The Interview with Carolyn Hembree

Greetings to new subscribers and welcome to Sitting in Silence, a newsletter for writers, readers, and thinkers. The interview is a popular ongoing feature of the newsletter. I love talking to writers about inspiration, craft, and life. They never disappoint. So, from time to time, you’ll find these intimate and enlightening conversations in this space. Today’s conversation with Poet Carolyn Hembree.

Carolyn is a fantastic poet and the author of three books of poetry, Skinny, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, and this year’s stunning For Today. She’s a professor at my alma mater, the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans and has one of the most thrilling performance styles I’ve ever seen. Seriously, if you ever have a chance to attend one of her readings, don’t miss out. She’s also a friend.

Thanks to all who purchased a copy of my new novel, The American Daughters. You made it a national bestseller!

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-american-daughters-maurice-carlos-ruffin/20147950?ean=9780593729397

As always, thank you also to premium subscribers. A record number of new subscribers signed up so far this year. I appreciate your support and hope this means I’m doing something right with all these posts, interviews, and podcasts. Say hi when you have a chance.

Now, for the Sitting in Silence interview.

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Maurice: What are your earliest memories of reading or writing poems or stories?

Carolyn: That's a great question – start at the source, right? When I was six or seven, I regularly pulled my parents' illustrated Washington Irving from the bookshelf to reread the paragraph in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" when Ichabod Crane crosses the church bridge, and the headless rider tags him with the pumpkin. Why though? Like Ichabod, I was scared shitless of everything. That damn paragraph with the church walls, that loud bridge, the one star reflected in the brook, and the tree clearing still gives me the willies. For the first eight years of my life, we lived in Bristol, Tennessee. During those years, my father was a German professor who frequently read his German poetry translations to me before bringing them to his students. So, I remember reading a translation of Paul Celan's "Death Fugue" in my dad's hand when I was little. 

Before I could write, my father transcribed my stories into booklets. I didn't get serious about writing until ninth grade when I had a wonderful English teacher, Mrs. Bolla, in a conservative religious school; she singled out my death and boy-obsessed poems and even sent them to a friend of hers—a published poet!—who responded with an encouraging letter. I was over the moon. Along with my father's mentorship, this teacher set me on the path to writing poetry. Oh, and in my early twenties, I wrote one "story," which was more like an extended, tedious prose poem in which nothing happened. A dyed-in-the-wool poet, I've wound up being, though I appreciate that genre needn't be so rigid.

Maurice: It's so wonderful to hear about the encouragement you got from an already established poet; that's the kind of passing of the baton that happens between all creative people, it seems. Now, you teach at my alma mater, UNO. Teaching poetry is so mysterious to me. What do you try to convey to the poets you work with and wherefore do you try to convey it?

Carolyn: Yes, I remember meeting you when, as a candidate for the tenure-track line, I visited Kay Murphy's poetry workshop. You were heading out to burn your own path as I was heading in to teach CWW courses, so I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to connect with you here and at gatherings around town. Unlike the MFA program I attended where we pretty much stayed in our genre lanes, UNO requires that writers take an out-of-genre workshop. When fiction and nonfiction students shake up my workshop, it thrills me. In response to your question, I hope to build on the practices of my teachers and their teachers before them; of course, I also hope to push back against those teachings. On a basic level, the great poet-teacher Theodore Roethke's encapsulates my approach in his On Poetry and Craft: “The scheme is that every student pursue his own bent, write the poems he wants to write—and also do at least some set exercises as a discipline" (103). Of course, the individual teacher then must figure out what exercises and how, for the love of God, we may encourage the poet to detect, much less pursue, her "own bent." Regardless of what I'm teaching, I usually come back to three elements that have most helped me: reading, revision, and mentorship. 

