Interviews 2023 (33-40):
Onwu, Goodfellow, Lee, Benton, Lainson, Porter, van der Elsken, Kennedy

The Shore Interview #33: Nike Onwu

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: “Wake II” is my favorite poem from this issue—a striking meditation on grief that is simultaneously graceful and raw. Can you walk our readers through your process when working on this poem?

NO: My work's never been called “graceful and raw”. Thank you and thank you for having me.

“Wake II” started as its own thing, like the poem says, one almost-morning when I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. Everything was enveloped in darkness and I could hear these distinct animal sounds. I had a sense of being suspended in the space around me. This transported me into the memory of another feeling. My friend died a few years ago and I try to unpack the aftermath.

It's called “Wake II” because I draw a lot from a bad short story I have sitting in my Google Docs. I had to adapt some of that prose into poetry, partly because in some ways it had become a surer memory than the one in my head. I’m a painfully slow writer so it took me weeks before I could achieve something that I was somewhat satisfied with. My main technique was sifting the narrative for its emotional thread and then spelling that out as truly and as awkwardly as I could. I then returned, severally, to weed out the excess and rewrite anything that burdened the fluidity of language. I also tweaked things like lineation. I often think about Despy Boutris’s observation about how lines “increase or decrease tension” and “create and then subvert meaning,” and that is something I like to explore.

Something that helped in writing this poem was taking space and time away from it so I could see it better. Some people advise taking a few days, weeks, however long you may need, from a writing project to put it in better perspective. I agree. This allowed me to make some structural edits, which isn't something I'd thought would be useful in poetry. Distance allowed me to zoom out of the work and see if it was organized coherently and usefully, and if all its parts were where they best fit. There's an earlier draft of the poem that's arranged differently. Some of the last few lines now were at the beginning. After a break from the poem, I could tell that some of the initial lines were premature and that I'd make a better journey, aesthetically and logically, if I didn't unravel the opening event at once, but returned after some other revelations.

TNS: Why did you choose the title for your second poem “Iwájú?” What is the connection from the title to the poem itself for you?

NO: “Iwájú” is Yorùbá for forward, future, later. A lot of my work is occupied with grief and loss. With “Iwájú”, I’m reaching for something like vindication. Naming it in Yorùbá was almost involuntary. It sort of told me its name and I agreed. I can think of a few reasons why my subconscious would do that. There is a highly poetic tradition of prayer in Yorùbá spirituality. My poem doesn't lean into that stylistically, at least not in the way that Kolawole Samuel Adebayo's “Invocation of the Morning // Or Oríkì Orí” does for example. I was raised in church—-hence the Biblical allusions—where Yorùbá spirituality is demonized, but exploring one’s relationship with the divine through one's Yorùbáness is encouraged. It would be normal to hear prayer made in English and Yorùbá, and this poem is prayer in a sense. In essence, the poem is situated in an inextricably cultural art of benediction.

Although, I was a bit hesitant to name the poem in Yorùbá. As a Yorùbá person who speaks the language badly, I didn't want to be insincere or mess up the diacritics.

TNS: When do you as a writer know a poem is complete? When it’s done, what do you want a poem to accomplish?

NO: I wonder about this myself. Ultimately, I think there is endless editing that could be done to any work. I usually work on a poem until I think I have sufficiently addressed the most important of the things I wanted to say. Have I shed the burden, if there was one, that drove me to write that specific poem? Does this word, sentence, belong here? Does it aid the meaning or aesthetic of the poem? I work on a poem until most of it intuitively feels ‘right’. Or until submissions close for the publication I'm sending it to. (Even after, I find myself reworking bits of it, sometimes only in my head.)

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

NO: I'm in school again and it tends to be the only thing I can think about lately, so I'm not reading a lot of journals or magazines. But I have been haphazardly reading through Split Lip’s Archive. That they publish one, usually short, poem from one author for one month is convenient for my current attention span. Of course, the poems are brilliant and they consistently use language and form in ways that I aspire to. I go to Split Lip knowing I will be reminded that poetry can be simple and inventive.

TNS: I enjoy how William G Gillespie’s “Pleasure” and Ryleigh Wann’s “35mm Film” efficiently condense worlds of emotion. “Pleasure” packs much for its brevity. Almost as if Gillespie, as Wann writes, “shows   two  [multiple] things at once but never the whole picture fully,” yet “we all know the metaphor.” Wann’s is a longer poem but where it directly explores the relationship between the speaker and their romantic interest, it zooms in on these particular moments that effectively carry the story. Both poems seem to speak to how intimacy quiets and slows one's experience of time, how intimacy is in fact built of these little moments. At the same time, I learn, from both, the power of skillfully constructing a story by carefully selecting scenes, using “the clicking flash of a moment” as Wann says.

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Nike Onwu writes from Lagos, Nigeria. Her work has been published in Agbowo, Isele and elsewhere.

The Shore Interview #34: Jessica Goodfellow

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: I found myself fascinated by your poems in this issue, "Green as Fixative, When Nothing Else Stays Fixed" and “Issues in Pronunciation.” I was particularly intrigued by the associative movement in both poems. What strategies do you employ when writing associatively like this? What were you considering as you were working on each poem?

