Lizzy Itkin: Locomotive Cathedral is an arresting and evocative title. It holds a tension between machinery and reverence, motion and stillness, industrial and sacred. What does the title mean to you, and how does it serve as an entry point into the themes of the book? Do you see the locomotive as a metaphor for poetic propulsion? Or is the cathedral the stillness at the heart of the motion?
Brandel France de Bravo: The image I had in mind was Gare du Nord or a train station from that era. They are soaring and beautiful, AND they make me think of that quote, “the future isn’t what it used to be,” the way something that once telegraphed progress and futurity becomes an exquisitely rendered fossil. Most importantly for me, Locomotive Cathedral speaks to the tension between my desire for stillness/eternity and the unstoppable propulsion of change. If there’s a resolution of that tension, it comes from a willed perspective—that change isn’t really about one thing ending and another beginning so much as transformation. That’s why the book opens with the quote from modern chemistry’s founder, Antoine Lavoisier: “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”
LI: “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry” is one of my favorite poems in the collection. It transforms a daily task into a kind of ritual, where laundromats become places of quiet revelation and “any raised surface can be an altar, a place to kneel.” The poem beautifully captures the tactile devotion of the everyday—the folding, sorting, and cycling of clothes as acts of attention, even reverence. Throughout Locomotive Cathedral, you return often to the holiness found in repetition and dailiness. How do you see ritual and the ordinary shaping your poetics? Do you think poetry, like laundry, is a cyclical practice of renewal?
BFDB: Poetry is, indeed, a cyclical practice of renewal. The labor and craft is about making it new. Your comment about renewal makes me think of the word “revision,” how it means to see again, as in see in a new light. That’s such a friendly way to approach the sometimes-painful process of editing or revising a poem. And that makes me think of the word “remember,” how certain acts of remembrance re-member us, put us back together again.
It’s funny that you mention “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry,” because that poem came up in an interview with Mary Jo Salter who chose it for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2024. The interviewer seemed to feel that my poem represents a trend in contemporary poetry “where people write a lot more about the mundane.” The interviewer goes on to say, “you never had Keats, for example, writing about household chores...” Do I believe that Keats ever mopped a floor or separated his whites from his darks? Maybe metaphorically. If I’m being honest, I was a tad appalled—as in how narrow is my life?—to find out how often laundry pops up in Locomotive Cathedral. I suggested to the University of Nebraska Press design team that we might evoke a locomotive with a row of washing machines. Any raised surface can be an altar, and any mundane task can enter into or inspire a poem. “Attention,” said philosopher Simone Weil “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I aspire to be a generous person but I am not, except perhaps in poetry. She also said “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” so, for me, poetry is a source of renewal and a form of prayer in so far as it allows for a very pure form of attention.
LI: “Resilience I” presents a world shaped by environmental precarity, where adaptation and survival intertwine. You write, “Like restaurant carp, we are learning to live in this aquarium.” What does resilience mean in this collection—persistence, transformation, endurance? How do these poems challenge traditional ideas of survival? Does the answer lie in lines like: “an ear acquires new habits: every liquid footstep bubbling inside me like oxygen”?
BFDB: Adaptation—another word for transformation—and survival tend to go hand-in-hand, as you say. We don’t call it adaptation, however, unless we survive. Otherwise, it’s bad luck, bad faith, bad decision-making (individual and/or societal), poor lifestyle choices, or ignorance. In the face of environmental precarity, I have no choice but to believe in adaptation, which in no way precludes action. We will figure out how to survive climate extremes, we will discover technological solutions, or we won’t. Mother Earth doesn’t need our pity—she will adapt as she always has; she may not adapt in a way that’s conducive to supporting human life but she’ll survive. I’m not big on looking backwards, and my capacity for nostalgia is limited. Like most people, I feel grief for disappearing species and lost ways of living but I prefer to look forward. It’s where hope lies—just ahead of me, like an armadillo crossing the scorched highway, or a mirage. Meanwhile, as a poet, I can pay attention to adaptation and celebrate the new ways of living being forged. “Resilience I,” like the other poems in the resilience series, is part elegy (“I miss our rooster’s kikiriki”) and part awe and wonder. I tried in that poem to capture the beauty that might exist in a drowning world. “Yesterday, I woke up peering through the slats of my bed and thought: I sleep on a bridge.” We are all sleeping on bridges now, between the world we knew and the world to come.
