INSIDE TERMINATION DUST

May 23, 2014 Karin Cecile Davidson

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSANNA J. MISHLER

“So much of the day consists of arcs induced

between separate planes—

hand to doorknob, or a trumpet solo

and an ear

pressed to the door.

Which is more beautiful,

The thing vaulting from one side to another

or the dark rift beneath it?”

— from “KNOCK ON WOOD”

— “TERMINATION DUST” — by Susanna J. Mishler

Susanna J. Mishler’s poetry collection, “TERMINATION DUST” (RED HEN PRESS, 2014), casts a wide and well-stitched net over arctic ice fields and southwestern deserts and across abstractions of perspective, identity, geography, and childhood. The broadest scope of “FLYING OVER BUCKLAND, ALASKA” is met by the close-up moment of “WHAT FITS NEATLY IN A HAND,” all with a deft, deserving sense of lyricism and surprise. Language meets landscape, “learn[ing] to dub fall snows termination dust”. This life, the afterlife, and beyond are examined with curiosity and an unsullied, inventive way of seeing.

Susanna J. Mishler – photo credit: Christina A. Barber

Susanna, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I’m so happy for the chance to learn more about “TERMINATION DUST.”

In “WEEKDAY IN SPRING” the human condition is laid bare by way of waxwings and communication, chaos and entropy, Barbie and blueprints. The speaker has ‘the sense of living under a vault, inside one of those snow globes except it isn’t snowing.” Would you tell us about your process of examining nature while tipping human understanding on its side?

“Weekday in Spring” came from a prompt to write a poem about sequencing the human genome. It takes rooms in a house, and houses in a neighborhood, as loose parallels for genes and chromosomes. The poem ended up with themes of information and loneliness—we have the human genome sequenced but we don’t know which genes do—we are inundated by information, yet don’t know what to do with most it or know what most of it means. Which is a little like living in a suburb: I know the street names, but many of my neighbors and their lives are hidden. It’s amazing how isolated one can feel in a suburb during the Information Age. I want to call it a “watershed poem” because the form is stream of consciousness, which pulls from all kinds of sensory input. And so, “Weekday in Spring” is a watershed poem of an Alaskan neighborhood in the 21st century.

The strength of nature is striking in many of your poems, and is present in the form of fauna—from whales, blue sharks, shrews, and Arctic terns to wolves, caribou, vermillion flycatchers, and ravens. They appear in metaphorical form, “bar[ing their] teeth,” in “AFTERLIFE: URSUS ARCTOS;” as image, “running toward us in the summer dusk,” in “CARIBOU;” and in actuality, “at night, walking/on the ceiling,” in ‘WESTERN BANDED GECKOS.”

Observation and perspective are keen in these poems. How do you discover your subjects and decide your focus?

As an undergraduate in Washington State and working on a school project, I spoke with a landscape architect who had worked in Alaska. He said he felt that being in Alaska—even urban Alaska—felt fundamentally different from being almost anywhere else in the nation, because wild lands elsewhere exist as islands in a sea of human endeavor, whereas human settlements in Alaska exist more as islands in a sea of wilderness. Even in Anchorage, one’s sense of place in the order of things, wild and human, is turned inside-out. The presence of wilderness, animals, weather, light/darkness, and season are keen. The solstices may pass unnoticed in San Diego, but in Alaska they’re a big deal—we don’t have such a steady upper hand on our environment. When I write about animals and weather I’m writing about what’s in my daily life, which has elements of both the urban and the wild.

I think, too, that telling stories about animals is one of the oldest human pastimes. We know what it is to be human by contemplating animals. Curiously, when we apply human imagination to animals, we also connect to ourselves as animals.

University Lake, Anchorage, AK with Termination Dust on the Chugach Mountains – photo credit: Susanna Mishler

Would you discuss how content, especially in the poems concerning wildlife, suggests form? For example, how “CARIBOU” includes two sextets followed by two quintets, ending with two quatrains.

