Gary Short: Your poem “Those Who Once Lived There Return” appears in the “SPIRITS” issue of r.kv.r.y quarterly, and indeed there is a ghostly quality to the poem. I’ve noticed a sense of things and people absent but seemingly present in other of your poems. How would you describe the territory, both literal and metaphorical, that your poems inhabit? Do you think of your poems as haunted? What places do you write from?

Wendy Miles: I think about both concepts—territory and haunting—quite a bit. I’m interested in the reverberation of past events—memories, personal histories—and how objects are imbued with spirit. That’s one thing that draws me. When I talk about “Those Who Once Lived There Return,” another poem of mine called “Float” seems necessary in the conversation because in these two poems I feel enveloped by reverberation—while in a specific landscape. One reason I’m so pleased to have “Those Who Once Lived There Return” published in r.kv.r.y is that “Float” was also accepted, but I got Mary Akers’ e-mail the day after “Float” won the 2014 Patricia Dobler Award. So that poem doesn’t appear here, but it was the breakthrough I needed in order for “Those Who” to exist. When I finished “Float” I was in residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (one of my favorite places). I was in my room for the night, on my little twin bed. I had the last few lines—which contain the word “love”—and I remember deleting the second “love” and then saying to myself, No, this poem is love. And I put the “love” right back in there.

The next day I printed it off and drove it to the post office, which was the postmark deadline. And it won! The marvelous poet Yona Harvey picked it! She said she found in it “delight.” To my mind, she found the love. Not a cliché but the real source that insisted its way into that poem. And for me that poem is also a place, and since its creation the only time I’ve gotten back to that place is with “Those Who.” It feels sort of magical, really, though I risk credibility saying a word like that, don’t I? In any case, Mary was kind enough to create the “Spirits” issue upon acceptance of “Those Who Once Lived There Return.” My initial thought was, These aren’t spirits but ghosts. I told myself, It’s just semantics, Wendy. But maybe not. To me, the word “spirit” connotes something happier. I was spirited away, She shows great spirit, that kind of thing. And ghosts, well, ghosts linger, don’t they? Ghosts drape themselves across furniture in empty rooms. If my poems are haunted, then hopefully they are also haunting. Does one condition create the other? Hopefully.

I often incorporate “true” events into my poems—in ways that reinterpret and shift and resettle the events—in different places, rooms, pastures, abandoned houses, yards, and so on. My mother told me once about a cat being lifted off the ground—carried away—by a hawk. And you can see what happened to that little story in the poem. It got shrouded in light and magic and it settled here. Speaking of light and magic, I just love the accompanying artwork by Dawn Surratt.

GS: You had a discussion on the NPR affiliated show Prosody last year. The interviewer, poet Jan Beatty, talked about leaping language and images as an evocative force in your poems. Could you could talk more about the notion of leaps in your poems?

WM: By recognizing “Float,” Yona Harvey gave me such a gift. By featuring me on Prosody, Jan Beatty gave me a gift as well. These are both wonderful, powerful women and poets—they know the depth and breadth of such recognition and encouragement—especially for women over the age of forty. The interview wasn’t rehearsed, and when Jan mentioned poetic leaps, I thought, Wow. So this is what it means to have paid some dues. For some time I’d been trying to move away from straight narrative into a more associative type of poem, and any gains I’ve made have been long sought and hard won.

About nine years ago I began to think of some poems as already existing—as sort of hovering out there in all their beauty and insistence—with my task being to puzzle them out, to put together scenes, dialogue, bits, moments, memories that I already recognized as “poem-ly” or “poem-ish”—to link them in ways that brought out their best features. Now that I think about it, it’s very visual, each time like making a still life. And it’s intuitive. I try to balance reading other writers and studying craft with my own intuition. I don’t think I’ll ever feel I’ve paid enough in “dues.” I’m not that confident. But the poems are confident. Does that even make sense? Yes. Of course it does.

GS: What are you working on now? You mentioned some self-portraits. Would you talk about that?

