Please tell us about the making of “Elegy for a Mallard.”
I wrote “Elegy for a Mallard” after the loss of a friend and during a time of isolation. I was living in Spokane, Washington, at the time and was overwintering a motley gang of birds: twelve chickens, one silkie (which is also a chicken, but I can’t seem to think of them as the same), and two mallards. Losing this mallard was too much, and it broke open something inside me that I had been trying to keep closed. But, eventually, this bird gave me a way forward in processing all else. The poem holds these two losses, but I think what became the poem’s center is the weight of isolation. The misplaced but excruciating presence of abandonment. Weathering loss. Absence.
When you feel uninspired, what poet might you read for guidance and motivation?
The poet I return to most is James Wright. The first collection of contemporary poetry I read cover to cover was Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break. It has rarely left my desk since I first read it. In Wright, I find a newness and a strangeness that evolves as I evolve as a reader. I highly recommend taking some time for The Branch or Wright’s final collection, This Journey. But there are other poets who guide and motivate who are very much alive, some of whom I’ve had the incredible opportunity to know and work with. When I’m looking for motivation, excitement, whimsy, or surprise, I never have to search very far. I look to Kyle Dacuyan, Paige Lewis, Brionne Janae, Sally Burnette, Kam Hilliard, and the many other “emerging”/young/vital writers making impossibly beautiful poems today.
What are you working on now?
I’m repotting all my houseplants to give them new soil and space for the growing months. I just repotted my alocasia plant, and I’m trying to propagate a new plant from it. Alocasias are really interesting because they multiply underground by dividing rhizomes (like tubers or bulbs). I plucked off a little rhizome and its shoot, but it’s now drooping from transplant shock. If you have a moment, send my little alocasia some of your green energy.
I know that’s not precisely the right answer to this question, but it’s where I’ve been. In terms of writing, I’m still reeling from my chapbook manuscript, Unmonstrous, being a finalist for the Vinyl 45 Chapbook contest. It will come out from YesYes Books in about a year. Now, all my attention will turn to readying my full-length manuscript for submission.
Which three words do you overuse in poems?
I made a word cloud of my manuscript, which was a miserable experience. The three most frequent words are “bed,” “hands,” and “listen.” This is after editing out “dust,” “dark,” and “calcium.”
Has your role as an editor for Redivider and senior reader for Ploughshares changed the way you write or submit work?
When I began writing poetry, the self, or my understanding of myself, was paramount with little thought to the reader. What should I say? How shall I present me? Who am I? Etc. But the only way to be successful in serving as an editor or a reader at a publication is if you ask what you can do for other people. What is needed? Whose voice will be given this platform? What audience is being reached? What service does this journal provide? Who is empowered? I find that editors often say that their work is to find the “best” poetry in their submission pool and present the work they publish as such, as though the editor and submission pool exist in a vacuum. This is how many editors have responded to the critique that they primarily publish white men. Editing a literary journal should constantly destabilize an editor’s sense of “best,” in terms of aesthetic, language, structure, voice, style, etc.
Serving as a poetry editor and reader has helped me decenter myself not only in editorial work, but in my writing, as well. I still use my experiences, stories, and self as the backdrop to many of my poems. My hope is that my writing meets others in need as I have been met—that my poems will be another voice in opposition to systems of power which silence and oppress. Poetry pertains to the civic as much as it pertains to the self. Poetry has as much to do with speaking as it does with listening, with music as with silence.
I wrote “Elegy for a Mallard” after the loss of a friend and during a time of isolation. I was living in Spokane, Washington, at the time and was overwintering a motley gang of birds: twelve chickens, one silkie (which is also a chicken, but I can’t seem to think of them as the same), and two mallards. Losing this mallard was too much, and it broke open something inside me that I had been trying to keep closed. But, eventually, this bird gave me a way forward in processing all else. The poem holds these two losses, but I think what became the poem’s center is the weight of isolation. The misplaced but excruciating presence of abandonment. Weathering loss. Absence.
When you feel uninspired, what poet might you read for guidance and motivation?
The poet I return to most is James Wright. The first collection of contemporary poetry I read cover to cover was Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break. It has rarely left my desk since I first read it. In Wright, I find a newness and a strangeness that evolves as I evolve as a reader. I highly recommend taking some time for The Branch or Wright’s final collection, This Journey. But there are other poets who guide and motivate who are very much alive, some of whom I’ve had the incredible opportunity to know and work with. When I’m looking for motivation, excitement, whimsy, or surprise, I never have to search very far. I look to Kyle Dacuyan, Paige Lewis, Brionne Janae, Sally Burnette, Kam Hilliard, and the many other “emerging”/young/vital writers making impossibly beautiful poems today.
What are you working on now?
I’m repotting all my houseplants to give them new soil and space for the growing months. I just repotted my alocasia plant, and I’m trying to propagate a new plant from it. Alocasias are really interesting because they multiply underground by dividing rhizomes (like tubers or bulbs). I plucked off a little rhizome and its shoot, but it’s now drooping from transplant shock. If you have a moment, send my little alocasia some of your green energy.
I know that’s not precisely the right answer to this question, but it’s where I’ve been. In terms of writing, I’m still reeling from my chapbook manuscript, Unmonstrous, being a finalist for the Vinyl 45 Chapbook contest. It will come out from YesYes Books in about a year. Now, all my attention will turn to readying my full-length manuscript for submission.
Which three words do you overuse in poems?
I made a word cloud of my manuscript, which was a miserable experience. The three most frequent words are “bed,” “hands,” and “listen.” This is after editing out “dust,” “dark,” and “calcium.”
Has your role as an editor for Redivider and senior reader for Ploughshares changed the way you write or submit work?
When I began writing poetry, the self, or my understanding of myself, was paramount with little thought to the reader. What should I say? How shall I present me? Who am I? Etc. But the only way to be successful in serving as an editor or a reader at a publication is if you ask what you can do for other people. What is needed? Whose voice will be given this platform? What audience is being reached? What service does this journal provide? Who is empowered? I find that editors often say that their work is to find the “best” poetry in their submission pool and present the work they publish as such, as though the editor and submission pool exist in a vacuum. This is how many editors have responded to the critique that they primarily publish white men. Editing a literary journal should constantly destabilize an editor’s sense of “best,” in terms of aesthetic, language, structure, voice, style, etc.
Serving as a poetry editor and reader has helped me decenter myself not only in editorial work, but in my writing, as well. I still use my experiences, stories, and self as the backdrop to many of my poems. My hope is that my writing meets others in need as I have been met—that my poems will be another voice in opposition to systems of power which silence and oppress. Poetry pertains to the civic as much as it pertains to the self. Poetry has as much to do with speaking as it does with listening, with music as with silence.