Chapbook Chat: Catherine Moore Discusses Story

Story

Author: Catherine Moore

Publisher: Finishing Line Press

Publication date: 2015












Gazing by Catherine Moore

Draco, Canis Minor, Sagitarreous, Orion…
as a child I could identify them by name.
Once, on a really dark night, I counted 1000 stars.
Tremendous, though less in number than the grains
of a cold dune where my grandma and I sat looking east.
We’d stopped for a great deep chart with no meaning,
since the constellations are imaginary things
made up by poets, sailors, and old astronomers.
Still, she pointed and spoke, and you’d remember
that Orion's hunting dogs are always nearby,
hovered at his left shoulder, or resting at his foot.
You’d draw the image on your hand. That’s the way
mnemonics works, reminding how the unrelated fall
into place. There’s no value in knowing the North Star
or watching craters on the moon, still here I gaze.

*   *   *   *   *

Catherine Moore’s writing has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Southeast Review, Cider Press Review, Southampton Review and in various anthologies. She won the 2014 Gearhart Poetry Prize and has work include in “The Best Small Fictions of 2015.” Her collection Story is available with Finishing Line Press. Catherine earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Tampa. She lives in the Nashville area where she enjoys a thriving arts community and was recently awarded a MetroArts grant. She currently teaches at a community college and reviews poetry books for literary journals.


Author blog: http://about.me/catherinemoore

Twitter: @CatPoetic, https://twitter.com/CatPoetic

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catmoore

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8471273.Catherine_Moore

Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Catherine-Moore/e/B00J5CHBNS

*   *   *   *   *

[This interview was conducted via email in September 2015.]

Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook Story.

CM: Story is a series of narrative poems that explores resilient stories found in seemingly quiet moments. This collection seeks to observe the small but significant things around our world and in our own lives, and to record it in variety. From a tea room, to a laundromat, to home, these story poems mark moments as intimate as a dream or a conversation, and as universal as star gazing.



If I understand correctly, Story originated from poems you wrote in your journal or notebooks—you weren’t looking to form a collection, such as a chapbook. Tell us a bit about how you came to realize that you might have a chapbook and what you did to shape the poems into a cohesive whole.

CM: Yes, the poems were written over a span of years and I did not set out with the intention of writing this chapbook. The collection originated by finding a similar narrative voice within my notebooks when I noticed a pattern of menial tasks or places, and an expression that in these moments that we still find poetry around us. This broadened into more poems about the small and significant, until I eventually reduced the collection into the poems I felt did a unique job in distilling variations on the theme ‘story.’ I arranged individual poems to complement each other and to hold their own, as if everyday the book can beckon, “come here and let me tell you a story.”



Narrative seems to be a foundational characteristic in this collection, beginning with the title itself, Story. In addition, you also describe the collection as a series of narrative poems that arose from day-to-day “menial tasks and an expression that in these moments, we still find art and poetry around us.” I took that to mean that the collection is a sequence of poems that explored experiences in daily life. In her essay “Eloquent Silences: Lyric Solutions to the Problem of the Biographical Narrative” (The Contemporary Narrative Poem: Critical Crosscurrents, ed. Steven P. Schneider), April Lindner writes of the tension between lyric and narrative impulse within a poem, saying, in part: “While any long narrative presents challenges for the poet, … the biographical sequence [is] the epitome of those problems, since its author must distill something as complex as a life into a poem and in doing so provide moments of lyric payoff as well as plot.” (105) How did you navigate between the two impulses of lyric and narrative? Being a prose writer as well as poet, did you find it difficult to move to the lyric end of the spectrum? What is your experience with switching between genres?

CM: Each genre puts a different pressure on language, which I like to use to my advantage by intentionally switching genres. Sometimes the process of moving between them adds an interesting element, or allows less focused material to fall away. In the past, I structured the switch between genres. If I had writing that seemed bigger than a poem, I’d write a longer prose version of the piece, and often then combine the two with their best moments. Likewise, if I had a narrative poem that became too prose-like I would re-write it in a stricter form, like a sonnet. This reduction in line space requires poetical devices and forces a more lyrical mode. Lately, I’ve been writing unidentified written objects. The freedom of not declaring genre was game changing for me. When I revise the unidentified then I decide genre direction. This method has become highly productive.

In the end though, the specification of genre may really be in the eye of the reader. “Not About Liz” from Story, is a prime example of a versatile piece— published as a prose poem, and flash, and now included in the Best Small Fictions of 2015 anthology.



