New England Review

NER Poetry Celebration

Video now available

If you missed our poetry celebration live on Zoom, you can now catch it here on Vimeo!

During this reading from the current issue of New England Review—Rick Barot’s last issue as poetry editor—we celebrated Rick’s seven years at the helm and welcomed new poetry editor Jennifer Chang, who read a poem from the forthcoming issue.

Featured in this reading are Philipe AbiYouness, Kaveh Akbar, Jennifer Grotz, Jenny Johnson, Dana Levin, Cate Marvin, Wayne Miller, Matthew Olzmann, Carl Phillips, Kevin Prufer, and Paul Tran. With thanks to Joe DeFelice from Middlebury’s media services.

Behind the Byline

Ada Limón

In conversation with Sabrina Islam, Ada Limón talks about her poem “Open Water” (NER 42.2), the genesis of her poems’ images, and how “what we pay attention to is how we show our love.”

Sabrina Islam: In “Open Water” you write: “It does no good to trick and weave and lose / the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper / into the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come, / my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent / in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you / moving through waves.” What is your process of navigating grief through poetry?

Ada Limón: I was just thinking of that recently. I don’t know if I have a process for navigating grief in my own work, instead it just comes when it comes. I often find myself sitting down to write and then my ghosts arrive. They are moving through me or they are with me always, and then when I allow myself to be tender to the world, to be open to the page, the ghosts come. It always feels like a gift to be able to receive them. To be able to open the door and say, “Oh I’ve been waiting for you!”

SI: Later in the poem we see, “That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish.” Kaveh Akbar once pointed out how in your poetry there is a preoccupation with animal life—sharks, fish, horses, birds. What role do animals and the natural world play in your thinking process?

AL: It’s true I’m obsessed with animals, but not just the nonhuman animal, but how we are animals too. A sense of interconnectedness on the planet is what encourages me to try to live each day with some sort of grace, some sort of enoughness. Animals are always reminding me that I am not the center of the story. That there is life all around me and that life will continue on without me. I am not the fulcrum or the arrow on the map. There’s a comfort in that. A spaciousness.

SI: “Open Water” ends, “But I keep thinking how something saw you, something / was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean / where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife, / but you in your original skin, right before you died, / you were beheld.” Elsewhere, in your poem “A Name,” we see Eve walking among animals, naming them, and the speaker wonders if Eve also wishes for the animals to speak back and name her. I am fascinated by the amount of openness and vulnerability necessary for the desire to be witnessed so closely. What does it mean to be seen?

AL: I feel increasingly fascinated about the idea that we often don’t think of the animal witnessing us, but rather we are always the seer. Humans are the ones with the albatross around our necks. We tell the story. We have the language-laden tongue and the opposable thumbs. But that still doesn’t mean we are at the center. In my work, and more so in the new book that I’m working on, I’m interested in what it is to not always be the one witnessing, but also what it feels like to be seen, to be witnessed by someone, something else. I’m intrigued by the idea that to be witnessed is as essential as to witness. I’m also intrigued with the idea that when an animal sees the human animal, it sees the animal us, the body, the skin, the movement, the threat, the safety, without all the chaos that’s steaming in our minds.

SI: In an interview with Diana Delgado for Guernica you talk about feeling things largely, “There is so much feeling that is moving through me almost all the time, and probably many people have this happening to them, but for me, I feel it. It can be a little intimidating and overwhelming sometimes, and the poem feels like a place where I can put all of that.” Your poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl” has an invincible quality, where the speaker feels things deeply and invites readers to see her “8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood.” I’d love to hear the inspiration behind that incredible poem.

AL: Thank you, thank you. That poem, like many of my poems, came out of a curiosity. A question. I wanted to know what it was that made me feel connected to the female horses. Why was it that I wanted to see them win? I started out with that question and let the interrogation lead me to the idea of having that heart inside me, that courageous and powerful heart. The poem was written when I didn’t feel courageous or powerful, but I was allowing myself to imagine what that might feel like to hold that enormous heart inside me, to believe in my own strength and power. Perhaps it’s a spell? I know I needed it.

SI: You’ve said Aretha Franklin has had a huge influence on your poetry. While searching for “the faint music under things,” how do you think about sound and composition? Do you have other favorite writers/artists/musicians who inspire sound in your poetry?

AL: I love Aretha Franklin. I grew up listening to her albums over and over again. (A fact my older brother can attest to.) I can’t actually listen to music while I write though. I am too much of a mimic. When I listen to music it’s with my whole body and my mouth. I sing and dance and it requires all of my attention. I can barely listen to music while I’m driving because it absorbs me so completely. A few of my favorite artists that I return to again and again are: Joan Armatrading, Sade, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, oh I could just go on and on.

SI: Joan Didion writes how certain images shimmer for her: “Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there.” In “Open Water” you recall your stepmother recount her swim, “That night, I heard more / about that fish and that eye than anything else. / I don’t know why it has come to me this morning. / Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.” How do you recognize if a certain image could become a poem?

