Interview with Ariel Francisco

...the hurricane somewhere out

in the Atlantic, spinning itself into nothingness,

dissipating under its own destructive power.

     — from “Post Hurricane Miami,”   
Ariel Francisco

The above photo and the following bio were found on the poet's website: 
https://arielfranciscopoetry.wordpress.com

Ariel Francisco is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke(C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he was raised in Miami and completed his MFA at Florida International University.

Ariel Francisco is a first generation American poet of Dominican and Guatemalan descent. He is currently completing his MFA at Florida International University where he is the editor-in-chief of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine and also the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square, and elsewhere.

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I've never met Ariel Francisco. When poet friend, Kate Fadick's chapbook, Self-Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen, became available for preorder from Glass Poetry Press, I learned that Editor Anthony Frame was offering a purchase deal on all the chapbooks he would publish in the first series, so I subscribed, and discovered Francisco's poetry in that series. —Karen L. George

You can read a review of Ariel Francisco book Before Snowfall, After Rain here. 

(This interview was conducted via email.)

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One of the qualities I especially enjoy about chapbooks vs. poetry collections is that chapbooks, especially one as exquisite as yours, are so effective in creating a cohesive work, a concentration that resonates in each poem and in the poems as a whole. Every time I read your chapbook, I notice more connections or threads woven through it by the use of repeated imagery and themes that deepen and illuminate your work. What do you like and/or dislike about this short poetry form?  

AF:  That’s actually really interesting because I was working on my thesis (which turned into my forthcoming full length collection, All My Heroes Are Broke) when I was approached about publishing a chapbook. I had another project I was working on which was about chapbook length, but ultimately decided to construct something from the poems in my thesis instead. So while I didn’t write it as a chapbook, or with a chapbook in mind, I had a lot to work with which presented ample opportunities to create connects and threads throughout. It was difficult but also a lot of fun, essentially paring 60 pages of poems down to 20, and then trying to figure out an order. I think I decided on the title first, for example, so that set the opening poem and closing poem in place, and I just worked my way inwards from there.

What I love about chapbooks is their ability to create and sustain these threads throughout the poems, whatever they may be. I don’t want to say it’s easier to do in chapbook than a full length book because I don’t want to diminish it, but it does make more sense to do that in a smaller space. I think that’s part of the reason why chapbooks are becoming more popular. It’s a slightly different medium where one can accomplish something different, and there are a lot of talented poets out there publishing very cool, very strange, and very beautiful chapbooks.

 In your poems you mention the poets Baudelaire, Bukowski, Lorca, and James Wright. Are these some of your favorite poets, or ones that particularly influenced you, and if so, can you tell us what you particularly admire about them? Or if these are not favorite poets of yours, what are some of your favorite or most influential poets, and why?

AF:  They’re poets that I’ve read pretty well at different points in my life. Of those, James Wright has had the biggest influence on me, even for the style of these kinds of poems— engaging with them directly instead of just writing a poem in their style, or after them, which seems more common. I’m thinking, for example, of Wright’s “As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor,” which alludes to Po Chu-I (another poet I really love). I also got this from Campbell McGrath, one of my teachers and mentors, who is always bringing in poets of the past into in his own poems whether it's James Wright or Richard Hugo or Emily Dickinson or Frank O’Hara. I think seeing it in his work sort of gave me permission to do it in my own, and it’s a lot of fun. Not to mention it gave me more poets to look up and read when I was younger. Reading Campbell’s “James Wright, Richard Hugo, the Vanishing Forests of the Pacific Northwest” was the first time I had heard of those two poets, for example.

Also, a lot of it is just true, and I often use that as a jumping off point for poems. Where it takes me is another story but I did find that Baudelaire book and mail it to someone that never got it, and I was reading James Wright on the L when that dude started throwing up on himself.

What drew you to poetry?  What inspires you to write poetry?

AF:  I didn’t start writing poetry until I started college. I’d been reading incessantly since I learned how to read, though I never read poetry until my senior year of high school. In AP English, I remember hatingT.S. Eliot but really enjoying Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and that was pretty much it. Going into college, I knew that being just a reader wasn’t a real thing, so I figured writing was the logical progression. Though I’d mostly read fiction and novels, I had no interest in writing it, at all. It seemed strange at the time, but I found absolutely no correlation between reading fiction and wanting to write it, whereas reading even just that little bit of poetry (most of it being The Waste Land, which again, I hated) seemed to just make more sense to me, I think because it struck me more as a sense-making endeavor. I could obviously understand why people read novels but I couldn’t fathom why someone would want to write one, whereas poetry right away made sense from both angles.

