On the importance of doubt and devotion

Since Halloween is coming up, I wanted to ask about the more frightening elements in your book The Mirror of Simple Souls.

[laughing] I hate it. I hate fall. I had a dream last night that there were yellow leaves blowing around a brick house. It was like the first night of fall, and it struck fear in my heart. But yes, Halloween is coming.

That’s a chilling image. Re-reading your book, I was struck by its undercurrent of environmental and body horror, especially in the first, “Columbina” section. Were you thinking about horror as a framework while writing, or did it emerge more unconsciously?

Mediums like silent movies, referenced in several poems, are frightening to me. There’s something uncanny about them. Commedia dell’arte, another major referent, is terrifying for the same reason. They are both representational forms that have aged into alienness. They’re very freaky.

As a kid, I went to the Museum of Science and Industry where they had Yesterday’s Main Street, a fake Victorian street with gas lamps, clopping hooves, an old dentist’s office, a Nickelodeon. It scared me.

You return to ideas of annihilation and rebirth throughout the book, which feels intensely seasonal: winter as both death and renewal. Snow appears often, and the voice takes on an icy quality at times. How do you experience the seasonality of your book?

It’s interesting—my press is called Winter Editions, and I felt a kinship there.

I was living in western Massachusetts when I wrote most of this book. That place is so bound up, for me, with wintry severity. I lived alone, and I remember looking out my window every morning, watching smoke rise from my neighbor’s chimney. Everything was always in sharp relief. Winter, for me, is a season of vision, of looking out from a frame. I associate so many poems with particular views from different windows in that small apartment. Your world contracts in a small town in winter; it becomes the few things you can see. You keep seeing the same view, and it changes you.

I think poets love winter. I love winter.

It seems like winter contracts the world physically but opens it up visually.

It’s not, “what am I looking at before me?” It’s more, “What’s in my line of vision that only I can see, projected onto the sky, or onto nothing at all?” Living in a rural place gives you so much room to think, especially in winter.

I’d love to hear more about how you think about landscape and color. Throughout the poems, color irrupts and shifts the atmosphere in unexpected ways—a sudden rush of brown water, or a wash of red that overtakes everything.

For me, a landscape is often composed around someone standing in a space. Most of my work feels more like a flipbook of still images.

I think that comes from commedia dell’arte, the idea that a frozen gesture creates character. I’ve always associated the book with landscapes in that sense, with figures standing a certain way, whose characters are made simply from the way they stand. I often think of Picasso’s Saltimbanques paintings, where every figure stands apart in the foreground, and behind them is only a wash of color. There’s something so striking about that separation—the foreground and background forming this frieze-like environment. The relationships between the figures are static and suspended.

That kind of tableau feels very different from a “setting” where things happen. The loneliness of those Saltimbanques figures has always stayed with me. I imagine Columbina emerging from a similar place: speaking from a lilac clearing, or a small stage in a square, but disconnected.

I see that more often than I see scenes playing out between people. The Columbina poems are really about anonymity, itinerancy, and an off-duty feeling: the relationship between self and figure when you’re an actress, when you’re nameless. In that sense, Columbina feels almost like a real person to me more than a figure. She’s mythic and historical, but also the loss or absence behind the part.

As for color: all of my earliest memories are colors. My first memory is with my eyes closed, being carried down the stairs in a stroller, red-orange sunlight on my eyelids. Then I remember the blue mats in my preschool and their smell. That kind of childhood synesthesia stays with you.

You reference several films and actors in the “Cryptomnesia” section that follows “Columbina,” with poems mentioning Fritz Lang, Brecht, Hollywood Babylon, and Jayne Mansfield. If the “Columbina” section is frieze-like, did the sense of space or time shift for you in this later section, or in the third, “Saturnalia” section of your book?

There’s a similarity here. When I wrote the poem “Hollywood Babylon,” for instance, I was thinking about Kenneth Anger—not just his film, but also his book, which is essentially a tabloid. That, too, is a kind of frieze: a sequence of stills, fixed images.

I’ve always associated Old Hollywood more with the static image than the moving one. I love the book Hollywood Babylon because Anger captures the irrationality beneath surfaces. There’s so much life behind things that look dead. I’m drawn to the idea that there was rot and debauchery beneath all the glamour in certain silent films or certain publicity photos.

It’s the same with my poem “Walking after Watching Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” In the film, there’s a scene where a woman performs this possessed dance before a crowd of men. To create the sensation of her being watched, Lang literally painted eyes onto the negatives. That brute, handmade quality of representation is what I love. That’s where the line “A movielike beauty/ Made of hand-drawn eyes” comes from in that poem.

That makes me think of early stage makeup as well, where every feature was exaggerated until the actors looked almost like they were wearing death masks.

