A Poet’s Dangerous Work: A Conversation with Stella Fridman Hayes & A Portfolio of Poetry – curated by Kristina Marie Darling


Stella Hayes is the author of two poetry collections, Father Elegies (What Books Press, 2024) and One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hayes earned an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU, where she taught in the undergraduate creative writing program and served as poetry editor and assistant fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, The Poetry Project, Four Way Review, Stanford University Press, and Spillway, among others. Hayes is a contributing editor at Tupelo Quarterly.

KMD:  Your gorgeously written second book, The Father Elegies, will soon launch from What Books Press.  Can you tell us a bit more about the questions driving this book-length sequence? 

SFH: In this book, I am engaged in dangerous work. I had to confront & write things that bring me equal parts pain, love, joy & shame. A loss at 14 of a beloved father, and loss of who I am to myself. Some of us mine from books we read, while some of us mine from our own (real & imagined) histories. The latter to me as a poet, represents risk-taking, walking into dangerous spaces—opening the heart to the heartbreak of one’s own making. It’s not the same kind of risk as learning a foreign language as a kid because I had to; it’s not the same kind of risk as falling in love for the last time, but it’s close enough. The foreign language was English.  Russian, the native tongue, became increasingly less native each time I chose English over it.

I learned to transform the danger of my own conjuring into poems. I feel lucky that I could.

The great poet Gregory Orr, in Poetry As Survival, chose the following lines from “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through,” a D.H. Lawrence poem (Lawrence started his career as a poet) to illustrate the “terror we might feel” as we write:

What is the knocking?

What is the knocking at the door in the night?

It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.

Admit them, admit them.

It took me a lifetime to write this book. I couldn’t answer the knock at the door for years because I was afraid. I am still afraid, but lately, I’ve welcomed the danger, from “the strange angels.”

I am not a native English speaker, but I worked hard as a young girl, a Soviet Ukrainian Jewish refugee, to sound like one. It worked. Sometimes when I’m nervous, my act breaks down, and what I hear isn’t the years of work to eliminate an accent, it’s not Russian, it’s generic English, unplaceable, and then: “Where are you from? And then: Are you Canadian? And I say what I always say when I slip up.

My family & I fled from the dangers of the unfairness & brutality of institutional antisemitism. We got help along the way but at great costs & harm along the way.

KMD:  I admire the way your poems use the page as a canvas, a visual field.  For you as a creative practitioner, what does formal experimentation open up in terms of meaning, imagery, and narrative? 

SFH: Thank you, Kristina.  T.S. Eliot said that all writing is experimental. Yes, form many times informs what is said. When I first started writing poems in college, I would put them in short-lined, small quatrains – I wrote all my work like that. As I was writing One Strange Country, my first poetry collection, I’d write in couplets. For Father Elegies, I wrote in prose poems. I was working with poet Nathalie Handal. She said that she sees my work in prose poems. It stuck. I’ve always admired the French Symbolists Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, & Stephane Mallarme, the form’s early practitioners. I start all my poems in prose. I have a quarrel with form, its restrictions, limitations. So I have explored a hybrid, that takes the whole page or defies the page, with chaos, a breakdown of the page. The image is embedded somewhere in the canvas. Meaning brought to a quiet. 

The block of text (the prose poem) is like a sculpture’s stone. And then I shape it, it goes through many forms — you know you have to not be afraid to smash it into pieces, then reconstitute it. Poem “Death of Venus” (Image September issue) started out in 8 quatrains. It was static. I couldn’t hear it.  When I re-shaped it, I could hear its music. And that’s what I’m after, if I’m lucky, I hear the music.

The poems’ “destructive punctuation” began with this book. I couldn’t stop “tripping” myself up, if you will, the Dickinson dashes followed by commas /semicolons / periods, felt organic, like I had to destroy the syntax of the line. A break. A stutter. 

I am operating under the aesthetic that Stella the individual is dead, that the author is dead a la Barthes and its opposites & paradoxes. But what is alive is the production of language. Just as Borges argues in his short stories or they could be seen as prose poems — “Borges & I,” “Shakespeare’s Memory” & “Everything & Nothing,” Stella the individual is under scrutiny & interrogation on the page through literary devices. Stella the author is dead too because she’s not the speaker but the dead individual Stella. The content of the poem is immaterial. Its materiality of language that survives the aftermath of the author & individual is material.