LI: “Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do” explores how perception shifts over time, particularly regarding history and identity. The poem asks, “What are verses but words running on parallel tracks?” Recognition—of what was once invisible—becomes a kind of reckoning. How does this idea function throughout Locomotive Cathedral? Do you see poetry as a tool for uncovering, revising, or resisting forgetting? And is this the kind of heaviness that can make a train cry?
BFDB: New ways of seeing force me to reckon with my old ones. For instance, in the essay, “Fractals,” I share aspects of my family history that in my youth I thought of as predisposing me to tragedy and now see as the foundation for my resilience.
Another way in which my perceptions have shifted over time has to do with identity, specifically my identity. In the poem, “The Lounge Chair Does the Work,” I poke fun at identity. Not because it has no relevance—it does, particularly when it comes to how society sees and treats us. In that poem, all the different chairs—butterfly, rocking, beanbag, throne, etc.—begin to whine about their unique challenges. Towards the end of the poem, they decide to play musical chairs. “When the music stopped, every chair was in a different place from the start, and no one was ‘out.’” One interpretation of that ending might be that our identity doesn’t take us very far or change much. We probably can’t or shouldn’t eliminate any of the chairs. Each is a seat for someone. Claiming an identity can provide us with protective armor, but clinging too strongly to identity/ies can be limiting. To bastardize Marcel Duchamps, identity (like tradition) is the prison in which you live.
As a young person, I wore my background, affinities, and opinions like an attention-getting costume. I wanted to be noticed. Now, I feel like getting noticed gets in the way of noticing. But as Ram Dass says, “you can’t be nobody until you’ve been somebody.” Or put another way: you can’t give away what you don’t have. Dylan’s song aside, it doesn’t take much to make me cry! A train makes me cry, especially if I miss it, if everyone’s begun their journey and I’m left behind and alone on the platform. The train’s linearity, like narrative, seems to have death, the final terminus, built into it. But trains sure are great for getting writing done! Is it the deadline of the journey or is it that you sit in stillness while moving forward? Art history professor Alex Nemerov (son of the poet Howard Nemerov) said in a recent lecture that “love is a dynamic stillness.” I can’t stop thinking about that. It seems to mirror the phrase Locomotive Cathedral.
LI: One of the most striking aspects of Locomotive Cathedral is its myriad movements of form—the shifting between all types of lyric and narrative poems, as if the collection itself resists singular definition. At times it feels Whitmanic in its embrace of multitudes, yet also deeply intimate and sharply crafted. Did this structure emerge organically, or was it a deliberate architectural choice? How do you see the relationship between form and meaning in your poetry? Were certain ideas drawn to certain containers, or did the form arise from instinct, as a kind of internal logic or necessity?
BFDB: I generally use a theme or themes as my guiding structure. In the case of Locomotive Cathedral, taking and giving were the rudder, and transformation the destination. I rarely if ever write in response to a prompt. I have a little notebook where I jot down phrases, images, ideas, quotes, and when I sit down to write I see how a couple or several of these disparate things relate to each other, and how they relate to the larger themes. Usually a line emerges that sets the voice and tone. And then the form (lineated verse, sonnet, prose poem, essay, pantoum) follows as a result. If there’s a natural musicality, I’ll lean into that.
For instance, the impetus for “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry” came from walking through my neighborhood and seeing “window caulk cracking and doors padlocked” on two different laundromats, and so followed, “another laundromat / is closing.” In “Resilience I,” I wanted a certain matter of factness about the rising ocean waters, so I chose to write a prose poem and have the speaker be someone very different from me, from an entirely different culture. She’s been to a restaurant on the mainland, has seen an aquarium there, and knows that mints are kept by the register. At the same time, she has a directness and practicality born of her island life married to a fisherman.