JG: Making associative leaps in poems is a challenge because there needs to be a loose rigor in the relationship between the seemingly disparate elements—you want the association to be intuitive, but not so elusive that the reader cannot feel the resonance. There are two strategies that I lean on. The first is to be patient when I have two elements that vibrate with some kind of resonance which I cannot yet articulate. I’ve learned to wait and see if a third element will appear that will somehow illuminate the association. For example, as mentioned in “Green as a Fixative When Nothing Else Stays Fixed,” my husband gave me a bracelet with a Murano glass bead the exact color of the vivid green so typical of the Northern Lights. I knew immediately that there was some kind of energy in that comparison, but for years (seven years I waited!) I couldn’t grasp what it was. Then this spring my son emailed me an image of a microscope slide of a slice of mouse brain, on which he had used a green fixative the same unusual color, and suddenly I understood that it was scale (microscopic to proportional to telescopic) that I wanted to write toward, using that green color as the anchor. Until I received the third element, I had been unable to find the meaning behind the resonance that I felt—I thought it was color that was enchanting me, but it was scale. But also, I think it’s important to remember that you don’t have to come to a meaning with an associative leap—you just have to be able to articulate the resonance.

The second strategy is one that I struggle with, and it is to avoid over-determining the association. You can kill the magic that way. There’s a fine balance between giving the reader too much—thus destroying her delight in experiencing her own intuitive leaping—and giving the reader too little and leaving her bewildered and abandoned, and I’m never sure if I’ve achieved that balance.

As for ‘Issues in Pronunciation,’ I had been explaining voiced and voiceless sounds to my students. Afterward I couldn’t stop noticing minimal pairs (pairs of words in which only one sound differs) with a voiced/voiceless difference. Also on my mind for a long time now has been the devastating effect that the lack of acceptance by a parent has on a child, long after the parent/child relationship has ceased to be the primary relationship. The voicelessness of the child tied together those two subjects that were serendipitously occupying my mind.

TNS: Writing about scientific concepts from a creative angle, as you do in “Green as Fixative, When Nothing Else Stays Fixed,” is a difficult task. Within the limited space of the poem, what do you focus on to balance poetic imagery and the context required to understand a concept?

JG: I agree that using scientific concepts in a poem is tricky. It’s the same problem as mentioned above—over-explain and you lose the lyricism, but if you don’t provide adequate elucidation, confusion results. My natural inclination is to over-explain, so I try to correct by going toward the opposite, sometimes disastrously. I love endnotes in a book and find that to be the place to elaborate on the science, which soothes that desire in me to make sure the reader follows my logic (even when logic isn’t the point—lyricism is!). When publishing in a journal where notes aren’t an option, mostly I try to let it go and hope that the other elements carry the poem, and that the mystery of the scantily explained science attracts rather than discourages the reader. I fail a lot.

TNS: "Green as Fixative, When Nothing Stays Fixed" is constantly playing with scale--the camera zooms in, then zooms out, setting a tiny mouse brain, atoms, a slide under a microscope against the northern lights, the solar system, the night sky. Why was it important to you to communicate scale here?

JG: I went to Alaska for a writing residency a few years ago and had hoped to see the Northern Lights, but we were a month or so too early. So upon returning home, I began to watch live cams of the lights obsessively (when in season) and when I wear my bracelet I think of how this small bead evokes for me the sky, the atmosphere, even the galaxy. And then my son sent me that image of the microscope slide and suddenly I could zoom in the other direction just by thinking about that specific color. It was an experience of scale I could have by just sitting and thinking, or looking at a very few images, and I wanted to share it—that sense of the interconnectedness of everything, from the smallest to the largest element, a sense that is both an exhilarating and soothing, that suggests a meaningfulness that I don’t often have access to. I wanted to document what was for me an unusual moment of connection and hopefulness.

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

JG: Recently some journals I have been enjoying are Ron Slate’s On the Seawall and the Virginia Quarterly Review, whose online archives, VQR Online, never fail to mesmerize me. My longtime go-to journals are the Bennington Review and the Nashville Review, both of which have aesthetics that speak directly to me. Of course, there are so many more, but these come to mind immediately.

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

JG: Both Karen Elizabeth Sharpe’s “Firmament Cracked” and Samantha DeFlitch’s “These Going Days” deal with letting go of a difficult period of time and moving forward afterward. Basically all of humanity is in the process of doing this now, as we move into a different and less deadly phase of the pandemic, and we gradually take more control of our lives and surroundings, returning finally to many of the joys we’ve had to abandon for a few years.  And naturally other aspects of our lives have changed during that long waiting period, so that many of us are moving forward after other more individuated painful circumstances. Sharpe writes that “… Our pain / was the best kind of invisible,” an observation I think many of us echo in our minds, after such a long period of isolation and apartness. Sharpe’s speaker addresses someone who is dealing with the passage through such a difficult period by using the same tools as always—demonstrating equanimity, perseverance, or perhaps even denial?—as indicated in the closing stanzas of the poem:

When frost took the rest
of the garden down to dead

you covered it in leaf mulch
as if this year was the same

as any other.

This ending suggests that the speaker herself did not have quite as much detachment concerning the past painful year.

DeFlitch’s speaker expresses the flipside of Sharpe’s unseen, invisible pain—which is the willful withholding of emotion, the not allowing pain to be seen, in the opening line, “November is the blank-faced month.” For this speaker, the meaning behind a painful time is not clear, has been withheld from her. Nonetheless, the speaker asks the penultimate month to “… take the years’ final sounds / with you when you go: bare-limbed and inscrutable as rime.” DeFlitch, like Sharpe,  wants to let go of a year that she can’t quite grasp the full import of, can’t quite shake off yet.  Perhaps more willfully than Sharpe does DeFlitch urge a painful period to pass, but both poets, and many of us I presume, are finding our own way of letting go of the recent yet inscrutable past.

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Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala and The Insomniac’s Weather Report. A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had poems in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Motionpoems and Best American Poetry. Jessica lives and works in Japan. www.jessicagoodfellow.com

The Shore Interview #35: Inkyoo Lee

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: Both your poems in this issue create powerful emotional resonance in a very brief space. When writing, how do you create tension? Are there any techniques you keep in mind?