Form is a constant question when I compose—often a vexing one. I try to treat each poem as something that has its own kind of volition, as something that has a preferred form, which by listening and experimenting, I help it to achieve. That form could be anything from a sonnet to a lyric essay. A form is the poem’s structure for thinking. I cultivate a variety of ways of thinking—it’s part of why I write poems.

“TERMINATION DUST” as a collection reflects this taste for variety in form and in subject. It ranges from unrhymed couplets to a ghazal; a prose poem to short-lined tercets; roving, single-stanza meditations to short, syllabic lines with fictional characters. I wanted to make a robust collection, one that has themes and obsessions but does not simply feel like different incantations of the same poem. A poem should surprise a reader in some way, as the reader moves through it. So, too, should a book of poems.

“CARIBOU” proceeds from sextets to quintets to quatrains as it moves from an outwardly descriptive poem to a more internal lyric. Shorter stanzas mean more caesuras, giving the poem’s progressively internal content more space. In this case, it has the effect of slowing the poem down, and gives extra room for reflection on the action in the first two stanzas.

“Silas digs a motocross pit in his backyard

for Hot Wheels. The sun on his back and the humid earth

are like Hell, he thinks. Silas knows about Hell

from two Sundays in church with his friend, Jesse—

Hell is uncomfortably warm. He knows, even,

that Hell is capitalized and so is Lord

because they are proper nouns like

Tennessee and Ferrari—things

you can touch or be inside of. People

are a special category, but he’s not sure

if people are special things or special places.

He feels like he’s inside himself, mostly, but

he could walk to the edge of town

and be a different place and maybe

a different thing.”

— from “REVELATION” – “TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler

Some of the pieces in “TERMINATION DUST” are about a young boy named Silas. “REST STOP, WILDLIFE VIEWING,” “ASSURANCE,” “REVELATION,” “THE IMAGINATION AS A HEDGEHOG,” AND “THOUGHT POLICE” reveal this child from close third viewpoint and at times as if from the perspective of an older sibling. There is a sensibility concerning family and siblings, identity and discovery and loss, possibility and fear in these poems. How did Silas come to you? What did you realize in creating his character?

“Thought Police” was the first poem in which Silas appeared. He’s a mysterious boy. It was challenging to write both convincingly and compellingly from a child’s perspective. He brings another distinct voice and perspective to the book. His poems are woven through the five parts. Silas’s voice brings a kind of vulnerability and a kind of thinking to a subject that an adult character can’t. In trying to make sense of the world, a child’s logic can go surprising places for an adult audience. It was tricky to conjure that kind of logic without either making a parody of it or making it seem merely quaint or nostalgic. Kids are trying to understand the adult world around them with limited information—they draw lines between things that seem unrelated in the adult world—and this is a legitimate way for a poem to move. Through simple, direct association, to see where it goes and how it lands, like a monkey brachiating from one branch to another.

“TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler – Cover Image: “STORM BIRDS” – by Christina A. Barber

Bobbin, weathervane, or flip-flops in paradise?

Flip-flops in paradise, of course! The bobbin and weathervane are sunning themselves in adjacent chairs.

As an electrician by trade, do you find inspiration in the workings hidden behind walls, pathways that others take for granted and rarely know?

I think it’s interesting that writers use the language of craft to describe what we do. Visual artists have “studios” and “critiques;” whereas, writers have “workshops.” We are wordsmiths who talk about crafting things as if we’re constructing a three-dimensional object. William Carlos Williams famously said that a poem is a machine. If we’ve created this kind of language for ourselves, maybe it’s not so surprising that a poet would also feel drawn to work with her hands, to build systems and machines.

The hidden aspect of the work of an electrician also has similarities to the crafting of a poem. As an electrician, I had to learn the aesthetics of the industry. For electrical installations to look professional, they should be unobtrusive. A conduit run, for example, should not be irregular with regards to its surrounding lines, and it should appear uniform and deliberate. It needs to appear deft and effortless. This is an aesthetic I recognize from crafting poems. A poem should be an experience that does not draw unnecessary attention to its craft, just as a room should not draw unnecessary attention to its electrical system.