WM: The self-portraits. Yes. It seems I’m doing a series of them. I’m not sure how many there will be, and I didn’t set out with a series in mind. The first one sounded fun to try, and the result enticed me so much that I did another and another and so on. They feel like a natural progression from the work I’ve been doing with atmosphere. So I place a woman—or a girl—in a setting. There’s a bit of a Hansel and Gretel echo to me, but safer. The female’s perspective in these poems is at turns playful, curious, lonely, but her sense of “knowing” is always substantial. Portraits are usually as much about the environment surrounding the figure as the figure herself. Anyway, that’s what I’m up to now, and I’ll see where the poems go—where the figures want to dwell. I’ve joked, saying, Who do I think I am—Frieda Kahlo? But we know, don’t we, that if we’re lucky, a figure observed over time discloses some secrets. If we’re even luckier, with each look, that same figure also entices by holding things back.

Gary Short is the author of three poetry collections: Theory of Twilight, Flying Over Sonny Liston (which won the Western States Book Award), and 10 Moons and 13 Horses. He has been a Stegner fellow at Stanford and a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Gary teaches fall semesters at the University of Mississippi and has a home in Panajachel, Guatemala.

In November, Alan Toltzis was invited to speak with Professor Cheryl Lester’s class on Jewish American Literature & Culture at the University of Kansas. The class read “Clearing Ivy” and submitted questions to the author; the students’ names appear with each question. Cheryl Lester is on the faculty of the English and American Studies departments at the University of Kansas and specializes in 20th-century US literature and culture. Recent publications have appeared in Fifty Years after Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha; Critical Insights: The Harlem Renaissance; Critical Insights: The Sound and the Fury; The Faulkner Journal; Approaches to Teaching As I Lay Dying; Faulkner and His Critics; and A Companion to William Faulkner.

Hannah Feldman: What inspired you to write “Clearing Ivy“? Was it a specific location or genre of poetry that inspired it?

Alan Toltzis: I wrote the poem at the beginning of the year, when the idea of new-year resolutions was fresh in my mind. Like everyone, I have habits and I saw ivy as a metaphor for how a habit takes hold and how difficult it is to free yourself once it does. I’ve removed ivy twice—once when it was overtaking a fir tree and another time when it was climbing a brick wall behind a goldfish pond. Imagery from both instances worked their way into the poem. As for genre, I love renaissance poetry and this is as close as I can get to a metaphysical conceit.

Elena Pratt: What does the poem mean to you?

It’s a reminder of how vulnerable we are and how much we are at the mercy of our weaknesses. Even when you break a habit, you’re never the same because the habit has changed you.

Hannah Feldman: What is/was your process for writing this poem/poetry in general? How long did it take you to write this poem?

The main work for most of my poems takes place over a few weeks with some minor fine-tuning afterwards. I often use images I’ve carried with me for decades before they work their way into a poem. I work in books and write according to a plan or outline. So, while I knew this poem was going to be about a particular kind of endurance, it was just good timing that it coincided with the new year because it worked well with the idea of resolutions.

Alexa Schmidt: Do you start a poem with an intention in mind, or do you begin with a feeling and see where it takes you?

AT: For the poems that I’ve written over the last 3 years, I always begin with an intention in mind. However, once I start the writing, the poem can take me in different directions than I originally intended. Part of the finished work comes from the original intent and part from the power that the words and images have on me and the poem. A lot of the internal rhyme in my poems come from the power and influence one word can have on another.

Savannah Pine: In the other works we read, you use mostly use quatrains. Why do you use a different form with “Clearing Ivy?”

AT: Form always follows function for me. In most poems, the lines and stanzas come from the natural flow and phrasing of the language and the words at the end of a line always have special emphasis. A poem’s organization can have a significant effect on its meaning and should help the reader understand the work better telling the reader how the poet hears his own poetry. Occasionally, I write in traditional forms (villanelles, sonnets, quatrains, quintains) because that’s what the poem requires or because the form pushes the poem where it needs to go.

