by Amie Whittemore
Amie Whittemore: Your collection, The Spinning Place, won the 2018 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. In addition to its lyrical dexterity, which is balanced by narrative texture, as the poems explore birth, marriage, pain, and loss鈥攎ore on these later鈥擨 feel like many of these poems master the art of statement. Statement can be such a powerful tool in poetry, but one that can be hard to pull off. Yet, your collection shines with statements that feel earned, that feel like they rewarded the writer as much as they do the reader . For instance, in the opening poem, 鈥淭he Spinning Place (I),鈥� I love 鈥淧erhaps there is no word / that is not longing.鈥� And later, in 鈥淪olstice,鈥� 鈥淪ome stories are too true to finish.鈥� Can you talk about how you arrive at statement in your poems鈥攄o they serve as leads or are they discoveries that occur through your writing process?聽
Chelsea Wagenaar: They鈥檙e absolutely discoveries. It鈥檚 not until now that I鈥檝e thought of them as 鈥渟tatements,鈥� as you put it, but I can see that as a helpful way of thinking about how those kinds of lines and moments do different rhetorical work than description鈥攖he tone of a short, declarative statement like the ones you mention is, to me, stark and emotionally vulnerable.
In graduate school I studied with B.H. Fairchild, and once, in an offhand reference to his own writing process, he told me that sometimes at the top of the page he writes, 鈥淧ete, what the hell are you trying to say?鈥� The completely unpretentious quality of that confession has stayed with me. Sometimes in a poem I鈥檒l find myself wandering and circling, and Pete鈥檚 question comes back to me. Usually a moment like 鈥淪ome stories are too true to finish鈥� from 鈥淪olstice,鈥濃�攐r in 鈥淟ines Approaching a Birthday,鈥� the lines 鈥淔or a long time I believed the right words / could make a thing beautiful鈥濃�攊s an answer to that question.聽
AW: I love how the use of statement is a means for you to answer questions that haunt your process; I also admire how your collection explores the limits of language. For instance, the first section, with its emphasis on birth and death, on the blurry divisions between these binaries as well as those of ascent/descent, of naming and namelessness, seems situated in and curious about liminality鈥攖he way experience is understood through language, yet often leaves us speechless. I鈥檓 thinking particularly about 鈥淧relude to Circulatory System鈥� and 鈥淒escent (Sort of an Annunciation),鈥� in which the speaker asks herself, 鈥淭he first work is to speak. / Why, then, when I saw you / in your shadowclouds / on the screen, webbed and froglike, your one heart a nucleus / of trembling鈥攚hy could I not?鈥� Can you describe your experience drafting poems that so often inhabit these (often) speechless moments of experience?聽
CW: I wish I鈥檇 thought of that expression鈥斺�渢he way experience is understood through language and yet often leaves us speechless.鈥� If I had to choose a subtitle for the book, that would be a top candidate! Yes鈥攊f experience is understood through language, but often leaves us speechless, isn鈥檛 that a way of saying there鈥檚 just so much we don鈥檛 understand? That鈥檚 the primary energy at work when I put pen to paper鈥攖here is something I don鈥檛 understand. Sometimes it鈥檚 something I鈥檓 deeply moved by; other times I鈥檓 troubled. My poems are not so much a way of trying to stamp out Not-Understanding and replace it with Understanding as they are just trying to make a home of Not-Understanding. So I think that space鈥攄welling in a lack of understanding鈥攊s a liminal one.
In a home, I鈥檝e come to believe, some of the most meaningful exchanges between people happen in silence, or sound that isn鈥檛 language (for instance, a baby crying, a child babbling, music). I鈥檓 thinking here of the poems 鈥淎 Story鈥� and 鈥淒uet,鈥� for instance. 鈥淎 Story鈥� is like an ethnography of a particular moment in a home. It鈥檚 full of sound (鈥渢he baby has learned /to blow raspberries with her lips鈥�), but no one says a word. In 鈥淒uet,鈥� there鈥檚 the implied noise of the yellow jackets, then the wordless, affectionate work of the speaker to extract the stinger from her beloved鈥檚 ear, all while their daughter plinks the keys of the piano. So much great drama unfolds in the near absence of language, and I think my impulse to write about these moments is not so much to understand them as it is to just pause them, stretch them out like an accordion, and look for a little longer.聽
AW: The collection is also imbued with allusions to Christian mythology. I鈥檓 particularly curious about your choice to have an erasure poem, 鈥淒elivery Room (Sacrament Under Erasure),鈥� based on Matthew 26:23-29, as both the first section鈥檚 last poem as well as the poem in which a child is born鈥攖he child awaited and longed for throughout this first section. Why did you select an erasure?