IL: Firstly, I’m grateful to hear that my poems have managed to do what I intended.

One of the ways I create tension in writing is to introduce contrasts. I do this repeatedly in “Terminus:” light reflecting off my hands against the darkness of midnight, the noise of a train filling empty stations, my trust in my closed eyelids implying my parallel distrust of “headlights.” Many of these are absurd, in the sense that seemingly tiny and insignificant things are rebelling against what is much greater than them. However, this sort of contrast is what I find in daily life, as when those brief moments that feel like eternity—say, a gust of wind upon the arrival of a train or the last minutes before farewell—point to certain truths about life that last far longer than a few seconds. It doesn’t always take the entire sun to “negate/midnight.”

Another way I create tension is by deliberately going against logical ways of thinking (or making ‘category mistakes’, as philosophers say). In “Autobiography,” I describe “home” as “a few streets/and years away.” My intention was that the reader first see the word “streets” and imagine home as a place, perhaps a house down the road. All familiar so far. Then in the next line, “years” indicates that something more is going on; a house can’t exactly be a certain period of time away, insofar as it is located in space (You could say “that house is ten minutes away by foot,” but that would be a different sentence altogether). So it must be that “home” is merely in the future, and thus more like an idea than an actual place. It is not here yet. This reflects the setting of the poem, where “the family” is marred by difficulties. I talk more about this poem in question 3.

Overall, I think surprise is important in poetry. Contrast and “category mistake” are some of the ways in which I try to achieve it.

TNS: “Terminus,” utilizes the transitory setting of a train station at night. My favorite lines of this issue are in this poem: “…the feeling/that I came into this world/the way a commuter falls asleep…/” This poem introduces a sense of liminality, of being in transit between one thing and another. What made you want to consider the liminal in your writing?

IL: Thank you so much for picking those as your favourite lines of the issue. A few thoughts about “Terminus:” the liminality is never resolved in this poem. Even the arrival at the terminus is not a real event but a simile. It is not clear where the narrator is coming from, either. There is only transit, without a clue as to what things the transit is between. I think that gives the poem a (hopefully) strong sense of liminality. It also implies that the poem deals with a negative sort of liminality. When you’re going somewhere but don’t know where you’re coming from and where you’re headed, your journey is going to make you feel lost and confused. That’s the way I’ve sometimes felt about life and presumably the reason why some people, including myself, feel drawn to religion and spirituality. This is one way in which I relate to the liminal and would like to explore it in my writing.

Another thing I find interesting about the liminal, about what lies between the beginning and the end, is that it tends to be where meaningful things happen. Consider hopes and goals. It is when you’re on track towards their fulfillment that pleasures, frustrations and discoveries happen to you. When you haven’t even begun to approach them, you only feel emptiness, painful desire, or perhaps comfort that leads nowhere. But even if you make them come true, you’re often left with a sense of achievement that doesn’t last long; you can’t help but ask “What now?” and start wishing for more. If that’s not the case and you’re completely content with what you’ve achieved, then you risk falling into a state of inaction. In this respect, Arthur Schopenhauer was capturing a great deal of truth when he said life was like a pendulum swinging back and forth between pain and boredom (The World as Will and Representation, §57). I guess a positive way to look at it is to value the mid-air motion, the transit, itself.

TNS: Your second poem, “Autobiography,” tells a story in flashes of image and setting: a family, unanswered prayers, and “the dead/face of God” peeking through a hole in the roof. Can you elaborate on your process when writing this poem?

IL: It tells a fictionalised, parable-like story partly based on the circumstances surrounding my birth. My parents initially didn’t plan to give birth to me. But they did, because they wondered if a second child could bring happiness to the family; hence why they often called me by an endearing Korean nickname, roughly, “a blessing.” And it did happen, whether by coincidence or not: both their financial and relational circumstances have improved since. So “the little/pebble” really did “bring down/rain,” contrary to what the poem suggests. I should note that I was never explicitly told about these circumstances, so what I’ve said is just a reconstruction based on what clues I have.

The poem reflects the dark side of my feelings about their decision to have me. Sure, my existence has brought happiness; but I feel as if I have a responsibility to make my family happy, or even as if I was brought to life for the sake of others, which is a heavy weight to carry. Also, I used to be susceptible to an unhealthy state of mind in which I felt that existence was a bad thing and dwelled on the fact that I never asked to be born (“unwanted air”). These are raw and vulnerable feelings that I’m still working on, which is why I chose to write the poem as one long metaphor instead of saying things directly. My tendency towards masking truths with metaphors is something I wish to break, though.

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

IL: I’m currently reading from collections more often than journals, but the journals I’ve enjoyed include Rust & Moth and Thrush Poetry Journal. I’ve found a lot of astounding poems in The Shore as well. Aside from these, I always appreciate Poetry for its variety.

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

IL: I really enjoyed Matthew Gustafson’s “Poem from the Edge of Things” and Barbara Daniels’ “You ask about love,” both of which seem to deal with loss and our relationship to what is not present. I wanted, however, to discuss a major contrast between them: Gustafson writes about a loss that has already happened; Daniels, a loss that will happen.

Daniels’ poem seems to be about the impending death of a loved one. She describes death as rain that is not currently falling but will almost certainly fall, as “the delicate movements of leaves” foretell. Her loss is yet to happen, but it is just as real and prevalent as if it were happening now: “bedroom windows/fill with thousands of leaves.” I am reminded of how the past and future sometimes affect us with equal urgency as the present does, yet each of them strikes us in its own way, as if in different languages.

