In Mary Ann Samyn’s The Return from Calvary, the weight of the speaker’s grief at her father’s death is balanced delicately with a matter-of-fact feel that “redemption is nice, but unnecessary.” I don’t want contentment to be out of the question,” she writes, and in it we find a reprieve. The silences within Samyn’s poems–in their staccato rhythm, endstopped lines, line breaks and caesura–propel the reader beyond the present where the “clouds don’t look the same,” as at the same time grief, ever patient, is held at bay: “So long as it’s not slippery, we walk.”
Tiffany Troy: You begin The Return from Calvary with the eponymous poem. How does it introduce the readers with what is to follow?
Mary Ann Samyn: The book began, even before it consciously began, with an early 19th century painting with that same title. The painting is by Herbert Schmalz. It’s a stylized depiction of Mary and the other women leaving the crucifixion. My grandmother had a print of the painting above her sofa and, as a little girl, I was very scared of it. I wanted nothing to do with whatever that painting was all about. When my dad had a devastating (but not fatal) stroke, in 2014, the painting came to mind. I understood then, deeply, what the painting was about, and I realized that not wanting anything to do with that kind of sorrow isn’t a choice anyone gets to make. In the wake of my dad’s stroke and all the suffering that had happened and was yet to happen—and, yes, also, all the beautiful moments, the unexpected gifts, the small if not large miracles—we were, my dad and my whole family and I, living that painting. It took me a long time to be able to write about my dad’s suffering and “The Return from Calvary” was not the first poem I wrote, but always the devastation and desolation and, maybe off-stage, the sense of hope that the painting captures were on my mind. How could I write poems that do what Schmalz’s painting does? How could I speak of the hardest things I had witnessed and experienced? That was the challenge. So putting that poem first in the collection felt natural; here, it says, is what’s at stake, here is where we begin. Also, that poem is typical of how I write: in a very compressed way, with quick cuts in terms of scene and mood. So the poem sets readers up, I hope, for what is to come.
TT: From that beginning, how did you write towards writing and putting together the poems as a cohesive whole? To me, one way to examine your collection is to see how that sense of hope is framed by song. The collection opens with epigraphs drawn from Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River” and Jackson Browne’s “Barricades of Heaven,” and one early poem, “Salvation,” begins “Three a.m., my father’s singing is the house.”
MAS: Thank you for asking about that! I’m not someone who writes with music on in the background—I need to hear my own music—that is, the music of the line—but certain songs do seem to accompany me during the writing of my books. “Moon River,” as sung by Andy Williams, was a song my dad liked, and it was playing as he died. Poignant, to say the least. After his stroke, my dad had very few words, so he couldn’t sing in the usual sense but he did hum/vocalize in a melodic way—often a song that was recognizable, like “Moon River” or “Silent Night” or something along those lines. When he did this at night, the sounds seemed to fill the house and it was like living inside his songs. Books of poems are like that, too, aren’t they? Living inside a song. Maybe, and I’m thinking this out just now, even the most mournful song (and my dad’s hum-singing could be very mournful) has some hope in it too—? Art-making is that way. Hopeful. I always want my books, wherever they begin, to end on a more hopeful note. To discover the music in something (to write a poem) is, I think, to find some hope. The book’s cohesion comes from the ongoing engagement with that search. Even when I don’t write every day, I write in a daily way, if that makes sense. Daily life, small moments, the ups and downs—these mean a lot to me, and in writing about my father, I just kept close, on the page and off, to these touchstones, with their music, with the way one moment of life rhymes with another, or produces a contrasting music, or settles us down like a good middle C. I think I better let the metaphor go! It can do its work without me spelling it out.
TT: Turning to the overall structure of the collection, how did you land upon the five sections in a way that showcases the ongoing engagement of the search and end at a more hopeful note than when you began? How did you organize the poems within each section?
