KARAN

I love love love these poems, ethan! Your voice is so captivating and brilliant. These poems truly cast a spell on me. Really, thank you for these powerful and thought-provoking poems. I was immediately taken by how you blend the personal and political so magnificently, magically! Excuse my swooning. They also reminded me of Fran Lock, who will be one of our poets near the end of this year. I’d urge you to check out her work. Before we speak about the intersection of the political and personal, let’s begin with the process question. How do you begin, write, and finish a poem? Do you begin with a phrase or a line or an image or observation or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, why do you write poetry?

ethan

Thank you for this kind and incisive question! I have a lot of admiration for the work you and Shannan do. 

I chose poetry, I think, because it fits the moment. I can open my smartphone and read about five different glaciers melting, watch a livestream of a drone bombing of a munitions plant in Tver Oblast, or learn how to get away with identity theft. I can track my heart rate. As I wrote this response, I realized I owed three people emails and had to respond to a different medical bill than last week’s medical bill. There’s no way to hew narrative out of this. I don’t know if poems are the answer to the informational overwhelm of late capitalism (Deleuze would call it schizophrenia), but they’re a way for me to grapple with a civilization that feels as if it is a simulation gone irrevocably awry.
I start writing when I find something infuriating (like getting a medical bill for being alive) or hilarious (like getting a medical bill for being alive). I try to chew the truth out of the thing. Then when I fail that task I describe what the stuff around the thing looks like. Is this an answer? I have never finished a poem. I love it when a poet says a thing and then turns around and says a surprising second thing that changes how we read the first thing. Like in this Matthew Zapruder quote from his poem “Pocket:” Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate / is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means. I look for the surprising second (and third and forth) thing and, sometimes, I get a poem out of it. 

KARAN

Talk to us about how you see the politics in poetry. There are poems that border on propaganda, on slogans, but then there’s poems like yours which come from a deeply personal space while always being aware that the personal space doesn’t exist in a vacuum but in a socio-cultural context that is governed by factors that are deeply political.  When writing, do you think about bridging the intimate and the political? Is all poetry political?

ethan

The fact that we’re conversing in English is political. As a beneficiary of white supremacy and colonization, I struggle with this fact. There's no way to art ourselves out of an empire. Given the crackdown on student free expression and the ever-heightening surveillance of classroom content that’s occurred following the outpouring of peaceful political unrest on campuses across the states last spring, it’s a fraught time to teach writing in a collegiate environment in a manner that acknowledges the violence and the exclusionary tactics that denote what languages are used and what forms of these languages are considered professional. If I have to worry about teaching the work of someone like Mosab Abu Toha simply because they’re Palestinian, then how could I ever consider any poem as an apolitical object? Someone owned the heath that Coleridge wandered through in his narcotic haze. The self in my work is a political being — both in violence they’re a beneficiary of and, to some degree, complicit in — and in the small, daily violences they encounter. 

With that said, I don't believe poems should be conceptualized as any form of praxis. My political acts are the organizing I do with my labor union. Or the free produce I help grow at the local Catholic Worker house. If we’ve learned anything from the silence of many tenured scholars in the humanities over the past year, it’s that writing and intellectual inquiry, however radical their orientation may be, don’t always translate to radical acts in our world. I don’t think about the political as a separate category when I write, but the work I do that can be deemed political is what allows me to write. Even something like volunteering at a community garden, an ostensibly neutral act, allows me to enter a community (both ecologically and socially) outside of the status quo. In turn, this enlivens my writing. 

KARAN

Your titles are particularly striking, often setting up a scenario or context for the poem. For instance, “all three of the gift shops at guantanamo bay sell fidel castro bobbleheads” immediately creates a surreal and politically charged atmosphere. How do you approach titling your poems? Do the titles come to you before, during, or after the writing process? What do you aim to achieve with your titles? I’m hoping you’d write a short essay. Because I want people to read it and know the importance of good titles!

ethan

Back when I lived in Nashville (a doomed prospect, but that’s a different story) I went to a Carl Phillips lecture where he told us that titles don't need to relate to their referents in an overt manner. They can, instead, stand in juxtaposition to the poem’s body; whatever meaning is made occurs in the grinding between the two.

That’s the basis of how I title poems. The “bobbleheads” line came from NYT reporting. The absurdity of a Fidel Castro toy being sold outside an extrajudicial military prison that exists in violation of the Geneva Convention feels so vulgar and yet so appropriate to our era. While the poem that follows isn’t about gitmo, it is about what the state maintains and what it fails to maintain. A lovely poetry professor once told me to avoid attempting “shock and awe” in my work. It was good advice. I stopped writing in all caps. However, there’s something about writing shocking titles that exhilarates me. Most of my favorite poems make me feel like I’ve been punched in the throat. I don’t always want to wait for the volta to feel the fist. 

Perhaps, the best titles are those that induce anxiety — specifically, the anxiety of freedom; the precipitous, Sartrean moment in which one realizes their earthly decisions are always in relation to other beings. The poem’s title is always free from (but indebted to) the text that follows. Who knows. Sartre never published poems. 