I remember before taking an Intro to Creative Writing course in my first semester of college, I went to Barnes and Noble to check out the poetry section (I guess even then, I knew I had to read more poetry in order to ever get good at it) to see if I could something that would interest me. First, I found Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (the affordable B&C classics version, which I still love). Then, in a moment of befuddlement and sheer job, I found Plath’s Arielwhich I had no idea existed. Imagining thinking “I’ll give this poetry thing a try” and then finding your own name on a book by one of only three poets you’ve read. I took this as a good omen and signed up for a workshop almost every semester in undergrad, and just kept writing, which was great because I had failed chemistry and college algebra in my first semester, and switched my major from Marine Biology to English (long story).

What inspires me to write poetry is just the desire to make sense of my life, which I think is the source of a lot of art. It’s as reflective and analytical as it is creative for me, so when I get it right I feel like I have created something and solved something else.

 

 I wanted to ask you about the poem “Perhaps it Wasn’t Such a Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Salinger’s story that is referenced in the epigraph is so haunting, and I found your poem haunting as well. The ending image stuck with me, of the “I” of the poem searching the hotel windows, “ears perked / for the sound of a muffled gunshot.” But I was equally struck by the image near the center of the poem, where, after seeing this man at the beach who “stands in the foam staring at his feet, / hiding his toes in the cold froth,” you say, “I lay Salinger’s / ‘Nine Stories’ in the bird-pocked sand.” The poem doesn’t spell out what the story of the man standing in the ocean might be, or of the other person in the poem who is reading Salinger’s “Nine Stories.” Yet they’re connected by being in the same place at this exact moment. And by how the man standing in the ocean suggests the male character in Salinger’s story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which is a story in the collection “Nine Stories.” The “muffled gunshot” in the poem also echoes the ending of Salinger’s story, where the troubled man leaves the beach, goes into his hotel room and shoots himself.

But I’m curious about why the “I” of the poem lays the story collection “in the bird-pocked sand.” We don’t know if he lays it there temporarily, or is, as it were “done” with the book, himself haunted by the story. I had the curious idea that maybe the “reader” I’ll call him/her, thinks this man on the beach is troubled in some way, and that maybe this book of stories is just what he might need. I’m curious what you meant to suggest by his laying of the book in the sand. It’s such an evocative image, as is the effect of the scene of this beach mirroring the scene in Salinger’s story.

AF:  This is a really great question and I feel bad that I can’t give a very long answer to it. On the one hand, I think he’s putting the book down to reflect. Given the setting of the story, I think he is perhaps imagining that he is on the very same beach that Seymour killed himself on and is maybe revisiting the story in his head, imposing it on his current surroundings. I think he sees the man hiding his toes in the water, that’s for the reader (also hopefully reminiscent of Seymour accusing the woman in the elevator of staring at his toes). I like the idea of the reader thinking the book might help this troubled man but the “I” is too lost in thought to notice him, unfortunately.

In your 2014 “Gulf Stream Literary Magazine” interview with Tony Hoagland, he says at one point in the conversation, “Poems are like clues that have been left for us along the road, little packages that have been left which anybody might find.  You might read a poem, like I did, by W.S. Merwin, many years ago and say, ‘this man knows what I’ve been looking for, and he’s saying what I’ve been waiting for somebody to tell me.’ Our contemporary poems have the obligation to do that too.”

Do you agree with Hoagland’s idea, and what do you envision or hope your poems tell its readers?

AF:  Oh yeah, I definitely agree with Tony there. I mean, I think that’s just a fun way of explaining why we love poems so much. When you read a poem that really resonates with you, it truly does feel as though the poet has some kind of secret insight into your life. How could they know this is exactly how I feel? Right? But it also acknowledges the extreme subjectability of poetry. There could a poem out there that everyone is raving about, but you don’t find it to be particularly good or interesting or resonant. It could be that that poem is not a clue for you.

What I hope for my poems, in the hands and eyes of readers, is to create a space or atmosphere for the mind to occupy. I think of them as tiny episodes of a very weird show— the episodes cumulate not necessarily into a cohesive story but into a larger space. I’m not sure if that makes sense but I hope people keep watching.

 

I read that you are the editor-in-chief of “Gulf Stream Literary Magazine,” and a reader for “The Indianola Review.” What are some of the elements you look for in submissions, that make a poem memorable for you?

AF:  Speaking broadly, my favorite kinds of poems are those that seem to communicate a genuine human experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something true. I know the speaker or the “I” in a poem isn’t always the poet, but I want to believe or be convinced that it is. I want to believe that when reading a poem, the person speaking to me is an actual person telling me something that’s very important to them. Why is this thing important? Maybe I’m not sure, but if I believe that it is, I will reread it for reasons.

What poets and/or collections are you currently reading, and can you tell us what you particularly like about them?