What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?

CM: The most lyrical poem in the collection, “The While,” is unique in that it’s about the absence of story. It may be a misfit of sorts but I felt this meanwhile period should be included. It came from my own experience of feeling life as a holding pattern, when life moves around us not through us. Sometimes no story is the story. Months that appear frustratingly empty are often a time of hibernation, rejuvenation, and recovery.

The While

Now, unbearable.

Still life harvested from its branch sway, while broken free, no longer inching.

Child hands match its slow swing, tock back, wait while ticks metronome my hours.

This mockery of a dream while spades and aces slough off our face cards.

In this while: everything a question, every event a direction.

Moves paralyzed— deep while each pit roaring in the silence of a swing.

Scaitheamnh, yes spells, wound over tea pots or some while pints in lieu of answers.

We sleep, meanwhile ravens and crows cast a mid-point pause on wind thermals.

Every while, tick, tock.



You mentioned finding beauty in the quotidian as being one of the purposes of Story, that “the collection seeks to observe the small but significant things around our world and in our own lives, and to record it in variety.” I was reminded of what Jane Hirshfield wrote in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, "The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look" (12), and I pictured you writing the poems almost as form of spiritual practice. Please tell us more about the importance of “small and significant” to you. Do you have a daily writing practice of recording observations?

CM: I love the writings of Jane Hirshfield and I’m tickled that you quoted her in this interview. I think of my poems as inventories of fragments: objects, narrative and people in word paintings, written photographs, and other literary inventions. Even in the simplest form, they are crafted to question our
making of the world through language and bias.

I've always enjoyed writings that explore the vagaries of situation and choices for women. Some may see it as domestic concerns, but I find the significant hidden in the smallest detail. Often times how I explore these themes is by combining mundane domestic narratives juxtaposed with unflinching poetics. A recent piece that comes to mind here is “How to Summons the Blues” published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 3.

I make an effort to maintain a daily practice of free writing— observations, prompts, object descriptions, dream recordings. Any type of writing can be fodder for larger works; I try not to get rigid about how I come into the writing process since that tends to bind my thought process. It may be written in a journal or on a grocery receipt, but I hardly go three days without sketching a poem even if I’m knee-deep in some other sort of writing.



What poets did you look to for inspiration?

CM: It is tempting to answer “the Pulitzer and Pushcart prize winners” because that is often true, even if highbrowed. Then I’d confess that inspiration comes from everywhere. This collection contains a brief appearance from the B-52’s, and I have a poem currently circulating that features Batman, and had one published about Dr. Seuss Sneetches. Along those lines, I admire poets that combine the formal and the familiar. A few go-to poets for me include Barbara Hamby, Lucille Clifton, and Kay Ryan.



What are you working on now?

CM: I am working on a collection that is a sequel to another chapbook, “One February.” It is a long narrative poem written in Ginsberg American Sentences, with Southern Gothic under tones. So for right now, I’m into longer thematic works that span a bridge between poetry and prose. We’ll see where this new hybrid writing takes me.

Chapbook Chat: Jessica Cuello Discusses My Father’s Bargain

My Father's Bargain

Author: Jessica Cuello

Publisher: Finishing Line Press

Publication date: 2015












Worn-Out Dancing Shoes by Jessica Cuello

My sister’s hair
as she walked in front,

had light metallic strands
she couldn’t see. I knew
her colors intimately,
and our silent footsteps.

At Christmas we gather,
our children run out back.
When I mention the stairway
and the boats we rode across,
middle sister leaves the room
and eldest laughs,
I remember how we played—
we knocked on the bedpost,
pretended it opened
like a door.

The shoes were proof;
I’m the only one

with memories. Each night,
last in line, I learned
by heart their shoulder blades,
part butterfly against blue
crepe and yellow silk.

It seemed to happen at once—
my sisters forgot,
were distracted if I spoke
of the boats in darkness

outside the lit dancehall.
We spun with our weight
flung back, holding tight
with sweaty hands.


(Originally published in Rose Red Review.)

*   *   *   *   *

Jessica Cuello is the author of the chapbooks My Father’s Bargain (Finishing Line Press 2015), By Fire (Hyacinth Girl Press 2013), and Curie (Kattywompus Press 2011). She was the winner of The 2013 New Letters Poetry Prize and the recipient of the 2014 Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. Jessica was selected as a Juried Fellow by the Saltonstall Foundation and will be a Writer-in Residence in summer 2015. Her first full-length poetry book, Pricking, is forthcoming from Tiger Bark Press in 2016.