Gustafson’s poem appears to be about his past belief in a god (or “holding together” of a god), which has then been “unmade.” His loss has already happened; it is in the past. But the poem speaks to me of how past things can persist, perhaps in the form of emotions or memories, even after they’re gone—indeed, they persist in that way because they’re gone—and the person who once had them can’t help but feel their paradoxical presence.

This sense of “can’t help but” is expressed, for example, in Gustafson’s striking simile: “There was a god/I held together once,//the way the wind/holds thick hair.” The wind holds thick hair simply by doing what it does, i.e. blowing. It can’t help but hold thick hair. In a similar way, I hear from many people that belief in god (or lack thereof) is not a matter of choice: if you genuinely believe in god, you can’t help but believe in it. However, Gustafson goes on to say, after his god has been “unmade,” that now he himself is “held/in the wind.” This seems to suggest that his continued existence, his being “still here” despite the loss of god, is what really can’t be helped. The title indicates that he is writing from “the edge of things,” perhaps in a state of spiritual exile or detached wisdom; in any case, the empty churches remain, also held in the wind, reminding him of his god-holding past.

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Inkyoo Lee was born in South Korea and studies philosophy in the UK. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Rust & Moth, The Literary Canteen, The Hanok Review and Phi Magazine. Find out more at https://inkyoolee.wordpress.com/

The Shore Interview #36: Emily A. Benton

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: Your first poem in this issue, “Back Country,” stood out to me for its emphasis on the man-made aspects of the environment around the speaker: a no trespassing sign, painted asphalt, a man-made lake, a fence. Why did the man-made aspects of this place feel important to you here?

EAB: I love a good pastoral landscape—in poetry or otherwise—and I grew up in an area where I could wander and quickly feel like Emerson in the backwoods, while still ironically being within earshot of my mother’s voice when she wanted me to return for dinner. In returning to that place as an adult, with widening gaps in between each visit, I’ve slowly watched this little oasis in the Southern U.S. whittle away to more and more development as land is sold and repurposed for subdivisions. I find it hard to write a poem about nature these days that doesn’t have some form of humanness interrupting it—I mean, I’m there, documenting whatever I’m trying to write about, for one—just as it’s harder to find a place anywhere, especially in America, where humans haven’t arrived and taken something or left their mark. I also realized that this particular landscape I was writing about was losing the parts of it that I remembered and cherished the most and therefore had changed into someone else’s home.

TNS: Your poem, “Great Wave,” meditates on a nearly ubiquitous, corporatized piece of art in our modern culture— somehow simultaneously invoking the nature of art and the art of nature itself. Can you speak about the work of the ekphrasis here?

EAB: I had been reading an academic book at the time—Hokusai’s Great Wave by Christine M.E. Guth (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015)—and thinking about why Hokusai’s print is so iconic. Simultaneously, I’d been trying to break from the usual clichés of writing about the ocean, as I was living in Hawai‘i and spending a lot of time staring at it. I mean, how many words can one use to describe the ocean? It’s an iconic subject for poets, much like the moon. I set out a few constraints for myself before writing the poem: think of Hokusai’s “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” start with the negative rather than the positive and try to write in a sonnet form. I didn’t keep the latter, but the first two intentions stuck. In terms of ekphrasis, I spent more time thinking about the artist than the print, looking for common ground between us as he likely had similar challenges trying to do a series of 36 prints about one subject—Mount Fuji.

TNS: In regards to “Great Wave,” what was the question or idea you held in your mind as you wrote this poem? How do you think that question may have guided your process and the final shape of the poem itself?

EAB: I think the lingering question I didn’t know I was asking until I was finished writing the poem was “What am I afraid of?” I was not like Hokusai’s paddlers in the canoe, nor was I like the poem’s surfer in the wave, but anxiety drove this poem into existence from the very beginning. I’ve always been a bit squeamish about the ocean. I get tossed around easily; I’m not a good swimmer and I hate it when fish or slimy things touch my feet underwater. Not a great disposition to be in when living on an island! But the longer I lived there, I grew to love the ocean and crave its pull on a weekly basis. Much could be said about the process of creating art under one’s own pressure to avoid some unforeseen blunder, only to find solace in the act of doing it or in the awe of something unexpected in a finished work.

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

EAB: The Greensboro Review and The Sewanee Review have regular spots on my nightstand. I also enjoy reading Juke Joint and Bitter Southerner—and The Shore! — online, in addition to the great poems we receive for storySouth, where I’m a poetry editor. And I keep up with Hawai‘i writers via Bamboo Ridge, FLUX Hawai‘i and Hawai‘i Pacific Review.

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

EAB: I love the reverence for old and forgotten things found in Matthew Gustafson’s “Poem from the Edge of Things” and William Littlejohn-Oram’s “Neon Moon with Cicadas.” I found it interesting that both poems include abandoned churches in them, but they don’t exist for the purpose of criticizing organized religion or making any grand political statements. Instead, they hold space for what was once symbolic but no longer serves their speakers’ current state of being. There’s something meditational about these poems and their couplet structure helped me slow down the pace of my own reading, stalling time until I was sitting there in stillness with them, thinking on these things as well.

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Emily A Benton is a poetry editor for storySouth and a former editor for The Greensboro Review and the University of Hawai‘i Press. Her poems have appeared in journals such as ZYZZYVA, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Harpur Palate and Southern Poetry Review. Raised in Tennessee and a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro, she lived and worked in Hawai‘i from 2012 to 2020. She now resides in Georgia. Find more at emilyabenton.com

The Shore Interview #37: Marisa Lainson

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: “Fall in California” opens with a zoom in: “Someone drops the marble of the world/into a glass of bourbon…Driving down the 5 we/sweat and hunger…” taking the viewer from the furthest distance possible, imagining the world as a marble in the hand of a god, to the passenger seat of a car in the space of a stanza. How did you think about distance and perspective when writing this poem? Why did you want to emphasize it here?

