CR: Elissa Arons
Wendy Mnookin is the author of four poetry collections, The Moon Makes Its Own Plea, published in October by BOA Editions, What He Took and To Get Here, also from BOA, and Guenever Speaks, a collection of persona poems. She has recent poems in the Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and Salamander. She has won a Book Award from the New England Poetry Club and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mnookin graduated from Radcliffe College and the Vermont College MFA Program. She teaches poetry at Emerson College and at Grub Street, a non-profit writing center in Boston. Her poetry website is www.wendymnookin.com.
Mnookin and her husband live in Newton, Massachusetts, where they raised their three children. Besides reading and writing, she loves walking, gardening, and cooking.
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Many of the poems use domestic scenes or natural images but are not only about daily life. There seems to be an underlying tension, a waiting in the dark or hesitancy. What do you make of the speaker in these poems?
On one level, this tension refers to my own life experience. My father died when I was two. He and my mother and I were in a car accident; we lived and he died. This sudden loss (which I write about in What He Took) has been central to my life. My way of being in the world is filtered through an awareness that you lose the people you love. Of course on some level we all know this—we are all mortal—but I think losing my father at a young age hard-wired the experience of loss into my brain. In some primal way I know that loss happens, that it can happen unexpectedly, that it doesn’t go away.
I did not explain the back story in The Moon Makes Its Own Plea (though I refer to it in “The Way Back”) because I think everyone lives with a sense of threat, whether it’s a fear of losing someone they love or the more generalized threat of living in the world with all its dangers. The challenge becomes how to live in relationship to others despite the risk of loss.
Perhaps, then, I would describe the speaker in these poems as a woman trying to sort out identity and relationship while acknowledging the inevitability of loss.
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The sea and the cat as recurring themes—why these?
The sea feels to me like an arena where social distractions are erased, or at least minimized. Identity and relationship can be examined in very basic terms, against the backdrop of something elemental and lasting.
The cat functions in a similar way—bringing things back to basics. I like that cats have relationships with people but don’t give up their own personalities (a theme that interests me). Like all animals, they demand that you relate on a level beyond words—you have to pay close attention. Also, my cat (and my dog) died during the time these poems were written, so my animals, too, wove themselves into the theme of loss.
Readers may be reminded of Mary Oliver, or of Louise Glück in the poems that ask questions and the poems on marriage, respectively—are they among the writers that have informed your work? Who are some of your favoriter writers?
When you asked this question, I went back and looked at Mary Oliver, and I see that I probably was influenced by her use of questions in her poems. Often I can’t trace influences, because I read and read and everything floats around somewhere and then I write and write and the ways the two intertwine are somewhat of a mystery to me.
When Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories came out a few years ago, I was surprised to find these lines in her story “Nashville Gone to Ashes”: “I think it was that love that I loved….I felt it would extend to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first.”
Here are my lines from “Birds Are Carrying String Again” (in What He Took): “I wanted my children to fill me up,/ and they did/ or they didn’t/ and now, that’s done.” I first read Hempel’s story years ago, and the construction of that line must have been floating around waiting for me to use in a poem—but I couldn’t have said where it came from, or that it came from anywhere other than my own imagination.
Anything Warm, by Mnookin
The influence of Louise Glück is more direct. I can remember buying Meadowlands and then standing on a street corner reading, unable to put it down. I felt tremendously energized by the way she wrote about marriage and family. At the time I read Meadowlands, I was trying to put together my own family saga—To Get Here—and her poems urged me on.
I love David Rivard’s poems about family, how the domestic opens out into so much more. Check out “Acceptance” (in Sugartown) in which a father who accompanies his daughter to school ends up musing, “I don’t know, now,/ if any of us get out of this./ It doesn’t seem likely.” Sharon Olds, Heather McHugh. I read lots of fiction. And mysteries and thrillers.
ISBN:978-1-934414-14-9
What are some of your inspirations?
Daily life. Writing is a practice, like yoga. It asks us to pay attention. To the weather, the light, to people and what they say and how they use their hands, to scraps of dialogue and the smell of food cooking. I never feel a lack of inspiration. Sometimes I feel a lack of will, to attend, and to create.
How do you get past those moments?
