“To Turn My Body Another Direction: A Conversation with Amanda Hawkins” — curated by Lisa Olstein


Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?

Amanda Hawkins: The book begins with a series of questions, and though the questions themselves morph in the distance as the poems roll along, that spirit of searching—of seeking something out—was the impetus for this book and what kept me writing.

More specifically, I was asking, perhaps: Why is anyone so affected by the world? (Because I certainly was/am:) By belief. By unbelief. By personal loss. By global loss. By the fact of a body. By the fact of the body of a whale articulated. It is my first book, and you can tell. The questions I asked that urged this particular work were often oriented toward earth and the bodies of the earth and a desire to know what the connection was and why I was needing to turn to poetry to explore it. I was also asking what silence did for the grief I held. I was asking what the effects were of solitude. I was asking, what do I need to do, where do I need to go, what do I need to write to make a place and shape for the grief I feel.

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?

AH: What is being published is the shortest version of this book. At various points in the revision process I let the manuscript bulk up to its thickest self. What remains is, I think, its truest form: the most quiet, the most spacious, the most at once sprawling and the most brief. The book has been—as it should be—pared down to its most essential, like the cremation process. What is left isn’t even bone.

There is something about the excess of some of these poems that go longer, interspersed and met with slips of text that also needed to happen. Among other things, the book contends with a need to speak, to articulate, but the space and silence needed to get to that eventual outpouring is wide and deep. That is what I think of first when I think of the form of the book as a whole. The poems themselves are another sacred site entirely. There are prose or near prose pieces here. They cycled through their own iterations. I played a whole lot with form as I was trying to figure out what each poem was trying to say. What I love about looking at the book as a whole though, is that I see I knew some things about the book before it even became itself. I knew it needed longer poems. I knew it needed prose. I knew it needed some thick-waisted poems, and I knew it needed some fairly short ones. I knew some poems would travel all over the page, and that pause and line break would play a huge role.

In other words, I knew there’d be a lot going on, simultaneously, just like in the poems, but that there would be echoes across the manuscript and echoes in the poems, and silences.

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?

AH: All my work thus far begins with a personal “I.” (It’s me, hi.)

Revision and time push that “I” into an adjacent persona that is definitely no longer me the poet, but is sometimes close.

Your question here, “How is the book’s ‘I’ informed by your I and or eye?” points to exactly what I think happens: The poem acts as a portal, a prophecy even, where I write something and in the writing and in the revision I will learn to see not just the words I wrote but the poem that is deeper than my own knowledge or insight. My “best” poems—ie the poems I personally find most exciting—are the ones I might have begun with my own vision or thought or perspective but have managed to allow my eye to take over, to see with the prophetic portal eye rather the experiential self, to tap into the subconscious and the unconscious and the collective I can’t often access except in meditation or on the page.

LO: Did you have in mind any identifiable recipients for the utterance of this work? Did your sense of how or to whom the work was speaking evolve?

AH: Whenever I hear this kind of question, I think of Annie Dillard’s mention of who she thought would read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She said—and I am paraphrasing here—that she’d hoped a few monks and nuns would read it.

True or not for her, I’ve felt similarly. When I wrote this book I had in mind a scattering of people who have a lot of feelings about the world and their own losses and perhaps need and want to process that grief via the physical realm: rock, bone, oceanic heft, wide swaths of desert land.

This is starting to sound like a dating app description of my ideal love interest: introverted science/writer/artist types who don’t smile a whole lot, post-religious free agents who refer to their loss of faith like one refers to the loss of a soulmate, people whose person has died, people whose landscape has changed, people who have come face to literal face with death and didn’t know what to do with the meeting. And maybe also my mom.

LO: What felt riskiest to you about this work?

AH: The space. The repetition. Allowing personal and collective losses to sit close together and receive equal attention. The act of articulation. The sitting down to write it all in the first place.  

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?

AH: I read my poems out loud often. It can be embarrassing, but without trying I internalize and memorize quite a hunk of my own lines. I do this because the cadence and rhythm and the sound the words matter so much to what the poems want to do. They are often prayers and songs, and repetitions and refrains happen or need to happen. Sometimes I choose a word because of how it sounds and re-sounds rather than what it means. The sound informs the meaning. In the initial writing, but also in the revision. It has to sound right to my ear for it to be right on the page.

LO: How did the book’s structure unveil itself to you? What emerged to shape its architecture? 

AH: The center was always Lessons on Ashes. The beginning was originally as it is now—with the personal losses frontloaded, filtered through the ashes of the center, and then woven wider in the third part. There were some versions in between where I tried to pull to the beginning poems I thought were more “important”—because they were not so close to my personal losses—but that just felt false. There was something more true about the beginning section starting from personal loss, leaning up against environmental degradation, going through ashes, and then coming out with essentially everything the poems touched covered in ash.

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? 

AH: Pilgrimage was a huge part of writing these poems. I intentionally took myself places and saw things that mattered to me for reasons I couldn’t quite name. I went on residencies and retreats. I visited landscapes and landforms like one visits the dead. To remember. To honor. To listen.

I also needed a ton of stillness and silence. These were years I woke early and daily. At that time, I attended a church, so I went to church. I listened to sermons. I said prayers. I listened on repeat to Jose Gonzales and String Theory on YouTube recorded at the Royal Festival Hall in London. I listened also on repeat to his “Every Age” each for hours on end.

Anything to mimic silence.

LO: How has it been to shift out of the creative space of this book? What are you working on now?

AH: As this book is my first it was kind of glorious to move out of the space of creating these pages. I remember the moment I realized I was writing something new: I was at Bread Loaf. It was the last day of the conference, and Amber Flora Thomas was leading our workshop in a composing exercise with slips of paper we had just written prophecies on for each other. I unintentionally drew my crush’s prophecy. I don’t remember what it was, but there was a bear involved, and as I wrote the poem that is now in a manuscript I’m just finishing I remember thinking, oh my god, this is it—this is the first poem of a new project.

I had gone to the conference hoping to shift towards something new, and there it was. There was a bear. There was the crush. It was revelatory because with a first book so many of us are somehow convinced we couldn’t possibly have anything else to say to the world. We’ve exhausted our creative and spiritual stores. It was revelatory because at the same time—the same week, in fact—I realized I’d have to come out and leave my long-term very straight marriage if I was ever going to write another word. And then I wrote that poem. And I had that crush. And I started to turn my body another direction—away from the manuscript I’d brought to workshop, away from my childhood sweetheart I knew I couldn’t be with anymore, and towards this new thing, these new things.

So. What am I working on now? I am writing what might be either a continuation of that manuscript I started at Bread Loaf—a book that explores the connections between desire for another body and the desire to write—a kind of extended ars poetica, or I am writing a wholly new manuscript, with a lot in it about relationships, love, crushes, and my recent break up. In contrast to the bleak and burned landscapes of When I Say the Bones, this manuscript has a lot of flowers in it. It has some gardens. More biblical figures. More salt. It even has a sense of humor.

Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections and two books of nonfiction: Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press 2006); Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press 2009); Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press 2013), Late Empire (Copper Canyon Press 2017), Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press 2020), and Climate, a book of epistolary essays co-written with Jule Carr (Essay Press 2022). Dream Apartment, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2023. Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, Pushcart Prize, Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and Writers League of Texas book award. A member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, she currently teaches in the New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers MFA programs.