“The mind flaps between

shade and glass,

tangles in drawcords,

gnaws thirstily at

ice on the sill.”

— from “(1/5) JANUARY CROSSING” – “TERMINATION DUST”

– by Susanna J. Mishler

“JANUARY CROSSING,” a stunning series poem, is a log of January contemplations. Winter, the arctic, the General, the girl, love, death, enclosed spaces, endless spaces, anatomy, identity (confused, mirrored, unknown), shapes, ice and snow, waking, and memory are revealed in its twelve sections. You’ve paid tribute to Anne Carson’s “BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND” in this comprehensive, thoughtful piece. How did this series come to you and then evolve?

Years ago I swapped a much earlier version of “TERMINATION DUST” with a manuscript by poet and friend Melissa Koosmann (part of which became the chapbook “ENDINGS,” published by Flying Guillotine Press in 2008). I had Melissa’s poetic voice in my head when I wrote “JANUARY CROSSING.” In her manuscript she was working in short, terse lines, packed with layered meaning and dry humor. I was also looking to tie together some of the many themes in “TERMINATION DUST” in a longer piece. I’d never written a poem more than three pages before and was curious to see how that feels, what opportunities it presents. January and February are long months in Alaska when the cold weather and darkness take on the tedium of a military occupation. It can be a very introspective time, when one sifts through memories and examines events with an edge of cabin fever. A long poem consisting of fragmented recollections and meditations seemed like a good formal fit for the subject and state of mind it attempts to render.

In subzero weather, all animal life feels borrowed. I appropriated Anne Carson’s line, “To stay human is to break a limitation,” from a tortured love poem. The context of her line implies that a hidden, internal limitation is overcome, an emotional one. I mean it more as an external limitation—a marvel that we don’t freeze or starve or lose all shreds of civil society.

“The days are bigger—I wake and am falling

inside them. The cups and clocks open their eyes and are falling.”

— from “LAKE CABIN” – “TERMINATION DUST” – by Susanna J. Mishler

Influenced by Li-Young Lee’s “SEVEN HAPPY ENDINGS,” you wrote your poem, “LAKE CABIN.” The idea of psychic and emotional spaces, as well as enclosed and anatomical spaces, is beautifully imagined here. Do you find that poetry aligned with the natural world is your best inspiration? Tell a little more of your process and what this holds for your literary future.

Sometimes I can’t get a good line or stanza of poetry out of my head. That’s how it was with Li-Young Lee’s “Seven Happy Endings.” I kept thinking about how it would be to open my eyes and find objects around me falling, and for the objects themselves to know they are falling. This image was the seed of “Lake Cabin.” The word, “falling,” became the refrain in a ghazal about falling out of love (Lee’s is about falling in love).

It was since pointed out to me that “Lake Cabin” can be read both ways—as a poem about falling in or out of love—and I like that discovery. That the poem has a flexibility of meaning, yet also has specific sensory details.

The seeds of poems come to me in all kinds of ways. While “Lake Cabin” came from a published poem I admire, I recently wrote a poem inspired by a RadioLab broadcast. Sometimes an image from a dream will stick with me and that will be a seed, or an encounter at work. Finding the subject or seed of a poem makes me think of water-dowsing—as a poet I walk around with my dowsing rod and when the rod inexplicably plunges toward the earth, that’s where I dig for water/poetry. Why does the rod dip where it dips? What force grabs and pulls it? How does the seed of a poem announce itself to the poet? I have no idea—I’ve only learned to feel it, follow it, craft it, and anyway, if I did know it might not be good for the poem. The following comes from a figuring-out, a pursuit and discovery, the suggestion of a mystery or of something much larger than it appears.

