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Behind the Byline

Rose McLarney

May 16, 2019

Rose McLarney (Nicole McConville Photography)

Luke Brekke, who serves on our Editorial Panel for poetry, shares a conversation with Rose McLarney about the musicality in her poem “Nutmeg and Mace,” featured in NER 40.1, and about her forthcoming collection Forage.

Luke Brekke: The music in the first two lines of your poem immediately grabbed my attention. “Spices were currency once. / Rent paid in peppercorns.” The poem goes on to grapple with a layered emotional terrain, yet sonic texture and music play a role throughout. Can you speak a bit about the role sound plays for you as a poet?

Rose McLarney: Sound often drives the formation of my poems. As I write, I may move between words by following sounds rather than reason, choosing, for instance, what word will come after another because of alliteration. I’d like to say it works like a hungry bat’s echolocation, the brain sending out a call for what it does not contain and listening until the signal bounces back, off a piece of language that will lead the way to a poem’s next phrase. But the yield isn’t so practical as prey. Instead, orienting by sound makes it possible to write a poem instead of the argument or straightforward observation the idea or images I started out with might otherwise have been. Musicality is what frees me from my overbearing practicality, to compose with pleasure and beauty as priorities.

I am drawn to internal rhyme, slant rhyme, consonance, alliteration, and refrains, and I listen for lines that feel too long or fall short according to each poem’s own aesthetics, though I rarely write in traditional forms. There is, of course, the risk of overdoing repeated sounds. And, so, when I am asking myself which repetitions are desirable and which are not, I suppose I trust a sort of natural sensibility. Everyone likes to hear waves crashing in and pulling out and crashing again, but not electronics beeping over and over. Maybe that’s because the former has a call and response quality and the latter is more incessant. In any case, I want the reader of my poem to wish for the sounds, like a cat’s purr, after each pause in it, to recur, not to react to them like the sounds of either a human snoring, or tapping her fingers with excess energy. I listen to drafts of poems for the perhaps inexplicable but somehow right qualities.

As for “Nutmeg and Mace,” sixty-some drafts ago, the second sentence was “In the middle ages, / you might pay your rent in peppercorns.” The phrasing is inelegant, but it’s surprisingly close (for me, a drastic reviser) to the final version. I am sure I cut the sentence down to the fragment “Rent paid in peppercorns” to highlight the consonance. In so doing, I made the short, sure-sounding lines from which the dynamic of the rest of the poem followed: the stating of known facts offset by a questioning voice that remains—and wavers—with its doubts.

LB: Can you share a little bit about how “Nutmeg and Mace” came about? The poem does such a graceful job of articulating the tensions between having a sensual appetite for the world and an understanding that our relationship to that world is finite. I’m curious how the subject of the spice trade came to be in the same poem with these other, more personal elements.

RM: My kitchen cupboard is so full of spices that there is barely room for the more substantial foods they’re to be applied to, and, after I cook, the plates and much more—fingers, tongues—are, as the poem says, ambered with curries or other seasonings. Around the time I wrote “Nutmeg and Mace,” I was also accruing quite a collection of information about spices by reading about the plants they come from, uses and trade, many angles. I wanted to use this information and understood that I needed a personal element or additional level to give the subject emotional interest for others, and myself authority to write about it. I love spices and so I overdo them because I can always acquire more, but, of course, we cannot replace so many other loves. When this thought, though not special in itself, occurred to me, the poem began to build around it.

Wanting to “use” material can be a questionable (if common) impulse for a writer.  And I have often been frustrated that it seems poems cannot be about just one thing and that thing in itself, such as an animal that does not get made into a metaphor for some human condition. So “Nutmeg and Mace” critiques the inclination to make one subject bear the weight of another, particularly in the line, “Two spices, one tree: an analogy.” (The rhyme of this line intentionally verges on annoying.) At the same time, this poem can’t resist the appeal of finding likenesses either, and continues its couplings as it tries to reach understandings, and the speaker tries to feel less lonely in this life.

