August 26, 2024 • 44 mins
After a summer hiatus, I chat with Nicole Cooley about Lucille Clifton's poem "June 20" from her 1992 collection The Book of Light, which was re-released by Copper Canyon last year with an introduction by Ross Gay and an afterword by Clifton's daughter Sidney Clifton. We talk about the unusual verb tense, what's scary about the poem, and just how sharp Clifton's images are. After that, Nicole shares her poem "Downriver" from her new collection Mother Water Ash. We close with a game about poetry in the Olympics. The episode is brought to you by Olympic Poems.
Also mentioned:
- Sharon Olds's poem "I Go Back to May 1937"
- Anne Panning's essay "Remembering, I Was Not There" (collected in In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal)
- The world's unluckiest pole vaulter
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast. I'm Charlie Green, back from a summer hiatus.
(00:04):
The show will be bi-weekly from here on out, maybe I'll do an occasional short and early
episode. On each episode I invite someone to bring in any poem they'd like to discuss.
We'll talk about what excites us, what delights us, maybe what frustrates us, and we'll
follow the poem and the conversation wherever they turn. On episodes like today's, the
guests will also share a poem of their own before we move to some silliness and a game.
(00:27):
I'm so excited to have on this week Nicole Cooley. She's the author of seven collections
of poetry, including her most recent, Mother Water Ash, which came out this year from LSU
Press and is beautiful. She's a professor in the MFA program in creative writing and
literary translation and the English department at Queens College, CUNY. She brought in Lucille
(00:49):
Clifton's poem June 20, and she's a delight to talk with and listen to. Thanks for listening
and go on to the conversation.
I was talking to somebody about this. They were asking if I can write during the semester
and it's not really. Are you able to write during the semester?
(01:11):
You know, for 15 years I directed the MFA program, then we started it. And so that was
a lot because I was teaching Tutu and I was directing it. And CUNY has no infrastructure.
You're basically a secretary, you know, doing everything for the program. So that was really
hard. But I stepped away from that and I have to admit I just had a very luxurious sabbatical
(01:33):
year. Oh, nice. And I spent the whole year like working at the New York Public Library
every day. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So I live in New Jersey. But so that was really
like that was amazing and wonderful. And I worked really hard and it was great. But yes,
for the past 15 years, it's been super hard and I would try to devote like one day to
(01:53):
it. But that it was just really hard, you know? Yeah. Really, really. It was really
difficult. So I'm hoping to I'm hoping that the sabbatical taught me a lesson somehow
and I can be better going forward. You know, I've gotten better at writing sort
of catch as catch can whenever anything is there, you know, and 20 minutes never feels
like enough. But, you know, doing writing in class with students and exactly. Yeah.
(02:17):
Being very, very low expectations and stakes. Yep. Yep. Yep. If there's one thing I'm good
at, it's writing a bad poem. You know what I mean? The expectations are like I should
have that on a t-shirt because like I really like my expectations are so low for writing
and that that's a huge help. Yeah. I'm a lot of people. I think everybody's
been an expert at writing a bad poem, even people who've never written poems. Right.
(02:40):
I know. I know. Let's let's turn to a good poem you brought in June 20 by Lucille Clifton.
It originally appeared in her 1992 collection, The Book of Light. I'll ask you to go ahead
and read it and then we'll talk. Perfect. Yeah. It came out in the 1992 book and I think
the book was just re-released by Copper Canyon recently with I think an afterward maybe by
(03:02):
her son, but I haven't actually read it. I love this poem so much and it scares me so
much. I'm thrilled to talk about it. I'll read it. June 20th. I will be born in one
week to a frowned forehead of a woman and a man whose fingers will itch to enter me.
She will crochet a dress for me of silver and he will carry me in it. They will do for
(03:28):
each other all that they can, but it will not be enough. None of us know that we will
not smile again for years, that she will not live long. In one week, I will emerge face
first into their temporary joy. Oh, thank you. I guess I'll start with the question
(03:48):
in a way I feel like the answer may be obvious, but what scares you about this poem? Oh my
God, like everything. So the poems that I love most and I've taught this poem a lot.
I've taught it to high school students, college students, graduate students, older adults.
I just bring it in like everywhere I go because I love people's perspectives. What I love
about this poem, what scares me about it is like if you try to explain this poem to someone,
(04:10):
they would be like, no, you can't write that poem. You can't write a poem that starts
with I will be born in one week. No. It's like we're in workshop and we're like, no,
no, Lucille, no, change the voice. So I think that's one thing. She's making a really fascinating
point of view voice decision. So I really love that. It shocks me every time I read
it, I will be born. I also think that just the details in the poem are so scary. And
(04:35):
a lot of what I think actually makes the details scary is the sonic values, the sound in the
poem, crochet a dress of silver, right? He will carry me in it. Like his fingers will
itch to enter me like that itch and crochet. Like it's so uncomfortable, right? It's so
very uncomfortable at the end of those lines. And I find this so I find the sounds really
(05:00):
scary. And then I also find it fascinating that this poem, which is about, you know,
is so tragic and about abuse and so scary, then ends with the word joy. Like another
thing, like if I'm always imagining like in workshop, right? Like if we're in workshop,
it'd be like, Lucille, that's not your ending, right? So this idea of ending with the word
(05:21):
joy, but having all of this complexity and terror in the poem. I love nothing more than
a short poem that can truly contain multitudes. And I feel like this poem really does that.
It is such a surprising poem, the I will be born in one week. That's such an unusual choice
to set it one week before her birth and as if she's speaking into it. And you're absolutely
(05:44):
right. The father character is terrified. We only see him through action. It's the fingers
will itch to enter me. The he will carry me in it. If not for the first action, that might
be something neutral. He will carry me in it. But because of that first action, it takes
on this incredibly sinister tone. And then, yeah, into their temporary joy. And we end
(06:07):
on the word joy. I think part of the reason for me it works is that it's mitigated or
complicated by temporary.
Yeah, and absolutely. And again, sound, right? Temporary and joy, like those two Y's and
the sonic echo of those two words. It's such an incredible ending to me. And and to even
I mean, how about the ultimate line like, in one week, I will emerge, you know, oh my
(06:30):
gosh. The other thing I love is that's like always confusing and fascinating to me is
the title, June 20. So I read somewhere once that every year on her birthday, Lucille Clifton
would write a poem for herself. I have no proof that this is a poem written on her birthday.
But I also think like, it could be the birthday is June 20. It could be the birthday. This
is June 20. And the birthday is June 27. You know what I mean? There's this like weird
(06:52):
complexity in this super simple title. That just seems like a temporal marker, but like
is still doing more work.
It's this weirdly resonant thing. By the way, I did fact check she was born on the on the
27th. So technically, we can say, you know, born born in June 27. This is a week before
she's born. The temporality part of what it does is just the defamiliarizing opening instead
(07:15):
of being I was born. This is immediate strangeness. And I was thinking about this with birthdays
that, you know, even as I get older and I celebrate them a little less every year, there's
this feeling of, oh yeah, I'm about to be born again. Not in the religious sense, but
there's this feeling of like a birthday can evoke every other birthday in a way, I guess.
(07:40):
Absolutely. Yeah. And you're so right about that opening because it's not I was born.
It's I will be born. And I also like when I'm teaching, I love to talk to students about
how the smallest changes make the biggest difference. Like that verb tense, I will be
versus I was, or I will be versus I am. Like the fact that it's conditional and future
focused, right. I think it is so important. Yeah, I think so too. And it is such a surprising
(08:05):
choice. How do students react to it?
You know, it's really interesting. So first, I love bringing in a short poem to class because
at first students are like, oh, this is going to be really easy. It's a short poem, especially
undergrads, honestly, like you're not asking us to read that much. And then I'm like, all
right, look at this poem, right? Because I, you know, it's the same reason I love bringing
in Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Cool, which also is like short poem that's like, yes,
(08:29):
you might have read it in eighth grade, but it's incredibly complicated and fascinating.
So at first people think it might be OK. And then when we take a deeper look at it, everyone
is very upset by a man whose fingers will itch to enter me. It's also really interesting
that it's not my father, right? It's a man. So everyone gets very upset about that. So
we start to talk about in what points in the poem, the poem begins to deepen and progress
(08:55):
and you really begin to understand the emotional complexity, right? Because I'm looking at
this poem and I'm like, how does she get to do this? This is so incredible. Well, part
of how she does it is language. Part of how she does it is sound. So we spend a lot of
time on sound and we spend a lot of time on form, in fact, because then again, this poem
looks like a fairly simple one stanza poem. But why is it in one stanza? I would ask students
(09:18):
like, what does that mean? You know what I mean? So it's a really great way, I think,
despite it being a free verse poem to get students to look really closely at the language
and put it under the microscope, which is my all time favorite thing about teaching.
It's so much fun to start in on a poem this short and then you look at your watch and
like 25 minutes, half an hour later, you're still talking about it. I want to talk about
(09:40):
the form because I have new favorite line breaks because of this poem. For listeners,
a man whose fingers will itch, there's that break after itch to enter me, you know, which
gives it that extra intensity. And then the same thing with they will do for each other,
which has that kind of like, well, yeah, they just kind of accept it. Oh, you'll do all
(10:00):
that they can, which makes it sound as if they are giving something to each other. And
but it will not be enough. And so as the sentence unfolds over those line breaks, the meaning
just keeps changing and becoming fuller and fuller. And I just it's one of the things
that I really, really loved about this poem. I know line breaks are kind of everything.
