Tarfia Faizullah’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, diode, The Nashville Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, a Fulbright fellowship, and other honors.

[Grist]: Can you speak about your relationship to your own writing and the writing world at-large since you completed your MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University? Has anything changed for your process and/or outlook pre and post MFA? How important is a writers’ community for you now and how have you maintained that part of the writing life?

[Faizullah]: Three years out of college, I felt the acute absence of a writing community. Three years out of graduate school, I am as grateful to the solitariness of my writing life as I am to my writing communities. It’s always been a lonely business, but there was a particular kind of isolation that followed graduate school in which I was able – or forced – to return to the excavation that compelled me to write in the first place. It’s a different kind of immersion than graduate school provides: there are no weekly workshops to prod you into writing or revising, no thesis hours to prepare for, no intense nightly conversations about life and art. The world doesn’t care whether you write or not (and given the drafts I produce some days, it really shouldn’t!), but there’s always the possibility of enacting the world into language across the blank page. I love Roberto Bolano’s assertion that “writing of quality” is “to thrust your head into the darkness, to leap into the void, and to understand that literature is basically a dangerous calling.”

That said, I do think that community is important. While the act of writing is solitary, I get so much value from the multiple communities I’m lucky to be a part of. Kundiman, for instance, is a rich space in which I don’t have to defend or explain myself as an artist of color, even as we as a community continue to explore and rearticulate what we mean by Asian American literature. I’ve remained close with graduate school friends and faculty: wonderful poets who continue to amaze me with the depths they achieve in their poems. A few summers ago at Bread Loaf, I crossed paths with writers who are as talented as they are humble. Most days I feel like a big fraud, so I’m deeply gratified for the reassurance and the challenges being part of a community provides.

[Grist]: Of the work we’re re-publishing online, there are two aubades and a poem responding to reading Willa Cather. Can you speak to your relationship with received form(s) and the work of other writers? Why the choice to engage the poetic past? In the Cather case, why have you included the poem’s impetus in the work itself?

[Faizullah]: I rarely begin writing with a received form in mind. The shape of the poem has to begin to emerge first, and if a tendency—repetition of an image or an idea, say—starts to reveal itself, then I’ll nudge it in the direction of a form. Often, working in received form helps me to compress or be more daring: to winnow a poem down to its barest elements, or to take greater risks because there’s a scaffolding for me to hold on to. For me, self-imposed restrictions of writing in form are synonymous with the permission to break out of it as well: if the form hinders the truth the poem is trying to tell, it goes out the window.

The same is true of intertextuality, as with the Cather poem. I’ve been visiting Bangladesh with my family regularly since I was a young girl, and every time I agonize over which books to take with me for the long trip across the two oceans and back. One year, I took Song of the Lark, and I kept underlining passages that I thought were not just beautiful and poignant, but remained superimposed over my time in Bangladesh. The novel itself moves through the life of an artist as she discovers and rediscovers herself, a process not unlike how I feel each time I travel there: an unexpressed self that begins, however unwillingly, to emerge. I’m not sure it’s possible to truly articulate the impetus for a poem. As Stephen King says, “We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style . . . but as we move along, you’d do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.”

[Grist]: Place and memory abound in much of your work. What happens for you in the process of bringing place into your poems? How do you sense personal and cultural memory working together in the process of making poems?

[Faizullah]: I’m fascinated by the way the world is a palimpsest: a landscape that is being written, rewritten, and written over. I’m drawn, too, to writers who are interested in memory and the way we live in, with, and outside it. Anthony Hecht’s wonderful poem “The Hill,” is a devastating enactment of the way memory can rise up unsummoned in the present. Russian neuropsychologist Aleksandr Luria’s beautiful little books The Mind of a Mnemonist and The Man with a Shattered World are testament to how the complexities of memory, language, and thought can’t be confronted merely scientifically or medically. As Luria writes, “The brief account of a man’s vast memory has quite a history behind it.”

