I love trying to spin the world into a web of words. And I love those times when it feels like those words turn into a world of their own.
What subject matters are the toughest for you to tackle in your poetry? Which topics are you most drawn to?
I love living on the water, and my poetry is soaked in it. For years, it was the ugly beautiful of the Gowanus Canal—the bright blue Carroll Street Bridge reflected in stinky, discolored waves. These days, it’s Aunt Betty’s Pond on Cape Cod (I just typed “Cape Cold”) and its itinerant swans.
Hard as I try to find sanctuary, though, the political world seeps through. Writing that implicates politics is tough, but necessary—sadly unavoidable. Honestly, though, it can be a struggle to avoid being didactic—essay, not poetry. To get to anything real, I have to press where it hurts—into personal vulnerability and self implication. When I back off and start feeling sorry for myself, I make myself come back to Seamus Heaney’s “Punishment,” studying how relentlessly he implicates himself and how he makes the reader feel complicit.
Love is hard, too. I don’t write many love poems—and the ones I do are more John Lennon than Paul McCartney. There’s always a dark side.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-08-27 16:09:002022-02-25 17:19:51An Interview with Rose Auslander (Poetry ’15)
The river boiled with trout. Alan Blake was beside himself. Guides reported monster fish from River Junction all the way through the box canyon. All day Friday in surgery, the doctor spoke of his plans to float the river, dismissing talk that the water was too high. Patients were wheeled in and Alan ordered the volume up on his jazz station, put his head down, and got to work. He wasn’t short with anyone. He hardly minded when a nurse dropped the retractors and the autoclave was empty; another pair only had to be fetched from down the hall. What did it matter? It was June and the salmonfly hatch had begun.
In between cases, Alan buzzed with energy. His boat was already packed, his shuttle set up. He had chosen a less popular section of water, with lots of snags and curves. This was Father’s Day weekend and the banks would be swarmed with waders. He didn’t like crowds. Higher water meant fewer boats. Besides, bugs didn’t care about snags and curves. If the reports were correct, he would see willow branches, shore sedges, even marsh grasses bending under the weight of salmonfly clusters.
The salmonfly was a slim bug, beetle-like, with long antenna. A mature female could be as long as a man’s middle finger. The sole purpose of its short adult life was to mate. Heavy with cargo, the females would skim the river surface and pump a dark, pea-sized egg sac into the water. Clumsy, exhausted, knocked by the wind, the females most often ended up in the river. A fisherman could sink his fly, imitating nymphs swimming towards metamorphosis, but Alan preferred dry fly fishing. It took more skill. He could lay his fly on the water with profound gentleness, a perfect simulation of the doomed female’s erratic flight after delivering her egg bomb. Once she hit the surface, the struggle didn’t last long. As if she knew her work was done, she would tuck in her wings and become still, waiting to be consumed.
When I think about Michigan essays, what I find myself thinking about is a subgenre I’d like to call “the cottage essay,” or maybe “the cabin essay.” It’s rarely a “lakehouse” essay, but it could be. I can’t always tell, in these essays, how large or well-appointed or house-like the cottages are. Sometimes my students just write about “my grandparents’ place.”
In Michigan, it’s not necessarily the richest people who have lakeside property, but the people who have lived here the longest. Wealthy people from Chicago might still simply buy a cottage. But for most of my students, for most of the people I know, your main choices are to rent one by the week or weekend, or to inherit or be hosted in one that was bought in another era, by an earlier generation, when such purchases were in easier reach. I was born in Michigan, but my parents were transplants. My husband is from Seattle. We write and teach. We will probably never have a cottage. But I read a lot of cottage essays.
Most have one of three shapes: the first is more commonly by a beginning writer, and it is an essay about joy. The joy is cozy and regular, without beginning or end—the writer anticipates the same joy every summer (the cottage essay takes place almost always in summer, though the cabin essay might also take place in autumn deer hunting season, or winter snowmobile season). The writer’s joy is so perfect and private and steady that it becomes a vague fog to the reader. We talk about this, the “problem” of joy, how odd and unfair it is that it’s so much harder to convey in interesting ways than tragedy. The student’s patience for this conversation tends to correlate to their patience for writing in general.