Alexa Schmidt: How do you decide where to break lines?

AT: Line breaks can come about in a few ways. They break where it is natural, in terms of meaning and phrasing. But for set forms, the rhymes and rhythms have a lot to do with how lines break.

Robert Curtis: You are clearly referring to nature taking over human structures as a form of slow ruin. You refer to the inevitable not having to happen quickly. That said, is there something specific you are referring to when you say the “inevitable”?

Yes, I often make parallels between nature and human nature. When something or someone has complete control of a situation or complete mastery over you, it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants and for me that is very powerful. I think the line works because “inevitability” is such an abstract concept but it seems almost human in the poem because of the conceit.

Kit Rice: What do you attempt to draw from your audiences? What kind of reactions or emotions? What about for this specific poem?

Whenever I write, I try to make the language so precise that the reader can experience my exact emotions and experiences through the words on the page. The reader only the words on the page and my responsibility is to make sure that every word I wrote is the right word, nothing more and nothing less. For “Clearing Ivy,” I’d like it if readers can feel themselves being pulled decline and decay of their own personal habit and the struggle they have had pulling themselves free.

Kit Rice: Did you intend for the ivy of this poem to represent anything in particular? It has the characteristics of many things (namely illness, time, and death). This poem had a fairly ominous tone to it. Can you speak to what inspired this poem?

It’s a metaphor for habit or vice. The way it sinks in and grips until it can take over your life if you’re not careful. I had a particular habit of mine in mind but it doesn’t matter what the habit or vice is because the feeling to giving in to a habit is universal.

Madeleine Moore: What is your writing process when composing a poem? Is it structured with a base idea that you build up and around, or more free flowing and spontaneous?

I wish my work more free-flowing and spontaneous but it’s just the opposite and I have to be careful not to overthink. I start with an idea that I want to write about, which for “Clearing Ivy” was endurance, willpower, and determination. Once I decide on the idea, I tend to experience the world through that particular lens and then I meditate on it. That process leads to a few words, an image, or an event that I am able to connect with the idea for the poem. From there, it’s a matter of the hard work—putting the right words down, refining, and rewriting until I’m satisfied.

Seth Miller: You make use of interesting line breaks and white space.  Do you think this tends to distinguish your poetry (at least the poems that make use of such devices) as a more visual than oral medium?  And sort of following on that – what about font, exact typesetting, coloring – do you care about these sorts of things, and are you ever slightly bothered by the choices a particular publishing venue makes?

I’m very sensitive to type and layout and think visually but the sound and rhythm of a poem must work too. The visual aspect adds another dimension. For instance, in my poem “Questions and Answers,” the first section is shaped like a question mark. But sound comes first and I read my poems out loud when I’m working on them.

Seth Miller: Your other poems seem to all have a link (though sometimes obscure) to religious ritual (parashiot, sefirot haomer, etc).  Is there anything religious to which “Clearing Ivy” alludes?

“Clearing Ivy” is from a series of 49 poems that are loosely based on a Kabbalistic concept that mediating on each of the 49 aspects of conscious human emotion, during the 49 day between the second day of Passover and Shavuot can elevate consciousness and awareness, refining the soul. The poem was written to correspond with a specific aspect of the emotion of endurance that has to do with willpower and determination.

Hannah Silverman: How would you say you’ve gotten your start as a writer? Did you start out as a poet, or did you evolve into one?

Purely by accident, I took a class in modern poetry at Temple University that was taught by Thomas Kinsella and then took a few other classes and workshops he taught. That’s the course that opened up poetry for me and I consider Mr. Kinsella to be the man who taught me how to read. I never stopped reading intensely, using the approach he taught me. To write a poem, you have to read.

Hannah Silverman: Which biblical figure do you identify with while writing? (In reference to the Noah poem, where did your influence come from?)

