Your Salient is a book of poetry about the Third Battle of Ypres in World War I, a battle that is also called Passchendaele. Do you think of it as epic poetry? Or is it part lyric? If any part of it is epic, what are you singing—what is your theme?
I never thought about genre before or during the writing of it. Nor retrospectively. Let me think… There are lyric moments. Formally, it can be read as a sequence of lyrics, although I think of it as a single poem. It was very hard to pull out individual poems for a submission or a reading. But it’s not an epic. It’s not narrative, there are no named heroes. The war itself—courtesy of the machine gun and the artillery barrage—broke any lingering ideas of heroic conquest. No imaginable Achilles thereafter. One could say that there are elements of epic that have been picked out and used differently. It deals with a war. It alludes to examples of individual and collective courage. And, of course, as in the Mahabharata and the Iliad, it turns out there are gods hanging around in theatre. But if I had to tick a box, I would choose threnody, a song for the dead. A sub-genre under lyric, I think. Maybe this is a monody for The Missing, who, for the duration of the song, may be present, and safe within its confines. But there’s another layer, the speaker’s quest. Whoever she is. Her effort to see without quite knowing what that means as she wanders around between the lines in this temporal and geographical No Man’s Land.
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Commencement Speech, Delivered to a Herd of Walrus Calves
Young walruses, we all must adapt! For example, some of your ancestors gouged the world with four tusks, but you can grow only two. It’s hard to say what evolution plans for your kind, but if given a choice, you should put in a request for thumbs. Anyway, congratulations! You’re entering a world that’s increasingly hostile and cruel and full of people who’ll never take you seriously though that will be a mistake on their end. You are more tenacious than they know. You’ll be a fierce and loyal defender of those you love. You will fight polar bears when they attack your friends and sometimes you’ll win. Of course, odds always favor the polar bear, but that’s not the point. The point is courage. The point is bravery. The point is you are all fighters even when the fight in which you find yourself ensures unpleasant things will happen to you. For example, the bear will gnaw apart your skull or neck until you stop that persistent twitching; it will eat your skin, all of it, then blubber, then muscle, then the tears of your loved ones, in that order; it will savor every bite, and you will just suffer and suffer until the emptiness can wash over you. The good news is: things change! For example: the environment. Climate change, indeed, is bad for you, but it’s worse for polar bears whose conservation status is now listed as “vulnerable” which is one step removed from “endangered” which is one step removed from “extinct” which is a synonym for Hooray! None of you get eaten!
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How has teaching poetry workshops to men who were formerly incarcerated impacted your writing process?
First, I’ve never taught before working with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men. Just the act of developing a class that looks closely at poems and preparing for leading discussions with the men have improved my knowledge of poetry. I believe this is one of the reasons why teachers and professors are so smart about the areas they teach. They’ve developed a comfort with and a deep knowledge of the material.
The other profound discovery is that the men in my workshops are no different than anyone we might talk to on the bus or waiting in line at the DMV. Yes, they’ve made mistakes but that doesn’t define them. Far from it. Most of them have moved past that time in their lives and are just doing their time so they can get out and lead normal lives. Before we do any writing, I always give a warmup exercise where they recall something from their lives. It’s usually something fairly mundane. I’ll ask them, for example, to talk about a time where they had a good time with other people. Their stories are real, human, sometimes moving, and often unexpected.
It has opened me up to having a much greater appreciation of people who have made mistakes (who of us hasn’t made terrible mistakes?).
All of us have made mistakes—and I am aware of and check my privilege as a white person. Where law enforcement is concerned, there’s little tolerance for mistakes—especially for many people of color.
How have the events of the past few years impacted your creative process (if at all)? Do you feel a certain urgency to make sense of this time through poetry?
It has intensified the energy behind my writing. Both my wife Mary Hawley and I retired to write full time. Before COVID, I was writing every day but also going out to readings and other cultural events three or four times a week. Starting last March when everything shut down, it gave me the time to focus even more time on writing.
I have spent my life as a poet writing between the cracks of my work and other responsibilities. Now I have been given the incredible gift of being able to write full time. I am determined not to waste it.
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…THERE ARE PEOPLE, I guess, who regularly regard the air—cloud watchers lying on their backs in the grass, contemplating the meaning of a breeze. I come from a different tradition of nature watching. What I have always wanted is contact. “The solid earth!” as Henry David Thoreau once put it, standing atop a barren mountain. “[T]he actual world!” The material things, the rocks and soils: the dust from which life emerged, to which we will return.
