The Shore Interview #45: Ash Bowen

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Your poem, “The Last Love Letter of Marie Curie,” calls upon several poetic modes, from epistle to persona. Can you explain the decision-making process in employing these modes and, perhaps in hindsight, the unexpected ways you feel those decisions changed the work that the poem ended up doing?

AB: When I think back on this poem, what’s interesting to me is that, once again, I found myself writing about a science-related topic. All of my degrees are in English and creative writing, and I was never a particularly good student in the hard sciences, but I’ve found myself often drawn to that field as fodder for poems.

As for decision-making in this poem, I’m not sure that I made a lot of the decisions. I mean that. I didn’t intend to write a sonnet (none of my poems are ever pre-determined). What happens in the poem just happens. This poem came together very quickly, almost a case of automatic writing, and I felt the poem dragging me along as a witness to its creation. Obviously, I made decisions from a technical point-of-view, especially in getting the closing couplet, but overall, this poem feels like an inspired, fortunate gift from the poetry gods.

EF: How did you conceive of this poem’s specific sonnet form, where certain rhymes are substituted with repetition and how did you see it in conversation with the poem’s subject-matter?

AB: The first four lines came out in a burst of inspiration, and once that first inspired moment ended, I read back over those first four lines and noticed that the form has established itself quite naturally, with the envelope/repetition in the first and fourth lines and the internal rhymes at the ends of lines two and three. This was quite a lucky accident, as the form came to me and not I to the form, which has always been the case of my most successful poems.

Sonnets are often (historically, anyway) about an unavailable love interest, and here I thought the tension created by what is unavailable in this poem (i.e., the expectation for a long life) juxtaposed against an already established love union was truly heartbreaking. The form, to me, is kind of like a meditation on the fear of dying in the way that all of the end words connote a kind of anxiety (“empty,” “scared,” “grieve,” “leave,” “white,” “light”) that begins with a plea to be held in the poem’s first line.

EF: Upon first reading your poem, I remember being left with a bittersweet feeling that I couldn’t quite place. The poem is both a love letter, but also a last one. It avoids despair despite the poem’s elegiac undercurrent. Could you speak to what craft elements you feel are vital to achieving the poem’s ultimate effect?

AB: I think that one of the key craft elements that is talked about too little in poetry workshops is when to break the rules for the good of the poem. For this poem, I broke several of my own writing rules and some of the rules I learned from my teachers. The meter isn’t perfect in places, for example. This is a ragged sonnet, as I suspect a love letter of this ilk would be. It’s more emotion than intellect. Because of this, I didn’t want the form to be too perfect. It needed to be a little messy. Had the poem been too manicured, I think the poem’s impact would’ve been lessened. Sometimes when I read a formal poem, I believe the poet to have been more concerned with filling out the line with the correct meter than getting a good line that contributes to the overall emotional heft of the poem.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

AB: There are several, actually. Obviously, The Shore. But also Hominum Journal, The Adroit Journal and Rust+Moth spring to mind.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

AB: I really love the way that Christy Ku’s “Monster Buffet” and Gus Peterson’s “Frankenstein’s Creature won’t shut up about being” really communicate with one another. If I were an editor, I would’ve placed those poems next to each other. Monsters are humanized and the humans are the real monsters in both. Peterson’s lines, “Go ahead. Christen me / Monster. Unnatural” really gave me pause. The Creature as a vegetarian—I loved it. But I loved both of these poems so much.

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Ash Bowen is the author of one poetry collection, The Even Years of Marriage (Winner, Orphic Prize, Dream Horse Press). Other poems can be found in Blackbird, Rust & Moth, Passages North, New England Review, Cream City Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere in print and online.