CW: I suppose the idea of erasure in the last poem brings me back to what鈥檚 鈥渦nsayable鈥� in the opening poem. A poem of erasure both says and unsays; it speaks and silences.
So perhaps in that way, it inhabits the liminal spaces of the collection, too. When I gave birth to my daughter, I had a hard time thinking and talking about the experience without drawing on tired, cultural abstractions鈥攎eeting my daughter was 鈥渋mpossible to describe鈥� and 鈥渁mazing,鈥� while the post-partum phase was also extremely alienating and confusing, a common experience for which we have less language. Women give birth to children every day, all over the world, and they have forever鈥攊t鈥檚 about the most mundane, unoriginal thing a person can do, in that sense. But to each individual woman, it鈥檚 a shattering, fundamentally life-altering experience that can also feel transcendent鈥攁nd both can be unspeakable. That question鈥攈ow do I speak about this?鈥攅nergizes the whole collection.
鈥淒elivery Room (Sacrament Under Erasure)鈥� uses ancient language, a sacred text, to speak of an ageless experience. I felt a little transgressive writing the poem, but that made me feel even more that the poem needed to be written. I confess I certainly think of that poem as a younger sibling of Mary Szybist鈥檚 fantastic 鈥�.鈥� Both erasures鈥攈ers and mine鈥攔evise a biblical gospel in a way that privileges an otherwise unheard female voice. As a mother, it鈥檚 easy to feel 鈥渆rased鈥� by my children, so I hope the poem captures that darker sentiment, setting up the next section鈥檚 themes of psychological and physical exile. Birth unites and exiles mother and child: in order to be together, they have to split from each other in a visceral, violent way.聽
AW: As you note, the second section of the collection focuses on 鈥渢hemes of psychological and physical exile:鈥� exile from place (as we see in the opening poem of the section, 鈥淓xile (The Spellbound Horses)鈥� and 鈥淏atrachomancy鈥�) as well as exiles from connection, from language (as in 鈥淎pology鈥� or 鈥淟ithomancy鈥�), even life itself (as in 鈥淢iscarriage鈥�). How did this through line of 鈥渆xile鈥� emerge in this section?聽
CW: The trajectory of the whole collection emerged, little by little, from the epigraph. As I understand Dylan Thomas鈥檚 poem鈥攕pecifically in the lines that serve as my book鈥檚 epigraph鈥斺�渢he first, spinning place鈥� refers to the newly created Earth. He conjures a picture of a brief, shining simplicity, in which everyone鈥攈orses, too鈥攊s stunned with the newness and astonishment of being. But the idyll quickly devolves into complexity and disorder, which in The Spinning Place, I cast as the idea of exile. I do think that many of our tragedies and wounds can trace their origin to one kind of exile or another, loosely speaking, of course. In the book, this disconnection, or severing, happens first in birth, and repeats throughout our lives in many kinds of literal and figurative ways.聽
AW: Despite, or alongside these concepts of exile, section II still contains a sense of connectivity, of sloughing binaries that continues and complicates the themes of section I. I鈥檓 thinking of 鈥淎 Story,鈥� where the woman in the poem lives with a man, 鈥渉is silence / a language in which the woman is fluent,鈥� pointing to the currents of communication that slip beneath words, such currents being, as you鈥檝e already noted, at the heart of home life. These poems also turn slightly away from the mother-child relationship toward the complications of marriage. At one point the speaker in 鈥淓xile with Fox鈥� muses, 鈥渢hat one great love is a thing / to be feared because it makes of all others / a kind of exile.鈥� I鈥檓 not convinced the speaker believes that though鈥攐r at least she has her own thoughts on it. I鈥檇 love to hear more about the great loves that flourish in this collection. How do you keep tenderness at the center of your poems?