ML: Climate change often feels like this big, apocalyptic, untouchable thing. Even the constituent words of the term—“climate” and “change”—are these abstract, encompassing nouns. But the lived realities and consequent experiences of climate change are unavoidably personal, intimate, human—a family fleeing their home as wildfire alights the hills, ancestral homes wrecked by storm and flood, an asthmatic child wheezing in the night.

I wrote the first draft of this piece in 2020 during the Silverado fire in Irvine, CA. At the time, I was attending UC Irvine for my MFA and my partner and I kept obsessively checking the news to see if the fire had hopped the freeway towards our neighborhood. Having grown up in California, I'm no stranger to wildfire season or even anxiously checking evacuation updates to see if your block has been added, but the greater context of the raging pandemic, stay-at-home orders and global uprisings against police brutality made that fall feel even more apocalyptic than usual—so the context for me at the time was this all-encompassing, large-scale sense of doom, like being a fish in a bag being shaken by an angry god.

That opening image came from one specific moment of walking outside, looking up at the orange-red sky and thinking I might as well be at the bottom of a glass of apple juice (which became bourbon in the final version of the poem). This feeling of smallness, of insignificance against a burning sky, was one of two crucial seeds from which the poem developed. I liked the opening tercet after I wrote it—it felt true to that helpless feeling, that goldfish-in-a-bag moment—but I also felt it lacked the intimacy and immediacy of day-to-day life in the midst of emergency. As I was writing the poem, I immediately wanted to problematize and push back against my own defeatism while anchoring the poem back in the lived, physical realm.

So the next tercet is a dramatic zoom in to an intimate, everyday moment in the midst of emergency—the second fundamental seed of the poem, a sharp, acrid memory of driving down the freeway in rush-hour traffic, watching as the purple of jacaranda trees was swallowed up by smoke. We're back in a body, sweaty and anxious, rather than the hand of a god. And there's that edge of complicity in being inside an instrument of pollution, of telling the addressed "you" to look away. And the rest of the poem unfolded as a push-and-pull dynamic of big and small, cosmic and personal, victimhood and culpability.

Straddling those plates of the exponential and the personal is a recurring theme in my work—I’m a chronic overthinker and obsessive reader of probably too much long-form journalism and abstract moral philosophy for my mental health, but the way I interpret and understand the world is through the body, the senses, the ambivalent accumulation of moments and memories that make up human life—so the shift, the zoom in, felt very natural for me in this piece. It wasn’t something I was actively thinking about when writing the poem, rather a natural marriage of the two distinct yet resonant images that were the seeds of the poem.

TNS: I was struck by your use of color in both your poems in this issue, “Fall in California” and “Old Scabs:” the natural vibrancy of an orange, purple jacaranda blossoms, red ketchup, “honey-gold hair.” What do you consider the role of color in a poem?

ML: I think there's likely as many ways to deploy color in a poem as there are poets and poems in the world, but these particular pieces both use color simply: as an element of sensory imagery.

I think poets and writers are often drawn to one or two senses most strongly—some write sharply visual descriptions, others have a knack for creating soundscapes with both words (rhyme, assonance, etc.) and sonic imagery, others can seamlessly invoke bodily experiences, etc.

For me, my strongest senses are taste and touch, so while the colors deployed in these pieces of course have a visual element, that visual aspect was usually a secondary concern to being appetizing (or unappetizing, as the case may be)—red ketchup, honey-gold, black mold on an orange—or tactile: purple jacaranda petals as bruises.

TNS: Writing about climate change or childhood requires an understanding of a reader’s expectations for the world as it was in the past and the world as it is now. In general, what strategies do you use when balancing these expectations?

ML: Before I can anticipate and balance a reader’s expectations, I first need to have in mind a clear picture of who my intended audience is. I often tell my poetry students that writing is akin to public speaking, in a way: your message is more compelling for every listener if you lock eyes with one person in the audience rather than vaguely glancing over the whole room. In the same way, I find my work is sharper and fuller when I have a clear concept of who my audience, my ideal reader, is. I think if I tried to anticipate and balance every potential reader's expectations, I'd not only fail to write a successful poem—I'd drive myself mad.

Poetic craft is all about cultivating a particular experience for the reader as they move through the piece—deploying enjambment, diction, tone, etc. to both set up and subvert expectations—but not every reader will be interested in or equipped to enter into that crafted experience. I'm not writing to every person in every room and I'm not interested in being understood or appreciated by every reader nor welcomed into every room. I'm writing to specific people in specific rooms.

So the question when writing is, what rooms do I want my poems to speak, creep, fall, saunter, or barge into? And who am I hoping will catch it on the other end with good faith, nuanced exploration and a critical grace? That's my reader, the person in the audience who I'm locking eyes with from the stage.

Jericho Brown has said, "When I’m writing, I think of myself when I was 19 and younger. That’s the person I think of as audience." When I'm writing, I'm most often thinking of women and non-binary folks who share a certain lexicon of millennial ennui, queer and feminist theory, and/or ex-religious sensibility. Those are my people, my addressees. I don't know how to write to anyone else—at least, not in a way that still feels interesting and generative for me, for I'm fundamentally a fairly selfish writer more concerned with writing what feels true to my vision and voice rather than what'll appeal to the largest demographic—even as I welcome any reader to approach my work and take or leave it as they will.

Having that specific audience in mind makes it much easier to anticipate and balance expectations when crafting the world of the poem.

