Once upon a time, Amanda was paging through one of the books her mother often read to her—Meg and Mog on the Moon—and discovered she could read the word “BOOM.” She’s been in love with books ever since.
With a BA in English Language and Literature from Smith College, she set out into the world with a vague idea of what was ahead. At each juncture, the desire to write returned. After a Master’s in Education and decades of teaching and editing, she received her M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers in 2020.
Currently, Amanda serves as the book review editor for Lily Poetry Review, championing emerging authors from diverse backgrounds. She is a member of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, active in several writing groups, and a frequent contributor to Warren Wilson’s alumni community.
Kristina Marie Darling: Tell us about your debut poetry collection, It Will Have Been So Beautiful, which just launched from Lily Poetry Review Books. What would you like readers to know before they dive into the work itself?
AS: The collection was written over the course of 15 years, or as long as I have been writing poetry. What I’d most like people to know concerns formal choices and the allusive nature of many of the poems, because I think these might be barriers to some audiences. Ideally, you don’t have to look up the references in order to live in the poems, but the book would have been harder to put into the world if we didn’t have the internet. I think in a rapidly associative way, where moments in time and in art and literature and history are all interwoven in my memory, so every idea is a palimpsest. The poems track and pace out how the associations occur, resulting in long syntactic chunks enjambed over the course of many lines. I find it’s a way to sustain attention despite turns that might seem to come out of nowhere.
There are a number of longer poems that spill over into several pages, and even the short poems rarely cover just a moment in time. So they’re not lyric in a traditional sense, nor are they exactly narrative. Of course we know these are superficial dichotomies, but with a debut collection, readers are wondering where work falls on that spectrum. This may sound odd, but I am not looking for imagistic precision per se—I’m interested in how thoughts start messy, but can yield something precise when pushed at. You have to suspend your response until the end of a longer poem to see how that happens, and readers often don’t have the time to do that. For example, a poem like “Ensconced,” which is the first poem of the first section, begins with a wind-up that some would see as scaffolding, whereas to me it’s a necessary grounding in the history I’m a smaller part of—an indication that I am grappling with vast ideas about time and accumulation as I question my place in it. Eileen Cleary, my brilliant editor, suggested that I begin with a short, lyric “proem” so readers can accept what in workshops might be called “clearing the throat” as an intentional element, a way of easing into big emotion.
Then there’s the question of influence and referentiality. I have a very traditional education and grew up reading thick Victorian novels like Middlemarch or Henry James and poets like Browning and Tennyson. My parents were both English majors who graduated from CUNY in 1968, which connected me to a tradition of left-wing intellectualism. They were big readers and many of their friends were artists, so I also went to a lot of museums. My childhood was incredibly language-rich, but my education was limited in other ways, because what I was exposed to was very white and “Western.” It wasn’t until my MFA that I read contemporary poetry extensively. I hope that my many allusions come across as sharing rather than erecting a wall through erudition.
I’ve used the analogy that I, like so many of us, think in hyperlinks. I’m trying to use the internet to my benefit, taking the opportunity a blog offers to share what I’m entering into dialogue with, so I plan to write a series of posts on my website with actual hyperlinks to the art, scientific phenomena, places, and cultural references mentioned in different poems.
KMD: I admire the way you’ve sequenced the book to tell a powerful story. Here, shifts in form, juxtaposition, and silence are placed in service of narrative in a compelling way. What advice do you have for poets who struggle to arrange and structure poems in their manuscript?
AS: Thank you; it’s always nice to know that those choices work. I was lucky enough to have a great workshop with Sandra Beasley that focused not on manuscript review—in terms of feedback on the poems—but how to assemble and shape a collection. We began by looking carefully at how other poets handle what she calls “metatext”: the table of contents, whether you want a proem, and how you open and close the book. I had a fairly finished MFA thesis, but I hadn’t felt the freedom to use section breaks or epigraphs. Adding those helped with the ordering of the more referential or longer poems so they didn’t have to be experienced back to back, and enabled me to interweave the ecopoetic poems with poems about my place in the world.
If you want the book to tell a story, I suggest thinking first about the two opening and two closing poems, even if they change. Then choose poems that speak to one another in any ways you think are significant (not necessarily chronological) and intersperse them. These become the spine of a book, and you can allow the body to form around them organically. And feel free to indicate this in the table of contents, changing names so they appear as variations on a theme or indicate continuity/disjunction. Above all, a manuscript should balance the louder moments with silences. It will give readers space to breathe between flashes of intensity.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you have had a distinguished career as a teacher. What has teaching opened up in your writing practice?