AL: I love the way images come to us. The mind making paintings all the time. Recalling and recalling. I’m not sure which images are going to make poems when they come to me, but I can tell you that if something strikes me, moves me, changes my body, then I know it’s at least worth exploring in a poem. That morning, the morning of the poem, it really felt like she came to me, was swimming, and that it wasn’t about her final days, but about how she was witnessed in the wild. That was what mattered. I don’t know why, but that’s what the image told me, it was about the EYE, and I was so moved that by the time I was finished with the dishes, I was nearly weeping. That doesn’t mean that the image was going to make a good poem, but it does mean that it moved me enough to sit down and explore it fully.

SI: What obsessions you are entertaining now? What ideas are you exploring?

AL: Lately, my work has been leaning on the idea of ancestors, connections, how a life is not just singular, how a life is made up of our surroundings, our chosen families, our beloveds, our bloodlines, our stories, our possibilities. I’m interested in the mess, the unknowing, the mystery of our world. It’s interesting to try to write a poem that has no certainty or can breathe in the in-between spaces. I’m fascinated by what it means to be an artist that has no answers and how that can translate on the page.

SI: For fellow writers, how do you foster the tenacity to keep going?

AL: It is so hard to keep going, isn’t it? I laugh that I’m always telling friends that we should just give up, just lie down for a bit, just stop and surrender to the spin of the world. And then of course, I nap, and read, and then something in me wants to make poems again. I think of living, of making a living, that can require a bit of tenacity. We must have tenacity to live, to continue, to pay the rent, and get groceries, and grieve, and work through illness and pain, and continue on when all we really want to do is rest for awhile, is to have things be easy. Life is rough. But for me, writing is not about tenacity. I’m not saying it’s not work. I work at it, I edit for months, years sometimes, I throw away hundreds of drafts poems that just don’t seem to want to come to life yet, but at the core of me, making poems, writing poems is not hard. Writing poems is the good part, it’s the gift, it’s the part that doesn’t require tenacity. Poems come when I am not gritting my teeth; they come when I make myself available. So if there was one thing I could offer about how to keep going is to follow your joys when you can, follow the bright edges, let yourself be drawn to what you love and then make poems from that place. What we pay attention to is how we show our love. If it feels too hard to write, don’t write for awhile, take time off, take a nap, call a friend, work at something else, weep. Poems will come. Time will pass. If you love poetry and making poems, you’ll find a way to make them no matter what. They’ll be knocking on your chest to get out, and when you’re ready, when you’ve cried enough, and slept enough, you’ll open your mouth and those poems will come flying out.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Ada.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Matt Donovan

Writer’s Notebook—Poetry Where Nonfiction Fails

Photo of Matt Donovan

Not long ago, I flew to Chicago with a list of phone numbers, an interview itinerary with several social workers, ER doctors, and victims of gun violence, and a book project that was already unraveling, although I didn’t know that yet.

[Matt Donovan, photo by Brandan Sodor]

More than a year into writing a journalistic exploration of guns in America, I had an agent, deadlines, punchy chapter subtitles, and a two-sentence handwritten mantra pinned above my desk: Figure it out. Get to work.

Given the structure and premise of my planned book, “getting to work” often meant jetting off to different locations to ask a single pre-determined question about guns. A few weeks prior to arriving in Chicago, I’d traveled to Cody, Wyoming, to speak with teachers, parents, and the town’s sheriff about a new proposal to arm public school staff. Soon, I’d be spending the entire day with a ballistic detective in Cleveland. And my misguided agenda for Chicago? To ask about a trauma surgeon’s claim that we could change public opinion about guns by barraging the public, in the wake of a mass shooting, with graphic photographs that capture the way a bullet ravages the human body.

Given all the inherent problems with that question, I’m humbled by the patience, kindness, and generosity of the Chicago residents with whom I spoke. I’m particularly indebted to two people who ultimately revealed to me the myopic nature of my approach.

The day after I arrived in the city, artist Garland Martin Taylor offered me an extended tour of his studio. I tried to capture just one of his beautiful, multifaceted, ever-changing sculptures in “Here the Thing with Feathers Isn’t Hope,” and the ways in which Taylor’s artwork uses metaphor to interrogate firearms helped me understand that I needed to rework my planned nonfiction book into a collection of poems.

And then I met Pamela Bosley, co-founder of Purpose Over Pain, an organization that fights for gun law reform and offers support to parents who have lost their children to gun violence. In a conference room in Saint Sabina, a church on the city’s South Side, Bosley began our conversation by matter-of-factly describing the murder of her son. Her response to the tone-deaf question that I eventually asked is incorporated verbatim into my poem, “The Wrong Question More Than Once,” which I hope reflects my failure in that moment to understand the most fundamental truths about race and empathy in America.

After our discussion, Bosley led me outside to the sprawling memorial wall which commemorates hundreds of neighborhood residents. She pointed to a photo of her son—grinning in a white tuxedo and holding a cane—that was captioned “A Night of Elegance, Prom 2005.” I stood there on the sidewalk, looking at a picture of Terrell Bosley—whose nickname had been Mr. Music, who had been killed at the age of eighteen while unloading a drum set in the parking lot of a church—having just asked, a few minutes earlier, about whether photographs of the dead could enact grief and change.

Matt Donovan is the author of two collections of poetry—Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press 2017) and Vellum (Mariner 2007), as well as a book of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). A new collection of poems—The Dug-Up Gun Museum—will be published by BOA Editions in 2022. Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. 

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. 

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