An Interview with Grace Wagner |
We were lucky enough to publish your poem “The Space You Leave Behind” in our very first issue. With this poem—as with all your poems—I was immediately struck by your use of music and sonic texture, with lines like “the contours of your curves,” “feel a phantom in your footprints,” and the iambic lilt of “At night, I walk the path you take.” Can you talk about the role sound plays in your work? This is a wonderful a place to start. Martha Serpas, my mentor, says “Follow the music” meaning that, sometimes, the logic of a poem is less important than the sound, and following the music can lead to unexpected connections or epiphanies. My images are often intrinsically connected to sound and created because I’m following the music. The logic works itself out. I also read all of my poems out loud as I write them. I read and reread a line aloud until I can make the music work. Sound has as big of an impact, in my opinion, as the connotative meaning of a word. If I use the word shush, it’s the softness of the word's sounds that conveys its meaning, not simply its dictionary definition. The sonic texture creates a sensory experience of the words and their many meanings. You strike me as a prolific writer: you publish poems regularly, you have a chapbook coming out soon, and I know you have a full-length manuscript, too. With that in mind, what’s your process in a writer? What usually goes into your making of a poem? It depends on the poem. Some poems require extensive research, some poems require experiential activities, and some poems require quiet contemplation. Some require all three. With research, I use a lot of scientific facts and historical events in my poetry because, for me, poetry is about learning. Sometimes that means writing a poem that explores the ecological process called “rewilding,” and other times it means writing something like “Erosion at Punalu’u Beach,” which is about my experience of gender and gendered expectations of the body, was actually written as a sort of challenge to myself. Martha Serpas once said there were no American shore odes about Hawaii or Alaska, and I once had a very formative experience in Hawaii and wanted to explore my memories of the landscape alongside my struggles with self-definition and gender. In terms of experiential poems, I had the luck to engage with the Gulf Coast landscape while in Houston including kayaking in the marshes around Galveston Island and birding on the Bolivar Peninsula. I wrote the poem, “Microcosm” as an ode to both my partner and the prolific flora and fauna of the neighborhood, including the invasive brown anole lizard. I need to feel connected to my subject matter, and localizing myself helps when discussing such intense topics as climate change and mass extinction. I know that Sylvia Plath is a major influence for you. How do you see your work fitting into the Confessional tradition? How do you see it deviating? My work touches on a lot of traditional, capital-C Confessional topics such as mental health and estranged familial relationships, but it does so against a backdrop of immense, global climate disaster which elevates the personal to a global level and also personalizes an overwhelming concept, making the immensity of the problem comprehensible on a human scale. I call my manuscript “eco-confessional” because it prioritizes the global climate disaster while still maintaining that sense of personal risk that comes with confession. I confess both to my struggles with mental health and to my shared responsibility and culpability regarding our planet’s current crisis. While I recognize that a small number of corporations are doing the most significant damage to our planet and our future, I still feel the weight of bearing witness to the catastrophe that our species is causing, whether or not I personally can affect the situation. Carolyn Forche has also been a major influence for you. What other contemporary writers do you see your work in conversation with? How do you see your work fitting into the contemporary scene? I am highly influenced by Carolyn Forche, but also by Tarfia Faizullah who was one of my first contemporary poetry inspirations. The way she combines witness and documentary methods is inspiring on both a personal level and a formal level. While what she documents is different, I still see my work as being influenced by her incredible ability to personalize mass catastrophe. I also am an admirer of Camille T. Dungy’s work around climate change—the way she incorporates science so elegantly and unobtrusively is a model for me to do the same. While I do have a healthy love for the canon, I think I am much more influenced by contemporary poets than historical ones. I also think that the connections I made in my MFA have been a huge influence on my voice, including your own work, Despy, as I think is evident in my poem “The Space You Leave Behind.” My peers have been just as influential as the well-established poets I read. I know you have studied women’s & gender studies, queer studies, and disability studies. In what ways do these interests interact with and influence your poetry? These interests are personal as well as academic because I am queer, nonbinary, and disabled. How could such major parts of my identity not influence my poetry? These issues arise organically. I think my formal training in academic theory has affected my language use, but not the feelings that are already there. Any poetry about my life or my interests will inevitably touch on issue of gender, queerness, and disability, as well as class, privilege, and ecological justice, because these are all things I care about. Poets I admire are also theorists, including Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Adrienne Rich—all of whom have influenced me both theoretically and artistically. There is a rich lineage of women and nonbinary poets and theorists, but they often are forgotten or taught as an afterthought. It was really valuable to study them for my Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies certificate during graduate school. It helped me not only understand but articulate my own experience of gender and sexuality. You mentioned that you identify as queer, nonbinary, and disabled. As a writer, how do you think about identity and persona? I think identity and persona are ever-shifting and fluid. I write a lot in persona but, in many ways, I’m just writing myself in imagined situations. The feelings are real. The details may not be. I often blur the line between self and persona, mixing autobiographical details with imagined scenarios. Poetry is often thought to be factual or nonfiction or somehow autobiographical, but I think that really limits the scope of imagination involved. I think something can be true without being factual. It’s an important act of empathy to be able to imagine oneself different or in a different situation. But I do acknowledge that there are always power dynamics at play with persona. Whose experience is being explored and by whom? What is the power relationship between them? I have previously explored experiences far beyond my own, but some of those poems are simply not mine to write. Instead, on those occasions, I prefer to uplift the voices of those who are historically marginalized and are better positioned to speak on or to witness these experiences. You identify as an “ecopoet,” and much of your work engages with nature and bears witness to the devastating effects of climate change. What do you think the role of witness is in poetry? I believe all poetry is witness to something, whether a quiet moment--a shift of the light--or a poem that tackles extremity and suffering. Poetry is an imprint of a thought or moment on the page and is itself an artifact of witness. The term “poetry of witness” is used to specifically refer to poems that witness human suffering, but a poem that documents mass extinction is also a form of witness. Even a poem like James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” bears witness—in its case, to an epiphanic moment. When you ask what the role of witness is in poetry, it’s hard to answer because poetry is always witness. There is no separation. A number of your poems are elegies for species that have faced extinction—and you have written elegies for people within your own life, too. What role does poetry have in facing grief? Everyone wants poetry at their funeral. There’s something about poetry that comforts people. Maybe it’s the beauty made from the tragedy that we find reassuring. While society at large does not engage regularly with the poetry world, it is still firmly rooted in our rituals. What wedding is complete without a poem? What funeral can comfort the living without turning to poetry? Grief is hard to make sense of, and poetry can often make sense of tragedy or at least help us be open to process of grieving. Memorializing people we love with beautiful language has to be one of the most human acts. What advice would you offer to emerging poets? My advice to emerging poets is to continue writing. Write in the face of rejection. Write despite the pressures not to. Write the truth that is inside you and then write it again. Art doesn’t have to be capitalized upon to be valuable. Art for art’s sake is just as important. And that’s a lesson I’m still learning myself. |
Grace Wagner is a queer, nonbinary, disabled ecopoet living in Denver, CO. Their work can be found or is upcoming in Salmagundi Magazine, The Atlanta Review, Palette Poetry, The Offing, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. They were honored with an Academy of American Poets Award.
Despy Boutris's work has been published in AGNI, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in California and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.
Despy Boutris's work has been published in AGNI, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in California and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.