Anna Journey / Writer’s Memo No. 1

Writer’s Memo: An Interview with Anna Journey Emily Akiyama and Amy Sailer

Anna Journey is the author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Journey holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, and she recently received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Anna, I couldn’t help but visualize places from around Richmond while reading your collection If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting. For example, reading “Lucifer’s Panties at Lowe’s Garden Center,” I imagined the checkout counter in the Lowe’s on Broad Street only a few blocks away from my apartment. How much of the collection is steeped in Richmond?

The collection is almost entirely steeped in Richmond—its ancient magnolias, its Southern Gothic cemetery, its witchy historical strata. I wrote the majority of the poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting while I was a student in the M.F.A. program at VCU. During that time, I lived in a brick row house on Cherry Street, two blocks up from Hollywood Cemetery and just around the corner from the pleasingly punk rock 821 Café, which kept me alive with its veggie sausage-egg-and-cheese sandwiches and endless cups of coffee. I loved being able to take walks in the graveyard and gaze across the James River at Belle Isle in the distance.

Sometimes I write poems out of revenge: against boredom, against complacency, against sterile or generic environments. “Lucifer’s Panties at Lowe’s Garden Center” is one of those poems. I worked as a cashier in the outdoor lawn and garden section of the Lowe’s on Broad Street for one month before I was laid off after the fourth of July rush. I experienced one of my best compliments at Lowe’s (that I look like I stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting!) and one of my worst summer jobs. Picture Richmond in late June, with its roiling humidity and trilling mosquitoes. Now picture standing on a concrete slab for eight hours a day, ringing up bags of cedar mulch and sticking the tips of your pinky fingers inside the jaws of carnivorous plants, just to keep yourself sane. Lowe’s was one sweaty existential crisis after another. I did, however, pick up lots of interesting bits of language relating to plants

and flowers, and there was something hypnotic—almost fantastical—about wandering around the steamy hanging gardens of red geraniums with a hose.

Do you have a place where you like to write now?

I write poems in the library of my house (an old school beach craftsman, built in 1912) in Venice, California. The room includes a teal velvet couch, a mounted papier-mâché giraffe’s head made from the pages of French storybooks, a wall of mahogany bookcases, and a desk facing a window that overlooks my front lawn and its gnarled olive tree. Because there’s an old three-foot tall yellow dollhouse that resides in the grass, people walking their dogs often stopped to point at it, and then turned to gape at me as I typed away on my laptop, framed in the window. Talk about distracting! I had to put up a swath of semi-sheer curtains to stop the dollhouse-peepers from making me feel like a baboon on display at the zoo.

You attended VCU for your undergraduate degree in art and then for an M.F.A. in poetry writing, to afterwards go on and get your Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Houston. This seems like such a new trend for creative writing—how does a creative writing Ph.D. program differ from an M.F.A.?

In my experience, the M.F.A. and the Ph.D. are entirely different animals. An M.F.A. is a studio-based program, emphasizing writing workshops, while a Ph.D. places a more sustained emphasis on literary scholarship and on training students to become academics. While M.F.A. degrees usually take two or three years to complete, Ph.D. programs can take up to five years, although it’s possible to graduate earlier. (I earned my doctorate in three and a half years.) For the Ph.D., in addition to submitting a creative dissertation (similar to an M.F.A. thesis), I had to take three comprehensive exams in my areas of specialization: Poetry, English Romanticism, and my self-designed exam in the Elegy.

If I were to give one piece of advice to a prospective Ph.D. student in creative writing, it would be the following admonition: if your primary goal in getting a doctoral degree is to have more time to write poems or stories, then you’re going to be in for a rude surprise. The Ph.D. is not “M.F.A., the Sequel”; it’s not a studio program; it’s closer to a Ph.D. in literature, with its coursework and exams. Getting a Ph.D. makes sense if you’d like to spend a few years reading broadly and intensively, you’re equally interested in creative writing 15

and scholarship, and you intend to teach creative writing at the university level. I’ve seen quite a few writers drop out of doctoral programs—not for lack of talent, but because they found the academic demands of the Ph.D. incompatible with the lifestyle of a creative writer.

Reading If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, I felt like I was inside a

contemporary fairytale. The Romantic lore is posed so beautifully and uniquely in an everyday landscape. Were there certain poets who influenced the book? Who are you reading now?

