Walls and Mirrors: Enacting the Howls of War A Conversation with Deborah Paredez about her newest poetry collection, Year of the Dog

Deborah Paredez is a poet, ethnic studies scholar, cultural critic, and longtime diva devotee whose writing explores the workings of memory, the legacies of war, and feminist elegy. Her latest book, Year of the Dog (BOA Editions 2020), is a Blessings the Boat Selection, Poetry Winner of the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award of Poetry. It tells of her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.

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Tiffany Troy: Could you introduce yourself and talk about the history leading up to the writing of Year of the Dog?

Deborah Paredez: I am Deborah Paredez and the author of Year of the Dog. I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and read Trojan Women for the first time. I became completely enamored with that play and obsessed with Hecuba in particular. It was around that time when I became aware of the silences in our home around my father's participation in the Vietnam War.

In some ways, my understanding of myself as a poet was tied to the experience of being the daughter of war and tied to the tradition of feminist elegy. The motif of Hecuba crying out plays itself out in this book and it took thirty to forty years to write the book that in some ways I had been meant to write from the beginning.

Tiffany Troy: How is Year of the Dog a book “with and not just about your father”?

Deborah Paredez: In my childhood, because there was so much silence around the war, I often sneaked into my dad's closet where he stored his photo album from Vietnam. I would pour over these photo albums like a kid reading Playboy. I knew instinctively that perhaps answers to the questions hanging in the air about my household could be found in these photos.

Even though I thought I was being sneaky, my family knew. Many years later, when my family was cleaning out the house my mom said, “I'm going to send you these photos that I know mean something to you. You can scan and then send them back to us.” So I did. I realized these photos held a very important archive not just for my father's experience, but also of Latino participation in Vietnam. This experience, in turn, has historically been and continues to be documented incompletely. As a result, I wanted to engage deeply with those archives and to co-create this work with my father. I understood that we were co-creators of this work since he was the photographer whose work I was engaging through my poetry.

On a literal level, I asked for permission to use my father’s archive. Being “with” my father, as opposed to “about” him also had a political meaning. It meant carrying a sense of reverence for him and his story from the perspective of the daughter, as opposed to transforming him into an object of study.

Tiffany Troy: As a poet, it always felt clear to me that the stories of the Vietnam War are told through your lens as you father’s daughter. How was the process like, weaving personal artifacts with iconographic images of war at home and abroad?

Deborah Paredez: Finding my father’s photographs was important in a number of ways. One aspect that really mattered was that the photographs were in the same medium, photography, by which we have often come to know about the Vietnam era. The Vietnam War was the most photographically-documented war because reporters had unrestricted access to combat. As a result, the reporters brought about those images that we saw on the nightly news with images of the dead. These images ultimately fueled protests against the war.

The photographic image, however, has in many ways over-determined our engagement with and our knowledge about that war. I was interested in defamiliarizing the photographs for the readers/viewers. Even as the photographs document, they have also inured us to those horrors. I wanted to re-familiarize us all with these horrors through an aesthetics of fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition, echo, etc. I wanted to implicate the history and stories that iconic photographs of war tell by buttressing them against my father’s photographic archives to expose the racialized terms of inclusion, to foreground the often overlooked Black and Brown experiences of war.

Tiffany Troy: That triptych with Mary Ann Vecchio in the middle and buttressed by the arm of the “napalm girl” Kim Phuc on either side definitely challenged my understanding of war through the archive. What guided you to juxtapose photographic fragments and how do your father’s handwritten photographic captions fit into the iconography of the stories you're weaving together to allow us to view the Vietnam War anew?

Deborah Paredez: I was very much guided by a poetics of fragmentation in bringing down iconic photographs to an arm, for instance. I juxtaposed the images through resonance or a kind of image rhyme visual rhyme or by images that are stitched together so they exposed the seams of each other. We knew the rest of the picture and implicated ourselves in our familiarity. I also wanted to show that there was only so much I could reclaim in excavating my father's story and the stories of soldiers like him. There was a partiality—in all senses of that word—because I was speaking as the daughter of this experience.

Using my father’s captions that he scrawled on the back of some of his photographs was important because of the way by which we're trained to understand the photos. I wanted his voice to be present and handwriting always implied the presence of the body. I fragmented and excerpted those captions so that as to foreground the sense of partiality, the elusive subject that was always present in this work.

Tiffany Troy: You made sure that your father's face did not appear in the collection. Why?

Deborah Paredez: It's important to always interrogate our attempts to represent the other, whether that other is my father or Kim Phuc or Angela Davis, and to understand the power dynamic between the writer and the other. For me, it was to present while emphasizing that I can only ever grasp partially my father’s experience. As such, preserving his privacy and rendering his own subject preserved and inaccessible to me and to us is important.

Tiffany Troy: How do you use songs and howls to add texture to your collection?

Deborah Paredez: In a very early version of the poem “Hecuba on the Shores of Al-Faw, 2003,” a sonnet, I realized I was being a little too tidy because I was trying to preserve the 10 syllables per line. Tinkering with the poem helped me realize the ways in which the book had to reenact the indecipherable howl.

I tried to do that in the final poem in the collection, the untitled concrete poem that repeats and fragments the final lines of the second poem in the book. I hoped to leave the reader with a "pang led" howl, wanting to require the reader to make the sound so that we're all heaving together, so that we see the limitations of language.

We also see the howl in “Year of the Dog: Synonyms for Aperture,” in the howling of “O—H—I—O—I—OH—OH—OH—” and in the Janis Joplin reference in "Self-Portrait with Howling Woman."

Tiffany Troy: Year of the Dog is the product of meticulous research. Turning to the specific example of the Edgewood Elegy, what is the nitty gritty process like?

Deborah Paredez: The nitty gritty is always boring, being the nitty gritty. Writing the “Edgewood Elegy” was difficult because Black and Brown people’s relationship to documentation has always been overdetermined yet un(der)-documented within the larger US imaginary despite having served in high numbers proportionally in the Vietnam War.

When I was writing Year of the Dog, Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” came out. Black and Brown soldiers are almost nowhere in that multi-episode documentary. Part of the reason we remain undocumented even in the most valorous moments, is that during the Vietnam era, Latinos were still (mis)characterized racially as White. Researchers literally counted the Spanish surnames in the casualty list to get a guesstimate.

Fortunately, in the Edgewood case, there was an actual monument in San Antonio documenting the names that the community could document. I poured over those names, plugging them into governmental and other databases. One site listed Vietnam War veteran casualties and whatever additional information that the site could collect, like if they were a Corporal or what unit they served in, or if they had siblings.

While there were many pockets of no information, I wanted that poem to capture both the absence of these men and the absence of the documentation and my struggles to attain that so that is how that poem came about.

Tiffany Troy: How do the three epigraphs set up the realities, narratives, and mythologies of the three sections that follow?

Deborah Paredez: The epigraphs very much provide a Venn diagram for the book.

I wanted the quote about Hecuba from Ovid’s Metamorphosis to be the original mythic cry from which this book makes its echoes. I also wanted to signal that while the stories of people of color I tell may appear very regional, it is a tragedy or story worthy of the epic treatment. In Adrienne Rich, I find a feminist committed to bearing witness to experiences that may not have always been hers. Her explicitly feminist ideology and feminist poetics was important in my own upbringing as an unabashedly feminist poet. June Jordan speaks to the very particular experience of racialized subjects. In her case, speaking about Black communities, she insists that we respond in ways that correspond with the scale of our tragedies. Within the context of this country her insistence that we are beyond time for being reasonable echoes through all three epigraphs. In these senses, all three of them are about that howl, which set the tone to guide readers into the mode that the book would register in.

Tiffany Troy: The second section speaks of Kim Phuc’s extraordinary and one-of-a-kind story. How do you bring yourself and your culture into her story?

Deborah Paredez: As a work of documentary poetry my book is invested in exposing the ideological work that photographs and other official archives do. In its aspirations toward feminist elegy, it is also invested in exposing the gendered terms of war imagery. In the collection, I explore the ways in which “othered” women, whether they are Black, Vietnamese or the teenage runaway (in the case of Mary Ann Vecchio), have been positioned in war photography, both in service of war or its resistance.

Nick Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc is exemplary of how war images often perform a kind of violence, even as we understand that immediately after taking that photograph, Ut helped Kim Phuc get to a hospital. It took a lot of soul searching to find a way to reach across time, space, and other divides toward Kim Phuc’s specific story with a sense of care and commitment to retrieving the subject from the ways she had been rendered an object. Part of it involved reading into Kim Phuc’s history. I relied heavily on a great book called The Girl in the Picture by Denise Chong, which spoke of Kim Phuc both before and after the moment captured by Ut's camera. Kim Phuc spent some time in Cuba. While there, she briefly took a trip to Mexico. In that initial trip, she was hoping to defect. Kim Phuc and her coterie visited the Temple of the Sun and while she decided in that moment that her overseers were too vigilant, I was struck by her own journey that took her to places that have particular resonance for me and my people. I was interested in having Kim Phuc be in a mythic location, both situated in and trapped by history. So I latched on this tiny moment in her own biography and did some documentary speculative work that that one does when you're a documentary poet.

Tiffany Troy: How do you incorporate Vietnamese geographies and the Vietnamese faith into the poems about Kim Phuc at the Temple of Cao Dai and the Temple of the Sun?

Deborah Paredez: I was very fortunate that a dear friend of mine, Hoa Nguyen happens to be a Vietnamese historian. She became a consultant to me about not only how to be factual but also how to incorporate certain elements with a kind of cultural specificity. I didn't incorporate very explicitly a lot of iconography or spiritual elements, or even mythic elements of Vietnamese Buddhism, aside from what Kim Phuc’s own biography engages in.

It was important to pick up on the biographical details: Kim Phuc and others were at the temple hiding out. The temple is a sanctuary that is no longer safe in the war and its aftermath. It was really important for me to begin in the temple, in the moments before the bombing, to emphasize that Kim Phuc exists before that moment, just as she exists long after it.

Tiffany Troy: How do you incorporate and refract the different identities through place names and languages other than English in a predominantly English language collection?

Deborah Paredez: Year of the Dog addresses both the insufficiency and violence of language. Hecuba was so grief stricken that she barked or howled. The most mundane or clichéd form of language, like the idiom, possess a kind of violence that is largely unseen.

With the use of Spanish and English, I was chatting with my friend, Sadiya Hartman, about the book and she said something like, "It makes sense that you would be writing about Hecuba because of La Llorona.” La Llorona was the mythic Mexican folkloric figure of the weeping woman. Until that moment, I hadn't made that explicit connection, but it made so much sense, and I was grateful for her insights. Putting La Llorona alongside Hecuba reflected my own poetic and artistic traditions. It was important for me to have the reader see that La Llorona is just as kind of mythic and as epic and important as Hecuba.

Similarly, much as Latinx communities are often predetermined in terms of language and documentation, I think of the meaning of having my last name spelt with a Z and not S in one of my poems. What does it mean to have a last name as “walls” (paredes) misspelled?

Tiffany Troy: Earlier, you were talking about “Paredez” meaning wall misspelled. You also wrote of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial becoming a mirror in the collection. How does the wall versus the mirror dichotomy play into your collection?

Deborah Paredez: The walls and mirrors idea came about in a very literal way. When I was 12, I went on a road trip with the neighbors to the Vietnam Memorial. It was the 1980’s, not long after the war, and I remember visiting the Memorial and being very moved. The Memorial’s granite was so polished, purposefully so, that you could see your reflection and were thus implicated in the losses carved into its walls. Beyond this moment, I was writing this book in 2018, which was, at that time, the year with the highest number of school shootings in the nation's history. I wanted the reader to experience being separate from the historical subject and yet included in its present-day impact.

Tiffany Troy: How do you approach talking about the way in which the women are grieving through the loss through their fathers, brothers, husbands, and family members?

Deborah Paredez: It’s definitely dangerous, right? With the mythic women, it's a little bit easier because they're not going to be so damaged by my clumsy attempt. But historical women, like Deborah Johnson, Angela Davis, Kim Phuc and Mary Ann Vecchio, among others, were women to whom I wanted to pay respect. I found that if I wrote in the second person, almost like I was writing a love letter to them. The second person, then, shows the poet genuinely attempting to reach across time and space to honor them.

