Conversations: Nicole Callihan and Anna V. Q. Ross
Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), SuperLoop, and the poetry chapbooks: The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as a novella, The Couples. Her work has appeared in Iterant, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. She has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ludwig Vogelstein, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. SLIP, which won an Alma Award, will be published by Saturnalia in Spring 2025. A longtime NYC resident, she now lives in Miami. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.
Anna V. Q. Ross’s most recent book, Flutter, Kick (Red Hen Press), won the 2020 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and the 2023 Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry. Her other books include If a Storm (Anhinga Press), winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and the chapbooks Figuring (Bull City Press) and Hawk Weather (Finishing Line). She is a Fulbright Scholar, a Mass Cultural Council fellow, and poetry editor for Salamander, and her work appears in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. Anna teaches at Tufts University and through the Emerson Prison Initiative and lives with her family in Dorchester, MA, where she raises chickens. Find her at annaVQross.com.
Anna V.Q. Ross: There is so much to admire in This Strange Garment, but what I want to start with is the way you combine the lyric and the documentary so beautifully, each of these modes strengthening the other. It’s not exactly magical realism, but there’s perhaps a leaning towards that in the way the poems move between the real and the imagined. It reminds me of Adrienne Rich’s essay “What Would We Create” (What Is Found There), in which she recalls Muriel Rukeyser, “who spoke of “two kinds of poetry: the poetry of ‘unverifiable fact’—that which emerges from dreams, sexuality, subjectivity—and the poetry of ‘documentary fact’—literally, accounts of strikes, wars, geographical and geological details, actions of actual persons in history, scientific invention,” saying “like her, I have tried to combine both kinds of poetry in a single poem, not separating dream from history.”
In your book, you write of and through your experience with breast cancer, seamlessly (to my ear) toggling between “unverifiable fact” and the “documentary.” The turns you make are so startling and exciting and sometimes surreal, and yet they feel absolutely true to the internal logic of the poems. The nearness of death and the question of the body—if and how it will survive—are always there, and the poems dip in and out of this reality, a reality which transforms the quotidian world into a surreal space, and vice versa.
How conscious were you of this balancing of “history” and “dream” within the work? Did you begin in one and move to the other? Or did the two aspects merge more organically (for lack of a better term). I’m thinking of “Everything is Temporary” and the movement from the documentary details of the MRI machine and drinking a White Claw on the train into the image of the speaker’s body having vanished from within the unzipped dress. I can imagine that traumatic “fact” might prompt a “dream” reaction as a way of parsing, or surviving, the unimaginable: the cancer become dream become poem?
Nicole Callihan: I love this question, Anna. Very succinctly, no, I wasn’t conscious of any sort of balance between the documentary and the unverifiable. To me, poems almost always arrive through the unconscious. I don’t know what will happen—or what can happen—until I get a word on the page, and then I don’t know what will happen next until I get the next word on the page.
This particular poem, which serves as the prologue for This Strange Garment, was written on a day that was substantial in both documentary fact (I’d gone for an MRI which would reveal, in fact, that my cancer was not isolated in one breast but was in both) and plenty of unverifiables (my friend Zoë’s dream, my own dream, the happenings on the train as I headed north). I was inundated with so much material, so much matter, both of the body and the soul. But in the midst of the trauma—I was about two weeks out from my diagnosis—I have to admit, everything felt a bit like a dream: the cherry blossoms on the ceiling, the egg in my hand.
For me, the image of the cranes in that poem will forever send me back to that day in a way that simply glancing over the radiologist’s report or recalling a dream will not. I suppose this makes me think that poetry for me—or at least the poetry I most love reading—is not a combining of these two kinds of poetry but more of a simultaneous reckoning. To think of it chemically, it is less mixture than solution. Dream within strike within sexuality within war within subjectivity within objective fact.
