author interview: ginger murchison's a scrap of linen, a bone

I’m curious: what’s your elevator pitch for your book?

From its readers: a scrap of linen, a bone, “an oversized musical score,” with its “Southern cadences and at least a decade of Texas“ in “rich, ever-focused poems,” with “such clarity and emotional courage” they “hit the mark” in a “rich voice and discerning sensibility,” a “lived past that invests worn objects with the sheen of meaning”—a “luminescence.”

How did you come upon the subject of your book?

Any poem I wrote always intended to point to what’s in the landscape and the people and the birdsong and every natural thing—the acorns, the orchid, the purple peas and butterbeans, those “ameria maritime, cleft-clinging, paper-thin pinks and stark whites”—a stubborn resilience to shine, to plant in the world the mark of everything out there that made its mark on me.

And the title? Sometimes, it seems to me, titles can strike like lightning or can be extraordinarily elusive. How did you go about finding your title?

The first iteration of this manuscript was titled “in all this hurt air,” a line from the poem “Mandatory Evacuation,” but as soon as I wrote “The Failure of Archaeology,” I knew part of the world’s historical document was up to me, that
 

                    the scholars

will inch by inch

                      dig down

to a bracelet, a scrap

of linen, a bone and write

the story without us—

and they would, inevitably, of course, get it wrong. The day I put those words on paper, I scratched through that other title and penciled in a scrap of linen, a bone.

Tell us something about the most difficult thing you encountered in this book’s journey.

The most difficult thing, hands down, (and I bet you’ve heard this one before) was ordering the poems which meant deciding what to leave in and what to leave out. There were those darlings, of course, that I had to be convinced didn’t belong here, and I went down hard on some of those decisions. I rearranged the manuscript a dozen or more times, the pages strewn, as poets will do, all over the floor, the bed, the kitchen table, and I sought the help of friends who had none of my prejudices. Finally, when the book had an editor and I heard Tom Lombardo’s vision for the book, I could see the book in a wider way. Tom Lombardo gets credit for shaping what’s here.

And the most pleasurable?

Oh the most pleasurable thing happened whenever an ending (or a title) that seemingly would not come got dropped into my brain in the bathtub or during a movie or on a run, and I’d scramble for some way to write it down. Hard to say how many perfect endings and titles escaped because I didn’t write them down.

What’s the best and / or worst piece of advice (writing or publishing or similar) you’ve gotten?

I remember the first two pieces of advice I ever got. They came in the same sentence: “Read Triggering Town” and “If you ever get a chance to take a workshop with Ellen Bryant Voigt, do it.” I’ve done both and while those are both right up there contending for the “best” advice I ever got, the prize for “best” goes to “Take out the last three lines.”

I’d been a teacher for 31 years and, when I started writing, I knew how the poem would end before I’d written the first line. I was still a teacher, now writing poems, so I announced what I was going to say, said it, then summed up what I’d just said in case you missed it. The result wasn’t a closed poem, but a poem with the lid firmly nailed down, and every time I workshopped a poem, I heard, “Take out the last three lines.”

One day after a workshop, the light beginning to fall, I went through all my poems on the computer and ripped off the last three lines. The poems just hung there, trailing off. . . .  Some of them stayed that way a long time, but eventually, the teacher in me gave way to the poetry and the poems started suggesting other endings. Getting the right ending feels to me like winning the lottery.

I honestly can’t remember ever getting “bad” advice.

Tell us one of your favorite books you’ve discovered recently and say a little about why.

I love Rebecca Foust’s Paradise Drive. I was at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH while she was Dartmouth Poet in Residence there, just after Paradise Drive had won the first annual Press 53 Prize for Poetry. I loved her earlier book, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, poems that knocked on the door of everything human in me, but Paradise Drive is a life journey (the traveler is Pilgrim) written in sonnets. I was halfway through the book before I realized I was reading sonnets, and I’m sure the form, even its contemporary iteration, did something to shape the narrative—intelligent, tragic and humorous social commentary that’s as much fun to read as a sparklingly satirical novel.

A book--open on my desk right now--that I read and keep re-reading is Kurt Brown’s posthumously published I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello: Poems Selected and New, poems with Kurt’s innocent, jaw-open surprise of discovery. How can my own jaw not drop at the surprise? And the craft! I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello is my go-to-book anytime I want or need a workshop. Stop anywhere in one of Kurt’s poems and ask: Why this verb? Why here? Why this line break? Why this space, this shape on the page? Everything I need to know is answered in the poem. As generous as Kurt was in life, his poems keep on giving.

Can you share an excerpt from your book? Give us a taste.

Sure. Here’s a quiet lyric poem titled “Evening”

At this angle of hours,

the orchestra all oboes—

blown goodbyes                                           

through the sea oats—

the windfall pears

have mostly gone to ooze

seeped into the earth,

all these trees

unclothed to cold,

the last of the shining

downstream by now.

Slow hungers breathe

beneath leveled dreams,

the muscular sky                               

painted over now, paler blue.

What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)

What would I tell someone starting to write at a later age like I did?

Read, read, read contemporary poetry. Go to readings and buy the books. Every book I have has something to teach me. so never read a poem just once. Read like a writer. Ask: How is this different than the same idea or story written in prose?  If I like the poem, what did the poet do in the selection of language and its placement on the page, in the tone, in the tempo, in the music, in the images to manipulate my feelings? I am intellectually moved by what the poem says, but the art of the poem is in how it was said. What craft is at work here that viscerally made the poem move under my skin? Keep reading until you figure out what that is.