I’m a big fan of bad writing. That is, often when I can’t write it’s because I expect myself to write something “good.” If I remind myself that most of what I write is pretty mediocre to begin with, it seems to be easier to get to it.
I also find that I need a lot of down time, or at least a lot of time doing something that allows my mind to wander. If I don’t have time to walk or garden or just stare out the window, I find it hard to write. My mind is too clenched up. So if I’m not writing I try to secure more time alone and see what happens.
If that fails I go to a movie or watch a ballgame or read a mystery. At least you can have some fun when you’re not writing. (And I do have a poem about the 1986 World Series…)
The activities you’ve mentioned require attentiveness, and to some degree, the willingness to start all over again if need be. Could you describe your writing process from the initial idea to the final form?
I almost always start writing by revising poems I have been working on. It seems infinitely easier to get back into something than to start from scratch. When I’ve been writing for a while, the blank page looks more like an opportunity and less like a threat, and I can start something new.
My poems usually start with some kind of fragment, a piece of narrative or dialogue, dream or image. I cull through my notebooks of free writes for interesting words, phrases, or tones. I spread poems out on my desk and move lines and images from poem to poem, seeing what happens. I try to be free with my process for as long as I can, so that my poems can be more than their original intent. In fact, the longer I’m at this, the less I try to have any intent at all.
I leave my poems and come back to them. Sometimes I leave them for a long time. The longer the better. The person who comes back to them is never the same, and so the poem grows.
The book uses time in an interesting manner, starting with an adult speaker in a marriage, looking back at her mother and childhood, then forward again to “First Marriage” and beyond. When you were assembling the manuscript, what was your process? How did you arrive at the current sequence?
I am interested in the ways poems fit together in a book beyond the chronological. A chronological arrangement—I was a child, I grew up, I had my own family, I grew old—seems to miss opportunities to establish emotional connections among poems. The book opens with questions about identity and relationship, as illustrated by the marriage. It moves into childhood, where the source of these questions took hold, then revisits the marriage with this new information. But of course it’s not that precise. Within that framework, I looked at individual poems and how they reflect on each other, and so tried to arrange poems as a kind of collage. I also opened the book with morning and ended with night to provide anchors for the poems.
Much of the language is clear and straightforward. There’s been debate among writers who praise this style as an antithesis to poetry that seems to be written for other poets, and those who equate being accessible with being too transparent or simple. Where do you stand?
I would like my poems to be accessible to readers—not just other poets—and still be complex enough to mean something beyond their apparent simplicity. I try to be friendly to my reader. I invite her into the poem. I want her to stay. Poems can be complicated, they can (and should) require slow and careful reading, but after I’ve read a poem carefully, I like to feel grounded. I hate to feel stupid. I don’t want my readers to feel stupid.
Having written four poetry collections, what would you say has been the driving force that encourages you to keep writing in the midst of teaching, life, and other activities?
When I first studied poetry, with Ruth Whitman in the Radcliffe Seminars Program, I remember thinking, “This is really hard. I am never going to get really good at this.” Or, to put it another way, “I will have to spend a lifetime trying to get good at this”. And that has remained the challenge. Although it is often frustrating, it is ultimately sustaining to be doing something that is constantly challenging. I love making things: growing vegetables, stirring soup, baking bread, knitting sweaters…and writing poems. I need to be making things.
And with poetry there has been the additional satisfaction of trying to exert some artistic control over my life. Since I can’t exert much actual control—by keeping the people I love safe—I can satisfy some of that wish by working and reworking a poem until it’s the way I want it.
Was there a turning point from that beginning to realizing one could make a life by writing?
There have been several “aha” moments. One was when my first poem was published: the January 1988 issues of Z Miscellaneous, a journal that I don’t think exists anymore. Anyway, when I saw that poem in print, more than twenty years ago, I thought that was enough sheer joy to carry me through any number of writing disappointments.
A number of years later I found myself reconsidering that. Although I had had a fair amount of success publishing in journals, and had published a book of persona poems with a small press, I was having no luck with my new manuscript of poems. I sent it around, and sent it around, and sent it around, and began to wonder if I wanted to keep at this.
I thought about doing something else. But in the end I couldn’t imagine my life not centered around poetry. Poetry had become what I did with my mind, the way I existed in the world. The writing was crucial to me. Of course I wanted to publish, but that was out of my hands. What I could do was keep writing, and that’s what I did.