Author blog: https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/

*   *   *   *   *

[This interview was conducted via email in September 2015.]

Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook My Father's Bargain.

JC: The poems are inspired by fairy tales, in particular the vulnerable experiences of women and children.



How did you arrive at the title?

JC: It’s a line from the poem “Rumplestiltskin.” Bargain is connected to the idea of the body as capital—that her body (in the poem) is not her own; it is to be traded by her father. In many of the fairy tales, fathers are either malignant or clueless. In fact, men are often unaware of the plot itself like the bridegroom in “The Goosegirl” or the father in “The Dancing Princesses.”

Manipulation and trickery, which we view as negative qualities, are often the only means for women in the tales to escape abuse. We need these traits less than women in the past, but I do think we’ve inherited these kinds of survival skills by necessity. The title points to the character’s awareness of how she is both part of a deal and also excluded from the deal at the same time.



Diane Green wrote in a 2007 Rhizomes essay “Exploring Border Country: the Use of Myth and Fairy Tale in Gillian Clarke’s Poem Sequence, ‘The King of Britain’s Daughter’”:  “[M]yth ... is such a familiar tool in the work of female poets writing in the latter part of the twentieth-century, particularly in its feminist revisionary role, as advocated by Adrienne Rich, and especially where nationality is an issue.” And in Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990, Ian Brinton writes “[A]n interest in myth and fairytale is a recognisable attempt to remove the poet s self from a lyric expression into an embodied narrative. Traditional fairytales have a residual power of rethinking the roles of women and the ways they are represented within society.” (49)

Could you speak a bit about your use of myth and fairytale in your poems and your response to one or both of the quotes?

JC: Fairy tales are powerful for women. The domestic realm possesses its own terror. Domestic violence means that the very place where we expect safety and rest is the place where we are most vulnerable. Childbirth hurts. One of my friends said that her experience of childbirth was like volunteering for a car accident. Sexual violence, marriage, the powerlessness of being a child in a family you can’t leave—these are unspoken kinds of pain and fear, even the tedious work that women do every day that is unpaid and unacknowledged, like feeding, clothing, and cleaning others. The other part of it is the responsibility for the bodies of others, particularly children. Many women who have grown up being careless with their own bodies suddenly find themselves responsible for the bodies and safety of others. That particular responsibility is primal. We see it on the faces of the refugees trying to enter Europe, holding their children in their arms. There is a negation of the father and mother’s self in that kind of crisis. Rumplestiltskin has this chilling theme. How can she save her child? How can she keep her child?

Certainly myth is a way to absent the personal self from the poem while retaining all the emotional connection to the poems. I did not choose to do so consciously. I never said, I don’t want myself in these poems, but unconsciously it began when I first read fairy tales at age 5. We negate ourselves and latch onto these stories; it is a way to cope with pain. I think an underrated quality of literature is its ability to comfort and soothe us, to literally help us survive. I think there is a self that exists in a story when we read—whether a self that identifies as the protagonist or a self that accompanies the protagonist. I watch my children do this. My 9 year old daughter writes journal entries in the voices of characters from her books.



While My Father’s Bargain is your third chapbook, from what I understand, the poems in it are the first poems you wrote that you intended to publish. How long did it take to write these series of poems and what, if any, was the impetus to start writing them? What’s the oldest piece in this chap? How did that timing come to be, e.g., that it isn’t the first chapbook that you published? When you started writing these specific poems, did you intend to create a chapbook or collection?

JC: I had always wanted to be a writer, but for years I spent far more time reading than writing. When my daughter was born, I felt a sense of urgency. I learned what time truly was for the first time. I wrote these poems then—intending them to be part of a full-length. I kept cramming them into books where they didn’t belong. I published two unrelated chapbooks and had a full-length accepted (forthcoming in 2016) before these poems found a home. A smart editor told me to take these poems out of my book and put them in a chapbook. Though my style has evolved since I wrote these poems, I still value them and wanted to see them in the world. The oldest poem is probably “Rumplestiltskin.” It was one of my first acceptances—published in Copper Nickel when Jake Adam York was editor.



What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?