This is one of the reasons I love reading your book, Flutter, Kick. So much is contained on each page, and the parataxis creates a feeling that’s quite physical–the simultaneous reckoning; the algorithm and the girdle; the documentary and the unverifiable; risk studies alongside petal-colored shirts; school shootings and migration; little white jugs and robot sheets—it lifts from the page and becomes somehow bodily—a flutter, kick, truly. In “Wrestling with the Gods” we move through the terrain of BBC headlines and Greek Gods in a couch cushion fight. We watch as the speaker trains herself to wrestle—”not to flinch”—and then a president’s helicopter, a husband turning into a killer octopus, more headlines, until, finally, the speaker steadies herself “against the granite lip of the kitchen sink,” and I found I had to steady myself as well.
I’m wondering about the way particular images—that granite lip!—serve to simultaneously hold both the unverifiable and the documentary. You do this so beautifully, for example, in your poem, “Fugue.” Here, driving your daughter home from dance class, listening to the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford, Senator Amy Klobuchar’s question repeating from the radio and then in the speaker’s head, you give us the image of “taillights that bleed / their afterimages.” That illumination, the looking back, the bleeding, it feels so essential to the drive on Boston’s I-93 accompanied not just by the physical fact of your dancer daughter but also by the harrowing memories, the haunting refrain (which begins as documentary fact but then becomes more and more subjective and dreamlike): Can you tell us what you don’t forget?
Can you tell me when that taillight image came to you? Was it a first draft image?
AVQR: Thank you for noticing that image! “Fugue” went through so many drafts that I actually didn’t remember if the taillights were there from the beginning, so I just went back and checked, and a version of them was in the first draft, to my surprise and delight. But I wrestled with how to get the idea of “afterimages” right for a long time because it is, or became, a hinge moment in the poem, a place where I move from describing the things that are actually surrounding me there on the highway—the bus, my daughter, the voices on the radio—to something liminal that is but isn’t really there—something I see, and so it does exist and in this way affects my understanding of the world. But it is also a product of only my particular retina and optic nerve; it is only in my eye and mind like the memory, of course.
I didn’t realize this at first, and in fact the poem went in a pretty different direction after that image in the initial drafts (there was a whole section about how the hippocampus functions that I axed, thank goodness!), but looking back now, I can see that the phrase “taillights that bleed” also helped me to zero in on the long “ee” sound that became such an important means of pulling myself through the poem and the memory. I started hearing the “ee” everywhere—”I-93,” “daughter in the back seat”—and then in Dr. Blasey Ford’s words: “His weight was heavy” and “It was hard for me to breathe.”
Once that “ee” was in my ear, I couldn’t get rid of it. “Bleed” is such a hot or potentially overwrought word too, maybe especially when women use it (we’re always bleeding all over things, supposedly). It’s uncomfortable, invoking bodily functions, violence, accident, and I surprised myself a bit by using it, but once it was down on the page, it never left the poem, maybe because I needed to feel and be uncomfortable to keep going? And then sonically, the “ee” itself creates a similar discomfort—it’s not a pleasant sound, is it? It sounds like a siren or, internally, panic rising in the body and the noise you might make as you start to lose your grip.
Juxtaposing these uncomfortable elements against Senator Amy Klobuchar’s rather dry, direct question (I love her for asking it! Shout-out to Sen. Klobuchar!), which contains no “ee” sounds, was the kind of fulcrum I was balancing on throughout the poem and allowed me to be both in the literal world and enter a dream/memory loop, and then to look more directly at what I found there.
Of course, this all sounds very logical and sensible when I reverse engineer the poem here, but when I was drafting it, I was mainly just following my eye and ear, at least initially. I think that I see you using sound similarly in your “The Paper Anniversary” series. Can you talk about the interplay of rhyme and refrain in those poems? They also include a “you” that intrigues me–sometimes it feels like the speaker (“your big fat forehead”), sometimes a mysterious other (“your spine…your name is mud”), sometimes the reader (“just so you know”). And this fracturing (as I read it) of the “you” is mirrored by the poems’ fractured structure so elegantly, and also evokes in me a similar feeling of dread to the one I was working through in “Fugue.”
