SHANNAN

Usually, we publish between 3-10 poems by a single poet in every issue. With you, however, things are delightfully unique in that while we are just publishing a single poem, it can pretty much be classified as a short collection in and of itself. And I do not say this because of the length. Yes, this is a long poem. Yes, the reader will need to enter it, and stay there, weave through it with you, the barbed and the sweet, and yes it’s a gorgeous maze. Yet beyond that, this poem, for me, resembles a whole living breathing thing. I feel spellbound even as I begin to read it. You don’t beat around the bush. You surge through with “I wanted lightning…” I love that “lightning” also conjured “lightening”, which – for those who might not be familiar with the term – is when the uterus drops and the baby’s head meets the pelvis, ready to engage and rush forth into this world. And that throughout the piece, light is a motif, something to both be feared and loved, something to be wanted. As we explore this poem, I’d love to invite you to seed the field of our collective understanding here. What must the reader know before entering this piece? And, universally, what must any reader know before approaching a specific poem or a poet? I use the word “know” rather romantically here perhaps, but certainly not logically or dogmatically. You write in the middle of that first paragraph “...let’s be clear, be touched;  interred as they’ve remained, and the lightning when it finally came  splintering the sand, cutting its path…” What would you say composes the voice here, the poet, the poem, the field of knowledge active within this piece at large?

CAREY

Thank you so much, Shannan. I’m so grateful for your insights and generosity toward this poem. From its inception, I felt as if I had hardly any control over what was going to happen with this sequence; the poem really forced its way into existence as you’re seeing it. With regards to your thoughts about birth/lightening, yes, the process of creating this poem was kind of analogous to labor in that the child always arrives when and as they’re ready, regardless of how or whatever we may have imagined in our minds. The plan is what happens, not what we think will happen. 

AAAAAs the poem made its way into the sequence form, the process happened naturally. The strikes of lightning that cut through each section juxtapose with the incisive and surgical lines of the alternating pieces. It was necessary for the parts of the sequence to speak to each other not just through the imagery but through the form as well, through the way in which the forms in the sequence vacillated and pushed up against each other. A palpable tension of moving back and forth between like but dissimilar structures, a toggling between, and an existing in inbetweenness is what I hope this captures. 

AAAAIn terms of what to know before reading this poem, I’d say there’s some specific language when it comes to infertility and in vitro fertilization (IVF), so having a basic understanding of what that clinical process entails could be helpful for readers who aren’t familiar. I think the process of fulguration gets covered through the course of the poem, and through its vessel, we pick up more indirectly on the machinations of IVF procedurally and emotionally. 

AAAAIn any sequence I’d say, you have to just kind of let yourself, as a reader, fall into it and move with the current of the poem, trusting you’ll be taken either to dry land or open water if we think of the poem as a river. Either way you’re being transported, and that’s what a poem’s ultimate responsibility is to do.

AAAAIn that line about being touched, there’s desire and sorrow. There’s isolation, vulnerability and the mask concealing these. It’s a point in the poem where all three: the poet, the poem, and the poem’s field of knowledge mush together, and perhaps at that point, the poem is a reflection of source and voice simultaneously. I hope the voice will tonally deliver the feeling of inevitability. When any poem hits that feeling, for me, it’s as if the poem is at its highest power and influence over us as readers. It will have its way. Of course, from the poet’s perspective, there’s quasi-anthropomorphizing at work (sorry to our late, great Maxine Kumin), or perhaps it’s more that the speaker of the poem recognizes something of themself in the trees, the circumstance of them. The doubleness of their lives. There's solidarity. There’s familiarity even as there’s strangeness. There’s the act of knowing, the act of intellect, and the persistence of mystery and shadow self. 