JC: The first poem in the book is important to me—I think because it is the only poem that addresses the idea of hunger and the importance of hunger and food in familial relationships. If a mother cannot feed her child, does she abdicate her identity as mother? I am still writing poems about this idea, nine years later.

Gretel

Where to put our bodies?
We knew how to sit

and pretend we didn’t want
to eat. Our hunger grew

into our skin. We fit
inside a hollow tree. Branches

were the ceiling
and we played in a second house

where I served up
a feast of dandelion and rock.

At night I pressed a stone
against my chest

like a Mother’s hand.
Not our Mother (though she was)

who whispered the fact of our mouths.
Not our Father (though he was)

who led us in the dark.
I looked back at the symmetry—

a door amid doors. A yard intimate
with metal: the outgrown slide,

rust that flowered
like lichen moss.

As we fled, I curved my neck
to peer into the other houses:

shoes lined on a porch,
meals at the times

of meals: dawn, dusk,
and middle day.



Who were you reading when you wrote these poems? e.g., other fairy-tale poems or Grimm’s fairy tales or other books of myth? Which a fairy-tale related poem written by another poet is your favorite?

JC: I was reading Jack Zipes’ translation of Grimm (not the new one just out—I don’t have that yet) and I was reading a lot of Lucie Brock-Broido. Her poems are not fairy-tale related, but the energy in them captures the kind of darkness and visceral fear I wanted for my own poems. I love all her books, but I must have read Trouble in Mind twenty times during that time period. Her poems capture the witchy darkness of childhood and I was more interested in that tone than fairy tale poems. Many contemporary poems are ironic when they write about fairy tales and I wasn’t interested in that. I mean for the terror to be real; I am in earnest!



In addition to the theme of fairy tales, what are some of the other themes, metaphors, and elements of craft that you used to unify your chapbook?

JC: Childhood, siblings, loss. They are free-verse poems and I was thinking about line when I wrote them, particularly syntax and the breaking of it. The ideas about line were important because so many of the poems are about being mute or about animals and objects speaking.



Have you given a public reading of the chapbook? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

JC: Yes. I have given one public reading from this chapbook and the poems made me very sad. They were almost impossible to read. I’ve done lots of readings and that has never happened before. The poems are old but apparently the material is still raw. I like to be in control when I read so I may read less of these particular poems at my next reading.



What are you working on now?

JC: I’m working on a series of poems based on the absent feminine in Moby Dick. Moby Dick is a myth too—an American one—so clearly I am stuck in writing from the mythic.

Chapbook Chat: Rachel Trousdale Discusses Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone

Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone

Author: Rachel Trousdale

Publisher: Finishing Line Press

Publication date: Sep 2015 (available for pr-order prior to publication)











Young Peggy Plays Taps by Rachel Trousdale
South Dakota, 1967

She is sixteen. She’s waiting for her cue
to take her trumpet, leave the heated car
and walk out to the grave. She has to do

this often, skip a high school class or two
and play for someone. It’s not very far,
and she’s sixteen. She’s waiting for her cue

behind the snow drifts round the lot, the blue
Dakota winter afternoon. They are
familiar: they do what the families do,

they stand beside the cut earth like a queue
for bread or for a bus. The minister
will lift a hand, and out she’ll come, on cue,

and play him down, the drop six feet into
the end of snow and trumpeting and war.
That’s all she does, and all she’s asked to do.

It’s always someone that she almost knew,
and she is worried by and fearful for.
She is sixteen. She’s waiting for her cue
and for a better thing that she can do.

(Originally published in Literary Imagination)

*   *   *   *   *

Rachel Trousdale is an assistant professor of English at Framingham State University in Framingham, MA. Her poems have appeared in Literary Imagination, the Atlanta Review, Rhino, and DIAGRAM, among other places. Her book Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010, and she is now working on a project on humor in modern poetry. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University.

Author website: http://www.racheltrousdale.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RachelTrousdalePoet

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rvtrousdale

*   *   *   *   *

[This interview was conducted via email in June 2015.]

NCL: Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone.

RT: It’s a playful little book, containing a poem spoken by a guy building a pyramid in his back yard, a comparison of migraine headaches to yetis, and a joke about bananas. And it’s also about art and death and family and the meaning of life. More specifically, one of the things Antiphonal Fugue deals with is how our work shapes and reflects (or fails to shape and reflect) who we are. This theme shows up in three longish poems that constitute about half of the book: "Isabel and Jimenez," about the unification of Castile and Aragon and the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain; "Night Shift, Summer, 1994," spoken by four employees working late at a McDonald's; and "The Pyramid," about a man building a pyramid in his suburban back yard. All three poems are, in various ways, about how different kinds of work demand that we balance the practical, physical demands of life with our ideals—and how that balance can tip horribly in one direction or another, depending on the constraints we’re up against and what exactly our ideals are.



