CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between K.A. Hays and Lauren Tess

April 4, 2023

Writer Lauren Tess talked with K.A. Hays about her most recent poetry collection Anthropocene Lullaby which was released in February 2022 by Carnegie Mellon University Press

Lauren Tess: Anthropocene Lullaby is a deeply moving testament to the weight of everyday moments in an uncertain age. To me, this collection is a tolling bell, each poem a peal, clear and ringing in its attention to some small point of connection that reverberates through our days. I’m curious about the journey of this book. I noticed in the acknowledgements you mention that the collection began during a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. Was there a particular moment or poem when you knew you were working toward a new book, and were the poems that followed written with thematic intent behind them? And how did you know when the book was done?

K.A. Hays: Lauren, thank you for sending me a note out of the blue to introduce yourself, and to ask about having this conversation. I appreciate having your eyes on my poems, and having asked to read some of your work now, I see us as kindred writers. I think your poems, too, hold the “weight of everyday moments” as they confront the grief of being a human benefiting from a consumer-driven society during a mass extinction caused (in large part) by consumer-driven societies.

You ask if there was a particular moment or poem when I knew I was working toward this book, Anthropocene Lullaby, and you mention my 2018 fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, where the collection began. Backing up a few years: my second book, Early Creatures, Native Gods, was in complete manuscript form by July 2014, when I gave birth to my second child. During the next four years, every cell in what I call “me” felt different as I grew into being the mother of two humans. So in 2018, I arrived at Vermont Studio Center uncertain, having written nothing that felt recognizable in four years. My children, in spring 2018, were almost-four and eight years old. Until those two weeks at Vermont Studio Center, I had been away from them for no more than one or two nights at a time. I didn’t know what to expect from two weeks devoted to writing––but I was receptive to whatever happened.

Here’s what happened. I found the rail-trail. I walked for two or three hours every day along the river. Sometimes I walked with other poets who had residencies––Joshua Aiken, Sarah Green––and many times I walked alone. I took notes. Each day, I went back to my room and wrote. And I discovered that I was writing poems, but a different kind of poems than those I’d written four years ago.

One day on a long walk I came to a dragonfly emergence. It was near Dog’s Head Falls, on the Lamoille river. For a long time I watched as these new, winged bodies climbed out of short nymph bodies. 

I knew sometime around that day that I was working on a collection, and that climate change, and the need to transform my way of living, were a part of it. I also knew that reproduction and personal change and technology were a part of it. I knew that even if a dragonfly emergence was a hard subject to write about in a fresh way, I was fascinated by it. I got obsessed with what I’d witnessed––I researched dragonfly species, dragonfly migration, how climate change affects dragonfly wing formation, dragonfly anatomy and life cycles… I knew that some of the poems I’d written prior to that would intersect with any poems written after that day. I felt as if everything I was feeling and perceiving and reading about intersected with this process that I’d witnessed at random. 

More than two years later––in January 2021––I printed the poems I’d been working on and spread them over the floor. I shuffled them, read them aloud, tried them in new orders, scribbled changes. I didn’t yet know how to order the poems, or which poems should fall away, but I could see possibilities. I gave the budding-manuscript to a few trusted poet-friends: Shara McCallum, Jan Verberkmoes, Chet’la Sebree, and Todd Davis. I asked if this felt like a book, and if they saw a potential order. They each gave me their generous insight. Some poems fell away. Many stayed. Their readings made the book better than it could have been otherwise.

I knew the book was done when I kept reading the collection aloud and listening to it. I could hear in the flow of poems that the collection was done and was ready to go away from me.

LT: It seems the poems of Anthropocene Lullaby vary in form, while still retaining a cohesive voice. This is really impressive and lends to this intertwining of the quotidian and the epic that I find often in your work. I'd love to learn more about why this collection has a number of prose poems, since your previous book, Windthrow, has none. I know your MFA is in fiction, and I’m wondering if you feel you’re moving more toward prose poetry in your writing, and if so, why?

KAH: Thank you for this compliment about intertwining the quotidian and the epic. I think one way to sense the epic in my life is through paying attention to the lyric, the moment––noting the details, sometimes researching, trying to perceive what I could easily miss about what is outside of me, and inside of me.

 And part of finding the epic has always been by listening to and reading other people’s stories. Stories teach me new ways of finding meanings or structures in my own life.

So, my MFA is in fiction, yes. I’ve written short stories, and I read short stories and novels even when I’m not writing in those genres––currently I’m reading Elizabeth Strout––but I have been primarily a lyric poet. Not by choice, but by fact. I get obsessed with the music of a moment. Most of my poems refuse to string moments together into a narrative. 