Tiffany Troy: How do you both honor veterans and protestors who want out of Vietnam?

Deborah Paredez: Many veteran writers before me get at the complexities of the Vietnam War. Yusef Komunyakaa is an exemplary model of a veteran poet who both writes about his own experiences in Vietnam as a Black soldier in a way that's not jingoistic while also not dismissive of the particular struggles faced by soldiers like him.

In my collection, I wanted to show how in these imperialist projects, those who are often most devalued are summoned to maintain or expand the reach of the colonial order. For me, then, it was important to begin with the story of my mother and grandmother. As much as this book is about my father, this book is an origin story about how I learned to grieve and to shout out against war from maternal figures.

I wanted to foreground how Latino experiences, even in regards to Vietnam War, were just as diverse as White experiences. In “Self-Portrait in One Act,” which features the fascinating story of Delia Alvarez and her brother Everett Alvarez, Delia becomes an anti-war activist even while her brother is being held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Delia doesn't want to be deployed in the ways that the POW families are often deployed. She's like, “No, you will not use me that way right, because what you are doing is wrong, even as I am honoring my brother's experience there.” Delia is a perfect example of the kind of experiences that I wanted to bring to bear.

Tiffany Troy: How do you use poetic forms to challenge the propaganda of war?

Deborah Paredez: Documentary poetry is very much invested in using a poet's intimacy with the vicissitudes of language to trouble the document, whether that document is a decree, an edict, a speech or photograph. Coming out of that tradition of documentary poetry, I am invested in both troubling and generating documentation through a poetics of erasure, repetition, and idiomatic (il)logic. How do we rearrange the idioms so that they tell a different story about war and warfare? For me, this approach to poetics helped me think through and beyond the particular ways that language gets debased in war propaganda.

Tiffany Troy: In the “Edgewood Elegy,” the poem visually takes the shape of little, lined up gravestone markers. Other poems take the form of lists. Does the poem like find it's form or do you choose the form intentionally and then the contents are to come to be?

Deborah Paredez: More often than not, the poem finds its form. So, in the case of “Edgewood Elegy,” as I was trying to gain information about these casualties, I just kept coming up again and again against the silence in the archive. Part of me wanted to build a poetic monument—there was certainly an actual monument built in San Antonio—and to render within that monument the silence. I wanted to stage the monumental-ness of that silence, to insist that we disorient or reorient ourselves to acknowledge this grief, so you have to actually turn the page, to literally turn the page to see the history.

In other times, I deploy received forms, like in the opening poem, “Wife’s Disaster Manual,” which is a villanelle. The villanelle in its obsessive repetition, is ideal for the insistent instruction. I found it was a perfect container for holding Lot's wife's insistence that we stand still, and keep standing still, and still, and refuse to look away from the burning city.

As a formalist, I am interested in how form determines our way of knowing. I'm not just reverential toward form but deeply curious about finding its seams so as to undo them. Sometimes the form or the photograph need to be deconstructed, rendered, or ripped apart at times, to spill out of the frame.

Tiffany Troy: In closing, what are you working on today?

Deborah Paredez: I'm working on a work of literary nonfiction, a memoir about my life with divas and their role in my life. About how divas guided me as a Brown poet, thinker, essayist and performance critic. And about how, even though we often associate divas with kind of the singularity, divas have actually taught me to really love and be in relation to virtuosic messy women and not be afraid of them. And I’m also working on some prose poems or lyrical essays about the sea and all of the things that the sea evokes for those of us people of color.

The Funny Business of Writing: In Conversation with K. E. Flann and Jen Michalski

K. E. Flann and Jen Michalski workshopped short stories together for years as part of a writing group in Baltimore (they both hosted fiction-reading series there, as well), and they each published a couple story collections. Their latest books have taken them in different — and yet parallel ‚ directions: Jen Michalski's third novel, You'll Be Fine (NineStar Press), is a family comedy featuring LBGTQ leads, and K. E. Flann's How to Survive a Human Attack (Running Press) is a humor book, the first-ever survival manual for zombies, cyborgs, mummies, nuclear mutants, and other movie monsters. Flann and Michalski got together to talk about writing groups, persistence, and risk-taking, among other things.

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JM: Congratulations on How to Survive a Human Attack, K. E.! As someone who is a prize-winning short fiction writer, this is a new direction for you. How did the idea come about for the book? Were you anxious about writing for a different audience than say, one that enjoys literary fiction, or do you think there's an overlapping sweet spot of readers?

KF: And congratulations to you, as well, on You'll Be Fine. I sometimes still don't grasp that we are on opposite coasts after being in the same city and the same writing groups for years. It's great to mark this occasion together at long last, not least because I had the privilege of reading early drafts of your novel. It’s delightful. People are going to love it.

How to Survive a Human Attack began when my husband was watching "The Walking Dead" in the other room, and there was so much screaming. Those zombies were getting slaughtered! Someone should really help them, I thought. I wrote a short advice piece, and it was published quickly. Pretty soon, I started to suspect there were other monsters that needed help. I wrote and published a few more and a few more. And here we are.

Monsters are definitely a new audience, although I suspect a lot of us are at least part monster, even if we don't know it. I got started in the "advice" milieu thanks to the story collection, Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore, which revolutionized my thinking about form and tone. I also love pop culture and B-movies. So now I'm the horrible hybrid creature before you. I do hope there are others! We’ll see.

It seems like your trajectory has been the other way. You started with the fantastical in The Tide King, while You'll Be Fine has autobiographical elements, making it — in certain ways, at least — reality-based. How was it different to work on this book as opposed to previous ones?

JM: It's funny you mention trajectory, because when you start out with your first book, there's an assumed trajectory, in genre, in audience, in sales, but my trajectory as a writer (and published author) has been anything but an upward trajectory — it's sort of been all over the place, up and down, different mountains, even. I'm pretty undisciplined in that I write about whatever interests me at the time, because that's where the energy of the words is. And yes, my first two novels, The Tide King and The Summer She Was Under Water, both had elements of magical realism at play, and they were both serious and kind of sad in places. And it's funny, because I would meet people who'd read my books and they'd be confused, because I guess I wasn't morose enough, and they'd say, "wow, you're funny in person." Which is kind of, I don't know, weird? So I knew, at the onset, I wanted to write something a little more accessible and lighter. Something that was more attuned to how I see myself as a person. And yet, it's still a little heavy — I started working on it right after my mom died, and a mother dies in the beginning, so it still manages to squeak in a little bit of serious and sad.

Now you, you're a very funny person, and you have a lot of work out there that attests to that, in McSweeney's Internet Tendency and other places, but when we were in a writing group together, you were working on a memoir about your dog, Clark, and there was some pretty heavy stuff in it. I wonder if a lot of the variation in our work is also the result of just growing as writers and as people. Is there anything that's surprises you about the writer you are now as opposed to the writer you started out being?

KF: Ha! The same thing happened to me. With my short story collections, I had people say, with equal frequency, Wow, that book was funny and Wow, that book was depressing. It bummed me out when people told me that my books were depressing because I didn't see them that way and because I hoped to buoy people with my work, rather than make life feel heavier.

I didn't set out to write humor, exactly. I simply entertained myself writing advice for movie monsters. Then, while I was working on the book in earnest, my dad was diagnosed with advanced, terminal cancer. One night, he fell and hit his head, and he went to the hospital. It occurred at the beginning of the pandemic, when visits were not allowed. We didn’t know he was in his final decline until nearly the last moment. Thankfully, we got him home for his last few hours.

To say I was reeling would be an understatement. As soon we got home from the funeral, I started a period of composing short humor pieces that ended up in McSweeney's, The Weekly Humorist, and other places, while also continuing to work on the book. I probably needed to laugh, but there was also the element that it made me feel closer to my dad because he was so funny. I also wanted to be useful to other people who were suffering, and I wasn’t sure what else I had to offer. I have no idea if reading, for example, the eulogy I penned for Real Pants, actually made a difference to anyone. But I offered what I could. I have only recently felt emotionally equipped to work on the "serious" projects I couldn't face during that time, like the memoir project you mentioned about moving to Europe with my dog.

I wonder if it’s common to write funny stuff when we're struggling and serious stuff when we’re content. Do you find your own emotional climate and your work to have a relationship that’s more parallel? Or what about your work as editor of JMWW journal? Do you ever feel that the tenor of your own work is affected by the pieces you publish there?

JM: Wow, that's tough, and I'm sorry that you went through it. It was definitely a very fertile period for you, in terms of humor, and very bittersweet to know what was underneath the surface while you were producing those stories. For me, although You'll Be Fine did sort of mirror my life at the time and felt cathartic in some ways, most of my work is emotional prepping for the unknowns. I feel like I'm always trying to figure out how to live, because in my real life I feel like I'm just winging it. So my work is often a response to questions I've posed to myself: what if a parent died? What if there is sexual abuse by a family member? What if you could live forever? What if one's life isn't what one wanted it to be? I love that as writers we get to game out these scenarios and live vicariously through other characters and their situations, good and bad. And I love that I get to read other writers' works and respond to their characters also.

I do feel the tenor of my work can be affected by what I'm reading, but it's less emotional and more technical, more craft-oriented. Of course, it's why writing instructors drill their students to read, read, read! I love that sometimes I find the tools to address deficiencies in my own work through other books. For instance, this summer, for fun, I read a lot of Emma Straub. And although I loved the beachy read vibe (I was on vacation), her novels also helped me figure out how to be more accessible to readers through her voice and sentence structure.

Of course, another way to hone one's craft is through writing groups, and you and I are battled-tested veterans! I feel like over the past 10 years we've been members of at least two groups together! What have you taken away from being part of a writing group?

KF: It's funny that you asked about writing groups because I was just speaking to a student today about how important it is to be involved with other writers. If we see other writers only from afar, we are aware only of finished products that get published, often announced online with trumpeting fanfare. We never see (a) what didn't get published and (b) the struggle behind the things that did. This lack of information can lead to a faulty assumption that success is frequent and effortless for other writers.

Being in a writing group with you specifically has always been a masterclass in discipline. You are not only one of the most curious and imaginative people I know, but also one of the hardest working writers I know — always crafting a major project alongside smaller writing projects, as well as editing a literary journal. In pre-pandemic times, you were often running a reading series. Plus, your day job involves using your writing and editing skills. In the groups, I saw how thoroughly you revise, as well as how creatively. I remember you talking about how you wanted to challenge yourself to cut a 5000 word story down to 1000 — and you did it, which required seeing the story from a totally different angle. A beginning writer who did not have the privilege of witnessing your process might look at your five highly-acclaimed books and many published stories, and fail to grasp what goes into that.

I learn a lot besides craft and discipline from other writers when I'm in a group, too. You talked about your trajectory being all over the place, but I interpret that as creative fearlessness. You worked on a graphic novel script, at one point, and I was like, Wow! So that's how you do that? In some way, I probably absorbed a measure of your adventurous spirit, and it no doubt emboldened me to try to some new things, too. When a group works, I think it becomes a kind of organism, providing energy or nourishment to each person. I'm curious to know how you see the groups. Is it the same for you? Even though we've been reading each other's work for so long, I never asked you what the group experience has meant to you, or if the perception of their value changes over time.

JM: Thanks for the nice words! It's such high praise coming from you, whose work I have admired continually over the years. I agree completely with your assessment on writing groups. I've had the privilege of seeing early drafts of your stories, as well as many other writers, and seen the work involved in revising and revising again. In a group, you also see the life cycle of submissions, your own and other writers — I've seen writers have stories rejected twenty times but then get picked up by a high-tier journal! I remember when Roxane Gay had a blog, years and years ago when she was just starting out, called I Have Become Accustomed to Rejection, where she detailed the ordinarities of her day but at the end listed which journals had sent her rejections. It was such a brave blog, in terms of not being embarrassed by rejection but also showing how often you need to submit, to not become discouraged after a few "nos." Anyway, I love the title because, in a way, groups are where you become accustomed to rejection and the grind of the writer's life.