Like I always think and not to trash prose, but in poetry, we get the line and the sentence,
(10:25):
we get them both, and we get to put the intention with one another. Right. So I will be born
in one week break to a frowned forehead of a woman break. So it's like, oh, first line
ends with a W sound. Second line ends with a W sound. Then third line ends with itch.
Fourth line ends with crochet. So there's even something happening with line breaks
(10:45):
and sound here, which is like amazing to me. And I also think there's a really interesting
balance of image and statement in this poem, right? Being born to a frowned forehead is
not being born to a mother. It's almost like a Zeus sort of situation. And then there's
that lovely alliteration with frowned forehead. But so there's all of these like super vivid
(11:06):
specific images front loading the poem. And then we get to the middle, you know, as you
said, they will do for each other all that they can, but it will not be enough. None
of us know that we will not smile again for years. So I always think like, what if she
had started the poem with none of us know that we will not smile again for years, right?
It would be so much less interesting than the way she starts it. So she really like
(11:29):
kind of earns the abstract statements by putting all of this super sharp language at the beginning.
It's image in action. And the sound of it is also fantastic too. To a frowned forehead
of a woman and a man whose fingers will itch to enter me, she will crochet. And there's
just that movement of the Fs, the alliteration there, but also the movement of the vowels
(11:52):
from fingers, itch, those eyes to the E's. It's just there is, it does build that intensity.
I love that. And like in my class, we also, we spent time talking about like with my students
crochet versus knit, right? Like you will knit a dress for me. It sounds very different.
Crochet, which is something you do with one needle, right? Which is maybe get a one hand
(12:12):
thing. Like it's a different word than knit. It's a longer word. It chimes with itch. Like,
and then we talk about like in my classes, why is the dress silver? It could be a dress
of gold, but it's not right. Is silver less valuable? Like there's just all of these wonderful
linguistic choices. I so wish I could talk to Lucille Clifton about this poem. All of
these really wonderful choices that make the poem as rich and complicated as it is.
(12:38):
That is one of the things that I like about teaching a poem like this too, is it's very
good for getting students to think about what they can pay attention to. Like you said,
this poem could start, none of us know that we will not. And I can imagine so many different
sort of alternate universe versions. The past tense, I was born or I emerged face first,
which is more active, but not necessarily, you know, it's, it's with the past tense,
(13:03):
it doesn't have the pop and surprise of the future of the future tense. And in thinking
about that, what I was thinking about is the action that the mother and the man do things
and the speaker doesn't really like the first time she actually does anything, it's emerge
face first. And so otherwise she is being in a way done to, she's being carried. You
(13:29):
know, she's not knowing and it's only that emerge face first. It's this really interesting
sort of who has power in this moment.
Yeah, I love that. That's such an interesting way to read it, right? And it's almost like
the speaker, the I is in the beginning of the poem and then the I is in the end and
that kind of bookends the poem, but the middle of it really is about the family as a unit.
(13:52):
You know, and this heartbreaking line, none of us know that we will not smile again for
years that she will not live long, right? It's devastating.
It's a double whammy of retrospect that it, she's able to put us in the moment where,
oh, everything looks positive. That temporary joy doesn't seem like it's going to be temporary
before the birth. It's a possibility, but she's also doing this retrospectively.
(14:18):
Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's also, you know, you could teach this poem in connection
with Sharon Old's poem. I think it's called I Go Back to May 1937, in which she imagines,
the speaker imagines her parents like outside of the college gates and imagining like they
don't know, and it's a horrible paraphrase, but they don't know what's going to happen.
And so it's like assignment, imagine a life, your family's life before you were born, but
(14:43):
like you know it and you're thinking about it, right? Like it just is a very fascinating
spin on point of view and thinking about the speaker and what the speaker can do and where
the speaker can be located.
There's an essay by writer named Ann Panning, very short, it's called Remembering I Was
Not There, where she's telling the story of her parents. I'll try to find either a link
(15:03):
to it and put it in the show notes or a PDF, which I can send to you. And she's basically
writing a scene of her parents before she was born and you get the sense of there's
the version of this she was told and there's the version of it she's imagining. And I think
what's interesting about a poem like this, what it speaks to in part is as children,
we often try to imagine what were our parents' lives like. And you know, she's remembering
(15:28):
her own childhood and at the same time trying to imagine that life before. She can only
get seven days prior to her birth. There's something very sad about the moment that she
lands on.
That's a great point, actually, especially about like that's the moment she lands on,
right? Yeah, yeah. It's just there's so much to think about and talk about in this poem,
(15:49):
right? It's just so I guess the word I would use is it's I keep saying it's complex and
complicated, but it's also just really rich. And like you put a little into give a little
interpretive pressure on this poem and like so many things start happening. I think that's
another reason I just love it so much.
There's a ton. A lot happens in this poem, just emotionally. It feels like and it's hard
(16:10):
to make a short poem do this. I mean, it's incredibly difficult for everybody, me especially,
but it's hard to make a poem keep having a sort of bigger emotional push without feeling
like like it's being overdone or overblown. But we're learning more about each person.
We're learning more about those interactions and how she sees those interactions. And it's
(16:33):
just as a real power that I love.
Absolutely. And the funny thing is, like I look at my own writing and my own. So I'm
a very messy writer. Like I'll write like 30 pages to get to one page. And I don't,
you know, I don't sit and try to work on a poem like as a beautiful art object. I'm a
mess. Like it's the one area in which I'm messy. Like I'm willing to just write junk,
write badly, fill a folder, whatever. But I feel like in so many ways, the writing that
(16:56):
I admire most is the writing that I'm striving to do, which is so hard for me, which is this
like crystalline short kind of poetry, right? Where it's just like there's so much here,
but she doesn't need to have lines that take you all over the page. And she doesn't need
to have a million parts. She doesn't need to take you up to her adulthood, right? She
doesn't need to do any of those things. So like there's so much left out here and yet
(17:19):
you feel like the poem is so fulfilling. I really love that about it too.
Yeah. It's so concise and crisp the way the frowned forehead evokes the mother immediately
and notably it's not mother, the frowned forehead of a woman that we get a man and a woman that
they're even detached from mother, father roles and names. And so, and then we just
(17:43):
see him so crisply, the fingers will itch to enter me. He will carry it. We just see
them so clearly and so immediately. And that's just so hard to do.
Isn't it? I know it would be so different if it was like, I will be born in one week
to my mother and my father. But the fact you're right that she doesn't ever use those markers.
So there's this detachment, right? But also not. I think it's like, it's so fascinating.
(18:06):
And you know, the woman has a frowned forehead, the man has fingers. So they both have the
F sound there. So they're connected through sound, but then I just like, I just find it
utterly fascinating. I've read this poem so many times and every time I return to it,
I feel like I honestly see new things.
As we're talking about, I'm seeing more and more. It's just kind of exploding. Like even
(18:29):
saying a woman and a man, it sort of suggests this distance that she feels from both of
them. Like there's a double meaning. On June 20, before she's born, in a very literal sense
to her, they are just man and woman. But looking back that they are man and woman and not mother
father suggests just the difficulty of that relationship. It's really powerful.
(18:51):
Isn't it? Right? I know. Again, like the small, you know, woman versus mother, like that small
shift I think is fascinating to think about.
Other things you want to note about this poem before we turn to you, a poem of yours?
You know, I just think, I look at this poem and it reminds me of what I go to poetry for.
(19:13):
Right? I think it, Lucille Clifton had a saying, she said, I want to write poetry that afflicts
the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. And I've heard that attributed to other people
too. And I just love it. And I feel like this poem does both. Like it certainly afflicts
the comfortable. This is a very uncomfortable poem. Right? But on the other hand, you can
also see a way in which this poem could comfort the afflicted. Right? So I love that kind
(19:37):
of dual both and way of thinking about what a poem can do. And I feel like it's really
contained in this poem.
I think there's a process note there too, that there are times when if I'm making myself
uncomfortable in the writing, I know I'm on to something.
Right. Yeah.
Not always. You know, back to the, I write lots of bad poems, but often that's a sign
(19:59):
that there's something here to mine and to articulate.
It's so interesting because one assignment I love to give in my undergrad poetry workshop
and sometimes in the grad is for the last week of class, write the poem you've been
avoiding all semester. And everybody said, what do you mean? I'm like, I'm not going
to tell you anything except that I'll say, is there a subject matter you're avoiding?
Is there a form you're avoiding? Like you're terrified of sonnets, you hate prose poems.
(20:22):
Right? Is there something that you feel you can never write about? And like, you're going
to write this poem, you're going to only turn it into me. We can have a conversation about
it. If you want to, we don't have to, but it's like, what are you avoiding in your own
work? You know, what are the things that make you so vastly uncomfortable that you can't
write about them? And I think that's just interesting as something to think about.