Susanna J. Mishler – Photo Credit: Clark James Mishler

Susanna J. Mishler’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as THE IOWA REVIEW, MID-AMERICAN REVIEW, and KENYON REVIEW ONLINE. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The University of Arizona in Tucson, where she served as a poetry editor for SONORA REVIEW. She’s the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship in Poetry at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop. In addition to her literary pursuits, Susanna is an electrician by trade. She lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska.

All photos permission of Susanna J. Mishler. Credits to Christina A. Barber, Susanna J. Mishler, and Clark James Mishler.

The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis,

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

First posted in the Arts section of Hothouse Magazine.

Poetry/Prose Exchange - # 3

April 19, 2014 Karin Cecile Davidson

To be honest, no other exchanges have arrived. And so, I'm continuing this series on my own. Not all by my lonesome, but in the company of words.

The poetry of Susanna J. Mishler is on my mind today.

"What Fits Neatly in a Hand"

A pebble. An earring. A stack

of dimes. A little water,

and the reflection of something small

or distant in the sky.

A toy fighter plane.

Not a live goldfish, but a dead one.

Not the other hand--

not completely.

A matchbook, a moth. A cupboard hinge.

A tooth. Pieces

of broken things, wristwatch gears,

plate shards, ashes. The curve

of an infant's head.

Crumbled plaster. A chipped button

sewn to a shirt scrap.

An ice cube--briefly.

Not the curled edges of burning paper.

Not an aspen, but a lemon seed.

The opposable thumb. Two aspirin.

Some sand--barely.

- from Termination Dust - by Susanna J. Mishler

- Red Hen Press, 2014

Brad Richard: from Aubade to Bacchae

August 15, 2013 Karin C. Davidson

“Aubade”

7:01: the first rain of the last day

of August starts to fall, then hesitates,

postpones itself to let the light

that would have come here anyway break in.

Nothing is amazed. None of the azaleas

have changed their minds about not blossoming,

and the lady cardinal who visits the lawn chairs

between 7:15 and 7:20 assumes her station

and finds the yard in its ordinary order.

But she must notice how the long branches

Of the euonymous, yesterday so straight,

Now are bending under days of dryness;

how the fig tree’s leaves are browning,

as if burned by a slow, exhausting fire

the small rain did not extinguish. Summer’s

steady certainties, the creeping

increments of heat and leaf, falter

and break, utter final colors.

No expectations could sustain these last

intact yet stunted primroses. After all,

what is the soul? The black ant

mazing through the rose’s sex?

These tendrils shrinking from the endings of air?

The repetitions of cloud and sky,

the kinetic clocking down of things

caught in the cardinal’s eye in flight?

— from Habitations

by Brad Richard

Brad Richard, New Orleans poet, writes with an incredible sense of perspective and place, reaching out toward history, mythology, art, and nature. Focus and attention are revealed in his poems, as well as questions regarding gender, an understanding of the world, literary and otherwise, and a way in which to examine it. Though I’ve known Brad for years, I’ve learned so much more in this interview about his way of seeing and about the form and fabric of his poetry.

Backyard Ferns

Confederate Jasmine

Brad, I’m thinking about the idea of perspective in your poetry. In your first collection, Habitations, many of the poems focus in on nature, as in “Aubade” and “Dirt-Dauber’s Nest,” and then lean away to widen and expand. And then there are those pieces that steal in and single out details that perhaps we’ve no business knowing, like “Everybody’s Little Secrets.” I felt a terrible, wonderful sense of voyeurism here, the digging down into places that are usually off-limits, and realized that these sorts of poems have a literary kinship with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

Would you speak about your process, in terms of perspective? And about how that process may have evolved over the years?

First of all, Karin, let me say thanks for this interview. I’m really honored to be one of your subjects.