Tender Excavations: Retelling Origin Stories in Adoption Narratives
Leslie Sainz: Cleave is no stranger to poetic erasure—the poem “The Stolen Generation” features an erasure of the Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869 and the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886, and the book presents and manipulates documents that pertain to your transnational adoption, including a letter requesting that you, as an infant, be baptized. In reading and rereading these poems, I was reminded of Solmaz Sharif’s essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” and her discussion of erasure as “obliteration,” as assuming the role of the state. In the context of transracial and transnational adoption—a system built on abandonment, separation, and trauma that is hallmarked by not only the removal from one’s birth country but oftentimes one’s birth culture and language—I’m curious about how you arrived at the decision to employ erasure on actual source materials. How did your sense of agency shift when you applied your adult hand to documents that blatantly pointed to your inability to consent?
Tiana Nobile: Historically and politically, it’s true that erasure most frequently equates some form of violence on behalf of the state. What, then, does it mean to enact an erasure in the opposite direction? “The Stolen Generation” is named after the countless aboriginal children who were forcibly removed, in some cases literally kidnapped, from their families and given to white Australian families for adoption. This horrific practice is not unique throughout history (you might have heard about the mass grave of Native children, some as young as three years old, that was recently discovered at a former “residential school” in Canada), and its purpose was to essentially erase aboriginal life and culture from Australia. This is genocide, possibly the most egregious form of erasure. Reading the legislation that made these acts legal was illuminating and appalling; they’re called the Aboriginal PROTECTION Acts for fuck’s sake! It felt necessary to call attention to that hypocrisy in the poem.
I’ve been a student of erasure for a while, and I’ve learned so much about the power of subversion. Solmaz Sharif’s Look and Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager are two groundbreaking examples of this. To manipulate the language of the oppressor in order to disrupt that version of the truth and uplift a previously silenced perspective is a powerful political act and one that really spoke to me as I began working through my own archive of records.
Erasure is particularly special because it points to so many layers: the original text, what is missing from the original, and the newly constructed, unearthed narrative. To be simultaneously immersed in a white family, stripped of any cultural ties to my country of origin, and for the reflection in the mirror to be an ever-present reminder of this migration and loss—I think of my body as a physical manifestation of palimpsest. In Cleave, erasure provides me with a poetic space to reckon with the erasure that happens as a result of adoption. It enables me to re-frame the stories I was told. I can finally uncover what is submerged within the language of my paperwork, give it a voice, and demand visibility.
When I stepped onto the deck after sunset a sliced moon floated low in a circle of its own light― no stars at that level, only one sure beacon in the southwest― I thought it must be Venus. Against shaded blue, maples pressed designs, so fast had new leaves unfurled this warmest May day.
From a vernal pool I heard peepers chirring, thrilled to be back in their bodies. White porch chairs glowed ghostly, as if last summer’s guests just left, food smoke dispersed.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-08-23 22:27:002022-02-25 17:19:48“When I Stepped Onto the Deck After Sunset,” by Ellen McCulloch-Lovell (Poetry ’12)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-08-20 22:21:082022-02-25 17:19:47“Missing Church Again,” by Eric Cruz (Poetry ’20)
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Dear Miss Metropolitan: An Interview with Carolyn Ferrell
The girls’ experience in captivity has parallels to the real-life abductions and years of torture experienced by Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus in the so-called “Cleveland House of Horrors.” But this story also contains echoes of so many other stories, fictional and factual, of “victim-girls.” What do you think is the root of our cultural obsession with missing girls, taken girls, victim-girls? Why does this particular narrative remain so powerful?
In Edward P. Jones’s story, “Adam Robinson acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister,” a Black mother, impatient with the tepid response of the white police, turns to a group of ex-convicts from a local halfway house to help find her missing son. The convicts do indeed find the boy—he’d been kidnapped and held captive in the woods, and clearly would not have, as the police condescendingly told his mother, “found his own way back home.” The story’s protagonist goes on to make the following observation: “That was Washington now…that was the world now—people forced to get criminals to do police work.”
