Robert Fanning’s All We Are Given We Cannot Hold looks to the crenelated inarticulata of his life, as father, son, husband, and citizen of this world. He celebrates the “little wing of something long flown,” and yet precious enough to “be prayer before the muted hour/ of ruin and ice.” The poetry collection vacillates between the “hurt of emergence” in caring for his late mother, and the arrival amidst life’s busy cadence, the moment just before the little parting of near strangers. Through the COVID pandemic, the hate parades, mass school shootings, and rise of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, Fanning looks at “all those times I told them There’s no such thing / as monsters” in the omnipresence of vile hate. In this sense, Fanning fights the insensitivity of our times, as a father “blindly scrolls/ and scrolls” with his little girl across from him, to shout (albeit only in his poems), “We only get so much time.” In lieu of doomscrolling, Fanning brings us to the scene of the violence and hurt caused by America’s “greatest hits,” and the social distancing caused by the pandemic. He brings us to the beach as a father reminiscing about his children growing up, as a son before his mother’s nightside window, and as a husband imagining the sea having washed over the “heartsick mush and mundane glory” of the epistolary. If what Fanning approaches is that feeling, what he asks is for not just the readers but the speaker himself to: “Let us find us by our words.”
Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “Inarticulata,” set up the expectation of the poems that follow? To me it immediately creates the expectation of the impenetrable, the familial (and the invocation of the myth through lineages and inheritances), the archeological (literally and metaphorical), through the passage of time. You write, “May this speak / of the depths of love, of how I held them all/ as close as I could and for as long, of how we played / and breathed in every summer’s golden, going light./ of how we stood together here, where once there was a sea.”
Robert Fanning: Thanks, Tiffany. Your assessments are entirely precise–and I agree. Particularly with respect to the familial, erosion, impermanence—the poem introduces themes and concerns central to the collection. In fact, “Inarticulata” was the working title of the manuscript for several months. The poem still serves as a bridge between the title and the collection, too, with its focus on trying to hold what we know we can’t hold forever, as the light goes. In this poem, a family sifts through driftwood and bones, through shells and ancient stones, and I wanted to catch not only that bittersweet “blink,” that feeling of seeing one’s children grow from toddlers to adults, but also the brutal speed of time, in general; the ambient imagery captures a late summer day and the transient light as autumn comes on, bringing the barrenness of winter behind it, which is beautiful in its own right. An ancient human concern here, obviously–gather ye beautiful seashells while ye may—but no less terrifying, in the Rilkean sense: for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. We can’t have love without erosion, and eventual separation. In fact, maybe that enables us to feel love to such depths.
TT: What was the process in writing your fifth poetry collection? How is it similar or different from your previous four collections?
RF: Over the arc of my writing career, an interesting phenomenon is visible in retrospect, a pendulum sway between, on one hand, collections driven by the personal and the real, and on the other, work that delves into the speculative, the imagined, the subconscious. When I was finishing my very grounded, personal first book The Seed Thieves, my second book American Prophet leapt out—a darkly comic narrative collection arc that follows the journey of a completely ignored, practically invisible doomsayer around the nation. After that book, and following the losses of my sister, my brother, and my father, along with the births of my two children, along came Our Sudden Museum, a return to deeply personal work (how could I not write of so much familial loss and gain?) This emerging stylistic arc continued, then, when my third collection Severance leapt out of nowhere, a dream-like dive that follows the journey of two marionettes who escape the stage. In fact, I’ve been calling these “day books” and “night books,” the results of this swing between autobiographical realism and more imaginatively unbridled work, between the conscious and subconscious, perhaps. And yes, after the strange dream of Severance, we now have All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, which returns to the real, and is my most personal and vulnerable book yet—with poems about my family, my identity, my observations of the world, and the loss of my mother—all out in the light of day. This pendulum swing between styles was unplanned; it’s just how things go with my creative process. I like to say that The Beatles and Radiohead have been my mentors in this regard—like the long and winding road of their discographies, each of my books wants to take a stylistic turn from what preceded it. Regardless, it’s an uneven path, yes–but I prefer this wild meandering to stylistic and thematic stasis. In fact, I have two completed manuscripts in hand now, too, both of which are wild leaps, and again, like nothing I’ve done before. So it goes.
TT: So it goes, indeed. I enjoyed what you spoke of in terms of the pendulum of creativity, something poet Diane Mehta also talked about with respect to how identity-focused (or not) her collections are. There is an interesting tension between the mother in “The Thorn Birds,” and the speaker in “Snow and Roses.” By that, I mean there is the act of forgetting and squinting “into the ink-black vines... toward the sting of what escapes you” by the mother and then there’s the speaker who writes, thinking of his father, “maybe grief will teach me/ to translate your mute dialect into love.” I feel like the poems in the fifth and sixth sections in that sense must be difficult to write. How would you recommend an emerging writer approach writing about grief and loss?