NCL: How did you arrive at the title?

RT: I woke up from a nap one afternoon with the title in my mind and an intense desire to write a poem to go with it. That isn’t something that happens often; I like dream-poems but don’t usually write them. When I was assembling the chapbook, I realized that the poem I had written under that impetus combined all of the things I wanted to place in dialogue in the manuscript: order and authority on one side (in this case, the dignified character played in the Marx Brothers’ films by Margaret Dumont), and humor and creative chaos on the other (the Marx Brothers themselves). However satisfying it is to mock Margaret Dumont, meaningful work (which here I guess means Duck Soup) draws on both sides. That dialogue is especially important for artistic work, which needs to make something really new and to grapple with other, older art, but I think the problem is relevant for most ambitious projects.



NCL: The subject of work and its hand in shaping identity factors into some of your poems in the book. In the introduction of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-41, an anthology of poems written by workers and published in union newspapers during the Great Depression, John Marshal writes:

As the contemporary economist Michael Zweig puts it, “To exercise power, you need to know who you are. You also need to know who the adversary is…” (74). If they did nothing else, then, these poems reminded people who they were and who their adversaries were…” (19)

And in an interview with poet Philip Levine (Fresh Air, NPR, rebroadcast on 2/20/2015), one gets the sense that his earlier work as a manual laborer, with its adversarial relationship with “management”—those in power pitted against the laborer, heavily influenced the shaping of his identity. In your poems, what role does an adversary or antagonist play with respect to shaping identity? Is there a group or person or circumstance against which the speaker rails, some power structure that needs to be overcome? or perhaps something along the lines of shaping an identity, not on what one wants to be, but what one does not want to be? How are some of the ways that work “shapes and reflects (or fails to shape and reflect) who we are” in your chapbook?

RT: In “Night Shift,” the McDonald’s poem, work provides one of the central tensions in the poem: the speakers one way or another all discuss the difference between the low-paying, unrewarding work that they are doing (purveying burgers at fifty cents an hour above minimum wage) and the meaningful work they would like to be doing instead (making music, raising their children, learning). There’s definitely an antagonist in that poem, but how you define it (management? poverty? capitalism?) may depend on your politics. The disjunction between paid and chosen work, which is particularly jarring for these speakers, helps define who they can be, not just because spending eight hours a day at a fast food restaurant constrains how you use your time but because it also shapes your body, your relationships, and how you view human nature.

In “Night Shift,” most of the speakers don’t get to do their real work. In “The Pyramid,” the speaker goes too far in the other direction, becoming obsessed with his artistic project. He thinks it’s going to secure him a kind of immortality and a connection to other people, but if that’s what he wants, he’s probably going about it wrong. Once again, there might be different accounts of who the antagonist is here. Death? Or the speaker himself?

“Isabella and Jimenez” is about a much higher-level choice: what kind of ideal we serve in our chosen (rather than our necessary) work. Isabella wants a unified Christian Spain. The poem examines the weird combination of cynicism and idealism it takes to do her work—i.e., launching the Spanish Inquisition. Here the sides are clear: it’s Isabella versus the Jews, the Moors, and (implicitly, since the poem doesn’t address them directly but is mostly set in the year 1492) the Native Americans. Which party counts as the antagonist depends on who you are; in the poem I’m interested in examining what she was thinking and how her actions have echoed in Spain ever since.

In all of those cases, how an individual balances the interplay between chosen and necessary work shows us as much about them as what their chosen work actually is.



NCL: In addition to the motif of work, what are some of the other themes, metaphors, and elements of craft that you used to unify your chapbook?

RT: Craft: I’ve been playing with concrete poetry—kind of a reaction to my early training, which was heavy on traditional form. Though I haven’t walked away from form, either; one of my favorite poems in the book is a villanelle. Themes: Closely related to the theme of work is an examination of consequences--cause and effect--on the large and small scale, like Isabella’s effect on Spain. I’ve also got an alien anthropologist deducing all of human history from the first cave painting and a damaged girl’s life as a Rube Goldberg mousetrap unwittingly set up by the people around her.



