Carolyn Hembree’s For Today is breathtaking. These poems invite and invoke, tearing up the seam between the conscious and subconscious, stitching together the sacred and the profane. Set in the gulf south, these poems chronicle the experience of a speaker who becomes a mother soon after losing her father. Climate change and pandemic anxiety pervade these poems, but our speaker’s strength prevails. Language is the vessel for this anarchic, resistant energy. The page holds magic. I was lucky enough to speak with Carolyn about these poems, due out January 31 from LSU Press.
She is associate professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
SB: I feel so connected to the poems in For Today. They are designed in such a way that brings the reader in, somehow lessening the distance between reader and text. “Prayer,” for example, says simply, “Listen,” a word that is both invocation and directive. Sound powers these poems. Lines like “Sorry, babygirl, this pawpaw’s no divine nom nom” are a pleasure to hear, to hold in the mouth. What is your process of capturing sound? How do you sound out the lines when writing a poem?
CH: Stacey, thank you for letting me know how the collection made you feel. Yes, "lessening the distance between reader and text," as you say, was a great desire of mine, but since I can't read my poetry any more than I can perceive my soul as separate from me, I crave to know how others read the work. When writing, I try to engage with a poem's tautness or looseness, drama or intimacy, momentum or stasis. Whereas the first poem you quote, "Prayer," feels more static, intimate, and taut and the second poem, "Funk Hour Fantasia," feels looser, more dramatic, and momentum-driven, I'm not sure the sonics carry these distinctions. To answer your question, I roll words around in my mouth a good long while. Except for rare treasures, the line comes about midway through my process of making a poem, as I start with unwieldy masses of material compiled from my notebooks and scrap paper. Then I hack at the masses until the curve of a sound, image, or speech act emerges. I guess I like to fly blind, having worked this way since I was a teenager. Of course, such long-worn habits may limit a writer, but I stick with mine. The practice is my way at the "disciplined attention to the true meaning of 'it feels right to me'" that Audre Lorde calls for in "Poetry is Not a Luxury."
SB: That attention is apparent! The speaker here exudes such confidence, although there is a sense they feel isolated despite being part of a larger community. The last haiku on Page 25 uses first person singular, as does most of this collection. When we read together at the Splice Poetry Series back in January 2022, I could swear the last line of this haiku used “we” instead of “I.” How do you see the pronouns working throughout the collection, and what prompted this particular shift to singular?
CH: Wasn't that a magical night at the Saturn Bar for the pre-launch of your debut, Sweetbitter? And I remember you opening with “Element of Red”: “We burned through September” – I love that book. In January, I had just written a haiku sequence, part of which is collected in For Today. A few weeks after our reading, humbled by the haiku of Etheridge Knight and Marilyn Chin and my favorite, that god of the form, Issa, I killed most of my haiku and rewrote the handful that survived. When I compiled the manuscript during the summer of '22, I changed the pronoun for my erotic haiku (an oxymoron I can't really defend given the haiku's resistance to subjectivity), sacrificing the flirty "we" for the feral and solitary "I." Writing the poems in my first and second collections, I felt shy of first person though I'm not sure why—whether a fad of my generation or a personal blind spot. Inhabiting the lyric-I without a persona or close third person perspective to filter encounters embarrassed me. The use of first person plural in a few sections felt audacious, as I think it should—that's dangerous business. Yes, the speaker is solitary through much of the manuscript—even "isolated" at times—though longing always to connect.
SB: Mmm. Yes, first person plural can feel audacious, but it also indicates a kind of coming together. The long poem “For Today” is full of food imagery: crawfish prices, peanuts, bread, fresh eggs, and so much more. And yet, there is so much hunger--not for food, but for a different kind of nourishment. This longing is emphasized through tension and juxtaposition: images of burning/fire and drowning/water resurface again and again. The poem is also rich with allusions--Ophelia, Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, and so many others. Are allusions inherently part of the long poem form? How can allusions quell (or create) hunger in a poem?
CH: Given the ubiquity of notes, glossaries, and bibliographies in the back matter of recent long poems and project books, I might hazard that once we write enough lines, we will stumble upon an allusion or twenty. In all earnestness, allusions worry me, especially literary allusions, because I know that they can lock readers out, which is not what I want. But I have the job of talking to my dead. While my long poem recycles allusions to Christensen's Alphabet and Rilke's Duino Elegies, "Some Measures," the opening sonnet crown, an elegy addressed to my father, piles allusion upon allusion through collage. My relationship with my dad was more akin to that of mentor and student than father and daughter. Before I could write, I dictated stories to him—precociousness a professor might encourage in his only child. When I was in grade school, he would talk me through his translations of Celan and Rilke. When I was a teen, we would go to his work after hours, and he would type up my poetry because I had yet to take a typing class and was lousy slow. It was all a great gift. To reach him beyond the veil, I spoke our language of allusion to express the love, blasphemy, outrage, and mordant humor I felt at his sudden death when I was six months pregnant with my only child.
