What happens in that space you inhabit as a writer of ekphrastic poems, between the original work and the translation, if you like, on the page?
I love the physicality of the word inhabit, as in to be present. I love the materiality and heightening of attention provoked by a work of art, as these can be great sparks to start a poem, but even more I want to, yes, translate, best as I can the nature of the encounter itself, the event. By this I mean the sense of immediacy and timelessness I get between the feeling of looking and being seen, as well as the reality of living in a very particular body in a very particular moment, and the private and public bodies, histories, mistakes, delights and encounters we bring along with us? In that sense, ekphrastic writing is about opening doors you didn’t know were there, doors that can only be opened in that happening, discoveries not only about the art, but also about the self, and the world.
How do you experience the lyric form as a container for grief?
Some have argued that all ekphrasis is inherently elegy, as the still-living poet meets the stilled object, but that doesn’t describe my lived experience of looking, and of loss, as both often remain in motion, and many of these poems, including some of the ekphrastic ones, are indeed elegiac as they grapple with the death of my dearest friend, a visual artist, continuing our decades-long conversation about parenting and gender, music and ambition, rivers and birds. The kind of lyric I found myself trying to write in this book remains an open container, if you will, attentive and reflective to the moment, to the punctum of the image, be it an broken umbrella or embers of a bonfire. But I also want my inner landscape to feel authentically tethered to the outside one, because that is how I experience grief, for the poem to show how we actually remember, that one can be pensive in the moment and at once still longing for and living in the world, feeding children avocado toast, playing cards in the chemo ward, thinking about the sinking of Titanic, listening to country music, because for me it is often all at once, both in life and in the poem.
Your collection is titled I Am Trying to Love the Whole World. Are there limits to that?
The title of this book, which also serves as the first line of a dozen or so poems that form a spine through it, originates from two sources. (That I know of? Maybe there are more?) One was a student in a course I help teach on global climate change. We were interrogating terms like wilderness and Mother Nature, and he asked what might happen if we actually loved the planet like we loved our own children? It stuck with me. And then, sometime toward the end of the worst of covid, when I was struggling in both writing and life so I gave myself a writing assignment, which often shakes something free . The great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski had just died and one morning I was reading his poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” and I was like, Adam, I’m trying here. And then I tried harder, beginning a poem draft every day for nearly a year with the line I am trying to love the whole world, and waited to see what happened next. It’s impossible of course it is, but most things worth doing are, and you have to start somewhere.