I grew up in West Texas in a Bangladeshi Muslim household in which Bangla was the primary language spoken. In the evenings, we prayed Maghrib and ate rice and lentils with our (right) hands, and in the mornings I would wake up and go to the Episcopalian private school and attend the daily chapel service. Many winter breaks, while my friends were skiing with their folks, we went to Bangladesh with suitcases heavy with gifts for our huge extended family. Each time we returned to Texas, it was impossible to convey to my friends where we had been and what it was like. Each time I went to Bangladesh, it was impossible to convey to my cousins what it was like to be an acolyte. Language has always been a way for me to try to articulate the strange & familiar wonder of both returning to Bangladesh & returning to Texas: those places that are both & neither my homelands. I think there’s such richness in the space between those worlds, even though some days I want to disavow them.

[Grist]: I’m continually awed by the way you can bring the personal into the public realm through your poems in a way that makes the emotional core accessible to a wide audience. Are you conscious of this as you write? What is it, for you, that allows a poem to open wide to the world when your work is at its most personal?

[Faizullah]: I just spilled coffee on myself, which is something personal I just brought into the public realm. In all seriousness, though, I’m not conscious of the distinctions between the personal and the public as I’m writing. I try to be as open and as vulnerable as possible to the urgency of the image, the narrative, or the lyric. It’s in revision that I begin to worry the poem into clarity & I truly start to consider audience. I try to aim for a balance between Oppen’s assertion that “All speaks, when it speaks, in its own shape” and Phillip Larkin’s idea that “poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having.” In other words, I hope to write poems that are, as my friend Laura Davenport says, made of equal parts shamanism and scrapbooking.

[Grist]: What historical traditions and/or writers do you find yourself aligning with as you work? How does your sense of tradition fuel you as a writer? Of course, when I say “tradition” I mean Eliot’s notion that tradition isn’t simply inherited, that it must be labored for.

[Faizullah]: One of the things I love most about literature is its richness: a vast and intricate geography of aesthetics, subject matter, style, and form. And yet we are all equally fighting for the same high stakes: the concerns of the human heart. It’s remarkable that, even with the constant onslaught of information in our digital, globalized time, I can be drawn so fully for a moment into someone else’s life through poetry, and in doing so, see my own life and the world transformed. I can appreciate Eliot’s notion that tradition must be labored for, & I hope we do earn the right to do so, because it should be hard work to simultaneously build upon the work of our predecessors, live up to them, and honor our own inner lives through language with integrity.

There are too many writers I love to name here. I love the visionary poetry in translation such as Cesar Vallejo, Anna Akhmatova, or Tomas Transtromer, as well as more contemporary American voices such as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. There are two female poets in particular I want to mention because they have passed and I fear their powerful poems will be lost: Eleanor Ross Taylor and Lynda Hull. Jake Adam York and Vievee Francis are both writing about race and heritage in such rich and necessary ways. I love, too, so much of the new work by emerging writers of color: Dilruba Ahmed, Joseph Legaspi, and Tamiko Beyer, to name a few. And always I am indebted to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, who gave me poetry before I knew to give it to myself.

[Grist]: Thank you, so much, for allowing us to reprint some of your poems online and for the new work, which is available in issue 5. What sorts of projects are you working on now? What can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

[Faizullah]: Thank you for having me! For the past few years, I’ve been working off and on two manuscripts and a collection of lyric essays. One of them, Seam, rotates around a sequence of poems about the birangona, or war heroine: Bangladeshi women raped or taken as sex slaves by the Pakistani Army during the 1971 Liberation War. While I was in Bangladesh on a Fulbright fellowship for nine months last year, I was fortunate to personally speak to many of the women who suffered this horrible fate, and many of the poems stem from that experience. The second, Ramadan Nocturne, I just returned to after many months of distance, and I’ve been surprised and excited by the new ways in which I’ve been entering those poems. I’m increasingly interested in hybrid or cross-genre forms, and there’s a certain expansiveness in the lyric essay that I find thrilling and liberating. I’ve also begun work on translating the work of Kazi Nazrul Islam, an early 20th century activist Bengali poet.

