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Behind the Byline
Marianne Boruch
Marianne Boruch, photo by David Dunlap
Sarah Wolfson talks with Marianne Boruch about the platypus, Pliny, and the discovery lurking in “the spill of words.” Read “The Lyrebird Hidden…” and “Every Available Blue…” in NER 42.1.
Sarah Wolfson: These poems are part of your forthcoming book, Bestiary Dark, a project you launched as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute. The purpose of your research was to observe Australian wildlife in order to write a bestiary. How did you first become interested in the bestiary genre?
Marianne Boruch: Is it an honest-to-Zeus genre? I just knew the platypus has always been my favorite animal. So when I saw Australia was offering Fulbrights, the University of Canberra and its wonderful International Poetry Studies Institute among them, I thought I might have a distant chance to look that confusing, species-rich creature straight in the eye. I very much wanted to observe that continent’s astonishing wildlife—not only the platypus—and write a sequence of poems about it. About climate change too, and our stained human hand at fault behind it. All this morphed into what I like to call a neo-ancient/medieval bestiary because I drew inspiration from those beautiful often outrageous woodcuts made in the Middle Ages, and from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, one of our earliest (and weirdest, cross my heart) natural histories, his final effort before dying at Pompeii where he’d gone in a boat to save a friend caught in Vesuvius’s eruption. (Clearly a bad idea.)
The fact was I was suddenly free as well. I’d recently gone rogue and emeritus from Purdue University where I’d established the MFA program in creative writing and taught for thirty-two years. That good timing also worried me. Maybe I’d seem too old, my retirement possibly rendering moot the Fulbright aim to foster lasting, ongoing links between universities around the world. Plus I’d been awarded a first Fulbright in 2012 for a coveted English-speaking spot in the UK, one of its most beautiful cities, Edinburgh. So perhaps I had used up my chips.
In short, I figured my application was more than dubious. And probably doomed. But my mantra always is: what the hell what the hell what the hell…
SW: What did your journal or field notes for this project look like? Waterproof? Bowerbird-theft proof? How much actual writing occurred on your forays to look for wildlife?
MB: I do wander around with a wee notebook, what I call my “image journal” for jotting things down. I’m basically an old-school imagist, I guess. So I did use that. Since I also carried an un-smart phone that nonetheless had a camera buried in it, I could take pictures to pry open my memory later. My husband and I were there mainly in the drought months—so no, not much concern about rain.
I did write a bit of the collection’s “Book 1” in Canberra. (Bestiary Dark is made of five of those “books”; I was mining Pliny’s organization.) But mainly I wasn’t writing poems “on site,” as such. It was overwhelming enough just to absorb the strange stunning details of that country, as many as I could. From start to finish, we loved it there. I mean, who wouldn’t love a place where your house was in a grove of eucalyptus trees, a mere ten-minute walk to see hundreds of kangaroos just lounging about of a morning? We called that our “kangaroo fix” for the day. Canberra turned out to be a fantastic city for me because, though the nation’s capital and quite urban, 60 percent of it is green space, by design. Which is so smart.
But to answer the rest of that question: I wrote the bulk of the poems after we returned, and mainly in two residencies, one at Yaddo in the fall, the other at MacDowell the following winter, before both places shuttered because of Covid. Such luck! I think about this a lot, how I made it just in time. Which seems a miraculous accident, and doubly so that we were there for that Fulbright when we were, and not the next year when the virus hit and sent all the American scholars packing only a couple of weeks after the new round started in February 2020.
SW: Yes, your research took place in 2019, right before the Australian wildfires and not long before the pandemic. How did these events shape the poems or change the course of your manuscript as a whole?
MB: Well, absolutely the fires shaped the poems and, finally, the curve of the book itself. But it was curious. As I mentioned above, the real writing began after July 31, 2019, when our visas expired and we had to leave the country. And after we spent our fifth and final month circling the Outback in a little yellow rental car that seemed to our Australian friends exactly the wrong vehicle in which to do such a crazy, grueling trip.
Preparing for that was disconcerting. We were constantly warned about the western half of the country, about getting gas and bad roads and the terrain’s desolation, the UFOs that might snatch us up, about the lack of places to stay the night and buy food, etc. But we ventured out anyway. Our back seat was a little grocery store on wheels! And we filled up huge containers of water in cities like Perth and Darwin and Alice Springs where the pipes were reliable. I would have given up the ghost on the idea from the start though—I’m a wimp at heart—except for my husband’s passionate insistence that we’d be fine, and his expert planning. He was right. And I am so grateful. It was a spectacular trip. Such a privilege.