 AF:  Oh, too many to name! I’ve been revisiting Phil Levine, though mostly his collected interviews and essays and various prose things. His work occupies a real world that I recognize very well (the working class struggle, etc.), so I’m always coming back to him in some way or another. Similarly, Adrian Matejka’s new “Map of the Stars” is a book I’ve been really loving this summer. He seems to dip into memory a lot in this book with poems about childhood, whether it’s wonder and curiosity (I too was obsessed with space as a kid) or the struggles of growing up poor, of feeling out of place in the place you call home. That’s always going to resonate with me.

  

I understand you have a forthcoming poetry collection called “All My Heroes Are Broke” that can be pre-ordered now, and released by C&R Press in September.  Congratulations! Can you tell us a little about this new book?

AF:  The book has epigraph from the rap group Atmosphere, which I think sums it up pretty well: “I ain’t saying that you never had to struggle for a buck or some luck or some love, motherfucker join the club.” The poems are essentially about a life in search of these three things (hence being broke, in more than one sense), not necessarily finding them, and not necessarily giving up. Briefly, it’s about being a first generation American and finding that everything kinda sucks.

Do you have anynew projects you are currently at work on?

AF:  I’m grinding away at my second book, and I have poems towards a third and a fourth (they don’t make sense together). I’m translating some of my dad's poems into English, which is a really interesting experience. I’m also maybe working on a chapbook of poems inspired by Cowboy Bebop. And, of course, I am looking for a job.

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You can read several of Ariel Francisco's poems below:

            “Reading James Wright on the L Train”in Duende

            “Nighthawks of the 24-Hour Donut Shops” in Tinderbox Poetry Journal

            “Post Hurricane, Miami” & “Silence Over the Snowy Fields” in The Boiler Journal

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Karen George retired from computer programming to write full-time. She lives in Florence, Kentucky, and enjoys photography and traveling to historic river towns, mountains, and Europe. She is author of the poetry collection Swim Your Way Back(Dos Madres Press, 2014), and five chapbooks, most recently Into the Fire (Blue Lyra Press, 2016) and the collaborative  Frame and Mount the Sky  (Finishing Line Press, 2017). You can find her work in Rogue Agent, Blue Fifth Review, Heron Tree, The Ekphrastic Review, and America. She holds an MFA from Spalding University, and is co-founder and fiction editor of the journal, Waypoints. Visit her website: http://karenlgeorge.snack.ws/. 

Interview with Anya Krugovoy Silver

In the Fall semester of 2016, I asked Jessica Wilson, the administrator for the Georgia Writers Association, if she could recommend a handful of new poetry books. Her kind and generous response included I watched you disappear, by Anya Krugovoy Silver, which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award (GAYA) in 2015. I soon began reading Silver’s 2016 publication, From Nothing and found myself suspended between the worlds of late 19^th and early 20^th century art and, at times, unfamiliar fairy tales. I suspect that what will keep me picking this book up again and again is that I’ve found a bit of my own true north in the poet’s reluctance to romanticize childhood in favor of celebrating the weft and twill of adulthood.

Speaking briefly of her journey, Dr.  Krugovoy Silver relates, “I was born in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania to a Russian/Ukrainian father and Swiss/German mother.  My father was a Russian professor and I learned my love of language from the multilingual and multicultural environment in which I was raised.  I grew up in a home that valued learning, creativity, and questions over material success. Literature and church were the two sacred poles of my childhood.  I started scribbling stories early, but as an adult, I’ve published three books of poetry, The Ninety-Third Name of God, I Watched You Disappear, and From Nothing. I have always wanted to be a teacher, and currently teach English literature at Mercer University.  I live in downtown Macon with my husband, who also teaches at Mercer, and my son.  I have been living with inflammatory breast cancer since 2004.”

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: At its core, this collection of poems is a quiet rebellion against the myth that innocence alone is able to shoulder and shrug off malevolence. These poems take the stance that naiveté (projected or clung to) has no place in womanhood with a capital “W.” Was this a deliberate message? 

Anya Krugovoy Silver: It wasn’t a conscious theme as I wrote individual poems, but I noticed the focus on sensuality, and a refusal to conflate innocence with goodness, appearing and reappearing as I put the manuscript together. That’s especially true in a poem like “St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, Lent.”  I have long resisted the Platonic binary between body and soul, and in that particular poem, I reject the neo-Platonist Paul’s assumption that sensual desire is sinful or opposed to holiness: “Not to live in the passions of the flesh--/how grim and arid the light we’re promised.” I like to call this collection of poems my “red book” because there are so many red images throughout it.  The color, for me, signifies vitality and energy, blood and life.  Although there are many poems about mortality in the book, I also wanted to make room for the fullness and lusciousness of lived, bodily experience.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Your newest collection, From Nothing, also includes several ekphrastic pieces based on art by early 20^th century painters such as Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, Chagall, Klimt, and Toulouse-Lautrec which reflect this “bodily experience.” The paintings and corresponding poems explore our sensual natures.  How did these works of art come to serve as a springboard into the conversation about sensuality and what is your personal connection to this time period?