MAS: That’s a good question, and it took awhile to land on these poems (and not others), but the poems have always been in this order and I’ve always had the feeling that the book needed sections. Other than the title poem, which, as I said, I put first, the other poems are ordered chronologically. I’ve done that with my previous two books too. Originally, the manuscript included some other poems that I wrote along the way that had less to do with my parents. I decided to take those out and make them their own chapbook (still looking for a home...). What remained is the book as it is now. Chronological arrangement often works for me because I do write with a daily/seasonal sensibility. The years wheel ’round, as it were. And themes and images recur because, well, they do! And so chronological arrangements feel, to me, to highlight both progress and recursiveness. We’re rarely “all done” with something. As for the sections... many years ago, Greg Orr told me that my MFA thesis was “relentless,” which struck me as true and funny and not necessarily a bad thing, though he did say it as a caution. My thesis was in sections, which I hoped provided some moments of relief (though maybe not enough in Greg’s estimation?), and that was also my thinking with the sections in The Return from Calvary. I tried to take a breather at moments that seemed to hover a bit, to require that kind of attention and offer (or insist) on time for reflection. For example, the poem that ends the first section leaves readers thinking about this line: “If you knew our story, you’d say it’s a miracle.” Miracles warrant/happen in/produce white space, don’t they? And white space is active space, to my mind. Whether in individual poems or as whole pages that divide sections, white space quiets us, holds us fast, challenges us, and then, I believe, propels us forward.
TT: Honing in for a moment to white space and the form that the poems in The Return from Calvary take, can you speak to how for you the content leads to the form or vice versa, or both? You mention how you write in this highly condensed, relentless style, and within your short poems, you have one-stanza poems, poems in couplets, and multi-sectioned poems broken off by asterisks. For emerging poets, do you have any advice about form?
MAS: Form and content happen together. I write a line at a time. I think/listen a line at a time. That’s the music. Sometimes when I ask students to point out a line they like in a poem, they’ll actually point out a line and a half or two lines or even more. A sentence, usually. And what they’re pointing out, more often than not, is an image that appeals to them or a statement or emotion they agree with. So it’s like asking for a cup of sugar and being given a cup and a half. That’s also delicious or interesting or whatever, but I’m truly asking for a single line, a piece of music, which, yes, will connect with the poem’s overall music, but let’s just look at a line to start. Line is the poem’s unit of measure. Knowing that, for me, is probably the most important thing about poetry. I was very fortunate to have Charles Wright as a teacher and so my ear got trained early. In workshop, that’s what we’re doing: training our ear and our intuition. So that later, “form” and “content” are not things we need to think about so much; they come together, a package deal. So my advice would be to slow down when writing; not to do a “spill” and then put it into lines later but truly write a line at a time; type up poems with lines you admire; read everything out loud and also record yourself and really listen to what you’re up to. For me, typing up Plath’s poems was wonderfully useful. Oh, and if you don’t know traditional metrical patterns, learn them. Plath’s poems always have that underpinning. You can and should scan your lines. Free verse is not without form. Formlessness isn’t possible, although sloppy form is. Instead, free verse means you are listening to that poem’s unique(-ish) form and your listening is informed by all your past listening and whatever you know (or don’t) about the sounds and rhythms of language. Free verse scansion will not lead to labels such as iambic pentameter, but you will be able to track and articulate something about the rhythmic patterns of a poem and, more broadly, about your own rhythmic tendencies. And that’s interesting and useful and helps make you more and more sensitive to the nuances of language and to the fact that how you’re saying is what you’re saying. Just as we want our surgeons to have “good hands,” so too we want our poets to have good ears. This is subtle but important and develops with practice, over time.
TT: Our mutual friend Mitchell Glazier mentioned about the whimsical quality of your poetry, and I feel like that’s so right, especially with the italicized found text/ conversational snippets/ notes to self that you throw in there. In thinking about developing your authorial voice, what are some strategies that you deploy to be “very very calm, non-negotiable” while also funny and relatable in your grief, which is related to the line “I don’t want contentment to be out of the question,” I feel.