SHANNAN

I am obsessed with the lines. They linger in odd places and keep pulling me to them like strange spatial magnets. And then the second section here opens. We feel dropped into it, thanks to the lines. The “embryo freezing” is brought up directly now, from the more mysterious imagery of “spun sugar” and “enormous subterranean trunks frozen hundreds of feet into the damp grains” above. There is something very Camus-like to the line “as much is known about as much as we can know it”. There is melancholy here as well, almost a kind of dejection but not quite. Because the language is so alive. I wonder, what is the poet’s role in communicating emotion? Are we to prize language above emotion or ought we to first serve the true emotion of the story we are telling? You are doing both here in such a fascinating way so I think you’d give me a very expert answer. I do feel again that “lightning” is anchoring this second section as well, adding both jolts of urgency alongside a kind of bright hope. And then the two lines again. I feel captured, enraptured. I settle myself into the second page. 

CAREY

Hah, yes, magnets. Before I answer the question in all seriousness, I just have to say first that I made a friend in Namibia some years ago whose father in law is obsessed with magnets. He keeps them on his toilet among other random places, and so my friend calls him “Magnet” instead of his real name or “Dad” or whatever, which always makes me laugh when I think of magnets now.

AAAABut to the question about communicating emotion, I think the bulk of this poem’s emotion is rooted in and communicated by the poem’s form. The “lightning” lines are meant to cut the horizontal lines of poetry. I want them to feel as if they attract and repel each other, that the lines are charged ionically to some degree, that perhaps they feel crackling, live, testy, hazardous. This energy is definitely important to the poem, and it’s also important to the way meaning is made within it, the fissures occurring as they do, as nature would influence them to–meaningful yet frustratingly random–is meant to suggest the lack of control over how and when these fissures occur, the meanings that are made because of that activity over which we have no control. And the emotions that come out of it: resignation, melancholy, confusion, disbelief. 

AAAAThere’s inevitability and the act of having to surrender to it, to take what meaning is given to you and move forward with what you’ve received even if it’s not what you thought or hoped you’d get. And the lightning can definitely be an anchor, as you noted, but it’s an unlikely anchor, an unpredictable one, a frightening and dangerous one, so then we ask what it means to be tethered to something unpredictable, to rely upon it, to place our heart in the hands of terror. 

AAAAAnd then, of course, there’s the scalpel’s precision portrayed in the alternating counterparts (or partnerships?) to these sections in the sequence. The line makes such clear delineations even as those breaks do the same kind of work as the lightning lines, creating a conversation between these formal acts which appear visually very different from one another but have a lot of emotional overlap. It’s a straight line, a cleaner line, but its product is still unpredictable, the cut still creates a certain level of chaos and disharmony in its indiscriminate, controlled behavior.

AAAAWhen it comes to language and emotion and what is more important, I don’t think we need or want to prize one over another ever with poetry. We always want to stay true to the course of the poem, which is, I also think, hardest. Sometimes, I think poems come through more emotionally-forward and sometimes they come through more via the language and/or the narrative, the storytelling. The trick is to allow the poem to unveil itself and then to see what the poem is asking of you after it's been drafted. To honor that process. After the poem is out on the page, we can see where to go next. Do we need more emotional clarity, for instance, or is the poem clear in its emotions but not in its actions? There’s precision to both but it’s a different kind of seeing work. I think all poems require more heavily, one or the other, from us after they’re drafted. 

SHANNAN

The third section opens almost like a weather report. I love this. It makes me laugh even to think of it. Not at the content. But rather at the guts of the poet – you! The way you are dissecting, refracting, and piecing the voice together is rather phenomenal. And I have a hunch (I’d love for you to correct me) – is there a desire to replicate the child here, the baby…the fetus…time? And also motherhood? Motherhood lurks like a ghost behind all these lines. There is trepidation and yet also hope, also love, gentleness. I notice a line like “to see if you truly feel like living (and do you?)” can easily be read as provocative, even vehement, but couched between the softness of the voice manifested through active imagery (“to polish smooth between your thumbs and palms” and “skin like oil, like ink…”), there is only sadness, kindness. I’d love for you to touch on any of what I’ve inquired into and pondered upon here. 