Read The Cortland Review. It’s free at www.cortlandreview.com. We’ve published amazing poems in audio and text for 20 years and, for the last 5 years, our Poets-in-Person features in HD video. Use our pages to see what poets are writing today. If you’re interested in publishing, find a poem you like. If you feel something as a result of a poem on a page, check the bio to see where that poet has published. If you respond positively to a piece, chances are those publications might be interested in your work, too. Never take a rejection personally. A rejection is an invitation to question the poem, rethink, revise it and send it out again. Never give up on your poems. They are your children. Some behave better than others and most require a good bit of attention before they come to their full potential.

OK, we’re smitten. Where do we go to buy your book?

To support a small press: a scrap of linen, a bone is available from Press53. 

It’s also available from amazon.com. If you buy the book from amazon, you are eligible to write a review. I hope you do.

author interview: kristen case's little arias

I’m curious: what’s your elevator pitch for your book?

Oh god. Am I supposed to have an elevator pitch? Honestly, I don’t know. I almost feel like this kind of summary view would be impossible for me, or maybe even not my business to try to undertake. It’s fascinating to read the ways that other people have described the book, and generally I think they see things that I can’t because I’m too close to it. I know it has to do with relation: between people, between readers and writers, between parts of the self and kinds of poetry, between the self and the world it occupies. There. Was that an elevator pitch?

How did you come upon the subject of your book?

Hm. Whatever the subject of my book is (I’m open to suggestions on this), it came together on its own. The book has roughly twenty years of poems in it, so if it has a theme—relation, maybe, in sticking with my elevator pitch—it was an emergent one, not something that consciously guided the poems.

And the title? Sometimes, it seems to me, titles can strike like lightning or can be extraordinarily elusive. How did you go about finding your title?

The title is a line from one of the oldest poems in the collection,  “Diner” (“the leaves sing their little arias”).  It just felt right. Later it struck me as having to do with voice, with singularity and plurality: “arias” is plural, but the aria is typically a solo performance. I don’t know much about opera at all, but I do remember that the aria is a kind of counterpoint to the recitative, which narrates or tells the story. The aria is more musical, more repetitive, maybe more of a meditative space. It doesn’t have many words. It stuck me when I finally held this book in my hands that, for a book that in some sense represents twenty years of work it’s a very slight little volume; lots of white space, not many pages, no story. So maybe the poems are the aria, and my life is the recitative? Something like that.

Tell us something about the most difficult thing you encountered in this book’s journey.

Since it was such a long journey, there were a lot of hard things. Mostly I had to re-learn how to write after a several-year hiatus. But this also turned out to be the best thing because when I came back to writing it was with no expectation of publishing; poetry just felt necessary, a necessary practice. When I started writing this way, rather than with the desire to create objects that other people would want or admire, the poems became more  interesting. That is, they became interesting as places for me to be, and I’m hopeful that that also makes them interesting places for readers to be.

And the most pleasurable?

When I was in my twenties I had some poems published in The Iowa Review. They asked me to remove a line from one of the poems, and I did, without a second thought, thrilled as I was to be published at all. During my final proof of the manuscript for the book I put that line back in. It felt like sending a message to my younger self. Like, hey, you’re okay, kid. And then, of course, hearing from readers who are moved in some way by the book. That still feels like a miracle. Thoreau asks in Walden, “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?” I think all writing is finally premised on something like belief in that impossible thing, that miracle. We don’t ever achieve it of course, but we come close sometimes, or we feel like we do. We approach the neighborhood of miracle.

What’s the best and / or worst piece of advice (writing or publishing or similar) you’ve gotten?

The worst thing, for me is the “you have to write every day” thing. I don’t write every day. There were years that I didn’t write, and sometimes even now I don’t write for weeks. When I’m not writing, I bake, I play with my kids, I teach, I read; I think and talk and try to be a good parent and a good friend, I pay attention to politics. I think all of those things are as valuable as writing, and that all of them are necessary to my writing in some way because they’re necessary to my life. It took me a long time to realize that the particular place of writing in my life was not going to be the same as it was for other people. George Oppen’s career is a great model for this. Not-writing is part of writing. Silence is okay.

Tell us one of your favorite books you’ve discovered recently and say a little about why.

Joseph Massey’s Illocality is wonderful for its performance of and encouragement of a kind of meditative engagement with the world. His poems are spare—minimalist, I guess you would say—but they’re so expansive in their invitation to the reader. They help, you know? And then Karen Weiser’s book Or: the Ambiguities, which is a prolonged engagement with Melville’s Pierre. I love writing that is explicitly relational, that engages with other writing directly, and the way Karen weaves her own experiences, and especially her experiences of profound loss, into her thinking about Pierre is really gorgeous and delightful.

Can you share an excerpt from your book? Give us a taste.

Haecceity

This gossamer, this shade of mind, this breathing, this small sleep, this Heraclitian, this circumference, this frame of thought, this root system, this plane leaf, this noumena, this stream, this thought that is called I, this habit, this clockwork, this handwork, this ghost house, this neighbor, this harbor, this topography, this desperate scraping, this language, this fractal light, this

What’s a question you wish I asked? (And how would you answer it?)

Where are you right now?

Answer: in my little cinder-block walled office, drinking a cup of tea, with a pile of papers and books next to me and threatening to topple over (The Iliad, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, Fear and Trembling/The Sickness unto Death), and an unopened candy bar waiting for me to finish this interview. There’s the most beautiful soft snow falling out the window, and I’m thinking about Emerson’s sentence in the Divinity School Address: “The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow.” I’ve been wondering all day whether I’m real like the meteor of the snow or spectral like the preacher. I hope I’m real, but I guess you never really know.

OK, we’re smitten. Where do we go to buy your book?

Here!