When I was attending the University of Arizona MFA program, my teacher Boyer Rickel disseminated the famed drafts of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," my favorite villanelle for those protestations that sensitively accelerate in each tercet until Bishop divests herself of all pretenses, even the pretense of writing a poem that could stave off grief for the beloved, with that final interjection, "(Write it!)." At the time, I was appalled by her relatively awful first try and felt strongly that these drafts should not have been made public. (She was a god—how could she write so badly?) Another feeling quickly followed appalment. As a young poet, I began to learn from the "One Art" drafts that I might one day reach beyond the limits of my talent through the doggedness, the curiosity, and most importantly, the time that revision requires. That's the lesson Boyer was getting at I believe. Determined that my students also have the opportunity to see their gods grope and falter, I teach drafts of twentieth and twenty-first century poems to help them identify and learn revision techniques. 

I regularly require that students select a “mentor” poet (preferably a dead one) to study for the semester; Yeats, Lorde, Dante, Brooks, Blake, and Bishop were among the elect recently. To track the mentor’s development across her career, students read their mentor poets’ poems, letters, interviews, and lectures. I hope that finding mentor texts as well as mentors outside of the academy, such as our visiting writers, will help sustain a poet's writing after the program ends. In Power and Possibility, a collection of her writing on poetry, Elizabeth Alexander discusses the problems of academic mentorship, and I try to keep that problem in the front of my students' minds—that my opinion, while valuable, is also flawed and inherently biased due to my own upbringing, privilege, and sensibility. Having taught college writers at all levels for the past twenty-four years, I have seen the significant good as well as the harm that teachers can do and have, I'm sure, contributed my share of both. No longer green, I believe that a significant part of my job involves minimizing that harm as much as possible by encouraging students to find and follow their own bent, which sometimes requires that I get out of their way as much as possible.

Maurice: As a teaching professional myself, I'm over here furiously scribbling notes from your response. These are ideas I'll employ when working with my students, I'm sure. And yes, taking poetry at UNO was transformative for me. The experience lit something inside that still shimmers. 

You've written a new poetry book that's out in the world called, For Today. I read every word and quite enjoyed the experience, which is no surprise. It seems you were focusing on bringing out the daily experiences of the persona. Can you talk about what your goals were for the poems and the book as a whole?

Carolyn: Thank you. I'm humbled. With Baton Rouge right around the corner, word of your fine teaching has gotten back to me. Yes, I can hear the music of poetry in your stunning new novel, The American Daughters.

I'm glad that you enjoyed For Today. Yes, "bringing out the daily experiences of the persona" makes me think of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Lorine Niedecker, and her direct inheritor Melissa Dickey. Though a reader wouldn't guess these influences from the style of my writing, we share themes of women’s culture, family relationships, illness, grief, and transcendence. We are also bound to the daily and the local. For the decade that I worked on the book, these themes became inextricable from my spatial setting: a neighborhood and cityscape (a warped dream of New Orleans), which like so much of our home state, fosters a unique community that regularly endures humanmade and natural disasters. Though I have the experience of being a mother in the Gulf South, a subject of the book, I interviewed other mothers from around here to broaden my perspective.

That's a good question and a tough question about my goals for the book. Not to be coy but that old chestnut—who said it first?—comes the closest: "I wrote the book I wanted to read." Of course, such an answer begs the question: "What book did you want to read then?" I wanted to read a poetry book that demanded rereading and even slow reading at times. Though I love books of lyric poems that just hang on the air (and envy their creators), I wanted to read a book that dragged everything into the mix, everything and the kitchen sink. I wanted to read a book that felt lived in. I wanted to read a book that risked failure. I wanted to read a book that overwhelmed me. A freighter on the Mississippi with a ten-foot wake. Too impossible a goal maybe but always on my heart, Emily Dickinson describes my ideal for a reader in her 1870 letter to editor T.W. Higginson: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

Maurice: I had that "as if the top of my head were taken off" feeling many times while reading. The details of the relationship between mother and child throughout the book are enthralling such as "I remember when her foot fit inside a letter tile. Four Easters ago, I lost her, just turning my back, as they say, for peaches." Another example comes in one of those mundane moments that is also eye-opening and transcendent. "Fresh house dress from my rack of house dresses/to pull oneself like an arm through/the open sleeve of the poem's life." How do you get yourself ready to sit down and write about experiences so many of us know, but with such a fresh perspective? Do you eat first? Light candles? Meditate? Read?

