Ever since I saw the review copy of I Eric America, I’ve wanted to interview you about this stunning collection. There is so much to love about this book. I especially admire the mythic quality of your writing. I love origin stories. I thought we’d open this interview with your first poem.
In this origin story, the moon crowns three people:
the mother, her children. In the original glory
a girl might birth her own brother. In this roiling
storehouse: relics from Delos, Sicily. Safe vests
for travel to Mars. In origin-storage: bloodroot.
Wet bulb. Torsi. Here and there worry seeps in
to rewrite the corm of the fathers. In its oaring
through woe, the tale will take in some deer. A dog.
This story’s original flora count locusts. Dogwood.
Fir trees. This tale refers to the genus of shrub
artemisia, holy mother of absinthe. Don’t you just
love how absinthe abs its way right smack into the
in the—exactly how epics start out: In the beginning,
maybe a girl ago, an original glory brined everyone kin—
DR: Not sure if I am supposed to say anything in response to this poem. It’s fair to say it represents a tendency of mine in poetry: I sometimes feel that I have to reinvent everything in each new book of poems—start the whole world over, create a new myth, reinvent language, reimagine new and better ways of being in community with fellow sentient beings. It is sometimes a debilitating expectation.
The cover is so beautiful as well. And it goes perfectly with the book. Who is it by?
DR: The cover is by a French artist Julien Tromeur; the title of the piece is “A Person Standing in the Air with a Star in Their Hand.” I love the title of the photo as much as I love the photo.
What was the first book of poetry you read and then thought, I love this. I want to write like
this . . . Can you say what it was about that poet/poem that inspired you? Maybe quote it here?
DR: I am very much influenced by the poetry, prose, and critical writings of Adrienne Rich. I return to her books often, inspired by the growth of her work and with it, the expansion of her soul and poetic vision. I love rereading her early poems in Diving into the Wreck. I am equally enraptured by her prose, in which she reminds us that poetry is a vastly underused national resource; she offers up the following wisdom for its possible utilities: I want a kind of poetry that doesn’t bother either to praise or curse at parties or leaders, even systems, but that reveals how we are — inwardly as well as outwardly — under conditions of great imbalance and abuse of material power. How are our private negotiations and sensibilities swayed and bruised, how do we make love — in the most intimate and in the largest sense — how (in every sense) do we feel? How do we try to make sense?
She goes on to say that [w]here every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions — not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire.
I remain in awe of how, with every new poetry collection, Rich reinvented self, investigated society, and “unsettled” language itself into as yet unconceived modes of imagining. I think of her as my lifelong teacher and envision her as an ideal reader.
You have such a musical ear. Did you ever play a musical instrument? Do you read and reread your work out loud?
DR: I did play the violin, the Suzuki method, by ear when I was a child. Sadly, I gave it up in my teen years, but it turns out that all that ear training was useful. I read and reread my work out loud and many times as well as silently. My brother Eric was the real musician in the family, a pianist.
This is a serious and seriously powerful book, but it contains so much light—so much wit and tenderness and brilliance. Sometimes, when reading, I just want to ask, how do you do it? How does a poem like this poem come about?
For my summer body, I would like
two pairs of buttocks: that populous
softness. An owl face peeping from my navel—
my gown-surround, a flock of orange
feathers. I’d want to have gold-red hair
and grebes’ lobed feet. I’d like even
the cleft of my knees to wreak bosom.
I want to pay egrets rent as I rise
from a basket of corn ears. I’d like to
serve up a torso of locust and fir tree,
ankle and star husk—six hundred eaves’
daydreams of tones sieved from the tissues
of language. I want every aged ripeness
to die in my care. I want everyone born here.
DR: I would say this poem was an attempt to work into sonnet form the idea that I am a bit codependent. Ha! The experts have it that “codependents confuse caretaking and sacrifice with loyalty and love.” Turns out this is not a great lifelong pattern on my part; as one of the sonnets puts it, “I egg on and over-care.” I was my brother’s primary caregiver for the first year and a half after his plane crash. I am a mother, a grandmother, a girlfriend, a daughter, a sister, a niece, an auntie. I have done an awful lot of caregiving over the decades, beginning in childhood. Still, it seems that our communities and societies, their fir trees and fauna, would benefit from more of an overall ethos of care. Who couldn’t use a little more—and better, more consistent—nurturing? Wondering about such things, I decided to concoct a new kind of I: part animal, part plant, part “ankle and star husk,” part grebes’ feet, part beauty, as a means to begin to care properly for everyone.
Why sonnets? At what point did the sonnet become your form?
DR: I’ve been writing almost exclusively in the sonnet form for about the past five years. Not sure it’s “my” form, but I realized that the poems I was trying to write would benefit from the limitations of form, and the sonnet is so resilient, so elastic, that I just can’t turn away from it. In an earlier book I had written that “the sonnet’s a prison I lock myself in / so I can find new ways to break free,” and this continues to be true. I love the challenge of compression which the sonnet demands. It is the most amazing little rectangle of possibility in which almost anything can be done if you’re patient and keep returning to it. A bit like a yoga mat.
I hate the question, What is this book about? I think it reduces a book. No matter what the answer, a book worth reading is so much more than that. But this beautiful collection was written during a pretty dark time in your life?
