Stephen Massimilla is a poet, painter, and author, most recently of the prizewinning poetry collection Frank Dark (Barrow Street Press, 2022) and, with coeditor Carol Alexander, the likewise multi-award-winning Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice. His multi-genre Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. Previous books and honors include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, winner of the SFASU Press Poetry Prize; Forty Floors from Yesterday, winner of the Bordighera Prize, CUNY; The Grolier Poetry Prize; the Van Rensselaer Prize, selected by Kenneth Koch; a study of myth in poetry; and award-winning translations; etc. His work has been featured recently in hundreds of publications ranging from AGNI to Denver Quarterly to Huffpost to The Southern Review to Poetry Daily. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches there and at The New School. (Website: www.stephenmassimilla.com )
In Frank Dark, philosophical and psychological investigation plumb many forms of tangible and visceral experience. This richly lyrical collection engages the environmental crisis, the pandemic, and historical and current turmoil. At once a death story and a love story, it probes the dark and sparkling corners of seasons, dreams, and journeys through various landscapes among creatures of the earth, sea, and air. Massimilla frankly confronts the scourges of alienation, blindness, blight, injury, addiction, sickness, suicide, death, grief, and underworld ghosts. Out of this deeply unsettled night come vision, compassion, love, and conscious reflections on the nature of perception, identity, myth, reality, and writing itself.
Tiffany Troy: How does the first poem in Frank Dark, “Aurora,” set up the collection that follows?
Stephen Massimilla: The first poem, “Aurora,” recalls the aubade, a lyric about waking at dawn to praise a beloved. That said, later poems in the book (such as “Almost Past That”) fit that description better. On this first page, the speaker acknowledges that we are not yet ready for a love poem: It has been “a night too long with no love.” The speaker is alone, and it’s too dark to greet the sunrise. Instead, the poet has to “squint” to “wake up images,” here identified as “fish hawks” scanning the waves along the shore.
This association between scavenging seabirds and the poet’s pursuit of images and signs is maintained throughout the book, as is the general exhortation to see. We “squint” to see better, but that action also narrows the visual field. As the book progresses, the eye of apprehension opens wider, allowing more light to enter. But widening that field of vision also requires taking in more darkness. The poem that follows, “Getaway,” which is only slightly less dimly lit, foreshadows various developing themes: not only nature and the flux of perception, but the challenges of injury, addiction, plague, blindness, and associated shades of the dead. In fact, the next poem, “What You Don’t Want to See,” is literally about the poet’s loss of eyesight, as a phase of and prelude to the deepening vision of the book. And it is a positive vision as well.
TT: I love what you said about squinting, and how that both moves toward and against the general exhortation of Frank Dark to see. Could you talk more about the “fish hawk” and how it interacts with the cover art? And if you could also touch upon how your practice as a visual artist intersects with that as a poet?
SM: It’s easy to see connections between these poems and the painting on the cover—a tenebrously expressionist self-portrait. In it, my right eye doesn’t match my left one, which merges with the superimposed eye of a lizard, which to some viewers looks like a fish eye. The ring of fire around the pupil resembles the sun’s corona during an eclipse.
Like my paintings, my poetry is very visual. Both are not only about seeing, but about looking at ways of seeing. And both are characterized by an obsession with associative phantasmagoria. I’m also a lover of rhythm, both in the musical and the visual sense. Another poem in Frank Dark, “Aftermath,” evokes the rhythm of the beam of light in and on the work of the painter in Virginia Woolf’s famous novel To the Lighthouse. The painter is the writer’s alter ego and vice versa; this interplay between art forms is a theme of mine. Several other poems in this book, such as “Little Art Plot” and “Dark Spot, Midnight, Midtown,” are to an extent about desire, love, death, and perception as represented or enacted in artwork and paintings. And in “Pieces” and “Faint-Lit-Photo-Thought,” the meta-medium is photography.
TT: I definitely sense the musical and visual rhythm in your work, and enjoy your allusion to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Could you describe for us the process of writing this collection, which makes reference to the pandemic, the news, and is rooted in New York?
SM: Though the pandemic is a relatively recent event, an earlier collection of mine, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, came out years before the first Covid outbreak. Maybe poets somehow get there first. And given the accumulated illnesses, crises, deaths, and tragedies in my family and friend circles, paradoxes such as collective isolation and the connection between love and sickness were already topics of mine. In Frank Dark, my process has continued to entail seeing contemporary and personal crises in relation to earlier, sometimes ageless, or in any event broader contexts and cycles. As particular as they may seem, these accounts are also about what the speaker of “The Clinic” calls “the greater emergency.”
