I was first introduced to For Today, by Carolyn Hembree, through Henk Rossouw’s critical introduction to an excerpt from the title poem in Tupelo Quarterly, Issue 31. For Today is immersed in the geography of the Gulf South, and the speaker’s home in New Orleans. It opens with the sonnet crown “Some Measures”: “Less of, less often, I see you still, free head / now gourd in wind, now bauble in crib light/ my baby” and is interwoven with the speaker’s “swain song fading,” her grief in losing her father. We follow a mercurial speaker, as she traverses dying, substance abuse, madness and pregnancy, to increasingly freer forms, ending with “For Today.” In Rossouw’s words, Hembree’s field composition opens on “any spring day” in a New Orleans neighborhood and progressively opens itself in a “political gesture of democratic welcome and as a formal move.” “[poetry is not memoir]”, Hembree writes, and we feel free to follow her as the bell strikes, in recurrent dreams, and ask, “What part do I play today?”
Carolyn Hembree is the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague. She is associate professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “Some Measures,” set the reader up for what is to follow (or not!)? I love the sonnet crown, and the idea of the grief transforming to the idea of being “free” at the end of the poem.
Carolyn Hembree: Thank you for asking about “Some Measures,” a lament for the speaker’s recently deceased father that takes place as she strolls her baby through a local neighborhood. Though a bit roundabout, I’d like to answer by thinking through structure and design as well as personal context. As the form requires, my first line, “Less of, less often, I see you still, free head—,” becomes the last line—well, almost, because as you mention, I end on “free—” Poet Michael Tod Edgerton suggested that I omit the last word, “head,” from the seventh sonnet, which immediately felt right. I like how the catalectic foot cuts the meter short and how the loop of the crown doesn’t quite close, keeping the piece suspended. It also felt right to isolate the crown in a single section. A red velvet curtain that will soon sweep open, the section break serves a dramatic as well as an organizing function for me. So, after this initial birth-death sonnet crown, the second section opens with “La Dictée,” a villanelle that echoes the crown’s iambic measure but upsets the tone and pacing of the crown. As the collection goes on, the prosody loosens and morphs until the final title poem, which incorporates formal elements and field composition across sixty pages. Except for the third section, which includes public poems on Katrina and Covid-19, the book proceeds chronologically but always returns to the parent-child relationship that the crown establishes.
When she led a community workshop in New Orleans, Marie Howe told us that she tested the truth of her elegiac addresses to her brother in What the Living Do by considering how he would respond to each line. Following her advice, I tested the word choice, structure, and allusions of “Some Measures” by considering how my father who died when I was six months pregnant would respond. Talking to the dead is a poet pastime, I suppose, but I intended to resurrect him and believed that the right combination of language might. To bring him back, I had to first make him listen, so the poem adheres to a traditional form and cribs lyrics from The Fugs’ “Wide, Wide River,” which my dad quoted in the hospital, his translation of Rilke’s “Autumn,” the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun,” and a suicide-note poem my dad composed and recited to me but never wrote. A mentor as much as a father, my dad translated German poetry, read and critiqued my teenage juvenilia, and shared his musical tastes with me. I knew the sonnets were complete when I recited them at his grave and he did not come back.
TT: What was the writing process of the collection, as a whole? Did the loosening of prosody and form over the arc of the collection–from “Some Measures” to “For Today” occur organically?
CH: Opening with the oldest and most formal poem, the sonnet crown, and closing with the most recently written poem, the sixty-page title poem that features field composition, For Today captures an organic loosening of my prosody over a ten-year period. When writing these poems, I had no intention of opening with the oldest and ending with the newest, and the poems in sections two and three are presented in a different order than they were written. I consider poem order, sections, epigraphs, and the architecture at the end of the process; for this book, I attended a Twisted Run Retreat writers residency in Vancleave, Mississippi, where I locked myself in the tiny Bishop cabin (named after Elizabeth, one of my favorites) for a week to cover the counters, stairs, bed, floor, every surface with poems I was auditioning for the manuscript. Of course, I cut poems that were in that first manuscript draft: free verse, prose, haiku, a ghazal, a villanelle. Like other poets, my process is recursive, book to book, poem to poem; I have a habit of working in received or nonce forms for a season then attempting to enlarge or escape form for a season. In a way, the long poem captures that process as I fold in haiku, odes, and other repetitive structures then let it sprawl (contract, expand, rinse, repeat).
During the generative period at the beginning of this project, I outfitted my office in poster-sized photographs I’d taken—mostly of places in the neighborhood and around the state, but also of people. I surrounded myself with poems important to me at the time and with totems I collected. I immersed myself in the argot, fauna, flora, vibe of the Gulf South, especially New Orleans. I also kept a binder of research and hoarded books on the area I traveled on foot and by bike, car, boat, and streetcar to make sure I was taking in different modes of passage. As a writer of books more than poems, I’ve worked this way since I started writing poetry seriously at age fourteen or so and have guarded my process jealously. In a Paris Review interview, Charles Wright describes the curiosity, privacy, and determination I try to bring to the process: “a willingness to take on what’s difficult and beautiful, a willingness to be different and abstract, a willingness to put on the hair shirt and go into the desert and sit still, and listen hard, and write it down, and tell no one.”