Also, for all my affection for foreign flavors and new information found through research, as I thought about spices, one of my strongest associations was the less than gourmet cinnamon toast my mother did make for me as a child—slices of store-brand bread that came out of the oven boiling up bubbles of cinnamon, brown sugar, and margarine, thanks to her generous application.

LB: Your next book, Forage, will be coming out later this year. I’m always eager to hear how a poet views a new collection in relation to the work they’ve done in the past. Can you say a little bit about this collection? Do the poems feel like an extension or deepening of work you’ve been exploring for a while, or more like a departure? Something else perhaps?

RM: I’ve been describing Forage as comprised of intricately sequenced poems on themes including animals’ symbolic roles in art and as indicators of ecological change and how water can represent a large, troubled system or the exceptions of smaller, purer tributaries. At the confluence of these poems is a social commentary that goes beyond lamenting environmental degradation and disaster to record—and augment—the beauty of the world in which we live. Forage, like my previous work, does deal with history, place, and the environment. But it’s less about the particular home environment in which I grew up—in the southern Appalachian  mountains—and losing it (by leaving to find work and to cultural change), and functions more broadly as ecopoetry. It also reckons more fully with Southern heritage. In my life insulated in the coves of the mountain South, before moving to Alabama where I live now, the land of cotton and its exploitation, I was not aware enough of what it means be “Southern.”

Forage is the book that I am proudest of so far, and the one I have invested the most effort and thought in. This is not to say the others weren’t carefully wrought, but Forage is my most intellectual undertaking. In addition, Forage’s five sequences of eight poems each, which I intend to provide openings and closings as well as connections and counterpoints across the collection, required the most meticulous organizing, writing, reconceiving, and rewriting in relation to each other I’ve ever done. I’ve always given a great deal of attention to the arc poems in a book make when taken together, and I hope the poems in Forage speak to each other—and the reader—in an even more thought-provoking manner.

I should note that “Nutmeg and Mace” will actually be in my fourth collection of poetry, someday. I’m trying to write that collection as slowly as possible and distracting myself with side projects such as collaborations with visual artists, lyric essays, and editing until Forage has time to do what it will in the world. Right now, I suspect that the fourth collection will connect to, or react to, Forage’s poems that consider extinctions and the end of the Anthropocene with more personal poems that resist the idea of the elegy. I am writing poems like “Nutmeg and Mace” that are tributes to my mother that I want to try to articulate before she has passed beyond where she can hear them.

LB: Were there poets who were particularly helpful to you during the writing of Forage? Poets whose work you came back to as guideposts, perhaps, or others who pushed you into new directions? And who are you reading now? 

RM: Ellen Bryant Voigt’s language, with its balance of elegance and economy, is a long-standing guidepost and, in her latest book, Headwaters, with its strikingly different style, she provides an inspiring model of ongoing innovation. I read Marianne Boruch when I feel my voice is getting stodgy and poems are getting stuck in restrictive conventions (that I invent and have imposed on myself). I read Larry Levis when I feel my writing is neither leaping far nor pulling in enough, or Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems are great for tuning the ear to music.

While writing Forage, I kept in mind the poems of Vievee Francis and Jennifer Chang as exemplars of how to write about landscape and the South. I read Jennifer Grotz’s books when writing about “issues” was causing me to lose control of the tone of the poem and sight of the grace I strive for.

At the moment, the books in the stack on my desk relate to ekphrasis. I’ve got Elizabeth Bishop, Rita Dove, Sylvia Plath, Rick Barot, Mark Doty, Mary Syzbist, Derrick Austin, Chelsea Rathburn, and Richard Siken to learn from, to name a few. Also, I have to say that I have volume 40.1 of NER on my desk, not because I am vain, but because, in addition to admiring the selection of poems, I want to revisit Molly Bashaw’s “All the Things We Once Thought Ordinary,” an essay that surpasses anything I’ve written in its expression of love for a mother and is transcendent in its lyricism.