But the group kind of mitigates the grind as well — I always feel very excited after I attend a group meeting, ready to get back to work. Critiques constantly open new windows for you to see things in a different light, new dialogue, and I'm always so excited to respond to that dialogue. There's also the deadline of submitting something to the group that keeps one writing, if you're not inherently self-directed. I also think groups humanize the writing process. It's easy, as you said, to see someone's successes touted on social media and be jealous or depressed, but it's harder to be anything less than 150% supportive when you've had a front-row seat to the writer's journey (and all the inherent stumbles, rejections, and disappointments that happen just as often, usually more). And, in a good group, you trust the writers in it and aren't afraid, as you said, to take chances and try new things without worrying about people judging you.

I think, even outside a group, though, it's important to take chances. Sure, the publishing industry is very much about brand, about building one's platform in one genre or another, I think it's important to write about what resonates with you emotionally, even if no one ever sees it. I've written novels that are just for me, because I know I have a particular taste and the fun for me is in writing it. And I really love that you started out at the very serious literary end of the pool but now you're books about monsters! It's very brave, because humor is hard and can be just as insightful and deep as literary fiction, but then all of sudden you're not supposed to write a novel that's a contender for the National Book Award because you've been pegged as "funny." But I'm totally sure you're going to write a book that's going to be a contender for the National Book Award, so screw those guys.

After writing You'll Be Fine (which is kind of funny but also sad), I realized that novels don't have to be either "serious" or "funny." A good novel can be both, and a good novel should be both. This blew my mind and it's strange that I finally "got it" after writing some pretty sad novels and novellas. Oh, and I wanted to point out that you wrote a freaking craft book (WRITE ON: Secrets to Crafting Better Stories) right before you wrote How to Survive a Human Attack, speaking of creative fearlessness. What are you working on now?

KF: Well, one aspiration is to write a novel, something in the long-form. I tend to be full of ideas. I bing-bong from one short thing to the next. I mean, no regrets. Certainly, my short story skills provided a great foundation for other short-form work, like essays, humor pieces, and the columns that led to the craft book, and short story skills even help my work in the classroom. Aspiring novelists I teach sometimes get lost in the woods of their own narratives, and as someone with a succinct vision of plot, I can help them counter-balance some of that. But can I find within myself the commitment novelists demonstrate to one project? How is it for you working in both forms? Did one come more naturally to you? Were there times in this latest novel when you weren't sure if it would come together?

JM: I tend to keep a lot of balls in the air, working on short stories and novels at the same time (sometimes even two novels, ie, going back and forth between them when I become stalled on one or the other). I'm happiest when I'm working, and it's the process of putting words on the page, rather than the long-term goal, on which I try and focus. It's kind of like running for me, which I know you'll appreciate — run the mile you're in. However, I have a harder time writing short stories, so I admire your succinct vision of plot! 

In terms of You'll Be Fine, this novel felt pretty cut and dry while I was writing it — for once, I didn't try to make this big literary statement — it doesn't try to be something it's not. I wanted to write something that entertained the reader, and that's it. That's not to say it didn't go through many drafts to be what it became. And I was very open to criticism from all comers — I tried to recruit as many people as I could to read, and I promised myself at the onset to be very open to any advice because I wanted it to be the best novel it could possibly be and not let my own hardheadedness get in the way. 

Critiquing can be hard, though, both receiving and giving criticism. Giving criticism, there's what you think should happen and maybe what you want to happen, but what matters is helping the author get their vision on the page. Conversely, when receiving criticism, it's very subjective, with people saying, "Well, I think that character should be different" or "I don't think that's how this situation should unfold," but how much of the critique is just their personal preferences or how they would write it? Art is really hard. It's not like being an accountant. But you absolutely shouldn't forgo the critique process, because there's always some piece that will resonate with you and you never know from whom it will come. I remember working on a novel when I was in the master's program at Towson, and in my novel critique class there was this guy I just couldn't stand. You know, he was that guy. And yet in one offhand remark, he solved a huge problem hanging over the plot of my novel, so I was grudgingly grateful, LOL. So the process can be infuriating but also mysterious and wonderful — writing in a nutshell.  

Speaking of clouds, we haven't talked about that mysterious fog writers must fight through after publication, you know, how to actually get the word out to readers and convince them to buy your book in a field of 30 million others! Has the pandemic impacted your book tour plans, or the way in which you hope to market your book, or maybe some new and different opportunities have emerged in the process? You've been teaching on Zoom now for over a year, and you're such a natural on camera! I would totally go to a virtual K. E. Flann reading. 

KF: I couldn't agree more about the experience of being in a workshop with someone I find, ahem, challenging. I have seen this both as a workshop participant and a workshop facilitator. Quite often, there's someone whose interpersonal skills leave something to be desired, and yet has razor sharp insights about the other writers' stories. That's a hard combination. If someone has bad interpersonal skills and little insight about the work, we can dismiss that person's opinion. Or conversely, if someone has great interpersonal skills and great insights, well, we love that person. So in either direction, that relationship is easy. But someone who offers razor sharp insights with a razor-sharp delivery style can be tough to take. And I think the knack to receiving criticism is finding a way to hear that person and even to relish that feedback because it is direct and easy to understand, not obscured by niceties. We don't have to incorporate that feedback, but we don't have the chance even to consider it if we're not willing to listen. I've had the same experience as you have of receiving a key piece of criticism, something that solved a big problem, from someone who rubbed me the wrong way in that moment.

Speaking of big feelings, though, you asked about the post-writing fog — that period of promoting something that's finished. I'm sure you're going through that right now, too, and with so many books under your belt, maybe you can give me some advice. I'm so nervous about the release of How to Survive a Human Attack that I find it hard to focus on loading the coffee maker, let alone on writing something new. Also, I drop items made of glass and bump my head on open cabinets. It's like the Benny Hill show at my house. How do you cope?

JM: Oh no, K. E., I see you! I totally understand. And the experience is different every time you have a book out, depending on your publisher, your intended audience, what's expected of you in promotion. I always tell people that promoting your book is your second job, the one you go to after you get off work (or maybe before work), on weekends, on vacation. You have to keep your book out there, make it feel inevitable in people's lives (and bookshelves) while at the same time not turning people off. It's almost an impossible equation, and people tend to scatter to two opposite poles — those who are too timid, embarrassed even, to promote their work and those who are the marketing equivalent of a flamethrower, piling it on everywhere and anywhere. I tend to fall into the former category (I literally cringe sometimes before I hit the post button to share something), but at the end of the day, the only person who really cares about your book (unless you're Stephen King's agent) is you. No one else is going to do it for you, and although you may have varying levels of help, it's up to you to make the case for your work. 

And you should promote it how you're comfortable (or to the edge of your comfort zone). I know someone who only visited book groups — for his debut novel, he scheduled visits with 50 groups! Other people might not be able to handle such repeated intimacy, and maybe online marketing is better for them. Maybe you do a lot of giveaways. For my first novel, The Tide King, I did a lot of readings — I visited bookstores, colleges, reading series, classes, and a few book groups. But I found that I didn't sell many books that way, or I couldn't figure out which venues produced book sales. Once I had an event of 50 people, and nobody bought a book, and another event, 6 people showed up and I sold 6 books (weirdly, they were all bought by the same person — I always wondered what happened to her). It was then I realized, unless you are a highly industry-supported author with some Reese Witherspoon movie option, your book's success is really a crap shoot.

Which was kind of freeing! There's so much you can't control, from how the publisher promotes your book (eg, either spending tens of thousands of dollars on your campaign or giving you a stack of bookmarks and wishing you good luck) to a 2-year pandemic that obliterates family, friends, and book tour. So this time I didn't set a goal for the "success" of my book. I literally don't have any expectations. There was a time when I was extremely worried about being a "successful" author, and it really was depressing and an awful strategy for maintaining a healthy self-esteem. Now that I'm older, it's not the most important thing in my life anymore, thank goodness. (I still have "I'm such a failure" days, but that's sort of like a colonic for my soul.) Being healthy, the people I love being healthy, and trying to have fun amidst random body pain are much more important. Plus, you get to define what makes you a "successful" author. I'm happy my book is out, I'm happy I wrote it, I'm happy that strangers so far seem to like it, and that's good enough for me. 

This was a long way of saying, I think as long as you're genuine, people understand, and they're not going to roll their eyes when you've posted for the 50th time on Instagram about your book. It's a hard job, I have an instant soft heart for every post I see on social media of someone hawking their book. Also, I hope everyone buys your book — you always make me laugh, and having your book is like having you make me laugh whenever I need it! At any rate, if I may quote myself, you’ll be fine.

KF: This is reassuring to hear, Jen. I’ve appreciated the advice (from several corners now) to do as much promotion as one is comfortable doing. I mean, if we took that advice too literally, we might do none? But I think the point is that there’s an endless amount one could do, and at some point, we have to say, Okay, I’ve reached my capacity for now.

I wrote the book out of an urge to make people happy. Life is hard, especially now, and what can you do sometimes but laugh? Yet, out of that urge to buoy people in some small way, I’ve ended up the recipient of support from so many people in the literary community. It’s enough to make you think humans are actually all right sometimes.

To Shoehorn a Cat: A Conversation with Reese Conner

Reese Conner is a poet, teacher, and winner of the 2020 Cider Press Editors’ Prize Book Award for his debut poetry book, The Body He Left Behind. His work has appeared in Tin House, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Barrelhouse, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. His writing has received the Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Mabelle A. Lyon Poetry Award, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Reese teaches composition and poetry workshops at Arizona State University.

I first met Reese in 2012 in Tempe, Arizona, where we were both incoming MFA Creative Writing students at Arizona State University. In the years since, I’ve been fortunate enough to have Reese, not only as a peer, but as a trivia teammate, Dungeons and Dragons comrade, and breakfast buddy. It has been a pleasure to see Reese grow as a poet in the time I’ve known him, to see his work become more biting, more introspective. I admire Reese’s ability to mix humor and earnestness, for his ability to look at what others want to turn away from. You can preorder The Body He Left Behind, a heartbreaking book of poems about cats, grief, and the ways we love, from Cider Press or your local bookstore.

*

Dana Diehl: We’ll start at the obvious place. What, for you, makes a cat such an enticing subject for a poem?

Reese Conner: Firstly, and I cannot stress this enough, I actually like cats. Let me tell you, actually liking cats did some hefty lifting when it came to writing a book chiefly about cats. The truth is I struggle mightily to simply start writing a poem, which I understand is a common issue for writers, so I don’t imagine myself unique. One way I found to combat that looming failure-to-launch was to shoehorn a cat into every piece I could because it created an immediate investment for me — I cared about the cat, so it made it easier for me to imagine the reader caring for the cat, too. That, in turn, made it easier for me to imagine the poem being successful and, therefore, worth writing.

Secondly, cats acted as vehicle to tackle some pretty big abstractions. For example, I was particularly interested in the ways we prepare for, encounter, and react to grief. The dying or death of a cat allowed for a general exploration of grief, yes, but it also led to questions about what we are allowed to grieve, how much we are allowed to grieve, and who is allowed to grieve. In one poem, “The Necessary,” I make this quite explicit by ranking griefs in order of importance. The point is not that an objective measurement of griefs coming from an external source is actually valuable, rather the point is that the ranking of griefs is a powerful, tacit thing that we already do. And that becomes wildly hurtful when one’s internal, subjective measurement of a grief does not align with where others think it ought to be. In particular, this comes into play with the father in the poems, who deeply loves his cat but does not feel comfortable mourning a cat on account of traditional masculinity. Come to think of it, exploring the effects of masculinity by way of a beloved cat is essentially the SparkNotes of my book. Even though I gave you the SparkNotes, I still hope you read it, though!

DD: I think there’s this fear that in writing about pets we risk being “cheesy” or overly sentimental. Is this something you actively tried to avoid while writing these poems? Or were there other challenges you felt you faced?

