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Behind the Byline

Kim Addonizio

February 17, 2023

Photo by Elizabeth Sanderson

Poet Sarah Wolfson talks with NER 43.4 author Kim Addonizio about intuiting endings, conjuring and consulting with major literary figures, and her poem “Existential Elegy.”


Sarah Wolfson: Who first found their way into this poem: Sartre or the cat?

Kim Addonizio: Great question. Actually, I think Paris came first. 

SW: In all seriousness, I’m curious about this poem’s origin story. Could you tell me how “Existential Elegy” came to be and a bit about the process of writing it?

KA: One kind of writing prompt I’ve given my students is to take a quote by some artist or thinker and respond to it. I’m not sure why I was thinking about Paris in the first place, but that led me to de Beauvoir and Sartre and I started reading a bunch of their quotes online. So I had those two elements early on. As for the cat, I would have liked to write about him exclusively but I knew better than to put most of what I wrote into the poem.  

SW: The poem feels breezy in its movement but meticulous in its construction. The couplets are practically free-standing, thanks to some well-considered enjambment. How and when do you know a poem has found its form? How did you know when this one had? 

KA: I do generally feel that click that Yeats talks about, like the lid of a box closing, when the piece is finished. But it can take a long time to close the box, and often I think I hear a click when I’ve just shoved the box shut out of anxiety and the desire to be done. At the same time, I hate being done, because then I’m not in that space of composition, which is the best place to be—the space where some energy is there in the language and I’m inside of it, working my way out. When I get really stuck, I know I’m nearing the ending. And the ending is always so hard to find. When the process works, to change the metaphor slightly, it’s like those drawers that close with magnets—you finally get close enough and then—whoosh, click. 

SW: As its title suggests, “Existential Elegy” is concerned with meaning and loss. The poem imagines de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s key ideas as literary thought bubbles delivered through perhapsing (“Maybe de Beauvoir,” “probably thinks Sartre”). The poem then juxtaposes these ideas with the speaker’s very concrete, at times mundane existence. In your recent book Now We’re Getting Somewhere, you also engage the ideas of major literary figures, including Whitman, Sontag, Neruda, and Keats. What draws you to invite these voices into your poetry?  

KA: Ideas as literary thought bubbles—I love that. As for literary figures, I think of them as fellow travelers. I have my own personal, idiosyncratic relationship with those minds and hearts, as I imagine everyone does.

SW: For me, the heart of the poem occurs when the speaker says, “Everyone I loved was still alive.” It’s a searing moment that joins the general elegiac rumination of the poem’s first half to a singular, intimate story. The line takes me inevitably to the pandemic, to aging. Would you say that a sense of mortality is on the rise in your work more generally?

KA: Hard to say. I’ve been writing about death since my first book. But then, everyone writes about death. It definitely becomes less of an abstract concept as you get older and think, wow, I don’t have all this time anymore. Death of other people, okay, hard enough—and more frequent as you age; one’s own death, though, how to wrap your head around that? (Which makes me ask, what does Keats say? Or Hopkins, or Dickinson or Whitman, or the ancient Greeks? And then I pull them into the discussion.)

SW: I read somewhere that you believe ideas themselves are an overlooked aspect of your poetry, with readers and critics focusing more on its grittier aspects, as if ideas and grit must be held at opposite ends of a taut line. To me, this poem—and many of the poems in your recent book Now We’re Getting Somewhere—are all about ideas. Do you think this misperception of your work is changing? Do you think your work is changing in the way it handles ideas?

KA: One thing I know about other people’s perceptions is that you don’t have any control over them. I care less these days about what anyone thinks about my poems, because I’m confident that I’m writing what I need to write, the way I need to write it. Or really, I should qualify that: I care about readers who can see what I’ve put there. It’s idiotic to have some reductive, binary idea of what can coexist. As for the handling of ideas, I’ve just recently noticed how philosophical my poems are getting. I seem to be thinking and writing about things like time and quantum theory and Buddhism from the perspective of someone who knows very little. I’m just trying to get my head around ideas and beliefs that interest me, so the poems are part of thinking my way through.

SW: What are you working on now? Is “Existential Elegy” part of a larger sequence or collection that’s in development?

KA: Yeah, it is. I’ve got another poem called “Existential Voyage,” and those other pieces about time, etc. I think the next book’s going to be called Exit Opera. Though the title I’m still wistfully thinking of is Journey to the End of American Horror Story Season 1.

SW: Great titles, both of them. I look forward to reading it. Thanks so much for your time.

KA: Did you know the Greeks have three different words for three different kinds of time? I love that. If only we knew what time actually was. But you’re very welcome.


Sarah Wolfson, a former staff reader 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.

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Kim Addonizio, Sarah Wolfson

Behind the Byline

Thomas Dai

August 2, 2021

NER staff reader Sarah Wolfson talks to Thomas Dai about his essay “Driving Days” and all the “different people, books, images, etc. getting in and out of the car at different points of the essay.”

SW: “Driving Days” centers on a road trip you took to follow Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly-collecting routes across America. Yet the essay is so much more than a literary travelogue. In it, you explore the self and contemporary America by considering migration, queerness, belonging, Asian-American identities, and the idea of lens more generally: who is looking at whom and how. It’s an ambitious and multifaceted piece. When you began your road trip, did you have a sense of just how much this essay would encompass?