NC: Ha! Yes, so easy to reverse engineer! I love hearing you think about those long ee’s and how they juxtapose to the senator’s question. Also this makes me want to ask you so many questions about your relationship to politics and feminism and what they mean to you and your poems and how they mean.
But first, “The Paper Anniversary.” It was September 29, 2021, one year since my diagnosis, and when I went to do my morning writing I googled to see what gift couples exchange on their first anniversary. Paper felt perfect to me. I love paper, of course (says the woman who writes almost only on her computer or her phone), but I do! Or at least symbolically, I do. And then the image of the paper gowns at the hospital came to me. Often in follow-up visits, or when you’re not yet a “serious patient,” you get a paper gown. “Serious patients” get cloth gowns, gowns washed a thousand times.
In one of the earliest poems in This Strange Garment, “Imaging,” which I wrote a year before my diagnosis in the midst of a scare serious enough to warrant a cloth gown, I write “blue cloth gown / washed so often / and at such high temperatures / as to become / the softest thing / that has ever touched / my body.” And then a year passed, and my scare became a reality where cloth gowns abound, and then another year, and maybe it became more like a dream, but in the follow-ups, I was often handed a paper gown. And so the first line that repeats across the sections of that poem emerged: Paper gowns are not as soft as cloth gowns are not as soft as…
Often for me poems begin with a line in my head, and I wander the streets repeating the line over and over, until the next line comes. I think the dread you feel when reading it was very much my own dread. Yes, I was grateful for soft gowns, I missed the soft gowns, I never again wanted to wear a soft gown, but they were so soft, Galena (my mammographer) was so gentle, so kind, I’d had my breasts cut off, I was so tired, I was so alive, I was so angry, I was so relieved. Paper gowns are not as soft as cloth gowns are not as soft as…
And so I landed on silk. Then milk. But then the milk soured. So I landed on hours. Then my sulk and bulk. And there in the first section of that poem, I think, really, I landed on the question of the book: “It’s been one year. What have I to fear?” (“These queer balloons. Pop pop pop.”) The tight rhyme led me. I totally submitted to it. I think I was like, hell, no being coy here, I’m a poet, and if I want to rhyme bed with dead, then I’m going to do it!
And it felt so good, I did it again. Each section began with that line, and I let the sound and rhythm move me. Just opening the doc and writing that first line opened me.
I wonder—speaking of balloons and openings—if you might tell me more about your Self-Portrait poems. In your book, the second poem “Self-Portrait as Girl,” begins, “You were always looking for balloons. / Or not balloons themselves // but the feeling that they might appear / at any moment.” These self-portrait poems beautifully populate the book–and with such grace and balance! A masterfully organized manuscript!—the penultimate poem being “Self-Portrait with Washing Machine.” Did you write these all at once? Did you have a few and write more? How crucial were they for you in the shaping of the book? In extension, your book—in so many ways and with great admiration—feels like a master class in “how to organize a manuscript,” might you want to say more about this as well?
AVQR: Wow, I love the story of the gowns and the focus on texture—soft vs “paper”—which led to the rhyme and how you “submitted” to it. Such a great and accurate word for the writing experience! I also think of rhyme as a kind of sonic texture, one that I need to feel in order to recognize how the sounds of the words connect to and deepen their meaning, and this suggests further connections, both aural and conceptual. It’s a kind of ripple effect, maybe.
I do think that sound is what makes us want to wrap a poem around us and, conversely, can set our teeth on edge or sting. I’m thinking of Hopkins here: in “God’s Grandeur” the thudding of “have trod, have trod, have trod” and then that pointy “ee” sound in “bleared” and “smeared, and then the relief in the exhalation of “Ah” in the final line. Whenever I get to that line, I feel a physical release of all of the tension he has built through sound and rhyme in the poem.