SB: It sounds like you had a special connection with your father. What a difficult time to experience such a sudden loss. I lost my own father a few weeks before my wedding and can completely identify with this urge to speak a shared language, to reach beyond the veil. That language is definitely a collage: it captures so much life in one tongue. Reading“For Today,” I’m reminded of Beth Ann Fennelly’s long poem at the center of her collection Open House, which also uses elements of collage and polyvocality. It is in a sense, an ars poetica. Did this poem influence you? What are some of the long poems you turned to for inspiration while writing “For Today”?
CH: I am so sorry that you lost your father—and at a moment that is already so intense. Thank you for reading my long poem as being in conversation with Beth Ann's Open House, a collection I don't know but look forward to exploring! During the five years it took to write the title poem, "For Today," Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Christensen’s Alphabet obsessed me. However, as C.D. Wright told Paul Magee in a 2013 American Poetry Review interview, "you need a virtual mountain of poetry at your back, to understand the language that poetry is trying to speak." So, I studied as many long poems as I could manage. Over and over I consulted C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining and One With Others, James Schuyler's "Morning of the Poem," Charles Wright's Zone Journals, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, and George Oppen's Of Being Numerous.
SB: I am not exaggerating when I say I could not live without Alphabet or Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. These texts are so brutally, beautifully important. They create their own language, imagery, and Rankine even incorporates visual elements. I think of those pictures as visual lyrics: they carry emotional meaning that resonates with the text, saying something beyond language. I’m so moved by those lyric moments. Did you ever consider adding visual art as part of this project, or another?
CH: Yes, when it first came out in 2004, I read Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric in one sitting and then read it again. In a 2020 blog entry, you consider the text as an exemplar of negative capability—Rankine's ability to create complex speakers who constantly question their world but also their own thinking. Yes, the photographs, diagrams, and graphics function as "visual lyrics" for me too, especially as I relate them to her subtitle—American consumerism/branding, healthcare, disasters, music/entertainment, racism, which I try to hold in my head along with the idea of lyricism. While this hybridity stimulates me emotionally and intellectually as a reader, I didn't seriously consider incorporating art in For Today. However, when generating and revising my poem, I was more interested in field composition— configuring visual pockets in an attempt to capture the speaker's perception—and long, long lines. Rankine's book served as a mentor text that helped me incorporate difficult personal subject matter. While writing the long poem, my friend was diagnosed with and subsequently died from colon cancer. In the opening section of her book, Rankine captures the speaker’s friend by mulling over how she first relayed the news of her breast cancer diagnosis. I tried to slow the text down to capture my friend’s way of speaking and our way of talking to each other.
SB: Thank you for your honesty and bravery in this conversation. I am so interested in field composition, and, as Lyn Hejinian says, “the rejection of closure.” “Form is not a fixture but an activity,” she writes. The reader is part of the text, actively participating in the poem. Repetition is a part of that activity. The speaker of “For Today” has several mantras that are repeated throughout: the reminder that certain items exist, the reminder that “today is P.” “[poetry is not memoir]” this poem insists, at least twice. It seems like repetition is a way at moving closer towards something true, but poetry isn’t memoiristic. Does poetry have any responsibility for the truth?
CH: I like this idea of repetition as "a way at moving closer to something true," and I think of the body's truth—beating heart, shedding womb, blinking eye. Do these truths become truer or move toward anything? Well, they cease, but there was also a time when they began. And I think about when one is new, not all arrived yet, "a fiend hid in a cloud," as Blake describes in "Infant Sorrow." Yes, in the title poem, "[poetry is not memoir]" appears four times; the last time I hope to tear a hole in that suspicious maxim by adding, "[who said that even? / and why not?]." For some poets, the truth is an article of faith. I'm afraid I'm not of that stripe. In The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson's allegorical response to Keats' famous chiastic structure, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," she alludes to "the true lies of poetry." I like that because I think of poetry as elastic—able to hold contradictions, ambivalence, paradox, a whole world that exists before and after my life. Once a person has learned some conventions, overheard more than a few poems, written a while and kept writing, that individual is as ready as anyone to get out of the way and let the poem decide the parameters of responsibility.