A handful of the poems in “The Last Commandment” are about Biblical characters. Instead of looking at their iconic nature, I think of them as everyday people, which led me to the examine things like the letdown Noah experienced after the flood. In “Elegy for Sarah,” I have lines about the private sorrow Abraham felt when Sarah died. And in “Spectra,” I focus at how Jacob, at first, missed seeing heaven in the story about Jacob’s ladder. Once I have the insight, I try to make it personal.

Hannah Silverman: Would you rather live in a dry heat, or frigid cold climate?

Give me hot weather any time. For me there’s no better feeling that heat sinking deep into me. It probably comes from hearing my mother say how the heat never bothered her. . . until our house got central air.

Laurie Saurborn: One striking aspect of your poem “Dark Feather” is how it captures the movement of flight. Flight, or that which makes flight possible, is present in the spilt paint that curves “like a crow’s wing.” It is here in the spring, which will “land light / on those boulders.” As it meditates upon its subject, the movement of the poem is akin to circling, as if the speaker is a bird looking on all this from far above. Could you tell us more about how you came to write this poem, and how close or far you feel from the events it describes?

Christine Fadden: When I sat down to write this poem, it came quickly, which normally would signal to me: Don’t trust it! I know you poets—I’ve heard the stories of nights lost agonizing over the placement of a comma. But also, as a fiction writer, hell, I’ve been working on my novel since 2010. Writing must take time, right? 100 words or 10,000, we had better revise. I did very little revising with “Dark Feather”—I changed a verb tense or two, adjusted a few line breaks.

In a way though, I had been sitting with this material for months, mourning the loss of my aunt (the subject of this poem), and so maybe my sense that I just came to the page and blurted my heart out isn’t entirely accurate.

It’s interesting: I didn’t “circle” or strive for distance on purpose, and did feel the piece came across as perhaps too cold and blunt (i.e. “this is when you start dying”) when in fact, my aunt was the first loved one I lost as an adult—and grieving her brought me to my knees. I had lived with her fairly recently, in my early forties, while working on my novel.

The home she and my uncle opened up to me, sits on a quiet ridge in a rural town. The three of us spent lots of time in the backyard together (the front yard, where she fell, not so much). Either way, when I got the call that she had fallen and hit her head, I imagined one scenario. Until I could fly back east—it took me a few days to get a grip on what was happening even though I sensed immediately she’d never regain consciousness—details trickled in. Of course, details don’t help. They change nothing. But maybe the circling has something to do with those days in which I was trying to make sense of the impossible—a very active and healthy woman falls not from a great height, but down three stairs—and that’s it?

Maybe the circling is an echo of “No, no, no.”

My aunt was lifeflighted to Pittsburgh. Maybe that’s the angle I had to take—I’m in that helicopter; I cannot be on that ground, because of some deadening force it now contains.

LS: I usually associate feathers with flight, and flight with flying (or running) away. But this poem maintains a tender, mournful attention on the “you,” as if creating a place for the absent loved one to rest. Was it difficult to revisit this event? Was writing “Dark Feather” a cathartic process?

CF: My aunt traveled the globe, but if she’s resting anywhere, it’s in one of her trees—or in the heart of one of the birds she fed, saved, or counted. More difficult than revisiting the event itself, is revisiting certain questions: Why, when she texted me four days before she fell, did I cut her short with an ‘I have to work now’ message? If and when I find an agent for my novel, will she know? (Damn it, I want her to know!) Did I ever directly say “thank you” for the time, space, and support she gave me?

My aunt gave me a place to rest, so that for whatever it’s worth, I could create. So yes, even if I am able to logically or artistically process the event itself, over time, those questions will always haunt me. I know it’s senseless to ruminate that way and I probably did thank her more than once, but I’m a writer—ruminating is one thing I excel at.

Forcing myself to fit just a portion of the pain onto one single page definitely was cathartic, but given the way grief waves move and mount, eventually I’ll need to hit a release valve again—somehow.

LS: Throughout the poem, careful details abound: Drunkard Joe, tomatoes, seed and suet. But the non-human primarily populates the landscape of the poem: the cats are okay, but Drunkard Joe is dead and there are no other people around. How did you decide what details had a place in the poem, and which did not?