I do something similar in my personal essay classes where at the, toward the end of a
(20:45):
class I hand out note cards to everybody and I tell them, I insist, they're not going to
show this to anybody. I'm not going to take it up. This is for you and you can opt out
of doing it if it sounds too intense. And I asked them to, what is something that you
would never write an essay about and why? And then once they've done that, I asked them
to turn over the card and say, so why would you write this essay? And every semester,
(21:07):
several of the students at the end, they say, you know, I, I doing that helped me understand
why I wanted to write about it and how ways I could, which always feels rewarding. So
I love that. And then do they take the index card home? I tell them they can do with it,
whatever they want. So a number of them, it's a discomforting exercise. I always feel a
(21:28):
little guilty about it because I'm asking them to think about something that's very
difficult to think about. But I mean, it's a personal essay class. So we end up there
a lot anyway. But let's transition to your poem. And before we get to the poem, could
you briefly describe the collection, Mother Water Ash, because it really is sort of a
unifying collection. Yes, here it is. It's very pretty. So I'm holding it up. It just
(21:53):
came out. This is a book about my mother's sudden death in March, 2018. And it's also
about the disappearing coastline of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast where I grew up and where
my mother lived. And, and part of it comes from a few sources. My mother died suddenly
and to make sense of it, I was just writing, writing, writing. And I was writing a lot
of junk. Like, I wrote 50 pages of terrible prose. I wrote a grief syllabus. I wrote like
(22:16):
junk, right? Hardly any of it in here. I wrote junk, but it was a way to cope with all of
this frantic writing. And then I was like, All right, what have I got? So that was one
thing. The other thing is in 2005, August 29, when Hurricane Katrina hit, my parents
had made the decision not to evacuate the city, which was really awful. I wrote an entire
book about it. My book Breach that came out in 2010, but they made a decision not to evacuate.
(22:38):
My mother said to me on the phone and our last phone call before we lost phone contact,
she said, we are not leaving. This is our home. And later she said to me, I will die
in this house. And she, she didn't die during Hurricane Katrina. My parents were miraculously.
Okay. But it, those words haunted me for basically 15. They've haunted me for all these years
(22:59):
since then. And they circled around in my head, like, you know, we're not leaving this
is our home. I will die in this house. So then this all started kind of coalescing with
my thinking about, erotically, a high school class I took as a senior in high school on
Louisiana ecology. And it was an elective and we learned horrifying facts, which are
now like not even as horrifying, right? Like Morgan city at the bottom of Louisiana is
(23:22):
eroding at the rate of one football field a year. Now it's literally like a football
field an hour. So we learned all this stuff and we took these field trips to barrier islands
and waited around in hip boots. And I wrote poems as my final project, right? They let
me get away with that, but I don't know what happened to those bombs, but the, the, the
stuff I learned stuck in my head. So when Katrina happened, I went back and did a deep
(23:44):
dive into like the environmental disaster that is the Louisiana coast and read tons
about it and caught myself up. And that, and so that information really stayed with me.
And after my mother died, suddenly I find myself walking on the levy. We live two blocks
from the river constantly and staring out at the river and all of these things swirling
in my head. And that's often like where poetry starts for me is a bunch of swirling things.
(24:08):
And I'm like, what is happening? How do they connect? What's going on? Yeah. So that, that
was the process. And, and it all started, it started coming together as I thought about
my mother and Louisiana. And, and then I was also mindful, I will say, not to make my mother's
death a metaphor for the eroding coast and environmental crisis or environmental crisis,
a metaphor for my mother. I didn't want those things to stand in for one another. That felt
(24:32):
really wrong, but I also felt like they were deeply connected. And the process of writing
the book was like trying to tease out those connections and kind of figure out why I was
thinking about all of these things together. If that makes sense. That makes a ton of sense.
And it reads, the poems read that way. It never feels like one is a metaphor for the
(24:52):
other, which I think is in a way feels like, but probably the obvious move to make, oh,
this one kind of grief, another kind of grief, but you're, you're not doing it in that way.
It is more the connection between those things, which is part of why I love the title that
we have three very different kinds of elemental things, ash, water, and then the elemental
(25:14):
relationship with the mother. And there, there are different things.
I know. And you know, I'm really, titles are really funny for me. Like I often will think
of a title for a book and it'll be terrible and I'll be wedded to it. A million people
have to tell me it's terrible. And in the case of this, this collection, I actually
thought of the title and I was like, wow, that actually works. But I did, no one had
to disabuse me of using this title, but this was the situation in which I was like this,
(25:36):
I just feel like this is the title of this project for whatever it's worth. Yeah. I mean,
the mother, the water, the ash. And I also liked having it without punctuation. It just,
I don't know the kind of tripartite piece of it. And I don't know if you can see this,
the cover here, but this is the work of a New Orleans artist, Sybil Peretti. I really
wanted the work of a living New Orleans artist. And I really wanted the cover. I'll send you
(25:58):
a copy of it later. An actual copy of the book. I really wanted the cover of the book
not to be like a drowned landscape or a mother. I wanted it to have a more elliptical relationship
to the subject matter. So her image is just beautiful. That's great. I love that. So you're
gonna, and I'll ask you to read it. We'll talk about your poem, Downriver, which is
actually the last poem in the collection. So I'll ask you to, whenever you're ready,
(26:23):
go ahead and read it and I'll ask you some questions and hopefully it will be relatively
painless for you. Perfect. Okay. Downriver. The storm is a girl on the edge of fury in
a dress the color of lead. Not the girl I once was. Too easy. Let's talk about downriver
parishes no one knows the names of. Not a spill of moonlight. No cool loose dirt. Let's
(26:51):
talk about a river. Thrashing blinking open. No lovely blur but a wrecked yellow shotgun
splintered crushed. Yes I am talking about dynamite. Yes downriver is a word. Take it
apart. I am talking about the levy at carnivon. No metaphor. Only spill only break only explode
(27:15):
not edge. Yet how often I walked the Mississippi shore. Mud sunk. Swirl of storm. No too lovely.
Tall river grass. Levy stunned open. Glow of a silvered moon between split trees. A
body swept and dredged. Oh thank you. I love this poem. Behind the scenes you suggested
(27:42):
talking about this poem or another one and this is a weird way into the poem but the
reason I chose it is that you're emphasizing the places that don't get talked about and
that we have carnivon and I'm just curious to hear a little about that. I did some looking
up about carnivon and the history of just the name is kind of strange but. Yeah so what
I was thinking of here so I was thinking of all the I was thinking about my Louisiana
(28:05):
ecology class back in the 80s but I was also thinking about a couple of other things like
there's New Orleans New Orleans parish and Jefferson parish and like parishes are like
the boroughs right. The other parishes surrounded but then there are all these other parishes
that we never think about down by Grand Isle and Morgan City and there's this sort of thing
expectation of like well those just get destroyed. So what are those parishes and the other thing
(28:28):
I was thinking about is when Katrina hit there was there was a conversation right after Katrina
because you know Katrina was a completely not a natural disaster is a completely human
made thing the levees breached because the levees were terrible and you know etc. So
there was it when Katrina happened there was immediately a conversation about how the levees
were blown up on purpose and there was a historical antecedent for that which was the 1927 quote
(28:52):
unquote great flood of the great flood of 1927 which I was shocked to find out I never learned
about in school in which the southern parishes were blown up to ruin the black neighborhoods
and keep the white citizens safe. So yes when people were saying that during Katrina yes
there was an actual historical precedent yes that could happen again. So I found that really
fascinating and interesting and I wanted to write about it and I was just thinking about
(29:15):
like all of you know what does downriver mean like down the river down the downriver we
don't talk about like and then I was thinking about other things like why are storms so often
named after women you know what I mean like all of this stuff and what I really was thinking
about after I after I drafted the poem after it's like you know 700 horrible drafts that
it started with that were 30 pages long I was like huh I think in a way what this poem
(29:39):
is about is ecological grief and I also think this poem is touching on what I want this
book to circle back on which is this idea of let's not use the beautiful language to
talk about disaster. Let's let's say a quote unquote spill of moonlight or cool loose dirt
you know let's not always make it beautiful which is something that you still see in our
(30:00):
contemporary language about disaster right so I don't know a lot of stuff was spinning
a lot of stuff was spinning through my head in this poem and I also made the decision
in this poem to take out punctuation which is something I never do but I felt like I
wanted the poem to have these blank spaces omissions and kind of junctures in between
(30:21):
to make it you know at first it had punctuation in the first draft and it felt very static
and wanted to have more of a sense of movement I was thinking about rivers I was thinking
about storms and so I came to that as well and it just seemed like it would so I love
nothing more than this is such a long answer your question I love nothing more than the
arranging a collection it's like the funnest thing ever and thinking about what goes next
(30:43):
to what and I really liked the idea of ending this collection with the phrase a body swept
and dredged as opposed to like ending it directly with my mother's body but an ending
on a note of a body swept and dredged felt like that was that was the place it feels
really resonant both in the poem and on other poems or on the collection as a whole I have
(31:07):
so many things that I want to ask about it I but what the thing the other reason I chose
this poem is I love that what you said that let's write or talk about the thing with literal
language let's not aesthetic set us as let's not pretty it up I don't know why I can't
speak today and that comes you know from something like naming carnivon to you know the different
(31:30):
language in the poem that's about but let's stay within the realm of the literal and it's
still impossible to get away from it I yeah you know all language is metaphorical but
like levy stunned open yeah this carries you know the the metaphor but it's it's intense
there's nothing gratifying about it I also want to ask you about the spaces on the page
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because you do for listeners there are there's no punctuation additionally there are spaces
within the lines sometimes it demonstrates sentence breaks other times it's sort of like
breath pauses I think and I'm just curious how that happened because you know the poem