The idea of artistic control reminds me of a fiction writer I heard, who said she loved fiction because it allowed her to change the outcome, to have the ending that was not possible in real life. Have you considered writing in other genres? Or in your poems, do you draw a line between recording events as they were vs. changing things for the “truth” of the poem?
I haven’t done much writing in other genres. I did write an essay on my son’s drug addiction that was published, along with my son’s companion piece, on Salon. I loved writing that piece, because, although I couldn’t change what happened in my life, I could shape the writing. That essay, and the book To Get Here, which deals with those same experiences, provided a measure of control when so much in my life was out of control. That may be one reason I put so much energy into the shaping of those pieces.
Although I didn’t change the basic facts of the story—my son’s long struggle with addiction—I did change other things in the story. For example, when I first wrote the poems in To Get Here there were three children, two boys and a girl, which corresponds to my family. But in the book it was clunky. I wasn’t naming the children, so I had to refer to the “older boy” or the “younger son.” I decided that the book needed a sibling to respond to the brother’s behavior, but not two, so I cut one child from the manuscript.
That meant that some poems that were written about one child were changed to be about another. (It also meant that I had to do some explaining to my younger son about why he wasn’t in the book.)
There’s also a poem in the book that made me look closely at what I mean by “truth” in a poem. I wrote a poem that imagined telling my husband over the phone (he was traveling a lot at that time) that our son was dead. I couldn’t write a poem that faced directly the possibility of his death, so this was a way of approaching it. I was pretty proud of the poem, and when I brought it to the workshop I was in, they kept responding to the hotel room in which I placed my husband. In fact, they suggested maybe the poem was about an affair. This was so far off I couldn’t believe it. I worked on the poem some more, and when I brought it back, the workshop really liked that hotel room. I was so aggravated that I wrote a short poem about an affair.
Affair, also by Mnookin
And that’s the poem that ended up in the book. The workshop picked up energy around the hotel room that gave me another way into what I was trying to write. To me it doesn’t matter that the affair isn’t true; the feelings the poem expresses are true.
That was ten years ago. My work since To Get Here has become less closely tied to actual events. Although the central event in What He Took did happen, there is a conflation of memory and imagination to describe both the accident and the events surrounding it. “How It Happened”, an early poem in the book, signals this by suggesting variations on the accident itself. My father’s thoughts when he’s dying, my mother’s fantasy when she’s in the hospital, God’s thoughts, are of course are all imagined in order to define an event that was for so many years unimaginable to me.
The Moon Makes Its Own Plea plays with both narrative and speaker in ways that I think remove the poems from a consideration of whether or not the poem records actual events. Poems quickly move away from the actual–in “Skating” the dead are staring through the ice—or never touch down with the actual–“On her Knees” characterizes colors. Sometimes the speaker is aslant, describing a reality that is not quite recognizable, as in “Anything Warm,” the poem you present here. In these poems I don’t feel bound by fact. I may use a scrap of dialogue or action that occurred and then invent around that. Or I may invent to begin with. I hope my poems feel true, but I wouldn’t want anyone to confuse that with what happened. In “Maybe I Made This Up” events are seen differently by different characters. Admitting all the possibilities, the speaker says, “I can only tell you// the truth as I know it.”
What are your current projects?
I have recently returned to teaching after a hiatus, so I am spending a lot of time right now on my teaching. I’m enjoying it a lot. Teaching makes me think about poetry and the writing of poetry in a more structured way. And I love working with students.
The other day I wanted my students to write a poem about childhood. Then I began to think about what that means. A poem written as an adult looking back on childhood? A poem from the point of view of a child? Can a poem from the point of view of a child embody some of the adult’s knowledge? Doesn’t it inevitably take on some of what the adult knows? What are my favorite poems about childhood? What makes them work? When I’m not teaching, I read poetry and talk about poetry and love poetry, but I don’t always discipline myself to study what I’m reading and why I love it (or don’t.)
I don’t have a defined writing project right now, which is an uneasy place to be. I am always happier when I am immersed in writing. I am trying to write more associatively, using free-writes and journal entries to move poems in new directions.
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Karen Rigby is a former Editor for Emprise Review