CF: At the time of writing this poem, I wasn’t ready for these interiors—conversations over coffee in the kitchen, the human heart and all the ties back to so many amazing childhood summers and holidays. My uncle is like a father to me, and I didn’t dare tread on his suffering, or on that of my cousins or my mother.

I probably had to take the poem outdoors, not because my aunt died there, but because no matter the season, she did so much living there. She moved out there. I can only describe the details I included as shorthand to her soul.

LS: Among many other things, you are at work on a novel, you write short stories, and you work as a professional ghostwriter, editor, and writing coach. All to say, you write a ton of prose. Could you speak about how you manage to traverse the poetry/prose divide? Or do you feel there is a divide? Are there reasons you chose to address this event through poetry? Have you written about it in prose?

CF: I do read and write prose for a living, and interestingly enough, two of the projects I’m currently collaborating on are about death—sudden and assisted. Also, I just put my cat of fourteen years down. I’ve cried more in the past year than I have in any other and wonder if this is my time to learn some core aspect of grieving, or of love. I doubt very much I’ll write about the “Dark Feather” event, or any death-related events, in my own work in the near future—I need to get back to the hilarious! It’s too bad death is so rarely funny.

But the poetry/prose divide—yes, for me there (usually) is one. Always, the words we choose and the way we set them next to one another matter, but in prose, sentences have to pull the reader much further down the road. Even in some flash fiction, I think, sentences and paragraphs hold, cast, and propel a long arc; whereas, the words, phrases, and lines of poetry, to me, feel like piercing instruments. There is something, for me anyway, that is blunter about poetry. There’s no arguing with it, no denying it. I set out to write a poem when I need to put my finger in the socket. I want to wake up. I go to story to roll around a little and to dwell.

Now that I’m answering this question, I see I probably don’t want to dwell on the events of “Dark Feather.” I wonder, because the death was so sudden, how I would work it out as an essay or short story—and if I were to go there, wouldn’t the piece end up being more about my aunt’s life? Or about how her death has affected everyone—one year later? Hmm, you’ve given me more to process, about the grieving process and the writing process! Now we’re talking about content dictating form, and (again) about distance from the event. There are probably infinite ways to talk about distance, right? (I love that topic.) But, for now, I have no prose in me for this—it’s still too fresh.

LS: Another thing I admire about this poem—about your process—is that you take one detail from a shocking moment and use it as a way to enter an alternate reality, one where time vaults from past to present to future, one where your aunt is absent but her cats are taken care of and where the catnip still grows. As you wrote, were you surprised by something that found its way to the page?

CF: Yes: I did not see the streak of black paint on my aunt’s hand. I landed in Pittsburgh several hours after they pulled her from life support—did not get to see her (body?) one last time. My mom, her sister, told me about that streak of paint and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I didn’t see it as related to a feather, a crow, or flight, at first. The color black is heavy, grounding, and, of course, often representative of death—or maybe the warding off of evil. The crow carries a warning, or provides wisdom and a connection to the spirit world.

Maybe what surprised me is that by visualizing the paint, at first in motion, arcing, I set myself up to be able to transform it once it dried. That mark of death, on the hand of my aunt who really did so many good things with her hands, has somehow merged with something alive, wild, wise, and free, and therefore, is rendered slightly less terrible.

Christine Fadden’s work appears in Cobalt Review, Hobart, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, The Louisville Review, PANK, Joyland, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2014 Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival Prize and the 2013 Blanchan Award through the Wyoming Arts Council. She lives in the Olympic Rain Shadow, beneath some trees.

Laurie Saurborn is the author of two poetry collections, Industry of Brief Distraction and Carnavoria, and a chapbook, Patriot. A 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient, her work has appeared in such publications as American Literary Review, storySouth, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. Laurie teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also directs the undergraduate creative writing program. She is currently at work on a collection of stories.