DR: As much as anything, I would say the book is “about” the harmful, lasting and often unforeseen effects of unprocessed pain at the level of self, family, and nation. We all can trot out names of politicians and presidents who did not get the love they needed from their fathers in particular. Such unprocessed trauma ends up getting played out on the world stage in ways we know all too well. As selves within families and communities we project our unprocessed grief onto others: “All that rage—at last / —is what pain feels like when I air it in public.” The book hums all around the idea that we each must seek to heal our pain to keep from harming others with it. Put differently, who will not heal his own pain can only inflict it. The collection unfolds from the basic premise that “America is the nation-expression of / a severely traumatized person.” A related motif of the book, to which I’ve already alluded, is what feels to me like an overall lovelessness in America, a resounding lack of care for.
The book was written during a dark time, yes, personally. Collectively, I believe we have been experiencing a dark time for decades.
And yet, out of darkness or suffering, you were able to write such beautiful poems?
DR: Yes, well, I don’t know how to play the violin any more, so I had to do something!
Writing teachers always tell students to find their voices, as if their voices are lost. How, when did you “find your voice.” Don’t answer this if you think, as I do, it’s a stupid question.
DR: I don’t believe I have ever found my voice, honestly. If I have, it keeps changing, like a pubescent boy’s. I guess I make a voice, or perhaps a series of voices, in each collection by internalizing the subject of each piece. By listening to that great ineffable force behind the writing and letting it carry the day.
What issues do you struggle with most when you are writing a sonnet? Do you edit obsessively? Does the editing process drive you nuts? Or do the poems flow out of you like water from a faucet?
DR: I edit obsessively, yes. The process sometimes relaxes me and sometimes drives me nuts. But I am made more crazy by simply living in the world without the aid, care, and possibilities afforded by poetry. It is very rare that a poem flows out of me like water! That is funny. Is it even a thing?
Funny, yes. But there are poets who claim not to edit. Or not to edit much. Frank O’Hara, Ashbery in his later years, Ammons, at least with some of his poems. I should make a list. But I digress. Back to you . . .
What nonliterary subjects or hobbies or obsessions find their way into your poems? Or serve as sources of solace or inspiration?
DR: Not surprisingly, given many of the books I’ve written, including American Amnesiac, I’m very interested in American history and current affairs. Maybe because I was a single mother, always scanning the horizons for dangers, I have always kept a finger on the pulse of what is going on in America. I’ve made it a point never to be blindsided or duped by parties, leaders, or systems—to ferret out the truth, no matter how harsh: “Turns out my single-mom angst worked great as seeing-eye dog,” as one of the sonnets, a “fourteener,” puts it. Simply put, I wanted to make sure my children would be o.k. I would carve out a Plan A, Plan B, Plan F, G and Z to make sure we would all survive regardless of what the cruel systems of power had in mind for our present, for our futures.
On a lighter note, I love the word America. I can’t get over it. Just thinking about the sounds of the word thrills me. The word troubles me. I’m interested in troubles, in writing something more than the confessional poem. As the poet Shane McRae says “It is necessary for any artist who wishes to make work of more-than-personal lasting significance to have a non-standard relationship with the materials of their art. Words ought to trouble the poet, and the poet ought to trouble them back. If it’s useful to note, in I Eric America, I do try to trouble the language, since it is in fact in peril. I use the technique of anthimeria quite a bit: using verbs as nouns, nouns as verbs, adjectives as nouns, and so on. In other words, I destabilize nouns and verbs in order to mirror and enact family- and nation-level destabilizations upon which the poems meditate.
Another sidebar: My poetry teacher in grad school, Alice Fulton (another huge influence on me, by the way), used to say that poets are athletes of the imagination. This is a terrific and apt metaphor. I’m involved in a lot of mostly solo sports: skiing, hiking, running, yoga. Athleticism is good training for poets. It lends a poet the never-give-up attitude we sometimes need.
How did you find Etruscan Press? I think of you as a perfect fit for Etruscan. Your a poet’s poet, smart, quirky, brilliant, mythic . . . I could go on . . .
I somehow ended up on Etruscan’s website and read and admired its mission statement. I checked out all the authors and ordered a couple of books, somewhat at random, by a couple of Etruscan writers: Myrna Stone’s Luz Bones, and H.L. Hix’s Legible Heavens. I was really wowed by these books and thought, well I will send them American Amnesiac. And boy was that one of the smartest things I ever did in my life. Etruscan Press is outstanding in so many ways, and everyone associated with the press, deeply kind.
If you were giving a reading, what poem would you always want to read? Maybe we can close with that.
I want to name America my brother,
since we all see that eric stashed in
the navel of nation-state. I want the union
to man an inner change of location, to shift
from the seed of Eric meaning one, alone,
unique, to its roots in long-time journey;
everlasting, eternity. I would like the place
to navel-gaze just enough to note that
dogwood’s frail stateliness. To annotate
decency. To nightly simulcast grace. I’d like
the state to glide on its rims, scuffed and
abraded, forging new rubrics of spine. I’d like
the nation to state out loud: All that rage—at last
—is what pain feels like when I air it in public.
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Author: Nin Andrews