Cheri Johnson was raised in Lake of the Woods County in northern Minnesota, and has since lived in Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Minneapolis. She studied writing at Augsburg College, Hollins University, and the University of Minnesota, and her fiction, poetry, plays, and reviews have been published in magazines such as Phantasmagoria, The Rio Grande Review, Glimmer Train Stories, New South, Cerise Press, The Emprise Review, Pleiades, and Puerto Del Sol. Her chapbook of poems, Fun & Games, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2009, and she has won fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center, as well as the Glimmer Train Stories Fiction Open and the Dorothy and Granville Hicks Residency in Literature at Yaddo. A fiction reader for the magazine Our Stories, Cheri is currently a second-year fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.

[Grist]: As someone who writes in many genres—short and long-form fiction, poetry, drama—how do you keep them all straight? Do ideas come to you as poems or short stories, or do you play around in different forms? Finally, what do you see as the benefits of being such a literary chameleon?

[Johnson]: Ideas usually come to me asking for a particular genre, although there are exceptions—once I turned a story into a play, although I’m considering changing it back again. I do love writing in different genres. There are practical benefits, such as, when I’m tired of working on one project, I can move not only to another, but to one that asks different things of me—or maybe the same things, but in different proportions. If I want something completely different, I’ll play my clarinet. I like how being comfortable in many genres, including criticism, makes me feel fearless about trying something in one genre that’s normally associated with another—like leaving in an accidental rhyme in a piece of fiction, if it works. In this way, I guess I don’t try too hard to keep them all straight.

[Grist]: Do you have a particular process for short stories, in particular? Do you typically begin a story with one thing in mind—a character, image, scene, etc.—or does it vary? How much of the story do you know before you begin?

[Johnson]: Yes, I usually begin with one thing: a character, a line of dialogue, a conflict, a visual image. I usually begin by writing the first paragraph, then writing that paragraph over and over again, often copying the same sentences five or six or seven times, but adding things, too, a word here and there, a sentence, as well as deleting, and altering—until I’ve found the feel, the tone, the style I want. I write the story all out longhand, mostly by instinct. Then I type it. Then I read over what I have and analyze it to see what the story is about: what its themes are, what its characters want, what structure it needs. I try to get rid of the idea I had for this story in the first place, and see instead what it’s become. Then I revise with that second identity in mind, sharpening its themes and structure. Usually, I don’t know much of the story before I begin.

[Grist]: Much of your fiction features a strong, palpable sense of place. Like many writers these days, you’ve lived in several places. Does this pose any challenges when thinking about place?

[Johnson]: Sometimes I love a place so much I want to write about it; but then, when I try, I can’t do it effectively, because I don’t know the place well enough yet: its trees, its weather, its defining histories and attitudes. I don’t know, yet, the story that would take place there. I hate that.

[Grist]: Thinking about place in “Guralnick,” what draws the narrator, a Californian, to the harsh landscape of western Minnesota? The life he’s trying to live wouldn’t be easy anywhere, but the extreme weather and isolation of this area doesn’t help.

[Johnson]: Some people go to that area to escape something, because it is very isolated, and, because of the very big lake there, it can feel like the edge of the world—in the same way people might flee to the coasts, as the narrator does at the end of the story. However, I think he doesn’t go to Minnesota as a hermit, to flee the company of all humankind; but in the hopes that here at the edge of the world there will be people like him, with whom he can build a meaningful community and a life.

[Grist]: The story contains a nice contradiction between the narrator’s fluent description of events and his outward inarticulateness (in speech, he’s rarely capable of putting together a complete sentence). How did this develop?

[Johnson]: I think many thoughtful people are not articulate, and make many beautiful and terrible observations in their heads that they would have difficulty doing justice to in speech. I had this problem for a long time. I could write, because I read all the time as a child and teenager, but I didn’t hear too much debate or discussion, so everything I said sounded pretty dumb. That’s why I was quiet for so long in class, when I was in college. I wanted to have something to say, and the means to say it well, before I really started to speak. It was graduate school that really taught me how to organize and articulate, and now I feel as if I can’t shut up.

[Grist]: In one of the more meditative passages, after Guralnick has quit working at Linnet’s, the narrator wonders, “How could a person work as he wanted to? What wouldn’t stand resolutely against him? How could he dare?” Work plays a key role in this story. The effort the narrator, Guralnick, and the Tisdales put into the land is the only thing that keeps them from going under, but I get the feeling the narrator means something more in the above quote. What did you have in mind?

