CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation Between Corrie Williamson and Marko Capoferri
September 28, 2023
Corrie Williamson was born on a small farm in southwestern Virginia. She is the author of two books of poetry, most recently The River Where You Forgot My Name, which was named a 2019 Montana Book Award Honor Book by the Montana Library Association. Her first book, Sweet Husk, won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize, and was a finalist for the 2015 Library of Virginia Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and many others. She lives in Lewistown, Montana.
Marko Capoferri is a poet, musician, and former conservation worker. He has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he has lived since 2015. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula. His work has appeared in Porter House Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Anti-Heroin Chic, Opt West, and elsewhere.
Marko Capoferri: Across both of your collections, there is a recurring exploration of the essence of language and words. And there are multiple avenues and frames by which you explore English and its tendrils, from etymologies to definitions to pronunciations to idioms to a speaker’s inner musings and various interweavings thereof, to dig into the materiality of words. What do you think it is that keeps you returning to this type of investigation?
Corrie Williamson: I tend to think artists should have a fascination with their mediums. If you are a printmaker, don’t you want to know the secrets of the oldest letterpresses, and study their mechanisms? If you are a weaver, like my maternal grandmother was, you are likely interested in dye methods and the evolution of looms and the science of color. I think we owe our modes of expression that curiosity, and the associated work of knowing them more fully. A couple of undergrad and grad courses on linguistics and language evolution probably didn’t hurt as far as nurturing my tendency to notice and want to take words apart or seek their origins. And I have been in love since I first encountered it with that Emerson quote: “Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.” Take the daisy for example—a simple-seeming word. But buried in its etymology is a tiny poem: it comes from “day’s eye,” or eye of the day, a nod to the awakening and opening of the daisy’s petals every morning to meet the sun. I have often used archaeology and excavation as guiding metaphors for my work, that poetry, and language itself, can be a kind of peeling back of layers, a digging or chiseling to reveal artifact or context. Two final thoughts about language: words make the world and shape our psyches and ways of being. At the same time, despite all its powers, the written word is of course a shadow of the feeling, of a moment, just a gesture between us. It’s also malleable and beautiful: why not play with it? Why not enjoy and explore that tension?
MC: Another theme I’m picking up on in your work—in addition to the language of people—is the plethora of nonhuman entities that speak and tell stories: “the insistent monologue of bone”; “the hounds, / their braided voice, its song”; “When you owned land at last, you swore // it spoke to you”; “the ebbing babble of the wild”; and so forth. What kinds of information can we glean from such voices? Is there something about these voices that poetry is uniquely situated to address?
CW: Increasingly, Western science has been confronted with the complexity and sophistication of the communication forms of other beings—dolphins, chickadees, prairie dogs, ants, corvids, fungus, the list goes on. Of course, plenty of Indigenous knowledge systems have held this understanding, and acknowledged these voices as a doorway into a deeper understanding of the world and its wholeness, for millennia. Much has been said about the power, preciousness, devotional possibility, and often scarcity of our attention. I sometimes think of attention as a kind of governing sense that stitches together all the others—that must be honed, and which can also easily atrophy. I have certainly experienced my attention’s capacity and keenness wax and wane, typically based on a combination of the demands being asserted on it, and my surroundings. But I do believe that poets are lightning rods for the universe’s attention, and because a deep attention is required to observe and reckon with those other voices, maybe poetry does have a unique angle on it. I also think, in a way that I haven’t fully articulated for myself yet, that there’s a whole bunch of compassion involved, which I believe good poets both thrive on and generate through their work. In my mind, writing a poem has two main steps: the first is the attention part, which is an attuning of our sensory and perception skills so that the observed becomes weightier. The second part is the processing, in which the observed becomes the poem. And since I’ve advocated for the playfulness of words, let me say I mean processing like a computer crunching and organizing input and spitting out data, but I also mean it like a butcher, who processes an animal by cutting and taking apart and categorizing, and then sorting what’s left into manageable (should we say digestible?) packages for others to consume.
MC: Like me, you grew up in the eastern United States and now live in Montana. Are there “Virginia” parts of your psyche and “Montana” parts? Where do you consider “home?” What does it mean to you to claim a place as “home” and what might that entail?