I could say a lot more about rhyme and sound, but I want to also respond to your feeling of needing to give yourself permission (and maybe a subtle f-you to would-be critics?) to rhyme “bed” and “dead” because I recognized that feeling immediately. For a long time, I was pretty suspicious of rhyme and of sound in poetry in general. I connect this now to the fact that I’m dyslexic and learn language primarily by ear, which I now feel is a tool I use in my work. But various experiences I had as a child, mainly in school, sadly, taught me to distrust my ear, and when I first came to poetry, even though I loved sound and rhyme rich poets like Dickinson and Yeats and Heaney, and even though my first poetry mentor in college was Mary Jo Salter, who is a neoformalist, I really avoided these elements in my work. I was wary of making pretty noises without actually saying or evoking anything.
Of course, I was working at cross-purposes with myself, but it took me a long time to get past this anxiety (you can see in my first book how studiously I avoided rhyme). Now, I often look to sound and repetition to guide me, as you do. As you know, I’m working on a new manuscript that contains many discursive, conversational poems (my “All my poems used to end in sky” series), and as I’m writing them I’m constantly looking to sound, both to shape my syntax and lines and to create figurative connections.
Getting to your question above, I think the Self-Portrait series was part of the way I eased myself back to sound and repetition. I did write the series all at once, and my chapbook Figuring contains even more of them. I’d just had my second child, and had, in four years, gone from being a person with a life I at least thought I recognized as my own to being someone who was now renamed and completely redefined as “Mom.” I’m not just talking about my kids here—I love that they call me “Mom”—but I’d be walking on the street with them and a stranger would hail me as “Mom,” or the nurses at the pediatrician’s office would greet me as “Mom,” or teachers and other parents at daycare and their schools—pretty much anywhere I went, I was “Mom.”
I felt like a stock character, at once recognizable and full of purpose but also completely erased. I wanted to go around yelling “My name is ANNA!,” but “Mom” was so pervasive, exhaustingly so, and of course shouldn’t I be grateful that I had these two beautiful kids? I was and am. But also, my name is Anna—who was she now?
I was alone one day in a coffee shop (no recollection of how that miracle occurred), and I saw an article in The Guardian about a theory that early in the formation of our solar system, the earth was orbited by two moons, our current moon and a smaller one. This was a new explanation for why the two sides of our moon are so different, topographically, one being smooth and the other pocked with huge craters. The theory went that these two moons were orbiting earth for a long time (millennia) and slowly, almost imperceptibly at first but then with increasing speed, the larger moon’s gravity sucked the smaller moon in until at last the smaller moon crashed into the larger and splattered all over one side of the moon, creating the craters we see there now.
It sounds grandiose to say it, maybe, but I saw myself in that smaller moon. I wrote a draft of “Self-Portrait as Smaller Moon” right there and then, and it was so comforting to see myself again, that I kept going. It was a way of writing about motherhood without losing myself, and, structurally, repeating “Self-Portrait” in the titles let me bring repetition into the poems themselves.
The repetition of “keep” in “Self-Portrait with Alternate Ending,” for example, allowed me to see what I still loved and valued in my life during a terrifying experience of early motherhood—it took me five years to be able to write that poem. Similarly, the refrain “Every day your children go to school” in “Self-Portrait with Refrain.” was almost self-preserving. It was such a frightening poem to write—imagining a shooting at my kids’ school. It felt almost like an exorcism of the fear and dread I felt every morning when I brought them to the bus, and I needed the refrain to ground me and keep me going. This was also almost an affirmation of the fear as real and not in my head only—the use of the second person in the poem is deliberate because this is not only my experience; it’s the experience of every parent with school-aged kids in this country right now. “Self-Portrait with Washing Machine” was the final one in the series (“We were happy” and “we slept”). Sometimes, sleep feels like a reaction to happiness and sometimes an escape from all the questions and “choices,” which we may or may not have any actual control over, in motherhood.
