L.S. McKee’s debut poetry collection, Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine, is the winner of the 2022 Zone 3 First Book Award in Poetry, selected by Tiana Clark. The four sections of the collection map the journey of the protagonist, Alva, as she searches for a “grove,/ with shadows deep enough/ to bite, branches both gate and nest/ and nest and grove.” I admire the tenacity and vivacity of McKee’s poems, as we relate to that itch “to open the spam email because the subject says “My dear” to connect to an “underworld of promises and surveillance.” Creature, Writing, Heart, Machine focuses on that “frayed thread of a multiverse in which you came/ as close to death as you did and didn’t die/ before I met you” as Alva the voyeur watches the “miracle of fishes,” the way “the water is calm, the bouncy heavy/ as his t-shirt billows and hope creeps in” and reenacts the potential for change.
McKee holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Recently, she received a 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant in poetry and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature. She has also received scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and has held residencies at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center.
Tiffany Troy: How does your first poem, “Alva on Getting Dumped in the Desert,” set up the poems that are to follow? To me, it introduces the speaker’s alter ego, Alva, the idea of physical restrictions placed upon women in natural and constructed places, and of Alva’s relation to men.
L.S. McKee: Thanks so much for this question, and I think you have absolutely identified the key forces at work in this poem. For me, from a dramatic and narrative standpoint, this poem serves as the inciting incident–the event that destabilizes the protagonist’s life and sets another series of events, a journey, in motion. Most simply, for Alva, this event involves catastrophic heartbreak and the revelation that her partner has betrayed her. And, yes, the poem absolutely uses the language of confinement in both its descriptions of natural and domestic spaces as a way of reflecting on the confinement of her relationship. Now that you’ve pointed that out, I realize this poem is about breaking in a number of ways: breaking up, breaking away, breaking free. Of course, Alva doesn’t know in the moment of this poem that that last force is at work–breaking free. But her relationship with men confines her and in many of the poems that follow. In terms of place, I think this poem, in the background, grapples with the concept of psychological and emotional home. The last poem in the collection, “Tender Creatures,” explores one’s relationship to desire and echoes these various constructed spaces–especially domestic spaces. There’s a bathroom in both of these poems, which seems right and sort of hilarious, now that I think about it. Where else are we most vulnerable and creaturely in our homes?
TT: Yes, we definitely are stepping into a breakup and in the poems that follow we see how Alva’s in fact breaking away from the air that gives her nosebleed to be free. Your collection turns the physical metaphorical while also forcing us to look at the materiality of things, as in “Sometimes it sings a silent, canary-throated song, / and sometimes is made of blood and muscle.”
Can you walk us through the process of writing this collection?
LSM: I worked on the collection for approximately eight years. Originally, I wanted to write a long-form narrative or epic poem that focused on a historical persona/protagonist. I wanted a reader to be transported by a sustained story. For a couple of years, I shaped the Alva character through these efforts, and did a fair amount of research to support this goal. Eventually, however, I found myself turning to Alva to explore more personal, even autobiographical experiences that I couldn’t quite explore with a traditional lyric “I.” For a long time, I thought these more contemporary Alva poems were just an exercise and that I’d find my way back to the “historical” Alva. But, eventually, I realized the opposite situation was in play–the historical Alva turned out to be the generative exercise. I began to understand that Alva allowed me simultaneously more distance and intimacy–that she freed my imagination in ways I didn’t expect. I felt more courage in writing about my own heartbreak and loneliness and that Alva offered my poems a greater universality. Once I made that realization, I committed to her as a character within a contemporary context–and doing so opened the door to many of the book’s supporting themes, especially those relevant to searching for intimacy and connection, as well as our relationships to various technologies. I was very much rebuilding my entire life as I created Alva, too.
Then, of course, there are the strange little creature poems that emerged about midway through drafting the book. These poems are much less narrative, but seek to lyrically reflect back and explore the interior states driving the narrative poems. My good friend Stacy Mattingly said, during one of our events together, that the creature poems “walk out” of the narrative poems and that feels more apt than any way I’ve found to describe them.
Writing this book was a wild ride–where I landed was quite far from my original plan. The process was full of detours and scrapped poems and experiments.
TT: I admire how you scrapped the initial plan of writing these historical pieces and went on a detour because the collection feels so much richer as a result of Alva taking on these modern resonances and feelings.
Turning next to the book’s overall structure, how did you land upon four sections? I can also see the throughline of Alva in her various guises and interacting with other people and things (like spam mail) across the poems.
LSM: I wrestled with the arc and structure of the book for a long time. Ultimately, I landed on the four-section structure for a few reasons. For me, the sections function as“acts” in Alva’s larger story in addition to organizing various sub themes in the collection. For example, in section two, where the spam email poem you note lives, we dive into Alva’s search for love alongside an exploration of how technology increasingly mediates our relationships, including how we connect and understand each other. Technology even mediates how we understand and define loneliness–and also how we seek refuge from it. This second section follows the initial heartbreak and loss in the first section. Alva is trying to move forward but it is not easy.
I also landed on four acts/sections rather than, say, three because as I pulled the collection together, I found that the “Alva and the Vanishing Woman” poems–the oldest poems in the book and ones based on a four-part sculptural series by Henri Matisse–echoed one aspect of Alva’s journey: her struggle to let go and transform. She is releasing old forms, old thoughts, and to some extent, old desires. I didn’t see that, of course, until most of the poems were written. And the Vanishing Poems are the oldest poems in the book–written years before I even had the idea of Alva. It was a lucky coincidence–or perhaps an inevitability–that these poems track a process of connections across the book’s various themes that felt impossible to describe in literal language. The Vanishing Woman piece was originally published (in Oversound) as a single poem. In organizing the manuscript, I divided this longer poem into four independent poems to provide subliminal anchors for the four acts ofAlva’s story.
TT: How does the title, Creature, Wing, Heart, Machine similarly serve as the anchors of the four acts of Alva’s story? I immediately noticed the centrality of the animal and technology, and both heart and the idea of flight (as departure) occur as motifs in the collection.
LSM: As I pulled the collection together, I found it challenging to find a title poem, or a line from a poem, that might capture all of these threads simultaneously. In particular, I hope a reader sees the animal and technology poems in conversation with one another. As I explored the abstracted, often disembodied state of the technology poems, I found myself digging into animal imagery in poems soon after. Your question also reminds me that I often switched among these “four anchors” while writing the book–almost like a braid with four threads. I’d focus for a while on the distancing experiences of technology and then I’d write a poem grounded in the physicality of the animal world–and I very much include humans in that taxonomy. At certain points in the writing process, the animal poems were probably a way for me to claw my way back into a body.
TT: I can definitely see the braiding of the four threads as well as the contrast between the animal and technology in your poems.
Do you have any closing thoughts you would like to share with your readers of the world?
LSM: Thank you so much for this conversation and for your thoughtful questions. My hope is that the book is relatable and engaging for readers who don’t always reach for poetry–I hope Alva invites them in!
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.