The Shore Interview #46: Cam McGlynn

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Your poem, “Turning and Turning and Turning,” leans heavily on Yeats’, “The Second Coming.” From its title, to its word choices and, of course, using that poem’s final two lines as the basis for your poem’s Golden Shovel form. Beyond these stylistic allusions, can you speak to how the stakes of your poem are in conversation with Yeats’?

CMG: I always thought that Yeats’ poem was concerned about the direction that the entire world and human history was taking. Yeats was living through hard times: WWI, the Easter Rising in Ireland and the great influenza. As for me, I feel like my life has been wedged between two world events: The Berlin Wall fell a week after I was born and Donald Trump was elected less than a week after my daughter was born. We can’t divorce our art from the events that we consume and are consumed by.

Afterwards, I was left with trying to make sense of my experience of childbirth, being a parent and raising a child in an increasingly hostile country. I think that most of my poems are questions, so this poem’s question would be: What can I offer my child when I myself feel so much despair about the world? How do I continue to turn (to despair) and turn (to joy) and turn (back to despair)?

In preparation for this interview, I brushed up on Yeats’ himself and was surprised to learn that he wrote “The Second Coming” when his wife was pregnant and terribly ill with influenza. So even though I thought of his poem as having high world stakes, I can’t help but believe he was wrestling with the same concerns as me and all other soon-to-be parents: what kind of world am I bringing my child into?

EF: Speaking of the Golden Shovel form, how do you see that form augmenting the meaning of your poem and in conversation with the fledgling tradition of the form itself?

CMG: I write poems best when I have a constraint placed on me. Like many writers, a blank page can be crushing, so when I read Terrance Hayes’ poem “The Golden Shovel,” I knew it was a form that would help me write. I had no grand vision for what this poem would be. All I had were the end words to guide me. I’ll write a sentence and see the words I’m writing edge closer and closer to my end word and have to suddenly switch gears to meet that word. Writing one feels like how I imagine slalom skiing must feel: the constant sliding back and forth towards these disparate flags/words without tripping. The form started just as a means to the end: the way to force a poem to come onto my page.

EF: I am continuously intrigued by the poem’s final line where the speaker addresses, “my darling,” and ends with plural “we.” It seems to open the lone speaker’s position to a shared one, whether it’s with an individual, a collective, or a gesture toward the reader. Where in the drafting process did this move come about and what essential work do you see it serving the poem now?

CMG: I never know where my poems are going until I get there. In addition, I do very little editing. The poem you have in your hands is almost exactly the same poem as when I first wrote it with just a few phrases changed to make it flow. After I wrote the poem, I was able to step back and realize that the poem was about processing my experience with becoming a parent and bringing my child into a world that I was not proud of. So the simple answer is “my darling” is my child and this move happened the instant I wrote those words.

But I wouldn’t write poems if I was only interested in the simple answers. I’m a big believer in the death of the artist and that the reader becomes a collaborator in the meaning-making process of the poem itself. I include myself as one of those readers. The me that wrote this poem was in a darker place than the me that is now reading it. When I wrote that last line “Still, be/ bold, my darling. We were never meant to be earthborn.” I was faking an optimism that I didn’t truly feel. When I re-read this poem, I now see myself reaching my hand out to me—my current self sending a message back through time that I will make it through and my past self reaching a hand out to remind me now that I survived.

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

CMG: Rattle is a treasure trove that keeps me writing. Besides reading the magazine, there are endless ways to find inspiration from them: weekly poetry prompts and podcasts, monthly ekphrastic challenges and poems based on the news. I hold a special place in my heart for lit mags that have poet interviews alongside their poetry. I love to learn the process for how other poets write. Besides The Shore, this list includes Only Poems and Sunhouse. I also love weird poetry that makes me question what a poem is. The weird journals I've been enjoying recently include whiptail, #Ranger, JAKE and HAD.

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

CMG: Abigail Cloud’s “On the use of Gonepteryx rhamni…” transforms the act of identifying a moth into an augury. The moth guide book is now a “brimstone book” whose discolored edges mark the presence of past scientist-witches performing the same rituals.

Matthew Wood’s “Aufheben” also feels like a spell. The poem has a strong voice commanding us to repeat magic words “lazurite,” “snowdrift” and “grief.” The meaning of the individual words are less important than the sounds that they produce. But the real alchemy happens when absence combines with absence, when voice combines with silence, when a room combines with what enters the room.

Both of these poems take seemingly mundane subjects (moth identification and the minutiae of pronunciation) and transform them into magic.

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Cam McGlynn is a writer and scientific researcher living outside of Frederick, Maryland. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Art, Molecule, Open Minds Quarterly and Cicada, among others. She likes made-up words, Erlenmeyer flasks, dog-eared notebooks and excel spreadsheets.