Poets in Conversation:

How did Left come into being? Tell us a little about the origin, inspiration, or circumstances surrounding it.

Left was something of a surprise, since its poems came straight from my life. My four earlier books are not autobiographical, and neither is the full-length manuscript I’ve just completed. In fact, my second book, Commonwealth of Wings, is a series of persona poems in the voice of John James Audubon—someone a few centuries removed from me and of a different gender. That’s how far I normally am from writing directly about my life. (I should mention that Commonwealth was influenced by John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a chapbook I love and one that showed me I could time-travel in poems.)

Left was also a surprise because I wrote the poems with no intention of publishing them. The material was too raw, too personal. I wrote them simply because I’m a poet, and needed to write my way through the experience. It was many years—more or less a decade—before I had the distance to recognize them as simply poems, ones that I might publish. I had to override my reluctance at giving up considerable privacy. An old friend of my husband’s helped me with that when he said, “It’s not about you. It’s about the poems.”

The book uses a spare, elegant, and wry style to tell an autobiographical story. What affordances and difficulties did such restraint present you as you shaped memory into poetic material?

The spareness is integral to my poetic voice; the restraint, to my personality. Memory is re-experiencing, so the greatest difficulty of writing the poems was enduring the pain and regret that arose from remembering. The difficulty of honoring my own restraint was in realizing how much I had to leave out. Left was originally a full-length sequence, but as I gained perspective I saw that the burden of too many details cluttered the story. I cut to essentials.

Your previous books, including Slow Fire (Copper Canyon, 2007), have been cited as concerned with nature and the earth, and Left is, in ways, too. What can close attention to the natural world teach poets in 2025?

As always, the natural world is what we are made of. We are part of it, and it of us. Since the industrial revolution, we have seen ourselves as separate from nature, masters of exploitation and extraction without further responsibility. It is long past time for our commercial culture to take nature and its systems into account. It is a matter of our survival.

Poets are probably already sensitive to the calamity in progress that is a result of our current relationship with nature. We have a tradition of celebrating the earth, the sea, the sky. We are already canaries in coal mines, oil refineries, plastic factories, landfills, algal blooms, and storms super-charged by climate change. We sing what we see. Sometimes we find solace in unspoiled places; sometimes we lament the abuse of the earth.

The settings in Left alternate between the Sonoran desert’s spiny beauty and the flat, agricultural landscape of Ohio. The sequence begins and ends in the desert, a powerful place for me because it’s where I met my husband and where we had our best times. When he gave up his beloved mountain hiking to be with me in the Midwest, it affected his mental health. Our bodies, our minds, our beings are enmeshed with the natural world—whether we are aware of that fact or not.

What do you wish you'd known when you first began writing?

I wish I’d had more confidence, taken my young self more seriously as a writer. The Yale Prize had a submitter’s age limit of forty back then, and James Merrill chose Navigable Waterways when I was thirty-eight. That was my first book. I remember thinking that if I’d known I would have that honor I would have worked harder. The lesson is clear, and succinctly captured in W.S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman”: “If you have to be sure, don’t write.”

And I wish I’d figured out sooner that the best practice is to write every day. It doesn’t matter if what I write is worth keeping. Daily practice keeps the light on in the rooms of the brain where some kind of writerly process goes on all the time. Early on I wrote when I felt a poem stirring in my mind. I have since learned that the better method is to keep my subconscious notified that it’s going to be called upon regularly.

When the BPJ editorial board gathers for selecting poems, it has been our tradition to cook and share soups and stews. Do you have a favorite comfort food (or food tradition) that sustains you? Would you be willing to share a recipe?

Oh dear, I’m not a cook. I occasionally dust my glass-topped stove, and friends once gave me a cookbook entitled How to Boil Water. The only thing I “make” often is yogurt topped with blueberries, walnuts, ground flaxseed, and cinnamon. My real comfort food is black coffee—gallons of the stuff.

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