SHANNAN

Your poems make me happy, Andrea, even the sad ones. This feels like a simple and perhaps even insignificant thing to say but let me try to enter that a little bit. One might argue that poetry cannot really make us do or feel anything. That we are already prone to experiencing a certain kind of emotion at certain times in our lives and then we gravitate towards whatever nurses that emotion. Sad day, sad songs, and so on. And perhaps this is the beauty of reading (and editing) lit mags. You are presented with a compendium of voices and possibilities for transformation. Your poems, when Karan shared them with me, lay so delicately over the page, the white space surrounding them peacefully, and they were so inviting. As I read them, the overarching emotion was joy. Which, again, is not to say that you’re necessarily writing happy poems. Just taking a look at “Why”, there is a sense of haunting and turmoil that lingers in between those lines. The three year old who still “believes there are reasons.” At the same time, there is a recognition of chaos, a wiser observing voice, a realization that the three year old’s inquiries into all her mysteries is natural, even if in a cosmic way unanswerable. But the essential feeling I’m left with is joy. I wonder if that comes from brevity. I’m thinking of “a sea of buttercream” in “Bridal”, the speaker wanting “someone taking a bite of me”. Perhaps in a longer poem with more conventional narrative, the picture would reveal more contours of potential pain or even terror. But in the form the poems take thanks to your hand and skill, what most shines through is the same feeling we get with the sun in our face in the morning. Bright, warm, bliss. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the joy and delight of poetry.

ANDREA

Thank you for all those kind words. What do I think about the joy and delight of poetry? I feel lucky that I get to get up every morning and sit down at a table and think about poems. Or not think too much, and just see what happens when I begin. With a word, a phrase, an idea. Then it’s off to the races. Maybe the horse stumbles. Or wanders off to a field. Maybe the horse meets another horse and says: hey, let’s have a picnic, let’s talk about why we prefer anything to these races. The delight in writing is the not knowing where one is going and the discovery along the way. I was visiting a poetry class at Worcester State University last week, and a couple students asked: What’s the hardest thing about writing poems? And I said: Nothing. Digging ditches is hard. Working in a poultry plant is hard. Being the chicken headed to the poultry plant is hard. Getting to write poems? That’s a pleasure.

AAAARegarding your feeling joy in reading poems I might write, well, I’m glad to hear that, and I agree that each of us does have a certain lens, and maybe that also steers us toward certain writers/styles of writing.

AAAAAs to wonder, that does figure largely in how I see the world. Wandering/wondering—they’re close kin, no? And if wonder feels like it wanders around near joy or some ecstatic moment, well, we know that despair/cruelty/injustice is never far off, casually sharpening its knife.

KARAN

My reading of your poems is almost in direct opposition to Shannan. I find your poems devastating! Also, devastatingly brilliant! Though I also feel ecstatic when I read your poems, I find them akin to the flash of lightning that broke the tree outside my window in half and now I can never forget it. I remember so many of your poems because of how haunting they are. Not a day has gone by when I haven’t thought of “Strategically Speaking” since I read it:

They said we

were human

 

shields—

 

they who

were human

 

spears.

This rings true in so many contexts. I tried writing an analysis for this poem, but then deleted it. It’s one of those poems, the beauty of which is ruined when you try to explain it. It’s remarkable that so much is happening in just 11 words! I am interested in knowing what your writing process is like. Where do these poems come from? Do you write every day? Do you revise a lot?

ANDREA

Oh, to be like lightning, to be by it hit!

AAAAI do pretty much write every day. Which can look like discipline. But really, I’m just a creature of habit. As for the small poems, they generally arrive pretty fully formed. I might turn a word around in my head a while, like a stone in the hand, and then it presents itself in a certain way. Which is the poem. The revision for these can be minimal. It’s very different with longer poems. Someone asked me recently about a poem, “Springfield,” in my new book, The Sorrow Apartments. She wanted to know at what point I knew the ending would be the ending, so I went back to count how many drafts there were. And there were more than 65, which surprised me—though I knew, in all those drafts that the poem was still wanting to find its right shape.

KARAN

Though I’m obsessed with the darkness/sadness of your poems, I’m not oblivious to their humor. You have a specific brand of humor that is peppered across your oeuvre — sardonic, dark, witty, distant, and always you can scratch the surface to find sadness and truth. Look at “Contingency”, for instance: “In another / life, I’d / want this one.” God, I love it so much! Do you believe “brevity is the soul of the wit”?

ANDREA

In another life, really, I’d have been a stand-up comic—one that would bomb over and over, for sure. Because that’s a tough job. And because—and I think I am stealing this from something I was just reading—nothing beats funny.