[Johnson]: I think there is no greater source of satisfaction and happiness than the work people choose to do, and they suffer if it’s taken away from them; also, if people are compelled to do work they don’t choose, that work can be torture. Guralnick and the narrator love to work on the land; Molly loves to take care of Letty. Both Molly and Guralnick also each feel the pull of each other’s loves—and yet the ferocity with which they pursue their defining desires brings about the clash between them that is the tragedy of the story. When I was a little girl, growing up in northern Minnesota, my father was trying to raise a family of five on the independent work he liked to do the best: raising beef cattle, doing stonework, shoeing horses, and making saddles. But it wasn’t enough, so he got a job at the window factory, where he stayed, pretty miserably, for twenty years. His struggle is in this story, as is my own dislike for much of the work that takes me away from writing.

[Grist]: “Guralnick” ends on a truly heartbreaking line—”I would not know anything else, if someone could tell me the worth of this.” Do you think it’s possible for the narrator, or anyone else for that matter, to understand an event like this as he would like to?

[Johnson]: Guralnick’s situation was tragic, as was Molly’s—but no one’s tragedy compares to Letty’s, who was not allowed to grow up and choose her own work. The narrator might be tempting the gods with this statement, and maybe that’s why he couches it in such an obscure way—he wants to know, or thinks he does, because he feels he must reckon with this heartbreak in some great way—and yet he suspects that what he would be giving up to know it would break him. He wouldn’t be able to bear it; going forth, I think he would be lost.

[Grist]: You’re now in your second year as a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Beyond the obvious—time to write—how else has this experience been beneficial for you?

[Johnson]: I love Provincetown! Here, I can relax. I feel like a working artist all of the time. The loveliest thing about the Fine Arts Work Center is that, surrounded by other serious young artists, and the arts community, I feel as if, at least for the next six months, I’ve already gotten where I wanted to go.

Lysley Tenorio has published stories in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Manoa, Best New American Voices, and The Pushcart Prize. A former Stegner fellow, he has been awarded fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, San Jose State, The Macdowell Colony, and Yaddo. He teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Morago.

[Grist]: I notice there is often a pop culture element to your stories. It tends to serve as a hook to get the reader interested and then develops thematic resonance as the story continues. So I’m curious about how you see the relationship between pop culture and literary fiction, both in your work specifically and in a larger sense.

[Tenorio]: I grew up a pop culture freak (first publication: a letter of complaint to Entertainment Weekly), and I don’t think it’s uncommon for a person growing up in an immigrant household to have such a strong connection to TV, films, music, comic books. When you’re new to the country, you’re drawn to anything that makes the culture immediate and accessible, with no initiation required. For better or worse, The Price is Right, Carpenters records, and fast food restaurants were integral to my family’s Americanization. So it’s almost instinctive for me to write about pop culture. The challenge is to figure out the right notes to hit when writing about it—to be playful instead of mocking, to show affection rather than reverence. In ‘Monstress,’ I mean to play up the whimsy of a B-movie in the making, while at the same time showing how it’s life or death for its Filipino creators, who are trying to find their place in America. My job as the writer is to render both emotional extremes convincingly, for the reader to find meaning in their juxtaposition.

I’m also conscious of the political implications of the pop culture elements in my stories, and in this respect, Salman Rushdie’s stories in ‘East, West,’ were definitely an influence. He does a terrific job of showing how contemporary India has taken some cues from Western pop culture in terms of re-creating its own national identity. But story and character are his main priorities; they’re mine, too.

[Grist]: I understand you’re moving from having completed a collection of short stories into writing a novel. Could you discuss the difference in writing these two forms? I’m particularly interested in differences between specific technical elements, like, say, the role of detail in each.

[Tenorio]: I wish I were far enough into this novel to answer that question with some degree of authority. I can say, however, that as I write, I’m becoming more conscious of this idea that a reader really “lives” with a novel. I like to think of the novel as tagging along with the reader as he moves through his days, that there’s almost a courtship between them, figuring out how they best relate. This is helping me pace the novel in a way that’s quite different from the short story. In that form, I’m thinking of the reader experiencing the narrative in a single sitting for just a few hours, which means that, during the writing process, I’m juggling all the various components of the story all at once, figuring out how they work with and against each other. Daunting as the novel might be, I’m breathing a little more easily than I normally would. For now.