In Frank Dark, my personal poem “Harvest,” for instance, references the 1918 influenza epidemic and concurrent First World War. The book likewise responds to the pandemic in at once pressing and timeless ways in poems ranging from “Quarantine Fragments” to “Inpatient” to “No Night to Drown In.” The speaker of the latter has succumbed to a struggle with the virus and is pleading for resurrection, or at least for understanding, through the help of a loved one. Since you can’t say you’ve died if you mean it literally, the poem is not just about actual death: It’s about the deadly endangerment of connection and comprehension—the longing for hope, love, and the power to appreciate, the vital recognition that the living can experience so much, including devastating loss.
TT: And can you say more about the news, and being rooted in New York?
Yes, many of these poems are set in or around New York. Others evoke Louisiana, California, Florida, the Southwest, Florence, Venice, Paris, Scotland.... “Inscape” takes us everywhere from Malaysia to New Zealand. In keeping with the impact not only of Covid but of underlying issues such as modern dislocation, psychosocial alienation, and the state of the ecosystem, the concerns of the collection are global.
This spatial range ties in with what I was suggesting about temporal range: whereas some pieces do reference the news, they’re inseparable from other political or mythic contexts. Another poem recalls European authoritarianism during part of the last century as a reference point for the “nativist wave” we’re witnessing today. The speaker also points to a Biblical subtext. Similarly, as opposed to approaching current 21st-century conflicts in isolation, the poem “Chimney” references prior waves of propaganda, war, and decimation. And the subtext is also mythic. One critic highlights how the book “taps into the mythic modern, an epic...in four parts.”
After all, there’s nothing too journalistic about the “news” in these poems. Their hauntings and promises take on the shapes of underworld and otherworldly penumbras. There are skeletal revenants slipping through the trees and over bridges, gloves poling gondolas, and even a displaced 19th-century boudoir hovering at the top of a modern urban staircase.
TT: How did you decide to put the book in its four sections? And I’m also curious about how you vary the rhythm of light and music within each section.
SM: The book fell naturally into four thematic sections, each of which begins and ends with landscape or seascape poems suffused with shade and light. These are often influenced by Symbolism and ermetismo, which also inform the more densely psychological pieces in each section, given the way sounds and symbolic qualities of words can be as significant as their semantic meanings.
The first section introduces overarching themes I’ve mentioned—not just the environment, the pandemic, and history, but estrangement, addiction, blindness, etc., as well as the quest for redemptive vision. The lineation and music open up in key places. “Map of Scars” marks one of these, where the form also reflects the sprawling quality of Los Angeles, the city this piece depicts. The form of each poem is an X-ray of its content.
The second section also opens with landscape poems, which transition to pieces about an intimate relationship beset by illness. Here the fragility of the human body is spotlighted, as also underscored by the delicacy of the music.
Then explorations of the natural world and human intimacy become even more intertwined in the third section, where the sounds and cadences range from echoing, cavernous “naturalistic” or outland patterns (as in “Inscape”) to the more “civil” music of the Shakespearean sonnet (“Northern Anniversary”).
The fourth and final section is where many of the windows onto larger cultural, familial, sociohistorical, and sociopolitical issues appear. These final pieces are often longish and, well, dark—in intense (not merely damp or dismal) ways. Their through-line still reflects the natural world and the relationship plot, along with what I’ll call epiphanic undertones, as also suggested by their musicality.
Also, so much here is “meta,” pointing to the mysteries of perception and writing. This quality is inseparable from what I was suggesting about the quest for redemptive vision.
TT: The opening and broadening of your poems as a kind of progression through the sections are impressive, and I love what you said about how the “form of each poem is an X-ray of its content.” You already touched upon the contrast between the “naturalistic” patterns and the sonnets in the third section, and I’m wondering if you could speak more about how on the craft-level you utilize craft to approach a vision of redemption?
SM: Well, I wouldn’t want the polysemous title, Frank Dark, to be misread. Even in its most tenebrous corners, this phoenix-like collection celebrates the iridescences and seductions of life: the late-in-the-day sky of experience—of language, nature, culture, art, and the gods on fire with the love of burning themselves up.
The craft and imagery in the poems suggest that if we could only take in more of that luminance, if we could only read reality more humbly and carefully, we could attain a more hopeful view of our damaged humanity. There’s something Buddhistic about this paradox. The speakers in these poems are continually probing the possibility of seeing a higher pattern of Being in, through, and despite the precarious flux of which reality—including the self that grasps it—seems to be constituted.