CAREY

Thank you, Shannan; you’re such a sharp reader. I appreciate your insights about the tonal shifts and voices and the ways in which they work to signal and direct the reader as they move through the sections. There should be points where we can laugh in times of sorrow, if only to capture and validate for ourselves the absurdity of living and of our human circumstances.

AAAAI felt, as I was writing the poem, that the shifts would help introduce new dynamics and sustain the poem’s overall momentum. They certainly helped me as I was approaching the material, conversing with myself, conversing with the poem, coming at the poem from its various angles and trying to see it as more of a circular object while it persisted in its linear form. 

AAAAThe matter-of-factness of the tone, I think, also does connect with the cooler and more straightforward communication style of a clinical environment or, perhaps, of a naturalist recording their observations. Then, yes, there are the more provocative intrusions into this which unsettle the landscape and shift the planes so they become, I hope, more textural in their physical and emotional manifestations. I wanted to, I think, demonstrate the overlap of persistence, fickleness, muddiness of emotion, the way we can try our best to think something into the world, but how that internal work could also just amount, in the end, to nothing. Does that make us feel alive? Like living?

AAAAThere’s so much activity transpiring constantly in our internal landscapes (at least there is in mine!), in our own silences and dreams, in the way in which we see an object or desire and turn it over in our heads until it’s rough from being smoothed, even while outwardly it appears as if nothing changes. The tension between the physical and metaphysical is what I’m trying to work with in order to express the grief and loneliness of that emotional work, what we’re all doing (to some degree or another at some time or another) completely on our own.

SHANNAN

Another recurring element is “soil”, land, earth. And I’m thinking of the title now — “The Fulguration”. There is light there – the spark of burning away – as well as earth – the body that is burned is dirt, dust, earth. So, fire and earth collide, are enemies it appears. And you also incorporate other elements. You have “thunderstorm”, “ice crystals”, “icicles”. Then you have man-made “precious metal” and “the edge of the roof of the winter house.” Human and sublime intersect, form, diffuse, and suffuse. Do these elements take a while to appear or be augured in your poetry? Or are they what the poetry springs from? Which is, perhaps, to say – how do you write — from image to story, or story to image?

CAREY

This poem definitely arrived through imagery. Its roots are in the visual, what I saw in my mind’s eye, I guess we could say, and was compelled to put on the page. It all happened swiftly, as I think more lyrically driven work does for me. In the end, when I look at the entirety of the sequence, there is an element of story present, but I didn’t set out for it to be that way at all, and I think that’s actually what helped me finally write a poem about the process of grief surrounding infertility and going through IVF. 

AAAAPerhaps my prior approaches were always too direct to feel successful or meaningful to me–or that they would be meaningful to anyone else besides me. The way I think about what I endured, though, doesn’t actually feel factual or linear, it feels more like…well, feeling. It’s like, there are the facts of IVF, the procedures and the charts, the reports, the surgeries, the outcomes, etc., but what I really wanted to express about it was the depth of grief, loneliness, and disbelief that many who go through it feel. 

AAAAThere’s a giving up on the power of the body or maybe a feeling that the body has given up on us that happens. There’s a feeling of being broken. The mind detaches from the body, and we view the body as something foreign to the self. During the many cycles of IVF, there’s optimism followed by a deep sense of failure and despair. There’s a constant amassing of desires. And this is all pushed together in a really messy way. 

AAAAWith regards to fulguration, that is the process that came first to the poem. Then, IVF followed. It was like there needed to be an invitation, a systemic, procedural counterpart to reside alongside IVF in order for the subject matter to surface organically and honestly. The concrete nature of IVF and fulguration subject matter created the structure required for the emotional landscape to surface and move fluidly throughout the poem.