When I started to order Flutter, Kick, I found myself using the self-portraits as a kind of spine for the book because they seemed to mirror or introduce themes that other poems expanded on. They acted a bit like magnets for each of the sections. I’m gratified that you think the order of the book works so well. It was hard-won. In the end, I submitted (there’s that word again!) to narrative: from child to mother (and child of a mother) to woman. There are discursions and incursions, of course, but that’s the overarching story, and once I found it, the book came together.
Thinking through all of this, I’m wondering back to the question of narrative tension in your work. Obviously, This Strange Garment arose out of the experience of being diagnosed with and receiving treatment for breast cancer, and that story weaves through the manuscript while collecting other details and memories from life—your poem about Jean Valentine, for instance. The poems feel at times like almost a veneer atop emotion—the Amazon Prime poem (“Amazon”), with all of the things you need to buy your daughters “because I have cancer,” all the while we’re aware of the fact that Amazon women cut off their breasts in order to be able to aim their bows more accurately, as is the speaker, walking into the operating room. Then there’s the horrible thud of the line “But then the drugs wore off” waking us up to the reality of the situation and the fact that, unlike the Amazons, the speaker has had no choice in this matter.
These repetitions and associative leaps are witty and devastating and always surprise me. The objective correlative looms large! Maybe this is a Wordsworth vs. O’Hara question: how much are these poems “emotions recollected in tranquility” and how much written on the subway on the way to the reading? Were you writing them to find or tell the story?
NC: I love this second moon, Anna. Your poem, which I’ve turned back to now—”I wasn’t looking at her,” it begins—I’m intrigued by this “I” and this “her;” it sends me back to your question of the many “you’s” in my Paper Anniversary. Who is her? The smaller moon? The self? The moonscape? The political landscape? Every woman who mothers? And what does it mean to be the smaller thing that disappears as it crashes and splatters all over the larger thing? It doesn’t sound grandiose to me at all. It’s beautiful and vulnerable and achy. Talk about objective correlative!
And this question too, really interesting. To find or to tell? To recollect or to be on the A-train? I think it’s important to note that most of my book was written during the height of the pandemic. There were no in-person readings, few train rides, very little tranquility. My diagnosis was in September 2020, and so, four of my five surgeries, my radiation therapy, the real crux of my trauma—these were all in a pre-vaccine pandemic. And so I suppose my answer is sort of my answer to everything: both and neither, neither and both.
I’m thinking of mothers now, or women, or caregivers, or maybe just modern humans–but is there ever tranquility? Is the only tranquility on the subway? In moments of transit? Where do we collect ourselves? Do we collect ourselves? I was listening to Jennifer Franklin read from her new book If Some God Shakes Your House, and I felt this sense of simultaneity, of being in the thick while still being able to observe, like it must all happen at any given moment, and as poets we can and must truly experience and truly reflect at the same time.
It’s hardly possible—I nearly wrote impossible—but it’s the practice. It’s quantum, somehow operating outside of the classical space-time continuum. I’m writing this, and I’m thinking, do I really believe this? And I do. Maybe it can be parsed out, or reverse-engineered to appear to be something less than mystical, but ultimately the act of making it—whether in Wordsworth’s cottage, or en route to Fire Island to see poet friends, or driving your daughter home from dance class, or sitting in a paper gown awaiting the oncologist–feels transcendent to me. In Cooling Time, C.D. Wright says “poetry secures a kind of ecstasis–” and I think that’s what I’m getting at: the ecstasis.
Last week, you and I were in a Zoom writing group—remember?—and during writing time, you’d accidentally left your camera on, and for thirty minutes, in the corner of the screen, I noticed you. You took a sip of iced coffee, maybe you ate a bit of something, perhaps a questioning look crossed your face, but nothing extraordinary. When the timer went off, I truly thought, oh no, Anna wasn’t able to write a poem. But then we all came back, and you had written a poem–a remarkable poem. Something real and beautiful had transpired, something divine.