AAAAAnd as for brevity and humor, yes, for the most part, I say: get in and get out as quickly as possible.  What’s the opposite of the shaggy dog story? Thehairless cat tale? Whatever we call it, it’s what Chekhov did, what Basho and Antonio Porchia did. I’d opt for that.

SHANNAN

Childhood and wonder are pervasive themes in these poems. And they do not announce themselves but are rather conspicuous by that very absence of obvious proclamation. For example, while a poem like “Spectacle” does not explicitly make clear the speaker(s) are children, the language and place point towards this. The title is intelligent and playful too. ‘Spectacle’ can refer to (especially in connection with the place conjured here, “the planetarium”) a magnificent display of power, or a theatrical show, something which distracts you from mundanity due to its sheer absurd larger than life but momentary presence. The word ‘spectacle(s)’, of course, also conjures glasses. A way of seeing when seeing is impaired or impossible. A way also of placing something between what is routine and natural in order to heighten or clarify that same thing. I notice how your poems love to employ such nuanced versatility and embedded metaphors. Is wonder a big concern for you when you’re writing? For some people writing is a way to look at the world the way a child sees it for the first time, full of curiosity and wonder. Does that resonate with you?

ANDREA

I’d say wonder does play a big part in my poems. Wondering on words and phrases takes me into ideas and into the past, which is its own grand or small or brittle or shape-shifting idea(l). And remembering or imagining how a child sees/seems/interprets/understands is a way of stripping away what can seem superfluous. To feeling. To understanding—which is different from knowledge, I think. When it comes to the human heart, I go back to Roethke: “We think by feeling. What is there to know?” The opposite of that is so tempting—to feel by knowing—tempting because it allows the safety of the intellect in lieu of the rawness of feeling.

AAAAAnd of course, that wonder has to live side-by-side, cheek-by-jowl, with the atrocities we are versed in and always, it seems, rehearsing and revising.

KARAN

There are so many everyday things in these poems (and all your poems) that I think work toward an image system that spells Andrea Cohen. How important is symbolism to you? Do you write like a language poet (I’m not even very sure what this means, but if one were to look at Rae Armantrout’s poems against yours, they might appear eerily similar but are very different in style and content)? Do you write with an intention of infinite possibilities of interpretation? How important is narrative to you? And is lyricism a real concern for you? (I apologize: when we interviewed Bob, he called me out on this: “I think your motto is why ask one question when you can ask multiple questions at once.”)

ANDREA

For the record, I love Bob Hicok. Also, I was going to say that I don’t think of myself as a language poet, and then I just read this: Language poetry tends to draw the reader’s attention to the uses of language in a poem that contribute to the creation of meaning. So, who knows? Maybe I am a language poet. Maybe most poets are language poets by the wide embrace of this definition. While I think that a lot of my poems might be called lyrics or lyrical, I also know that there is a narrative bent to many of them. If I were more of an academic, I might be better at defining myself, or more interested in that. But I just like to sit down and see what happens. And regarding the possibilities of interpretation, I think of one of Antonio Porchia’s gems: “I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.”

SHANNAN

Earlier I mentioned that your poems inspire a sense of happiness. I think, on par with this feeling, is also a sense of revolution. In “Directive” you write “how hollow it is to be followed.” While this can be placed in any context (war, history, etc) I feel drawn to see it in the context of social media. The “hollow”-ness of not this digital world disconnected from real life even as it has made itself indispensable to “real life”, and the hollow feeling of fleeting fulfillment that arises from gaining “followers” who don’t actually follow you anywhere but might even stagnate you (in thought, intellect, growth, because the artifice of being known and liked is not the same as actively engaging with other individuals in reality). Now, having said this, I also see that online communities can do a lot of good as well, can truly make people feel connected and can, of course, help with careers, friendship, education. I suppose this is a two-part question then. Is that hollowness something that can be escaped or avoided or is it something that we must accept as a part of the commodified world we live in today?

ANDREA

I’m not sure that hollowness can be escaped by most of us—or by those who’ve lived in any era. Sure, maybe it’s harder now, but hollowness could be contained or achieved or encountered via so many avenues.

AAAAAs for the interpretation of followers re: social media, all you say makes good sense. And was not what I was thinking about when writing the poem. I was thinking more of the sci-fi scenario, which of course is the scenario of any invader: take me to your leader. And generally, that scenario never ends well—unless for the invader.