Anya Krugovoy Silver:  Expressionist painting and art from the turn of the last century in general happen to be among my favorite art.  I particularly like German painters like Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, Köllwitz, Werefkin.  Each of these painters, and the others you mentioned, sought to paint the human body in a non-romanticized way.  With the possible exception of Klimt, they painted ordinary people with ordinary bodies, and sometimes erotically (Chagall and Toulouse-Lautrec, especially).  Modersohn-Becker painted German farmers without turning them into symbols of “the land” or “good, honest people.”  She simply painted them as she saw them, including what she perceived to be their individual spirits.  I love Kollwitz’s famous quote that “The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.” One of my goals in this book was to write about the body—the ill body, the sexual body—honestly, without making the body either grotesque or precious.  I wanted to always respect the body’s, even the dead body’s, integrity and dignity.  The Expressionists whom I admire the most do that, so they were models to me, in a way. They painted human beings neither heroically or fastidiously.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: These same long strokes and subtle countenances that favor insight rather than minutiae are inherent in your own work. For example, several impressions of your father appear in “The Christmas Hat,” “Wake,” “In the Sanatorium,” and “Partings.”  He is, at once, a beloved parent seeking refuge from his demons, a man who cannot articulate his own suffering, and one who only found peace in death.  Do you feel that this is more kinship or craft in regard to the Expressionist painters?  

Anya Krugovoy Silver: Wow—that’s very insightful. I had never thought of a biographical reason for my love of expressionist art, but I think you’re right.  My father and I loved each other very much, and he was very proud of my poetry.  At the same time, in hindsight I would say that he experienced PTSD from the murder of his father during the Stalinist purges and from other experiences in the Soviet Union and in exile during and after the Second World War  He would begin to tell me stories and then explode in rage at the memories of what he’d seen.  When I look at expressionist art, and its focus on the turbulence of the inner life, and about how much can’t be articulated or understood by others, I definitely see my father’s face.  There is a loneliness in the figures of that art that I think resides in many people.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Fairy tales are woven through From Nothing. One might think that they are close relatives, but in this case the speakers of these poems seem to admonish the mythological ‘happily ever after’ while conveying childhood memories that do not mollify young skepticism. In fact, the speaker in Snow White cautions against romanticizing death and recognizes her own early folly. What inspired you to use fairy tales to promote the conversation addressing innocence in this collection?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: Fairy tales were the first form of literature that I encountered in my life.  My parents had a big blue book of the Grimms’ fairy tales that they read to me as a child.  I’ve continued to be obsessed with fairy tales, as so many writers are, because beneath a seemingly obvious and predictable narrative, they can be analyzed in countless ways.  I believe that reading and thinking about fairy tales can help humans find their values and vocations, to reach into their own minds, and I read many of them allegorically.  For example, I read the story of Cinderella as a tale about how one can survive grief; the romance is incidental to the real purpose of the story. It’s true that fairy tales posit a generally benign universe; things almost always end up happily for the protagonists.  I want readers to question those happy endings.  Specifically, serious trauma can’t simply be overcome by meeting a prince with a castle.  Pain stays in one’s memory, in some form or another, forever. 

I was consciously writing against the dominant cultural mood that one should “get over” grief and “move on” from pain.  I can’t stand that superficial notion of healing, and it’s often used to bully people who have gone through cancer or some other kind of violence.  As someone who has lived with cancer, I reject pink ribbon “survivor” culture.  My fairy tale poems, like “Nettle Shirts,” “Maid Maleen” and “Snow White” each argues that the concept of “getting past” cancer is absurd and puts a huge burden on a sick person.  I think that idea could be applied to anyone who has suffered abuse, assault, or violence.

And finally, I see in some popular culture, especially music and social media, a glorification of dying “young and beautiful.”  That’s always prettier in songs than in real life.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Is your answer to a more genuine healing process found in the poem, “Four Prayers for Forgiveness”? Because it is here that the origins of wounds are pursued while shifting perspectives still allow pain its rightful place.

Anya Krugovoy Silver: “Four Prayers for Forgiveness” grew out of my Sufi meditation classes. I’m trying to forgive a lot in the poem:  cancer, my body, myself, God.  For me, life with chronic illness is best lived when one is able to find peace and joy in the present.  I realize that’s a cliché, and easier said than done, but for me, happiness is an active practice and choice.  It’s definitely not the emotion that comes most easily in the face of suffering; happiness is difficult.  So the forgiveness that I describe in the poem is a forgiveness of my cancer cells, which are only doing what they’re biologically programmed to do, and a forgiveness of my body for endangering me.  I attempt to look beyond illness, and I refuse to let cancer define my life.  I choose to be fully alive. The last lines “I am absorbed like a drop of water/into a bottle of perfume without a bottom./I open my eyes and all is golden” express how I want to live completely immersed in life.  That’s also one reason that I included several love poems in the book.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Before we close, I’d like to discuss the book’s title poem, “from nothing” which is preceded by the lines, “I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” from Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.” 