RF: I want to begin by saying that not every writer needs to address grief and loss personally in their art. It is a choice to do so, or not. I’m thinking of Robert Frost, who suffered a tremendous amount of personal tragedy throughout his life, but for whatever reason chose not to address those losses and grief directly. For him and for others, poetry is a way of transmuting that pain into other themes and imagery. Primarily, I choose to write about grief and loss directly because it’s my way of taking time and care to process experience in language. In a little more than a decade I’ve lost a brother and a niece to suicide, a sister in heart surgery, both my parents, a close friend, and my mentor. Honestly, I don’t know how to move through loss without writing poems about it, and I’m grateful to have this art to guide me through. Secondly, I share such poems publicly because I feel that my vulnerability might benefit others who read or hear my work. Many times at readings I’ve had audience members approach to thank me for sharing poems about my losses and to tell me that it was healing to cry. To me that is a huge compliment. I feel it draws us all closer together, and maybe helps others to endure their inevitable losses, when we share our own. Beyond elegy, I approach other personal topics such as my identity, my marriage, my family, for the same reasons. To me, vulnerability is strength, and fosters empathy and love, which I believe are the invisible but universal human fabric that requires our constant tending and mending, and with increasing volume and magnitude, especially as others are working night and day to rip holes in it. As for specific recommendations about writing about grief, loss and other personal issues, I would say to be aware that doing so is not without risks to one’s mental health, in revisiting painful experiences to an even deeper psychic degree, but that with that risk comes the tremendous reward of healing, through touching the fear and pain around the grief, and bringing it to back to the surface, transformed by light. It hurts on the way down. I’m thinking of someone diving deep–arguably too deep–into a lake or pool to recover a lost thing from the bottom. The held breath burns in the descent, but breaking back up through the surface into the air is an incredible relief. Beyond the emotional risks and rewards, I would say that personal work requires great modulation of all the aspects of craft, but particularly the use of specific imagery and voice. And I find this work requires an even deeper attention in the editing process due to the powerful personal connection to the subject, and the desire to get it right. As it has been said, when you’re writing about your sister, you need to make her everyone else’s sister.
TT: Turning next to the collection’s six sections, how did you land upon this structure? How did you organize poems within each section?
RF: I find the process of organizing collections such as this one, with poems on an array of subjects, absolutely maddening, frankly. I remember Sharon Olds addressing this frustration in an interview, saying that she writes “poems, not books.” That resonated with me. So, to answer your question, I landed upon this structure like a plane with one burning engine and broken landing gear. After years of writing the poems, then determining enough threads between them to even begin the process of making a manuscript, first I print them up, place them all in rows on the living room floor, (or cabin floor, or classroom floor or whatever floor I can find) and literally crawl around on and in between the poems, moving them around like I’m making a big mosaic or putting together a puzzle. It’s very physical. I need to see and feel the poems, and notice how they speak to each other when I move them around. Eventually I can start to see sections emerge, but then there will be months of agonizing over whether they make any sense, or if I should just get rid of the sections entirely. And do readers of poetry books actually give that much of a shit about the sections? I suppose many don’t. But I’m an old school, pre-streaming music lover, and to me the album is one of the greatest forms of art. Books are like albums to me. So the sequencing of poems into movements or sections means a great deal. Throughout this organizing process, I’m deciding to remove some poems from the manuscript entirely, then adding others. As for individual poems, they are like beads on the necklace, so I pay great attention to how they speak to each other side-by-side and across each section. It’s an organism that evolves, for me, over many months, and years. All We Are Given We Cannot Hold changed its shape dozens of times and is completely different than it was even a year before it was accepted for publication (and it even changed after that!) Overall, I’m pleased with the movements of this book, which begins with poems about family, then examine personal identity in the second section, then current social issues–particularly violence and toxic masculinity–in the third, before turning to love poems in the fourth, then closing in section five with elegies for my mother, who died while I was writing the book. Section six is the single title poem, that hopefully wraps it up thematically, and ties the knot.
TT: Your poems feel very timely, but of a very recent past, of COVID, hate parades, and the like. Of those poems, I am fascinated by your persona poems including the facing poems, “Mirror Mirror Manifesto” and “Used to be a Sweet Boy.” How do you adapt the voice of those you may disagree with and make that clear to the reader within a poem?