But I admire how a narrative carries tension: the tension of what the person at the center of the narrative desires, and how that desire gets thwarted or fulfilled. My identity as a consumer became an explicit subject in my poems sometime in 2018, and suddenly, some of that writing insisted on being prose. So I let it be. My culpability in consumerism and environmental disaster is a detailed scene. It contains dialogue, and tracks a progression through time––and it’s a big overwhelming block of prose. Not pared back. Not elegant. But sprawling. Taking up space. Form is content, and content is form.

LT: You've spoken about having a philosophy of giving significant space to a poem before revising, and also how many of your poems begin just as collections of words. After drafting a poem, do you tend to set it aside for an extended period before revisiting and revising it?

KAH: In answering, I’m going to bring in my personal circumstances and limitations first, and say that my artistic process evolves according to those, as it has always had to do. 

When I had a newborn human in my care (which has been the case twice), and I was still working full-time, I didn’t have any open windows for writing that I could depend on. In the day’s margins, I’d draft fragments and collections of words that didn’t feel like poems. Those collections of words would sit for weeks or months, or maybe as long as a year––some are still sitting––before I returned to reread some of them and made a practice of recopying by hand what felt most interesting to revisit. That was one way I found to be a writer during the early years of motherhood: I learned to live in the messy, uncertain space of having written words, but not poems, not anything I recognized or felt was art, for a long time. I learned to keep coming back, just to see what would happen––but without any expectation of “finishing” a thing.

Poems and revision never happen the same way twice for me. It’s a process of remembering, every time I’m working on a poem or any piece of writing, that I don’t really know how to write a poem. It’s a process of trusting that if I keep returning to the words, saying them aloud, recopying a draft, something will happen, and it’ll turn into a thing. Maybe a poem. Over and over, I learn to play with language and make something new, and the process scares me, because I never know what might come of it. And the process also gives me surprise and joy and wonder––for the same reason.

LT: Poems like "On stillness and confluence" land on such brilliantly clear and indelible endings. Do you find that clarity comes in first writing the poem, or much later?

KAH: Clarity. Hmm. If something that can be called clarity comes while first writing a poem, I don’t consciously anticipate it. Actually, if clarity comes to a poem, I can’t seek it with my rational mind. Clarity doesn’t come to me in a way I can plan for, or at a time of my intending. I experience it as a sudden opening, an oh! 

Maybe that’s the only way it can ever come for me.

Or no, maybe that’s too simple. There’s not any “only way,” but an infinite number of possible ways that clarity can show up. I think that often, for me, clarity walks very quietly, holding hands on each side with mystery and strangeness. I attend to the largeness of mystery and strangeness––but there’s clarity, joining the two.

Sometimes, for me, clarity in a poem (or outside of a poem) is just a place of breathing, and accepting what isn’t clear.

It depends on the poem. And the poem shows me, rather than the other way around.

LT: Is there a poem in Anthropocene Lullaby that stands out to you as having undergone the least amount of revision?

KAH: Of any poem in the book, it may be that “By the sidewalk I lift my child from the car” remains the closest to the way it began. That’s because I knew the subject matter would be a recent visceral experience, and I set myself the challenge of experimenting with a form that works like Philip Larkin’s “Sad Steps” (as I acknowledge in the book’s front matter) and then the words just sort of poured out like the contents of the child’s stomach in the opening lines. (Sorry.) Again, form is content, and content is form.

LT: I was so excited to find your four-part ekphrastic poem on four of Rothko's works, "Lines written in the Rothko Room, The Phillips Collection, December 31, 2019." I recently tried and failed to write a Rothko poem myself. For me, the more moved I am by a work of art, the more difficult it is to write an ekphrastic poem that does it justice. I feel like you accomplished this, and gave me a new perspective on Rothko as well. Did you find the evocation of earth and field came to you right away in looking at his art? And did composing this poem present any different challenges to you from your other, non-ekphrastic poems?

KAH: I understand what you’re describing. I think my being already well familiar with and deeply moved by a piece of art, and trying to write an ekphrastic poem dealing with it, might lead to my putting a kind of impossible expectation on the poem. The poem wouldn’t have room to reveal itself to me.

It used to be that when I went to an art museum, I’d overwhelm myself by moving through many rooms––moving more quickly than I could really feel what I was encountering. On the last day of 2019, as an experiment, I decided to sit for a long time with some art that I hadn’t spent time with previously. I brought my notebook, but I didn’t know if, or how, I might write. I went into the Rothko Room in the Phillips Collection without any particular feelings or expectations about Rothko. I knew of Rothko as an artist, I knew what his art looked like, but I was not someone who had given significant time to his work or to reading about him. I sat in the Rothko Room for a couple of hours as people came in and out, and I looked and listened and turned 90 degrees on the bench to face each of the four walls for a time. I got the urge to take notes after around forty minutes. I got absorbed in the process, almost like a witness to it. Later what I had written became that poem. I didn’t feel sure what the poem was doing, never having written anything like it before, but I trusted myself to feel what I felt and perceive what I perceived and let the writing be what it was. 

