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DPR:
Where is your childhood homeland, and what was it like growing up
there?
SH:
Thank you so much for asking me about my past! I was born in
Savannah, Georgia. After my father died in the line of duty (he was
a fireman), my mother moved back to her family of origin in Athens,
Georgia to raise me. My first four years were spent in Savannah,
which had not yet undergone its renaissance after the success of
John Berendt’s bestseller-turned-movie Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil. The Savannah I first knew was troubled with
poverty and violence. To give you a sense of how bad it was, I
quoted Michael Hirsley in the notes section of Burn: “A
Georgia Crime Information Center annual report indicated that the
Savannah metropolitan area had the highest crime rate of any of
Georgia metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, in 1985. . . . The
Georgia Crime Information Center report showed a 14 percent increase
in serious crimes such as murder, rape, and robbery in Savannah from
1984-1985” (Chicago Tribune, September 4, 1986). My young
years inspired the poem “Ghost Story,” which details the unfortunate
cold case involving my babysitter Laurie, the daughter of my
mother’s best friend. At the impossibly young age of 13, Laurie was
found raped and killed. At the time, I did not have the vocabulary
for disappearance, sexual assault, or murder. I just knew that
someone I loved like a sister (I am an only child) was never coming
back. Her death and its unresolved, violent nature changed me in
ways I would not understand until I was much older. Don’t get me
wrong: I loved the Savannah I remember. It was where my mother,
pregnant, waited out Hurricane David, hellbent on keeping her fetus
(me) safe from harm. It is where my mother and I slept on a mattress
in our kitchen when she couldn’t afford to turn on the air
conditioner, the Rolling Stones playing on the record player. It is
where my mother and I spent Saturdays walking River Street, where I
first fell in love with saltwater taffy. It is where I learned to
feel the pulse of the ocean inside me. But it is also where I
learned that joy and love have a dark mirror: death and destruction.
Savannah, ultimately, is where I learned that mortality is why we
must love every moment of the lives we are given, because we never
know which will be our last.
DPR: Burn
is a beautiful collection of poems for many
reasons, one of which is your ability to show the harsh elements of
life alongside elements of hope and beauty. How do you decide what
details to include and what to leave out when creating this effect?
Do you feel that one group of elements is stronger or more prevalent
than the other in your work? How so (or how not)?
SH: Wow,
what a beautifully difficult question. My central ethos for writing
Burn was to be as emotionally honest as possible, to write
from the heart. I know that sounds sentimental, but when you come
from the kind of background I come from—a life touched by domestic
abuse, rural poverty, the sexual assault of girls and women, the
death of my mother and father by the time I was in my early
thirties, my grandfather’s alcoholism—survival and joy mean
everything. When writing the poems that comprise this collection, I
refused to dwell in darkness. I did, however, address difficult
things, as they irreparably changed who I was and how I existed in
the world. In that way, I tried to choose the difficult details that
would help frame any rhetorical moment, but then look for insights I
learned from them. In the case of “Drive-In Nights,” a poem you are
featuring here, the rhetorical situation was that my marriage (at
that time) was in a bad place. My husband I were trying our best to
reconnect, for instance, by going on dates (that’s how we ended up
at the drive-in to watch Die Hard). That was the movie that
was playing at the time, but it was also an ironic choice—the
characters John McClane and his wife Holly, as we know, are
estranged, and the whole reason John goes to Los Angeles in the
first place is that he yearns for reconciliation. Of course, that’s
when German radicals pose as terrorists and violent drama ensues. I
love my husband very much—we got over our rough patch and are still
married—but I wanted to demonstrate in this poem that love and
difficulty can coexist at once. In another poem you feature here, “A
Brief History of Light,” I focus on describing my fascination with
my mother’s Tiffany lamps, lamps that became that much more precious
to me after her death from colon cancer in 2016. In these two poems,
the trauma of marital trouble and a mother’s death are catalysts for
the speaker’s awakening—to love, how to cherish people and the
things that are meaningful to them. To directly answer your
question, I think it is important to choose details that present the
full-spectrum experience of a moment and what it can teach us. I try
to do that throughout Burn, and I think the result is a
balance of darkness and light.