AVQR: The divine via Zoom—ha! But also, yes. First of all, how sweet that you were watching over me and worrying that I hadn’t been able to write. That’s true friendship! But it also makes me think that the pandemic has made that simultaneity that you point to, and which perhaps is necessary in order to achieve Wright’s ecstasis, more evident to all of us.
I mean, there was, and still is, the very obvious logistical simultaneity of being on Zoom in a meeting or teaching a class while all hell breaks out behind you in your house—the kids roaring at each other, somebody needing a crucial something that only you can provide, and you’re just smiling brightly at the camera through it all and hoping that your blurred background also somehow obscures noise. And all the funny pictures of people in their silks and suits on the top half and pj bottoms below the desk—that very visible splitting of the self.
This also connects to motherhood, for me, in that as a mother I’m always aware of mine and my kids’ physical (and to some extent psychological and emotional) space in the world relative to each other, whether they’re in front of me or in a different room or building or state. The constant care-taking and checking in of motherhood—are they breathing, have they eaten, did someone say something mean to them, are they hurt?—is a hum underneath everything else I’m doing.
Perhaps this is also a kind of practice in double awareness, of moving along on the surface of the world while still being aware of and sometimes diving into that hum underneath? I’m writing this while sitting on the back deck of my parents’ house in upstate VT. The deck overlooks a lake, and right in front of me in the water, a loon is floating along with its head up, seemingly looking off into the distance, but every few minutes it suddenly dives underneath and comes up swallowing a small fish. I have no idea how it does this. Is it able to see very small changes in the surface reflections on the water? Or does it feel some subtle movement below it? However it manages it, it’s thrilling to watch.
I also think back to going to the Fairbanks Museum up in St. Johnsbury, which has a whole room full of taxidermied animal and bird specimens in the style of 19th and early 20th century natural history museums. They have a pair of taxidermied loons there, and when I first saw them I couldn’t believe that they were the same species of bird I saw swimming on the lake every summer because they were enormous! I had no idea how much bird was under the water when I watched them float by.
Going back to “Fugue,” part of the work of that poem was making the double awareness visible. The refrain “Can you tell us what you don’t forget” running in a loop in my mind underneath the sounds and sights of the traffic and the daughter’s voice and eventually bringing forth the memory of the assault. “Not if, but when” does some of this work too: swimming in water inhabited by sharks provoked memories of other times and ways in which I’d been attacked over the years in bars, busses, etc. But really I don’t think a poem—any poem—can happen without that turning between the inner and outer. Maybe I’m just saying something everyone knows here. But that tug underneath to the emotional, psychological, the divine, the ur, the self–that’s what connects us and the reader to whatever the floating surface of the poem reveals or tells.
You know, it can be hard to get to know people as adults and even harder to become friends—we all have so much personal history we’re dragging around with us, and we’re all so busy. Who has the time to explain it all to each other in order to achieve that kind of intimacy? But I sometimes think that if someone really wants to get to know me–not necessarily all of the particulars of my history, but know how my mind works–read my poems. I mean, some of my actual history is in them too, but I think the emotional understanding of the particular detail is what is most revealing and thrilling. Who else other than Nicole Callihan would make the leap from the egg you squeeze in the MRI machine to say you’re scared and need help, to the fact that cranes are “perennially monogamous” unless their mating “doesn’t result in an egg” (in “Everything is Temporary”)?
And then there’s an echo of that failure in the body vanished from the unzipped dress, which perhaps is an iteration of the speaker’s fear that the cancer has somehow made her non-monogamous with her own body, that she’s betrayed or failed it in some way (or the reverse). But whatever the meaning , what draws me is watching and feeling the connections—the intimacy of that.
Eamon Grennan has a beautiful poem, “Detail,” that I often teach. It begins with the speaker “watching a robin fly after a finch,” and in the course of this flight a sparrowhawk suddenly swoops in and catches the robin “whose cheeps of terminal surprise twinkle” in the air and allow for the poem’s final turn:
I began to understand how a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.