[Grist]: From the fairly straightforward building of momentum in “Superassassin” to the more elaborate but equally seamless flashbacks in “Save the I-Hotel,” your work is very impressively structured. So I’m guessing that structure is something you put a lot of thought into. At what point in the writing process does structure become a conscious consideration? How does it interact with the more primordial elements of how the story emerges in your imagination?

[Tenorio]: For me, structure comes after I figure out what a story is about. In “Save the I-Hotel” I knew that the present time moment of a single night had to be measured against events spanning an entire lifetime—the challenge was to develop and reveal a character through the back-and-forth between present and past, to find the points at which the two timelines would converge and echo one another. Given this structure, I had to be careful to not use the past as a way of “diagnosing” the protagonist, to infuse both timelines with the same amount of drama and suspense.

A story like “Superassassin,” which is told in the first person present, needed a linear structure. The past comes only as quick flashbacks or memories, and those moments are meant to serve the present-time tension. That’s a story that relies on amplification. The character begins in an emotionally bad place which grows worse, scene by scene. I only need a single timeline for that, and therefore a simple, linear structure.

That said, the structures of my stories are fairly traditional, so I’m envious of writers who are truly experimenting structure and form.

[Grist]: Though you often use first person and utilize quite varied points of view from one story to the next, there seems a certain consistency of voice in your work nevertheless. I wonder if you could characterize what that voice is and how you see it functioning.

[Tenorio]: My narrators, as well as their circumstances, are pretty different from each other—a young woman falling in love in a leper colony, a kid obsessed with comic books, a man coping with his transsexual brother’s sudden death. But because my stories deal with the idea of clashing and melding cultures (America and the Philippines), my characters are trying to figure out where they belong, negotiating where they want to be vs. where they’re supposed to be. So they’re constantly keeping themselves in check, staying a step or two outside their immediate situations in the hopes of not drowning in them. Because of this, I’d say that the voice of my work (which is tough to think about, much less characterize) has a certain distance to it, one that tends to record/report/observe events as they happen, as a way of assessing them, so that the characters can figure out where, within all the chaos, they fit in.

[Grist]: What is the hardest part of writing a short story for you?

[Tenorio]: Finishing.

[Grist]: Comedy plays an interesting role in your stories. It isn’t the sort of thing that makes me open up and let out a huge guffaw, but there’s often this smirking absurdity that accompanies me throughout an entire story and has a lot to do with why I want to keep reading. How do you see the role of comedy in your work?

[Tenorio]: Huge guffaw or accompanying smirk—I’ll take either one because comedy is really hard for me. Obviously, you don’t want to look like you’re working for the laugh, but it’s important to recognize when comedy is not only beneficial for a story, but essential. In my story, ‘Help,’ for example, the narrative builds to a climactic scene in which a group of young men try to beat up the Beatles at Manila International Airport. It’s a pretty weird scenario, with an inherent madcap spirit that would be—I think—wrong to ignore. That scene should be played—to a certain degree—for laughs. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that whoever is planning such an attack has serious intentions, so the comedy of the moment needs to be tempered by that.

My story, ‘Superassassin,’ works in reverse: we start with an oddball character whose obsession with the Green Lantern makes him a little funny, but his circumstances make him a truly dark figure: he’s bullied at school, his mother’s a drunk, and he spends an unhealthy amount of the day indulging revenge fantasies. So a scene where he rigs a can of spray deoderant into a makeshift flame thrower might seem funny at first, until we realize real harm has been done. I remember reading that scene at Phillips Exeter Academy—the kids laughed pretty hard at the start of the scene, then turned silent by the end.

For me, comedy isn’t about lightening a situation. I’m more concerned with the way it textures and complicates a story, the way it reveals different sides of the truth.

Adam O. Davis was born in Tucson, Arizona. His work has appeared in several journals, including Boston Review, Fourteen Hills, The Paris Review, Raritan, The Southern Review, and Western Humanities Review. He earned his MFA from Columbia University and he is the co-founder and director of Mystery Bench Press. He currently works as a freelance writer and teaches English literature and composition in San Diego. His writing and other curiosities can be found at www.adamodavis.com.

