Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?
Cecily Parks: I began the poems in The Seeds when I moved to Texas in 2014 for a new job. I was a new wife and a new mother, and, for the first time, I owned a home. It had a small front yard and a small backyard. As I spent time in that home, yard, and, eventually, my Austin neighborhood, I was struck by how little I knew or understood about Texas flora and fauna. Prickly pear cacti, night-blooming datura, crape myrtles, Texas Mountain laurels, ball moss, grackles: I know their names now, but I didn’t know their names then. I didn’t know that spineless cacti can still prick the skin, or datura will make you hallucinate if you ingest it, or ball moss lives in live oak trees but feeds on air. I didn’t know why the presence of cockroaches surged in our home in August. I couldn’t believe how the grackles’ song sounded like metal scraping metal. I didn’t know the name for the ravine next to the train tracks one block from our house and didn’t know that people experiencing homelessness lived there. When my family moved to Texas, my twin daughters were 19 months old. They were walking, acquiring language, and often playing outside. Together, beginning with our yard and moving outward, we began to learn about the lives of the plants, animals, and people in our new community. Motherhood gave me the uncanny experience of trying to convey some sort of wisdom even as I most identified with my daughters’ unknowingness. The poems in The Seeds are animated by the questions that arose for me during that time and in the years that followed.
LO: “Form sets the thought free,” says Anne Carson, and I believe her. How did form and thought co-evolve in the unfolding of this work?
CP: A year after we moved to Austin, I came across a review for the nursery rhyme anthology Over the Hills and Far Away and bought it. As I read it to my daughters one night, I remember coming to a particular spread that included a counting-out rhyme that I’d first encountered in childhood, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” It’s not a favorite of mine, mostly because it’s a poem used to exile someone, to make them “out” or “it.” However, the poem in the anthology was accompanied by several more counting-out rhymes that were new to me. As I read them out loud, I marveled at how they were both propulsive and elusive, inevitable and mysterious. I paused reading. I wanted to know how they were made, how they worked. The pause annoyed my daughters, who wanted me to turn the page, and so I turned the page.
Sometime later, I pulled the book out from my daughters’ bookshelf. From it, I learned that a counting-out rhyme is composed of 8 trochaic lines, 7 of which all rhyme with each other. It’s a challenging form but a short one, I thought, and why not try writing some, for fun. The moment when the form set me free might have been when I realized that, unlike “Eeny, meeny,” a counting-out rhyme did not have to cast someone out of a group. I saw that I could repurpose a form that I associated with childhood exile and use it to gather elements of an ecosystem, however small, together. Several of the counting-out rhymes that I wrote during that time ended up in The Seeds.
LO: Did you have in mind any identifiable recipients for the utterance of this work? Did your sense of how or to whom the work was speaking evolve?
CP: I imagined a reader who appreciates and even loves nature and yet is aware that their everyday actions—making photocopies, pumping gas, or filling a kiddie pool with water—conflict with the larger needs of the earth. Sometimes, this reader wonders, as I do, Am I an asshole? Other times, when alone, this reader might have the sense that the natural world is the only place where they are truly understood, a reader who, like Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, notices how
if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.
I imagined a reader who cycles through identification with, intimacy with, and estrangement from the earth—and turns to poetry because it’s a place that can hold the varied experiences of being a human who lives alongside the more-than human world.
LO: What felt riskiest to you about this work?
CP: There are six long, essayistic poems that I debated whether to include in The Seeds. Some of them are lineated; some are in prose blocks. I couldn’t decide if they were poems masquerading as essays, or essays masquerading as poems. They existed because, during the emotional and intellectual chapter in my life that I spent writing this book, the questions I brought to the page couldn’t always find accommodation in shorter lyric forms. They sprawled. It felt inauthentic to omit these long poems from the book, as if to do so would be to pretend that I was not the person I was (with all her attendant concerns, awarenesses, recollections, and curiosities) during the time that I wrote it. Privately and to close friends, I fussed about how those long poems might test not only attention spans but also expectations of poetry. Did the poems belong? Would they alienate or invite readers? Those poems ended up in the collection because, I decided, The Seeds would be an abridged version of my poetics without them. I would be discomfited by their absence.
LO: How do the book’s aesthetics inform its ethics, or, how do its ethics inform its aesthetics?
CP: When I began writing this book, I was teaching an Introduction to Creative Writing class in which a student turned in a short story draft that ended, abruptly, when a character died. When I asked the student why he ended it there, he spoke of death as an obvious conclusion. I asked, What could happen next? Wouldn’t it be interesting to imagine where the story could go from there? It seemed, to me, like the student had turned back just when he’d come to the place that, were he to proceed, would be presided over by his imagination.
Around the same time, Tracy K. Smith visited the university where I teach and led a craft class for graduate students. In her talk, Tracy prompted students to write beyond what might feel like the logical, natural conclusion of the poem. One of the poems she shared was Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses”—a poem which, I admitted to myself, I would have been tempted to end early, before the poem brilliantly and unforgettably dares me to dip my hand into the icy ocean. What I took away from Tracy’s talk was that pushing past an ending was not just the terrain of fiction writers: it could be part of a poet’s practice. When I tried it in my own poems, that feeling of writing on felt exhilarating and a little scary—like, is it okay for me to do this? In retrospect, I could see why my undergraduate student decided to end his story when his character died, because refusing an ending felt defiant, at least to me. That defiance animated several of the poems in The Seeds. I guess it feels to me like both an ethic and an aesthetic to keep going past an ending, to see what might be beyond it.
LO: As a medium somewhere between time-based and static, poetry engages temporality in a fascinating range of ways. How does time operate inside this work and across the experience it creates?
CP: I was reckoning most with time in the poem “December.” When I wrote this poem, I wanted to record one month of living in the thick of family. The result is less interested in what Robert Frost would call “the momentary stay against confusion” and more interested in the confusion. Because December is often a time of summing up, the poem also, I hope, will strike readers as my attempt to account for the messiness and magic of a month’s worth of living. The poem also makes tiny monuments to some of my daughters’ firsts: their first manicure, first secret, and first “Don’t come in” note taped to a bedroom door. The first time we do anything can be momentous, I think, but of course I can’t remember many of my own first times. I suspect that having children is allowing me to revisit (or confront my inability to revisit) my own childhood firsts and overlay those memories (or voids) on my daughters’ experiences. I’m less interested in comparing my experiences to my daughters’ and more interested in how motherhood can (like writing a poem) be an invitation to dilate and/or collapse time.
LO: What kept you company during the writing of this work? Did any books, songs, art works, philosophical treatises, snacks, walks, or oddball devotions contribute to a book-specific creative realm?
CP: I love this question! An incomplete list of my companions includes: the mourning doves on the power lines outside the room where I write, Texas State Parks, Austin public pools, the Butler Hike and Bike Trail around Lady Bird Lake in Austin, a particular hackberry tree, the unpaved alley behind our house, Anne Sexton’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center, Interstate 35, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the floral arrangements by Wild Vine Floral in Austin, the weeping persimmon tree in our backyard, and dark chocolate.