But your question… The fires, even from a distance, across an ocean and half a continent, haunted everything I wrote. I lived for news from the good friends we made there, both poets and wildlife people. We were so concerned about them. Utterly terrible, the pictures on the news and the internet, and the photos people attached to their e-mails.
I had to be careful: I was seeing it all from away, as they say in Maine; I understand I am a highly questionable outsider. Australian poets are the ones with the right to hold forth about it directly. I didn’t want to appropriate. But I did feel the awful pressure of those fires, especially what it was doing to the koalas, also the wallabies and kangaroos. This was true even for the platypus. In Tidbinbilla, the vast reserve where we had been volunteers, they had to be moved elsewhere since one or two of their ponds were feared to be in the (literal) direct line of fire.
SW: Both of these poems move inductively: they focus first on the immediate details of the birds’ behavior and then whorl outward toward human questions. Only late in the poems do we encounter an “I.” When you were writing, how did you balance the observational mode with the impulse to point toward broader concerns like art, knowledge, catastrophe, hope?
MB: Wow. What an insightful and primal question for any poet to consider, this eternal balance between self and world, past and present, disaster and hope, the mundane opening to larger realizations. Poems are destined to connect all that, being perhaps the most revered and ancient way to think about things.
Then there was the fact that we cracked up completely when our bird-whisperer friend, John Bundock, showed us the bowerbird’s truly off-the-wall collection of all-things-blue to impress a future mate. It was hidden way back in the bush. Then the lyrebird’s endless rattling off sounds natural and human-made (bring on that backfiring truck!) to woo a true love though we only heard of that. Which is to say, the comic element in both pieces—and throughout the book really—is crucial. In the case of NER‘s two poems, I hope that brings out the meticulous otherness of those birds, their passionate gravity, however quirky. Of course humor breaks down distance, and is a kind of linking of worlds. I mean, we can get as ridiculous as those birds in our various aches and passions, yes?
The bower-bird’s bower, photo by John Bundock
But the “speaker”—as we are in the habit of saying now—never sees the actual bird. That loss, that emptiness at the heart of most mysteries, seems important to note as well. And eerie. The sense of that, the shared situation of that, seemed to offer itself at closure.
Honestly, I never know how a poem will move. It rarely arrives anywhere predictable at the end—I hope for an unknowing throughout—though it mostly starts with an image that stops me. My theory, if I do have one, is the “begging bowl.” You go blank and wait for something to drop in, then try to hold back the agenda, let it go where it wants. Of course in revision—I call that my “hospital rounds”—you find out what the poem really is about; its initial reserve breaks down to reveal more of itself to you. It perhaps sounds crazy, but the poet’s patient attention day after day builds trust that there might be a discovery lurking in whatever spill of words after all.
SW: You mentioned that these poems unnerve you. Why is that? Do they unnerve you more than other poems of yours, or is being unnerved by one’s work part of a poet’s condition, in your opinion?
MB: It is the best and fully necessary condition for a poet, I think. To be knocked off one’s pins in the actual writing. I suppose that unnerved state is a version of Frost’s old saw “no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” The poems of mine I think the strongest do have a way of scaring me, freaking me out a little, or a lot.
That seemed pretty much always to happen in this new book, so much that I still can’t imagine who wrote most of these, though I recognize them. So many of the poems still strike me as deeply odd. This might be because that wildlife constantly astounded, those unthinkable animals that Australians, so used to them, consider largely ho-um. The beloved purpose of art is to make the strange familiar (and the reverse, of course), but I have to say, that didn’t happen to me in those five months, certainly not in these poems. The strange remained strange. In fact, got stranger. In many parts of the book a snarky archangel wanders in and out, sometimes spoiling for a fight. And a roadkill emu returns from the dead to speak. So there is that; a mythic thread entered the weave.
What can one say? Or do when an archangel turns up, a cheeky one, at that? You get rather unnerved. But it’s too late! He’s right there on the page…
SW: Speaking of strangeness, there’s a delightful strangeness to the language in these poems. Standard syntactical orderings are disrupted. Words are assigned new parts of speech. Chatty asides abound. How much do you think the distinctiveness of Australian wildlife invited this the linguistic elasticity? How much does it simply represent your poetic voice more generally?