MAS: I try to write as I am. Serious and whimsical—that’s who I am. So why not put it all in? And any given day contains so much! I think I say this is in a poem somewhere. Daily life—with its snowfall and laundry and interview questions and baking projects and purring cat and barking dogs and, yes, also, its hopes and memories and vague worries—is the subject matter of my poems. I think my strategy is no strategy. I don’t want to “poem it up,” whatever it is. My poems might have a tautness that my daily speech doesn’t... but also maybe not. I think people who know me will say that I sound very much the same on and off the page. One of my favorite parts of workshop is asking a writer about their poem and hearing a much clearer and more evocative version than what’s on the page. Just write that, I tell them. Really? YES! Be as clear as you can. As you as you can. That’s best, always.
TT: Speaking of poetry and baking (a most wonderful list !) you also run a Substack called “Cake & Poetry,” which just had its second birthday. How do you feel poetry off the page feeds your poetry writing, and what do you hope to achieve by engaging with a wider audience, in sharing that “[v]ivid evening sky” or the excitement of grabbing the slice of the book cake with your name, and the like?
MAS: It’s all connected—writing and not writing and baking and teaching and being with animals (I have two dogs and a cat) and reading and gardening and weaving (which is something I also do)— and Cake & Poetry is about those connections. I feel very lucky to live a life that very often feels like art-making. Even the boring stuff, the errands, whatnot... I like a lot of that too and find it interesting, and those details find their way into my poems. Cake & Poetry does at length what the poems do more succinctly: moving among these different moments and interests and impulses—enjoying them all and, I hope, inspiring readers to notice those same kinds of things in their own lives. There are so many serious and frightening developments happening in our world and we do need to attend to those, but there are also so many interesting, inspiring, delightful, pleasingly perplexing moments... and attending to those is also important. Cake & Poetry does just that.
TT: Nodding to the prompt that you gave at the end of “A Piece of Cake,” if you could travel back in time and give advice to your younger self at your childhood home about poetry or life in general, what would it be? What feeling does it evoke for you?
MAS: Although a mix of “good” and “less good” things happened at my childhood home, as is the case for anyone, when I walk past the house now, as I often do, I’m filled with a sense of gratitude for how and where I was brought up—and by whom. My parents were deeply good people, and I feel fortunate to have had a real upbringing. If I were to travel back in time and give advice to my younger self, it would probably be to enjoy herself sooner rather than later. Not just “have fun” or whatever, but enjoy who she is. Probably that takes time for any of us and is an ongoing process, but that’s where the good stuff, including poetry, comes from: being genuinely ourselves.
TT: What are you working on today?
MAS: I’ve been lucky to be on sabbatical this fall, so I’ve been finishing up a novella I started a while back. I never expected to write prose, but for the past five years or so I’ve been drawn, first, to flash creative nonfiction and then to long-form fiction. I’ve done what everyone says to do and written things I would want to read. Learning about and liking plot has probably been the hardest thing for me, but first I tried my hand at middle grade fiction, which I really love, and I wrote three manuscripts that helped me really get a feel for how narrative works. Then I came across a thread of a story that I knew I could imagine into, and that became the novella, which is for adults. I hope my prose is lyrical, and though I write it “faster” than I probably write my poetry, the process is still not that fast. Listening to the rhythms of each sentence matters a lot to me and I try to revise the music as I go. The MG novels and the novella all need homes, so if anyone has advice about that, let me know! Of course, I’m also writing poems and probably have enough for another book, but sometimes I don’t quite want to know about that yet, if you know what I mean. Sometimes it’s good just to be with poems and not make them put on their Sunday best and get out on stage. It’s ok to go more slowly.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share with your readers or the world?
MAS: Well, let me see... probably the same things I tell my students: take good care, bring yourself along, keep in touch. And then particularly for readers of my work: thank you for reading! I hope my poems, whatever they seem to say about me and my life, also and more importantly return you to yourself, to your memories and questions, to your music, with renewed interest and compassion. That’s the whole point of poetry, isn’t it? To be a help.
Mary Ann Samyn’s seven full-length collections of poetry include The Return from Calvary, Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance, winner of the 42 Miles Press Prize; My Life in Heaven, winner of the FIELD Prize; Beauty Breaks In; Purr; Inside the Yellow Dress; and Captivity Narrative, winner of the Ohio State UP/The Journal Prize. She has also published two chapbooks.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Co-Editor of Matter.