♦

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, winner of the 2014 National Poetry Series, and Forage, forthcoming in 2019, both from Penguin Books, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books in 2012. A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, which she coedited, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. Rose is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and coeditor-in-chief of the Southern Humanities Review.

Luke Brekke’s first published poem appeared in the pages of New England Review, and other writings have since shown up in Poetry Northwest, Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. He’s a graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and has taught poetry in elementary, middle and high school classrooms. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife and two daughters. 

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, News & Notes Tagged With: Luke Brekke, Rose McLarney

Behind the Byline

Heather Christle

August 16, 2018

NER poet Heather Christle  (“In Order of Appearance,” NER 39.2) talks to fellow poet and NER editorial panel member Luke Brekke about counterpoint, composition, and managing tone—and how she cannot imagine where she’d be without the work of poetry.

 

Luke Brekke: “In Order of Appearance,” from its title to its final lines, seems to delight in associative energies. I know you’ve been working in a different form over the last several years—on a nonfiction piece about crying. Have you been writing poetry during that time, too? Does this kind of associative movement feel more at home in a poem than in your prose, or does it show up there, as well?

Heather Christle: I did not much write poetry at all for the five years I spent on the crying book, only recently returning to the form this February.

The associative energies—or urges—you mention have been very much at play in the crying book, but I have to keep a different kind of eye on them there, because as they extend over more and more pages they have a tendency to reproduce harmful associative patterns that have little to do with the imagination, and much to do with the hierarchies and systemic oppressions that want to arrange minds. In a poem, I find it easier to maintain the associative energy that—for me—disrupts predetermined movements. I have been so glad and grateful to re-enter that space, to find that it still wants me.

LB: One of the things that always keeps me engaged and charmed and surprised by your poems is the way they manage tone. At times a poem of yours may seem whimsical or playfully absurd, but then there will be a line that runs counter to that, a line that, to borrow a phrase from Marianne Moore, makes “a place for the genuine.” In this poem, some lines that do this kind of work are “I thought of the cowardice / of certain of myselves” or that moment when you refer to your hands as “those most constant of weapons.”

To what extent is developing this kind of counterpoint something you’re conscious of as you compose?  

HC: I do not know that it is precisely conscious in composition, at least in its initial moment. Or rather, that tonal shifting is my consciousness, is always there, and when I am able to access poem-making, the words use what they find in my consciousness to do their strange work. The title of this poem, “In Order of Appearance,” is, quite honestly, a description of how the poem was composed: this thinking, in this order, made to occur by language. And it is also my favorite way for movies to credit their performers, because it occupies a strange space between the arbitrariness of the alphabetical and the hierarchy of privileging stars. It’s just . . . linear time. How odd!

LB: Can you talk a little about your “interior peripheral vision”?

HC: I think of it as a space where much of a poem’s desire is located, one that tends to disappear when gazed at directly, which is why the poem spends so much time trying to look elsewhere, so that the desire can remain alive, present, and unobtainable.

LB: Two forces keep opposing each other in this poem—the “swimming mountain” and the speaker’s hate for various people. I kept thinking of Frost’s poem “The Mountain”—were you thinking of it here? It’s also a poem that is actively working to keep an illusion alive. The final stanzas of this poem seem to privilege the imagination as a kind of antidote to the poem’s hates, and they make me wonder where your latest poems are working in regard to that continuum.  

HC: I’ve read Frost’s, but did not have it in mind (that I know of) while writing this one. I suppose I should say I was not in that neighborhood of my mind. I was just in the space of wanting to preserve the imagined opposite to a swimming hole and letting the poem use whatever it needed to—whether actual or pretend—in order to not let that swimming mountain flicker out of existence. It had made me happy. I didn’t want it to go away.

The poems I’m writing now do a lot of wandering between worlds possible and otherwise. Or rather, my mind feels more these days like a place where many worlds overlap, where reality and the imagination are lovers, live in the same house, even wear each other’s clothes.