FROM NOTHING

                                    Again and again, from nothingness I’m born.

                                    Each death I witness makes me more my own.

                                                I imagine each excess line of mine erased,

                                                each muscle shredded, each bone sheared.

                                                   One day, my spine’s long spar will snap,

                                    ribs tumbling loose; my face will droop and drop.

                                    Then I’ll be re-begot – the air will shimmer

                                    and my molecules will vault, emerging free.

                                    From darkening days, the light will surge and flee.

The poem itself is absolutely void of sentiment or affect, thus setting the tone for the rest of the collection, while the slant rhyme and final true rhyme imply a belief in a sense of order. How has your own belief in “the order of things” transformed since your cancer diagnosis, and is this poem most reflective of that sense?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: When one’s life feels out of control because of illness or trauma, it’s helpful, in a therapeutic sense, to wrest order from circumstance.  Some people do that through religion; others conceptualize their lives as journeys, with illness as part of the meaning and self-actualization of their time on earth.  In my case, poetry enables me to take a chaotic experience and fix it on the page, to give it line lengths, images, and sounds and to do what I want with it.  I reestablish a sense of control by giving experiences the meaning that I want them to have, no matter how inchoate that meaning is. 

In “From Nothing,” and in my poetry in general, I am more and more drawn to internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and sound effects such as assonance and consonance, to emphasize a sense of order.  For example, I used the slant rhyme of “snap and drop” and the alliteration of “droop and drop” consciously.  I like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s assertion that “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines/And keep him there.” Ultimately, if there is any underlying order in the world, I don’t think that human beings are privy to it.  I discern no order whatsoever in the deaths of my friends, or in the daily tragedies and disasters of the world.  All humans can do is create our own individual structures with which to deal with the unknown.  That’s why poetry and art will always be essential to the experience of being human.

Anya Silver has published three books of poetry with the Louisiana State University Press.  She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2016 (Scribner) and The Turning Aside:  The Kingdom Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry (Poiema Poetry).  Her work has been featured in Ted Kooser’s column American Life in Poetry, on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and as an Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.  She is currently completing her fourth poetry manuscript.  She has taught for eighteen years at Mercer University.  She is also a metastatic breast cancer thriver.

 

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a Lecturer at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.  She received her MFA in Creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Republic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems.

Interview with Poet Ruth Foley about her chapbook Creature Feature

Creature Feature

Author: Ruth Foley

Publisher: ELJ Publications

Publication date: 2015












Dear Maria by Ruth Foley

I used to think it was your fault, sinking
      blossom, for being kind, for being naïve,

poor child, dripping limp as lake weed
      across your father's arms, your limbs

swaying in the watery air—this is where your
      power lies, where you might have grown

from peasant girl to peasant wife, your
      own children playing near the dappled edge

—but dead, your power forces men to
      their knees, and then their feet; dead, you torch

every cold club. Dead, you can make an entire
      village swarm and bellow against the night.


(Originally published in NonBinary Review and featured on Extract(s).

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Ruth Foley lives with her husband and two retired racing greyhounds in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her work appears in numerous web and print journals, including Antiphon, The Bellingham Review, The Louisville Review, and Sou’wester. Her poems have been included in the Best Indie Lit New England anthology and nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart, and she is the recipient of a finalist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches poetry workshops in various locations around New England. When she’s not writing or teaching, you can sometimes find her elbow-deep in a bee hive or neck deep in the water. Her first chapbook, Dear Turquoise, is available from Dancing Girl Press. She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review and blogs at Five Things.

Author blog: Five Things

Twitter: @GrainOfRuth,  https://twitter.com/GrainOfRuth

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/foley.ruth

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/foleyruth/

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Ruth Foley and I are in a number of online poetry groups together, which is how I came to learn about Creature Feature, her wonderful chapbook of epistolary poems. As poet Les Kay writes on the publisher's website, "These are love letters that help us love ourselves—no matter how monstrous we mistake ourselves for being." I'm delighted to have had the opportunity to interview Ruth about her chapbook and her writing process.

—Nancy Chen Long 

[This interview was originally published on my blog.]

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NCL: Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook Creature Feature.

RF: Creature Feature is a collection of epistolary poems, letters written to the various actors and characters (and one director) of the early black and white Universal monster movies. The films range from The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney (1925) to The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), but is focused on what I think of as the big three: Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man.