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

ML: Too many to name! I’m a big fan of Muzzle Magazine and always look forward to their issues. I recently got my fall 2023 copies of The Paris Review and Black Warrior Review. Some other regular faves are The Offing, Beloit Poetry Journal and Birdfeast, to name just a few.

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

ML: Lila Waterfield’s “Lazarus, Come” invokes the biblical image of calling the dead back to life, perhaps ironically or prophetically as the whole piece is heavy with an anticipatory grief.

Chelsea Dingman’s “Letter from the Dead to the Living” speaks from a present grief, a worry fulfilled and could be read as a voice from the darkness that the cat in “Lazarus, Come” lopes into at the poem’s end.

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Marisa Lainson (she/they) is a queer poet from Southern California. She recently earned her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where she served as Poetry Editor of Faultline Journal of Arts & Letters. Their work has appeared in The Journal, Poet Lore, The Pinch, Frontier Poetry, Peatsmoke Journal, Stonecoast Review and Foothill Poetry Journal, where they were a finalist for the 2021 Foothill Editor’s Prize.

The Shore Interview #38: M M Porter

Questions by Ella Flores, Art Editor

EF: Your first poem in this issue, “On Shaking Hands,” moves from a projected funeral, to un-conjurable photographs, until the speaker “can’t quite/find water the way it is.” Why did ending on this formless object feel apt for the poem’s title?

MMP: I appreciate you asking this question, as the end of this poem had a surprising amount of debate behind it. When writing this poem, I knew I wanted to get across this idea of meeting a person who you do not know and yet will become inextricably invaluable to you. After the “you” and “I” characters shake hands, they form this bond that dreads the loss of each other. Reaching for one another is like reaching for water. This need to find it to survive but also not being able to access it for some reason. Like the bottle is preventing the obtaining of the liquid even though the liquid is usually put in a container in order for us to hold it. The speaker doesn’t want to lose another essential element and hesitates to grab for water because they know what it is to lose something they have needed before.

EF: “Failing Marriage” is written in third-person, has short winding lines and long stanzas. Can you speak to how you thought about form when approaching this piece and topic?

MMP: Another great question! My writing process for poetry is a little odd. I write everything in paragraphs first. It’s a little bit of stream of consciousness without paying attention to what I am creating, to what form even is. Surprisingly, I have written very few prose poems. Because after the paragraph comes the revision and this is where I begin to carve away. It’s a little like that saying about staring at a block of marble and seeing the statue inside it. I stare at my block of text and start to carve out the form. When I was writing “Failing Marriage,” I just started to notice that the natural places where I wanted to break the poem were shorter. Line work is always about suspense and double meaning to me. What surprise will happen if I delay the readers information by that millisecond that it takes their eyes to go to the next line. I also think that since the marriage is breaking apart, it kind of demands broken thoughts. When you are in something, it’s hard to see the full scope of it, if the characters were in fact going through this struggle, they certainly wouldn’t know that the marriage was ending, they’d see fragments. As for the stanza’s, these kind of hold the whole thought of the short lines together. Creating the bigger picture and allowing the reader to get a sense of what the short lines mean together instead of individually.

EF: When reading “On Craving” familiar touchstones like leggings, croissants, a Macy’s parking lot, a shower scrub, all contrast with the threads of desire and violence. What role do you see these familiar elements playing in how this poem arrives at its end?

MMP: I honestly really enjoy putting in mundane and modern things into poetry. I think I developed an affinity for this because of my exposure to Frank O’Hara when I was first introduced to poetry. I think something about that everyday life feeling through specificity of names and things is extremely poignant when it comes to tackling overwhelming concepts. So for this poem, I really wanted to approach that massive concept of what it’s like to feel so lonely and in need of human touch/interaction. I don’t really know how to get at that concept, seeing as it’s so large, so pinning the speaker in a place of such normalcy allows for this kind of grandness to be communicated. Everything is as a reader would experience a day, except for how clearly hyperbolic the speaker then begins to rush to this violent image because they are that desperate for care. I think it allows the reader to understand the speaker. Before the speaker half-explains their desire in the last couplet where they confirm that if someone gave them this care, they would be able to give it back ten-fold. They aren’t only looking for a one-night stand kind of touch, but a two-way compassionate human experience.

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

MMP: Well, clearly I have been enjoying reading The Shore. But also, I just moved to Ohio and I’ve been getting acquainted with the journals around here. Currently, Quarter After Eight and New Ohio Review have been great reading pastimes for me. I think something that is really amazing about the writing community is how many journals are out there. A poet friend of mine really enjoys Richard Siken, who has recently been releasing new work. They sent me a poem of his that was just published in TriQuarterly, which is a journal through Northwestern University. I hadn’t heard of it before, so I am making my way through their Summer/Fall 2023 issue right now and it’s really been a pleasure to read. My career as a poet is so new, and I am still trying to wrap my mind around the world of poetry. There is such great community in writing, so many people start journals, edit for journals and submit to journals, its overwhelming in a good way. Writing is just so alive in people and it’s been beautiful to begin to become a part of this space.

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

MMP: The Shore’s 19th issue consists of a remarkably intelligent collection of poets. There are so many through lines between the works: women, desire, anger, longing, haunting, childhood/parenting, shadows, remarkable associative leaps and syntactical play, all of this, in my opinion, wraps around to this idea of “we are trying.” I think that this issue is tackling struggles that are typically viewed as hopeless, inevitable, or tragic. But instead, poets are taking it upon themselves to provide a sort of hope, in the idea that we are all trying to do the right thing, move on, fix, destroy, etc. for the purposes of living well.

