When I moved to Austin for my undergraduate degree, I instantly became homesick. I missed the quite nature of life in the Rio Grande Valley. I missed my family. I missed the friends who stayed behind and those who also moved to other cities to begin their studies. The Austin of 2007 isn’t the Austin it is today, but it was a large city by every standard. I had to adjust to the reality that I lived among so many people from all across the globe. I was a part of the landscape’s fabric, and as I read V. Penelope Pelizzon’s newest poetry collection, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press 2024), I realized every place we live stays with us in some shape or form, that our worldview changes (for the better hopefully) because of it, and that we learn more not only about other people, but about ourselves in the process. In a little under 100 pages, Pelizzon takes us to from Namibia to New York to the emotional terrains where there is no center, where we must navigate the very nature of language to arrive at a clearer understanding of who we are and who we want to be. If my homesick self had read A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye in 2007, I don’t think I would have had the everyday epiphanies that Pelizzon’s speaker has in this book. However, I’m sure that if Pelizzon’s speaker had met me then, she would have reassured me that this new city and its new people were to be cherished, and that through the simple act of embracing the unknown, I could make any place home.
Esteban Rodriguez: Penelope, thank you immensely for your time. Poets are incredibly attuned to the idea of place, to exploring the areas they call home and navigating the cultural labyrinths they find themselves in throughout the course of their travels. You’ve lived in a number of places, including Italy, Namibia, Syria, and South Africa, and some of the experiences there are found throughout your newest collection, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye. In what ways has your time in these locations provided inspiration for your poetry? Has there been a place that has been more influential than others?
V. Penelope Pelizzon: Thanks for this thoughtful question, Esteban. There are a few branching answers.
First, to give context, it’s useful to know that I’m married to a diplomat, and his work takes him to different parts of the world, usually for two- or three-year periods. I’ve been lucky in that these places have all been wildly interesting to me. So learning about them — their history, their inhabitants, their environments, their material and literary and oral cultures — has been the deepest pleasure of my life. And I’ve tried to live in each place as an inquisitive learner, so that I can meet people and have a life there and not be totally ignorant about what’s going on.
That said, my poems often germinate from small events in daily life. Maybe there’s some faint sense of a cultural “rhyme” across continents; I can feel that some events are connected, if I can only untangle how. Or I might get a prickly sensation of cognitive dissonance, a disconnect between things that a local person would not notice. For example, I had a moment of terrifying disorientation on my first night in Windhoek when I looked up and saw that my familiar constellations were either missing or “upside down”! Of course, the heavens had not changed—I had! I had traveled so far into the southern hemisphere that I was flipped head over heels and Orion was laughing at me! The reverse effect is also a gift. Every time I come back to the USA, I see how weird many American expectations can be, and for a few days, until the palimpsest of locations fades, I feel like an alien. This is an incredibly useful experience for a writer in any genre.
Another way to answer this question is to say that each place offered me the experience of trying to have daily life in a language other than English. There’s something deeply generative for me about wrestling to understand and be understood in Italian or Arabic, and then to feel the delicious thrilling ease and fluency English syntax offers when I sit down to work on a poem.
In Namibia and South Africa, although the official language was English, most people around me were multilingual. My students at the Polytechnic University in Windhoek, where I taught a creative writing class in 2012, were astonishing. English was everyone’s third, or fourth, or fifth language. I was always conscious of the fact that I was, linguistically, the most limited person in the room. That’s a useful reminder for any English-only writer.
It’s also relevant that these poems were written over a ten-year period and move through times before that, so I was a poet at different life stages in these different locations. The speaker thinking about her students in Namibia and Syria is quite different from the one observing gentrification in her Brooklyn neighborhood or caring for her cranky elderly mom in Turkey and rural Connecticut. While topographical spots are obvious here, temporal location (and dislocation) also shapes these poems.
ER: While the locations might change, there is a recurring character that I found absolutely fascinating, the dog. It seems as though the speaker throughout these poems cannot escape the literal and figurative image of a canine, and she goes as far as to question how this relationship developed in the poem “The Soote Season”:
What hunger led the first hominid to feed
scarce meat to a wolf and thereby nurture
trust attuned to our every gesture
more fully than we trust our species?
As a dog dad and someone who has a soft spot for any and all dogs, I seem to find myself in the speaker’s camp. Can you speak about how dogs emerged as a theme in your work, from the title to various scenes throughout the collection? What is your relationship with our species’ best friend?