DPR:
What is your feeling about the concept of
poetry as survival and how has writing about your family and other
events in your life changed over the years?
SH:
Poetry is such an interesting genre, isn’t it? It is how some people
awaken to meaning, how some people pray, how some people find
themselves. Kim Addonizio once wrote something I’ll never forget:
“Poetry isn’t what we think of as the ordinary, but what we feel and
sense is underneath the ordinary, or inside it, or passing
through it. Poetry is the essence of the human spirit and
imagination; it can be playful, irreverent, sarcastic, intellectual,
despairing, filled with longing or anger or happiness. It can tackle
the largest subjects, like Suffering and Love and Death and the
Meaning of Life; and it can be about the smallest events: a beetle
inching along a stick, shampooing a friend’s hair, plums falling on
the sidewalk. In fact, a poem is about both the ordinary and the
extraordinary at the same time, because it recognizes that they are
the same thing.” Addonizio’s insight here is amazing to me, because
it teaches me that poetry is the pulse of the human spirit trying to
exist in a difficult world. Learning to survive is a big part of
that, but even more important, I think, is learning to thrive.
Writing about my family and other events in my life has taught me to
survive difficult things, absolutely. But more importantly, it has
taught me how to process pain and look for meaning in survival, the
joy that comes after. To me, that’s what makes poetry so essential
to how I live my life as an artist, professor, wife, cat mom, and
human being.
DPR:
Mary Jo Bang tells her students that
one writes about one’s obsessions and that those don’t change. What
are your obsessions, and do they remain the same or changed, and if
so, how?
SH:
I
love that you mention this anecdote about Mary Jo Bang. Her amazing
advice echoes in necessary and beautiful ways something I learned a
long time ago from reading Richard Hugo’s essay “The Triggering
Town:” “Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of
writing locates, even creates, your inner life.” I have a lot of
obsessions, like a lot of us. Let me provide a few examples. Since
my mother’s death, one could say that I am obsessed with
understanding and living an examined life. This stems, of course,
from having an intimate experience with her mortality. I am also
obsessed with things that look potentially silly on the outside, but
have a deeper meaning upon reflection: crockpot cooking (I am
committed to eating healthily, which is a challenge due to splitting
my time between writing and serving as an assistant professor of
creative writing at Marshall University), my cats (I inherited my
love of these beautiful creatures from my mother), perfectionism
(the only way I attended any of my three educational programs—one
undergraduate and two graduate programs—was through earning and
keeping scholarships), and manicures (my mother suffered terrible
anxiety and bit her nails, and I became obsessed with having
beautiful hands by watching her struggle). I think that because we,
as people, are constantly changing, constantly evolving, our
obsessions must change with us. I find that this is true for me.
DPR:
In Stephen Furlong’s review of Burn,
included in your DPR feature, he refers to several of your
epigraphs in the book. What is your process for choosing epigraphs,
and how do they inform your own work and its themes?
SH:
Ok, you got me: another obsession I have I didn’t outline in the
last question is my obsession with epigraphs! I am only half-joking.
I love epigraphs because they demonstrate what is true about all
art: art is a conversation, a way of joining and being in the world
with other artists. If my poetry is not speaking to the work of
others—growing from it, questioning it, agreeing or disagreeing with
it—I don’t think I am writing good poems. Having these important
intra-artistic dialogues are the way we grow as artists and as
people, and it is how the genre we work in becomes more expansive
and culturally meaningful. I also believe in attributing ideas where
they are due: This is just good and ethical scholarship. Using
epigraphs is one way to do that, as well as curating an intentional
and comprehensive notes section at the end of books (I have been
told by friends and critics that my notes section in my poetry
collections are remarkably detailed!). I love this question so much.
Thank you so much for asking it.
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