TD: When I began the trip, I wanted to keep the essay rather minimal and focused: I was going to write about Nabokov, all these American places he’d gone to hunt butterflies, and I was going to do it while also driving around to those places. That was five years ago, and each time I’ve pulled the essay back out to revise, that same basic story—Nabokov, me, the butterflies, driving—would feel a bit foggier, and the other stuff started seeping in, as if to replace what my memories and notes alone couldn’t supply. I wound up with this mishmash of stuff, some of which feels organically related to what I was doing that summer, some of which feels a bit more forced, but I guess I liked the idea of all these different people, books, images, etc. getting in and out of the car at different points of the essay. I actively dislike driving, which doesn’t translate well to writing about a road trip, and so getting to bring along all this “baggage” made a really boring and at times harrowing activity much more interesting for me.

SW: What surprised you most about the writing of this essay? 

TD: Honestly, that I spent as little time as I did writing about cars, car culture, or the literal road. Luckily, Nabokov always seemed more concerned with the roadside than the road—he never drove but was a frequent passenger—so I let that be my license to take the same stance, even if, in my case, the physical act of driving was obviously still very much part of the experience. 

SW: This piece looks like a travelogue but moves like an essay. In the span of one paragraph you hop from Tori Amos to white aspen trees to Lolita. Later you move poignantly from Nabokov’s “Continental” method of killing butterflies for collection to a memorial for Matthew Shepard. Themes emerge and are refined as new vignettes appear. How did you think about structure when writing this piece? Was it something that you mapped or that emerged organically?

TD: With this essay, I actually tried my best not to fight the simple, linear structure that defines pretty much every road trip I’ve ever been on. You start somewhere. You end up somewhere else. What you see and consider along the way is the essay. Because all the road names I take as section headings refer to actual roads which I drove on in exactly that order, this essay definitely has a map underlying it, and I depended on that map to keep me situated while I made all these essayistic tangents on Nabokov, Tseng Kwong-Chi, Grindr escapades, lepidoptery, and everything else.

SW: You write with nuance about Nabokov’s antihero Humbert Humbert. You manage to find in him “clues about how most of us, good or evil, seem to live our lives.” How difficult was it to incorporate a character like Humbert into the piece?

TD: Humbert’s one of those characters (and Nabokov one of those writers) who’s obviously garnered a lot of attention from scholars and other writers. That can be intimidating, especially if you feel like you need to say something “new” or specific to your moment. This essay definitely doesn’t have anything new to say about Humbert or the literary ethics of Lolita, which doesn’t mean I’m not interested in that whole discourse (recent, great essays on Lolita by Ian Frazier and Susan Choi come to mind), but there’s also no getting around the fact that my own Nabokovian journeying really began with another text, Speak, Memory, and another character: Nabokov-as-child, swinging his butterfly net. I think this essay reflects that bias.

SW: You say you don’t want to “pin [yourself], insect-like to the coattails of just one story.” To me, that reflects a central purpose of essays: a rejection of easy certainty in favor of complicating, opening, connecting. What attracts you most to the essay form?

TD: Pretty much what you just said: the desire to complicate narratives, especially the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves, but also that instinct’s opposite, which I think of as a move towards clarity that never quite clarifies. Essays search for the heart of things but tie themselves in knots to get there—if they get there, and usually they don’t.

SW: You’re currently working on a PhD in American Studies. This essay takes a creative lens to the study of America. How does your academic work inform your creative essays or vice versa?

TD: Oh boy, that’s definitely a question I’m still figuring out for myself. All I can say for now is that there’s first and foremost a practical connection between my academic work and my writing. Academia provides me the time and resources I need to write, even as it also exerts demands that take that time away, or rather redirects that time elsewhere. More specifically, I couldn’t have taken off on this trip if I hadn’t gotten a small grant from a center at the University of Arizona where I did my MFA. I also would’ve dragged my feet on writing the essay longer than I did if I hadn’t taken a course on space and literature at Brown, where I’m doing my doctorate, that had rather lax rules about what made an “academic” term paper. I’m sure there’s also a more conceptual connection between my training in American Studies and how I write about America, but that connection can be hard for me to describe, even to myself, without caricaturing what “academia” and “creativity” are and can be.

SW: “Driving Days” is part of a larger set of essays that you describe as “mapping the self.” Could you tell me more about that project? 

TD: The collection I’m working on straddles two interrelated genres: travel-writing and place-writing. Both are genres that can be rather sentimental, which I admittedly enjoy (every first draft I write verges on the florid), but which I also have learned to be wary of, because there’s so much at stake when we represent or claim an affinity for a place. Boiled down to their cores, the essays in this project are all about the relations we forge with different places, whether fleeting or long-term, and how those relations are in a constant state of flux. The essays are maps in a way, but mutable ones, at once fallible and incomplete.

SW: You’re about to set off on more travels. Where are you headed and what do you hope to find?

TD: Speaking of sentimental journeys, I’m traveling to East Tennessee, to what I guess would be my version of Nabokov’s Vyra. I haven’t lived in the South in quite some time, and so there’s definitely some writerly motive hanging about in my peripherals, but it’s early stages yet, and I’m mostly just glad to be headed home. 

SW: Thanks so much for speaking with me about this wonderful essay.


Sarah Wolfson, a staff reader 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. 

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Behind the Byline, Sarah Wolfson, Thomas Dai

Behind the Byline

Marianne Boruch

April 29, 2021

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. 

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes, Poetry Tagged With: Behind the Byline, Bower-bird, Lyrebird, Marianne Boruch, Sarah Wolfson


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