Carolyn: Though I keep a notebook on me to record observations and snatches of language, I am a homebody writer when it comes to putting the pieces together on my desktop. More finicky than I'd like to admit, I write in my "hole," as my child calls my office, which is a laundry room where I have a writing desk and totems pertinent to the current project (blown-up photographs, charts, maps, poems) alongside our washer, drier, and mounds of dirty clothes. I like to write in the morning after drinking coffee, doing yoga, and walking the dog. If I don't write before turning on the Internet, too many obligations and excuses erode my time. Things get too noisy. Starting with some light revision, a practice my teacher Jane Miller recommended, helps me ease into the work usually.

I approached the two excerpts from the long title poem, "For Today," very differently. When organizing this sixty-pager, I used the "I remember" refrain, a nod to New York School Joe Brainard's sequence and the many other poets who have followed suit, to vary the pacing and relax the writing with the past tense since so much of the poem is in present tense, which can get pretty gummy or stifling. So, this prose sequence you mention first about the speaker losing then finding Kiddo in the grocery store required a lot of reworking though the ending, "my child a seagrass meadow thousands of years old," came earlier, a scrap I wrote in my car at a stoplight. Oh, and the street name letter tile came at some point during a walk around my neighborhood; the longer poem encourages me to think about scale, and I enjoyed thinking about the human, human-made, and natural world around me, how to measure one against the other. But the bulk of this passage was rewritten in response to my series editor Ava Leavell Haymon's notes. As always with me (my weaknesses, my weaknesses), I had to revise toward clarity. In sum, most of that passage was rewritten as more of an assignment from Ava, which I enjoyed quite a lot. At that point, I was working in longhand on the printed page.

While I don't recall the specific moment of writing the second passage, I know that I was so deeply enmeshed in the world of the poem that it had become a kind of analogue for my reality. I worked on the long poem for five years, and two of those years (2020-2022) were the most difficult of my life—private and public. As poet and writer of "life poems" (the long poem on steroids) Rachel Blau Duplessis describes "inhabiting time with thinking in writing" in her article, "After the Long Poem." Passages where my poem has agency, a life, came into being not long before I finished the draft, as my relationship to the work had become a bit sick. I had to leave the construction and re-enter my real life.

Maurice: It's interesting how our creative lives are so important to us, but we also have to be intentional about carving time and space to get the work done. If you weren't a poet, what would you be doing with your life? Would your laundry room just be a laundry room? Would you be teaching calculus?

Carolyn: A man whom I admire and mildly despise once told me that I have "the mind of an administrator," which though well intended, offended me. I mean to be a poet—spirited, audacious, and unburdened—not an officious doer of doings. Of course, I also took offense because he's right. Andy Warhol's claim, "I want to be a machine," speaks to my intimate desire; I love revising masses of material, moving them around mechanically, almost mindlessly, for months until I feel the click that no one else can feel because it is my work and my laundry room. With all the romantic leads I played in college and ingenues I played in my puny and short "professional" acting career, I most identified with Clov of Endgame whose repeated behaviors and predictably laconic replies soothed me and Mr. Zero of The Adding Machine whose displacement by a machine would insult anyone who desired to be a machine. More to your point, I entered college with every intention of pursuing law but found before I even took a class that I did not like the law. I thought of being a psychiatrist and took an introductory class and found my interest was limited to my own psyche. I worked as a paralegal in New York while pursuing the aforementioned acting career but also found all of it boring. In recent years, I have entertained becoming a death doula as I have seen a number of family members die. My arrival seems to inspire their expiration. Then again, I would have to deal with bodies, and I prefer to forget that those exist at all. I would like to be more useful, but that's what washing machines are for.

Maurice: I had no idea that you had pursued acting! I'm also not surprised at your revelation as you always kill in front of a crowd. More than almost anyone, I find your performance style unique, engaging, and hard to ignore. You're always doing something interesting. I've heard some say that poetry is meant to be performed rather than just read. But I'm not sure that most poets care about how their work is embodied aurally. What are your thoughts on performance? What are you doing when you're in front of an audience? And how do you feel when you perform?