AS: In my first years as an English teacher, I worked in public high schools in New York City. To be blunt, the US educational system has failed poetry, or we would all welcome it into our lives. And I am not just talking about contemporary poetry or crowd pleasers, which are a necessary bridge to students’ experience. Teenagers love feeling smarter, all of them: no one goes to school wanting to fail. Sometimes they just lack the support, or the belief that a system can help them, justifiably so. Once my students no longer viewed poems as a zero-sum game (you either “get it” or you don’t), they loved even the traditionally off-putting, “hard” or “inaccessible” work.
At a time in your life characterized by questioning your identity, matching emotion and thought with the right words (and sounds) is both exciting and grounding—and it’s a huge opportunity to gradually raise the bar as kids feel empowered. I witnessed my students begin to trust their own capacity to think seriously and revel in language. Once they can do that, they are going to blossom as readers and writers. How can you not benefit—as a person and a writer—from creating the circumstances in which that takes place?
So the short of it is that I wouldn’t be a poet without teaching. You really should know the poems and prose you teach inside and out, with attention to craft as well as content. And when you teach something like Macbeth four times a day for three years straight, its language comes to dwell in your head. (In fact, I have trouble watching even the best performance of the play because of how the speeches internally scan.) Although I had no time to write, lines or passages from whatever I was teaching became earworms—I fell even more deeply in love with language itself. Once I had more time and the proverbial room of my own, the poems came, especially when I moved to Italy, and everyone around me was speaking another language, so English became my own private language. My MFA deepened the practice and allowed for almost exponential growth, but even now, the poems I taught in my graduate class remain in my head more than any I wrote about in my critical work.
One of the best aspects of having a book out is the chance to share it with people who aren’t normally poetry readers. This has reawakened my belief that poetry can be opened up to everyone, given an initial audience. In an imperiled democracy where language is often weaponized, people need quiet and reflective space to consider its healing capacities. There’s no real way to live in community if you aren’t generous with yourself.
KMD: You are the reviews editor for Lily Poetry, which has published some gorgeously written literary criticism. As a reviews editor, can you speak to the importance of literary citizenship and giving back to the poetry community?
AS: I am, like most poets, intensely introverted. One of the myriad ways editor-in-chief Eileen Cleary has supported me is by insisting I have something to offer to other poets. We can only publish 8 or 10 reviews a year, but it’s a small way to give back to the communities I’ve been so warmly welcomed into. Eileen was doing everything on her own at Lily and feared she would have to drop the reviews section. From the start, she has trusted me to make it my own.
I’m a pretty hands-on editor, which probably comes from all the teaching and developmental editing I have done. I try to collaborate closely with my reviewers to be sure we are presenting books in the best way possible, highlighting not just their merits in craft and voice, but also emphasizing the timeliness of the work. The first issue I contributed to was a time crunch, so I drew on my Warren Wilson community to solicit reviews, knowing the rigorously careful reading the program inculcates wouldn’t require me to formulate extensive guidelines on the fly. We are taught to ask “How can I, as a poet, learn from this book?” That ensures an empathy to accompany the evaluative element of a review. At every point, I am asking “Why should we care?”
And we should. We’ll have guest editors for our next issue, and I’m excited to expand a pool of reviewers by reaching communities I’m not part of. The reality is that reviews take time to write, and we aren’t in a position to pay. But especially with the dissolution of SPD, indie writers need all the exposure they can get. So if you’re a talented expository writer, it’s a nice way to promote books you love and broaden the audience for poets who aren’t getting recognized. I encourage all of us to consider writing them.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can readers look forward to?
AS: Well, I have a ton of ideas, but not a lot of time to write lately. I’ve written a number of poems set in museums—not ekphrastic in a traditional sense, but about the experience of a painting’s setting. There are so many mediating elements—the wall-texts, the audio guide, overhearing other viewers’ comments—that come between the art and how we “see” it. If I have time to write more of them, I can envision them as a section of a book.
Recent news about Artificial Intelligence has affected my focus on words. Last week I read about a scientist who is using his child’s linguistic development to inform his work in machine learning. The idea is that we learn words in ways that lock experience into language, so if you think “sand,” you have some specific memories of sand informing your neural network. There’s a photo with the article, and the doctor-father has actually placed a sort of helmet with sensors on his two-year-old’s head. So I got caught up in the Frankenstein elements of it.
The reporter used the example of learning the word “log” from playing with a Lincoln log. I thought of Lincoln being shot in the head, and remembered my mother falling on a toy I’d left out. This led to a fight between my parents, so the word “loggerheads” came to mind. Finally, because my mother has Alzheimer’s, it progressed from there to what “waits” in the brain, how that is informed by parental relationships, and the “weight” of the brain—in the father/mad scientist’s hands, in the physical deterioration that age causes. With that kind of word-play, the jarring effect comes across better with abrupt, short lines. We’ll see if that style continues.