RF: Those two poems, in particular—the former concerning toxic masculinity and the latter investigating the psychological evolution of a school shooter—felt dangerous as I was writing them. It is uncomfortable to say the least, crossing the line, trying to get into the psyche of men consumed by hatred. In a poem like “Mirror Mirror Manifesto” it is an imaginative act that calls upon what we know of those we disagree with, in the service of finding out what we don’t know about them. Persona is an act of dwelling, of inhabiting another entity; sometimes the only way to answer “how does this person tick” is to climb down into their gears and clockwork. I have been inspired and influenced by Louise Glück and Patricia Smith, in this regard. To me, Smith’s poem “Skinhead” is one of the bravest acts of persona I’ve ever known, in the way she inhabits not only another person’s gender and race but also their ideology–to investigate and bring to light such burning racism and hatred. My poem is nowhere near that brave, however it is always a bit scary wearing the mask of something / someone we don’t understand. Perhaps such boundary-crossing is more and more necessary in our time. As for the reader, I’m hoping there are enough contextual clues from my book to know that these voices are only being worn temporarily.
TT: Relatedly, does a poem find its form or vice versa, meaning the form give rise to a poem?
RF: It depends on the poem, but most often for me the poem gives rise to the form. Usually I’m several lines in when I begin to question or sense what form will most benefit the poem. And I listen for the poem to answer. However, though more rarely, sometimes an idea for a form comes first, or a form is suggested externally. “Clearing the Lot,” for example–one of the very late additions to the manuscript–was prompted by intense anxiety sparked by a few different things in my life happening simultaneously. One day, I was watching from the window of my house as a few men across the street were cutting down several healthy, decades-old pines and maples, for no apparent reason, from a neighbor’s yard. I’d also just been reading about the global rise of authoritarianism and nationalism, and at that moment I was simultaneously concerned about my teenaged daughter falling prey to various trends being fed to her by friends and algorithms. Meanwhile, these huge branches were falling from on high and literally shaking the ground and the walls of my house. I knew I needed to process this deluge in writing. I had this idea to mimic the falling branches by presenting sentence fragments—the ends of sentences—that would land with a thud before the reader could then feel the whole sentence. In another example of form coming first, and this is a new trend of mine, I borrow the form of another poet in extending the idea of their poem. This occurs in “Because You Never Asked About the Line Between,” a poem considering emergent sexuality, which borrows both Howard Nemerov’s form and his thematic idea of in-betweeness from his poem “Because Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry.” I use this technique in mimicking James Wright’s poem “A Blessing” in my poem “At Home Once More,” which repurposes Wright’s lines and images; in this instance I tried very carefully to match the shape of his poem on the page–same amount of lines, same line lengths. In “The Lockless World,” I borrowed both Robert Frost’s meter and rhyme scheme and basically re-wrote his poem from bottom to top, with his last stanza’s imagery being the content of my first stanza, and so on down the poem. My villanelle “Go Gentle” borrows Dylan Thomas’s images and language from “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” but turns down the rage, in a poem asking my mother to not fear letting go, as she is dying. This idea of using another poet’s form and foundational structure for my own purposes is something I’d never done much of before. But in general, form has always been a primary love and focus for me–whether it comes first, or emerges from the poem-in-process.
TT: What are you working on today?
RF: As I mentioned, I have two completed manuscripts in the queue, both departures from the personal/autobiographical. One is called Cage, about a man who discovers and befriends a corpse who he decides is the body of composer John Cage, and takes it home, later carrying it out into the world wherever he goes. The second manuscript, called Land Songs, consists of eighty, 8-line persona poems inspired by the Icelandic landscape. As for in-process work, I’m currently harvesting a lot of epistolary prose I wrote throughout the summer and seeing what to make of it all and, as discussed in the previous question, thinking about what shape it will take as a manuscript. It’s an absolute bloody mess, and I don’t like to talk about work that is so fresh–but I’ll just say that it takes yet another departure from the personal side of the spectrum. The poems, if they are to be poems, are exploring the boundary between religion and AI/technology.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts to your readers of the world?
RF: I find that spending time with a poem, holding it in our hands, our ears, our mouths, is one of the deepest ways of tending to the light in ourselves, and of knowing each other—keeping each other close and aglow. It’s no small thing–these brief communions between us. If you pick up a copy of All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, I hope that it nourishes you and makes you feel more alive, more connected, more human. Also, thank you for your support of poetry and poets, in general, and for supporting Tupelo Press and other excellent independent presses, including Dzanc Books, who brought this latest book of mine into the world. And here’s to poetry—the great fire we gather around, in spite of the surrounding dark.
Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length poetry collections, Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet and The Seed Thieves, as well as three chapbooks: Prince of the Air, Sheet Music and Old Bright Wheel. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, The Common, Waxwing, Diode, and many other journals. He is a Professor at Central Michigan University and the Founder/Facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt. Pleasant, MI.