[Grist]: I was wondering if you could talk about your current aesthetics. Certain poems such as “The Mosquito Monocracy” have a fluidity to them that results in this complex layering that is impressive. As a reader, I’ll ask myself, “How did I go from reading about bones to Josephine to Zulu?” Yet, it works.

[Davis]: My current aesthetics focus on expanding my aesthetics. I want to see how far I can stretch things, how different I can be from before. One of the things that I love about poetry is that regardless of the style or form or era or writer, when the words work, they work. A line, a series of images, a brocade of well-placed breaks that send the message home—if there’s truth in the poem it shines through, regardless. Everyone has their own way of working toward that and I want to see how many different ways I can work toward it. I think of poems as phone numbers you dial at random—sometimes they ring true and someone picks up on the other end, while sometimes you get nothing but dial tone, a dead line, an operator telling you to try your luck elsewhere. I’m looking to dial good numbers. Or, at the very least, find some interesting prerecorded messages.

[Grist]: You have mentioned before that you admire jazz improvisation, and I can’t help but recall writers like Yusef Komunyakaa who write about how their work is affected by Jazz. In Blue Notes, Komunyakaa writes: “A poem doesn’t have to have an overt jazz theme in order to have a relationship with jazz, but it should embrace the whole improvisational spirit of this music.” Does jazz influence your writing in a concrete way or is it more a certain connotation about jazz, like improvisation, that influences you?

[Davis]: You mentioned layering above and it strikes me that that’s a concept of jazz—stacking notes, modal progression, following certain rules until you see the chance to break them for their own good—and that’s what good poetry does: remind us of the old rules while showing us they no longer apply. It’s history: we’re simply building upon what was built before. And, of course, if what we write proves solid foundation, it’ll be built on in the future by others.

What I love about the “improvisational spirit” is the freedom it affords. To develop as an artist, regardless of the medium, is to court risk at every turn. Miles Davis is a paradigm of this. He repeatedly worked toward newer sounds, which infuriated most at the time because he showed no loyalty to what had proven successful in the past. It’s interesting to me to see how we reward creativity in those we admire—we ask for more, but only of the same.

But why keep doing the same thing over and over? That in itself is a definition of insanity. Do something well and then move on, find something else to do better. Miles was vilified by many for going electric, for incorporating guitar, funk, atonal notes—at the time it must have looked crazy, but in retrospect, the work is stupendous and his artistic evolution incredible. The lesson I take from that is you have to follow and find inspiration everywhere. We all develop safe places from which to write and see the world—try another one, and then another, and then another.

For me, the idea of improvisation is appealing because it provides positive creative pressure. Your success depends entirely upon your ability to think and react in the moment. No blueprint, but there are ideas present, things that have been mulled over that suddenly become useful. An important thing to acknowledge is that not everything works—by its very nature improvisation can yield stunningly good or poor material—but the process itself can be very fruitful. Sometimes the words just work. Other times I can write a full page where nothing seems to be coming together, but when I go back I find some choice cuts—that’s where the writing caught fire, but I couldn’t have gotten there if I hadn’t written everything before it.

[Grist]: You’ve been seriously writing now for nine years. After that length of time, writers definitely can mark stylistic periods with their work, changes of concern and form. James Wright, for example, after his second book said he was done with those types of poem, which for him meant received form. Relating all this back to your work, what has been a significant change for you? What were you responding to or reacting against?

[Davis]: In late 2007 I started working on a series of poems that concerned themselves only with themselves—I was writing them and allowing them to be whatever they were, without concern of who might see them or how they might be interpreted (I was never heavily concerned with those ideas, however I discovered after graduating from Columbia that the workshop—and the MFA—while being great things, can also take your poetry away from you). Fundamentally, on a certain level, when working with peers who you both admire as poets and call friends in public, you tend to cater lightly (or not so lightly) toward what you perceive their tastes to be. Interestingly, the majority of the poems I wrote in the program and in the years up until my most recent project seemed haunted by the ghost of the MFA and consequently the manuscript I had didn’t work. There were many good and honest poems in it, but they never meshed fully, there was no unifying theme or connective tissue between them other than they had been written for presentation in workshops.