Until recently, the closest I’d come to contemplating the sky was a five-week commitment to sunrise. A few years ago—after the death of my father, after a dismaying US election, amid the final fraying of a six-year relationship—I canoed a thousand miles down the Mississippi River, camping on islands and sandbars. I wanted to be in a landscape that made me feel small, that showed me something bigger. I made it a point to rise before dawn each morning so that I could watch the sky shift from the gray scale of morning twilight to gentle oranges and pinks, until these were overtaken by the spreading blue.
But what was a sunrise? What produced such pastel magic? These were questions I could not answer—questions I did not even think to contemplate.
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Mornings that long-ago summer, the sun consumed the sky. The suburban air smelled of hot asphalt and absence. We wore nylon shorts and his-and-her sunhats on our miserable walks. We carried 30-ounce water bottles and our own immeasurable grief.
Along Windmill, the cicadas buzzed. Most of our neighbors remained cocooned inside their cool stucco homes while the two of us sweated and suffered, darting like lizards between patches of shade provided by the occasional palm or purple plum tree.
And then an ancient, stooped man would appear, out on a walk of his own. We would watch in amazement as he drew nearer in his faded dress shoes, shapeless trousers, dark corduroy blazer and derby cap.
This was in July, remember, in Las Vegas.
The old man’s face looked dry as parchment, his expression serene, as though he had acclimated to this harsh desert climate generations ago, or discovered some secret to staying comfortable and eternally alive on this disinterested planet.
We forgot our discomfort—and sometimes even our despair—for a moment, our torsos like overheating engines. We slowed our pace and studied the old man as he shuffled toward us on the sidewalk. His small feet lifted almost imperceptibly with each tiny step, as though he were floating or dancing, without a care in the world.
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AN: I’m interested in the ways in which your poetry contemplates the relationship between the self and the community and the ways in which community shapes identity. Your first two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 201), both involve a speaker who is welcomed, to some degree, into an “other” community—and in the case of Kill Class, she is observing a military community, but always aware of her difference. This requires a sort of double vision, no?
NS: I love this question of double vision, Amanda. My first two collections of poetry were yes driven by the charge of the insider-outsider position and also questions of identity: in Stranger’s Notebook, although I am Jewish and the daughter of a reform Rabbi, I spent time in a more traditional Jewish community in North Africa to press on the valves of something that I wanted to understand: what is faith, what is ritual, what is belonging, what is relationship to homeland, and why did these questions produce such friction for me? In Kill Class, I was doing my anthropological fieldwork for my dissertation, and I observed some US military pre-deployment training exercises in mock Middle Eastern villages around America to write about war.
Anthropology’s key method for fieldwork is so-called “participant-observation”—and the poems in Kill Class are poems of witness, poems of uneasy participation, and poems of complicity. I am not in the American military (observer) and I write to critique the military (critique); however, I am an American citizen. As such I am entangled (participant). This brings me to your question of double vision, which paradoxically creates both twofoldness but also sometimes halfness. The so-called “field” was always elsewhere, and I was at its edge, working through self/other, here/there, field/life, work-self/ private-self, where one is perhaps often engaging with both, but sometimes only one at a time, and potentially occluding or sidelining the other.
My new collection of poems in progress, Fieldworkers of the Sublime tries to explode “fieldwork” beyond anthropology, pushing against the binary between Field and Life, and letting being-alive overflow in every direction. It is a book about awe, about fear, and also the ways we are each observers and participants in the sublime (through nature, science, the social world, and intimate life). It is a manuscript about love and my new marriage and queerness and desire and my attempts to overcome my own limits, as well as the thinkers (mostly anthropologists and philosophers) who shape my imagination.
The poems are also populated with marine biologists and octopus dissections, botanists and chanterelle-foragers— and my encounters with scientists and others I’ve become friends with on the island of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland, my wife’s beloved home. But this book is not trying to understand a particular community or a problem the way my other two were: it is instead a bid for an embodied poetics with fewer partitions and more encounters. My poems have become more capacious, letting everything in: the ocean and gooseberries of the island, but also the shopping malls and playgrounds of my suburban childhood—each spangling open through conversations and memory and dreaming and feeling and loving and reading.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-11-18 18:14:002022-02-25 17:17:41An Interview with Nomi Stone (Poetry ’17)
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