NCL: What’s one of the more crucial poems in the chapbook for you? (or what is your favorite poem?) Why? How did the poem come to be?

RT: “Old Joke,” the penultimate poem in the chapbook, is important to me. It’s built out of a joke my grandfather told us shortly before he died. The idea of using that joke’s setup and punch line as the outer layers of a poem sandwich came to me quite abruptly, and when I sat down to write it I was shocked to find how much filling the sandwich had. The process of editing the poem, which I did with the help of Terrance Hayes’ workshop at Bread Loaf in the summer of 2013, was very much one of removing extraneous material. Here’s the poem:

Old Joke

An old man goes to his doctor and says,

Doctor, how long have I got?

            (This joke is to be told in a descending intonation,

            with echoes behind the voice of the man behind the fish counter

            calling number ninety two, and Mrs. Silber requesting         

            a nice piece of whitefish, and the whirr

            of the coffee grinders, and if it were

            possible for a voice to contain a smell it would have the tinny

            smell of refrigeration holding in check

            the thousands of dollars of imported cheese;

            this joke contains gold-wrapped three-pound bars of chocolate

            and apricot jam from Turkey and rye bread which can be sliced or left whole;

            when it’s done being told, this joke will be getting on the crosstown bus

            and riding with big plastic bags lined with paper bags

            through the park on 79th Street to the east side

            where the old women wear white sneakers

            beneath their long mink coats;

            this joke will walk four blocks north from the bus stop

            through the sliding glass doors, nodding to the doorman

            whom it tips well at Christmas, past the big vase of flowers in the lobby,

            up to the apartment it’s lived in for twenty-seven years,

            alone for the last eight, where it will wrap

            cheese and halvah and chocolate and a flat

            of smoked salmon in yesterday’s Times

            to overnight to a girl in college reading too seriously

            and not cleaning her room and from the look of her starving)

And the doctor says, well, I’m not saying you’re going to die,

but don’t buy any green bananas.

(originally published at Two Serious Ladies)



NCL: When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?

RT: When I read poems, I want play and precision and payoff. I’m writing for people who share my priorities. So maybe I imagine myself, but a self who didn’t write the poem and wants to discover something interesting in it. Perhaps that’s why the “I” of my poems is rarely me, or is me only in passing—I couldn’t write to myself about myself and think I was getting somewhere novel.



NCL: I read your essay “Humor Saves Steps: Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore” and the poems you link to on your website, some of which have a delightful humor to them. Can you speak a little about the role of humor in your poems? What has been your experience in publishing those poems?

RT: Thank you for reading! I think humor is one of our most complex emotional registers, and one of our most deep-seated. One of the first things a baby learns—long before language, before even sitting up—is to laugh. Humor is really fundamental to what makes us people. And our senses of humor, like our work, shape our understanding of the world. Is it a hostile place where we laugh at other people’s failings? or do we laugh out of glee, or surprise, or fellow-feeling? and what happens when those provocations to laughter are combined? Perhaps most importantly, humor is a wonderful way to discover new ideas and strange juxtapositions, which makes it particularly fruitful for poetry.

I’ve enjoyed looking for places to publish those poems. While I’ve placed some light verse in venues like Light, my more humorous work seems to do best with journals that publish experimental writing. I like that, because it suits my theory of humor, namely that it’s a way to be innovative, to get new places.



NCL: What are you working on now?

RT: Lots of things! I’m writing a critical book on humor in modern poetry. The Moore article is one chapter of it; other chapters are on T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, and a big round-up of contemporary poets. I’m also editing a collection of essays on the same topic. I’ve got a book-length poetry manuscript, which is about the ways that our minds and bodies shape each other. (One of the poems in the chapbook, “Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem,” provides that book’s title.) I’m always writing reviews. My husband and I recently had a baby, so I’m also working on finding ways to write while we care for him—and on making him laugh, of course!