When I started writing these new poems, I kept them to myself and focused on an overarching narrative structure and experimentation within each poem. I wanted to see where the unconscious would take me—I wrote focusing on sound and incorporating leaps that depended wholly on my own skewed logic—how I relate to the world, how I think one thing equals or doesn’t equal another, etc. More often than not, the poem would present itself in surprising ways, which leads into my answer for your second question: I’ve been consciously weaning myself off expectation when writing poems—I want to be surprised by where they go. I mean expectation in the sense that oftentimes we have ideas of where we want something to go, or have a great idea for a poem but we just need to find the right words. I’m basically putting my faith in the conscious and unconscious parts of my brain that light up when writing to guide me toward the truths or lies I want to write.

I read an interview with the Spanish novelist Javier Marias once and he said (I’m paraphrasing) that “I never plot out a story beforehand. If I’m not surprised by what happens, how can I expect them to be?” I think that idea is kin to Robert Frost’s “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader” statement. Poetry should surprise and delight and sadden and hearten and render every emotion and meaning possible to the reader, so it makes sense to me that the poet, when writing the poem, should be equally open to all those feelings. Uncertainty, the unknown, are good friends to the writer.

[Grist]: Yes, that sense of surprise, of uncertainty as you call it, is part of the necessary tension in a gripping poem. Do you have any examples of lines here in Grist that are doing what you are talking about? For me, the imaginative play in “The Constellations Lost” where a neighbor is serving time for stealing constellations is one of those surprising moments, partly because of how dead-pan and unsentimental you deliver it all: “The neighborhood agreed: these things happen.” I love that line because “these things”—meaning stealing constellations—do not happen, but in the microcosm of your poem they do. Anyway, could you talk about some lines or movements in your poems that surprised you?

[Davis]: To be honest, I’ve been surprised by much of what I’ve written in the last two years. I have no idea where “The night is a cash register that doesn’t know when to quit” in “What Blues?” comes from, but I like it. It makes perfect sense to me in every way that it shouldn’t. The “Bedtime Stories” took some surprising turns, more in terms of the abridged yarns they spun than the language—the idea of a hand emerging from the desert floor was too horrific and romantic to resist. Like “What Blues?” the movement in “Meteorological Symptoms of a Psychic Phenomenon” was surprising—it developed very organically when I wrote it, following this thread from “ruthless words” to the chemist’s recommendations to the way the weather has its way with us day in day out. “Heraldry” was conceived after I took all the words from a description of roundels and filled in the gaps. It’s almost like codebreaking—or perhaps codewriting—but it started as a puzzle that ended in a poem. I was surprised by “gulp what the fountain gives, give this in return.” Mainly in that “gulp” never held much poetic stock with me, but in that instance it feels right.

[Grist]: One element to your work that caught my attention was the rhythm. Your poems use strong, stressed beats that add momentum to the poem. And the lines aren’t simply rhythmic but coupled with vivid images. “What Blues?” is a great example of this. The opening lines are: “Horseflies hunt in the hockshop, heel / like hinges and rest like rust when dead.” As I reread the poem, I realized it was in accentual alliterative form, which made me wonder; how often do you use received form? What is your poetry’s relationship with received form and open form?

[Davis]: I’d say it’s a mixture of both. There are a series of separate narratives running through my manuscript belonging to several different characters, but one thing they share is an adherence to sound. I love the heightened musicality that poetry can offer, particularly when it’s unexpected. Most, if not all, of my work is in free verse, but there are moments of unexpected rhyme and a predominantly musical drive to the poems. I know the lines are working when I can recall them as soon as they’ve been written.

[Grist]: Thank you for these poems and sharing your thoughts with us. What might we expect from you in the next year?

[Davis]: I recently finished my manuscript, The Great Etcetera, and I’ve been sending it out—fingers crossed. After five years in New York I moved to California last summer. I can wear shorts year-round. My skin’s a lesser shade of pale. I’m upping my intake of avocado. I only live three miles from the beach; I think it’s time I learned to surf.