To Attend to the Sacred in Those I Love:
A Conversation with Brian Turner about The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, and The Goodbye World Poem
Brian Turner is the author of five collections of poetry (from Here, Bullet to The Wild Delight of Wild Things) and a memoir (My Life as a Foreign Country) and is the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres anthologies. A musician, he has also written and recorded several albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and The Retro Legion’s American Undertow. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando, Florida, with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.
The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, and The Goodbye World Poem are three recent poetry collections by Brian Turner, from Alice James Books. They inspire a deep renewal of awareness of the natural world, on the fields of war, and in the aftermath of devastation and grief. Turner teaches us to look at others and ourselves anew again through travel overseas, covered as much by “dead peasants insurance” as by “an inside pitch” that “can alter your life.”
Tiffany Troy: Am I correct to see the three collections, The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, and The Goodbye World Poem, as a trilogy, divided by theme, broadly-speaking, which then affect both the tone adopted and the forms utilized?
Brian Turner: Absolutely! I tried to make each collection work independently of the other two; but if read as a whole/trilogy, my hope is that readers will find threads and undercurrents and more developed one collection to another. The same is true of the multi-media aspect of the trilogy—where I have tried to mirror the process and intentions in audio and video landscapes. It’s my hope that tone is in harmony with the form and structure as the poems layer one upon another.
TT: We begin the The Goodbye World Poem, with “Geologic,” where the lost love Ilyse Kusnetz ground her fascination with the fossils of “the early people, trapped between one geologic era and another,” with a looking toward and beyond her death. What was your process in writing about grief through this almost cosmic view of the world, of jellyfish and seagulls?
BT: Ilyse’s poetry and vision have helped me in the years since her crossing over, and that is true both on and off the page. In The Goodbye World Poem, I’m attempting to be in conversation with her work and vision as a poet and human being, grappling with both personal loss and global climate change. She loved the ocean especially, and so it’s no surprise that I found myself seeking meaning in this environment, with jellyfish and seagulls offering ways for me, perhaps, to begin falling in love with the world once more.
TT: I admire how you pay tribute to Ilyse and her love of the ocean, which is carried over I the graphic design of the three collections. The black and white photographs of the jellyfish and the incorporation of the QR code to music albums is especially striking. How does being a musician influence the putting together of the collection as a work of art? Do you have any tips or cool experience tidbits in adding to your collection an artistic or musical touch?
BT: Oh, thank you so much, Tiffany! For years, decades really, I’ve kept these different artistic pursuits separate. In my house, there’s even one room where I house musical instruments and art/media supplies and equipment. That’s where I play bass and prepare the ink to paint on rolls of rice paper or pads of watercolor paper. Another room serves as an office—with a desk, computer, printer, bookshelves, etc. Over the past two decades, I’ve begun to blur the lines between the mediums, and I find myself shifting back and forth between them more and more as the years go by. When dealing with grief, I’ve found that language has helped me in some ways to learn and to process and, at a more basic level, to find ways to love and live on with Ilyse (as well as other loved ones who have crossed over the past twelve years). Music has opened doorways into experience that I couldn’t access with verse or prose.
I’d encourage artists to experiment with other artforms, especially if it offers a form of play or sparks curiosity and helps one to explore ideas in new ways.
TT: That’s definitely great advice for artists looking to incorporate interdisciplinary forms in their works. In your Library of Congress reading, you speak about keeping notes in a notebook during the War in Iraq. I am wondering if the writing of The Dead Peasant’s Handbook took place in tandem with or apart from work from your two other collections? In “Paperwork,” for instance in lieu of awe I felt the perniciousness in the gruel of living and the idea of the tally which your writing of “the dead woman lying on the roadside” (in “Twelve Roses for the Dead” really pushes back against).
BT: Fascinating question! And tonally pitch perfect. The thing that’s different here is that the opening section of The Dead Peasant’s Handbook includes several poems that were written over the course of two decades. I assumed initially that those poems might be part of a loosely-connected volume of poems some point down the road, maybe for a selected, but as The Dead Peasant’s Handbook began to gel, I realized they served as an intriguing counterpoint to the third section in the book, which includes poems more overtly rooted in love. That’s why there’s an identical number of poems in those two sections, and I tried to create each poem in conversation with its ‘pair’—whether in structure or in approach/intent.
TT: I am also curious about “The Goodbye World Poem” in the eponymous collection. In what ways does the poem being the trilogy together?
BT: I sure hope I’m not being coy or obtuse in this response to your good question and insight, but for the most part I feel that answering this question with too much depth would be a way of interrupting the reader’s good work (and, hopefully, delight). Maybe this is helpful, though—I did try to create final poems in each book that would serve to both complete the book itself while also functioning as a 3-part conversation across the trilogy. Each of these three poems has a two-fold conversation woven into it (or at least that’s the intent): an intimate conversation between the speaker and a beloved that I hope also blends into a larger conversation rooted in love.
TT: I definitely can see how it’s a larger converation rooted in love, which the reader can uncover for themselves in reading the triology. Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
I’m a reader and a lover of the art, like you, and so I’m curious to see what writers will discover for us all. If you’re a writer, too, then I look forward to what you will bring us, word by word and line by line. We live in a phenomenal time for poetry, an age which offers a wave of voices filled with wisdom, witness, pain, beauty, humor, justice, interiority, profound insight, and love and love and love and love.
If I were to offer advice to writers, then I’d say something I tell myself, too: If you’re going to write, then be sure the words are fueled with ink from the reservoir of love.
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, and Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review.