Please tell us about the making of “Where I Went Afterward.”
In this poem, I was interested in treating something very abstract as if it were literal. That is, the “here” of the poem didn’t start out as a physical planet, but as an emotion — grief, probably. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud suggests that “in grief, the world becomes poor and empty,” which 100% makes sense to me. And I was like, ok, what would this post-grief world actually look like? Freud doesn’t mean that we are physically transported to a poorer, emptier world after we’ve suffered a loss, but what if we were? What would that new planet look like? Would gravity behave differently? What would the atmospheric pressure be? What would it do to our bodies?
Do you write with a particular audience in mind?
Not unless I count as that audience. For me, writing is primarily a selfish project — my goal is to take a certain emotional experience and articulate it so that, with the right images and the right rhythm, I’m able to re-experience that feeling when I read the poem back to myself. If it doesn’t happen, I know the poem hasn’t succeeded yet. Succeeding is always thrilling, if not always pleasant.
Which three words do you overuse in poems?
Like, dark/night, field/meadow.
Name some influences on your writing that are not literary.
I’ve mentioned him above, but Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia and Beyond the Pleasure Principle are both endlessly fascinating to me. And I’m drawn to those texts because there’s obviously something deeply literary about them. At one point, Freud describes melancholia as “an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies from all sides […] and draining the ego until it is utterly depleted,” which immediately conjures up the image of a black hole or a maelstrom at the center of the body that annihilates the self from the inside out. Like, sign me way up.
When do you admit to yourself that you are working on a new book? Do you decide at the outset or realize it after a certain number of pages?
I think I’m always assuming that I’m working on a new book. That is, though the poems I’m working on at any given time won’t all necessarily feel like part of the same “project,” I treat them as if they have the potential to all live together as a book someday. In the case of Wilder, I was working on three “sets” of poems simultaneously over a couple of years — a sequence of erasures, a sequence of post-apocalyptic prose poems, and a set of lineated poems that were thematically linked. Altogether they made up about 55 pages, so I started to think about whether I could allow myself to see them as a book (the answer was yes, with the right ordering — though I’m convinced that you can bring together any number of projects with the right ordering). I knew the book was done when I tried to write one final poem for the prose sequence and just couldn’t. That voice had stopped being thrilling to me. It’s like you come back to your house one day and your keys don’t work and it’s like, WELP, I guess it’s time to move on.
[Photo credit: Matthea Harvey, Of Lamb (McSweeney’s, 2011)]
In this poem, I was interested in treating something very abstract as if it were literal. That is, the “here” of the poem didn’t start out as a physical planet, but as an emotion — grief, probably. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud suggests that “in grief, the world becomes poor and empty,” which 100% makes sense to me. And I was like, ok, what would this post-grief world actually look like? Freud doesn’t mean that we are physically transported to a poorer, emptier world after we’ve suffered a loss, but what if we were? What would that new planet look like? Would gravity behave differently? What would the atmospheric pressure be? What would it do to our bodies?
Do you write with a particular audience in mind?
Not unless I count as that audience. For me, writing is primarily a selfish project — my goal is to take a certain emotional experience and articulate it so that, with the right images and the right rhythm, I’m able to re-experience that feeling when I read the poem back to myself. If it doesn’t happen, I know the poem hasn’t succeeded yet. Succeeding is always thrilling, if not always pleasant.
Which three words do you overuse in poems?
Like, dark/night, field/meadow.
Name some influences on your writing that are not literary.
I’ve mentioned him above, but Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia and Beyond the Pleasure Principle are both endlessly fascinating to me. And I’m drawn to those texts because there’s obviously something deeply literary about them. At one point, Freud describes melancholia as “an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies from all sides […] and draining the ego until it is utterly depleted,” which immediately conjures up the image of a black hole or a maelstrom at the center of the body that annihilates the self from the inside out. Like, sign me way up.
When do you admit to yourself that you are working on a new book? Do you decide at the outset or realize it after a certain number of pages?
I think I’m always assuming that I’m working on a new book. That is, though the poems I’m working on at any given time won’t all necessarily feel like part of the same “project,” I treat them as if they have the potential to all live together as a book someday. In the case of Wilder, I was working on three “sets” of poems simultaneously over a couple of years — a sequence of erasures, a sequence of post-apocalyptic prose poems, and a set of lineated poems that were thematically linked. Altogether they made up about 55 pages, so I started to think about whether I could allow myself to see them as a book (the answer was yes, with the right ordering — though I’m convinced that you can bring together any number of projects with the right ordering). I knew the book was done when I tried to write one final poem for the prose sequence and just couldn’t. That voice had stopped being thrilling to me. It’s like you come back to your house one day and your keys don’t work and it’s like, WELP, I guess it’s time to move on.
[Photo credit: Matthea Harvey, Of Lamb (McSweeney’s, 2011)]