on the levy once again I walk to sharpen is similar in having those spaces and I'm just
curious how that came about you mentioned it looking static with punctuation yeah yeah
(32:15):
so it's really funny so my MFA is in fiction and I published a novel two million years
ago but I do and I raised this because I feel like this is kind of important for my own
poetics so like when I'm for many many years writing poetry I was like must have a narrative
must tell a story must be a giant poem right and it was super hard for me to get out of
(32:36):
narrative focus on lyric the lyric moment not be super literal you know what I mean
and I was frustrated I was deeply frustrated while I was getting my MFA in fiction and
writing poems on the sign at the at the time and then writing my first book I was like
deeply frustrated about how to deal with narrative but there was something about this project
and writing about my mother and writing about my daughters and being a mother without a
(32:59):
mother and writing about place that somehow allowed me to step away from narrative more
easily you know where I felt less like I need to tell the story of everything that ever
happened on this levy by my house you know what I mean I don't need to actually do that
and I was like okay what would happen if you let your gave yourself a little more sort
(33:19):
of space and if you gave yourself I mean this is these are questions I asked in revision
and you gave yourself space like space to leave things out what would happen if you
didn't jam everything into a poem you know what I mean because which is always what I
want to do and so I found that putting the spaces in allowed me to think differently
about omission negative space blank space and what is left out and that and that felt
(33:43):
like it was that felt useful to me you know because there's a whole other poem happening
in the middle of those blank spaces but yeah I wanted I really wanted to play with that
I'm also really interested in this idea of and this is going to be highly simplistic
but there's kind of like the poem as the mind in action and the poem as artifact right and
(34:04):
I'm not privileging one over the other but I feel like they're very different impulses
and I'm interested in that like how that plays out like every every poem has its own like
reason for being and its strategy and every pump doesn't fall into those categories but
I was interested in this poem and downriver of playing with that idea of the mind in action
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especially as a way to end as well so the collection didn't feel like it just ended
on a note of resolution or total despair right I didn't want it to foreclose anything I wanted
it to end on a kind of idea of openness I like that I like that way of thinking about
it a lot one one quick note just about carnivon since I did the research that part of it is
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what I like that you name about it because this place I'm completely unfamiliar with
it's an unincorporated community and there are a lot of those in the US and in that area
and it's this sort of like you're detached from the narrative and you're sort of detached
from the sort of basic things that come with being a city also it's named after a plantation
which I didn't know apparently a lot of places down there are named after plantations but
(35:11):
the plantation is believed to be named after a town in Wales which is just very strange
that is totally fascinating I did not know that yes there are a lot of plantations and
a lot of things named after plantations it's truly awful yeah it's really interesting like
place names I mean I'm fascinated by place in general and I felt like and again like
the places that we don't think about the places that we haven't read about the places that
(35:33):
I didn't learn about in school like what are those places you know I remember so vividly
during hurricane Katrina Katrina the narrative was almost both during and in the aftermath
it was New Orleans and sort of like the coast of Mississippi like and there was there was
very little sort of focus anywhere else or naming of other places and you know even in
(35:55):
a tragic event you know enormous terrible event like that still much gets lost I know
and I think about that a lot because we seem to have to state the obvious more and more
terrible tragic events all the time like the fires the floods and I think about the way
we talk about disaster and catastrophe on the news and the way we think about it individually
and which people we remember and who we bear witness to you know it's it's just like it
(36:20):
feels more it feels incredibly important to think about all that right now and part of
it is just a difficulty of volume that there are so many places and so many narratives
but the fact that the same kinds of omission happens so often with these kinds of narratives
on on that note are you ready to transition to the silliness I am I have to tell you a
(36:41):
little I'm a little terrified of the silliness because listening to the podcast your other
guests have done so well and I feel I may fail at the silliness but here I am I there's
no failing at the silliness as long as you're in the spirit it's great all right did you
watch much of the Olympics I really did not okay did you see this is not relevant to anything
but did you see the pole vaulter who by his genitals failed to clear the the bar oh no
(37:07):
that's terrible oh no oh it's it's it's terrible and very funny I hesitate to send the picture
but anyway well this episode first it's brought to you by a new anthology Olympic poems and
a wide variety of poets contributed in honor of the now concluded Summer Olympic Games
it's sure to stir your patriotic heart because as we all know there are only two acceptable
(37:30):
forms of patriotism in this country they are rooting for Olympic athletes and hating the
British so there are poets in this anthology like theater reth karate Carl Lewis Carroll
and Allison Flo Joseph and great poems like Robert Frost nothing gold can stay unless
it was won by an athlete from the USA USA USA there's Adrian Rich's poem about practice
(37:55):
diving into the rec room and Elizabeth Bishops in the weightlifting room so the you'll love
I'm skipping a joke here because it doesn't work of course lastly you're gonna love the
centerpiece of the anthology Emily Dickinson's this is the hour of lead DECI that's the new
anthology Olympic poems available at pawn shops everywhere so I'm gonna stick with the
(38:20):
Olympic theme for the quiz okay so this is a little bit true did you know that poetry
was actually a competitive event in the Olympics from 1912 to 1948 no really yeah it really
was the the guy who basically is responsible for the modern Olympics is a French Baron
named Pierre de Coubertin he he believed that the modern games had to reflect sort of the
(38:44):
classical games and quote I'm quoting here reunite in the bonds of legitimate wedlock
a long divorced couple muscle and mind there's a lot to dig in there but just the idea that
there had to be both the intellectual strength and the strength of sport so there were actually
five arts categories there was architecture literature music painting and sculpture which
(39:11):
I mean they're not really competitive categories but somehow they were so I'm gonna ask you
a series of questions about literature competitions at the Olympics okay hopefully are you ready
to play I am ready okay five questions question number one true or false the first gold medal
in literature at the Olympics was awarded to the man responsible for creating the games
(39:34):
here to coubertin true or false oh I feel like that has to be true it is true it was
awarded to George Horod and Martin Escobar but it turned out that those Pete created
those pseudonyms for himself only years later that this came to light so you're one for
one classic and perfect yes excellent so true or false the poems were required to be about
(40:01):
classical subjects of ancient Greece oh I wonder if that would be true as well true
false they were required to be about sport oh interesting okay the first the first gold
medal medal winner was a poem called owed to sport over time they became more and more
(40:23):
specific about different kinds of sports but okay so you're one for two question three
this is also true or false they're true or false there were categories for both lyric
poems and epic poems oh I really want that to be true so I'm gonna say true it is true
it did not start out that way but what they found the first year only five people submitted
(40:46):
poems but it very quickly ramped up and so they found themselves having to distinguish
between you know epic poems and lyric poems and this leads into question four which is
our one and only multiple choice question so they ended up creating a category for dramatic
works and at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles one of the judges was a well-known
(41:10):
American playwright so was it a Eugene O'Neill be Clifford Odets or see Thornton Wilder oh
my gosh this is so tough I knew who I wanted it to be but I think I'm gonna put somewhat
I'm gonna go for a different answer Clifford Odets no who did you want it to be what is
(41:33):
Eugene O'Neill oh that's the New York your your it would be funny if it were Eugene O'Neill
or interesting but it's Thornton Wilder oh all right sense so which in retrospect makes
a certain amount of sense to me yeah after after the Olympic Games were over he said
quote if we continue encouraging them we may be able to build up a tradition that will
(41:56):
call forth some splendid work oh I love that yeah but it never reached that there's some
weird things so the 36 Olympics in Berlin the medalists were German and Italian in the
poetry it's like oh well yes these are national we're being nationalistic and and and fascistic
(42:19):
so last question true or false no American ever meddled in literature at the Olympic
Games I really want that to be false I'm sorry it's true no American ever meddled wow
so the closest in the 32 games which were again in Los Angeles someone named Avery Rundage
(42:40):
was awarded an honorable mention and technically he he was third but they did not give him
a medal oh why I don't know what's weird about it is that there's some of this history
is just gone like on the Olympics main web page they don't list any of these old awards
(43:00):
because they were only from 1912 to 1948 and so it just seems to be largely erased from
history like most of the poems are just gone apparently why did it end in 1948 then I think
it was waning interest basically yeah and part of part of it was you know it's right
(43:20):
after World War Two there were no games in 42 or 40 or 44 and in 48 that was the last
year I think that the just as they start the very first year in 1912 they had like five
applicants I think they only had like five or six in 48 and then just didn't seem like
it also seems like there are just so many problems with it you know English was not
(43:44):
used as sort of the lingua franca like there were poems in German and in French and in
Italian and so are we working from translations you know it's just seems complicated to me
so you're so right oh my gosh I learned so much from this game I had no idea about any
of this I didn't either I came across it where that I came across it somewhere there's an
(44:07):
article in the hub there have been a couple of articles in the New York Times and it actually
knows Smithsonian magazine because they ran it during the Olympic Games that's where I
saw it Nicole thank you so so much for being here is there anything you would like to say
or mention or plug before we go no just that it was a real joy to be here with you and
to talk poetry and I so appreciate your inviting me on this was super fun no thank you so much
(44:29):
I'm just realizing I forgot to write my closing so let's see if I can remember it since I
took the summer off from recording listeners thank you so much for listening go have a
great day read some poems pet some dogs and support striking workers wherever you find
them bye I remembered it whoo-hoo
Welcome to the Talking Poem Podcast. I'm Charlie Green, back from a summer hiatus.