To the question at hand: I love looking at things and I love describing them. I hope my eye doesn’t censor what it sees, that whatever is seen is fair game for thinking, feeling, writing. Still, at times I feel incredibly obtuse, like I miss things that are right in front of me. Then again, I’m always surprised when someone reads one of my poems and something I’ve seen, something I may have thought was so obvious as to be banal, strikes a reader as perceptive. I think it’s just the habit of looking that makes me notice things in a particular way—something particularly beautiful, or odd, or telling.

Imagination is the next step, and that involves a looking out as much as a looking in. That is, if I can imagine myself into something (a person, an object, a painting), I hope that I can see from that particular perspective and generate some sense, however partial, of how that consciousness would think. I’ve written a lot of persona poems and dramatic monologues and variations thereon, and that mimetic habit of imagining a different perspective runs closely parallel, I think, to the habit of seeing I described above. What interests me the more I write is how I locate whatever I consider to be my perspective.

I love Sherwood Anderson (“Death in the Woods” is one of the most brilliant and haunting things I know) and As I Lay Dying is a touchstone. And yes, the sense of being a little too close for comfort is something I admire and am a little frightened of in Anderson and Faulkner’s best work.

Fiction

Poetry

You’ve written poems as tributes to other poets and to artists, landscape, mother, father, lover, self. And that’s all very nice. But here’s my question: have you ever written a poem of thoughtful, quiet revenge? And (even if you haven’t) what, pray tell, is the best poetic form for writing of reprisal?

I love this! “Writing well is the best revenge,” said a writer with a famously poison pen. And George Garrett perhaps wrote the wickedest bit of literary revenge in his novel, Poison Pen (dedicated to the memory of Joan Rivers). I can think of lots of examples of well-turned vengeful daggers in prose, but I think what makes literary revenge work is the same in poetry. It’s a matter of finding the appropriate balance of irony, ire, and bile, and singing your hate-song in perfect, pissed-off pitch.

Now, in my own work . . . hmm, is there anything I would admit to as arising from wanting to settle a score? I’ll take a kind of middle road with the two poems I’ll cite. One is “Eye-Fucking,” from Butcher’s Sugar, which is in the persona of a gay-bashing murderer. Letting him speak for himself is, to my mind, pretty good revenge. The other is “The Artist’s Wife and Setter Dog,” from Motion Studies, in which I play a trick with point of view, withholding the identity of the speaker for as long as I can until it’s clear that it’s the wife, that is, Mrs. Thomas Eakins. He and she had a very complicated relationship, but I felt she deserved a chance to speak her mind about how that horrific portrait portrays her. Withholding and then revealing the speaker was a way both to complicate and dramatize how Eakins repressed her and her image. I hope a little brute justice was served in that case.

Now, if you were hoping I would reveal some juicier, more personal poetic revenge . . . sorry!

Poetic devices

Place informs so much of your writing. Your childhood in Texas, your adult life in Louisiana, the interim in Iowa and Missouri. Armadillos, levees, gulf waters, wasps, acorns, mockingbirds, sweet potatoes, wild sweet-peas, locusts: details of those places.

Within place in your writing are intonations of desire—to be home; to be elsewhere, near the shore, examining things washed up; to be wanted, loved, understood. What do you think? Places, people, passion. Sound familiar?

Of course. A person who will remain nameless (note to self: subject for revenge poem?) once made fun of me when I told him I was considering learning more about birds so I could identify them more precisely. Clarity is my absolute standard for good writing, and precision is fundamental to clarity. This is all essential to understanding place in a meaningful way. Places, people, passion: these things are very specific, and it’s their specificity that moves me.

Motion Studies - by Brad Richard

“Motion Studies”

I. [1929 / 2005]

We’ll never make it in time: you’re twelve,

Riding west to see a corpse in a flood,

I’m your grandson at forty-two, riding east

to see my city’s flooded remains.