KARAN

I like how you use “random” facts (I put this in quotes because I totally see how relevant they are to the poems and totally not random) in your poems. In “the problem with constructing a moral calculus is that most of us start in the red” (boy do I love that title!), you tell us: “that there were 42,951 structurally deficient bridges in the united states when i wrote this poem is relevant only insofar as i used it to externalize my fear.” First, it’s funny and second, it’s scary. Such a cool tension is created. Similarly, in “for elizabeth, at the start of the end of the world,” you mention “20% of / the atlantic's plankton dissolving.” Would you talk to us about research? Do you always know what you’re going to use in a poem? Does research like this precedes or follows the idea of the poem? Does the research ever influence the direction of your poems?

ethan

Before I started my MFA, I worked in environmental communications and habitat restoration. I entered my undergrad hoping to be a field biologist and, while that hasn’t quite panned out, I have an enduring love of ecological communities. I still struggle to write about the specific kind of joy and solace that finding the first skunk cabbage to bloom in a seep gives me, it’s these encounters that shape my interest in the world around me. 

I try to approach writing in a similar vein. Most of my research comes during the act of writing itself. I rarely know where a poem is going, but I’m always curious about the world it lives within, which drives my research. We journey through the words, the ideas, and the figures together. 

KARAN

Your poem, “for elizabeth, at the start of the end of the world” touches on environmental concerns and the complexities of living in a time of climate crisis: “there is no interesting way to write / that, 50 years ago, a handful / of company executives decided / to suppress research that suggested / fossil fuel extraction might end civilization.” I sense so much rage and despair in your poems — how do you approach writing about such overwhelming subjects without succumbing to despair? I’ll allow myself to be silly and ask you this: Does poetry bring you joy or ease your pain?

ethan

I frequently succumb to despair. At its best, rage is what guides me through writing. In her essay “The Practice of Anger in a Warming World,”Genevieve Guentherput the value of anger better than I ever could: 

I think anger is a feeling that we can actively cultivate as a political and even spiritual practice. Not only can anger power the climate movement, energizing us to fight for our survival, it can also rescue us from that alluring, double-faced siren of nihilism and despair. 

In the context of organized labor, I’ve been taught to seek common ground. Specifically, to focus on the joy and the value of labor, even as the systems these forms of labor occur within are frequently antithetical to wellbeing. Rage, unlike joy, burns people out. And despair is the opposite of action. With that said, I can never not experience rage when I consider the cataclysmic weather events that kill people every day around the world. I think of the main thoroughfare of my hometown, leveled by an unseasonably early tornado. It’s strange to see a place you grew up in changed irrevocably by a climactic event. It’s also not strange, in that most of us will experience this within our lifetimes. Rage, it seems to me, is a more productive response than what I initially felt when I saw the rubble — the feeling of paralyzing fear and alienation from a world whose climate grows more unpredictable every day. I try to approach writing the same way I try to encounter these events, in that I try to channel their emotional devastation into acts that might make our world more livable. 

With that said, my despair is fraught. It’s hard to separate a term like “ecoanxiety” from the fear of losing one’s bourgeois lifestyle. My poetry occurs in relation to what Stephanie LeMenager describes as petromelancholia — the grief for the period of time in which energy extraction (and the wealth that it produced in western nations) was less complicated (pre-fracking, pre-BP blowout, pre-Iraq war, etc) — both in terms of its immediate environmental harms and our civilization’s lack of widespread knowledge concerning atmospheric carbonization. There’s a reason the U.S.’s presidential candidates are battling over who gets to embrace fracking harder (despite the relatively low price of oil, at least in late September, as I write this); shifting away from petroleum culture means shifting away from our conception of modernity itself. While it’s unsexy for me to admit that I feel this grief, I do. MFA programs probably wouldn’t exist without the oil boom. I try to leverage humor in my writing as a means to meet this grief. I think about my buddy in Dallas who lives right next to a lake but has to take a highway in order to get to the lake. The United States devastated its landscape for cars, destroyed countless neighborhoods, and then engineered a whole bunch of foreign regime changes to keep oil affordable. In return, we got parking lots the size of cemeteries next to all our Applebees. In the month between my writing this answer and its publication, anywhere between 720 and 4500 species will go extinct. Remember fidget spinners? At least I won’t have to worry about needing a retirement fund. When poetry eases my pain, it does so when it allows me to envision the world that comes next, rather than mourn the one we occupy. 

KARAN

There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see yourself moving elsewhere?

ethan

I dig Spinoza’s metaphysics— we’re all part of one extended substance, all striving to preserve our being. While I’d frequently love to be separate from my body and all its small errors, I don't buy the mind/body divide. I guess, then, that my poetry is the poetry of the extended body. I'd love to extend it further. Lately, I’ve been really into bogs. Check out this pitcher plant. It evolved to collect rainwater, drown bugs and juvenile salamanders, and absorb their nutrients. Isn't that wild? Bogs (and their peat) are some of the earliest sites of resource extraction and large scale cropland conversion. It’s the striving of the strange and brilliant inhabitants of ecosystems like these (i.e. gravely endangered ones) that make me want to write with them.