TT: Wow! I love this behind the scenes look at your process so much in large part because the coming together of poetry is often shrouded in mystery. The poster-sized photographs also remind me to ask you about the interviews. You mentioned in the “Notes” that you conducted interviews with Louisiana mothers. How do the interviews make its way to the poems, and how does your mother/ father/ daughter prefigure in a same or different way in For Today?
CH: An important part of this immersive process, the interviews came about because I was curious about other women’s experiences, especially the experiences of mothers and grandmothers who lived here during Hurricane Katrina and had returned after the storm. Some born and raised in the New Orleans area, others “transplants” like myself, the interviewees welcomed me into their homes—I brought their favorite food, as you do—to talk about neighborhoods past and present, storms big and small, and family. Often as not, we went off script to discuss remedies, poetry, and men. So much was pertinent to the crisis down here from one friend being priced out of her neighborhood because of encroaching Airbnbs to another suffering from a lung disease after living in one of those toxic FEMA trailers. There was a lot of joy too as we went through photo albums and maps, walked their neighborhoods, and tasted dishes. Since I didn’t go the documentary direction with the manuscript, the interviews served to pull my community closer to me more than anything. I think that pulling closer shaped the long poem’s subject matter and voice as well.
In the book, there’s a lot of overlap between my experience and the speaker’s. When I was six months pregnant with my only child, my mother’s mental illness and addiction worsened then my father died suddenly. I bled for the first ten weeks of the pregnancy then I got rear ended at a red light by two minivans; the driver had just left the daiquiri shop—luckily, everyone was fine. Much of the time, I was scared that my grief and rage were hurting my unborn child and couldn’t wait to get her out of my body, an inhospitable environment. Dying, substance abuse, madness, and pregnancy kept a present-ness in my writing and my body for years; shit, they still live here rent-free. Though not so telegraphed, these experiences, especially with my mother and father, informed the work, but the only documentary piece would be my dad’s letters from his year in Germany in the 60s. Of course, the speaker is an artifice and as Dorothea Lasky describes in her lecture, “Poetry and the Metaphysical I,” “a self (both fabricated and true, simultaneously),” a “wild lyric I,” “a shape shifter”—at least that is my hope.
TT: I love you pointing to “Poetry and the Metaphysical I,” and I am wondering if you can bring it to life with examples of differentiation between duende and the “metaphysical I” within For Today? How is your speaker a trickster, a “core I,” as well as “a core that is willing to move and recreate itself at every turn”?
CH: Yes, as a poet reluctant to use first person after my teens, I find Lasky’s lecture affirming and teachable, especially for students who test the elasticity of that intimate, little pronoun. Is this I the poet? Is that I a speaker? Is the other I a persona? Or maybe these I’s are polyphonic? No, we say “polyvocal” now! Rather than getting mired in these distinctions, which are important to the poet-critic and poet-editor but not to the poet-creator, Lasky embraces the many ways of inhabiting the I. In For Today, I hope that this “Metaphysical I” comes across, especially as “mercurial trickster” and through the removal of the fourth wall. I can’t really read my own work, but I hope that the trickster comes across after the theatrical break between sections 1 and 2 that I mentioned earlier. As you noted, the sonnet crown ends on the word “free,” which I think of as an attempt to release the father’s spirit: “Less of, less often I see you still, free—” After the section break, the possessive pronoun “my” opens “La Dictée,” a sort of anti-elegy anchored in the corporeal: “My mother calls to say she isn’t dead / but choked on a cheap kebab.” In my world, that contrast is naughty—a little funny, a little mean. The four I’s of “Prayer” clot at the center of the text and might be considered shapeshifters, as the mother projects her grief onto aspects of the child’s hospital room. For breaking the fourth wall, the “mental notes” of the long poem could “make evident that the persona of the poem sees you.”
I don’t fully understand Lasky’s interpretation of duende and its relationship to her Metaphysical I. In his lecture “Theory and Play of the Duende,” Lorca writes, “The duende never repeats itself, any more than the waves of the sea do in a storm.” Whereas we can track a “Metaphysical I” through the poem’s grammar, I don’t believe that duende can be unhitched from process. Daemon rather than demon, duende is rooted in nature, and it is in our veins. As I understand, we don’t necessarily point to duende in Goya’s paintings but know that the artist was in touch with the duende through his process of painting “with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks.” The eighty year old’s dance beat out the young contestants’ because of her connection to the earth and her body in one irreproducible moment. Even the written texts wherein Lorca recognizes duende were relayed through speech or song. As I understand, duende is the struggle of the artist, not the result of that struggle. I have felt the duende but cannot find it.
TT: I feel you’ve definitely succeeded in creating a trickster. Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers in the world?
CH: Yes, I would thank them for reading my poetry. Tiffany, thank you for reading my book and conducting this interview but also for your poetry and your unflagging engagement with the poetry of others through translations, reviews, and interviews. For anyone who might be curious, I’m currently reading Hannah Baker Saltmarsh’s Hysterical Water, Japanese Death Poems, compiled by Yoel Hoffmann, Brooke Champagne’s NOLA Face, and Shelly Taylor’s B-Side Girls Knockin’ Sugar in the Gourd. I am loving an exquisite little book titled Hurricane Story, by Jennifer Shaw, the New Orleans photographer whose Flood State 1 graces my book cover. Anyone who enjoyed For Today might also enjoy the work of other New Orleans poets, such as Nicole Cooley, Skye Jackson, M.A. Nicholson, Brad Richard, and Andy Young, all of whom have books coming out this year.
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.