Gueydan to Port Arthur, Austin to New Orleans,

you in a pickup with your daddy and one brother,

another brother waiting in a funeral home,

laid out in somebody’s suit on a cooling board,

you trying to imagine that body past this rain,

me in a rental car with the music cranked,

trying not to think about stories that got snagged

in stories that failed to hold up, to hold

water—

— from Motion Studies by Brad Richard

Motion Studies, the title of your second collection and of three movements within the collection, becomes the telling of stories within stories, like sketch boxes inside the set of suitcases that, from smallest to largest, fill the old leather trunk in the biggest closet of your father’s art studio.

Would you tell us about the circumstances surrounding the writing of these poems? How they came to you, from the art examined to the exodus from and the eventual return to New Orleans?

I love how you imagine this big leather trunk in my dad’s studio! There wasn’t one, but you’re absolutely on target with the metaphor of stories packed into stories. And I’m delighted to talk about this.

I began writing the Eakins material in Motion Studies in 2003, after seeing the Eakins retrospective at the Met in 2002. I really didn’t know his work before then, and was in the middle of working on the poems that would find their way into Butcher’s Sugar. But Eakins work really got to me: I admired it, I was annoyed by it, and I wanted to make it give me something back for all the energy I was putting into looking at it, especially that damned Swimming painting. I ended up doing a considerable amount of reading and research and was planning to write a book of poems almost entirely about Swimming. By the summer of 2005, I was pretty far along with that project, and well into its explorations of impossible yearning. And then that stupid storm happened.

Among the many ways that Katrina affected me, one of the worst was it (or my reaction to it) made it impossible for me to continue the Swimming poems. Fortunately, I had already written a lot of those poems, and probably even more fortunately, they weren’t just about that painting. While Tim and I were in Austin, during our weird, extended evacuation period (our apartment was fine, the city wasn’t, and we didn’t need to return immediately), the Ragdale Foundation graciously offered me a residency. I went there to write one poem, “The Raft of the Medusa,” based on the very famous and much-written-about Géricault painting; that poem ended up taking months to finish, and I really meant for it to be my only Katrina poem.

In the summer of 2008, I received another Ragdale residency; I hadn’t been writing much during the previous year, and I was frankly unsure what to work on. I knew I didn’t have enough Eakins material for a book, but I also knew that work was good enough to become part of a book. I was also wondering if I could find a way to write again about Katrina that would mean something to me, just as the writing of “The Raft of the Medusa” had: not something merely didactic, but something really felt. About a week before I left, I had one of the few “eureka!” moments I’ve ever experienced as a writer. I suddenly realized that my Katrina story, a story about my paternal grandfather trying to get to Texas during a 1920’s flood to retrieve the body of a dead brother, and Zeno’s paradox were all related and could generate a single poem. It took a lot of work, including genealogical research, research about cooling boards (thanks, Audrey Niffenegger!), and imaginative re-creation, but over that four-week residency, I came up with most of what become the “Motion Studies” series that forms the spine and nervous system of that book. I’m still amazed that all of that meshed so well with the Eakins material, plus a few other poems I had written previously. I don’t expect to ever again have such an incredible experience of unity in creating a book.

Freddy’s tail

Butter Boy!

Influences: literary, cultural, culinary, gender-wise, otherwise.

I always go a little stupid when I have to answer the literary influence question. Once I start listing the usual suspects (Bishop, Stevens, Yeats), I feel obligated to start listing everyone whose work I love and has had some impact or left a trace on my own work and then I freeze up, can’t think, babble. So I’ll try this.

Literary: Gilgamesh. Moby-Dick. King Lear. Yeats, Stevens, Bishop, Plath. Tomas Tranströmer. Michael Alexander’s introduction to The Earliest English Poems (Penguin, 1966). Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.”

Partially literary/extra-literary/cultural/etc.: I have and have had many important literary friendships, and Dana Sonnenschein and Reginald Shepherd have been the most important of those. Dana’s friendship sustains me in all kinds of ways, and Reginald’s changed me, big time. I’m in a talented and invaluable workshop group—Peter Cooley, Melissa Dickey, Carolyn Hembree, Andy Stallings, Andy Young (and past members Jessica Henricksen, Major Jackson, Ed Skoog, Liz Thomas)—and am lucky to live in a city with a vibrant, diverse literary community. My relationship with my father is where my relationships to the visual arts, music, and food begin. Gender-wise = otherwise. OK, that’s a joke. Sort of.

