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Paula Bohince - Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods
Interview
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1. Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods has been described as a mystery. What’s important to note, however, is that your book does not concentrate so much on who has committed the murder but how those left behind deal with what has happened; the real mystery of your poems is how the daughter absorbs the details of her father’s death and how she can possibly walk through the labyrinth of such grief and rage. Would you agree?
I definitely agree. Grief really is its own universe: mysterious, isolating, and transformative. The violent suddenness of the father’s death and the speaker’s inability to understand it force her to focus on the bewildering details of their life together. I think that her particular obsessions are driven by a rage that can only be felt incrementally. She recollects these smaller incidents almost as a way of cancelling them out, as if everything must be remembered and re-experienced for the father to be revived, or so she might be returned to her earlier self. The structure of mystery novels seems to mimic this grieving process: flashing back, far before the point of the crime, to understand the life destined to end so badly. At the same time, the narrative snakes forward as evidence is uncovered and fit into a solution. In this book, the ones responsible for the father’s murder speak for themselves. I’m equally interested in the story that happens beyond that ending: when there is nothing left to solve and the speaker must wake into her own changed life.
2. Would you consider your collection to be a novel-in-poems? Either way, could you talk about the narrative thread of this collection and how you ordered each poem?
I don’t consider this book to be a novel-in-poems, but I wanted the opening and closing poems to be truly the opening and closing of a world. As I wrote each poem, I didn’t have a sense of how they would eventually connect. I’ve tried to order them in a way that I hope shows character development, conflict, foreshadowing, etc. It seemed essential, early on, to establish the physical landscape of this world, the history of the homestead, and the complicated relationship the speaker has with her father and with herself. I’ve tried to arrange poems in clusters that interrogate her interior landscape and how that changes as the book progresses. Since the collection draws many images from the natural world, it felt possible to think about a seasonal progression. The narrative begins in fall, with its implied sense of fallingness and dying, and moves through the seasons to end in high summer.
3. From the care of sheep to the stories of the apostles, your poems are abundant with references to the New Testament. Would you consider this book, in its own way, to be a Christian text?
I didn’t realize the extent of the references until I read through the book again, prompted by this question. I think that part of the answer has to do with the solitary process of writing and how another text provided a kind of company for me as I was immersed in this world. The speaker is struggling, in a broadly spiritual sense, with issues of faith. I found that stories and images from the New Testament offered a familiar framework for these inquiries. I wouldn’t consider my book to be a Christian text, but the various allusions do provide parallels for life on the farm. A distinction between those Biblical stories and the events in this book, however, seems to rest on the idea of miracles: the multiplication of fish, resurrection, and others. I think that, emotionally, the speaker resides in the thrall between what seems promised and what is delivered.
4. The farm, and the ancestral history of the farm, is a character in itself in this collection. Could you talk about your own upbringing in rural Pennsylvania and how it has influenced your work?
I grew up on a road that felt like a world unto itself: marsh and woods, stables and kennels, cornfields and a junkyard, pastures for cows and horses, some trailers, some houses, two farms—all along one winding road. It was beautiful, shabby, and strange, and I felt, growing up, a sense that where I lived was not included in any larger world. I was a pretty shy kid, and the woods were important to me: spending time there alone, feeling at peace there and in my imagination. I think that childhood feeling influences my work as much as images from that place.
5. Birds constantly make an appearance in your collection. The barn is “damp with birdsong,” the “wrens / go on like nothing’s missing” after the father dies, and later, the narrator says “everything becomes a version of you, assumes a fern or bird shape, some feathery thing I put want into,” in “Acrostic for My Father.” Could you talk about this?
Birds seem like messengers or signals—of what I’m not entirely sure. Part of the intrigue, for me, circles around their disappearances and reappearances: small flits and larger migrations, so we’re left either dazzled or bereft. It’s easy to idealize them, but being a bird seems like endless hard work. Thus their unsettling presence: a beautiful surface with trouble underneath. I think the fantasy of them—particularly their ability to leave and return—stands in for the larger ways the speaker fantasizes her life. Birds also seem to not need anything from human beings, hardly anything at all from earth, which is so unlike a human life or the lives of deer or sheep or horses. This speaker is, perhaps rightfully, mistrustful of human nature. Birds, untouched by that nature, are then imbued with a sense of goodness. I think that, in some ways, the speaker is trying to parse out goodness from the world, which might explain her (and my) reliance upon them.
6. Despite the beauty found in the pastoral setting of your book and the deep love (and grief) the narrator feels for her father, your poems adhere to an unflinching realism. How did you so keenly resist nostalgia and sentiment in telling this story?
I think that when there is a complex and troubled relationship, as with this father and daughter, and that relationship is cut off by an out-of-nowhere and unnatural death, then a chaos is introduced that the speaker must dig herself out of, and that’s what I believe she’s doing: trying to dig herself out by performing a kind of reconnaissance of this new world. The suddenness and weirdness of the father’s death force her to try to rebuild a realistic world in which she might continue to live. I think that nostalgia might cloud her way in these navigations, and so it becomes a matter of survival to stay clear-eyed. She also feels a kind of sad relief, which could also counteract any sentimentality.
7. Earlier in the process of publication, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods was entitled Charity. What made you decide to change the original title?
Once the book had been accepted by Sarabande, Jeffrey Skinner came up with Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, which he and Sarah Gorham thought nicely echoed the titles of Ambrose Bierce’s stories. A poem in the book is called “Spirits at the Edge of Bayonet Woods,” and Bayonet Woods is referenced elsewhere. This title seemed very right to me when I heard it, and I hadn’t been tied to Charity. In some ways, that previous title had been a sort of mental placeholder for me, trying to keep in mind the notion of what is given, and to whom, and who gives or withholds it. I love the title Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods for its cadence, gothic undercurrent, and way of being specific and mysterious at once.
8. In the online zine From the Fishouse, you talk about the genesis of your poem “Black Lamb” beginning with one single word, chamois. Is it typical for you to begin a poem in such a way? If so, could you talk about other words that sparked poems in this collection?
I do sometimes begin with single words that seem evocative for me in sound and tone, trying to find that particular word that will open something up, and then other words clustering around it, and then those words shaping into a line. Another word that prompted a poem in the book was the word “arrhythmia,” which is in the first line of the poem “Landscape with Sheep and Deer.” I liked the breathiness of the second syllable and how it the word itself seemed to mimic a sheep walking across landscape—the softness of the sheep across the worn jaggedness of the land. It was interesting to have a slightly different starting point for the acrostics. I began these as a sort of “breather” project, and they ended up being pretty enjoyable to write. Their semi-coded form seemed to fit with the idea of mystery that runs throughout the book.
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