CW: Places claim us as much as the other way around, I think. I certainly feel like Montana has claimed me—in the way a place can be both attuned and indifferent to its inhabitants—and taken over my psyche in many ways. When I go back East these days, I tend to feel a certain amount of hemmed-in-ness, searching for that bigness of horizon line. But there are most definitely parts of my brain in which sycamores and the hills and streams of the Shenandoah Valley are deeply rooted and inextricable, and a nostalgia that wells up hard at the sound of certain songs and spring peepers. But home is a shifting concept. When I lived on the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon for the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency for 7.5 months, that place was absolutely my home. I had a new kind of relationship with it, as well, in that I was ostensibly its “caretaker” during that time, a unique component of that residency. But of course, what happened is that it took care of me—rewiring my busy brain to a slower, more observational, often reverential speed, teaching me about madrones and rough-skinned newts (don’t eat those) and the behaviors of particular creeks and resident owls and how to chop wood and live alone with my mind for long stretches. To me, that’s the best way to think about home: the place with which you have the strongest reciprocal ties.
MC: In your interview with Adroit, you say that The River Where You Forgot My Name was written “entirely while living in Montana,” and that it “could not have been written anywhere else.” Whereas Sweet Husk features many poems that largely feel like the eastern U.S. in all its verdancy and thickness and fertility. Could you talk about how place informs your consciousness and how that then filters into the poems themselves?
CW: It goes back to attention, I think. At least for me, writing is attention-driven, and so naturally what I see and pay attention to is at least somewhat reliant on what there is to pay attention to—and Montana can be insistent that way. Someone reminded me recently, actually in the context of ecosystem conservation, of that Pope line: “Consult the genius of the place in all.” So, there’s the place, there’s that interest in the non-human, which has also become more important in my life and my writing over time, but also there’s so much else about Montana in The River that isn’t particularly about the physical place. There’s the myth and the history and the messy idea of the West all balled up in there. And of course, I didn’t leave Virginia behind in that book: the persona voice throughout, Julia Hancock, grew up there, walking in the shade of the long-gone American Chestnut, and the early poems in her voice are set there, so the book is in some ways a conversation not just across time but between those geographies. It’s funny how the power of place filters in. When I was at the Rogue, I found it pretty much impossible to not be writing about what was outside my door, but it doesn’t always work that way. There’s a long poetic series in Sweet Husk called “Ruin Song” that’s actually set in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, where I spent a summer working on an archaeological survey crew. I tried repeatedly to write about that experience, which was singularly haunting, but the poems didn’t come. It took several years, and one rainy December back in Virginia, for those poems to suddenly start spilling out. And even though they are distinct and separate geographically from the rest of the poems in that book, their echoes and obsessions permeate it.
MC: I’m interested in your experiences studying and practicing anthropology (which appear quite prominently in Sweet Husk) and how you might see that pursuit interweaving with the pursuit of poetry. For instance, in the poem “A Study of the Anthropologist: I” there are lines that read: “At some point every great story presents // a holographic picture of itself. Digression / is the soul of anthropology,” which I cannot help but read also as statements on the nature of poetry. I see this thread extending into The River Where You Forgot My Name, which feels like something of an excavation, the poems forming a “holographic picture” of the American West and the stories we tell ourselves about it. Does any of this resonate with you?
CW: Oh, gosh, most definitely. I should say that holographic picture line—that’s Roy Wagner talking. Roy was my anthropology professor at the University of Virginia, and a sage and a weirdo and a trickster and a genius. (He’s mentioned in Sweet Husk’s book notes.) He developed this elaborate concept around understanding mythology and cultural narratives, and how they all contained symmetries and reciprocities you could map in order to understand them in a new way. He developed a method for it, called “obviation,” and I took a whole course from him in, which all we did was read myths and draw wonky triangles to dissect a story’s elements and symbols and find their parallels… I think that’s what we did, anyway, it’s been nearly 20 years. But you couldn’t do it wrong, was part of the magic, as long as you were actually trying. We also talked a lot about Bigfoot’s mating calls, and Nazi spaceships, and mermaids, and Ursula Le Guin. It’s nice to think about Roy. He passed away in 2018. But that was his great gift—to see into how stories inform our lives and cultures and help create meaning, all the while celebrating their secrets and their strangeness. When done right, this is the gift of both anthropology and poetry: they can take a story, or an object, or belief system, what have you, and see what’s extraordinary about it, amidst its particular time and place and culture, but also how it’s interwoven into the strangely ordinary fabric of being alive.