“…perhaps I will keep the empty space, a lighter gray where the print hung, for my shadow to be thrown against nights I turn on my gooseneck lamp.”
For Today (LSU Press, 2024)
A question from Lucien Darjeun Meadows: I’m always fascinated by ancestral lines, inheritances, and legacies. So, I would love to ask: What three (or so) authors, creatives, or works most influenced your collection? And/or, if readers are moved by your collection, who would you recommend we next seek out?
I returned to the following collections during the ten years that I wrote For Today: C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining and One with Others, Charles Wright’s Zone Journals, James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Already more than asked for, but I have to heap on two more as my long title poem grapples directly with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Inger Christensen’s Alphabet. If a person likes my poetry, I would direct them to the work of C.D. Wright.
A question from Talia Lakshmi Kolluri: What tools do you use to remain uninhibited in your writing?
As a pretty logic-driven person, I have to trick myself into being uninhibited or getting some air up under me, a little lift. With my tendency to pick a line to death in one sitting, I force myself to get up and take a walk when stuck. I also stop writing when I feel good; maybe a version of this would be stopping mid-sentence, a practice fiction writer friends have shared with me. Of course, reading and listening to the speech of friends, neighbors, and strangers helps me get out of my limited diction pool.
A question from Caroline M. Mar: What was the soundtrack of your book? Were there specific songs, musicians, or sounds that helped you access your writing?
Yes! For the book launch party, I actually made a playlist of the songs in the book: Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun,” Fugs’ “Wide Wide River,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Brides of Funkenstein’s “Disco to Go,” Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” and Leonore’s Act I aria from Beethoven’s Fidelio. Metaphorically, there’s the soundtrack of the Gulf South—our bodies of water, our street musicians, our rituals, and our conversations.
How do you decorate or arrange your writing space?
I write in the laundry room of our 1910 bungalow at a dining room table left me by my father, left him by his parents. As with my previous two collections, I outfitted the space with totems that helped me inhabit For Today—my father’s “natural muskrat” trapper hat; an oyster shell from the yard, pinecones, poems I admire; maps; lists; poster-size photos I took of the neighborhood, the Mississippi, fauna, flora, carnivals; photos of family, dead and living; poems I admire; books on the Gulf South; a handwriting copybook. Then there are things that always remain—framed photos of my grandmothers Mamie and Anne, a plastic trophy on which my fifth-grade teacher wrote “Carolyn, Best Journal Award,” my first diary, and a rock from Tucson, Arizona, where I received my MFA. Maybe more interesting is what I took down of the permanent decor: a framed print of Rembrandt’s Apostle Paul that was hung way over my head. I may replace it with a print of the recently found daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson and Kate Scott Turner. Or perhaps I will keep the empty space, a lighter gray where the print hung, for my shadow to be thrown against nights I turn on my gooseneck lamp.
Do you have a favorite prompt or revision strategy? What is it?
Well, now we’re onto my favorite subject: revision. The older I get the less I like the early blind-flying of generative writing. Somewhere floating across one social media feed or other, I read a snatch of a Paris Review interview where the writer said that things get going around the fifth or sixth revision. Though I might revise that statement to the tenth or twelfth, I agree. I find it’s always worthwhile to rewrite the damn thing backwards—whether line by line for a shorter poem or in big heaving chunks for a longer poem. It helps me get out of my own way a bit—reduce some of the “thinky-thinky” as Roethke called the abstract or overdetermined and relax the poem. The title poem originally opened with the ending, ended with the opening.
What question would you like to ask the next author featured at Speaking of Marvels?
Aside from press and magazine editors, did anyone read the poems before you submitted the manuscript for publication? If so, describe the process of receiving feedback and how this feedback shaped the final collection.
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Carolyn Hembree‘s third poetry collection, For Today, was published by LSU Press as part of the Barataria Poetry series, edited by Ava Leavell Haymon. Carolyn is also the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague,winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and other publications. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
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