VPP: A friend joked that I need to issue a warning: this is NOT an instruction manual on how to train seeing eye dogs! Actually, the title comes from Holinshed’s Chronicles, and it’s sort of a wry clapback to a sixteenth-century author who published some miserly things about middle aged women and their pets.
But it’s true – there are a lot of canines sniffing about in some of these poems, aren’t there? This wasn’t intentional; I have no grand theories about dogs, except to note that they extend the sensory perceptions of the observer. Going for a walk with a dog is a very different experience than walking without one. They force you to venture outside and notice things multiple times every day, which can be a real tonic if you’re someone who is by nature bookish or reclusive.
All the dogs in the book are composites. But there was once a dog of my heart, a scrappy Namibian village dog adopted from the SPCA in Windhoek, who traveled the world with me for a decade, and his spirit certainly informs some of the poems. Like Thomas Hardy’s pooch Wessex, my guy rarely met a human he didn’t want to bite. He was terrifying, such a bad dog! Yet every morning we looked deeply into each other’s eyes and blinked dreamily at one another and he made little whuffling sounds and I was inexplicably happy. His death was devastating; I have only five senses now.
ER: The animal theme is totally unintentional here, but I’ve been listening to the album Rat Saw God by the band Wednesday, and the second song “Bull Believer” clocks in at eight minutes and 30 seconds. There are ten songs in total, and each averages about three to four minutes, so placing such a long song at the beginning of the album is quite interesting. But this got me thinking about the long poems “Animals & Instruments” and “Of Vinegar Of Pearl.” Can you speak a bit about the poems and their placement in the collection? How did you go about organizing the book as a whole?
VPP: Your musical reference is so relevant here because it’s sonic qualities, as much as narrative or thematic ones, that shaped the book’s architecture. We’re at a moment when prose autobiography sells well, and there’s often a sense that a book of poems, too, should narrate a life story or explore a single main issue. Consequently, there are a lot of contemporary collections of what’s essentially versified memoir, with a narrative arc tracing what happened to a single speaker.
Gaze Hound includes plenty of narrative–these are story-telling poems, for sure! And there are leitmotifs; after all, the book begins and ends in gardens that, for the poems’ speakers, offer a kind of messy, complicated paradise. But when arranging the finished poems, I was working to intersperse musical patterns and rhythmic pace as much as elements of story. So, I wanted the two long poems that anchor the book to sit apart from each other, with breathing room offered by more lyric poems around each one. And generally I wanted poems that use similar techniques to have some space between them. So, for example, I didn’t want to sit a free verse poem in irregular rhymed tercets, like “Blue Hour,” right next to a poem like “Cliche,” which is free verse in irregular rhymed couplets. Conversely, I did want “Blue Hour” to be close enough to “Ill-starred,” with its triple-rhymed haiku stanzas, so that someone reading consecutively would have the pleasure of hearing tercets that sound really different. Likewise, I wanted to intersperse the poems in syllabic lineation with others whose lines are built on different musics. Overall, I wanted to create a sense that, while there are clear thematic lines through the book (it’s not a miscellany by any means), there’s sonic variety and texture in the reading experience. Creating that ear-candy texture is where the real pleasure lies for me in writing.
ER: I’m so glad you mentioned “Blue Hour,” because this poem has occupied my mind quite a bit, and each time I read it, I see myself within each “hypnotic tick / of keyboard.” The poem centers on staying late at work to accomplish a task that is taking up too much time, but I couldn’t help but also relate that same feeling of “failure” the speaker is experiencing to the perceived failure one experiences as a writer. There have been countless days and nights where I’ve stared blankly at a computer screen, wishing for the words to come so that I can “be somewhere else, or / someone different.” But the struggle is part of the process, so I’m wondering what emotional and psychological journeys you undergo when composing a poem. Additionally, how do you define success as a writer?
VPP: Esteban, it’s so poignant to me that you mention your own sense of that struggle. Yes!
Over here, we’ve hit that point in the semester where I’m primarily a creature who reads and comments on student work. Or I write program assessment justifications explaining why the cap on our Creative Writing courses should not be raised to an unmanageable number. Or I write grants to fund next year’s visiting writers. Or, because UConn is getting hit with a completely unnecessary austerity budget, along with scores of colleagues I write testimonials to state legislators. I’m giving a reading tomorrow night, but when I pick up Gaze Hound, I have a real sense of “Who wrote this?” It feels like all I’m capable of right now are emails and marginalia.