From the writer’s perspective, attaining this vision involves fretting over and sanctifying the nature of observations: observations even on the organ of observation, the filigree art of grasping at apprehension, and the psychology of what lies around the edge, within and beyond the rippling “Water Mirror” (to use the title of another poem). So yes, on the level of craft, the collection is expressly about grappling with how to be fully attentive, as by searching for the right deliberate and delicate course and cadence of such reflections. Among other things, these are writings about the role of language, about taking ourselves from one world into another by scripting who we are, insofar as such transliterations are possible.
TT: In light of what you just said about craft, language, paradox, scripting the self, and redemptive significance, can you explain what you meant regarding how to read the title and individual poems?
SM: Well, even the half-rhyming title Frank Dark points to tensions that are not merely bleak, but vital. To the ear and eye, these titular words go together while suggesting ambiguity. To be “frank” is to bring difficult or uncomfortable truth(s) to light. But the “dark” is by definition hidden (Old English for “conceal”). For the “dark” itself to be “frank,” it couldn’t just become light, but must be made visible as darkness in all its depth. “Frank” (after St. Francis) is also the name of the friend who first encouraged me to pursue poetry. If Frank is read as a proper noun, then Dark can be read either as a last name or an adjective. Here too there is obvious tension between the candor of the first word, which suggests seeing the light, and the shadowiness of the term that follows.
In sum, the title suggests bringing the darkness into the light, a contradictory notion, or how seeing the light requires having a dark vision to throw it into relief. In the name of seeing, however it is understood, there’s a lot to be said for steering into the darkness.
TT: And how is this tension in the self and the world and this movement toward redemption reflected in the structure of entire poems, including, for instance, the many nature poems in this collection?
SM: I know I was talking about just the book’s title; but in the structure of so many of these poems, pervasive sonic tension is often reinforced by staccato enjambment (line-breaks, of course) informing observations about so much, including the natural world. I wanted even the nature poems (such as “Pieces,” “Harbor’s Edge,” “Extreme Ratio,” and “Slow Storm”) to take on disjunctive qualities—since modern alienation involves estrangement from nature, as well as from society, and from ourselves.
That said, nature is also the site of inner conflict. I’m not really echoing the Daoist notion of seeking oneness with nature. Since well before the Transcendentalists established a movement around it (one less doubt-obsessed than that of the English Romantics), American writers have tended to romanticize Nature with a capital “N.” But even as they celebrate the mystery of life and our environs (and many of the poems also celebrate urban and suburban settings), pieces such as “Inscape”—with its long, sonically complicated, often fractured lines—invite us to peer into interlocking caverns full of natural menace in which we ourselves, for all our idealized human desires and affections, are ensnared. The speaker of another poem asks, “Why would I bother crying / that the universe is inhuman?” We forget that our needs and wants are not the causes of our being here but the effects of what did originate.
Even so, it’s still only natural to be striving for recuperation and rebirth. This collection could be seen as a series of love poems, one that charts the tenacity of human relationships through flood, heat, fog, ice, death, and sickness—even if those relationships are sometimes seen through a glass darkly.
TT: I am interested in the “glass darkly” with which you observe human relationships and the natural world. And in closing, do you have any thoughts for your readers?
SM: Relationships can be seen “through a glass darkly” because our vision is partially obscured. That’s the meaning of the Biblical phrase; and it’s apt, I think, given what I’ve said about literal and figurative challenges to sight and reliable apprehension. And yet, to recapitulate, being able to admit to the limits of our vision is what it may mean to see humbly and better—in the name of attaining a more hopeful outlook. Secondly, even though most of these relationships affirm the power of the human spirit, a few are darker or less salutary. The “he” in “Faint-Lit-Photo-Thought,” for instance, may be partly responsible for the speaker’s suicidal ideation (as she struggles to see what she sees in him, only to spiral into reflecting obsessively on her own reflections).
Though the book moves in and out of light and shadow, I see Frank Dark, at its heart, as a celebration of transformative and seasonal perceptions enacted in and through human relationships, life, art, and the built and natural worlds. Though I make no bones about the deathliness and fretfulness of existence, I do so even as a way of honoring the individual expression it enables. The perils that surround us, and the profound troubles we incur and inflict, do not negate the beauty we also witness and create—what we become while wending our way through cities and landscapes, charting their kaleidoscopic cycles, including those of their flora and fauna. After all, our perceptions and understandings mirror where and how the eye and the heart find their way. And our destiny is bound up with our understanding of language and the role it plays in our lives. On a deep level, poetry makes it possible to ponder and honor the unsettling and affirming miracle of human interaction, of compassion and love, along with the magical activity of fish and fowl, possums and iguanas, avalanches of light and air, and clouds streaked with lighting and chaos.
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.