I was inspired by this scene when I first began Dear Miss Metropolitan. I was struck by the obvious: why weren’t people doing what they were supposed to be doing? Why was this missing Black boy not a priority for those public servants meant to protect him? Let me start out by saying that NO GIRL (or boy or human being) deserves the fate of abduction, abuse, or captivity. My heart hurts when I think about what these crimes do to not only the victim but their families and communities. But what is also painful is the lack of mainstream attention when it comes to missing people of color. There is a “missing white girl narrative” in popular culture that can exist at the expense of Black and Brown children. The missing white girl is young, innocent, and undeserving of any type of evil. She is the one society wants to see brought home safely. Rarely is the missing Black or Brown girl—often described as a runaway or delinquent—viewed through the same lens or with the same urgency. The Women’s Media Center observes that African American girls make up over 40% of the missing children in America, and yet are absent from any collective outrage.
I once watched a true crime program about a young Black sex worker who’d been kidnapped and tortured for months by a man who forced her to become his “wife” (she considered herself luckier than the other women chained in his basement). This Black woman managed to free herself and, finding a pair of white police detectives at a gas station, begged them for help. They laughed, thinking her a strung-out addict. It took more than ten minutes for this Black woman to make them see she was indeed a victim of a kidnapping. Watching her try to convince these white men of her authenticity as a Black victim—as a viable human being deserving of care and safety—broke my heart. The program never followed up on details of race and class, but this Black woman’s lack of being seen and heard stayed with me. It informed Dear Miss Metropolitan as much as any other story of kidnapping and abuse.
I wasn’t interested in writing about actual events in my novel, but I was certainly moved by them. Like many others, I was caught up in the news story of the Ariel Castro kidnappings. How could these girls go missing for so long, I wondered? How can girls, women simply be overlooked, misplaced, forgotten? And for weeks, months, years? This erasure commanded my attention. When I began Dear Miss Metropolitan, I wasn’t thinking true crime or statistics; but I was thinking of the ways race, class, gender and sexuality figure in these stories of abduction and abuse. I considered what communities do (or neglect to do) to recover their missing girls. I thought about the life that is begun after liberation, the emotional aftermath of all involved, and the debt owed to those who are recovered. For Dear Miss Metropolitan, I imagined three disappeared Black and Brown girls and I didn’t want them relegated to some cold case file, some faded missing posters, some tenderly held photo albums.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-08-16 20:43:002022-02-25 17:19:46“Dear Miss Metropolitan”: An Interview with Carolyn Ferrell
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-08-13 20:38:002022-02-25 17:19:45“Albatross,” by Michael de Armas (Poetry ’20)
The apartment thing was weighing on the man. The dog went on yanking him down the dim path, veering into the woods first one way then the other, per some plan of her own. There was no getting away from anything; the back decks of the nearest houses were too near, and from where the path doubled over the shoulder of a hill, the lighted shopping centers by the highway stood out in clear, crisp miniature against the twilight. He could hear but no longer see the stream that split the preserve’s handful of November beech-woods in two. He let himself be pulled along, risking a stumble. Finding a new roommate — that would be a bother. Lissa had been bothersome too, no question. She had found him two years ago, from an ad he’d put in coffee shops, with the little strips you could tear off. She’d brought the little strip to their first meeting; in a burst of enthusiasm, he’d written her into the lease, which they now both more or less regretted. She worked two jobs, one at a Whole Foods, the other at a pottery co-op, and always paid the rent on time. Sundays she slept till noon. She left hair in the shower, and buttery knives on the countertop, but nothing worse. So where had her odd, unappeasable grievances come from? That he’d drunk her milk (he hadn’t), that he’d been hostile about the use of shared space (he had asked her to pick up some magazines in the TV room once). That his habits were stressful. A headlamp moved along the trail below, whether toward him or away from him he could not tell.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-08-12 17:15:002022-02-25 17:19:44“In a Small, Square Woodland,” by Steve Lane (Fiction ’20)