Carolyn: Thank you for telling me how much you enjoy seeing me read! Though poetry readings can be a terrible drag if the poet doesn't give a damn about reading or drones on over their time, New Orleans poets show the hell up to read—maybe that's because the bar is so high with legends like Rodrigo Toscano and younger phenoms like Skye Jackson. You're asking terrific questions that I should probably ask the poets I just named. Most generally, I try as a reader to work with what is given to the best of my ability: my instrument (body, voice), the venue, and (to the extent that venue determines) the audience. Though I have good range and very good volume, my instrument simply isn't of the quality of Douglas Kearney's or Joyelle McSweeney's. I accept this and work with what I've got. The day of a reading I eat light meals, avoid too much caffeine, and drink lots of water (I always bring water to the reading since nerves make us dry out and in case the host forgets). Just like my instrument, venue and anticipated audience are givens that I can't control but that can help me prepare. A couple of days before a reading, I select my set, making sure that it will be within the time limit. The selection and my "chatter" about the poems depend very much on the where and likely who. Ahead of any reading, I check out the venue by watching a clip of someone else reading in that space. I have to know spatially where I will be for acoustics and the vibe. Sure, at my book launch at The Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge, I went big, reading straight for twenty-seven minutes from the book's title poem, "For Today," after a brief introduction. I indulged myself. In contrast, when preparing for New York venues, such as the Book Culture bookstore and KGB Monday Night Poetry Series, I selected a set for audiences who would not be inclined to indulge me. I thought about accessibility, variation, and pacing. Whether through "chatter" between the poems or through reading something much shorter or lighter, I try to offer audiences relief (places to laugh, grab a drink, check their phone). In general, at bar venues, I usually get a bit more performative, pitch my voice, offer dramatic pauses. People are drinking, which can work to a reader's advantage, i.e., more clapping and crying, but the more lubricated and unpredictable audience is more likely to yell, react inappropriately, throw up, or make out. In contrast, I usually give more intimate readings at bookstores and libraries, which are the toughest for me: the lighting is harder, customers sometimes wind up at the reading and are desperately looking for a way out, and everyone is usually very sober. It's an exciting challenge. To answer your terrific question about what I'm doing when I'm in front of the audience, I'm trying to feel them out and adjust accordingly. Some years ago, three people showed up for a reading—what, am I going to hold them captive while I fake it? No, I decided to join them in the audience; I read poems to them, answered questions, and heard their work. Under normal circumstances, I acknowledge the other readers, my host, the occasion, and the space. Ceremony is important. Ideally, I feel in sync with the audience even when things go wrong. Someone has a coughing fit, a group gets up to leave, a low-flying jet drowns me out, the mic dies—at my best, I stay in touch with these happenings by giving them slight notice and remaining light on my feet. When I just can't connect with the audience, I try to center my body and ground myself in the material; as I say to myself and my students, "Just read the words on the page." 

Maurice: Thank you for sharing that. I'm not surprised that you're so thoughtful about performance because you're great at it. Along those lines, what brings you joy?

Carolyn: Cutting up with my family and my friends, just talking trash. Sitting on my screened-in back porch with a cup of coffee watching my angel dog Rose play with the next-door neighbor's tabby Scarlet. Taking Rose to visit with her friends at UNO and Blue Cypress Books. Walking Dante St. to the levee to see the wild parrots when they are worked up and squawking. Reading my child's stories and poetry. Hearing about them standing up to bullies who pick on their classmates. Getting under the covers with my husband to watch trash TV and eat ice cream. Watching our 15YO cat, Wylean Big Country, who has cancer, kidney failure, diabetes, and a slow heart get up, pop the dog, and steal her food. Reading and hearing New Orleans writers. Witnessing my students thrive. Being alone in my hundred-year-old bungalow listening to the birds outside my laundry room/office window. Writing when I can catch a current that lifts, lifts me.