CW: I鈥檓 actually so happy to hear that you read tenderness and love in the poems, that you see a sense of connectivity. Jack Gilbert has been deeply influential to me in modeling poems that risk tenderness over and over. I think often of his lines, 鈥淲e must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of this world.鈥� Often I鈥檓 trying to write about exile and disconnection, but not in a way that鈥檚 completely bleak. I suppose I do think of the second section as poems of exile, but full of people who are not willing to resign themselves to that exile. In 鈥淎 Story,鈥� as you point out, the woman is fluent in the man鈥檚 silence, which I hope suggests the difficulty of living with and understanding another, but also the tenderness implied in the fact that she learns to 鈥渟peak鈥� his silence. She鈥檚 fluent in it: that鈥檚 active鈥攕he鈥檚 not oppressed by it. 鈥淎pology鈥� is also a poem of silence, two people on the cusp of speaking, but not. The speaker meditates on their quiet as both 鈥渢he threatened wasp striking鈥� and 鈥測our mother easing // your tender finger into a spoon of milk.鈥� It鈥檚 both stinging and healing.聽
AW: I鈥檓 curious about the two divination poems in the collection, as well as about the influence Christianity/spirituality in general has on your work. How did you come to the divination poems? How does your spirituality infuse your writing (assuming it does)?聽聽
CW: The divination poems were part of a longer series鈥攖here were others, but ultimately I cut them because I felt they didn鈥檛 fit the collection as well, or just weren鈥檛 as good. So that left me with these two odd little poems that don鈥檛 fit with the otherwise Judeo-Christian framework of the book鈥檚 spirituality, but I decided to keep them鈥攑erhaps foolishly!鈥攂ecause they fit in other ways, and because I didn鈥檛 want the book鈥檚 spirituality to feel too neat. I wrote the book, of course, but I鈥檓 not the speaker of every poem! I felt the divination poems allowed another epistemology into the collection. Most Christians don鈥檛 believe anyone but God can know the future, but in reality, I think many of us wonder if鈥攁nd perhaps even believe鈥攐ur lives can be interpreted as a text that foretells its ending. It鈥檚 alluring, if not totally convincing.
It took me years to be able to explicitly engage my faith in my own work, and even so, it鈥檚 rarely that explicit (as in 鈥淣ight Shift,鈥� the speaker assuming an eventual resurrection of the body). I think what ultimately helped me most was studying the way other poets have done so: Christian Wiman, Mary Szybist, and Lisa Russ Spaar are all contemporary writers enshrined in my sacred canon. Tom Andrews, too. Franz Wright. Charles Wright. Poets who see doubt and questioning as a meaningful expression of faith in its own way. For a long time, I thought of Christianity as a series of answers, and I didn鈥檛 really know how to bring 鈥渁nswers鈥� to a poem, because as we all know, that makes for bad, boring, or didactic poems. But increasingly I think of it as a way of asking questions in the world, and I鈥檓 more attuned to its mystery rather than the tendency of some believers to oversimplify. My favorite moment in the liturgy each Sunday comes after the priest has consecrated the host, quoting from passages about the Last Supper, all of it exact and clear and straightforward enough, but then he says: 鈥淭herefore we proclaim the mystery of faith.鈥� I love that鈥攖he mystery. To quote B.H. Fairchild again, he often said in our workshop, 鈥淚t鈥檚 easy to sound mysterious about things that are actually clear. It鈥檚 much harder to be clear about mystery.鈥� That鈥檚 what I鈥檓 after.聽
AW: You鈥檝e mentioned that you鈥檙e not, the 鈥渟peaker of every poem,鈥� and, not to further conflate the speaker and the author too much, but your students get a shout-out in 鈥淚n Praise of the Names of Things:鈥� 鈥淲hen I told my students monosyllabic words / force us to slow down, they did not / believe me.鈥澛� Many poets double as teachers, so I鈥檓 curious: how does teaching inform/complicate your writing practice?聽
CW: I think teaching informs my process in the same way parenting and marriage and faith do: it鈥檚 a huge part of my day to day, taking up lots of brain space, so naturally it ends up in poems. But unlike some poets, most of what I teach is actually not creative writing, so the path between my teaching and writing is not quite so linear. But whether I鈥檓 teaching an interdisciplinary Great Books seminar or Narrative Medicine, or an actual creative writing course, I think of everything I teach as a kind of laboratory of language. Words are on the other end of the microscopic lens, so to speak, and since they鈥檙e my material for poems...naturally teaching sharpens my sensitivity to them.聽