SHANNAN

Tell me more about the “we” here. The collective voice can be really hard to write and what you do here is create a symphonic polyphony of the collective, the subjective, and the deeply personal. Also, I have not been able to get the phrase “solid glamour” out of my head. What is it, I keep thinking. And then sometimes, I know what it is! Oftentimes, poetry can be confounding for those who do not usually read it. It can feel inaccessible. Perhaps, you might say a long poem is especially inaccessible. Yet I feel the opposite might be true. With the “we”, the length, the phrases that pull us in with their intuitive, interpretative meanings – there is so much joy here to be found amongst the language, that it can indeed inspire the befuddled to simply experience, to – dare say – enjoy poetry. Do you feel that you can do in poetry what you cannot do in other forms of writing? 

CAREY

The collective is important to this poem. I want the poem to transcend the speaker’s experience and allow for readers to feel invited into these feelings as well, to explore them and see what resonates with them. Even if we all haven’t been through the same things, specifically, it doesn’t mean we can’t connect emotionally about our experiences. And this assertion is especially true with regards to the elements of the poem that have to do with deep longing and loneliness – the isolation of it. I think that’s something that everyone has felt at one time or another for one reason or another.

AAAAThe “solid glamour” to me is initially speaking about loving to be seduced, to be tricked, to be sweet-talked into giving yourself over. There’s something about how easy it is, how effortless. Like, here, take all the blood in my body. I’ll give it to you willingly. Yet, it’s a slippery thing as well. It poses questions about will, trust, and hope. “Glamour” also feels ridiculous in the context of the poem’s subject. It’s such a sexy word, and there’s nothing sexy (and really no sex involved) in IVF at all. It’s all the organs without the orgasms, so to speak, no seduction, so in that way, there’s a level of absurdity I hope to capture by making this double-entendre gesture in the poem. 

AAAAAnd, too, there’s a way in which one’s relationship with sex and with their partner changes when infertility enters the picture. When there’s no longer the necessity of sex to create life and also when the joy of sex is diminished by the failure of the act to generate the full scope of its potential or desired results. The two become tangled: the act of sex and the status of infertility, creating an intellectual disharmony, too much thinking about what sex can’t or didn’t do, etc., which, perhaps, is another type of glamour.

AAAAAnd definitely, poetry has the capability to express ideas and feelings that we cannot otherwise articulate adequately through any other medium. There’s a comfort that poetry has with the gray areas of living which really lends itself to being endlessly flexible, endlessly capable. I think that can make poetry seem, at first, inaccessible, this way it has about itself that resists “true” meaning, but at the same time makes true meaning. I think this paradigm and resistance are what makes poetry so accessible, that there doesn’t have to be one specific outcome, one thing we take away from it but many. It’s difficult, as students or readers, to find comfort with that. We want concrete answers. We prefer knowing to not knowing, and not knowing can conjure negative emotions, frustrations, a feeling of unrest or being unsettled. It’s hard to want to approach material that invites such things, invites complexity, encourages such things from us, and that is comfortable existing within those spaces, that makes endless space for those spaces. It’s really remarkable, actually. God, poetry is so amazing. The infinity of it is profound.

SHANNAN

I am also feeling like your poem folds in a cyclical energy. There is so much light in the opening, and then there are “shadows…laid down during the rainstorm”. Time is stretched, torn apart, taped up, and reshaped in this piece. Please walk us through your process of navigating time in poetry, especially in this poem. I’d also love to know whether you wrote this poem in one sitting or several. What was/is the experience like, either way?

CAREY

In this poem, time moves fluidly between the lines, sentences, and stanzas. In the poems I’m working on for my next collection, which this sequence is a part of, the element of time plays a role in interpretation with regards, mostly, to the book’s emotional landscape. There’s intentional inconsistency. Past and present reside together, and sometimes the past takes the present tense and vice versa. I hope that these manipulations evoke a sense of interminability,  alongside the perpetual motion of time there’s the endlessness of emotion and its complications, its contradictions, its way of distorting not only memory but the present moment, which is memory as soon as it happens–future memory.