Gladys – former bridesmaid, always the hen

Crawfish: étouffée, bisque, or boil? And how come?

I have to choose?! Well, boiled is the most fun, so I’ll go with that.

Butcher’s Sugar by Brad Richard

“The Men in the Dark”

Dropping shut the trapdoor that opened the dark

above my childhood bed, they don’t want me

to tell you about them, those two men

who left their smell with me each night

until I was no longer a boy. In tee shirts

or sometimes shirtless, they sat on bunks

as in a cell, smoking cigarettes and staring

down as I whispered. They liked to hear

about my parents, my dog, hurricanes, the wasp

and the dandelion, how blood tastes, how deaf people talk.

**– from Butcher’s Sugar by Brad Richard**

In your third collection, Butcher’s Sugar, you step out onto the ledge of gender, curling your toes toward “dirty boy” poetry, then lean over the edge toward yearning, sex, and even homophobic violence.

Tell us more. What else were you moving toward with these poems? And have these pieces led you into another dimension in your writing, a place where you can take off into the next stretch of work?

The first poems I wrote that ended up becoming part of Butcher’s Sugar were exercises in form: “Queer Studies” came from practicing the sonnet, “The House that Jack Built” from practicing the villanelle. I wrote sonnets and villanelles on other subjects, but in these particular poems I was interested in queering the forms. I didn’t think they would necessarily lead anywhere; they were exercises. I did play around with similar material, most of it also in forms, but a lot of it was pretty bad; this was back in the mid to late ‘90s, when the manuscript for Habitations, my first book, was basically done, and I was looking around for a new direction. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do and a lot of the abandoned work from then reflects that.

There were two turning points. One was “Eye-Fucking,” which was a response to reading about gay-bashing killers in Texas. Although I had played around with writing about creepy material, that was a more visceral writing experience, one that made me confront the real horror of what I was dealing with, and made me question why I wanted to write about it. After that, I couldn’t deal with material of that gravity without feeling more certain that it was OK—morally and artistically—for me to do so.

The other, more liberating one was a re-encounter with ancient literature, specifically Gilgamesh and Greek mythology. That gave me a frame of reference for dealing with material that was quite personal, even in poems that don’t refer directly to classical myths. I’m not a Jungian, but archetypal material is undeniably powerful, deeply referential in ways that heighten the intensity of a poem and give them a certain density (which I hope isn’t merely borrowed). I feel that, too, in the kind of material I drew upon for Motion Studies.

Motion Studies is a very elegiac book with some hope for the living, for those who can remember, for the lovers at the end. Butcher’s Sugar is also elegiac, but brutal: of all the classical influences in it, the strongest may really be Euripides’ The Bacchae, which is, in my reading, about the question of whether it’s necessary to destroy the self in order to have self-knowledge.

Right now, I find myself working between two impulses. One is directed outward, toward the idea of the city and of history, in a partially completed manuscript about the capitol of an imaginary kingdom and in another about New Orleans (which is also kind of an imaginary capitol). The other impulse goes more inward, and a lot of that material is very domestic; there are poems about things growing in my yard, and about my life with my husband, Tim. (Not coincidentally, I’ve been going back more often to James Schuyler’s beautiful poems.) Related to these are some memory poems, some cousins to poems in Butcher’s Sugar, others more like poems from Habitations. Which means, I guess, that I keep coming back to place and perspective, trying to get my bearings again and again.

Reprise of Freddy’s tail

Tim Watson & Brad Richard – Hansen’s Sno-Bliz – New Orleans

Brad Richard

Brad Richard is the author of Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), and Habitations (Portals Press, 2000). He chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans.

All photos – with permission of Brad Richard and Karin C. Davidson.