KMD:  Along these lines, your poems frequently consider themes of inheritance, identity, and the experience of cultural otherness.  Can you speak to the choice of such innovative forms–prose poetry, hybrid, lyric fragments, etc.–for this particular narrative and the questions it raises? 

SFH:  At NYU (graduate creative writing program) I had many spectacular conversations in class, in office hours with Terrance Hayes about what is a poem. He’d say: for a poem to be a poem, it has to have figurative language (figure, shape, form). Brilliantly, he’s irrefutably right BUT I have an instinctual intolerance for all & any definitions, restrictions. I want more than that! As I pushed the boundaries of form in hybrid, letter, fragment(s), flashback, fabrications, & destructive punctuation, I’d arrive where I started, at Terrance’s poetics, his figurative language.

KMD:  Relatedly, can you speak to the power of silence and what is left unsaid in a poem or hybrid work? 

SFH: Kristina, I love how you’ve put it: the power of silence. There are poems with redactions & pauses (silences) inserted between words in lines that speak to silences when read. Terrance Hayes taught us to “read the silences.” I never thought of reading silences out loud. The blank page is silent, & silence is music too.

The poems that speak to me the most are small, quiet; like “b o d y” by James Merrill.

Look closely at the letters. Can you see,

entering (stage right), then floating full,

then heading off—so soon—

how like a little kohl-rimmed moon

o plots her course from b to d

—as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door?

Looked at too long, words fail,

phase out. Ask, now that body shines

no longer, by what light you learn these lines

and what the b and d stood for.

The poem is a quiet monolith.

KMD: What advice do you have for poets who might be struggling to find their subject or voice after publishing a first book?  What challenges does the second collection in particular pose for writers and how did you overcome these obstacles?

SFH: The second book gave me anxiety: I sort of knew how to put a book together – since I had already written one. I knew how to organize the poems, how to sequence them: I knew how to make a book. But this book: was a monumental undertaking. It is a book of mourning, like Barthes’ about his late mother, which I so love, my steadfast companion throughout the experience.

Accept your hunger to make poems! Like any drive, you can’t outrun, bury it. Keep making poems. Carry a notebook or use Notes in your smartphone like you would the back of a napkin. When you hear the knock of the dangerous stranger at your door, honor her: write down what you hear her say. If you don’t she won’t repeat it, and you will forget it. I wrote my first book in between washing dishes, doing the laundry, feeding Margot & Finley, my two children who were 12 & 8 at the time. There’s never the right time, the right space, the right subject. Read everything, Maggie Smith told me when she answered my fan letter.

After a years-long pause – after my first creative writing degree from USC, after David St. John, my beloved friend, I started to feel the hunger, again. It was remarkable. I wrote & wrote, all the time, about my obsessions, about my quarrels with myself, about the people I loved, about people I couldn’t stop loving. The subjects usually pick me. When I pick them, in the end, they pick me.

For Father Elegies, I developed a bibliography of mourning: Roland Barthes Mourning Diary, Kevin Young’s Book of Hours, Forrest Gander’s Be With Elegy, & Larry Levis’s Elegy, poetry books on profound loss, I read, & re-read as I was writing my own. I was looking for guidance, you know the one you get from a parent; the one a girl gets from her father. I had to write my father into being. And what a colossal thing to do, you know. At last I did it, after an eternity of waiting.

KMD:  What are you currently working on?  What else can readers look forward to? 

SFH: I am looking for the right home for, Surely Happiness, my third poetry collection I wrote at NYU – for which I thank Terrance for helping me make it into a book! I have been working in prose: On the Wrong Side of Beauty,  a memoir-in-fragments about my encounter (the assault) with a serial rapist at 14. And a novel, The Flea, about a suicide, a poet & her mother.. I am working on a contemporary  adaptation from the Russian of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s novel-in-poems. 

A 4th poetry collection, Everything I Write is a Love Poem, is in the works. There is a section on de Tocqueville.

I am always writing poems, my first love.

A Portfolio of Poetry by Stella Fridman Hayes

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