Chapbook Chat: Merie Kirby Discusses The Dog Runs On

The Dog Runs On

Author: Merie Kirby

Publisher: Finishing Line Press

Publication date: 2014















When the kind girl grows up by Merie Kirby

There were the fairy tales, of courses, the fire-hot
shoes, the pecked out eyes, the sliced off
tongue, the horrifying stew, the finger flying
through the air – that world where sweet words
are rewarded and bullies end up with a mouth
full of burning ashes, a world made more make-believe
by the headlines that she can now read
over my shoulder, or in line at the grocery store.
It began, I think, with last December’s news stories
about the shootings – children her age, teachers,
and her questions about what happened
to the man who killed them – and then
about the children harassed for who they were,
who they loved, desperate for escape.
She asks, in the car, at night, in the dark
between restaurant and home,
Have any kids died or killed themselves this week?
and later her worried father draws me aside
Where did that come from?
I remember what it was like trying to make
peace with the unkind world, trying to resist
knowing it, confronted continually with evidence
that fair may only be another word for pretty.

*   *   *   *   *

Merie Kirby is the author of The Dog Runs On (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and The Thumbelina Poems (forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks). Her poems have been published in Willow Review, Midwest Poetry Review, and Avocet, and in September 2014 she participated in the 30/30 Project for Tupelo Press.

Her writing in collaboration with composers has been performed at various venues in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota. In 2014 she was the recipient of a North Dakota Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant. She teaches at the University of North Dakota. Merie's website: writecraftthink.blogspot.com

*   *   *   *   *

[This interview was conducted via email in May 2015.]

NCL: Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook The Dog Runs On.

MK: I think it is fair to say the collection is concerned with innocence and experience (which felt very present during my introduction to parenting), how they seep into each other, how to confront the harsh world without losing wonder, and without denying the harshness or ignoring it. In fact, the first poem includes an allusion to William Blake, where the speaker thinks about how she and her child are “crawling on the floor being nice tigers looking for socks / but one day we will be burning in the forest of the night / burning with questions about all that is harsh in the green world” (“How she came to know the animals”). I have found that being a parent gives you plenty of opportunities to contemplate thorny questions like whether it is mean for birds to eat worms, and whether it is awful or wondrous that a worm can break in half to survive the bird’s attack…which later seem so easy in comparison to questions about school shootings and child suicides.



NCL: How did you arrive at the title?

MK: The poem that gives the chapbook its title is “The dog bolts into traffic,” one of the oldest poems in the collection - the poem is itself a dog that has kept running! In the poem, the speaker observes a dog so determined to continue its trajectory that it runs right into a busy street, suffers a very near miss, and then continues on course. On a concrete level, that dog breaks my heart. But on a metaphorical level, I want to be like that dog, to keep running.



NCL: The bulk of poems in the chapbook are themed around motherhood/daughterhood, raising children in contemporary American society. What are some of the other themes, metaphors, and other elements of craft that you used to unify your chapbook? What is your favorite poem in the book or one that is important to you?

MK:It’s safe to say that my poems largely fit snugly into the lyric tradition, whether in free verse or prose poem format. Motherhood, daughterhood, and parenting are definitely strong themes in the book. Other prominent themes would be story and fairy tales, the animal world and our intersections with it, persistence, and witnessing/remembering - from watching a child soldier recount something horrifying to sharing a friend’s grief.

It’s hard to pick a favorite poem, isn’t it? One is definitely “When the kind girl grows up,” but another poem in the chapbook that is important to me is “5am tattoo.” For me, this poem captures the way I find it possible to maintain my kindness, to not lose my footing in worry and fear.

5am tattoo

It is early. I’ve risen from the little wooden boat
that floated me through darkness.

Two weeks before the solstice
daylight continues to expand,

filling the world minute by minute with more sun.
Now, five am, the birds sing the promise of the day.

Their calls trill through trees,
like brooks in the mountains just at the tree line.

Two more white poppies
have opened their taffeta skirts in the night.

More leaves have been stuffed into the birdhouse
now occupied by squirrels, squatters who gnawed the opening larger.

Mosquitoes navigate their crooked, blurred flights.
The fridge burrs on, a plane rumbles over the neighborhood,

the man next door opens, closes, locks his door
and thuds down his steps to the sidewalk.

Some mornings it seems the boat
has been moored to the same dock all night.

Other mornings it is as if our boat, left unpiloted,
has run aground on unfamiliar sand. Climbing out

I find everything is known but unfamiliar.
A landscape I know from the map, the journals of others,

the visions that came while I rocked
in the bottom of the boat on dark currents.

18th century sailors got tattoos in Tahiti, to prove
they had been there, that island paradise

the only place they could get that kind of mark.
I want to show that I have been here,

to this island of morning.
How will I be marked?