Yes, there were certain poets who influenced my book. Beckian Fritz Goldberg is probably the collection’s main influence. Reading her books—particularly Never Be the Horse, Lie Awake Lake, and The Book of Accident—helped me figure out how to create a voice in my poems that was closer to the kinds of voices I admired in other writers’ work. Some other touchstones for the book were Norman Dubie, Charles Wright, and Larry Levis. Sylvia Plath, too, was an early and lasting influence. I also read a lot of poets in translation, such as Celan, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Akhmatova.

16 The most significant influences on my book, however, were my excellent teachers at VCU, Gregory Donovan and David Wojahn. I owe everything to those guys; and I’ll always be grateful for their peerless mentorship and support.

Recently, I’ve enjoyed reading Catherine Pierce’s The Girls of Peculiar, Saeed Jones’s When the Only Light Is Fire, and Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning.

What about musicians? Do you think that listening to music can inspire you the same way that reading a collection of poetry can?

I love listening to music. I wouldn’t say, though, that doing so inspires me in quite the same way that reading poetry informs and invigorates my work. Blasting The Grateful Dead or Nina Simone or The Flaming Lips while I drink my morning coffee is a great way to relax and wake up, but I usually need language on the page to help kick start my own writing. Chances are if I’m not writing well, I’m not reading widely or nearly enough. So I always try to keep my favorite books on hand as well as brand new collections. I also draw inspiration from the realms of science (weird facts about bioluminescent shrimp, “drunken forests” caused by melting polar ice caps), art (the way Francesca Woodman complicates the genre of self-portraiture in her gothic

black-and-white photographs), fairytale (that campy French adaptation of Bluebeard on Netflix, the fabulous 1895 edition of children’s fairytales I scored on ebay), and personal history (that funky home video where my chainsmoking grandfather gives my father a monogrammed silver gumbo pot). I think most poets are eclectic. Music and other forms of art can often provide rich and dynamic sources of inspiration.

Many of the poems in the book are elegiac, especially for your grandfather. What attracted you to elegy?

The circumstance of our lives is fundamentally elegiac—we lose friends, family, places. We lose time. I find it impossible to write without reckoning, in some way, with the fact of impermanence, which isn’t to say that I’m interested in becoming some sort of poetic equivalent of the Grim Reaper, traipsing about with my scythe and black robe. I like poems with sass and spirit. I like poems that aren’t afraid to play.

In fact, I think poetry is exactly the opposite of death: it’s concrete, it’s personal. And, you know, it’s going to stick around a hell of a lot longer than we are. Elegies—from the Greek “elegaia” for “lament”—are poets’ efforts to reckon with absence by turning to images of substitution—Milton’s plucked berries, Whitman’s snapped lilac, Plath’s toppled Colossus—however inadequate that language may be. Elegies don’t give us back what we’ve lost, but that’s not why we write them. That’s not why we read them. We return to elegy because it helps us abide, because language is a powerful magic.

What gets you started on a poem? Is it a rhythm? A particular subject?

A particular subject usually triggers my writing, and it’s almost always in the form of an image I find striking or appealingly odd. I’ll pluck the image from a cluster of related images that I’ve recorded in my spiral notebook.

Recently, for example, I was talking on the phone to my hypochondriac sister, who’s managed to convince herself that she’s reactivated a vanished twin embedded in one side of her jawbone through the hormones from birth control pills. After I hung up the phone I started doing my image-cloud thing. I also read a little about the science behind vanishing twin syndrome because I enjoy discovering new bits of language that resonate with my sensibility as a poet—phrases that have metaphorical or imagistic potential. I learned the 17

term “fetus papyraceus” describes the condition in which a dead fetal twin is compressed by its growing twin into a flatted, parchment-like state. The dead twin becomes a piece of papyrus! I loved the image of the vanished twin as “parchment-like” and so that triggered a bunch of associations, including my sister’s vanished twin unrolling an ancient scroll—an old letter—in her jaw, trying to communicate with her.

Also, I tend to search for “echo patterns” of potential associations, so my speaker’s sister trying to see an absorbed twin in her jaw triggered the image of my speaker raising her sister’s pointer finger, in childhood, to trace the face of the man in the moon, and that image led to their staring at the belt of Orion, etc….So I follow the initial image and let the ensuing metaphorical pairings form a kind of helix which twists and makes turns in the poem’s overarching dramatic circumstance.