MB: Sorry. These questions assume more self-scrutiny than I can manage. (I think about something I read once, that you can’t picture yourself laid out and lifeless. Can’t happen. Try it. Imagine you are looking down at yourself, from the ceiling. It’s true!)
But yes, perhaps the distinctiveness of Australia wildlife, as you rightly frame it, influenced these poems down to the word by word sentence level. More generally, I tend to hear poems this way because the mind works similarly, doesn’t it?—i.e., all over the place. I do value playfulness, and a grounded, image-rich invention. I love poets who do that.
And I fear I have to plead the begging bowl again.
SW: One of my favorite lines here refers to the speaker’s not having seen the lyrebird, which, true to the poem’s title, has remained hidden. The line goes: “But me, a life member, / the World Congress of the Disappointed, I understand hope.” This line extends metaphorical weight beyond birding, and it seems like a good emblem for the times. I mean this only slightly humorously: Do you have any suggestions of how other lifetime members of this particular world congress can nonetheless understand hope?
MB: Other suggestions beyond trusting art to help keep us going?
Well, I’ve become a better cook during this terrible pandemic. More ginger! More garlic! More vinegar! More coconut milk! That will help us hopeless sorts, I promise you.
SW: Thanks so much for your responses! It was a delight to spend time with these poems. I look forward to reading the book.
MB: No, I need to thank you, Sarah!
I appreciate the questions. And am so glad the poems make some sense to you. It was a disquieting thought to me, that they wouldn’t translate to this country somehow, coming from that wondrous other side of the world with all those seemingly impossible, most ancient and loved creatures in tow.
Marianne Boruch recently published her tenth book of poems, The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon, 2019). Her forthcoming collection, Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon, 2021), is based on her experience two years ago as a Fulbright Scholar in Australia where she closely observed the continent’s astonishing wildlife. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Sarah Wolfson, a staff reader in poetry for NER, is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Walrus, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, AGNI, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches writing at McGill University.
NER Interns: Where are they now?
Thomas Kivney
Thomas Kivney ’13 talks to NER intern Rachel Horowitz-Benoit ’21 about his work at a literary scouting agency and getting his MFA in screenwriting.
Rachel Horowitz-Benoit: When were you an intern at NER and what was a highlight (or anything you remember doing) of your experience?
Thomas Kivney: I interned at NER over winter term 2013 and it was a wonderful experience that I’m so thankful to have had. The people there were all an incredible mix of hyper intelligent and super welcoming and I remember the office having this warm, almost magical atmosphere—full of old NER volumes, lots of comfortable places to read, and there always seemed to be snow outside. I really looked forward to going into work every day. I especially loved the Friday meetings where we got to discuss some pieces that had been submitted to the journal and give our input. It was an informative peek into the editorial workings of the journal that taught me a lot about how to articulate and defend my opinions about what makes a story work.
RHB: What was one skill you developed as an undergraduate, either in school or any internships, that most benefits you today in your professional work?
TK: Middlebury and NER really taught me how to think critically about narrative while also opening my eyes to a wider world of stories out there. I like to think that I’m a more adventurous and more reflective reader and storyteller because of my time at Midd.
Thomas Kivney at Middlebury, where he double majored in English and film
RHB: Where are you now, geographically and professionally, and what were some of the steps in between?
TK: I’m in Los Angeles getting my MFA in Screenwriting at the American Film Institute Conservatory. Before that I spent six years in New York working in publishing. I started off at Macmillan in the audiobook department, which was just a fantastic crash course in the industry as a whole because it meant working with tons of people across multiple imprints and genres—literary, thriller, romance, sci-fi, YA, you name it. For anyone looking to get their start in publishing I can’t recommend audiobooks enough. From there, I transitioned over to a literary scouting agency for four years, which is where I started becoming more involved in film. It was a rewarding experience that meant getting to work closely alongside Warner Bros and Netflix, advising them on the acquisition of books for adaptation to TV and film.
RHB: What is the focus of your Master’s, and why did you decide to pursue this field?
TK: I’m getting my Master’s in Screenwriting. I’m just a massive movie nerd through and through.
RHB: What do you read for pleasure? Have you read anything good lately?