SHANNAN

Reading “Contingency” hit me so hard. I keep reading it every few minutes as I’m thinking about these questions for you. I’m wondering how you decide in which way a poem will be framed? This one resembles a haiku, but do you see it that way? Many of the other poems are laid out in couplets that break at turning points of the narratives contained in the poems. For example, in “In the Dark”, the first couplet ends on an ominous note because it is taking us from a point in the past to the present and then inviting us to inquire into what happens next. The second couplet employs enjambment instead of the finality of the period to a delightful effect as it leads into the third couplet with the “We thought they could teach us / something—something”. These layered omissions invite the reader to fill in, to enter, to co-create (which is also why I love how much blank space you have on the page — I feel like I can make a home in the pages of your poems). Each ending to each couplet is like a diving board. Thinking of “Primer”, too. The opening line begins with a voice that seems didactic, realistic and then the couplet breaks into the second one with “in the ice age”, creating an unexpected break from that original realism and thus inciting surprise and wonder (even joy), until the next and final couplet rests with loss, solitude, while still feeling gentle, primal, soft. The couplets, then, seem to work like little spells, adding and taking away from whatever the reader might think of as expected or routine. Once again, I’d love for you to respond to anything I’ve touched on here.

ANDREA

I don’t begin a poem knowing what shape it will take. The poem shows me. And though many of the poems are small, I don’t think that I write any haiku. What I do think about a lot is the line. What it can do. Pretty much everything, it seems. And yes, that diving board feels like an apt metaphor. Or a cliff. The unexpected is what I am after—though it has to be an unexpected turn that provides an opening, and a certain kind of logic, albeit often an internal and sometimes strange one.  And I appreciate your saying that the poem’s omissions “invite the reader to fill in, to enter, to co-create.” Because really, as readers, isn’t that what we always do? In some ways the poem is a suitcase. We unpack it and find in it what we need—or find it lacking.

KARAN

I’ve been asking poets whose voice I love (and have spent a long time with) about the capital-V voice. Do you think about Voice? When I read “Primer”:

Everything I need

to know I learned

in the ice age—

how cold cold

is, how

lonely extinction.

What the fuck! How are you making me feel so much chaos in just 18 words, only 5 of which are longer than 4-letter words. It is insane. Is brevity part of your voice, or style? Is there a difference between voice and style? Would you think aloud about this?

ANDREA

I don’t think about my own voice, really, though of course I have one. We all do. Maybe it’s like hearing one’s speaking voice in a recording. If you haven’t heard that very often, it sort of stops you and you say, oh I guess that’s me, that’s how I sound to everybody else. But mostly we just talk and get on with it without stopping to listen to how it sounds to others. Maybe what I mean is that the voice is in my head, and I go where it tells me to go. And then whatever makes it to the page gets corralled or trimmed or guided in some way. But the seed is always a word or a phrase. And the voice, for me, comes from trusting the unconscious. From tending it. 

KARAN

Of late, we’ve also been asking seasoned poets for advice for young writers. You’re deeply loved as a poet and have published books that are well acclaimed — what are some things you’ve learned along the way that you’d like to share with young writers, by way of advice or caveats?

ANDREA

I suggest (implore) young poets to have fun. To not worry too much about one poem. To imagine that all our poems are in service of the next one. Or that we are in fact writing one poem. Of course we revise and try to get poems right. But young poets can feel this pressure to get to perfection. And that can stymy creativity. So much of good poetry, and the wondrous mystery of poetry, comes from the unconscious. So I ask young poets to let the poem lead them. To trust that. To trust themselves. And to edit later. And to remember what Wislawa Szymoborska said when asked why she had published so few poems: “I have a trash can in my home.”

AAAAMore advice: Don’t put too much store by acceptances and rejections. It’s a crapshoot—who gets noticed, who gets awards. The race may go to the swiftest, but the prizes can go to all sorts of talents or tastes of the moment. The poem I think is brilliant you may find mediocre. There’s so much subjectivity to all this. So I also advise young poets is to have both humility and hubris. And the good sense to know when each should be employed.

AAAAAnd above all, my counsel is to read. Because good poems really are our best teachers. For writing. For living.

KARAN

Thank you so much for this wonderful advice, Andrea. You’re brilliant! Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would also love to know poets and writers who have influenced you most.

ANDREA

Well, I think of myself as a student, as a scribbler, as a keeper-at-it. Not a master. Some of the first poets I read as a teenager and in my early twenties were Philip Levine, James Tate, Charles Simic, Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Antonio Machado, Lorca, Ashbery, Bill Knott, Merwin, Neruda, Frank O’Hara, Russell Edson, Tadeusz Różewicz, Yannis Ritsos, Keats. And poets such as Basho and Issa and Kay Ryan and Christian Wiman and so many others have guided and companioned me across the years. And then there are the new poems I just read today, including one by a student and another by the Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah. And I’m inspired by new books by Geoff Brock, Catherine Barnett, Spencer Reese, Tracy Fuad, and Michael Dumanis. I’m looking forward to Robert Pinsky’s new collection and Luke Allan’s chapbook with The Poetry Society of America. And I want a new book from Suzanne Buffam, please. And the problem with lists? They’re finite. There’s a whole lot of poems to love.