2021 is mostly garbage, but even bad years have good moments, don’t they? And one of the bright sides of this year is that my lovely friend Jeanne, of Necromancy Never Pays, has come out with a book of poems! We’ve been IRL friends for years, and blogging friends for even longer than that, so I was thrilled to have the chance to interview her about the collection, her writing process, and all the travel she can’t wait to get back to.
How did you go about putting the poems together? What organizing principles did you use, and how much reshuffling did you do over the course of the process?
At first they were in the order I wrote them, which was arbitrary and meant that some of the weakest poems, before I hit my stride with this kind of writing, were first.
When I first sent them to Broadstone Books in the spring of 2020 my query included ten poems, which I selected as representative. I chose Broadstone because of their reputation for publishing coherent collections, which is how I always thought of these poems. The publisher recommended adding a narrative arc to run through the full manuscript, so of course I sent the full manuscript, rearranged to make the narrative arc more obvious. And this time (second try, my first choice publisher) I got an acceptance!
I got the “I’d be happy to publish it” email in September 2020 and the book was published in July 2021. In that time I did more rearranging and created the three sections. Finally in April I did a final rearranging, putting a few more of the poems I like best in the first section, like the one about the Santa Monica pier that I also used for publicity postcards.
Your poems are formatted like postcards, which I absolutely love. Are there other poets you like who tend to work with unusual forms?
Not really. The closest would probably be John Berryman, with his short poems, the Dream Songs, about Henry. My favorite is the one about being bored, “Dream Song #14“:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have noInner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
How have you filled your time without being able to travel, during the pandemic? If you had to write a book of poetry about your pandemic activities, what format would those poems be in?
I’ve filled my time with reading books and watching movies and TV shows. A lot of the books have been read outside and so I’ve watched the groundhogs and birds and chipmunks and squirrels and all the different kinds of insects.
If I had to write a book of poetry about my pandemic activities, it would be about the wildlife in my back yard. I’ve actually written a few, like a poem about the Wooly Aphid/Fairy Fly, but they’re small poems and that feels too much like a continuation of the very whittled-down postcard poems.
Which poets have inspired you? Which poets do you admire whose work is absolutely unlike yours?
Poets who have inspired me: Denise Levertov, Stanley Plumly, Edward Field, Howard Nemerov, James Wright, Wallace Stevens, Phillip Larkin, Lucille Clifton, Ruth Stone, W.H. Auden, Tony Hoagland, John Berryman, Gregory Corso, Stephen Dobyns, Tom Wayman.
Poets whose work I admire but whose work is unlike mine: Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Rita Dove, Carolyn Forche, Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell, Audre Lord, W.S. Merwin, Marge Piercy, Anne Sexton, Tess Gallagher, Adrienne Rich.
The postcard poems are meant to be “accessible” poems, which is a style perfected by Billy Collins, but I hope influenced by what Nick Courtright says he looks for: “a poem that is friendly, but thought-provoking.” When I use the term “accessible” about my poems, sometimes people think I mean that I’m able to write the more abstract and complicated kind of philosophical or academic poem but I’m dumbing it down. I’m not. I don’t like that kind of writing and can’t do it well.
My mission for Necromancy Never Pays is to make more books appealing for everyone, and my approach to that is usually to take the personal tack and see if I find like-minded readers. If not — to continue the sailboating metaphor — the boat capsizes and I have to try again. When that happens, I try not to take the tone up a notch, as if I understand this stuff but can’t make it clear to anyone else. That’s the last refuge of the scoundrel as writer.
In a book of poems inspired by travel, how do you find the specific moment, story, or image that kicks off a given poem? Do you ever get stuck once you’ve started on a poem, and how have you gotten unstuck again?
I started writing postcard poems when I got home from a trip and had a bunch of postcards to send. I would look at the picture, think about what I wanted to say about the place, and write a poem about something that happened when I was there. I sent a few to my brother and some to a group of my friends who write, the Scarletts. I would write a poem, print it out, tape it to the back of the postcards, and send them.
Then I got more serious about it and went through the stack of postcards I’ve brought home from trips and starting piecing a story together with each poem. By the end of the process I sometimes imagined the picture for a postcard, like for the one about Apple Valley lake. One of the Scarletts found a postcard of the lake on eBay after the book came out, but it was always an imagined postcard.
A sobering note about the scene I picture, at Apple Valley lake, is that there’s a gray lakeside house with a dock where we first saw the big inflatable “Party Island.” That house is in the center of the view from the lake that I think of when I think about that poem. Last year they had a big “Trump” banner across their deck, visible from the lake. It spoiled my view of those happy days on the lake with my kids. More happily, it’s gone this year.
I never got stuck, but sometimes the poem just didn’t go anywhere good. I cut a few from my manuscript. There was one about a postcard of Legolas, and I wrote about when we’d drive with our kids for an hour to Columbus to see the movies, but the poem didn’t end up saying what I wanted it to. It didn’t really come across to anyone else.
What does travel mean to you?
It means seeing people and places I love, or seeing someplace new, which I love. This is what we missed during the Covid year:
- March 2020 conference with me, both kids and one kid’s partner giving presentations
- April fan convention with one kid and her college roommate (who traveled the SW with us when we went to Chaco, the Grand and Antelope Canyon)
- the other kid’s April trip home around a conference
- summer trip abroad (we go to Isle of Palms every other summer, this was the “off” year when we go somewhere new)
- fall trip to Niagara-on-the Lake
- Thanksgiving guests
- Christmas with the whole family
Maybe by themselves none of these things matter so much; in the face of so much grief and loss, I realize how fortunate I am. But what is life if not a collection of small joys?
Do you write a lot of postcards in real life? How do you choose them? What’s the best postcard you’ve ever found and sent?
I do write a lot of postcards! I choose them by the photograph; I like to get a picture of some aspect of the place that I got to see in person. Sometimes I like to get an imaginary aspect—I really do have a postcard of Los Pollos Hermanos, the restaurant from Breaking Bad, which absolutely exists in Albuquerque.
One of the best postcards I ever found and sent was one with a picture of the Bates Motel. I put an X in the window, wrote the line about the “honeymon” from the Faulkner story on the back, and sent it to my college professor, Dr. Chappell. Of course, the one of the Kentucky State Penetentiary was just too funny to send. My dad found it, I think, and he and I and my brother chortled over it and at some point he gave it to me (without mailing it).
When my kids were small, my dad sent me a whole series of postcards that he pretended had been mauled by wild animals. One of the final ones—his triumph—was supposedly shredded by the claws of a lion, and it arrived in a see-through envelope with an apology from the U.S. Postal Service for damage in transit.
Where do you hope to travel next and why?
Italy! I want to see Venice, Florence, and Rome if it’s possible to cram all three into the same week-long trip (we don’t like to be gone for more than a week at a time because our cats have to stay grumpily inside the whole time). I’ve been wanting to go to Italy and Greece for years while our kids got to pick the place we’d go for their graduation trips. My mother started a tradition of taking my brother’s family and mine on a trip when someone graduated, and she left some money to my brother and me, so we’ve continued the tradition. She took us to Maui for Walker’s high school graduation and Stratford, ON for Eleanor’s college graduation. We took both families to Argentina for my older niece’s college graduation, and Switzerland for my younger niece’s high school graduation. I may retire next summer, so I’ve said that Italy should be my “graduation” trip. We’re very tentatively looking into it for the summer of 2022.
I need to go a few more places while my knee holds out. I’m afraid that Greece may already be beyond it. I hope that New Zealand is not, because Eleanor has said for years that’s where she might pick when she finishes her PhD. And Ron really wants to go to Iceland.