoes,

as the drunk girl snores

on the drummer’s lap in a pool chair,

and Devon walks in front of me

with the almost finished bottle

of Wild Turkey in one hand

we are passing between us.

There is a joint for the both of us I am licking,

and when we round the corner and stare straight

into the Pink Floyd sunrise,

forgive me, friends,

there is always an instant

every time I am telling this story

when I get here

that I want to be the one disappeared

by light who never was

because no one wants to be what’s left over,

and what’s left of this morning?

Hello or goodbye?

I seem to be saying both,

we are almost finished, and forgive me

again for going back so often, my friends,

but I need you to squeeze inside

my blood and help me remember this

final sunrise in which Devon

is taking off his shirt

and letting down the blonde rainforest

of his hair and dancing

to the music that is only in his head,

and one-by-one the waking people

are coming into the field to join him,

a flock of musician women and men

dancing barefoot circles in the dirt

to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”

playing only in my friend’s head,

and my friend Devon is spinning around

silently in the center of all of us,

playing the bottle of Wild Turkey

like a saxophone,

like a last photograph,

like a parting metaphor,

like a sentimental machine

which is in very few moments

of monumental pressure

strong enough

to stop time.

Please also see our review of Sommers’ first book, The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire. Continue reading “Sister/Brother Poems” →

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Interview: Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel is the author of How the Sky Fell (1996), Girl Soldier (1996), The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999), Kinky (1997), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2001), Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh, 2009), Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), and SCALD (University of Pittsburg Press), out in early 2017 after this interview was conducted. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013.

In this interview, we focus on Blowout, that rare poetic collection that expertly bridges the distance between the earthbound and the abstract. The pieces are utterly approachable but still manage to surprise in their perception. Duhamel distills decades into the moments that most inform the path from childhood love to the adult dismantling of those early aspirations, sparing no one, least of all herself, along the way. We are also happy to share three new poems by Denise Duhamel here on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

I just want to say that I enjoyed this book so much. I identified so much with what you said, which is so rare. Reading, you may think, that’s beautiful, but you don’t necessarily see yourself in other people’s work. But with so much of what you wrote, I thought, I have had that experience. When you were writing, did you have an idea that you would speak to that feeling, make those connections with readers?

Denise Duhamel:

No, in fact I thought, like anybody who goes through a divorce or bad breakup, that my situation was so particularly weird and worse than anyone else’s, kind of over-dramatic about it. I thought it was such like a midlife story, but love is love and being betrayed is being betrayed whether you’re seventeen or ninety-nine.

TFR:

I also wondered if you made a conscious choice to talk about things that were a little bit more every day, down to earth.

Duhamel:

I had a friend say “When you write, you have God and a banana, and then there’s a whole world in between.” So, for me, the god, the abstractions, I’m not really interested in that much. I’m really more interested in the day to day and how we get through these things, and using pop culture or using our friends, or reading bad self-help books, whatever it is that get us through. I was more interested in that than a big statement.

TFR:

Given the times we suddenly find ourselves living in, is there even more pressure to write in the moment?

Duhamel:

Yes, absolutely. I was thinking so much about how my next book, which is not out yet, is going to be called Scald. [The book came out in February 2017, after this interview.] It’s about feminism and it’s dedicated to three different great feminists. I was so in the zeitgeist of a Hillary Clinton presidency and women, and now I feel so unmoored. But I’m so glad I wrote it when I wrote it because, while I wasn’t thinking of Hillary necessarily when I was writing it, I felt this movement towards women and the feminization of power and saving the planet. Now, we really have to stay in the moment and not stick our heads in the sand. I mean you may have to stick your head in the sand for a week to survive, but then we have to come out strong.

TFR:

I felt like I often heard people say, “We are having more conversations about race during Barak Obama’s presidency and we will talk more about gender with a female president.” Do you feel like we will talk more or less about gender given the president we ended up with?