SB: Poetry is definitely elastic. It holds so much. These poems hold the entire world, it seems: this collection takes place in the city, but nature is prevalent. Our speaker is constantly walking through the neighborhood or along the levee, collecting the names of plants. The flora creeps in, becoming its own character here. I was recently reminded of these lines by Adrienne Rich: “Because you still listen, because in times like these / to have you listen at all, it’s necessary / to talk about trees.” The phrase “times like these” sounds reminiscent of your title, For Today. Tell us more about the trees.
CH: Not sure I'm the one to ask about trees. I remember the red cypress that governed the front yard of our rental, a little cedar-shake siding house at the end of a block in Bristol, Tennessee. After a hole opened in the cypress trunk, it had to be felled. All this sawdust I remember, and I ran around and around the rooted remains, not sure why. I fell flat on the fresh-cut stump, and it tore through me. Couldn't wear a shirt for weeks. Still have the scar under my right breast. Of course, down here, "the flora creeps in," as you state. I netted a lemon tree to keep the rats and mockingbirds from the fruit, and damn if there wasn't a snake probably washed in with the rains that died in the net, poor thing—all five feet hanging from the branch and over onto the sidewalk. Come spring, the buck moth caterpillars launch from the trees, and make young people swell up. I love trees in the old way some people love God—at a good distance and with a healthy dose of fear.
SB: Doesn’t reverence always come with a bit of fear? Fear is a part of God, the trees, and For Today. There is an undercurrent of violence throughout this collection: political, environmental, gun violence. “Where will our children hide?” the poems ask, again and again. This return to the image of the child’s school practicing lockdown drills makes “For Today” into a poem of witness, or maybe even a plea for change. I don’t know what else to say, or what to ask. But maybe we can talk together through violence, in some way?
CH: In the final section of Christensen's Alphabet ("N" for nuclear annihilation), the forest has been burned, and the surviving children retreat to the caves. In the final section of my poem, after hearing a gunshot in the neighborhood, the speaker calls on Christensen: "Where will we hide our children in this swamp? / Where will our children hide? / Where will our children hide / from us?" Mainly, I was following an intuition that the mother's fears of external violence to her child (kidnapping, war, femicide, school shootings) shrink beside the more threatening though quieter psychic violence of this family.
SB: Thank you for that response, and for speaking so candidly about intuition. Intuition is such a complicated thing: we have been told (and tell our students) to follow it, to ignore it, to work with it, against it. It’s all we have, it’s not good enough. But intuition does matter, doesn’t it? It has to “feel right,” to bring Lorde back into the conversation. Perhaps we can end with a bit of advice towards writers who may be struggling to embrace their intuition or begin a wild new project.
CH: Keep going. Keep going how? As a teacher and a poet, this question shapes my writing practice and creative writing pedagogy. Getting to know one's sensibility may help the writer to create and protect their ideal writing practice. This poet benefits from a solitary residency in a hotel near home, while that poet is stimulated by collaborations supported by an artists' community. Of course, both ways are valid, but we may waste energy trying to work against our own bent, trying to do what we ought. I also believe we keep going by protecting early work, especially work on a big project, from negative forces. For my part, I must take strange routes, get lost, grope, fail, and wander out again without interference. Most poets—with exceptions like Friedrich Hölderlin in his room in a patron’s tower and thank God for exceptions—keep going by attaching themselves to the world. Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke was apprenticed to the French sculptor Rodin and came away with the radical approach he called "inseeing." A friend of mine became an ER doctor to improve his fiction. Another became a master gardener for the sake of his poetry. As C.D. Wright discusses in that APR interview with Paul Magee, research often fuels project poems. Even now, I whine to myself, "Why am I a project poet? I wanted to be a lyric poet!" Such is my bent—the whining and the answer. And I may change. Finally, keep going and a bit more slowly. A lot of soul-gobbling doubt came after me during the ten years it took to write For Today, and my glacial pace bettered the poems. Some write faster, and that's okay too. I'll close with a fairly well-known quote that I keep above my writing desk. It is from choreographer and dancer Agnes de Mille's book Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. Frustrated at the reception of her work, de Mille consulted Graham who responded, “It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open” (264).
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Carolyn Hembree is the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague. She is associate professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State & teaches online at The Poetry Barn and The Loft. She lives and writes in New Orleans.