(00:04):
The show will be bi-weekly from here on out, maybe I'll do an occasional short and early
episode. On each episode I invite someone to bring in any poem they'd like to discuss.
We'll talk about what excites us, what delights us, maybe what frustrates us, and we'll
follow the poem and the conversation wherever they turn. On episodes like today's, the
guests will also share a poem of their own before we move to some silliness and a game.
(00:27):
I'm so excited to have on this week Nicole Cooley. She's the author of seven collections
of poetry, including her most recent, Mother Water Ash, which came out this year from LSU
Press and is beautiful. She's a professor in the MFA program in creative writing and
literary translation and the English department at Queens College, CUNY. She brought in Lucille
(00:49):
Clifton's poem June 20, and she's a delight to talk with and listen to. Thanks for listening
and go on to the conversation.
I was talking to somebody about this. They were asking if I can write during the semester
and it's not really. Are you able to write during the semester?
(01:11):
You know, for 15 years I directed the MFA program, then we started it. And so that was
a lot because I was teaching Tutu and I was directing it. And CUNY has no infrastructure.
You're basically a secretary, you know, doing everything for the program. So that was really
hard. But I stepped away from that and I have to admit I just had a very luxurious sabbatical
(01:33):
year. Oh, nice. And I spent the whole year like working at the New York Public Library
every day. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. So I live in New Jersey. But so that was really
like that was amazing and wonderful. And I worked really hard and it was great. But yes,
for the past 15 years, it's been super hard and I would try to devote like one day to
(01:53):
it. But that it was just really hard, you know? Yeah. Really, really. It was really
difficult. So I'm hoping to I'm hoping that the sabbatical taught me a lesson somehow
and I can be better going forward. You know, I've gotten better at writing sort
of catch as catch can whenever anything is there, you know, and 20 minutes never feels
like enough. But, you know, doing writing in class with students and exactly. Yeah.
(02:17):
Being very, very low expectations and stakes. Yep. Yep. Yep. If there's one thing I'm good
at, it's writing a bad poem. You know what I mean? The expectations are like I should
have that on a t-shirt because like I really like my expectations are so low for writing
and that that's a huge help. Yeah. I'm a lot of people. I think everybody's
been an expert at writing a bad poem, even people who've never written poems. Right.
(02:40):
I know. I know. Let's let's turn to a good poem you brought in June 20 by Lucille Clifton.
It originally appeared in her 1992 collection, The Book of Light. I'll ask you to go ahead
and read it and then we'll talk. Perfect. Yeah. It came out in the 1992 book and I think
the book was just re-released by Copper Canyon recently with I think an afterward maybe by
(03:02):
her son, but I haven't actually read it. I love this poem so much and it scares me so
much. I'm thrilled to talk about it. I'll read it. June 20th. I will be born in one
week to a frowned forehead of a woman and a man whose fingers will itch to enter me.
She will crochet a dress for me of silver and he will carry me in it. They will do for
(03:28):
each other all that they can, but it will not be enough. None of us know that we will
not smile again for years, that she will not live long. In one week, I will emerge face
first into their temporary joy. Oh, thank you. I guess I'll start with the question
(03:48):
in a way I feel like the answer may be obvious, but what scares you about this poem? Oh my
God, like everything. So the poems that I love most and I've taught this poem a lot.
I've taught it to high school students, college students, graduate students, older adults.
I just bring it in like everywhere I go because I love people's perspectives. What I love
about this poem, what scares me about it is like if you try to explain this poem to someone,
(04:10):
they would be like, no, you can't write that poem. You can't write a poem that starts
with I will be born in one week. No. It's like we're in workshop and we're like, no,
no, Lucille, no, change the voice. So I think that's one thing. She's making a really fascinating
point of view voice decision. So I really love that. It shocks me every time I read
it, I will be born. I also think that just the details in the poem are so scary. And
(04:35):
a lot of what I think actually makes the details scary is the sonic values, the sound in the
poem, crochet a dress of silver, right? He will carry me in it. Like his fingers will
itch to enter me like that itch and crochet. Like it's so uncomfortable, right? It's so
very uncomfortable at the end of those lines. And I find this so I find the sounds really
(05:00):
scary. And then I also find it fascinating that this poem, which is about, you know,
is so tragic and about abuse and so scary, then ends with the word joy. Like another
thing, like if I'm always imagining like in workshop, right? Like if we're in workshop,
it'd be like, Lucille, that's not your ending, right? So this idea of ending with the word
(05:21):
joy, but having all of this complexity and terror in the poem. I love nothing more than
a short poem that can truly contain multitudes. And I feel like this poem really does that.
It is such a surprising poem, the I will be born in one week. That's such an unusual choice
to set it one week before her birth and as if she's speaking into it. And you're absolutely
(05:44):
right. The father character is terrified. We only see him through action. It's the fingers
will itch to enter me. The he will carry me in it. If not for the first action, that might
be something neutral. He will carry me in it. But because of that first action, it takes
on this incredibly sinister tone. And then, yeah, into their temporary joy. And we end
(06:07):
on the word joy. I think part of the reason for me it works is that it's mitigated or
complicated by temporary.
Yeah, and absolutely. And again, sound, right? Temporary and joy, like those two Y's and
the sonic echo of those two words. It's such an incredible ending to me. And and to even
I mean, how about the ultimate line like, in one week, I will emerge, you know, oh my
(06:30):
gosh. The other thing I love is that's like always confusing and fascinating to me is
the title, June 20. So I read somewhere once that every year on her birthday, Lucille Clifton
would write a poem for herself. I have no proof that this is a poem written on her birthday.
But I also think like, it could be the birthday is June 20. It could be the birthday. This
is June 20. And the birthday is June 27. You know what I mean? There's this like weird
(06:52):
complexity in this super simple title. That just seems like a temporal marker, but like
is still doing more work.
It's this weirdly resonant thing. By the way, I did fact check she was born on the on the
27th. So technically, we can say, you know, born born in June 27. This is a week before
she's born. The temporality part of what it does is just the defamiliarizing opening instead
(07:15):
of being I was born. This is immediate strangeness. And I was thinking about this with birthdays
that, you know, even as I get older and I celebrate them a little less every year, there's
this feeling of, oh yeah, I'm about to be born again. Not in the religious sense, but
there's this feeling of like a birthday can evoke every other birthday in a way, I guess.
(07:40):
Absolutely. Yeah. And you're so right about that opening because it's not I was born.
It's I will be born. And I also like when I'm teaching, I love to talk to students about
how the smallest changes make the biggest difference. Like that verb tense, I will be
versus I was, or I will be versus I am. Like the fact that it's conditional and future
focused, right. I think it is so important. Yeah, I think so too. And it is such a surprising
(08:05):
choice. How do students react to it?
You know, it's really interesting. So first, I love bringing in a short poem to class because
at first students are like, oh, this is going to be really easy. It's a short poem, especially
undergrads, honestly, like you're not asking us to read that much. And then I'm like, all
right, look at this poem, right? Because I, you know, it's the same reason I love bringing
in Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Cool, which also is like short poem that's like, yes,
(08:29):
you might have read it in eighth grade, but it's incredibly complicated and fascinating.
So at first people think it might be OK. And then when we take a deeper look at it, everyone
is very upset by a man whose fingers will itch to enter me. It's also really interesting
that it's not my father, right? It's a man. So everyone gets very upset about that. So
we start to talk about in what points in the poem, the poem begins to deepen and progress
(08:55):
and you really begin to understand the emotional complexity, right? Because I'm looking at
this poem and I'm like, how does she get to do this? This is so incredible. Well, part
of how she does it is language. Part of how she does it is sound. So we spend a lot of
time on sound and we spend a lot of time on form, in fact, because then again, this poem
looks like a fairly simple one stanza poem. But why is it in one stanza? I would ask students
(09:18):
like, what does that mean? You know what I mean? So it's a really great way, I think,
despite it being a free verse poem to get students to look really closely at the language
and put it under the microscope, which is my all time favorite thing about teaching.
It's so much fun to start in on a poem this short and then you look at your watch and
like 25 minutes, half an hour later, you're still talking about it. I want to talk about
(09:40):
the form because I have new favorite line breaks because of this poem. For listeners,
a man whose fingers will itch, there's that break after itch to enter me, you know, which
gives it that extra intensity. And then the same thing with they will do for each other,
which has that kind of like, well, yeah, they just kind of accept it. Oh, you'll do all
(10:00):
that they can, which makes it sound as if they are giving something to each other. And
but it will not be enough. And so as the sentence unfolds over those line breaks, the meaning
just keeps changing and becoming fuller and fuller. And I just it's one of the things
that I really, really loved about this poem. I know line breaks are kind of everything.