The order of poems lends itself to topics being shared, mother to mother, cat to cat. However, each poet takes these topics in their own right, twisting it away from the last poet’s interpretation of the object/subject. It is hard to pick just two poems/poets that exemplify the work being done in this issue, because a lot of them are working together to create the overall message.

Noor Shahzad’s poem, “Bitch Pastoral,” aptly portrays almost everything I have mentioned above. I think it is important to mention that as a person, I shy away from anger as an emotion, but I think that Shahzad’s poem, for all its intensity and rage has this underpinning of longing to be understood and desire to assert these things as true. It is traversing the nature of “Earth as brothel” throughout the entirety of the piece. Exploring what it means to subject women to the existence of patriarchy and coming out with the strength of we are trying to find a place for women to exist. That we have this birth right to be a bitch, which has a powerful double meaning. Are we born into a place in which people subject us to their opinion and demean us as bitch or are we empowered by our ability to be something other than passive, kind and submissive?

I considered many poems that I believe to be involved in this conversation of womanhood, parenting, trying to better a situation, etc. Marisa Lainson’s “Old Scabs,” Alejandra Cabezas’s “Sirena,” Conan Tan’s “Open Air” and Ann Weil’s “Estrangement” are all great examples among others.

I settled on Heather Truett’s “Let me tell you what I know about beds,” because it’s ending provides this tinge of hope that I have been talking about. Her poem depicts the dangers of sexual assault through different episodes of times in which beds were a comfort or a horror. Like Shahzad, she is applying linguistic gymnastics with associative leaps that navigate the rough waters of being a woman. Her poem is underpinned with a longing to return to innocence. Her ending, much like Shahzad’s, has a two-toned quality. “Tonight, I choose memory/foam, marriage mattress. I paid so much/to wreck myself ashore a softness/that will not smother.” Here Truett uses the line break on “I paid so much” to emphasize how much it cost her to grow up as a woman in this world, but then it turns instead from devastation to “ashore a softness that will not smother.” Truett finds hope in the midst of a dark situation and finds shelter in a “bed” that will not harm her.

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M M Porter is attending Ohio University to pursue her PhD in English with an emphasis in Poetry. She is a graduate of the MFA poetry program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Originally from Michigan, she continues to pursue the arts and hopes to one day teach creative writing with others who share her passions.

The Shore Interview #39: Zea Pippi Lotte van der Elsken

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: The perspective of a photograph, of a story, is a decision made in the moment the photograph is taken. Your poem in this issue, "Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City, 1981," focuses on expanding this moment in a triptych of perspectives that stretch beyond the flash of the camera: Nan, the camera and the viewer of the photograph itself. What do you see as the role of perspective in the poem?

ZPLvdE: This is such a wonderful question! It perfectly highlights the relationship between poetry and photography that draws me to ekphrasis. The stillness where photography and poetry overlap is where both mediums have me in their grasp. They differ intriguingly in their process of creation. Like you said, the story of a photograph seems irrevocably decided at the shutter. Language however, takes time to build. It is never set in a singular instance with all its undeniable truth and detail. In this poem in particular, language was my tool to expand that sixtieth of a second into an imagined reality through making perspective malleable. I wanted to reach beyond what I knew about the image by moving past myself, and by extension the reader, as the viewer. The camera—positioned by Goldin purposefully in this self portrait—plays a voyeuristic role here that I related to as this poem was becoming. I found myself thinking of the camera itself as the viewer: not only in this exact moment but rather for years to come. Knowing the images this camera was still to take—in particular Goldin’s self portrait, “Nan one month after being battered,” taken three years later—was the catalyst to what this poem became. In a sense, perspective is limited in a photograph, but in a poem it can move like a film unbound by borders of frames or time. Allowing for perspective to move from what is seen to what came before and comes after allows for the singular image to unfold into the story that contains multitudes: wishes, speculations, truths and other images.

TNS: The rhythm and pacing of this poem constantly disrupts itself. Can you speak to your process as you chose line breaks and line length here?

ZPLvdE: My line breaks always happen intuitively as I write. Breath plays a huge role in my writing process and that is usually what informs my line length. I often feel as if the poem chooses its own breath, almost involuntarily. Especially with this piece the process of composing it was visceral, partially fueled by anger. It became a prayer-like experience as I grappled with my admiration for Goldin and her raw, honest work and my repugnance of the abuse she endured. I think the disruption that emerged from this intuitive state represents that part of wanting to watch and look away simultaneously. Each line break seems to embody a hesitation. I kept asking myself: What happens next? Where do I look to? Where does this go? What does she see now? What does she know? Can I wish this for her? Every time I questioned, the poem automatically paused. It asked for breath, for space.

TNS: You're an experienced photographer yourself, having had your photographs published in magazines and displayed in galleries. How did your understanding of the medium inform your sense of perspective in this poem? Do you find that this experience informs your writing in other ways?

ZPLvdE: My background in photography always sneaks its way into my poetry and vice versa. Starting ekphrastic poetry actually seemed all the more daunting at first because of that, weirdly enough. It felt as if the direct intersection between my two loves was just too tender to touch. Once I found ways to go beyond description though, ekphrasis became a playground. In this particular poem it gave me an opportunity to express my passion, not only for the beauty of imagery, but for the hands-on process of analog photography in particular. This poem had a couple drafts, but only really flourished once I allowed the speaker to be a watcher inside Goldin’s darkroom. The many darkrooms I’ve worked in have always felt like sanctuaries to me: the appearing of somethings on a sheet of nothings will never cease to amaze me. The developing and printing process can be meditative in the same way writing can be. It can also be full of frustrations. Not unlike scaffolding a poem, a good photographic print can only be made from errors, most of your time is spent saying: too light, too dark, that part isn’t quite as visible as it needs to be… Anyways, I can go on about poetry and photography forever. To come back to your question, I think my understanding of the fragility of the photographic medium itself, as well being very familiar with the intimacy of self-portraiture, also informed the way this poem moves and spends time with the (speculated and imagined) decisions made by Goldin. I know what comes before and after the shutter, and I wanted to make space for those experiences in this imagined alternate ending for her.