AAAAAnd emotions don’t really abide by time, though we seem to love to put a timestamp on them. We run the clock on emotions like grief, for instance, to which we’ve assigned specific stages for even, but the truth is the experience of emotions is persistently singular. And at the same time, secondarily, it’s universal. I think a lot of the reasoning for that has to do directly with the relationship between emotion and time and the length of time we spend feeling our feelings, or the time it takes to identify them, process, understand them. How much time do we spend denying our feelings as well, etc.? 

AAAASo, I suppose I’d say that in the poem, time is a function of emotion, a way of trying to pin down its nebulousness by attaching to its calculable entity which also serves, provocatively, as its principle point of chaos.

AAAAI drafted the majority of this poem in one sitting. You intuitively picked up on this! I wonder if it’s because of the poem’s momentum, the compound-complex syntax can make it feel breathless. The experience of drafting it was intense, and I was fortunate at the time to be secluded at a lake house in the dunes on the coast of Lake Michigan, which was the perfect environment for this poem. The house had these floor to ceiling windows that overlooked the lake from where it was perched on the dune. I drew immense inspiration from the surrounding landscape, and the memories of being entrenched in it in my youth. It was profound to reside with the elements as they were all around me as the poem came together. 

AAAAI also thought a lot about my departed friend Jane Mead, who once said that her writing process involved lying down in stillness until her poems arrived to her in some way, until she heard or felt them. What a deep way of conjuring that is, what trust and peace of process that is. I love thinking about poems descending down on her and she receiving them open heartedly. Or the sky whispering poems into her ears. If the sky did that for anyone, it would definitely have been Jane! I’m sharing this, because I felt great kinship and connection to her process when I was writing this poem. It seemed to be a download straight from the universe more than me setting out to write anything specific. It was like it appeared and kept appearing and appearing. My job was just to relax into it and let the words continue onto the page without activating my editing brain or trying to cut them off.

SHANNAN

AAAAIn the second last section you pose the question “what does that say about the enduring power of lightning? Of us?” This feels like a call for connection and forgiveness. Which, again, I ponder that with a pointed short sentence punctuated with a question mark like that – anywhere else it could well be seen as accusatory, inflamed. With this piece, however, I feel that such questions act like recurring compasses for the voice you are developing. They keep setting both the speaker and the reader back in motion, back to the poem, to the story “when we fail to keep our shit together…” I love that. I love how a poet can guide the reader through a poem more uniquely than in any other form. It’s subtle, and at the same time blatantly obvious. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the reader-writer relationship. Does the poet have an accountability to the writer? To provide them a certain kind of experience? Or are writers best left to their solitary obsessions? Or perhaps the truth is somewhere grayer, softer, in the middle? 

CAREY

Yes, like actually how durable are we? How durable are we expected to be? How durable do we expect others to be, and how do our assumptions about ourselves and others erode us, erode our relationship with each other? It absolutely calls for connection, for forgiveness, for patience and for recalibration. The hard wars we fight against each other because we’ve always fought them even though they’ve gone absolutely nowhere, no progress–what are we doing? I think a lot about this, having the same arguments over and over, for instance. Or, having the same friendships and relationships over and over, the same outcomes, the same lessons, the same ways of thinking about ourselves and others. Pride and tradition are so ingrained in us, and when I say tradition I mean the traditions we create and exact by ourselves for ourselves, our private traditions, which I think are different from habits and rituals. They are largely some of our greatest secrets and our greatest destroyers, and I wonder in this poem if – our traditions being so ingrained in our identities: who we are and consider ourselves to be (even ourselves in the eyes of someone else) – there’s a looming question as to whether we can ever let them go? 

AAAAAs a poet, I think absolutely, there’s accountability to the reader as a writer. We can obsess, yes, but we can also let people in, be vulnerable. We have to be vulnerable. Otherwise what is the point? Who wants to read something that’s not trying to connect with them? The poem, any poem, exists as a form of communication, and there’s responsibility inherent in that relationship on a very basic level. 