Earth and field came to me fairly quickly in looking at the work, yes. I think the biggest challenge of that poem, for me, was deciding during revision how strange I would let it remain, and how much I should cut back from my long ramblings. I cut little. I let it be weird. I’m glad you liked the piece. I still feel mystified by it, but interested. I do trust that emotions move through people over time, and each piece of art causes emotions to move through the person viewing it, even if the viewer is very different from the artist. Looking at Rothko’s work, I felt oddly like a vessel for emotions and associations, in my stillness. Kind of like an open sky that clouds and light can move through. I’m not sure. I’m glad to be unsure.

LT: I love how you use language. I'm thinking of poems like "I write a biography of the galaxies—" where the words take on a physicality thanks to unexpected dictions alongside acrobatic phrases like "parts of them spat out matter / as if to fashion new, but no, / each piece they seemed to fashion / had preceded them." When I read this, it slows me down and makes me pay attention, and it also encourages me to connect ideas in ways I hadn't yet thought to do. But I think what I love most about lyrical language moments like this in your writing is the sheer delight and surprise I feel in seeing these sounds and meanings interact. Do you find these linguistic feats arise naturally and often in early drafts, or are they something you consciously add in later? Are you ever selective or restrictive in your use of them?

KAH: When I worked under the guidance of Carole Maso in graduate school, she said I need to learn how and when to harness my word-drunk tendencies. That has been helpful to me. In my drafting, what you kindly call linguistic feats propel me forward, become momentum. Sound and music guide a draft, often more than meaning, and often I do feel sort of word-drunk and wild, just taking pleasure in how the words rub against each other or tumble. But variation is important. Contrast. High tide and the low tide, full moon and new moon, complex syntax and simple syntax. Stark lyric, wild narrative. And vice versa. So I sometimes feel led to pare back, restrict the sonic wildness. But whatever I say here, there are possibilities beyond that, and that’s why I keep writing. To discover what the possibilities are.

LT: In Anthropocene Lullaby, I can sense someone contending every day with the tension inherent in concepts like evolution and devolution, climate guilt and interconnectedness, resistance to change and embracing the unknown. Are there any philosophies or thinkers that interest you or influence your work?

KAH: I think probably every philosophy and thinker I’ve absorbed, pushed back against, or embraced, shows up in my writing in small or large ways without my conscious intention. I try not to view this as either bad or good, but just as a fact. Something to remember, and to consider when revising. But in this book I know the poems are influenced consciously by the work of David Wallace Wells, Elizabeth Kolbert, Camille Dungy, Richard Powers, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Their thinking about human relationships with non-human life (the lives of plants, other animals, etc) has influenced mine. I’m also influenced by what I’ve learned through years with people involved in the Society of Friends, at Meeting Houses––having no creed, seeking, being curious. I’m grateful for their influence. 

LT: Reading Anthropocene Lullaby is such a joy. It's vivid and accessible, and rich with layers of deep insights on every page. And the world of each poem is animated by your virtuosic language in such magnetic ways. I'm excited to read what's next! Are you working on anything in particular?

KAH: You’re very kind. And I feel similarly about the poetry I’ve read of yours. I’m so glad to have met you. 

With my current writing, I’m back in that state I referenced earlier, when I am not sure what I’m doing, or how to write a poem, or how the drafts become poems, or what’s next. As a child raised Catholic, I felt ashamed that I was a doubter, a disbeliever. I believed my religious uncertainty was sinful, and feeling religiously certain would be a mark of my virtue, if I could achieve it (I couldn’t). Now, I believe that doubt, uncertainty, multiplicity, mystery, and complicated truths are entwined with divinity (or divinities). I believe that living in a state of unknowing and openness to change as an artist, and as a person, is healthy, even if it feels hard. If I keep jotting things down, reading, existing, I’ll begin to sense what kind of art I’m already beginning to make. I can turn to other writers in this, and be with their finished art, and that feels miraculous. Currently on my nightstand are Raena Shirali’s summonings, Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind, and Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field. These are my companions, and many others. One of the great gifts of being a word-using self-conscious mammal is that I have song lyrics, poems, and stories by both the living and the dead in me at all times. I’m glad your poems can be my companions now, too. Work by other artists changes me, and as I change, I become capable of new kinds of art-making––and, more elementally, new ways of thinking, feeling, being. 

Thank you again for this interview, Lauren.