RC: Hmm…this is a really good question. I was certainly aware of the risk of sentimentality because I had been warned, but I guess I never really worried about it. In fact, I like to think that I purposefully approached the sentimental because, while it is often regarded as “cheesy” and lowbrow and not appropriate in a poem, there is a reason it is so ubiquitous, right? It speaks to shared experience. It must. We have Hallmark cards and abstractions because they resonate with just about everyone. And so, since the collective “we” has a penchant for getting overly sentimental about our pets, it seems pretty valuable to explore why. Pushing that further, it seems pretty valuable to explore why it is considered overly sentimental do so, especially if it is so common. Why is it that there is a perception that dead or dying pets should not be worth the grief we give them? I’ve certainly felt it — there is a guilt associated with mourning a pet so powerfully, and, in my experience, that guilt is a reaction to the idea that it is just a cat or just a dog, again referencing that unspoken hierarchy of griefs. In my book, I guess I wanted to legitimize mourning a pet so powerfully by exploring why the sentimentality makes sense and why we shouldn’t look down on it.

DD: Please tell us about the process of writing this collection. At what point did you know you had a book on your hands?

RC: I want to preface by making clear that I do not necessarily suggest the route I took because much of it was flailing about and generally having no idea about a great many things regarding publishing.

All right, so the one talent I know I have when it comes to writing is my ability to get lost in the weeds. I am consistently proud of my moment-to-moment choices within poems. You know, diction, line breaks, the particular idea I am trying to get at, etcetera? I’m proud of those. I really pay mind to have a rationale for each of those smaller choices in case the never-going-to-happen scenario of someone publicly holding me accountable for one such choice actually happens. This means that I am pretty confident in each poem I have written because I have the bandwidth to consider a full poem at a time. Unfortunately, that talent for the microscopic seems to have adversely affected my ability to see the big picture, which made organizing all my poems into a cohesive book quite the task.

And so, my process was mostly to lean into my talent and simply focus on each poem as a standalone. There was additional logic behind this approach because the idea of ever winning a book prize and publishing a book felt impossible, so it made sense to devote my attention to publishing individual poems. I didn’t really realize I had a book until I had enough poems to make a book. At that point, I took stock of what I was actually doing in my work as a whole.

All right, to be fair to myself, I may be being a bit misleading about how little I considered a book-length work. It’s not that I had never considered what my book might look like. For example, I knew, even as I was writing standalone poems, that fathers and cats and domesticity were through-lines for my work. I also knew exactly what the first and last poems in my book would be, and I knew the important poems that needed to go in-between in order to make the narrative work, but I had the vaguest idea of where those poems belonged. Essentially, I felt overwhelmed. When I had enough poems to meet book-prize criteria, I slapped together an iteration of my book that was significantly longer and less cohesive than what it is now. It also had a different title that I consider embarrassingly pretentious in hindsight: An Expectation of Broken Things.

Anyways, at this point, a wonderful friend and fellow writer, Melissa Goodrich, offered to slog through my mess and to help me out. I owe an incredible debt to her suggestions on ordering, cutting, and even the title of the book. Truly, I cannot overstate how integral Melissa’s involvement was in making my book what it is. You should absolutely check out her fiction and poetry because she’s not just an organizing maestro, she’s a damn good writer, too. When I read through my book as assembled by Melissa, I knew I had something to be proud of (and I knew I had someone to thank).

DD: In the first section of the book, there’s a focus on the physicality of the cat: old cat made of bird bone and balsa, broken rubber bands / heavy as ball bearings. However, as the book goes along, there’s a shift to the human body, as well. How are the body of the cat and the body of the boy connected for you?

RC: I guess those specific bodies are not terribly connected for me. Bodies, in general, were an important topic in the book, though. I wanted to really wrestle with the distinction (or lack thereof) between the body and the mind, which I know sounds like pseudo-philosophical bullshit, so we can roll our eyes together. Still, I recall a time when I was young where I honestly did not consider the two things as separate. That has changed. Now, when I define “me,” I am thinking of my mind primarily. And so, I am very interested in locating that last time when I hadn’t separated the two, when my body was “me” as much as anything else. Exploring that transition as well as exploring how we often define others as their bodies rather than their minds were important considerations when writing my book.

DD: This book takes a stark look at violence, as it is inflicted both by and on the subjects of these poems. The speaker loves his cats, while simultaneously observing their potential for brutality, their propensity to kill. The speaker begins to see violence in himself, as well.

I love this line from “I Was Innocent After All”: She told me / I had been good incorrectly […]

And this one, from “The Necessary”: To be clear, he is not a monster. / He simply decided that progress / meant putting things / where they do not belong […]

What do cats, or other animals, teach us about being a monster versus being innocent? Is it possible to be both at once?

RC: I think animals can teach us quite a bit about both monstrousness and innocence, particularly regarding the nuance of intentions mattering while concurrently not mattering at all. For example, in my poem “Like a Gift,” I address this head-on when the speaker is holding his cat to protect it from the neighbor’s dog. The cat recognizes the danger that the dog poses and would likely prefer to run away, so being arrested in the speaker’s arms probably doesn’t sit too well with the cat. And so, the poem posits that at some point the cat’s instinct to run from the dog becomes an instinct to run from the speaker, as well. This, in turn, poses the question of whether the speaker is correct to “save” the cat from its own instincts simply because the speaker has good intentions and the power to impose them. If the answer to that question seems simple and that the speaker was wholly in the right, then I would offer another set of questions regarding at what point the cat loses enough agency for the loss of agency to matter; at what point micromanaging the cat’s instinct becomes a trespass; and at what point the intention to save the cat from itself becomes monstrous. Obviously, I do not think there is an easy, blanket answer to these questions, which is why I do not offer one in the poem and why I won’t offer one here. What I do know is that many people seem to think good intentions earn a clear conscience, end stop. I believe that mindset can be incredibly dangerous and is often incredibly condescending, which is why it is something I address pretty heavily in my book.

DD: What are some other obsessions in your life right now? Do you find that they influence or inform your writing in any way?

RC: This is not a “right now” thing, but I have been obsessed with movies, television, and music for as long as I can remember. Each influences and informs my writing in powerful ways. In fact, I would say that my primary mode of experiencing stories is not through traditional reading but through those other modalities. I used to be pretty self-conscious about that because I felt like I couldn’t be a strong writer if reading traditional texts wasn’t my main source of reading. I do not think this is as widespread as it once was, but there is often an elitism when it comes to types of writing and, therefore, types of reading. I wholeheartedly disagree with it, but I’m sure you’ve heard this mantra: “Those who can’t write poetry, write short stories. Those who can’t write short stories, write novels. Those who can’t write novels, write screenplays.” I have heard that exact quote in multiple workshops throughout my career as a writer, and it always stung. I get it, though. Follow that proposed escalation in quality of writing and you essentially find the converse of who makes the most money from writing. Considering that, I can understand why some would want to believe in that hierarchy. After all, you’re not going to make much money from poetry, so it would be nice to believe that it is the purist expression of the lot. So, while I understand where the cliché comes from, I adamantly disagree with it and, more than that, think its utter bullshit. Good writing is good writing.

On a lighter note, I will offer one movie, television show, and song that helped inform some part of my book.

Movie: In Bruges.

Television show: Dollhouse.

Song: “Night Moves” by Bob Seger.

DD: If The Body He Left Behind had a soundtrack, what are a few songs that would be on that list?

RC: “Independence Day” by Bruce Springsteen. “As the World Caves In” by Matt Maltese. “Father and Son” by Yusuf / Cat Stevens. “Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose)” by Joan Baez. “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin. “Divorce Song” by Liz Phair.

DD: Finally, what advice do you have for emerging poets trying to finish or publish their first books?

RC: Well, I’m not sure if I have any advice on how to finish a first book other than to write it in a way that works for you and to take every bit of advice on how to write a book with just the biggest grain of salt. There are so many “truths” about what you need to do in order to be a writer and, while I think most of them are well-intentioned, they often serve to gatekeep who gets to be a “real” writer. As a wise interviewee once said: good writing is good writing.

As for publishing a first book, I do have some advice, and you may take it with whatever sized grain of salt you see fit: submit. Honestly, that’s it. I know so many ridiculously-talented writers who are too intimidated to submit, too afraid of rejection to submit, or who just don’t quite believe the mountain of failure that happens behind the scenes for just about every successful writer. If you are an emerging writer and you have conviction in your work, submit more than you think is necessary because that is what’s necessary. Get as comfortable as you can with rejection because, unfortunately, what you’ve heard is true: publishing is a numbers game.

Lastly, and this has nothing to do with finishing your own book or publishing your own book, but I’m going rouge with some unrelated advice: urge your own ridiculously-talented writer friends to submit, too. Be the good kind of envious when they succeed and support them as fully as they deserve. 

A Conversation with Peter Ramos about His Book of Poetry, Lord Baltimore

Editor’s Note: Peter Ramos and Paul Nemser each have published books of poetry this year. Their conversation about those books is presented here in two linked posts. In this post, Paul Nemser interviews Peter Ramos about Peter’s book, Lord Baltimore. Peter Ramos’s interview of Paul Nemser about Paul’s book A Thousand Curves ca be accessed here.

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Peter Ramos’ poems have appeared in New World Writing, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online), elimae, Mandorla and other journals. Nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, Peter is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and three shorter collections. Lord Baltimore (2021), his latest book-length collection of poems, was published by Ravenna Press. He is also the author of one book of literary criticism, Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge (Routledge, 2019). An associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.

*

Nemser: So many of your poems in Lord Baltimore are about night—for example, “Night Shift,” “ Night Gown” “Night Flight. What does night mean to you?

Ramos: Thanks for these questions, Paul. I’m happy to be doing this with you.

I’m not sure this answer will make the poems you mention any clearer, but I have long had two strong feelings about night—fear and excitement. My son is now 12, almost 13, and when I was his age, I was terrified of being awake when everyone else was asleep. But in the summer of my 14th year, I turned to reading in bed, late into the night, and that solved my fear of not being able to get to sleep with everyone else. In my mid-teens, and when I could drive, I would go out with my neighborhood friends to punk and new wave clubs in the city (Baltimore), though I lived with my family in the suburbs. That time (during my 11th and 12th grades) and those first experiences of city night-life were filled with great excitement, thrilling with new, original (to me) experiences. But I have also felt fear of the evening throughout my life. I think I turned to drinking in part because of such fear. There have also been times where I was clear-headed, present and at ease in my skin when night came on, and I felt a different kind of excitement.

Nemser: “Night Shift” is about seeing and working, sleeping and waking. Night comes, “truer than time,” with its own distances, its own light:

All day it was summer, an open melon
thrumming with insects and minutes.
Now something else jumps
bolt upright, awake. Moonlight roams
for a thousand miles.

Is “Night Shift,” in part, an ars poetica?

Ramos: Yes, I can see that, and as I implied above, it’s also tied up with my personal relationships to night, especially my sober, clear-headed ones.

Nemser: Night Gown” is unusual in your book as a poem in the third person. Why did you use the third person?  You have an epigraph from Emmanuel Levinas who saw the origin of ethics in a person’s encounters with the “face” of the unknowable “Other. Levinas said, “The beyond from which a face comes is in the third person." How did you become interested in Levinas?

Ramos: I wrote that poem long before I knew about Levinas. I use Levinas in my book of academic criticism, Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge (Routledge 2019), as a lens through which to view the translation of poetry. In this poem, I saw a connection with his passage about waking up as a way of actively and responsibly making the world come to life (as opposed to not waking by hitting the snooze button, say, and thereby continuing to let the world cease to exist). The poem, for me, is thereby like his discussion of the relationship of the self to the Other, which we decide to make before reason yet out of obligation. This, too, seems like a responsible way to make the world come to life. I think I used the third person because it seemed to me like an experience that many share, one not limited to me.

Nemser: “Night Flight” closes your book with what might be a first-person experience of the Other. The Other, according to Levinas, is “infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign.” In your poem, the speaker wakes at night saying, “Do it,/ that thing, again. He goes up into the attic and encounters “a Syrofoam/ head, anonymous/ wig-stand. I knew it…. The thought of this anonymous face “prickle[s] [him],” and he thinks of a street that runs “forever. You end with these lines: “I took/ that manikin head—/ frightening white// center of all things—/ for a sign, I took/ the matter as closed. Please talk about “Night Flight. What is the “flight”? What is the sign? Is the manikin really the Other or a mock-up? What are the matters that are closed?

