January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (February 2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem, “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial,” was a co-winner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2024 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). O’Neil earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA from New York University. She lives in Beverly, MA.
January Gill O’Neil
https://www.januarygilloneil.com
Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?
January Gill O’Neil: I love the idea of obsessions and complications in poetry. Glitter Road is the result of my search for identity, belonging, and how landscape can influence a narrative. In 2019, I won the John and Renee Grisham Fellowship at the University of Mississippi, so we moved to Oxford, MS for one academic year. The experience of being in an unfamiliar environment, learning about Mississippi’s enslaved population, and researching the legacy of Emmett Till gave me the opportunity to focus on my work and myself in a way that had never happened before. The work became a journey to into the past, which is never really the past.
There is a good bit of joy, specifically Black joy, in this book. And there is no joy without pain. I love thinking about joy as an obsession!
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?
JGO: I think of myself as a free-verse poet. That being said, I tried my hand at lots of forms in this book: the ghazal, duplex, pantoum, and prose poems, but mostly I relied on the American sonnet. And if I wasn’t writing in a traditional form, I imposed couplets and tercets on the lines to give my thoughts a structure. It wasn’t until Glitter Road was it the revision stages that I really looked at the individual poems against the entire manuscript and noticed the number of forms in this book. No one was more surprised than me.
LO: What’s the relationship between the speaker’s “I” and you, yourself? How is the book’s “I” informed by your I and/or eye?
JGO: In my workshops, I tell my students that we should allow a little distance between the speaker and the poet. But I am the “I’ in my poems. I work hard to make sure the “I” doesn’t take over the narrative, but this book is an amalgam of firsthand experiences, observations, and historic explorations. Suffice it to say that the speakers voice both is and isn’t me. I hope my voice informs, transcends, and reaches for the universal.
LO: What felt riskiest to you about this work?
JGO: There are points in the Glitter Road where I feel extremely vulnerable. The first poem, “Autopsy,” about my ex-husband’s passing, always makes me uneasy. I have yet to read it in public. In an earlier version it was buried in the manuscript. But we decided it was a strong lead-off poem. And I have some intimate, risqué poems that I love but are extremely personal (see “Clit Ode”).
LO: How do the book’s aesthetics inform its ethics, or, how do its ethics inform its aesthetics?
JGO: During our time in Mississippi, my daughter and I attended the re-dedication of the Emmett Till River Site Memorial Marker at Graball Landing. Standing by the murky waters of the Tallahatchie River, where Till’s bloated body was discovered, ignited my interest in researching his story. I visited historic sites and engaged with folks who had firsthand knowledge of the events from 1955.
My journey into my own sense of Blackness, of womanhood, informed Glitter Road. This book was shaped by the natural landscape and historical context, which influenced every aspect, right down to the imagery, rhythm, tone. I needed time to process, imagine, and ultimately share my experiences through my writing. The aesthetics are not merely a backdrop but are essential in conveying the weight of the narratives and histories explored in this collection.
LO: What’s your sense of the aural life of this work? What role did sound or music play in the generative process, in revision?
JGO: Rivers and roads were an integral part of Glitter Road, something I am discovering as I read the book in front of audiences. The cadence and silences of each line of each line shaped these poems. Often, a line would start with a sound that needed to find its way onto the page. In revision, I paid close attention to how the poems would read aloud. I wanted language that lifts off the page visually and aurally, so that the reader experiences as many of the sense as possible.
LO: How did the book’s structure unveil itself to you? What emerged to shape its architecture?
JGO: It wasn’t easy. How to you manage poems about Massachusetts and Mississippi? How do you tell the story of Emmett Till and a return to romance? It took me a while to get there, but my editor (Baron Wormser) suggested that we put the poems into mini sections to help guide the reader through the collection. The order was not something I could at first, so I was thrilled to collaborate with Baron and CavanKerry one more time.
Throughout the book, there are magnolias that we use as a visual cue for the section breaks. This allowed gave the Mississippi poems space and gives the reader a chance to balance the heavier topics with the lighter ones.
Fun fact: the magnolia line art was designed by my daughter, who was in high school at the time. Now she a sophomore at MassArt. Having her be a tangible part of this book is probably the thing I love the most about Glitter Road.
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?
JGO: David Byrne’s American Utopia. Michael Kiwanuka’s Love and Hate. Jon Batiste’s We Are. As I tour, Beyonce’s Renaissance. Diane Seuss’ Frank. Law and Order: SVU. Long walks. Hot tea with lemon and too much sugar.
LO: How has it been to shift out of the creative space of this book? What are you working on now?
JGO: I’m a poet looking for a poem. Hard to create a new routine when I’m busy. But I remember something that Nick Flynn said when he visited my university via Zoom that I’ve taken to heart. Someone asked about writer’s block. He said (I’m paraphrasing), I don’t worry about not writing. When I’m not writing, that means I’m living.”
Lisa Olstein is the author of five poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (2006), Lost Alphabet (2009), Little Stranger (2013), Late Empire (2017), and Dream Apartment (2023). She has also published two books of nonfiction: Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020), a book-length lyric essay on the intersection of pain, perception, and language; and Climate (Essay Press, 2022), an exchange of epistolary essays co-written with Julie Carr.
Olstein’s honors include a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, Hayden Carruth Award, Writers League of Texas Discovery Book Award, and Sustainable Arts Foundation award. She is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs. She is also the lyricist for the rock band Cold Satellite and curates an interview series with poets about their new books for Tupelo Quarterly.