Like I always think and not to trash prose, but in poetry, we get the line and the sentence,
(10:25):
we get them both, and we get to put the intention with one another. Right. So I will be born
in one week break to a frowned forehead of a woman break. So it's like, oh, first line
ends with a W sound. Second line ends with a W sound. Then third line ends with itch.
Fourth line ends with crochet. So there's even something happening with line breaks
(10:45):
and sound here, which is like amazing to me. And I also think there's a really interesting
balance of image and statement in this poem, right? Being born to a frowned forehead is
not being born to a mother. It's almost like a Zeus sort of situation. And then there's
that lovely alliteration with frowned forehead. But so there's all of these like super vivid
(11:06):
specific images front loading the poem. And then we get to the middle, you know, as you
said, they will do for each other all that they can, but it will not be enough. None
of us know that we will not smile again for years. So I always think like, what if she
had started the poem with none of us know that we will not smile again for years, right?
It would be so much less interesting than the way she starts it. So she really like
(11:29):
kind of earns the abstract statements by putting all of this super sharp language at the beginning.
It's image in action. And the sound of it is also fantastic too. To a frowned forehead
of a woman and a man whose fingers will itch to enter me, she will crochet. And there's
just that movement of the Fs, the alliteration there, but also the movement of the vowels
(11:52):
from fingers, itch, those eyes to the E's. It's just there is, it does build that intensity.
I love that. And like in my class, we also, we spent time talking about like with my students
crochet versus knit, right? Like you will knit a dress for me. It sounds very different.
Crochet, which is something you do with one needle, right? Which is maybe get a one hand
(12:12):
thing. Like it's a different word than knit. It's a longer word. It chimes with itch. Like,
and then we talk about like in my classes, why is the dress silver? It could be a dress
of gold, but it's not right. Is silver less valuable? Like there's just all of these wonderful
linguistic choices. I so wish I could talk to Lucille Clifton about this poem. All of
these really wonderful choices that make the poem as rich and complicated as it is.
(12:38):
That is one of the things that I like about teaching a poem like this too, is it's very
good for getting students to think about what they can pay attention to. Like you said,
this poem could start, none of us know that we will not. And I can imagine so many different
sort of alternate universe versions. The past tense, I was born or I emerged face first,
which is more active, but not necessarily, you know, it's, it's with the past tense,
(13:03):
it doesn't have the pop and surprise of the future of the future tense. And in thinking
about that, what I was thinking about is the action that the mother and the man do things
and the speaker doesn't really like the first time she actually does anything, it's emerge
face first. And so otherwise she is being in a way done to, she's being carried. You
(13:29):
know, she's not knowing and it's only that emerge face first. It's this really interesting
sort of who has power in this moment.
Yeah, I love that. That's such an interesting way to read it, right? And it's almost like
the speaker, the I is in the beginning of the poem and then the I is in the end and
that kind of bookends the poem, but the middle of it really is about the family as a unit.
(13:52):
You know, and this heartbreaking line, none of us know that we will not smile again for
years that she will not live long, right? It's devastating.
It's a double whammy of retrospect that it, she's able to put us in the moment where,
oh, everything looks positive. That temporary joy doesn't seem like it's going to be temporary
before the birth. It's a possibility, but she's also doing this retrospectively.
(14:18):
Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's also, you know, you could teach this poem in connection
with Sharon Old's poem. I think it's called I Go Back to May 1937, in which she imagines,
the speaker imagines her parents like outside of the college gates and imagining like they
don't know, and it's a horrible paraphrase, but they don't know what's going to happen.
And so it's like assignment, imagine a life, your family's life before you were born, but
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like you know it and you're thinking about it, right? Like it just is a very fascinating
spin on point of view and thinking about the speaker and what the speaker can do and where
the speaker can be located.
There's an essay by writer named Ann Panning, very short, it's called Remembering I Was
Not There, where she's telling the story of her parents. I'll try to find either a link
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to it and put it in the show notes or a PDF, which I can send to you. And she's basically
writing a scene of her parents before she was born and you get the sense of there's
the version of this she was told and there's the version of it she's imagining. And I think
what's interesting about a poem like this, what it speaks to in part is as children,
we often try to imagine what were our parents' lives like. And you know, she's remembering
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her own childhood and at the same time trying to imagine that life before. She can only
get seven days prior to her birth. There's something very sad about the moment that she
lands on.
That's a great point, actually, especially about like that's the moment she lands on,
right? Yeah, yeah. It's just there's so much to think about and talk about in this poem,
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right? It's just so I guess the word I would use is it's I keep saying it's complex and
complicated, but it's also just really rich. And like you put a little into give a little
interpretive pressure on this poem and like so many things start happening. I think that's
another reason I just love it so much.
There's a ton. A lot happens in this poem, just emotionally. It feels like and it's hard
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to make a short poem do this. I mean, it's incredibly difficult for everybody, me especially,
but it's hard to make a poem keep having a sort of bigger emotional push without feeling
like like it's being overdone or overblown. But we're learning more about each person.
We're learning more about those interactions and how she sees those interactions. And it's
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just as a real power that I love.
Absolutely. And the funny thing is, like I look at my own writing and my own. So I'm
a very messy writer. Like I'll write like 30 pages to get to one page. And I don't,
you know, I don't sit and try to work on a poem like as a beautiful art object. I'm a
mess. Like it's the one area in which I'm messy. Like I'm willing to just write junk,
write badly, fill a folder, whatever. But I feel like in so many ways, the writing that
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I admire most is the writing that I'm striving to do, which is so hard for me, which is this
like crystalline short kind of poetry, right? Where it's just like there's so much here,
but she doesn't need to have lines that take you all over the page. And she doesn't need
to have a million parts. She doesn't need to take you up to her adulthood, right? She
doesn't need to do any of those things. So like there's so much left out here and yet
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you feel like the poem is so fulfilling. I really love that about it too.
Yeah. It's so concise and crisp the way the frowned forehead evokes the mother immediately
and notably it's not mother, the frowned forehead of a woman that we get a man and a woman that
they're even detached from mother, father roles and names. And so, and then we just
(17:43):
see him so crisply, the fingers will itch to enter me. He will carry it. We just see
them so clearly and so immediately. And that's just so hard to do.
Isn't it? I know it would be so different if it was like, I will be born in one week
to my mother and my father. But the fact you're right that she doesn't ever use those markers.
So there's this detachment, right? But also not. I think it's like, it's so fascinating.
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And you know, the woman has a frowned forehead, the man has fingers. So they both have the
F sound there. So they're connected through sound, but then I just like, I just find it
utterly fascinating. I've read this poem so many times and every time I return to it,
I feel like I honestly see new things.
As we're talking about, I'm seeing more and more. It's just kind of exploding. Like even
(18:29):
saying a woman and a man, it sort of suggests this distance that she feels from both of
them. Like there's a double meaning. On June 20, before she's born, in a very literal sense
to her, they are just man and woman. But looking back that they are man and woman and not mother
father suggests just the difficulty of that relationship. It's really powerful.
(18:51):
Isn't it? Right? I know. Again, like the small, you know, woman versus mother, like that small
shift I think is fascinating to think about.
Other things you want to note about this poem before we turn to you, a poem of yours?
You know, I just think, I look at this poem and it reminds me of what I go to poetry for.
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Right? I think it, Lucille Clifton had a saying, she said, I want to write poetry that afflicts
the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. And I've heard that attributed to other people
too. And I just love it. And I feel like this poem does both. Like it certainly afflicts
the comfortable. This is a very uncomfortable poem. Right? But on the other hand, you can
also see a way in which this poem could comfort the afflicted. Right? So I love that kind
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of dual both and way of thinking about what a poem can do. And I feel like it's really
contained in this poem.
I think there's a process note there too, that there are times when if I'm making myself
uncomfortable in the writing, I know I'm on to something.
Right. Yeah.
Not always. You know, back to the, I write lots of bad poems, but often that's a sign
(19:59):
that there's something here to mine and to articulate.
It's so interesting because one assignment I love to give in my undergrad poetry workshop
and sometimes in the grad is for the last week of class, write the poem you've been
avoiding all semester. And everybody said, what do you mean? I'm like, I'm not going
to tell you anything except that I'll say, is there a subject matter you're avoiding?
Is there a form you're avoiding? Like you're terrified of sonnets, you hate prose poems.
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Right? Is there something that you feel you can never write about? And like, you're going
to write this poem, you're going to only turn it into me. We can have a conversation about
it. If you want to, we don't have to, but it's like, what are you avoiding in your own
work? You know, what are the things that make you so vastly uncomfortable that you can't
write about them? And I think that's just interesting as something to think about.