NCL: Are some of these poems about your own child? Who is your favorite author who has written about his or her children and/or your favorite book or poem?

MK: I think perhaps it might be most true to say that my own child is a catalyst for some of these poems. Like most writers, I reserve the right to revise reality if it makes the poem better, yet still true. (My grandmother once told me a story, then demanded I not use it in a poem, then waved her hand and said, “You’ll probably change it anyway. Go ahead.”) There are so many poets writing amazing - moving, honest, thrilling - poems about the parent/child relationship, but there is one poem in particular that I first read long before becoming a parent, which has become richer for me over time, as I have made the same shift as the speaker in that poem, from daughter to mother, from Persephone to Demeter: “The Pomegranate,” by Eavan Boland.



NCL: What are your thoughts on the question Emily Bazelon poses in her 2008 Slate essay “Is this Tantrum on the record,” about the ethics of writing about one’s children: What are the ground rules for writing about your kids?

MK: Now that my daughter is nine, she has a lot of say when it comes to things like social media, where the sharing is more immediate. But a poem, which may not be widely read until years after it is first written, is a little different. In The Dog Runs On, there are poems from her infancy and poems from just two years ago - she tends to have a nostalgic feel about those, and to be curious about them rather than defensive or embarrassed. In perhaps the most complimentary gesture possible, she took to school her copy of the chapbook (which she has illustrated) to share with her friends. But the ground rules are always evolving, and it is a conversation we return to frequently.



NCL: Diane Green wrote in a 2007 Rhizomes essay “Exploring Border Country: the Use of Myth and Fairy Tale in Gillian Clarke’s Poem Sequence, ‘The King of Britain’s Daughter’”:

[M]yth ... is such a familiar tool in the work of female poets writing in the latter part of the twentieth-century, particularly in its feminist revisionary role, as advocated by Adrienne Rich, and especially where nationality is an issue.

And in Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990, Ian Brinton writes:

[A]n interest in myth and fairytale is a recognisable attempt to remove the poet’s self from a lyric expression into an embodied narrative. Traditional fairytales have a residual power of rethinking the roles of women and the ways they are represented within society.

Could you speak a bit about your use of myth and fairytale in your poems and your response to one or both of the quotes?

MK: I have been an avid reader since a very young age, but perhaps my most obsessive reading love was my grandfather’s 1932 edition of the Brothers Grimm tales - the translations were not too cleaned up, some of them were pretty horrifying, and I loved them all. So fairy tales (and myth and ballet stories and nursery rhymes) do creep into my poems - sometimes in a revisionary sense, sometimes for the usual version to be repudiated, and often as a way of taking a critical look at those roles and representations of women. One of the poems in The Dog Runs On that does this in a more overt way is “When the kind girl grows up,” where the title refers to the English tale of “Diamonds and Toads” (sometimes called “The Kind Girl and the Unkind Girl”) - a dichotomy that fascinates me, because growing up seems almost designed to turn you into an unkind girl! That one is followed by a couple of poems that continue the exploration of the kind girl in the unkind world: “Sunday Morning,” “When I think of genocide,” and “Fear.”

Red Bird Chapbooks will be publishing my next chapbook, The Thumbelina Poems, which has more to do with Ian Britton’s idea of moving from “a lyric expression into an embodied narrative” and examining the roles Thumbelina is given in that story. In the original story she is perpetually cast into the role of potential bride; I wanted to pull out her opportunities for agency, for response, and for meaning beyond what Hans Christian Andersen offered her. In my poems she is not always a kind girl, in fact she corrects the speaker at one point, who points out that “The wishes of others were winds that blew her life. / They birthed her, unmoored her, snatched her, and courted her” and Thumbelina is very firm in pointing out that when she was able to, when she needed to, she could act in her own interests at the expense of others: “Be fair, she says, the leashed butterfly still haunts me, / how it must have tired and fallen into the river to be taken by fish” (“The wishes of others”).



NCL: What are you working on now?

MK: Most immediately, I’m writing a poem a day in June with friends. Later this summer I’ll be working on revising poems from last fall and shaping two manuscripts. One will be a chapbook and the other a full-length manuscript; the full-length one is coming together from poems that run a gamut of themes, while the chapbook is more likely to come from the trove of mothering poems. Although lately it’s been a lot of monsters and ocean creatures showing up, so we’ll see. And we just got a new puppy, so that is another project (an extremely fluffy and adorable project) in the works.