Ramos: I’m not sure this will satisfactorily answer your questions. Like “Night Shift,” this poem runs ahead of me, in terms of its own logic, its atmospheric, uncanny plot. And I like that. I don’t want to know, completely, what my poems are about. To me, this poem seems to have its own understanding of time, an unconventional, dream-like presentation of it. I think there’s a hint that the flight is in the present moment, away from such a sense that the matter was closed. What does/ did the speaker take as closed, you ask. I think a sense that at the center of his world (especially since childhood) lies an enticing, alluring but ominous, even terrifying, and controlling fate-like power or entity. I wouldn’t call it the Other. I guess it’s fate, in the sense that I take Emerson to mean it in his essay with the title of the same term. I hope the speaker can activate more autonomy over his life.

Nemser: Themes from “Night Shift” are explored throughout your book. “Con La Mosca” describes the experience of waking suddenly and alone in a hotel in Frascati, not far from Rome. There’s a mix of dream and half-awake excitement. A stream of short, enjambed couplets, the poem flows through a current of history and free association, but events are described as if they happened almost at once. Aristocrats play “homo-erotic footsie” in marble fountains. In the hotel bar they drink to the death of Il Duce. In the ballrooms, women wear trappings of Eros—expensive heels, powdered cleavage, puckered lips. Outside there’s celebration, “corks/ & machine guns/popping off. All of this flow seems to be powered by Sambuca with a few coffee beans—a drink known as “With the fly,” “Con La Mosca. The poem ends with music, the speaker calling out a gentle crescendo as if he were a composer:  “Piano,/ piano, mezzo-/ forte. How much of this poem is memory, how much history, how much imagination?

Ramos: I think your questions at the end work well—parts personal memory (I stayed in such a hotel once), history, and imagination. Like “Night Flight,” this poem to me presents a kind of haunting, a scratching of some invisible unreasonable itch. To me the speaker seems possessed for an intense moment, as you put it nicely, by “a current of history and free association, [by] events [that] are described as if they happened almost at once.”

Nemser: Your poems have many different ways of presenting time. In a number of short, present-tense, prose memoirs, you often describe events that proved indelible. These poems are full of period detail from the 1960’s or 1970’s. Many depict generational conflicts or erotic encounters. Could you tell us more about the inspiration for these poems?

Ramos: Yes, but I’m a bit uncomfortable with the term “memoirs” as a descriptor for these.

Nemser:

a. “Can’t Get There From Here” is  a narrative of a teenage garage band denied access to their gig at a fair because of how they look—in an old car, in “black suits and ties, hair gelled up tall. They came to be cool, but are shunted from entrance to entrance till the car gets “hot as hell. Our eyeliner stings.

Ramos: In terms of pop-culture or period detail, this poem seems connected to the early 1980s. The poem is probably more autobiographical than others in that I was in a band in my mid-teens to early 20s and we grew up near a rural part of Maryland. I can identify with the speaker’s desire to fit into a sense of his home or place even as he clearly also wishes to register his defiance of its provincialisms. But in the poem, such defiance is also lambasted for its pretentiousness and innocence.

Nemser:

b. “Immigrant Song,” is about a musical war between the speaker and his father. Son puts on high-volume Led Zeppelin in his bedroom. Father is in his own bedroom, daydreaming back to his old life in Venezuela, but the noise from the son is too much. Father slams the door and turns on the Four Tops. Then in a moment of magic, a deeper past comes alive in the remembered time of the poem, the father’s father beating a tango rhythm on his coffin wall. For generations, the men in the family have used music to “stage our frustrated coups. What else can we do? We are not kings. These have been themes for men from time immemorial: battles between fathers and sons, old and new; the immigrant’s life—being from elsewhere but living in a strange land; how the dead speak to us and through us. Do you see your poetry as part of a musical lineage that allows you to know and overthrow the past?

Ramos: I don’t think the speakers can overthrow or escape their pasts in this poem. The father in the poem is transported to his own bedroom from the 1940s and then early ‘50s, and he enacts the same kind of Oedipal revolt as his son with his own father, and so on down the patrilineal line. The older I get the less I seem to know about my poetry. In my limited experience, I feel more calm, less antagonistic in my early 50s. My father was not violent, and he never taught me to fight, so this seemed like the closest thing to the father-son agon that I could use.

Nemser:

c. “Master Bedroom” turns these memoirs on their heads. It’s a present-tense, stanza-ed narrative of hallucination in the 1960’s. “A cleaned-up country sleeps beneath Sputnik and all the crown molding. The house has iconic features of what realtors now call “a mid-century gem”—constructed for soldiers who returned from WWII and started families. The married couple in the poem, however, live in a sci-fi horror movie combining paranoia, government experimentation, and wild sex. Characters appear and vanish as if in a masque. A field mouse in the heating ducts, crew-cutted scientists in the basement working on hallucinogenic truth serum, the couple’s grandparents, the women speeding on Dexatrim.

Ramos: Much of this poem is a meditation on the houses, fighter jets, drugs and pop-culture of that period. I grew up in the wake of the Vietnam War (I was 6 when the U.S. left Saigon), and I would see images of that war on TV as a young child; my earliest memories, which go back almost to language acquisition, are of the televised moon landing (a few years after it happened), hippies, the deaths of the Kennedys (Robert the year before I was born; John F. fresh enough that it was still in the air). As is hopefully clear, my father was an immigrant, but my mother’s family goes back generations in this country, and her father, grandfather and brother were all in the U.S. Navy, so my brother and I received all these forms of mid-century U.S. culture and institutions early. We grew up about 40 minutes from Washington, D.C., and our family frequently visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum when my brother and I were young. I don’t know why these things have such a strong hold on my psyche. Like poetry, they linger, deeply familiar but a little out of focus; they continue to haunt me. I think Rilke mentions in his Letters to a Young Poet that we spend much of our adult lives trying to distill and understand our earliest memories.

Nemser: Some of your poems are like paintings of a past that still exists in the present. “Hawaiian Tropic,” for example, is a portrait of desire, sensual and sensuous in its detail, perhaps tracing the path of the speaker’s eyes and mind as they glide over beautiful women lounging by a pool. “God did I lean/ toward them—and still do—. You emphasize these movements with changing line lengths and with line breaks.

Ramos: I like your description above: “Some of your poems are like paintings of a past that still exists in the present.” I don’t have much more to say about this poem.

Nemser: Lord Baltimore is the title of both your book and its longest poem. The title has several, mainly ironic resonances; for example, the poem conjures up the English noblemen who founded the Maryland Colony, the city of Baltimore—depicted as a rough, industrial, down-and-out, dead-end place—and the poem’s struggling speaker, who is focused on memories of one hot, “wretched,” Twentieth Century, bohemian summer in the city. Who and what is Lord Baltimore?

Ramos: For me, Lord Baltimore is the city, itself, a character in the poem, alluring, brutal, demystifying, or maybe experience, itself, which can rob us of our ideals. I just thought of Emerson’s essay of the same name (“Experience”). And in some ways, maybe the speaker sees himself as Lord Baltimore, but ironically, as you imply, cynically—a clownish drunken failure who bitterly mocks himself.

Nemser: Your long poem begins with an italicized epigraph introducing the city and the life of the speaker within it. When did you write the epigraph in relation to the rest of the poem? The epigraph made me think of the beginning of La Boheme, where the young artists in a garret in Paris in the winter are burning their books to keep warm. In “Lord Baltimore,” young artists swelter in broken-down studios with bad plumbing, bad furniture, kitchen cabinets that “pulse all night with bugs. But there’s a breeze through an open window, and a view: “The rusted, industrial blocks of Baltimore” are “all smoke and unloading, 9 to 5,” and by dusk the lights come on with an eerie, inanimate beauty. The artists indulge in “high talk, inspired. They believe their whole lives will be art and poetry. Then they realize that everything is crumbling. By day they taste the dust of idealism, and by night they have “a gathering unbearable thirst. What influences were you thinking about when you worked on “Lord Baltimore”? What is the relationship in the poem among dissolution, disillusion, craving, and beauty?

Ramos: “Lord Baltimore,” as is clear in the book, is a longer sequence poem. I had written a long sequence poem a few years earlier which appears in my first full-length collection, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVOX Books 2008), a poem called “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock.” I wrote the italicized epigraph in this collection, as well as a few others, earlier as individual poems. For me, the epigraph happens earlier in the speaker’s life and foreshadows what will come.

I’m not sure I can identify the influences for that poem. I’m sorry. I wish I could. I think all of the terms you use are present in the poem. I hope I wrote myself out of that poem. It was painful to live some of it, and it was difficult to write it.

Nemser: After the epigraph, the body of “Lord Baltimore” begins with an ironic line that has the feel of epic quest: “Here begins the journey to bread. You launch into a description of hellish jobs done in the toxic heat of that Baltimore summer. It reminded me of summer jobs I had in my teens—janitor in a crematorium, washing down the walls of an airless, ten-storey staircase in a newspaper plant, scouring huge I-beams in vats of hydrochloric acid and boiling lye at a plating company. Later, when I read about journeys to hell or knights crossing a wasteland, those jobs would come back to me—the stink and sweat and the sense of unreality. Is there an element of spiritual journey in “Lord Baltimore”?

Ramos: I think so. I think the following section alludes to a kind of spiritual journey:

I got out.
Walked for years, the flames
eating my skin
less and less, dumb and dazed,
afraid but steadying, toward no place
I’d ever known.

Nemser: In your section “Wisdom Teeth.” a grueling time with family and work and drinking merges into the surgeon’s gruesome extraction of in-grown teeth. The speaker woke up in a Percocet daze in an air-conditioned room belonging to a girlfriend’s parents, and now he asks, “Why go there now, why hold on to those bloody molars, your ingrown and bone-aching twenty-something teeth?”  What do those teeth represent in your poem?

Ramos: I think that, as with the rest of the poem, the speaker feels compelled (for some reason) to go back to that period of his life, despite or even because it was painful. To me, there’s a desire to hang on to it and a self-command to let it go, the latter the healthier option but maybe requiring the former first.

Nemser: Your book often refers to music. The long poem uses lines from the Neil/ Nilsson song, “Everybody’s Talking At Me. The singer feels blind and deaf to the people around him—“I don’t hear a word they’re saying. “I can’t see their faces. He seems alien, out of place, dislocated, but he dreams of finding his place. It’s an escape into weather, into turbulence, and a mastery of them. “I’m going where the Sun keeps shining through the pouring rain. He’ll be riding winds and “skipping over the ocean like a stone. Many of the poems in your book Lord Baltimore begin with alienation, displacement, dislocation. How do the poems drive toward a place like the one where the song-singer longs to go?

Ramos: I always associated Baltimore, and especially my life in my 20s in that city, with the film, Midnight Cowboy, and that song recurs throughout the movie. The “green” cowboy goes to a huge, alienating city and loses his innocence (not that I think of myself as a cowboy). It’s such a devastating and beautiful movie, and to me, the song sounds very much like something a junkie would fantasize about, a longing to escape through his powerful pain medicine (I think I once heard Harry Dean Stanton say the song was about heroin). I’ve never done that drug, thank God. But the sense of womb-like comfort and escape seems like (to me) what the speaker is longing for throughout that poem. Does he get there? The poet isn’t there yet, but he hopes to.

Nemser: The final section of “Lord Baltimore” zeroes in on “the only thing/ you remember now” from all the drinking. Hung over, the speaker went out, and the street was lined with people evicted from their apartments. “By their own cheap sofas, gold shoes and negligee, spilled boxes of glass jewelry in the gutter—the Call-Girls,/transvestites, tall and elegant still but without their wigs, in ratty bathrobes/ out without time to put on makeup, suddenly/forced to wander the streets in broken pumps—/a few in slippers—breasting the cold bright/ morning, all of them, moving on/chin-high and stiff-lipped. This is the image that stays with the speaker—a community of people cast-out, performers only partially costumed, neither who they were, nor who they were not, but “tall and elegant still. What do these people mean to you?