NCL: As a guest blogger on Lisa Romeo Writes, you wrote:

I became obsessed for a time with the archetypes—the mad scientist, the specific visions of some of the monsters, the villagers—developed in those films, and with the actors who helped create them. This is, in some ways, the most complicated of my series, because it's most at risk for misinterpretation.

Please speak bit more about that obsession, e.g., how came to be; why those archetypes; what drove the interest in the *actors* who portrayed the creatures; unpack, or expose a bit of what underlies, the phrase “risk for interpretation.”

RF: I have loved those movies since I was a kid in the days before cable. A local UHF station played a double feature of horror movies on Saturday afternoons—B movies from the 50s and 60s, the Hammer horror movies with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, Japanese monster movies like Godzilla, that sort of thing. They also played all of the Universal monster movies, and while I learned later that it was because they were shopped around as a package deal, so they were really cheap, I didn’t know that then. As a kid, I was taken in by the otherworldliness of them, how completely we were asked to believe in the outlandish. I came back to them as an adult by way of an Ursula K. LeGuin essay, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction,” in which she says, among many other wise and wonderful things, that Frankenstein’s monster walked his way into our collective unconscious and refuses to leave.

I thought about that a lot, about the way that you can walk into any store around Halloween and what you see isn’t just Frankenstein’s monster, it’s the monster that Boris Karloff created. Other versions didn’t sink in the way his did. And every vampire since Bela Lugosi played Dracula reacts to or against his version—everything from Count von Count on Sesame Street to Count Chocula cereal to the vampires of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Twilight or anywhere else you find them. They are all aware of Lugosi’s Dracula, and all the creators of the vampires since have to make decisions with that character in mind. That’s the power of archetype—when Boris Karloff first enters the room in that first Frankenstein and the camera holds on him, switches to a different angle of his face, holds again...they’re creating that archetype right there on the screen, and you can watch it happening. That realization was very powerful for me. Even the fact that the Frankenstein’s monster you see in your local grocery store is green comes back to that film—Karloff’s makeup was green so that it would read as corpse-like on the screen in black and white. That blows my mind because it’s a fact from reality that doesn’t appear on the screen and still made it into our idea about what the monster is. How many people knew Karloff’s face was green? A couple of hundred? And how many people think of that green now when they think of that monster? All of us.

The “risk for interpretation” I was talking about with Lisa Romeo was that these poems would be dismissed as “monster poems” or as basic treatments of popular culture. And they do stand as those, and I’m fine with that. But it was important to me that the poems be about more than the monsters or the movies, that they maybe serve to highlight a little bit what the films were trying to do: talk about where the monsters really lie (inside and outside of us), about how we recognize and fear the ugliness in ourselves, about how to find beauty there. That might be how I came to include the actors, too—I began researching the films to get insight into the characters in the hopes of discovering a bit of why these particular interpretations of the stories resonate with us so deeply, and in the process, I learned quite a bit about the actors themselves, and one of the major directors of the genre, James Whale. Whale’s story is covered in part in the 1998 movie Gods and Monsters, and with sympathy and empathy (and a dose of fiction, of course), but if you go into, say, The Bride of Frankenstein or The Invisible Man knowing that Whale was gay and was telling stories of outsiders and of hiding and of fitting in, it adds yet another layer to the films. I wanted to capture a bit of that, too, that masking and mystery-making, because every human being I have ever met participates in that as well in some way.



NCL: In a 2011 essay “Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript,” April Ossmann writes “[T]he biggest mystery to emerging and sometimes even established poets is how to effectively order a poetry manuscript.” How did you order Creature Feature? Was it something you had in mind early in the writing process, for example or did you write the poems with a strategy in mind? What were some of your considerations?

RF: I might be breaking the Poet Code when I admit I had zero strategies when it came to writing these poems. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing—I didn’t know it was going to become a series. I wrote “Dear Bela” first, for Bela Lugosi, who had such a tragic life in a lot of ways because of addiction. If you had asked me at the time, I probably would have told you that I’d write a poem for Bela Lugosi and one for Boris Karloff, and then maybe be done with it. I started watching the movies, though—it was September and Netflix was streaming a lot of them because Halloween was coming up in a couple of months. I watched the precursors to those movies, too, the silent films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where I could see the roots of the films I found so captivating. Once that happened, I was lost—the series just sucked me in and I wrote drafts like a fiend, sometimes one or two new poems a day. It took a long time for me to revise, but that came later. In the beginning, I was just trying to make sure I didn’t miss anyone.

When it came to arranging, though, I had something of a strategy. It was a balance between letting the poems echo in and off each other without any group of them getting so heavy with a certain theme that they landed with a thud. Some of the poems—one for Lon Chaney, Jr. as himself (as opposed to in character), for example—didn’t make it into the chapbook. Those poems hit the same themes too hard or didn’t seem to discuss their issues as well as I would have liked. “Dear Lon Chaney, Jr.” does plenty of things on its own, but also covers much of the same territory as the poems for the two halves of the Wolf Man, so I relegated him to the cutting room floor. As it were.