For so many of us, then, before getting to the emotional and psychological journey of composing a poem, there’s simply the journey of being a person in the world with a job that demands oodles of time and emotional energy. (And this whole problem is infinitely harder for my colleagues in contingent positions or other sectors of the gig economy or in other parts of the world – I could go on and on about that.)
I realize your question is about the creative rather than the practical side of writing life, but it’s hard to disentangle the two. I think especially for writers who grow up in somewhat precarious financial situations, if you actually land in a reasonable job, you want to do it well. And if you’re teaching, you want to do well by your students. Many of my students here at UConn are first generation; they’re working to be in school, accumulating student loan debt, without much of a safety net. On top of that, it’s just a really hard time to be twenty years old: the climate is collapsing, democracy seems to be collapsing, there’s war and catastrophe on every front, the humanities are collapsing, the publishing world feels like it’s collapsing — think of the journals and distributors that shuttered in the past year. LGBTQ+ students are vulnerable, DEI is under attack...there too, we could go on and on. So how does one give genuine constructive critique and not just squishy praise to newer writers who are in a state of constant anxiety? How does one lead classes that are rich and rigorous but also nurturing and playful and experimental spaces for writers of all levels? And then—then—how do you create enough psychic distance and time away from that to plunge into your own weird imagination and experiences in a truly unfettered way?
A few things I’ve learned over the years, also practical. I apply for a lot of grants for time away from teaching, so I’ve been able to secure large blocks of time to sink into my own work. I’m very possessive of my time when I’m not teaching. I’m quite introverted and my mind needs a lot of daydreaming and nonverbal puttering around as well as time to read deeply and widely, so I avoid most social things. When I’m in my deep poem-writing phases, I don’t go to many readings or public literary events...this is helped by the fact that I usually flee the country and am situated somewhere that’s not my usual space, as noted earlier. I take a lot of long walks, I noodle around with languages, I go back to the scratchy notebooks I keep pretty regularly, I try to get a sense of what the real subjects are for me at the moment, bubbling along under the surface.
I trust that if something is a real subject for me, my undermind will be nibbling away at it in the parts of the semester when I’m not writing poems. I do keep messy notes all the time—snippets of observations, lines from things I’ve read, questions, peevish thoughts, fears– and these are often the spoor of a subject. So, I might be sketching out lines toward something or testing out the possible directions a metaphor could go in the margins, as it were, for some months before I can actually sit down and connect deeply to it.
In my intense working months, I’ll often have a longish “major” poem that I’m wrestling with, as well as a couple of shorter lyrics on the side. I’ll work on the longer thing day after day until I hit a wall—often it will be some narrative problem I don’t know how to solve, a real “what happens next?” issue. Or a “how do I actually feel about this subject?” dilemma. Those are points, then, when turning to shorter poems or translations for a few weeks helps. If I come back to a long poem after a month of working on other poems and it’s still exciting to me, that’s a sign to go on with it. Often, if it’s still alive for me after some time away, I can see a way around the problem that had stopped me. Then I can go on again until I hit the next wall.
Some poems take a long time. For example, the poem “Animals & Instruments” was started in early 2013 in Namibia and finished in Milan in 2021. That one took me eight years and three continents to figure out. I had a sense of the geographical and emotional triangulation between Namibia, Syria, and Connecticut early on, but I had to really overwrite that poem and then pare away heavily. There are scores of pages, many characters, and many scenes that went into the wastebasket. In that poem there’s a scene of boiling a camel skull and then conversation about a blowjob in an old crusader castle—those details are in the first version, but just about everything else changed!
It’s maddening to me that my process often involves massive overwriting and then aggressive cutting, but that’s just how it is; I can’t seem to get to the right place unless I go through that whole ordeal. And that is a real psychological journey! I’m working on a new poem now that has been accumulating in pieces in my notebook since 2021. I have a draft of it that gestures towards where it needs to go, but it’s just a kernel, and I can tell there’s more growing around it. It both draws me in with exhilaration, because I need to see what it’s about, and also keeps me away, because I’m terrified of how taxing it will probably be to follow it to the end. But then, why else write poems other than this process and challenge? I have no idea what the poem will be when I’m done with it. I have no idea who I will be when the poem is done with me..