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

ZPLvdE: Besides this beautiful issue of The Shore I have recently been loving the latest issue of North American Review. Also, I adore Literary Mama always and have been going through their wonderful archive.

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

ZPLvdE: There are so many poems in this issue that I could spend a lot of time with! I absolutely love Melanie H Manuel’s “on watching scream (1996)” and the way it ebbs and flows between danger and pleasure. It’s just a super sexy poem with such clever and calculated dualities. After Manuel paints a most romantic picture of a fictional murder she moves into reality and has us, quite literally, by the throat: “when you said, let’s fuck/like we’re in a slasher movie, we laughed, &/months later, we did. on the hardwood floor,/three double shots of patron silver in, scissors/to my throat,” the messiness and want that shine in these lines build a filmic scene that blends seamlessly into her ekphrasis. I feel like I am still watching a movie as the speaker becomes Sydney and is “undone” by her lover at the poem’s close. The yoking of love and tragedy, murder and sex, creates a very realized tension that carries this poem from start to finish.

Though in a completely different tone, the tragedy that lies in want surfaces beautifully once again as James King’s brilliantly titled “In Light of Recent Fires” unfolds. The sense of danger is sweetened in this poem in such an ingenious way: King seems to close our eyes by having us imagine darkness, but then shows us a new reality in which the dark, the soil, even death can be romantic. When the poem turns, the beloved and the speaker become worms underground: “We will learn/multiplicity of hearts,/as the worms did all those years ago,/breathing and being the breath/of the black soil. Come to me,/sightless. You and I will be myriad/in our slitherings”—a tragically romantic image. I adore how in both these poems, horror entangles itself with sweetness and want.

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Zea Pippi Lotte van der Elsken grew up in Amsterdam and holds a BA in Photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Netherlands. She is enrolled in the MFA Poetry program at San Diego State University where she received the Presidential Graduate Research Fellowship. She is Development Director at Poetry International and an instructor for SDSU's department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies. Her photography has been exhibited in galleries across The Netherlands and published in numerous magazines and papers alongside her non-fiction writing, such as De Volkskrant, Focus Magazine and others. Her poetry is forthcoming in Zone 3 and has been published by Michigan Quarterly Review, Foothill Poetry Journal and Pineapple Road Press. She lives in Encinitas with her soon to be husband and many plants.

The Shore Interview #40: Mickie Kennedy

Questions by Taylor N. Schaefer, Interview Editor

TNS: I found myself fascinated by the first stanza of "Shoving Newspaper into My Shoes:" “I grew up afraid/of photographs, the shudder/ of lens and shutter—antelopes/caught in the glass at the zoo.” This image of a fleet-footed prey animal caught, the ability of a photograph to similarly catch a fleeting moment in time. Can you speak to the role of confinement and memory in this poem?

MK: The antelopes, which are usually associated with grace and freedom, are trapped within the confines of the glass enclosure. This image symbolizes the feeling of being trapped or confined by the act of being photographed, as if a moment in time is frozen and captured. Photographs are often seen as vessels of memory. They capture moments in time, preserving them for posterity. However, in the context of the poem, the fear of photographs suggests that these captured moments might not always be pleasant or desired memories.

TNS: In your poems in this issue and your work in general, what do you feel is the role of the strange? How do the strange and queerness intertwine and reflect each other?

MK: The role of the strange in poetry is often to disrupt familiar patterns and challenge conventional perspectives. The strange introduces an element of surprise, ambiguity, and sometimes discomfort, prompting readers to reconsider their assumptions and view the world from a different angle.

Both queerness and the strange can be employed to amplify marginalized voices and experiences. They can shed light on the lives of individuals who don't conform to traditional standards—like me, a gay man who spent twenty years married to a woman—providing a platform for their stories and perspectives. They challenge readers to reconsider their preconceived notions about identity, love and belonging.

TNS: “Sonnet with Eyelids and Frogs” centers on the natural process of small things: frogs calling for mates, a sliver of a new moon, children made small as mice, a glove in the snow. Why place emphasis on the small here?

MK: I’m interested in the contrast between these small things and how they opened a vast field of spaciousness within me. This poem orbits a domestic life I never thought I’d call my own. The domestic is composed of tiny moments, tiny images, tiny people: but the impact they make is mysterious and vast.

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

MK: I have been very impressed with & Change, a new journal of gay poetry, edited by Kevin Bertolero. I’ve also enjoyed the latest issues of The Paris Review, Nimrod and Gulf Coast.

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

MK: The two poems, “Life in Pay-Per-View” by Justin Howerton, and “The Boss” by J P Dancing Bear, share thematic elements and emotions. In “Life in Pay-Per-View,” there is a longing for the past and a sense of missed opportunities. The speaker expresses a desire to step off the carousel of life and make different choices. In “The Boss,” there's a feeling of looking back on the past, particularly a relationship, with a sense of longing and a hint of regret. In “Life in Pay-Per-View,” there is a reference to the speaker's father and a desire for a son. In “The Boss," the relationship between the speaker and someone they drove away is central to the poem. These characters and relationships add depth to the poems and evoke complex emotions.

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Mickie Kennedy (he/him) is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland with his family and a shy cat that lives under his son's bed. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Nimrod, Copper Nickel and elsewhere. A finalist for the 2023 Pablo Neruda Prize, he earned an MFA from George Mason University.