I do something similar in my personal essay classes where at the, toward the end of a
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class I hand out note cards to everybody and I tell them, I insist, they're not going to
show this to anybody. I'm not going to take it up. This is for you and you can opt out
of doing it if it sounds too intense. And I asked them to, what is something that you
would never write an essay about and why? And then once they've done that, I asked them
to turn over the card and say, so why would you write this essay? And every semester,
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several of the students at the end, they say, you know, I, I doing that helped me understand
why I wanted to write about it and how ways I could, which always feels rewarding. So
I love that. And then do they take the index card home? I tell them they can do with it,
whatever they want. So a number of them, it's a discomforting exercise. I always feel a
(21:28):
little guilty about it because I'm asking them to think about something that's very
difficult to think about. But I mean, it's a personal essay class. So we end up there
a lot anyway. But let's transition to your poem. And before we get to the poem, could
you briefly describe the collection, Mother Water Ash, because it really is sort of a
unifying collection. Yes, here it is. It's very pretty. So I'm holding it up. It just
(21:53):
came out. This is a book about my mother's sudden death in March, 2018. And it's also
about the disappearing coastline of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast where I grew up and where
my mother lived. And, and part of it comes from a few sources. My mother died suddenly
and to make sense of it, I was just writing, writing, writing. And I was writing a lot
of junk. Like, I wrote 50 pages of terrible prose. I wrote a grief syllabus. I wrote like
(22:16):
junk, right? Hardly any of it in here. I wrote junk, but it was a way to cope with all of
this frantic writing. And then I was like, All right, what have I got? So that was one
thing. The other thing is in 2005, August 29, when Hurricane Katrina hit, my parents
had made the decision not to evacuate the city, which was really awful. I wrote an entire
book about it. My book Breach that came out in 2010, but they made a decision not to evacuate.
(22:38):
My mother said to me on the phone and our last phone call before we lost phone contact,
she said, we are not leaving. This is our home. And later she said to me, I will die
in this house. And she, she didn't die during Hurricane Katrina. My parents were miraculously.
Okay. But it, those words haunted me for basically 15. They've haunted me for all these years
(22:59):
since then. And they circled around in my head, like, you know, we're not leaving this
is our home. I will die in this house. So then this all started kind of coalescing with
my thinking about, erotically, a high school class I took as a senior in high school on
Louisiana ecology. And it was an elective and we learned horrifying facts, which are
now like not even as horrifying, right? Like Morgan city at the bottom of Louisiana is
(23:22):
eroding at the rate of one football field a year. Now it's literally like a football
field an hour. So we learned all this stuff and we took these field trips to barrier islands
and waited around in hip boots. And I wrote poems as my final project, right? They let
me get away with that, but I don't know what happened to those bombs, but the, the, the
stuff I learned stuck in my head. So when Katrina happened, I went back and did a deep
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dive into like the environmental disaster that is the Louisiana coast and read tons
about it and caught myself up. And that, and so that information really stayed with me.
And after my mother died, suddenly I find myself walking on the levy. We live two blocks
from the river constantly and staring out at the river and all of these things swirling
in my head. And that's often like where poetry starts for me is a bunch of swirling things.
(24:08):
And I'm like, what is happening? How do they connect? What's going on? Yeah. So that, that
was the process. And, and it all started, it started coming together as I thought about
my mother and Louisiana. And, and then I was also mindful, I will say, not to make my mother's
death a metaphor for the eroding coast and environmental crisis or environmental crisis,
a metaphor for my mother. I didn't want those things to stand in for one another. That felt
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really wrong, but I also felt like they were deeply connected. And the process of writing
the book was like trying to tease out those connections and kind of figure out why I was
thinking about all of these things together. If that makes sense. That makes a ton of sense.
And it reads, the poems read that way. It never feels like one is a metaphor for the
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other, which I think is in a way feels like, but probably the obvious move to make, oh,
this one kind of grief, another kind of grief, but you're, you're not doing it in that way.
It is more the connection between those things, which is part of why I love the title that
we have three very different kinds of elemental things, ash, water, and then the elemental
(25:14):
relationship with the mother. And there, there are different things.
I know. And you know, I'm really, titles are really funny for me. Like I often will think
of a title for a book and it'll be terrible and I'll be wedded to it. A million people
have to tell me it's terrible. And in the case of this, this collection, I actually
thought of the title and I was like, wow, that actually works. But I did, no one had
to disabuse me of using this title, but this was the situation in which I was like this,
(25:36):
I just feel like this is the title of this project for whatever it's worth. Yeah. I mean,
the mother, the water, the ash. And I also liked having it without punctuation. It just,
I don't know the kind of tripartite piece of it. And I don't know if you can see this,
the cover here, but this is the work of a New Orleans artist, Sybil Peretti. I really
wanted the work of a living New Orleans artist. And I really wanted the cover. I'll send you
(25:58):
a copy of it later. An actual copy of the book. I really wanted the cover of the book
not to be like a drowned landscape or a mother. I wanted it to have a more elliptical relationship
to the subject matter. So her image is just beautiful. That's great. I love that. So you're
gonna, and I'll ask you to read it. We'll talk about your poem, Downriver, which is
actually the last poem in the collection. So I'll ask you to, whenever you're ready,
(26:23):
go ahead and read it and I'll ask you some questions and hopefully it will be relatively
painless for you. Perfect. Okay. Downriver. The storm is a girl on the edge of fury in
a dress the color of lead. Not the girl I once was. Too easy. Let's talk about downriver
parishes no one knows the names of. Not a spill of moonlight. No cool loose dirt. Let's
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talk about a river. Thrashing blinking open. No lovely blur but a wrecked yellow shotgun
splintered crushed. Yes I am talking about dynamite. Yes downriver is a word. Take it
apart. I am talking about the levy at carnivon. No metaphor. Only spill only break only explode
(27:15):
not edge. Yet how often I walked the Mississippi shore. Mud sunk. Swirl of storm. No too lovely.
Tall river grass. Levy stunned open. Glow of a silvered moon between split trees. A
body swept and dredged. Oh thank you. I love this poem. Behind the scenes you suggested
(27:42):
talking about this poem or another one and this is a weird way into the poem but the
reason I chose it is that you're emphasizing the places that don't get talked about and
that we have carnivon and I'm just curious to hear a little about that. I did some looking
up about carnivon and the history of just the name is kind of strange but. Yeah so what
I was thinking of here so I was thinking of all the I was thinking about my Louisiana
(28:05):
ecology class back in the 80s but I was also thinking about a couple of other things like
there's New Orleans New Orleans parish and Jefferson parish and like parishes are like
the boroughs right. The other parishes surrounded but then there are all these other parishes
that we never think about down by Grand Isle and Morgan City and there's this sort of thing
expectation of like well those just get destroyed. So what are those parishes and the other thing
(28:28):
I was thinking about is when Katrina hit there was there was a conversation right after Katrina
because you know Katrina was a completely not a natural disaster is a completely human
made thing the levees breached because the levees were terrible and you know etc. So
there was it when Katrina happened there was immediately a conversation about how the levees
were blown up on purpose and there was a historical antecedent for that which was the 1927 quote
(28:52):
unquote great flood of the great flood of 1927 which I was shocked to find out I never learned
about in school in which the southern parishes were blown up to ruin the black neighborhoods
and keep the white citizens safe. So yes when people were saying that during Katrina yes
there was an actual historical precedent yes that could happen again. So I found that really
fascinating and interesting and I wanted to write about it and I was just thinking about
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like all of you know what does downriver mean like down the river down the downriver we
don't talk about like and then I was thinking about other things like why are storms so often
named after women you know what I mean like all of this stuff and what I really was thinking
about after I after I drafted the poem after it's like you know 700 horrible drafts that
it started with that were 30 pages long I was like huh I think in a way what this poem
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is about is ecological grief and I also think this poem is touching on what I want this
book to circle back on which is this idea of let's not use the beautiful language to
talk about disaster. Let's let's say a quote unquote spill of moonlight or cool loose dirt
you know let's not always make it beautiful which is something that you still see in our
(30:00):
contemporary language about disaster right so I don't know a lot of stuff was spinning
a lot of stuff was spinning through my head in this poem and I also made the decision
in this poem to take out punctuation which is something I never do but I felt like I
wanted the poem to have these blank spaces omissions and kind of junctures in between
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to make it you know at first it had punctuation in the first draft and it felt very static
and wanted to have more of a sense of movement I was thinking about rivers I was thinking
about storms and so I came to that as well and it just seemed like it would so I love
nothing more than this is such a long answer your question I love nothing more than the
arranging a collection it's like the funnest thing ever and thinking about what goes next
(30:43):
to what and I really liked the idea of ending this collection with the phrase a body swept
and dredged as opposed to like ending it directly with my mother's body but an ending
on a note of a body swept and dredged felt like that was that was the place it feels
really resonant both in the poem and on other poems or on the collection as a whole I have
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so many things that I want to ask about it I but what the thing the other reason I chose
this poem is I love that what you said that let's write or talk about the thing with literal
language let's not aesthetic set us as let's not pretty it up I don't know why I can't
speak today and that comes you know from something like naming carnivon to you know the different
(31:30):
language in the poem that's about but let's stay within the realm of the literal and it's
still impossible to get away from it I yeah you know all language is metaphorical but
like levy stunned open yeah this carries you know the the metaphor but it's it's intense
there's nothing gratifying about it I also want to ask you about the spaces on the page
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because you do for listeners there are there's no punctuation additionally there are spaces