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Do you prefer revising poems or beginning new ones?

As a writer, I welcome those fortuitous it-just-came-to-me moments in which I sit down and compose a poem that’s almost immediately successful. I’ve found, however, that those kinds of “gift” poems are quite rare, and that facing a blank page can often be a source of anxiety. That’s why I favor the process of revision—of “re-seeing” all of the imaginative possibilities that may open up and reveal themselves in a poem. Revision is both comforting (No more blank page!) and exciting (Whoa! I didn’t know I needed to chop off the ending and resurrect my speaker’s dead grandfather…). I like good poems. I like unexpected things to happen in poems. And poems aren’t usually good or surprising right away. Anyone can sit down and write a poem and then leave it alone. A “pro” knows that the art of revision demands nothing short of diligence and excellence. So after that bold and unabashedly messy first draft is out of the way, you pick up the poem, and you revise with risk and energy. Revision is what makes a poem good.

Some of your poems, like “Elegy: I Pass by the Erotic Bakery,” are interrogative of organized religion without treading into polemics. How do you find a balance?

Poetry is all about balance. We balance clarity and mystery, sound and sense, memory and imagination. I suppose I try to avoid treading into polemics by steering clear of pronouncements or explanations in poems. It’s not the fact that drives me to write a poem—it’s the mystery. In Letters to a Young Poet,

Rainer Maria Rilke advises, “try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.” “Living the questions,” then, requires an imaginative openness and adventurousness on the part of the poet, or, as John Keats would say, the capability “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—what he called “Negative Capability.”

In the poem of mine you mention, my speaker strolls past an erotic bakery and stares at a display of “tits of lemon meringue,” simultaneously remembering her dead grandfather and wondering what would happen if the racy confections were to animate, like a resurrected corpse. At the end of the poem, she thinks, “I’m afraid // like Christ they’d turn / to flesh in my mouth.” The notion of transubstantiation, when taken quite literally, and when evoked in a secular (one might say profane) context, has a quality of magical realism that I find exciting and fraught with imaginative and psychological possibilities. The way I see it, answers shut a poem down, while mysteries open up multifarious avenues of exploration.

In 2006, you discovered a previously unknown sonnet by Sylvia Plath, written during her undergraduate career, which was then published for the first time in Blackbird. What was the experience like?

The experience was incredibly exciting. And how encouraging to know that sometimes just doing your homework for a VCU literature course can land you in The New York Times! I discovered the poem’s unpublished status (quite accidentally, actually) during my first year as an M.F.A. student at VCU. At the time, I was taking a seminar course on Fitzgerald. For homework one weekend, I was instructed by my professor, the excellent Bryant Mangum, to peruse the University of South Carolina’s online Fitzgerald archive, where I came across Park Bucker’s fabulous transcription of Plath’s handwritten notes in the margins of her personal copy of The Great Gatsby. Next to the paragraph in which Daisy claims, “I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything,” Plath scrawled the phrase “L’Ennui.” I knew from the index of Plath’s Collected Poems that she’d titled an early poem “Ennui,” so I requested copies of the poem from Indiana University’s Lilly Library. From there, I wrote a seminar paper for the course discussing Fitzgerald’s influence on Plath. As I was compiling my works cited list, I wanted to specify the journal in which “Ennui” had originally appeared, but the librarians told me the piece had never 19

been published. I confirmed that fact with the estate of Sylvia Plath. Since I was an editor at Blackbird at the time, I helped negotiate with the estate to gain first serial rights to the poem, which we published.

I think Plath acts as an example for all us writers: she was a voracious reader, a wickedly funny and adventurous woman (she once recited Chaucer to a herd of cattle while vacationing in the country!), and a deeply serious and committed writer.

Have you ever been one to work within poetic forms?

I once had a passionate yearlong love affair with the sonnet. I wrote a Shakespearean sonnet—perfectly rhymed and in impeccable iambic pentameter—every day during Algebra II class while I was a senior in high school. It’s like I had a metronome jammed in my frontal lobe like a pinwheel. And anything to avoid math! I mean, I can handle the grand mysterious of metaphysics—just don’t make me tussle with the quadratic equation. Although those youthful efforts didn’t make for great literature (the poems featured Tolkien-inspired elves and maidens who lived in bejeweled forests on the moon), the experience of writing in form gave me a solid feel for the integrity of the poetic line and fine-tuned my ear to the musical possibilities of language. I think it’s a good idea for all poets to write in forms so they’re better able to approach free verse from a position of confidence and authority.