I love the blunt literalness of that—the idea that to make the image appear, you have to draw it on. There’s something primitive and direct about it.

The frozen quality of those performances and the question of what that actually looked like in real life fascinates me. We’re so used to digital realism, but back then actors were walking around with these wild, almost grotesque sets and effects. No wonder the acting feels so heightened now. You’re reacting to something that looks both dead and deranged.

The tension between life and petrification that you’re describing really animates your book as a whole. Earlier, you mentioned that little “happens” in a conventional sense, yet there’s an extraordinary sense of movement: dislocation, implied bodily action, a kind of vertigo that builds as you read. There’s a persistent dizziness to it. And then, after finishing the manuscript, you were struck with vestibular neuritis, which gave you vertigo for months. What was that like?

Vestibular neuritis sounds like something that simply befalls you, something woo-woo. But it really did happen: I had nerve damage in my inner ear, likely from a virus, which caused vertigo for an extended period of time. It comes on suddenly; you just wake up with it. I remember waking to a ringing in my ear.

I had just written “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” the poem, a few days before. It was one of the only poems in the book that I wrote all at once. That poem feels unusually logical to me; it follows a clear progression. The others have logic too, but that poem in particular feels like it’s written in half-steps.

Then I was struck by vestibular neuritis, and that really marked the end of the generative process. The manuscript had existed in various forms for a few years. When I wrote that poem, and then suddenly had to stop, it felt finished. I remember Peter Gizzi, my former professor, saying, “No more. You have to stop now.” And I was forced to, really. The only thing I could do without discomfort was drive. Strangely, driving is good for the vestibular system.

I’m curious whether your own experience of vertigo shifted your sense of language or perception in any way.

My writing is always trying to approach wordlessness—maybe a better word for it is gesture. Many poets have the sense that language itself is a kind of negative, and that the desired state is silence. How do you create the feeling of wordlessness through an abundance of words? That paradox has always fascinated me. It’s something early Christian writers wrestled with when defending the cult of relics—the attempt to make language transparent, to generate silence through an excess of words.

At one of my readings, someone once joked, “If I’m paying by the word, this is a bad investment.” I think that’s true. I’m drawn to gesture, to movement, to performance—forms that approach silence from another direction. Trying to conjure through language something that feels still or mute feels like an impossible but irresistible task.

What have you enjoyed reading recently?

In my reading group, which is organized by my friend, the poet Filip Marinovich, we recently revisited Lifting Belly by Gertrude Stein. I’ve always found it hard to enter, but this time we talked about what makes an abstract text feel like a dialogue. There’s something in Lifting Belly—the way the title phrase turns into nonsense exchanged between two people who’ve lived together for years, the kind of erotic nothingness that circulates through domestic life. Even the lack of punctuation makes it feel dialogic.

In my own work, the absence of punctuation feels different, more monologic. In my book, there’s only one moment, in “What the Mind Wants,” when another voice enters: “In the doorway you say/ What do you have to say for yourself?/ In a theater of the whatever/ Life is not about happiness.” That’s the single intrusion of an ulterior speaking voice. Often they’re written in second person, but rarely does that other voice surface. It’s interesting to think about texts that feel populous, whether dialogic or chorus-like, and what gives them that quality.

**The distinction you draw between the dialogic and the monologic makes me think about how your poems often stage an inward conversation–the self thinking aloud, or talking back to itself. In a book so steeped in doubt, named in the epigraphs and woven throughout the text, those flashes of proclamation feel especially striking. How do you think about the relationship between doubt and certainty in your work?
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Doubt really is king in this book. There are themes of annihilation and devotion—and annihilating devotion, like Margarete Porete’s [a 13th-century French mystic], whose vision was so total she died for it.

Doubt is something I’ve had to take on both in my thinking and in my life. Doubt is thought, and you can have a kind of devotion to doubt that mirrors absolute devotion. For me, that’s the only devotion I have. If you throw yourself into doubt with a grandeur that mirrors something total, what comes out is poetry.

And yet, your poems sometimes announce themselves with great conviction. I absolutely love the audacious and funny first line of “Rune”: “I’m back with a theory.”

Oh, for sure. It’s like, you thought I was gone, but I’m back. It’s taunting. Because it makes you wonder, if I’m back with a theory, what were all the intervening statements? Weren’t they theories too? That gambit of return, and the humor in declaring it in the middle of a book.

Writing often feels like scraping away the fat cap of everyday thought. I write longhand, and at first it’s all noise—whatever I’m worried about, or repeating the same words or phrases. Then a line comes, an idea, and I think: “Okay, I’m back. I’m so back.”

When you’re not writing, when you don’t have those small, crystalline theories, you’re just awash in the everyday. That’s when you’re not back. That’s the bad place. But when you get the diamond thought— that moment when something cuts through—that’s when you feel it.