Ramos: To me, they are the strongest, bravest people in the book. As such, the speaker simply cannot understand them. How did they do it, he asks, amid such desolation, loss, humiliation, poverty. I think the speaker wishes he had that kind of courage and fortitude.

A Conversation with Paul Nemser about His Book of Poetry, A Thousand Curves

Editor’s Note: Paul Nemser and Peter Ramos each have published books of poetry this year. Their conversation about those books is presented here in two linked posts. In this post, Peter Ramos interviews Paul Nemser about Paul’s book A Thousand Curves. Paul Nemser’s interview of Peter Ramos about Peter’s book Lord Baltimore. can be accessed here.

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Paul Nemser’s third book of poetry, A Thousand Curves, won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press and appeared this past April. It is a collection from a lifetime of writing poems. He grew up in Portland, Oregon where he fell in love with poetry while reading in the storage room in back of his family’s tool store. He studied poetry with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and many others. His book Taurus (2013) won the New American Poetry Prize. A chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, appeared from Mayapple Press in 2014. His poems appear widely in magazines. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harborside, Maine.

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Paul Nemser: Peter, I enjoyed answering your questions!

Peter Ramos: Let me say that I, too, enjoyed this exchange, both asking and answering questions.

I see that you studied at Harvard with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. I’d love to hear more about that. They’ve been impressive to me since I first started writing more seriously back in college. I have a funny story about Lowell.

Nemser: 

Robert Lowell

I had a writing seminar with him in 1968 in my sophomore year of college. There were 10 or 15 people in the class, mainly undergraduates (e.g., Heather McHugh, James Atlas, Robert B. Shaw), with graduates such as Frank Bidart and Lloyd Schwartz often present. I wish I had taken more notes and could remember those days more clearly.

Lowell came to class quite regularly and was on time. Though he usually wore typical Harvard professor clothes, I noticed one or two times that he was wearing what seemed to be bedroom slippers. He sat at one end of the seminar table and began talking in a soft drawl. The class hung on his every word. He was seen as the great American poet of the time.

Lowell had a large head. He tucked his chin into his collar and looked down as he spoke or looked out over his glasses. He came into class, it seemed, with a plan of what he was going to discuss. He might read poems of other poets and talk about them and about history, he might talk about writing. Then he would devote the bulk of class to student work. I found his comments to be elliptical, expressed in his personal diction, hardly ever including specific editorial suggestions. He praised things he liked and was not unkind about things he didn’t like. Lowell allowed a fair amount of student discussion in the class. 

Lowell taught me to embrace the idea of poems written in rough form—forms that might seem unpolished or full of conflict. It was Lowell who first introduced me to early English Renaissance poets such as Wyatt and Raleigh and who led me to study Donne’s language and form. He also talked about writing drafts in strict form, then cutting them back to tighten them, freshen them, give lines an explosive force. Another point that stuck with me was Lowell’s remark about ambition. He said that many people can be good poets; only a few can be great poets; but you can’t be a great poet unless you try. For better and worse, this encouraged me to take bigger risks in my poems and take on hard, perhaps unattainable goals.

Elizabeth Bishop

I took Bishop’s poetry writing seminar at Harvard while doing graduate work in 1975. The seminar included both undergraduates and grad students. In 1975, I had read and admired her poems, and I had heard a lot about her, so I was eager to meet her. In class, she seemed very restrained—in her dress and appearance, her polite manner, her punctuality, her unassuming ways of talking, and the conscientious precision of her words. She kept to herself. I didn’t get the sense that she enjoyed connecting with students. She warmed more, and seemed pleased, when talking about animals.

Her writing was so strong and flowed so naturally. Her poems were models of how to observe the world closely and to write well from the beginning of the poem to the end. She conveyed this by assignments that sometimes involved a particular form, but also could be to imitate or answer another poem or to write about something specific or in a defined voice. Her comments on our poems and her fuller comments on poets she admired got across that poetry could emerge from care, precision, honesty, and really attending to what was there.

In the early 2000’s, after a work trip to Rio de Janeiro, I wanted to see Samambaia—“fern”—where Bishop had lived with Lota de Macedo Soares in the mountains near Petrópolis. But when I arrived, the front gate was locked, and there was no one to let me in.

I’d like to hear your story about Lowell.

Ramos: I had a psychiatrist in Baltimore back in the 1990s, and he told me he was an intern at Bowditch Hall (in McLean Hospital near Boston) and this wild-eyed guy with tousled gray hair named Robert Lowell was admitted. Apparently, Lowell was telling everyone that he wanted to speak with the president. No one believed him (not surprising—the patients there made such requests all the time). Somehow someone relented and gave him the phone. He immediately dialed the White House and spoke with John Kennedy and Jacqueline, whom he knew, of course. I asked my psychiatrist what the doctors did after that. He told me they revoked his phone privileges. 

I can picture the whole thing, though I never met him. I’m envious that you got to study with such famous, great poets.

Ramos: A Thousand Curves seems neatly divided into a number of themes or topics: a section with a speaker who is growing old and still very much in love with his partner; a section that seems to deal with a speaker’s relationship to his (I’m just going to assume that the speaker in many of these poems is a man, but there are exceptions) Ashkenazic family going back through generations (another assumption, and please correct me if I’m wrong); a speaker traveling and/or entering foreign lands, etc. Given these clear distinctions, it’s tempting to think you wrote these poems with themes in mind, but I’m also stunned by your original and powerful images, phrases and language—“Tree wings furl upward higher than birds” (from “Current”); “Chitters drown the radio jazz” (from “Song Over Song for My Father”); “Wasps fly at our teeth but miss and freak the screen” (from “End of the Century”); I could go on and on—which makes me think the poems began with these (images, phrases, language). I want to ask, did you write them from an idea that you then developed, or did you write them from the inside out?

Nemser: Almost always inside out. Usually, I just start writing and see where the poem leads. A poem might launch from anything or anywhere—experience, memory, dream, something I’ve read, a film, a song, something I’m thinking about, often something I can’t explain. As a result, editing is equal parts tightening, heightening, cleaning, but also letting the subject reveal itself. This can take years. All that said, life generates topics. I’ve been married to one woman for 47 years, so I frequently write about her and our connection over time. Also, some poems begin in response to other poems of mine, and if the response works, I may be on the road to a theme.

You’re right that I’m from an Ashkenazic Jewish family—from Russia (now Ukraine) on my mother’s side and from Poland and Lithuania on my father’s. My grandmother often talked about her life in Chernobyl. They left in 1913. My parents were born in the US, and my maternal grandparents, my parents, and I lived near each other in Portland, Oregon.

Ramos: I’m impressed by the way the poems in your collection travel through time and allude to ancient or elemental or enduring things—seas, the moon, love, the natural word, as well as Aubades—and things more current and/or part of American pop culture—popular bands and songs from the last 4 or 5 decades, including songs and albums from The Ramones, U2, as well as jazz tunes. I guess that’s less of a question and more of a statement. I’m a musician, and I’m interested in your relationship (in your life and in your poems) with music.

Nemser: Those ancient things are still here, still marvelous, sometimes in reach. So it’s no surprise that seas, the moon, love, nature, and waking in the morning show up in pop music and jazz—in every kind of music. I love music. No one in my extended family had voice training, but everybody liked to sing, the older people in Yiddish. I remember listening to Burl Ives when I was quite small. At five or six, I started listening to rock and roll, especially Little Richard and Elvis, and then doo wop. My parents listened mainly to standards—Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, and on TV, Perry Como, Dinah Shore. And they loved Broadway show tunes. I played violin for about ten years—classical music and Yiddish songs. I quit early in college. My girlfriend in college and graduate school was a violist who taught me a lot about classical music. My wife loves “early music,” especially Baroque opera. My son sends me to great music—usually popular music—that I didn’t know about before.

My musical tastes have always been eclectic, but here are examples: Bob Dylan, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Child Ballads, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Yiddish songs my grandparents sang, surf music, soul music, Chicago blues, British invasion, Leonard Cohen, Donna Summer, The Clash, U2, Buena Vista Social Club, Prince, J. Balvin. In the 1960’s, my father listened to a few Bossa Nova records over and over. Decades later, working in Brazil, I fell head over heels for classic samba, Bossa Nova, Tropicália, forró—and more.

Many of my poems were written while music was playing. I love song lyrics. Songwriters can be poets, and poets songwriters. The Child Ballads are written-down songs. Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge (among many others) wrote with song in mind. Brecht wrote songs that Weill put to music. Vinicius de Moraes who wrote the words to “The Girl From Ipanema,” was a poet who wrote and sang his own songs. And then there’s Bob Dylan.

Ramos: As I wrote, you name the poets you worked with in your bio., but I’m also interested in other poetic influences. I detect some Paul Celan, especially in the Germany poems like “Letter from Berlin”: “All April first I’ve dreamt and redreamt/ that everyone’s feet are asleep.” Are you willing to cite others?

Nemser: I first read Celan in college years, and he’s been a significant influence since then, though he’s inimitable. The Bible has been a constant influence because I read it often. Beyond that, here’s an incomplete list: Homer, Greek tragedy, Sappho, Catullus; ancient Chinese poetry; Hafez; Dante; Shakespeare; Renaissance ballads and early Renaissance sonnets; Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, Marvell, Milton; Goethe, Schiller, Büchner: Edo period poetry in Japan; Ghalib; Blake and all the other Romantics; Dickinson; Whitman; Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova; Lorca, Borges, Neruda, Vallejo, Drummond; Yeats, Eliot; Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes; Brecht, Ginsberg, Amichai, Heaney, Walcott, Milosz, Hayden, Rich, Zbigniew Herbert, Clifton, Szymborska. I’ve left out a lot; notably my teachers and my friends, who have been a huge influence on me. And I admire many many poets writing now whose work gets into my head, my heart, and my poems.

Ramos: I see your collection’s title appears in a poem called “Mil Cumbres.” Did you have in mind other explanations for this title, more metaphoric ones? I read it this way, especially given the way the poems in your collection cycle through separate but related topics and then curve around, toward the end, to the speaker and his beloved who continue to grow, spiritually and in love.

Nemser: Yes, I intended the title metaphorically. We have to deal with all kinds of curves. Often the curve brings a surprise. You think you’re going one direction, and suddenly you’re going another. There are the steeps and hairpins and revelations of a road like California Route 1. Who knows what’s coming or who’s going “around the bend”? The batter expects a fastball, the pitcher throws him a slow curve.

Curves are also pleasurable. We like to look at them, to run hands over them, to touch the curves in a beloved face. The natural world is made of curves—genes, flower petals, rolling hills, river bends. And, as you suggest, curves can return you to where you started.

Ramos: I really enjoy the way the future seems terrifying, hopeful, uncertain, and potentially dangerous in your poems. In “The Origin of Yet,” the speaker notes, “For moments/ we’re out of danger, afraid of nothing—when/ a rain that had never rained begins to rain.” Yet in other poems, there’s a promise of delight yet to come. Your poem, “Aubade,” ends with this lovely image of dawn: “Dockworkers pull the morning moon up by her arms/ to watch her slither on carts, or dive to sea and swim away.” Is this also related to the uncertainty of what is to come that your title seems to connote? In fact, I’d be interested in any of your thoughts on the way the future presents itself in your poems.

Nemser: As I’ve grown older, I’ve felt that I know less and less about the world. The fragility of the present and even the past adds to my sense of the fragility of the future. It can go in every imaginable and unimaginable direction—in a line, in a circle, in curves. And when a rain that had never rained begins to rain, it could bring pain and death or beauty and delight. As I suggest in “Felicidade,” we could end up on “a small, unspeakable/ shoal of chances of drowning// in joy.”

I do believe in mathematical and scientific truth, and in the ability of math and science to say useful things about the future. In fifth grade, I read a book about wonders of math, which had a picture of Pascal’s triangle. I’ve been thinking about probabilities ever since. As a lawyer, for example, I know that evaluating likelihood becomes a habit of mind. Weighing evidence and assessing credibility are all about likelihood, and many legal issues entail prediction. I suspect that these habits of mind influence my poems and what they say about the future.