There are so many strong currents that run through the book— eroticism, lush plant imagery, the devil, your red hair. They say that one writes to know one’s self. Did you already know your thematic obsessions, or did some of them come as a surprise to you while writing the poems?

I think I was conscious of certain obsessions: I’ve always been drawn to myth, the grotesque, and the musicality of language. But there were definitely some surprises that revealed themselves as I spread my poems across the bed in my cabin at the artists’ colony Yaddo and looked for connections. I was like, “Wow, there are a lot of foxes and devils and dead grandfathers roaming around in here!” So much of what draws us to poetry is often mysterious, so it’s helpful to recognize what images or phrases or motifs you repeat and to ask other writers you respect to take a look at your work.

When and what can we expect from your next book, Whisper to the Hive?

I’ve changed the title! In my second collection of poems, currently called Vulgar Remedies, you may expect the recurring character of a boy with an eyeball-sucking fetish, a girl who’d trade more than her teeth to the tooth fairy in exchange for Faustian magic, a speaker who wears a “gas mask bra” designed by a scientist from Ukraine in case those blipping lightning bugs she sees are actually the stars perishing and falling to earth. And, of course, you may also expect all sorts of offbeat myths and fabulations braiding with and refracting from my speakers’ multilayered and strange histories. You know, that kind of stuff.

As far as when the book will come out: I’m not sure exactly. The director of a certain university press down south recently solicited the manuscript, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she also thinks gas mask bras are cool and that she believes the tooth fairy is voodoo priestess.

As an undergraduate at VCU, your poems “Bone in the Throat” and “Still Life in the City” were published in Millennium. And in less than ten years, you’ve published a successful book and are now teaching at a major university. Was Millennium your first publication? Do you have any advice for beginning poets who are submitting to Poictesme now?

Yes, those two pieces in Millennium were indeed my first published poems. I remember being so excited to see my work in print. I even braved a reading for the magazine at an old pub (now the restaurant Cous Cous) in the first floor of an apartment building across from campus in which an incredibly vocal ice machine and I competed to be heard.

I do have some advice for beginning poets who are currently submitting to Poictesme. First, read broadly. Read the mid-century poets, such as Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, Plath, Sexton, Rich, and Jarrell. Read farther back. Read the English Romantics: read Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, because that’s where the revolution in poetic language happened; it’s where we poets writing in English all come from. Read all of Keats’s Odes and his stunning letters. Read Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Read Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne. Read books of poetry in translation: Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Celan’s Poppy and Memory, Pasternak’s My Sister—Life, and Akhmatova’s Selected Poems. Go back to ancient Greece and read the fragments of Sappho’s lyric poems. Becoming

well read is a lifelong project full of richness and reward—don’t ever stop.

Second, read excellent online journals, many of which are free, such as VCU’s very own Blackbird, and subscribe to two to three literary journals per year, such as American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and FIELD. A subscription to a literary magazine only costs about as much as two cocktails at a bar, and your support helps keep alive our vital contemporary arts culture. Many magazines, such as Poetry, offer generous student discounts. Show the literary community some love.

Third, seek out new collections of poetry and review them for school magazines, local papers, or blogs. Ask your teachers to recommend a few exciting new authors. Look at small press catalogues online, such as the websites of Copper Canyon or Graywolf. Look at the books advertised in Poets & Writers. Make your young, smart voices heard. If you email a publisher and offer to review a certain book, the press will often happily mail you a “review copy” for free—just ask.

Fourth, volunteer your time for journals based at your school. Does Poictesme need help reading submissions? Does Blackbird need help with data entry? Working for a literary journal gives you valuable experience in publishing and a desirable item to add to your résumé.

Lastly, define for yourself what being in the world as a writer means to you. Would you like to publish collections of poetry or novels? Teach creative writing at the university level? Work in publishing? Join the brave ranks of our public school teachers? Write as hobby while you work in another field you find inspiring? Whatever your ultimate goals may be, consider giving yourself the gift of devoting three years to your writing by pursuing an M.F.A. I still think of my time in VCU’s program as the single most valuable experience of my life as a writer; that program molded me as a poet and gave me the confidence and skills necessary to write the kinds of poems I’m driven to write. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.