Interview

Your work seems blessedly free of irony and despair, standing out from much of what is being published today. Do you agree? If so, how do you manage to be hopeful and avoid the muck of nostalgia and sentimentality?

I think the poems lack irony because they were written, first and foremost, out of a longing to connect, even when the connection is a shared sense of loneliness or pathos. It’s not that I dislike or intentionally avoid irony; rather, irony is probably not a natural vehicle for connection. I don’t know if the poems are free of despair, but it’s not a stylized despair, and it’s not indelible. To me, the book is largely about cycles, and despair—or at least profound sadness—is part of those cycles. But so are hope and rebirth.


Making the New Lamb Take describes the miraculous, macabre practice of tying the skin of a dead newborn lamb to another young lamb in order to trick the bereaved mother into accepting another offspring as her own. Have you witnessed or participated in this practice? And why was this piece selected as the title poem for your collection?

I’ve never participated in this practice, no, and I’m not even sure it’s a practice that’s still performed. I discovered it as I discover many of the things that take shape in my poems, through reading. I did grow up among orchards and farmlands, though, which clearly had a big influence on me and in turn on the topography and sensibilities of my poems. I am not sure the ewe in the title poem is tricked, exactly! Or at least, that’s not quite how I think of it. She is mourning, seemingly inconsolable, and the idea that she might be coaxed back to the land of the living by this fleecing ritual moves and fascinates me. Will she really be turned by it? And if so, is it that she’s fully convinced that the lamb is her own, or does she, on some level, find the effort of the shepherds to revive her—and the presence of the new lamb that needs her—to be sufficient impetus to begin her life over? The poem doesn’t answer these questions—in fact, its speaker is skeptical that the ritual will work at all. But the ritual existed and persisted because it did work, on some level, and because the people who performed it lived in a culture in which a single ewe was worth consoling, which I also find striking. I was relieved to land on the title of this poem for the collection. I’d had an awful time coming up with one prior to its discovery. I think, as a phrase, it is both intriguing and odd, and I think, in spite of my best efforts at directness, these poems are a bit odd, their voices and psyches slanted. And also, it’s a phrase that conveys something agrarian, which the poems are, and re-rendered, which I think they are, too.


The Old Testament is clearly an influence on your work. Why?

The Old Testament is employed quite a bit, yes, though not (in my mind, at least) as much as classical mythology. These are our great stories—and I don’t mean stories in any small sense. On a primal level, they are our explanation for things, our explanations for ourselves—as a people and as individuals, whether we are religious or not. The figures in the Bible and in myths are cultural archetypes, whether we conform to them or rail against them.


Similarly, the scarecrow makes several appearances in this collection. What is its thematic importance?

In a collection of poems, which is often written over a number of years, often with significant breaks, there are images or phrases that recur with only a limited level of intentionality. They are not coincidences, but they are also not exactly strategies. In Making the New Lamb Take, the scarecrow is such an image. It is a resonant agricultural figure, one that suggests being close to nature, and yet also a desire to ward off nature. I think this conflict is probably why I am intrigued by it and return to it several times. “The Scarecrow Fair” is a poem that took me forever to write. Its generation held me up for months and months. “Mid-Fall,” which refers to a scarecrow, is probably the oldest poem in the book. I may be overstating it, but I think both poems carry that same tension I described: living among the forces of nature as opposed to shielding oneself from them.


Could you talk about how your position as Poetry Editor at Persea affects your own writing?

My editorial work has led me into the lives and work of a small group of wonderful writers who also happen to be wonderful people. I think all artists probably have some requisite sense of isolation, but there also should be kinship. Kinship, though, isn’t easy to come by—for me, anyway—so it’s a tremendous boon to me as a poet—and to my writing—to work so closely with such remarkable people. It gives me a sense of function in the world of literature beyond the necessarily hermetic work of making poems.