In your new collection, which so compellingly engages with the world’s hardships and wonders, there’s a sense — as Jessica Jacobs writes — of the poet “like a bee converting honey,” transforming difficulty into something luminous and sustaining. I’m struck by how your work inhabits the natural spaces of New Mexico and beyond with such attentive presence, and how it channels poetic and artistic influences into forms of witness and transformation. How do you understand the poet’s task in shaping the weight of our current moment into language that not only bears witness, but also offers clarity, grace, and a kind of hard-won wonder?
What happens to me in the upswing and downturns of this life is also what happens in my poems. I spend a good amount of time wandering in the wild areas around my home, and what I witness in nature often finds its way into my work. The other day I saw stink bugs mating. The bigger one (I will call this one “him”) was the aggressor, and he basically captured the other one by pressing down on her as she tried to get away. She did escape, but he quickly pursued her, got her pinned down again and she relinquished. How can I not be in awe as I observe this kind of activity? What I hope I do is ensure that this expression of wonder is mirrored in my work, and that the things I witness offer others valuable associations in their own lives. It takes me a long time to finish a poem, sometimes years and years, because it takes me a long time to really see what is happening. Each poem materializes in its own way, each has its own trajectory distinct from its predecessors. Sometimes a poem comes quickly — maybe there are four of these in the book — but generally I
love this unhurried process; I have learned to trust it, which was certainly hard-won.”
The title of the poem There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral suggests an infinite interconnection between nature, voice, history, and presence. How did you arrive at this title, and how do you see it structuring the book’s themes of ecology, memory, and the lyrical act itself?
I wrote the preface poem for the collection, “Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Moon”, as a way to introduce the reader to the koan and the themes in the book: interconnectedness, contrariness, distinction, joy, despair, confusion, ecocide, memory. My rethinking of the koan for the book’s title arrived spontaneously as I was working on the title poem. I reasoned, if there are as many songs in the world as branches of coral, and the coral is disappearing – in a sense murdered by humans – then isn’t everything threatened, everything vanishing? I came to the closing line of the preface poem while assessing how my life felt at the time. There are immeasurable glorious moments, but nonetheless, now – maybe always – the politics, the horror, the death and cruelty, the colossal ecocide – the shattering grief – all parallel the glory, and this, to me, is crushingly brutal. As I embraced this paradox, there was a sense of freedom in realizing how each moment can hold both.
This collection often finds profound revelation in the ordinary—the tactility of dailiness infused with a sense of the sacred. “Mother’s Day with Birdbath and Wildfires”moves seamlessly between small domestic rituals and an unfolding ecological catastrophe. What is the relationship for you between intimacy, the personal signatures of a life, and the environmental?
So much of what is happening around me ends up in my poems. When I open the mudroom door in the morning, step outside to inhale the lush layers of pine in the surrounding mountains, rich with dew from a chilly night, I am alive in a way that is authentically human – instinctive – linked with all the creatures who inhabit the space of our little plot with us and beyond. This intimacy that I foster is, however, only in my mind. All the other creatures are indifferent to me, aside from keeping away from the human! There is a sweet koan that I love: Not knowing is the most intimate. The writing practice, with so many variables, is an embodiment of uncertainty and the most personal way I know to be in sync with what is happening around me. What a fortunate moment it was, to see that robin flying up into a tree with tufts of my hair.
The presence of loss, of grief, is deeply felt in many of these poems, but the book resists elegy as closure. In the important poem “Three Stages of Friendship and Grief” the final section, “Elegy with Birdhouses,” holds grief and renewal in the same breath. Do you see poetry as a way of holding onto, or transforming, absence?
This poem was written over the course of the three years a very dear friend and mentor was going through cancer treatment. I tried to portray the spirit of our friendship and how it evolved as his illness became more invasive and the possibility of him staying alive diminished. The first section is full of hope and then this dwindles in the second section as depicted through the somewhat detached conversation between the two poets. In the final section, he has died (he was just shy of his 65th birthday) and the speaker is contending with grief and ascertaining what remains of his presence. This poem was unquestionably a way for me to stay close to what endured of him: our conversations, the textures of a long friendship and his legacy. Poetry can certainly be a balm for healing, and for me, the completion of this sequenced poem offered me a semblance of closure. He gave me one of his handmade birdhouses, a bright yellow one, it’s in a crabapple tree that I see from my office. It has never been occupied by a bird, although many spiders make use of it. The little hole for a bird to enter perpetually sings a sad song.
The book as a whole has a remarkable ability to hold poetic and other paradoxes—intimacy and distance, destruction and renewal, clarity and mystery, human and animal. In “Wasn’t It Yesterday That Our House Was Full of Poppies” the poem cycles through time, dissolving linearity in a way that feels almost incantatory, prayerful. How do you think poetry allows us to inhabit multiple temporalities at once?
My poems usually have a sturdy narrative tug, which helps me keep track of where I am. I find that each one tells a story as well as having separate stories behind it. As an artist, aside from this being a twofold way to work the memory and to also remember things, a story acts like a timekeeper. Here the tug flows along with the river and the riparian ecosystem while the story behind it carries the melancholy of the speaker as she muses in the fact that everything changes. The palindrome form, a poem that reads the same backward as forward, enabled me to more precisely express the illusion of linearity that I experience. As living appears to move me onward, I simultaneously feel suspended in the spaciousness that is time.