Of course, voice and tone are not the only determinants of form. I have written several poems about restraint or constraint (“Tradition is the Prison in Which You Live”; “As Seen on TV”; “Wind in a Box”) in unrhymed sonnets because as the inimitable Diane Seuss says, “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without.”
I have a poem about the pandemic written in two columns called “What It Took and What It Gave,” and I have a pantoum (“Seam and Sieve”) about waiting—waiting for the lock down to end, my mother in hospice waiting for death, waiting for my labor to be over and my daughter to be born. It’s said that repetition is a vocalized pause, so the pantoum’s repetition of lines, or at least parts of lines, slows down the poem and simulates a kind of waiting. Short essays are my go-to when I want to probe something using associative facts. I’m a huge fan of the lyric essay and love its versatility. There’s even a concrete poem in Locomotive Cathedral—the last poem in the book and part of the resilience series. Some readers might find it cheesy but it seemed like the right move: the shape of the poem which is about Rene, the one-footed crow I befriended at the beginning of the pandemic who punctuates the collection, suggests a reverse bell curve.
LI: Your work engages with Buddhist mind-training slogans, particularly in the second section of Locomotive Cathedral. Poems like “Slogan 27: Work with the Greatest Defilements First” suggest that spiritual growth requires both discipline and detachment—two impulses that may to some seem at odds with poetry’s intensity, where “not even my passwords are retrievable without a password.” How do you reconcile poetry’s demand for presence and precision with the Buddhist invitation to let go? For instance, I absolutely love the father at the dinner party in this poem: “This was a dinner party in the seventies, population a ticking bomb./What will you do when we run out of space? a disgusted guest asked/ My father stood up and slurred, I’ll make room, flinging his arms wide.” I love how he embraces it all in a brave effort toward inclusion of all souls, whether defilement or not, the end is a moment where we are all one in humanity.
BFDB: The father in Slogan 27 is my father, and the story is a true one. He wreaked havoc in his short life. He had vices, lots of them. What he did not have: a scarcity mindset. And perhaps for that reason, people found him charismatic, larger-than-life. When I speak about the greatest defilement in me, I’m talking about clinging (even my passwords have passwords), which derives from a non-abundance view of the world. Your observation about spiritual growth is interesting: discipline and detachment are also extremely helpful for writing poetry! One needs to write as a disciple—reading and listening to others—and with discipline. You can’t simply wait for the muse to stop by for a bite; you have to regularly prepare a meal and set the table.
And having a certain detachment enables a writer to revise (to see again). Another way that spiritual practices such as meditation and poetry-writing are similar: you can’t will a great or “pleasant” sit, and you can’t white knuckle a poem into being. Stuff comes up. Meditation isn’t about mind-control or the elimination of thoughts. With time, you learn to accept that. Similarly, when you dedicate time to writing on a regular basis, you have to let go of the idea of writing a “great” or memorable poem, the pinnacle-of-your-career poem. I don’t love writing bad poems but I frequently do, and I save them nonetheless. They remind me of all the multitudes I contain. And sometimes, a failed poem has a good line in it. I have a poem in Locomotive Cathedral called “Resurrection,” which is a cento comprised of all my murdered darlings.
LI: Humor and grief move alongside one another in your work, often within the same stanza. Poems hold both absurdity and wisdom, especially when reckoning with uncertainty. Do you see humor as a kind of resilience? How do play and seriousness coexist in your creative process?