AW: All three sections, and the title of the book, are borrowed from Dylan Thomas鈥檚 鈥淔ern Hill,鈥� an excerpt of which is also the epigraph, as you鈥檝e noted. And, while you鈥檝e already discussed a bit how this poem served you in titling the collection, I鈥檇 love to hear more: was it with you from the start or was it something that came along and shed a light on your intentions for the collection?聽
CW: I had a fledgling handful of poems, the seed of the book, though I had no idea what it was going to become. I was working on my dissertation, and I needed to be shaping and writing a full-length manuscript of poems for that, so I was bringing a more intentional shaping process to the collection than I did to my first. My first book fits into the category of many first books鈥攊t functions as a 鈥済reatest hits鈥� of everything I鈥檇 written so far, and I cut things that didn鈥檛 seem to fit with the others, but most of the poems were not written consciously toward the idea of that book. (And please don鈥檛 get me wrong, I actually love that quirk about first books.) But The Spinning Place was a more focused process. Nonetheless, the way the epigraph/title/Thomas connection happened, was the way many good things happen, which is completely serendipitously. I happened to be rereading some of his work one day, enjoying the musicality of 鈥淔ern Hill,鈥� and when I read that stanza, it just popped into my head to use 鈥淭he Spinning Place鈥� as a title. I liked that in the context of 鈥淔ern Hill鈥�, it referred to a place of origin鈥擨 knew origin was going to be important to the collection鈥攂ut that it also could read as a kenning, potentially describing more than one thing. The idea to write multiple title poems was there from the start鈥擨 actually had two more, so a total of five poems sharing that title鈥攂ut after a while decided to cut it to three.聽
AW: I recently read Rebecca Solnit鈥檚 The Faraway Nearby, and in it she writes:
It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.
She then goes on to talk about the 鈥渟pinning鈥� done by various female figures in myth and story: Scheherazade spinning her tales to save her life; Penelope unweaving by night to prevent an unwanted marriage; the fates spinning, measuring, and cutting our lives. In all of these, 鈥渂y spinning, weaving, and unraveling, these women master time itself, and though master is a masculine word, this mastery is feminine.鈥� How does Solnit鈥檚 exploration of 鈥渟pinning鈥� align (if at all) with your own thinking of your collection, which is not only titled The Spinning Place, but features three poems by that title, as you noted, physically enacting a thread that, though cyclical, is also linear.聽
CW: That鈥檚 such a beautiful passage from Solnit鈥檚 book. It aligns so well with my thinking of The Spinning Place. (In fact, one of the other title poems that didn鈥檛 make it into the final book was a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, in which the miller鈥檚 daughter must spin gold from straw.) These examples of spinning Solnit offers鈥攕pinning as narrative, as fate, as tapestry鈥攁ll suggest that our lives can be represented as cohesive, a meaningful whole made up of many smaller parts. But the bottom line, to me, is that this 鈥渟pinning,鈥� whatever it looks like, resists chaos. Resists disorder. One of the ways we resist chaos and disorder is through repetition鈥攂y its very definition, repetition defies random chance. So this picture of the spinning of time, of narrative, as cyclical, seems essential鈥攂ecause it鈥檚 repetition. This reminds me of a passage in Robert Hass鈥檚 essay 鈥淥ne Body: Some Notes on Form,鈥� which reads, 鈥淭he first fact of the world is that it repeats itself鈥�.Though predictable is an ugly little word in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things.鈥澛�
And in these many iterations, the spinning places of my book and the examples Solnit offers, I see spinning as fundamentally creative. In The Spinning Place, the new life of the child is spun from the mother鈥檚 body, yes, but there鈥檚 also so much attention to language as a creative act throughout. The opening poem meditates on what we don鈥檛 have words for; much of the third section is full of speech acts, or their lack, or a hybrid version (thinking of 鈥淰ia Negativa鈥�). I think I鈥檓 just obsessed with the idea of language as a boundary that keeps us and defines us, but also blinds us to everything just beyond its edge.聽聽
聽is the author of the poetry collection聽Glass Harvest聽(Autumn House Press). Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in聽The Gettysburg Review,听Nashville Review,听Smartish Pace,听Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.