Success as a writer? Well, there are so many human experiences that no one has yet written about in English, in part because for a long time we were only listening to a small number of voices. If I can get just a few of those experiences into language in a way that satisfies me, that would be success. (Of course I hope that readers find the poems and feel themselves excited as well as enlarged by them... but an author can’t control readership. I think that way madness lies, to worry too much about who is reading your work. You have to do the work you need to do, and see where it goes, and maybe some readers will meet you there.)
ER: In the same vein as “Blue Hour,” “Wishes for Fifty” has stayed with me long after I put your book down. There is a sense of acceptance of what can and cannot be changed the longer one is a writer in this world, and the following lines capture that feeling so well:
It’s obvious you’ll never
step in that river again.
But let your mind spill
now and then with sources
you’d skinny-dip
once more if you could.
Intimacies? Let there be
lascivity with sexy
librocubicularists . Loneliness
only in tonic doses
for its delicious silences.
And dusks, when memory’s
a glass jar dipped from a steam
with curls of murk
wildly turning: let them settle
until the water clears.
So clear it tempts
your sip. Salud—
here’s water under
all the bridges
you burned.
How has your writing evolved over the years? Has your appreciation of your own work changed?
VPP: Of course I’d like to believe that my poems have become more compellingly my own over the years, less predictable, better able to cover unexpected territory and then delve deeply into nuances of experience that haven’t yet been written about much. Is that really the case? That’s probably up to readers to decide. I do think the sonic texture of my work has changed dramatically; my ear can hear sound patterns that were not clear to me earlier on. Certainly the poems have become more playful (some might say more baroque, or even too baroque) since I started actively trying to translate and think through other languages.
Appreciation is a hard thing. Honestly, what happens is that, because I work slowly, by the time a poem is done and published, it generally feels ancient to me. Seeing each of the Gaze Hound poems again in print...it can be a little like bumping into an old lover. I feel a sort of nostalgic tenderness –we went through so much together in the heat of composition! But now our interests lie elsewhere and we’ve gone in different directions.
ER: In the absence of poetry, what sustains you?
VPP: I’m not sure that there’s ever an absence of poetry, or the stuff of poetry. Although there are often long months where I’m not writing poems per se, it does feel like – if I pay careful attention to it all – the daily exchanges and frustrations and awkwardnesses and happinesses and confusions are the gear and tackle and trim of future poems. And the buzz that runs almost imperceptibly under each day is: “will there ever be another poem, and what will it do?” Later, when I’m working intensively, I do find that plenty of quotidian experiences I didn’t realize I was mentally storing are there and available to me. (This is where keeping a notebook of regular messy jottings helps.)
One thing I can’t live without daily, though, is reading. It’s a way for me to escape the sound of my own voice, which in the teaching part of the year can come to feel like a constant background nattering. I read poetry old and new, of course, but often my great pleasure is in other genres. I do read history fairly systematically, depending on what I’m thinking towards in my writing. Now, for example, I’m tinkering with a poem that’s set partly in Ankara and partly in Venice, so I’m reading a lot about the history of the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans! What stories! Will that history come into the poem? I don’t know yet. But it feels like an important resonating surface for some of the personal material the poem seems to want to explore.
And obviously great fictional prose is fantastic for poems, just to hear how many ways there are to build a sentence. When my mother died in 2021, I spent about a year of evenings just listening to 19th- century novels on Audible. Weeping uncontrollably again? Try a little Sense and Sensibility for tonic! Can’t get out of bed? Anton Lesser reading a chapter of Little Dorrit will put you right! I really did think “The amount of time it will take me to listen to all of Dickens being read aloud will be about equivalent to the Victorian mourning period, and then I’ll be restored and can get on with it.” And it basically worked. I still burst into tears randomly, but I can laugh at the bursts.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He lives with his family in south Texas.
V. Penelope Pelizzon’s next book, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth By the Eye, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series in 2024. Her previous poetry collections are Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time (2014) and Nostos (2000), which won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. She is also the co-author of Tabloid, Inc: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives (2010), a study of the relations among American sensation journalism, photography, and film from 1927-1958. Pelizzon’s awards include a 2019 Hawthornden Fellowship, a 2012 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, the 2012 Center for Book Arts chapbook award, and a “Discovery”/ The Nation Award. She is a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.