AAAAWhile I can’t really say I think about the reader as I’m writing (I’m too shy for that, really), I do think about them a lot during the process of editing. And especially with a long poem such as this, a poet needs to be sensitive to a reader’s capacity and needs. Long poems have to be purposeful. They need to sustain themselves, and they need to be trustworthy in order for the reader to continue to move through the poem. No one wants to read something and get nothing out of it. No one wants to write a poem that no one gets anything out of. There must be reciprocity. I think that’s where comments like “murder your darlings” come from. It’s like, you have to give things up for your reader. You can be selfish when it’s just the poem and you, but if you want to take things further, you have to allow space for the reader in the poem as well. Otherwise, what is the point?

AAAAWith regards to truth, every truthful answer is always in the gray for me. I have a hard time with absolutes. As fastidious as I am, I also maintain little patience for labels, narrow-mindedness, and strict judgments. The act of judgment seems more about us than about what we’re judging anyway, doesn’t it? It seems so ego driven, all about what we think. Reality is more elusive. Every answer is more than one answer, containing a multitude of answers within itself, every one of them soft and resident in a middle that can’t ever be accurately measured. The distance to either end of a space can always be parsed further and further to some smaller and smaller degree. And then, there’s what exists beyond that space as well. That’s the truth, the act of answering, of conversing is the act of poetry. All of it is delightfully slippery. I could, and do, spend way too much time thinking about it.

SHANNAN

Additionally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would also love to know poets who have influenced you most (preferably 3-5 but totally okay if there’s more). 

CAREY

Who I’m reading obsessively right now is Carl Phillips. I started carrying Reconnaissance around with me wherever I travel (and also just buying copies to give to people I adore) along with Then the War, his new & selected. When I was studying for my MFA, I remember falling in love with The Rest of Love, how he addressed loss, disbelief, grief. At the time I was writing poems for my first book, Shelter, which was largely about the experiences of kennel workers in kill shelters. Now, I’ve come back even more intensely to his work and found resonance in his ways of speaking from within the very gray of our human complexities. I gravitate to the poems that converse within the liminal, not necessarily taking stock of what is on either side of it, not the product or result of the argument but the argument itself. I find comfort in how the poems are able to reside in the unsettled and illuminate what is for what it is without it needing to be one way or the other. The clarity is so satisfying.

AAAAAnd then there’s this strange karmic relationship I’ve developed with Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard, whose long lines I confess, sheepishly, that I flippantly decided I didn’t care much for upon reading it years ago only to have their form/purpose surface and plague me in my new work. At least, it feels like plague sometimes. I guess it’s also blessing. It makes me laugh thinking about it; how I whined to my teacher, Michael Waters, at the time, telling him how frustrated I was by the excessiveness and overabundance of the work in that collection. Too much, I objected. His response was that Kelly’s formal choices served to elongate and sustain her language and metaphors. He’s so right. And so lately, over and over, I replay this conversation when I’m editing my poems, which are, to some degree, doing the same–karma delivering.

AAAAAnd of course there’s Jean Valentine whose work, let’s just say it like it is, is godlike. Adrian Matejka, whose ear is so keenly tuned, and who seems able to weave the intricate structures of music into his work effortlessly as if he’s a sleeping magician. Anne Marie Macari, whose poems are utterly soulful, piercing, and radiant. They move deep within your body and take root there. Or, it’s as if they were already rooted there, planted within you when you were just an egg. If you’ve never read her book Gloryland, what are you doing with your life? I’ve been reading Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and her command of blank verse is entirely profound as well. And, too, I find the trash-talking in The Iliad to be extremely, extremely delightful – Paris and his little arrow hitting Diomedes in the foot, and Diomedes just dressing him the fuck down. Lol, I just can’t. It’s too good.

AAAAI also read a lot of fiction, and that influences my work. I deeply admire the writing of novelist Hanya Yanagihara, whose prose is stunning. Her work is straight poetry. The lyrical prose and stylistic singularities of the work of Cormac McCarthy, Paul Lynch, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Deepti Kapoor (Age of Vice) are also highly influential.