Another consideration was the weight of the films, how many poems I had written for each one. The Frankenstein movies in particular take up a lot of space—Boris Karloff, the creature (which I had to call “monster” in the series to avoid confusion with The Creature from the Black Lagoon), Doctor Frankenstein, Maria (the little girl who drowns)...the list goes on and on. When I teamed those up with the poems to the villagers and the ingénue and Dwight Frye, who plays the Igor-type character under different names in various films, it all just felt like too much, especially since there are movies in the chapbook which only have one poem. I decided to move thematically in some ways, but in others, I was aware that some of the characters in the poems needed to have some grounding—the gypsy woman in The Wolf Man, for example, is better served by having her poem placed in a context where it’s clear that’s the film to which she belongs.



NCL: In a recent interview of you by Linda Sienkiewicz, you said “Poems are where I explore and understand and interrogate.” What are you exploring and interrogating in Creature Feature?

RF: Well, the archetypes, certainly, and the way they resonate with me and, I think, with a lot of us if we allow them to. The human beings in these movies do not come across well—the good people are flat, as if their goodness is all that matters (and in terms of moving the plot, I suppose that’s the case). At the same time, most of the “evil” people are simply misguided—obsessed with knowledge or consumed by the belief that they are above needing to face the consequences for their actions because their motives are pure. And then the monsters are the most human of us all. They’re misunderstood, their otherness is seen as ugliness instead of beauty, they’re punished for their aberrations. Well, except for Dracula. Dracula is a jerk. But I love him anyway. And he, unlike the scientists for example, didn’t ask for what he became.



NCL: What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?

RF: Oh wow. I think if you asked me this question every day for a month, I’d rotate through all the poems with my answers, based on what’s happening that day. All the female-centered poems are important to me, and “Dear Maria,” which you link to, is certainly right up there in terms of me coming to grips with myself as a feminist and poet, and as the key to seeing where the monsters really are. The Bride is on the cover for a reason, and I became more and more aware as I was writing of how very un-represented women are in these films. But what resonates with me right now is “Dear Larry Talbot,” because of the work I’m currently doing and discuss in another question below, but also because of how it ties a bunch of the themes together. I’m supposed to root for Larry Talbot, but instead I root for the wolf because at least I know what I’m getting into there. Talbot is supposed to be the safe one, the solid one, the man who doesn’t want to become the wolf. Yet he ruthlessly pursues a woman he is interested in. He looks in her bedroom window with a telescope and then uses the information he discovers as a pick-up line and it WORKS. She turns him down for a date (she is already involved with another man) and he responds by telling her what time he’ll come by for her. He doesn’t take no for an answer, and this is supposed to be appealing. Really, though, it’s just creepy. He is supposed to inhabit Love—capital “L” intended—but he represents himself with force instead. It might have played okay in 1941, and I certainly didn’t notice it when I was a kid, but it sits badly with me now, and adds to the horror factor for me. At the same time, it weaves right into my thoughts on power, love, romance, and the ways in which we are beautiful, ugly, and misunderstood.

DEAR LARRY TALBOT

I used to know a man like you: the scarce
veneer of skin across the beast, the claw curled

in a hand. I used to wait for him to snarl
or snap, to say I drove him to it like your

autumn moon. I recognize your startled heat,
your palm against the scrabbled bark of a tree,

the furring edge of a french cuff, the unraveling,
the woman backed against the trunk, the duff

at her feet. I used to know the woman too:
the way she likes to pretend she doesn't hear

the howling, the way she lifts her hand,
tugging her collar closed against her throat,

the blood bruising her temple from within,
the beating pulse of her. The call. Dear man,

she knows you're hardly man at all, despite
your polish and your shoes. Despite the hollows

at her clavicle and the way her marrow
holds her scent, begs you to unmake her.



NCL: Please discuss the choice for a chapbook. For example, why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)?

RF: I can’t imagine a full-length book of these poems. For one thing, I deliberately kept the subjects limited to a specific cast, to narrow the viewpoint to a particular time and place. I could have found room for Vincent Price or Alfred Hitchcock, for example, and I know both of their work well, but they tell different stories. I could delve into the minor characters, the less well-known movies and monsters, and maybe I will eventually, but many of them don’t have much to say to me. That may be my own failing. The only poem I wish I could have written is one to Zita Johann, who plays the ingénue in The Mummy and is the least ingénue-y of the bunch. She smolders. But I couldn’t figure out what to do for her, what to say, and so that poem hasn’t been written and maybe never will be.