within the lines sometimes it demonstrates sentence breaks other times it's sort of like
breath pauses I think and I'm just curious how that happened because you know the poem
on the levy once again I walk to sharpen is similar in having those spaces and I'm just
curious how that came about you mentioned it looking static with punctuation yeah yeah
(32:15):
so it's really funny so my MFA is in fiction and I published a novel two million years
ago but I do and I raised this because I feel like this is kind of important for my own
poetics so like when I'm for many many years writing poetry I was like must have a narrative
must tell a story must be a giant poem right and it was super hard for me to get out of
(32:36):
narrative focus on lyric the lyric moment not be super literal you know what I mean
and I was frustrated I was deeply frustrated while I was getting my MFA in fiction and
writing poems on the sign at the at the time and then writing my first book I was like
deeply frustrated about how to deal with narrative but there was something about this project
and writing about my mother and writing about my daughters and being a mother without a
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mother and writing about place that somehow allowed me to step away from narrative more
easily you know where I felt less like I need to tell the story of everything that ever
happened on this levy by my house you know what I mean I don't need to actually do that
and I was like okay what would happen if you let your gave yourself a little more sort
(33:19):
of space and if you gave yourself I mean this is these are questions I asked in revision
and you gave yourself space like space to leave things out what would happen if you
didn't jam everything into a poem you know what I mean because which is always what I
want to do and so I found that putting the spaces in allowed me to think differently
about omission negative space blank space and what is left out and that and that felt
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like it was that felt useful to me you know because there's a whole other poem happening
in the middle of those blank spaces but yeah I wanted I really wanted to play with that
I'm also really interested in this idea of and this is going to be highly simplistic
but there's kind of like the poem as the mind in action and the poem as artifact right and
(34:04):
I'm not privileging one over the other but I feel like they're very different impulses
and I'm interested in that like how that plays out like every every poem has its own like
reason for being and its strategy and every pump doesn't fall into those categories but
I was interested in this poem and downriver of playing with that idea of the mind in action
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especially as a way to end as well so the collection didn't feel like it just ended
on a note of resolution or total despair right I didn't want it to foreclose anything I wanted
it to end on a kind of idea of openness I like that I like that way of thinking about
it a lot one one quick note just about carnivon since I did the research that part of it is
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what I like that you name about it because this place I'm completely unfamiliar with
it's an unincorporated community and there are a lot of those in the US and in that area
and it's this sort of like you're detached from the narrative and you're sort of detached
from the sort of basic things that come with being a city also it's named after a plantation
which I didn't know apparently a lot of places down there are named after plantations but
(35:11):
the plantation is believed to be named after a town in Wales which is just very strange
that is totally fascinating I did not know that yes there are a lot of plantations and
a lot of things named after plantations it's truly awful yeah it's really interesting like
place names I mean I'm fascinated by place in general and I felt like and again like
the places that we don't think about the places that we haven't read about the places that
(35:33):
I didn't learn about in school like what are those places you know I remember so vividly
during hurricane Katrina Katrina the narrative was almost both during and in the aftermath
it was New Orleans and sort of like the coast of Mississippi like and there was there was
very little sort of focus anywhere else or naming of other places and you know even in
(35:55):
a tragic event you know enormous terrible event like that still much gets lost I know
and I think about that a lot because we seem to have to state the obvious more and more
terrible tragic events all the time like the fires the floods and I think about the way
we talk about disaster and catastrophe on the news and the way we think about it individually
and which people we remember and who we bear witness to you know it's it's just like it
(36:20):
feels more it feels incredibly important to think about all that right now and part of
it is just a difficulty of volume that there are so many places and so many narratives
but the fact that the same kinds of omission happens so often with these kinds of narratives
on on that note are you ready to transition to the silliness I am I have to tell you a
(36:41):
little I'm a little terrified of the silliness because listening to the podcast your other
guests have done so well and I feel I may fail at the silliness but here I am I there's
no failing at the silliness as long as you're in the spirit it's great all right did you
watch much of the Olympics I really did not okay did you see this is not relevant to anything
but did you see the pole vaulter who by his genitals failed to clear the the bar oh no
(37:07):
that's terrible oh no oh it's it's it's terrible and very funny I hesitate to send the picture
but anyway well this episode first it's brought to you by a new anthology Olympic poems and
a wide variety of poets contributed in honor of the now concluded Summer Olympic Games
it's sure to stir your patriotic heart because as we all know there are only two acceptable
(37:30):
forms of patriotism in this country they are rooting for Olympic athletes and hating the
British so there are poets in this anthology like theater reth karate Carl Lewis Carroll
and Allison Flo Joseph and great poems like Robert Frost nothing gold can stay unless
it was won by an athlete from the USA USA USA there's Adrian Rich's poem about practice
(37:55):
diving into the rec room and Elizabeth Bishops in the weightlifting room so the you'll love
I'm skipping a joke here because it doesn't work of course lastly you're gonna love the
centerpiece of the anthology Emily Dickinson's this is the hour of lead DECI that's the new
anthology Olympic poems available at pawn shops everywhere so I'm gonna stick with the
(38:20):
Olympic theme for the quiz okay so this is a little bit true did you know that poetry
was actually a competitive event in the Olympics from 1912 to 1948 no really yeah it really
was the the guy who basically is responsible for the modern Olympics is a French Baron
named Pierre de Coubertin he he believed that the modern games had to reflect sort of the
(38:44):
classical games and quote I'm quoting here reunite in the bonds of legitimate wedlock
a long divorced couple muscle and mind there's a lot to dig in there but just the idea that
there had to be both the intellectual strength and the strength of sport so there were actually
five arts categories there was architecture literature music painting and sculpture which
(39:11):
I mean they're not really competitive categories but somehow they were so I'm gonna ask you
a series of questions about literature competitions at the Olympics okay hopefully are you ready
to play I am ready okay five questions question number one true or false the first gold medal
in literature at the Olympics was awarded to the man responsible for creating the games
(39:34):
here to coubertin true or false oh I feel like that has to be true it is true it was
awarded to George Horod and Martin Escobar but it turned out that those Pete created
those pseudonyms for himself only years later that this came to light so you're one for
one classic and perfect yes excellent so true or false the poems were required to be about
(40:01):
classical subjects of ancient Greece oh I wonder if that would be true as well true
false they were required to be about sport oh interesting okay the first the first gold
medal medal winner was a poem called owed to sport over time they became more and more
(40:23):
specific about different kinds of sports but okay so you're one for two question three
this is also true or false they're true or false there were categories for both lyric
poems and epic poems oh I really want that to be true so I'm gonna say true it is true
it did not start out that way but what they found the first year only five people submitted
(40:46):
poems but it very quickly ramped up and so they found themselves having to distinguish
between you know epic poems and lyric poems and this leads into question four which is
our one and only multiple choice question so they ended up creating a category for dramatic
works and at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles one of the judges was a well-known
(41:10):
American playwright so was it a Eugene O'Neill be Clifford Odets or see Thornton Wilder oh
my gosh this is so tough I knew who I wanted it to be but I think I'm gonna put somewhat
I'm gonna go for a different answer Clifford Odets no who did you want it to be what is
(41:33):
Eugene O'Neill oh that's the New York your your it would be funny if it were Eugene O'Neill
or interesting but it's Thornton Wilder oh all right sense so which in retrospect makes
a certain amount of sense to me yeah after after the Olympic Games were over he said
quote if we continue encouraging them we may be able to build up a tradition that will
(41:56):
call forth some splendid work oh I love that yeah but it never reached that there's some
weird things so the 36 Olympics in Berlin the medalists were German and Italian in the
poetry it's like oh well yes these are national we're being nationalistic and and and fascistic
(42:19):
so last question true or false no American ever meddled in literature at the Olympic
Games I really want that to be false I'm sorry it's true no American ever meddled wow
so the closest in the 32 games which were again in Los Angeles someone named Avery Rundage
(42:40):
was awarded an honorable mention and technically he he was third but they did not give him
a medal oh why I don't know what's weird about it is that there's some of this history
is just gone like on the Olympics main web page they don't list any of these old awards
(43:00):
because they were only from 1912 to 1948 and so it just seems to be largely erased from
history like most of the poems are just gone apparently why did it end in 1948 then I think
it was waning interest basically yeah and part of part of it was you know it's right
(43:20):
after World War Two there were no games in 42 or 40 or 44 and in 48 that was the last
year I think that the just as they start the very first year in 1912 they had like five
applicants I think they only had like five or six in 48 and then just didn't seem like
it also seems like there are just so many problems with it you know English was not
(43:44):
used as sort of the lingua franca like there were poems in German and in French and in
Italian and so are we working from translations you know it's just seems complicated to me
so you're so right oh my gosh I learned so much from this game I had no idea about any
of this I didn't either I came across it where that I came across it somewhere there's an
(44:07):
article in the hub there have been a couple of articles in the New York Times and it actually
knows Smithsonian magazine because they ran it during the Olympic Games that's where I
saw it Nicole thank you so so much for being here is there anything you would like to say
or mention or plug before we go no just that it was a real joy to be here with you and
to talk poetry and I so appreciate your inviting me on this was super fun no thank you so much
(44:29):
I'm just realizing I forgot to write my closing so let's see if I can remember it since I
took the summer off from recording listeners thank you so much for listening go have a
great day read some poems pet some dogs and support striking workers wherever you find
them bye I remembered it whoo-hoo
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