Ramos: Your “In the Alley of Perpetual Industry” nicely combines elements of the sacred and profane

Our lips and eyelids burn away,
leaving all we crack open for holy,
all we mistake for decay.”

I always associate such combinations with T. S. Eliot and Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Are there other poets you are influenced by who make such combinations?

Nemser: By the 1970’s, I was deep under the influence of Neruda. His essay “Toward an Impure Poetry” made a big impression: “Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it. A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.” My poem “In the Alley of Perpetual Industry” seeks this kind of impurity.

Mixture of sacred and profane is in much of the literature I love. Once when I reread The Iliad, I was also going to action films like “The Terminator.” The carnage in both was immense, unthinkable, yet The Iliad explored dimensions of the sacred that the action films never dreamed of. The Inferno also is a mix; for example, the predatory scenes of falsifiers and betrayers near the center of Hell might fit in a horror movie, but The Divine Comedy is undeniably an evocation of the sacred. The profane and sacred appear together in everything from Shakespeare to Goethe’s Faust to Kafka to García Márquez.

Ramos: I’m ashamed that I have never written a good love poem, but you have many in this collection, poems that present an enviable partnership between a couple that enjoy ever-increasing love over the years. Have such poems come easily (as if poems come easily!) or have you had to learn how to write love poems. 

Nemser: I first wrote love poems around the time I married my wife in 1974. We’ve always had a lot to talk about, so our love has always been involved with language, and it has evolved with language. We’re both only children, and our son is an only child. It’s a tiny family, and we look to each other. There are hard times and happier times. Both can generate poems. Poems about love are no harder or easier than my other writing, but given how my life has gone, writing love poems has been inevitable.

Ramos: These are poems of beginnings and endings, mornings, evenings, and travels that lead the speaker back to a beginning: “Here I am” (from “What I knew and What I Had to say”), or “There was no way down” (from “Mil Cumbres,” as if one cannot return from such a height without being changed, as if the truly new transforms us, the old way hidden forever): or, “the squawk circles back like a crack in vinyl” (from “Field Guide to Mercy”); or “the god of endings hangs on his hinges” from “Janus”). Are these departures and arrivals themes you have consciously meditated on in your poems, here and in the previous collections?

Nemser: I am interested in beginnings and endings. I don’t remember not being interested in them. And I’m interested in appearances, vanishings, recurrences, periodicity. I don’t consciously meditate on arrival and departure themes in my poems. My mind just goes there, as it goes to themes of transformation. I feel all those themes in my body as it ages, and I’m attracted to writings about those themes: e.g., Genesis, the Book of Job, Lao Tzu, Heraclitus.

My two earlier books do explore similar themes, but both are crazy, myth-influenced narratives. Taurus is a wild retelling of the Europa story: A bull-gargoyle in St. Petersburg, Russia is possessed by a god, comes down off of his building, roams and works in the city, and falls in love with a mysterious woman named Europa. In Tales of the Tetragrammaton, set in Portland, Oregon from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, a woman whose life resembles my mother’s is visited constantly and bewilderingly by the unpronounceable name of God. 

Ramos: I’m so impressed by the unobtrusive rhyme and poetic forms you employ in many of these poems. Is there a moment in the composition of your poems when you decide to use such forms?

Nemser: Thanks. It all depends on whether I am trying to write in a strict, traditional form—e.g., with meter and end-rhyme or with required repetition. If so, I have to make that decision at the beginning and then try to stick to the rules, nearly all of which I first learned from Robert Fitzgerald’s wonderful prosody class in college. If I’m not writing in a strict traditional form, the effects just happen, usually by process of discovery in the editing.

Ramos: In your poems that allude to Japan, do you feel like you’re channeling or speaking back to Basho and others? I’m particularly fond of “May” and “Garden with No Boundaries.”

Nemser: Yes, I first read Bashō when my high school sold little haiku books in a bookstore in an alcove between classrooms. I read Narrow Road to the Deep North and other of Bashō ‘s haibuns when I was in college. In those years I also realized that the landscapes around Portland, Oregon and landscapes in Japanese poems and woodblock prints had strong similarities—fogs, torrents, fish, frogs, big solitary mountains, bridges, blue-gray seas.

My poem “Garden With No Boundaries” is a response both to Bashō and to Musō Soseki, the 13th Century poet, calligrapher and Zen monk who was the foremost garden designer of his time. While in Kyoto, I got to visit the Zen temple called Tenryūji, of which Musō Soseki was the first abbot and also the designer of the magnificent garden discussed in my poem. It was a joy to see how harmoniously the garden’s plantings, trees and water related to the temple, the mountains, and the famous bamboo forest not far away. Only later did I learn that the animating spirit of this place was Musō Soseki, whose poems, translated by Merwin, had long been on my bookshelves. The signs at Tenryūji had called him Musō Kokushi, another of his names.

Ramos: Does your location, i.e where you happen to be living, strongly affect your poems? I understand you live in two different places, depending on the season, I imagine.

Nemser: The particular landscape and atmosphere of a place enter the images in my poems and often take them over. Oregon, where I grew up, became imprinted on my brain when I was small, and it emerges when I write about childhood. My wife and I have gone to Maine for 47 years—first on our honeymoon—and it’s a beautiful, sometimes bleak, place with amazing views—ocean, forests, fast-changing weather, encounters with animals. Love, life and death reside there. Many of the poems in A Thousand Curves are set in Maine. Finally, I’m excited by travel. It’s about the unexpected. Wandering in a foreign place, trying to speak the language, jolts me out of the world I’ve known. I feel a new propulsion—I see, feel, remember more. Some experiences are written in fire.

Connecting Through Chinese Cookery: A Conversation with James Beard-nominated author Carolyn Phillips

Forty years after she moved to Taiwan, Carolyn Phillips’s first book, All Under Heaven, was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s International Cookbook Award and her second book, The Dim Sum Field Guide: A Taxonomy of Dumplings, Buns, Meats, Sweets, and Other Specialties of the Chinese Teahouse, also came out that year. Drawn to her background and the story of her cross-cultural marriage to author and epicurean J.H. Huang, which she discusses in her latest book, At the Chinese Table: A Memoir with Recipes, I recently sat down to speak with Phillips over Zoom. 

Susan Blumberg-Kason: When you first landed in Taipei in 1976, Taiwan was at a crossroads. Longtime leader Chiang Kai-shek had just passed away a year earlier and across the Taiwan Strait, the decade-long Cultural Revolution came to a close as Chiang’s nemesis, Mao Zedong, also died. When you got to Taiwan, what did you know about the politics of the region and did you understand what a pivotal time it was?

Carolyn Phillips: I was an oblivious kid. I was just out of college and had no idea what I was doing. I didn't even know why I was really there. I wanted to learn Chinese, but I didn't know what to do with my life. I was like a headless fly with no sense of direction, as my mother-in-law used to say. So, no, I really didn't understand anything and was slowly figuring out what the world was about.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: This was at a time when the United States was in the Equal Rights Amendment era and women were no longer expected to marry, have kids, and stay home right after finishing school. What was your biggest surprise in Taiwan when it came to women's equality? Certainly your mother-in-law was very strong and you learned a lot about the women in J.H.’s family, but was there something else that showed we are all much more alike than we are different?

Carolyn Phillips: At that time it was at the very tail end of the Confucian era and still very much a stratified society where men had all the power. Women had very little say, even over their own children. As I mentioned in the book, if you got divorced your children belonged to your husband. Lots of women suffered and were expected to work for their in-laws.

So I had to modify my behavior because it would be very easy for people to assume I was a “bad girl”. I had to stop smoking and came to never drink. But I’ve always been a feminist. Going to Taiwan was like jumping back into my mother's generation where it was all a one-way street. Men could do what they wanted and women had to toe the line. But in Taiwan I learned not be judgmental and realized I couldn’t impose my views on others. I made good friends with women in Taiwan, though, and they'd tell me their sides of the story.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: Did you see changes in the time you were there?

Carolyn Phillips: Yes. I became fascinated by the feminist movement in China, particularly around the 1911 Revolution. Women began to finally gain certain freedoms and I talk about that a little in my book with my husband's maternal grandmother. Before then, women were absolutely uneducated and had zero rights.

And so I started talking to elderly women in Taiwan. In chapter two of my memoir, I talk to Professor Gao, a feminist. I read many books and tried to figure out what was going on in Taiwan, because they, too, were on the cusp of change. The courage and strength of these women is absolutely phenomenal. Women are now increasingly not marrying in Taiwan, and it's also like that in Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong, where women don't need to be somebody else's daughter-in-law and don’t need to have children in order to be fulfilled.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: Another thing I loved about your memoir is that you include gorgeous illustrations you drew yourself, along with recipes you learned from your time in Taiwan, your travels in China, and from J.H.’s family. It's really a multifaceted book, and it's going to be difficult for me to read more traditional memoirs after being so spoiled by yours. Did you plan to include illustrations from the beginning? You'd already illustrated your two other books, The Dim Sum Field Guide and All Under Heaven.

Carolyn Phillips: My publisher really wanted to have illustrations. I had originally started out with illustrations in my first book, All Under Heaven, because McSweeney's, my publisher at the time, had asked if I wanted to have photographs or illustrations. I asked about the difference between the two, and he said the cost of illustrations was much less, so I could have more recipes. So I said let’s do illustrations. And because I’m a total control freak, I did the illustrations myself.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: Were you trained in art? Your illustrations are so beautiful.

Carolyn Phillips: No, I was never trained in art, officially, although I did take lessons in painting and so forth in Taiwan. I worked at the National Museum of History for five years and we had some of the greatest artists in Taiwan. So I would watch them paint and learned from them. I always loved to draw, although my mom discouraged it. I had my Rapidographs when I was in high school and thought they were the best thing ever. I guess this sort of carried over.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: So with your memoir, it was just kind of a given that you would illustrate it?

Carolyn Phillips: Yes. They really wanted to have illustrations and I think that was part of the sell. They liked the idea that it’s unique. Not too many people illustrate their own books.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: Dim sum is one of my favorite meals. It's also that whole experience you write about: sitting for hours in large dim sum stadiums, sipping tea and chatting with friends or family. Can you talk about how you came to write The Dim Sum Field Guide?

Carolyn Phillips: I had my first great dim sum meal in Hong Kong on Nathan Road not too far from the Star Ferry. I knew this American nun who was living in Hong Kong, and she and her sister nun invited a couple of my friends and me to have dim sum. At the end, we got into a huge tussle over the bill, which of course is very Chinese. So these two white women are duking it out in the middle of the dim sum parlor and everybody's practically taking bets.

I was thrilled by the whole concept of dim sum. When you get an American breakfast with waffles, eggs, and bacon, it's delicious, but after two or three bites you wonder if you want to have forty more bites of the same thing. With dim sum you can slowly go through steamed, pan fried, deep fried, and baked, and everything is totally luscious, and I'm drooling as I speak.

The seed for the book came when I first got that contract with McSweeney’s for All Under Heaven. My editor was Rachel Khong, and she was also an editor at Lucky Peach. She asked if I wanted to write something for their upcoming Chinatown issue. And so we came up with the idea of a field guide—like a bird guide book—with sixteen different dishes. When Lucky Peach had the MAD symposium in Copenhagen, they turned the article into a little pamphlet to pass out. While I was waiting for All Under Heaven to finally get published, I wrote to Aaron Wehner, the editor at Ten Speed Press, and told him what I’d done at Lucky Peach and asked if he’d like to do a whole book on this. And he said, “Sounds cool.”

Susan Blumberg-Kason: That came out the same year as All Under Heaven?

Carolyn Phillips: It came out the same day! Only Prince and I have done that. I’m in a good company with The Purple One. It was a thrill. Ten Speed Press took over the publishing of All Under Heaven because McSweeney’s was going through some issues so they did it in cooperation with Ten Speed.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: So I have to ask this because I'm sure readers will wonder about it. Have you ever been questioned on your authority of Chinese food?