I don’t think I can express it more perfectly than that.
NC: I love that. O, the cheeps of terminal surprise…
And the intimacy, yes. The kinship. Here is my poem; here is my mind. Here is Anna V.Q. Ross; here are her poems; here are her subtleties and wonder and strength and intelligence and inheritance; here are her chickens, and here is her girdle! Now, step away, breathe deeply, observe, observe… Here, you can steady yourself with her “against the granite lip of the kitchen sink.” So grateful for the kinship and for this conversation and to be able to have someone with whom to lean against the kitchen sink.
And I know our conversations will continue–though perhaps not with such attention to syntax and grammar!—but I wanted to leave you with a bit of my own loon story. This morning, I was reading a poem—“Peaches” by Peter Davison—and good lord, if I couldn’t feel the peach juice dripping down my face. But then! A wild wormhole! When I went to try to find more from Davison who I’d only stumbled across on someone’s Twitter feed, I discovered he’d dated Sylvia Plath(!) and was, according to archivist and Plath scholar, Peter K. Steinberg, “stone-cold used and ditched by her.”
Maybe you already knew this? About Plath and Davison? But I didn’t, and so when I turned back to the poem, my mind went in a thousand directions: first, just to a little delight for Plath; then wondering at my unseemliness for delighting in such a thing; then onto your recent Plath poem in The Missouri Review; to Li-Young Lee’s riff on peaches in “Blossom;” to the Anne Sexton library book I stole from the Tulsa Public Library in 1989 (the only thing I’ve ever stolen besides Schuyler from the Brooklyn Public Library in March 2020); and had I “stolen,” stolen is such an ugly word; and how might I have become a different poet had I stolen Plath instead?; to Holly, who I’d been with when I “stole” the Sexton, how that same year of the stealing, we’d streaked the high school football field yelling “wild women!;” how she died unexpectedly of heart failure in 2018, how I miss her; and back to Davison’s “mouthful of language to swallow;” to his “stone-cold using” of Plath; [to my mother, always my mother;—to thinking I must sound like a loon!—; ] to wondering if that’s where the semicolon goes and if now that I’ve moved to Miami I will ever get good peaches again; if maybe the peaches will be even better, but in February; to again being “clenched in the sweetness of the reaches” that Davison lauds; and back, finally (at least temporarily) to you and Grennan and the cheeps of terminal surprise…
Perhaps, I’m speaking to your notion of the inner and outer—that a poem can’t happen without that turning—and I’m thinking of how—when it’s really, really satisfying—it’s not just the writer turning in and out, but the willing reader, too—led by the poem—is sent into that same motion. Here we all are leaning against the granite lip.
A field of energy exists between reader, writer, and poem–and I’m thinking the biggest most beautiful field you can imagine. In that same passage about ecstasis, CD Wright writes of poetry, “There may be a wiser vantage, but we haven’t discovered one yet. Perception leads to further perception. Perceive. Perceive. “See what the grass would see if it had eyes,” writes Oppen.” And that is what Wright does–perceive, perceive—that field with that grass—over and over—and I think what we’re trying to do too. At the end of that passage, bringing to my mind your second moon, she writes, “However thin and colorless and tiny we remain in our original context, it is the one we are perpetually challenged and most equipped to render lucid.”
And so I wish you great lucidity, my friend.Thank you for thinking through so much with me. More soon.
AVQR: Oh, thank you, Nicole! Especially for that wild and wondrous ride from Davison and Plath to the Tulsa Public Library (I agree, stealing poetry doesn’t seem like stealing–shouldn’t it belong to us all?) to “wild women!” and the awful loss of your friend–I’m so sorry–and then Miami and peaches and your mother and Grennan’s “cheeps.” Whew!
You prove the point about the reader following the writer exactly. It’s been such a joy to follow this conversation with you. To lucidity, yes, and also fields of energy and perception. And to friendship, always friendship.
