“I wanted a ghost-taste of wild honey, a dark smear of earth: A Conversation with Joan Larkin about Old Stranger”— curated by Tiffany Troy


Joan Larkin’s newest book, Old Stranger, was published in August by Alice James Books. Five previous collections include Blue Hanuman and My Body: New and Selected Poems, both from Hanging Loose Press. A lifelong teacher, Joan has served on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence, and Smith College, among others. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Old Stranger by Joan Larkin takes the speaker’s lost steel knife as it “raked / joy onto my plate while the gauze / that wrapped my cut, reddened.” The coexistence of joy with pain forms a through-line of Larkin’s latest collection, as she paints vividly the mouth of disgust of the doctor, the O of the soprano in Medea, blood-strangers’ names out of the father’s mouth. Poems uncover the pathos behind each object, as the speaker says: “Death poem, wait. / Joan, keep walking.”

Tiffany Troy: How does the first poem, “Girls Department” set up the poems that are to follow? To me, there is the emphasis on the societal and familial expectations on a girl’s body, the joy of hot fudge, and of song.

Joan Larkin: My choice to open with “Girls Department” was more intuitive than my logical mind knew. It made sense to start with a poem set in preadolescence, an early experience of yearning and failure to fit. Now I see more clearly how this first poem sets up vibrations that recur in much of what follows it, even at the end of the book. You’re right to mention the expectations imposed on a girl’s body and behavior. The daughter is a chore, a problem to be solved. Shame is the mother’s and daughter’s shared inheritance––in this poem, assuaged by a splurge. Class is in it too (hand-me-downs, a bargain bin) and aspiration: a singing voice as something to enter contests with. Many poems in Old Stranger, as in my previous books, evoke the speaker’s relationship to her body—the house of pleasure and trauma, wounding and healing.

TT: Diane Seuss who blurbed Old Stranger called the book a “much-awaited” “miracle of compression, mystery, and innuendo.” What was the process of writing and putting together your sixth poetry collection? How is it the same or different from your previous works of poetry?

JL: My practice has become more than ever one of stripping down, cutting unnecessary words and then cutting a little  more. Listening for the music and making those cuts that bring vowel sounds closer to each other. I read aloud to hear whether the rhythm feels somehow inevitable and the language speakable. When I reread my older,  more expansive, more narrative poems, I sometimes hope I can do that again, but since Blue Hanuman, the poems have insisted on thrift. I’ll write thirty drafts to make a line more satisfying to my ear. I want it to be surprising and inevitable at the same time. Language is the bottom line. And I’m grateful for  Diane’s words “mystery and innuendo”––not obscurity. The reader matters.

TT: “Language is the bottom line,” indeed. I am wondering if you could expand a bit, for the benefit of the readers, what you mean by that. I, for one, am fascinated by the use of punctuation and the relatively short line lengths in the emergence of the poem’s often striking visuals (which typically morph by the end of the poem into something else). Can you speak a bit more about how you move from the first to the thirtieth draft?

JL: When I begin, I don’t know where the poem is headed. Some image or phrase, some intense moment I can’t dismiss from the chaotic swirl of thoughts and experiences, compels me to start writing––always by hand, in an unruled notebook (my go-to for years has been extra-large, softcover Moleskines with unlined pages that offer room to expand). Sometimes I hit a wall and don’t persist, but if I’m patient with uncertainty, sometimes a dance begins, a thought connects, a shape emerges from the emotional terrain. I tap into something I haven’t found words for in the past.

          At some point, the next phase of more conscious structuring begins. It’s play, really. I type a rough draft, print it, stare at it, read it aloud, move lines around, cross out explanations and generalizations, and physicalize any abstractions, going back and forth between computer and notebook. If a form suggests itself, I see if the poem wants to become a loose sonnet, or if there’s a pattern of repetition (for example three strong stresses to a line, or four). A rule, received or invented, helps me discern the poem’s emerging shape. There’s power in limiting one’s options. Once a draft emerges that seems to hold together––all writing, in my experience, is a house of cards!––I subject the poem to a more meticulous process of refining. The language has to be fresh. There has to be mystery and surprise.

          And sometimes, the poet friend I’ve trusted for years as my first reader will tell me that in my anxiety to control the language I’ve overdone it and that an earlier, messier version has more life!

TT: Many titles of your poems are names of objects, as is “old stranger.” For aspiring poets, do you have any tips about conveying feeling through the description of an object?

JL: Part of any poet’s work is to find the details that evoke an object––or person or place––with economy and exactness. But even a fine description can’t be an end in itself. It’s what the poet discovers deeper down that lets the poem emit light. Objects like the carbon steel knife in “Old Stranger,” the upright piano in “No One Wants Them,” or the broken figurine of a violinist in “Three-Inch Day-of-the-Dead Musician” weren’t random. They haunted me until I wrote. The poem “Old Stranger” describes the rediscovery of a missing object, which for me brought up associations with loss and death. I sought to elevate the language for the knife by comparing the opalescent rivets on its handle to the moons of Pluto and to broaden its associations by using the word “haft,” from Anglo-Saxon roots. And only in the midst of writing, I discovered the mystery of how something that creates can also wound. What resonates for me will be different for another poet, who, through the process of writing, may discover the mystery that makes the object strange and powerful. It might be useful for the aspiring poet to try holding a pen in their non-dominant hand and see what the dark side unearths.

TT: Other poems in Old Stranger are ekphrastic. What do you feel is one thing you uncovered that surprised you while writing through and after visual art?

JL: Before writing the poem “In Heaven,” I spent hours in the Pinacoteca Art Museum in Siena, a major repository of 13th and 14th century painting and sculpture. More images in one place than I’d ever seen before of the Madonna, with and without the infant, endless scenes of the Annunciation, a superabundance of saints and angels and gold backgrounds. I started to write about the art, not knowing where it would take me, and found myself focusing on a compelling Annunciation in which the Virgin looked taken aback as a boyish-looking young angel thrust a lily at her. What began as an ekphrastic poem turned out to be a two-and-a-half-line beginning that made a sudden U-Turn into a real-life “angel” and a teenage pregnancy (highly secular!) that ended in a traumatic illegal abortion. I’m always surprised by the tenacity of that memory––and surprised again at the poem’s combination of gratitude and wry, not-quite bitter questioning of the wisdom of adults with the power to shape a young person’s destiny.

TT: That journey into epiphany with the U-turn is so well put, as is your thought on the ability of poetry to question imposed social norms. You’re an experienced and well-respected educator. Do you have any thoughts for aspiring poets or your readers of the world?

         JL:  These are a few of the thoughts that still hold true for me, whether I’m the writer or the reader. It sometimes surprises me that they still need to be said––to myself and others:

Poetry involves the body in a primal way. Read your own and others’ poems aloud. Let rhythms and the sounds of words––as important as their dictionary meanings––speak to you. Dickinson’s assertion that a poem could make her “whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me” was no metaphor.

Don’t expect readers to care about your opinions. If it’s an essay, it’s not a poem. Allow the reader to inhabit an experience. Think of the urgency and immediacy of Keats’ “This living hand... see here it is––I hold it towards you.”

Resist the urge to introduce, explain, or wrap it up. In Pound’s words, “Deliver it alive.”

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.