BFDB: Humor is a necessity, like bread and water. It’s how I process what is going on, and alleviate the anger, fear, and frustration that arise. I’ve been teaching a course called Compassion Cultivation Training© for the last five years. Compassion—whether for self or others—begins with the recognition that all beings experience suffering. One definition of suffering is the inevitability of unwanted experiences. Many of us are having painful unwanted experiences right now! What my studies and teaching have helped me grapple with is resistance to suffering (pain x resistance = suffering). By attending to it rather than pushing it away, I feel like I’ve opened a portal for joy. Humans aren’t equipped to selectively shut out one emotion so when we try to shut out discomfort or dissatisfaction, we often end up shutting ourselves down to awe, beauty, and joy. Grief and humor have a similar symbiosis or mutuality. I want to write about the big, serious stuff (the manuscript I’m working on now is loosely based on Buddhism’s Five Remembrances, e.g. I am of the nature to grow ill. I cannot escape sickness; I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death...).with honesty and levity.
LI: Your poems seem deeply aware of time—of memory, decay, repetition, and recursion. In the fabulous prose poem “Fractals,” you ask, “How does repetition become a fugue?” and in “Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do,” you write: “Give it a terminus in history. Build a station around it.” These lines evoke Borges and the idea that poetry can spiral through time rather than move linearly. The prose poem form of “Fractals” renders this movement beautifully—driven, recursive, self-contained yet suggestive of larger pattern. Poet Charles Simic once described the prose poem as “the monster child of two incompatible strategies, the lyric and the narrative.” How do you understand the crux of the prose poem, and what draws you to it as a vessel for this particular poem? Do you see the prose poem as a structure that resists time or folds it inward?
BFDB: Well, now we’ve entered into some sticky territory! When is a piece of writing a prose poem and when is it an essay? I tend to think of “Fractals” and “Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do” as essays. I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise! Prose poems—there are several of those in Locomotive Cathedral—are to my way of thinking not longer than a page. They usually are one, maybe two paragraphs long (“Final Descent,” for instance, is two), which means that if there is narrative, it is very compressed. The leaps that happen in a prose poem are like parkour. The essay (or essayette as I’ve dubbed those two pieces) is more likely to amble than jump. The associative logic may be similar, but in the essay there’s space/time to sit down on a park bench. Both the prose poem and the essay can, and in my mind should, be lyrical. As you noted, “Fractals” and “Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do” are both “about” time—as a construct and as represented by successive generations. If I had to generalize, I would say I tend to lean into prose—whether a prose poem or essay—when I’m getting thinky about time and death.
LI: Finally, your work often challenges the idea of fixed meaning—whether in metaphor, philosophy, or personal identity. In “Free Trade Agreement, a Zuihitsu,” you write, “Metaphors can seem so transactional, language doing business, swapping currency.” The poem’s epigraph references Tonglen—the Buddhist practice of giving and taking—which adds another layer of relational exchange. Do you believe poetry should resist definitive interpretation, or is meaning-making part of the reader’s role in completing the poem?
BFDB: I consider most of my poetry to be very accessible. That’s a dirty word, I know. By that, I mean, readers can usually come away after 1-2 readings with an interpretation. A reader may not like the poem, and their interpretation may not be what I had in mind when I wrote it, but the reader rarely feels utterly stumped or confounded. Polyvalence—multiple meanings—is what most of us poets shoot for. More meanings offer the possibility of connecting with more readers (there’s a meaning for everyone!). And just as importantly, multiple meanings may lead to a deeper connection with readers who become intrigued enough, challenged enough, to read the poem a 2nd, 3rd and 4th time. My poems have layers but I think what most characterizes them is a kind of zigzagging. I lead the reader in one direction, and then there’s a switchback. Hey, I’m a Libra. I’m all about justice and balance, which must be why I do a lot of on-the-other-handing. These days, I’m trying to be less “yes, but” and more “yes, and.” My I’ll-make-room father would have approved! Like almost everything in life, poetry is relational. Putting a poem out into the world is like giving readers a key to your house. When they let themselves in, you won’t be there. What they choose to look at, pick up, eat is determined by who they are, the mood they’re in, the life they’ve led. You rarely know who’s visited your poetry house, but occasionally, if you’re lucky, readers leave a note behind. It doesn’t say, Kilroy was here; it says, Kilroy was moved. Or better still, transformed.