LB: Who are the poets you are reading these days? Who has you excited?

HC: I can’t stop thinking about Renee Gladman’s Calamities, which gave me the feeling of running—Wile E. Coyote-style—out past the edge of a cliff, only to realize that an invisible grid was still holding me aloft in the air and everything around me was sparkling with strange meaning. I am still carrying the feeling of the words around with me. They are like a gold net I can suddenly activate around my body and through which I can see the world. I love that book.

I also just read A. K. Blakemore for the first time and felt that good thrill of finding a new alertness. And I am loving Emily Berry’s long lines in Stranger, Baby. (They are tempting me into trying out some of my own.)

A couple months ago I heard Hanif Abdurraqib read, and while I loved the poems it was an essay he read—centering around Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”—that left me reeling. It was just so loving and graceful. And he read it surrounded by Columbus people, people he’d just returned home to, and the room was full of such warmth I felt lucky to be there.

I love poets. Thank goodness for poets. I know they—we—get things deeply wrong too, but I just can’t imagine where I’d be without this work. Thank you, poets!

Buy the issue today! Or better yet, SUBSCRIBE!

Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). She lives in a small village in Ohio.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, News & Notes Tagged With: Heather Christle, Luke Brekke

Behind the Byline | Luke Brekke

March 26, 2015

 

Luke Brekke
Luke Brekke


Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which we share conversations with current NER writers in all genres.

This month, NER poetry editor Rick Barot speaks with poet Luke Brekke,
author of “June” (NER 35.4).

 

 

RB: When I first read “June,” I thought of it as a pastoral poem with an elegy up its sleeve. How did the poem come about?

LB: Some years ago I had friends whose first child—after a full-term and otherwise healthy pregnancy—was stillborn. The burial took place in a little country cemetery, in summer, on an exceptionally beautiful day. The mother held her child during the ceremony and, when the time came, couldn’t bring herself to lay the child down. The first attempts at the poem tried to register that experience. As the poem moved further along, it also became a response to the loss of three young people, who I knew in varying degrees, who took their own lives.

 

RB: “June” has a lush descriptive quality, and it makes me wonder about the poets you’re reading and responding to. Who are the poets in your personal canon?

LB: This poem was written a while ago, so I don’t completely remember what I was reading and responding to around the time it was written. I do know that Keats, at some point, became a conscious model. He says in a letter that beauty “obliterates all consideration,” and sometimes I like to believe that’s true. I know, too, that I was reading a lot of John Ashbery’s early books around the time this was written, which may have something to do with its reticence and its willingness to go on for a while, though in other ways it probably belongs to a very different lineage than Ashbery’s.

As far as a personal canon goes, I’d add Stevens, Yeats, and Bishop. For the last year, I’ve been continually stunned and inspired by Paul Muldoon’s work, and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s last book, Headwaters, is another that I keep going back to.

 

RB: You’re a coffee roaster in your day job. Tell us about that. And where can people get the coffee?

LB: I’ve worked at Kickapoo Coffee Roasters for almost five years, and it still doesn’t feel much like a job, which has a lot to do with the people I work for and with. I don’t really roast too much, but spend more time packaging coffee and filling orders. A lot of the work I do is fairly physical, and it’s a pleasure to make a living with your body—to be up and moving around, to be sore at the end of a day. Physical fatigue is highly preferable to mental fatigue. The job also allows me plenty of time for daydreaming, which, for whatever reason, seems essential.

You can find our coffees online.

 

RB: “June” is your first published poem. What reactions have you gotten from your family and friends?

LB: They’ve all been sweethearts. My family has been especially encouraging. I stole my first copy of The Dharma Bums off my sister’s bookshelf when she was away at college, and then a year later took a copy of Yeats from my brother’s room. While neither theft went unnoticed, both went unpunished. So they’ve been involved from the beginning.

[read the poem]

♦♦♦

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: Luke Brekke

Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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