Carolyn Phillips: I've really never gotten any pushback, knock on wood. What I have received is a whole lot of love, especially from the Chinese American community. For example, there was a lady who lived in Central Valley in California and she described these cookies that her grandma used to make. But she didn’t know the name. I went through the many cookbooks I have in Chinese. When I finally found a couple of recipes, I asked her if they sounded like it. After several tries, she finally said that’s it. So if I can help somebody like that reconnect with their family, I just feel like I’m doing something right. As long as you're not approaching it as cultural imperialism and if you're doing it with respect and with love and with humility, I think it’s okay.

My role model has always been Diana Kennedy. I think she’s one of the very few white women who has actually become an expert in her field. Even the Mexican government has recognized her contributions, and she’s received the Order of the Eagle.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: It's good to think about all these things because there are so many benefits to having these recipes and these methods of cooking.

Carolyn Phillips: The reason I wrote All Under Heaven was because the foods that my husband and I loved eating in Taipei during the 1970s and 80s were classical cuisines of China—and there are many cuisines in China—that had come to Taipei. We were the beneficiaries of this and ate like kings and queens many times a week. But when we came to the States, they didn't exist. When we went back to Taipei to eat, these places no longer existed either, because the chefs were passing away or retiring. The younger people didn't know what it was they had had. I hope to not only encourage people to remember the foods and to cook them, but also to appreciate them. You can have a great chef, but chefs need to have a clientele with sophisticated understandings of what is being served to them.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: I think Americans have gotten more interested in food in the last ten to fifteen years. It’s a slow process and books seem a good way to bridge that and to get people interested.

Carolyn Phillips: It's a good beginning. Television is also a good way to go. Anthony Bourdain was marvelous in that way. He had that humility and curiosity I think we all aspire to, where he would eat every part of a warthog, or go into a village and eat whatever they served him, which is absolutely the correct attitude.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: You did everything that Bourdain was known for, but decades before, and one of the things you write about in your memoir is cooking a pig head. Anthony Bourdain would have made that glamorous but you did that for your family and friends.

Carolyn Phillips: A lot of it was to just win over my future mother-in-law because she was a real hard nut to crack. But she did love to eat, so I learned to cook the foods that opened her up and warmed her to me. That was a great stimulus, winning your mother-in-law over, especially when she was a warlord lieutenant’s daughter.

Susan Blumberg-Kason: Did any books or authors inspire you to write At the Chinese Table? And do you have plans for a fourth book?

Carolyn Phillips: I’m actually finishing up my next cookbook. I can’t talk about it now because I don’t have the contract yet. As for food biographies, there are so many wonderful memoirs out there. My first influence was M.F.K Fisher. She writes more sensually about food than anyone I know. Some men don’t like her. I don’t know why, but to me she always spoke to my heart. Even now I can remember her peeling a mandarin orange and placing the segments on a radiator so that the skins would slightly crisp up before she took a bite. That kind of depth of sensuality is phenomenal to me. Julia Child’s writings are wonderful. Han Suyin’s Love is a Many-Splendored Thing is based on her cross-cultural life. There is also Georgeanne Brennan with A Pig in Provence. I filled up my shelves with people, especially women, who went to another country and sort of lost themselves. I’m really fortunate to be on the James Beard Foundation’s Book Committee. We see a lot of really great food writing and we’re so lucky to live in this world where food writing is appreciated. Kiss a food writer!

Susan Blumberg-Kason: I just love that ending!

Carolyn Phillips: But just don’t kiss them during the pandemic.

As the poet would anything beautiful: A Conversation with Carly Inghram about her newest poetry collection, The Animal Indoors

Carly Inghram is a poet from Atlanta. Her first collec­tion, Sometimes the Blue Trees, was released from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2019. Her newest poetry collection, The Animal Indoors, is the winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize. She currently lives in Manhattan and teaches kindergarten in the Bronx.

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Tiffany Troy: Can you introduce yourself to your readers of the world?

Carly Inghram: My name is Carly Inghram. I am a poet and writer. I am interested in the intersection of nature or the earth—physical things—and the spiritual world.

Tiffany Troy: In one of your poems, you write how the poet creates a woman who never appears in real life, that of a woman dancing for money on the train, as the poet would anything beautiful. How do nature and reality intermingle with each other and inform your preoccupations?

Carly Inghram: Really interesting line that you have pulled out. I do think it’s connected to what I’m saying. Like we can use things in the material world in order to find beautiful, or insert word there or insert object of desire there. Longing, craving, etc. I think we can use physical things in the world to create what is being longed for. The process of making is a very wonderful process, allowing us to create new landscapes and new places that we’ve been wanting.

Tiffany Troy: I found the tension between material and spiritual wealth very interesting in your poems. You have female characters who do not crave for gold, but personhood. The line, “She didn’t want gold like the powerful, she wanted it like the weak” reminded me of the Christian idea of how to be humbled is actually to be powerful. How does that inversion help you underscore the beauty of things beyond the price tag placed on them?

Carly Inghram: Lol at Christianity because that’s very much my upbringing. I feel like as a gay or queer or insert word here woman, I have a strong faith background. I feel some tension there like it didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I still felt like spirituality was alive for me and has always been a part of my life. Maybe strictly to the context of Christianity and maybe more broadly. I still love the practices of Christianity which is beautiful or can be at its core but inversions allowed me to see how in a similar vein, I can create or make truth in a certain way, and maybe we can make truth as we continue to see we are all connected and belong to this world.

Tiffany Troy: In the collection you also bring forward the dancing girl emoji which really roots the poem in the present as opposed to 100 years or 200 years ago. But you also talk about womanhood and gender identities and I feel like the idea of belonging runs throughout history. How do you play with the idea of what is virtual like what can be downloaded and the real?

Carly Inghram: Reading a lot of poets has been useful, because there's a lot of poets who do similar things or play with language in interesting ways. So I've definitely learned a lot from reading. Aside from that, skills I have learned from one of my favorite poets, Morgan Parker, who came to the MFA one time and talked about how she included the Real Housewives in her poems. She did not want anything of her world to be left out from her poems. I thought that was very impactful and that idea stuck with me.

The word “downloaded” is helpful because we, as people have a lot of information that is downloaded. There is a lot of given information via apps or systems that we live in. Via friends or just via everything like living life. There is a lot of downloaded information and part of the process of making that I have learned or inherited is to download that information. A friend just said this to me and it’s been on mind. There is no proper history because history is currently happening and we are in it.

Tiffany Troy: You have a lot of found quotes where the speaker filters what she is hearing. It becomes interior dialogue between the found quote. A lot of the time, the poet disagrees with what is being said. How do the quotes find their way into your poem and how do you transform it?

Carly Inghram: I was really interested in this question because the poet is me and loosely, a lot of the poems are me-based in a way that feels story-based. We are very much in it and we are continually inventing new things about ourselves. So I feel part of me as an invention. In this place in my life, I was realizing that there were parts of me that felt less like they belong to me that belong to us. It’s not like in my present I don’t identify with some of those parts which can feel tricky and it can feel hard to encounter old parts of ourselves because it’s like I don’t want to look at that past. I think that’s part of the tension.

It can be easier for me when I encounter a new person to play and project to them what I am remembering as an old part of myself.

Tiffany Troy: How do you move from the real and the everyday into the metaphysical or mythical, like the rivers, the waves, their paths, drowning and resistance? How do you craft your poems to go into completely different realms?

Carly Inghram: Again, you are very perceptive. Many of my poems are literally moving. I write while walking, on the train, and it is just something that interests me. I used to feel I needed to finish poems in one swoop, and maybe I still do that. When I do finish the poem in a single sitting, I’ll notice that I hit the end of the thought, the end of a story, or the end of what I’m feeling. I will notice that I need a kind of beat or some sort of measure and switch into a new channel.

In a similar way to repetition, I move in and out into different realms, mostly as a vehicle of sound. My late brother was a musician and I feel a lot of my writing is inherited wealth from him. I aspire to create music the way that he did. A lot of sound play can be useful to me when I have hit a stop. I use repetition as a vehicle to enter a new place.

Tiffany Troy: How else does repetition function in your work, and by that I mean, there is amplification, there is the inversion and there’s also a way in which the number of times a word or even a line is repeated seems meaningful.

Carly Inghram: I was thinking about this question a lot because I feel like it’s related to the sound pattern of how I think but also how I grew up in a certain way.

I can recall my mom just repeating and repeating things when it’s important so a large part is definitely amplification, so if I keep saying it, it’s important. Things that feel meaningful to me or I was surprised by, like I really like. Repetition is useful in poems and in writing but also in real life, in the physical world.

Tiffany Troy: In your work there is a prose poem where you talk about the crayon color, which talks about the actual color of a thing. But it also underscores the poet as a kid before skin color was a thing. Then there’s also the idea of color as an object, as in gold chains. And color as a subject, which is the way society views Black individuals. How does color shape your work?

Carly Inghram: My use of color feels very informed by my brother’s music. He loved the color blue, which was his favorite color. This drew me to using color in my work. As a person of color, I am also aware of color functioning in that way. When I grew up, my mother was white and my father was black. From a young-ish age, I was aware that in some ways I was strange or different. My writing in some ways is always dealing with that. My writing is aware that there’s though my Black friends tell me I’m not different, there is a feeling of difference I used to feel like I had to contend or battle with.

Nowadays, I like color as another means of creation or making. But there’s also a part of me that’s aware that color has a lot of different meanings for different people and can be really loaded as a topic.

Tiffany Troy: How does womanhood and the idea of approaching it with some trepidation, intersect with the idea of color in your poem? One of the lines from the poem right before your prose poem is “The store I’m in or this world keeps asking me if I want my receipt.”

Carly Inghram: That’s a great question. Finding my identity as a woman or queer woman or Black woman as connected was really useful for me, because it helped me see in my particular experience how other struggles are connected. Understanding and learning that all struggles are connected was really useful information. About the “receipt line”: part of my story at that time was that both of these identities are linked in a certain way to capitalism. In order to be a woman, for instance, they needed me to dress I certain way, I needed to have certain things, I needed to do certain things. All of these things felt very linked to the capitalist system. It was interesting for me to discover that things that I thought were just inherent qualities that belong to me are part of a larger system.

Tiffany Troy: One of the biggest curiosities I had is why would a work so interested in putting to question capitalist ideas also be obsessed with celebrities? I found your framing or take on the celebrities to be the most fun or interesting part of the celebrities section of your work. How does the idea of celebrity function in your poem and how does that in turn sort of reflect on like the poet as like an individual?

Carly Inghram: I’m super interested in celebrities because all of us experience the pressure to present in a certain way or feeling like there is an audience and how to present to and show up to those people. Like, I want to be liked, I want to be loved even. A lot of it feels tied to social media culture, or something that is literally programmed into us. For that reason, I feel like to be a celebrity and to have an actual audience feels like a really terrifying place to be. I find they can be interesting characters because I think I can often feel like with a literal like no audience, I can feel very viewed in a certain way, and so I think that's why I like to step into them as characters in the book.

Tiffany Troy: Why the title, The Animal Indoors? Why did you choose the title and how does it help the reader read your poem?

Carly Inghram: I find titling fairly tricky and it’s funny because identity can largely feel a little funny sometimes too. Sometimes the way I title individual poems will have nothing to do with the poem itself. I find titling a larger body of work tricky because I don’t think you can do the same thing. You actually have to find something that is encompassing.

Something that a friend helped me with in my other book was he read through the poems and found a poem and then used a piece of the text to create the title. I did the same thing with The Animal Indoors. I underlined different parts of the book I thought were useful or felt were most important to me at the time then tried to make titles out of them. The Animal Indoors ended up with an interesting title as we all just lived through a global pandemic.

Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today? Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world.

Carly Inghram: Recently I have been trying to write fiction, which has been fun. I’m going to see how it goes.

I have a friend of my brother’s who writes music and he shared his album. I was listening to his album and he very honestly shared his whole story. That’s very beautiful. I think there’s power in stories and sharing our stories. Our not as an exclusive our, but I think everyone sharing their stories is very freeing. So I wish everyone can share their story.