KARAN

Oh man, that is such a beautiful plant. Where did you grow up, ethan? I’m suddenly curious about the relationship between your work and place of growing up. I’d love for you to think and articulate how where you grew up influenced your poetics, if at all? I’ve never asked this to anyone so far, but if this ends up producing a great answer, I’ll make this a regular question! No pressure, haha.

ethan

I’m from Bowling Green, Kentucky. It’s lined with Mississipian-era limestone — carbonate rock all slowly dissolving. Our caves are full of blind shrimp. Where underground rivers surface, the water stains a blue deeper than a bruise.

There's a hauntedness to Bowling Green that I struggle to describe. Maybe it’s the caves. Maybe it's the Christianity I grew up around, or the failure of the Christian right to follow Christ’s social teachings. Maybe it's the ghost of my younger self. Nobody’s writing practice is unhaunted, really. While I write more about my time in Iowa, a lot of Bowling Green looks like a lot of the United States — unwalkable networks of roads that lead to shopping malls and parking lots. Like Iowa, much of the barrens region of Kentucky was once dominated by tallgrass prairie and savanna. Pre-settlement it was regularly burned by indigenous peoples to encourage animal grazing (and thus, hunting). Everywhere I’ve lived has been haunted by the extirpation of species and indigenous land practices. These ghosts are slowly making their way into my work.  Recently, I’ve been revisiting the work of Davis McCombs, who writes deftly about central Kentucky. 

KARAN

You’re also a photographer (amazing photographs!). How does your visual art practice inform your poetry, and vice versa? Do you find that the two forms of expression complement each other, or are they divorced from each other?

ethan

I took photos long before I seriously wrote poems. The thrust of the art forms is the same for me — I want to capture images that reveal a thing that cannot be simply described. I love film photography; its analogue processes necessitate a degree of uncertainty within each photograph I take. Lots of poetry I like does a similar kind of work — offering images without seeking to editorialize them.

I’ve tried to combine word and image before. I had a photographic series where I projected short quotes by poets I knew onto abandoned buildings. I was once an intended studio art major. My work was derivative of Jenny Holzer’s truisms. While Holzer’s art isn’t usually described as poetry, it does a poet’s task: estranging us from language (in Holzer’s case, the kind of language found in slogans, electioneering, etc). While taking photographs feels like a similar act to writing poetry for me, I’ve yet to combine the visual and the textual with the deft of someone like Keith S. Wilson or artists at PromptPress. 

KARAN

What is some of the best writing or writing-adjacent advice you’ve received, whether now in your MFA at UVA, or outside of institutional education?

ethan

I took a class on witchcraft and poetry, taught by the wonderful poet Meg Wade. While I’ve long dug poets like CAConrad, I hadn't, before Wade’s class, attentioned myself to ritual in poetry. Meg taught me that all poetry is ritual, since the writing and revising of a poem is always in relation to the world around us, with its seasonal shifts, its communities, and it’s strange magic. This isn’t advice so much as practice. But poetry is practice. 

KARAN

Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

ethan

This prompt is inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archive. The best way to complete it is to first read Gumbs’ luminous text. 

Think of a future where the gulf stream has stalled. National borders have shifted or dissolved completely. Whatever civilization is now has morphed into something we cannot, for better or for worse, yet envision. 

Write a poem that a cultural anthropologist will unearth. How might you describe a bad tinder date to someone in a post-digital world? What will your credit score mean in two hundred years? Has the species of owl that perches outside your window gone extinct? Write your poem for a denizen of a world you cannot yet imagine. 

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience, especially in the context of the themes you explore in your poetry.

ethan

Garth Greenwell’s work, both as a teacher of mine and a novelist, left a profound influence on my writing. What Belongs To You is full of remarkable syntactical shifts — Greenwell is able to capture his unnamed narrator’s psychological dislocation through a bewildering mix of hypotactic and paratactic sentences. 

I also couldn't have written my poems without Chris Offutt’s Kentucky Straight, a remarkable short story collection that writes Kentucky’s hollers as sites of community, family, poverty, and of the hallucinatory wilds of Appalachia. 

KARAN

Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would love to know which poets have influenced you most.

ethan

billy woods is my favorite artist. His ability to combine microfiction, jarring juxtapositions, and social commentary both hilarious and devastating within his bars astonishes me. Elucid and Moor Mother are big influences of mine as well. 

Noor Hindi wrote my favorite poem ever.

I also love the work of: Max Lavergne, Arthur Sze, Sherwin Bitsui, Natalie Shapero, Roque Dalton, S. Brook Corfman, and Matt Rasmussen. 

Postscript: I’m donating my Poet of the Week honorarium to the Qwaider family in Gaza. If you dug my poems and have the means, do consider chipping in (or checking out more campaigns here) (thank you, Maria Gray, for pointing me towards this resource).