Duhamel:

He’ll talk a lot less about gender and even his wife will say less. I was reading something just this morning about how she wants to be more like Jackie O. It’s so retro and cultural regression to the max, right? She really wants to go back to the 1960s pillbox hat and not even say anything. We are in big trouble, but I also think because this election is so egregious and Clinton didn’t lose to a man who was moderate or even a Mitt Romney or John McCain, she lost to a misogynist who calls women the worst possible names, I think women are not going to give him a pass. We are going to come back strong, especially since we had a taste of what could have been. I can’t imagine women going, Oh well, we’ll let it go.

TFR:

No.

Duhamel:

I think we’ve been letting it go for decades and centuries and I don’t think we can let it go anymore.

TFR:

I think that’s also what I admired about your book. You didn’t let it go. You talked about it.

Duhamel:

I gave a reading this morning with Catherine Bowman who had this wonderful poem about going through a divorce and then going back to etiquette books and Emily Post. Emily Post had this weird quote about how when a woman is going through a difficult time, like her husband leaves, the worst thing she can do is mention it because that’s not ladylike. But the realities of our everyday lives can be powerful and help us connect even if we think we’re the only ones going through it. If you put it out there it’s very possible that a lot of people will be nodding, oh yes, me too.

TFR:

I had wondered–since you had a poem talking about a new friend who wonders if you steal stories from people–whether you found that people are more concerned they will end up in your poetry, or more interested in ending up in your poetry.

Duhamel:

It’s very funny. Even though Blowout is very memoir-esqe, I think every time you try to write a poem you’re going towards a bigger truth than the truth of what happened on this day. You have to always be fabricating. In some ways people like to think they’re in the poems when they’re not or think, I can’t believe you wrote about me. And I think, no I wasn’t writing about you or vice versa.

TFR:

Are there certain poems you run by people prior to publication?

Duhamel:

Yes.

TFR:

Have you ever then not ended up publishing something based on someone’s reaction?

Duhamel:

No. It’s only if I’m afraid I’m going to hurt someone, which is so female. I don’t think men think like this, but maybe they do. I would never want to intentionally hurt an innocent party. It’s my reaction to what happened. The people or villains in the poems have their own side of the story.

TFR:

You have a couple of poems in this collection where the speaker is much younger. What do you think it is about pre-adolescent love that lingers?

Duhamel:

Especially when you go through a divorce or a really bad breakup, you kind of have to ask yourself, it’s got to be me on some level. It feels like you have to at least investigate that, so I found myself going back to a boyfriend I had in kindergarten who I wanted to do things that he wouldn’t, or a painter that I knew on the lower East Side, and these patterns of disappointment. That was really fun to do actually.

TFR:

The fourth-grade boyfriend was good.

Duhamel:

Right? You finally get someone who really likes you and you just miss him for whatever reason.

TFR:

The book isn’t completely chronological but there does seem to be a lot of forward movement. Did you work in some purposeful chronology to the book?

Duhamel:

I did. I tried really hard because I didn’t write the poems in order. When you put a book together you’re just kind of culling from poems you’ve written over a span a time. “How It Will End” is the first poem, so you think it’s going to give away the ending, which it both does and doesn’t.

TFR:

You had mentioned in one of your poems becoming a Reverend of the Universal Life Church, which I did as well.

Duhamel:

All right. [Exchange of high fives.]

TFR:

You talk about it being appropriate, having been divorced, but I wondered if you thought being a poet also gave you a special ability as an officiant, someone who could produce ceremony.

Duhamel:

I didn’t think of it like that at the time. I was just doing it to help my niece who didn’t want a traditional religious wedding, so I said I would do it. I had another friend who had done this, and you did it. It seems like a poet thing to do. I have to say, it’s almost like you put on the cloak of that official and you get all this wisdom. One of the women at the wedding had just lost her sister and she was my age and her sister died of cancer and she was crying in the bathroom with her daughter and then the daughter said, “Talk to her, she’s a reverend.” And I thought, oh no, oh no, oh no, but I rose to the challenge, and I said your sister is with us now. Don’t ask me how I said that, but she was comforted. So, I think there are these roles that we can play. I don’t know if her sister was there or not, but I felt like I’m going to comfort her and I did since I’d taken on that role

TFR:

You have to wonder the reaction if the daughter had said, “Don’t worry, there’s a poet here.”

Duhamel:

That would be the best, if they said, “Go talk to a poet. They see the big picture.”

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