TK: Working at a scouting agency meant reading two or three books a week for work, and much of this past year has been about slowly rediscovering the love of reading for its own sake. I recently really enjoyed Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which was a great little puzzlebox of a book. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Jason Lutes’s epic but very entertaining three-part graphic novel Berlin was a behemoth I happily devoured while stuck inside this summer. And a little less recent—but the best thing I’ve read in years—remains Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. They’re just fantastic and the HBO adaptation is really good too.
RHB: Thanks for your time, Thomas, and the best of luck with your degree!
NER Interns: Where are they now?
Alison Lewis
Former NER intern and current literary agent Alison Lewis ’14 talks to intern Rachel Horowitz-Benoit ’21 about her career, Middlebury, and new books she’s excited about.
Rachel Horowitz-Benoit: When were you an intern at NER and what was a highlight (or anything you remember doing) of your experience?
Alison Lewis: The highlight was always discussing fiction submissions—trying out my own very nascent editorial opinions, and hearing Carolyn Kuebler’s shockingly wise and perceptive insights. There were two stories we read from the general submissions pile during my time at NER that ended up getting published, and I remember the awe of feeling each of those stories open up for me as Carolyn talked about them.
Also an unexpectedly memorable highlight: during that time NER moved offices, and I got to help then Editor Stephen Donadio pack up his mountains of books. There was an unbelievable number of them, filling deep shelves and stacked up on every flat surface. That was awe-inducing too, just touching all those books.
RHB: What was one skill you developed as an undergraduate, either in school or any internships, that most benefits you today in your professional work?
AL: Learning how to form and organize an argument. It came to me very slowly and painstakingly, over many late nights in the library (and the library cafe after the library would close for the night!), writing and rewriting essays for class. Also through working with first-year students on their essays as a writing tutor. I’m so grateful for all that. Now it feels very possible to help an author move the pieces of something they’ve written around until they make sense, to cut what feels vague or distracting, to clarify what they’re trying to say, and then (thrillingly!) watch the whole come into view.
Alison Lewis (in the middle) and friends during her time at Middlebury, where she majored in English and American Literature.
RHB: How did you come to your current job as a literary agent? What is your day-to-day like at the Zoe Pagnamenta Agency?
AL: I’ve been working in book publishing since graduating from Midd, first as an intern and then an assistant at the publisher W.W. Norton, then as an assistant at ZPA, and working my way up to agenting on my own, through sheer persistence! My day-to-day now is a mix of very “business-y” work—e-mails and contracts and negotiations—and long phone conversations with authors about their ideas and careers, lots of reading and editing, and talking with editors about books.
RHB: How much time do you find to read for pleasure outside of the reading necessary for your work? Have you read anything good lately?
AL: I try to always be reading for pleasure, however slowly, around all the work reading. It makes life feel worthwhile! And it also is always opening up new (or new to me) ways in which books can work on readers—structurally or line by line or in their vantage point on the subject or whatever. That fills me with hope and possibility too. I’m in the middle of Sanam Maher’s recent account of modern Pakistan, inflected through the honor killing of the social media star Qandeel Baloch, which is intimately reported on the ground, in the aftermath—it’s called A Woman Like Her. I also can’t stop talking about the Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower’s In Certain Circles, a completely delightful short novel about two nearly devastating marriages, and about the software engineer and brilliant essayist Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code, on the 1990s and early 2000s in Silicon Valley. She saw it all coming, and warned us!
RHB: Is there a current or past project you are particularly excited about?
I’m really excited about the journalist Julia Cooke’s narrative history Come Fly the World, which published this March, and follows the lives of several Jet Age Pan Am stewardesses (as they then called themselves), who took the job for a chance to “see the world” and perhaps have a career of some consequence—a rare opportunity for women at the time—and ended up actively involved in history on the global stage, as airlines inserted themselves into international conflicts, most significantly the Vietnam War, and as stewardess unions fought for rights and dignity ahead of second-wave feminism and in concert with the Civil Rights movement.
And then coming out in August is the scholar Tina Campt’s A Black Gaze, examining the work of a remarkable emerging cohort of Black artists (Arthur Jafa, Deana Lawson, Khalil Joseph, Dawoud Bey, Okwui Okpakwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson) who are actively dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see, and see Blackness in particular, anew. It’s such a powerful and important work of theory—I think it really gives us tools to reckon with this nation’s present and historic assault on Black lives—but also Tina is such a sensitive, poetic (and often very funny!) writer and observer of art, that it’s just a pure pleasure to spend time with her words.
RHB: Thank you for your time, Alison, and best of luck at your agency!
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