I have been very vocal about not including them as a section in a book—I just can’t imagine the shape such a book would take, in the context of another work—but a couple of poets whose advice I respect have been talking to me recently about the ways in which these poems might expand in the presence of other poems, and the ways in which my other poems might also benefit from rubbing up against these, so I could end up including some of them as part of a larger collection. I haven’t made up my mind there yet, but I’m thinking.

As I said above, I didn’t have a plan when I started writing, but once I saw I was in the midst of a series, I did think it would become a chapbook one day. I didn’t compose drafts to that end, but as the series wound down, I realized that I should go looking for holes or for places where I might expand or define the scope of the series a bit more, and then I watched all those movies again with that specific goal in mind. A couple of the poems, like “Dear Ingénue,” didn’t arrive until that second, deliberate viewing. I wrote most of the first drafts of these poems over the course of about a month, and then spent ages in revision. Some of them took much longer than others, which is just how these things tend to work, and then I didn’t even put them together into a chapbook for over a year because I got caught up with a different project, which became the chapbook Dear Turquoise and then grew from there.



NCL: While the common understanding of ekphrasis is poetry in response to visual art, in a 2008 essay “Notes on Ekphrasis” by Alfred Corn, Corn mentions that poetry in response to “works of music, cinema, or choreography might also qualify as instances of ekphrasis.” Do you consider some of the poems in Creature Feature to be ekphrastic? If so, to what extent is knowledge of a film, character, or actor, necessary in order to “get” the poems?

RF: I absolutely think of the majority of the poems as ekphrastic—all the poems that cover characters, certainly, but also aspects of the poems to the actors, many of which make reference to their characters, might also qualify. I don’t think it’s necessary to know the films—even if you’ve never seen them, you likely know the basic idea behind them, and that’s where the importance is for me, is in that grounding in the collective imagination. I’ve had a couple of people tell me the poems sent them looking for information, and that’s great. I’ve had others ask me to watch a movie or two with them, or tell me the chapbook made them watch the movies, and that’s also great. I guess the short answer is that nobody needs to know the films in order to get the poems, but the more you know, the deeper you’ll be able to get. Isn’t that true of everything?



NCL: Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

RF: I just read from the work in July at Classic Lines in Pittsburgh, and it was really well-received. The reception of this chapbook has surprised me—I was surprised to have it accepted in the first place, even—because I know that my love for these films strays into the obsessive and I didn’t know that anybody else would ever care about them or the poems. It’s been gratifying for me to get the responses I’ve had so far, notes from people who understand what I’m doing, or questions from people who want some clarification but whose questions indicate to me that they do in fact get it. That’s an amazing experience. I’ll be reading from it again in October, at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH.



NCL: When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?

RF: I have a group of poets with whom I gather every year for a week of poetry and discussion and laughter (and wine), and I’m lucky enough to get to see most of them in between times as well. I often revise with them in mind, with what they have raised as issues in their own work or in mine. When I’m in the composition process, that earliest of stages when a poem hasn’t yet told me what it’s going to be and I’m still just working with the impulse, I sometimes have one specific person in mind as a reader, often as a spoken or unspoken “you” even, but that person can change from poem to poem, and does. Sometimes that person is a specific person I know, but sometimes it’s someone I create out of parts of different people. I’m tempted to put a Frankenstein joke here, but sometimes you need to let readers fill in their own blanks.



NCL: What else would you like readers to know about you or your chapbook?

RF: I’m way funnier than I seem to be here. WAY funnier. And the chapbook is more tender than I think one might expect from the way I describe it. There’s a lot of love in there, admiration for the actors and their choices (I could watch Boris Karloff all day long, I find him so fascinating), appreciation of these movies as films of importance rather than cheesy horror movies. I am trying, in these poems and maybe in all poems, to find humanity. That brings a little bit of sweetness, and if that accentuates the horror, then I’m just fine with that.



NCL: What are you working on now?

RF: I think I might be, finally, figuring out a way to get my sense of injustices out into the world. I’m a political person and a feminist. I have deep, solid beliefs about the ways human beings should treat each other, and I have been trying for years to find a path toward opening my poems to more of that without crossing over into lecture or didacticism or rage. There’s a place for all of that in poetry, maybe especially for rage, but I am not comfortable with my poems hanging out there. I want to find a quiet outrage, one that builds and maybe one that resonates by bringing that sort of simmering heat. Angry people are often very, very placid on the surface, and I grew up knowing that sort of anger, and I’d like to see if I can tap that in a way that shows it for what it is. I’m not there yet, but I am working on ways to get it in there without abandoning who I already am as a poet. It’s too new for me yet to know if I have another series on my hands, but I suspect it will color whatever I end up doing next. We’ll see.

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Nancy Chen Long is a poet and author of the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Nancy received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. She lives in south-central Indiana and works at Indiana University.