~ Delta Poetry Review ~

An Interview with Nicole Cooley

by Susan Swartwout

DPR: We’ll start with the “can take the writer out of the South but not the South out of the writer” concept. Which traditions/preferences/ characteristics do you still carry with you from your childhood in New Orleans? And how does that background continue to carry you as a writer?

NC: I love this question.

      First, I grew up two blocks from the Mississippi, and I feel that has shaped me as a writer and a person. The levee. The water. The sound of the boats and barges. Katrina sharpened my awareness of the relationship of New Orleans and water—and my 2010 book of poems BREACH looks at this and my parents’ experience during the storm. Second, I grew up as a writer in New Orleans, as a student at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) in high school. Because my father Peter Cooley is a poet, I was fortunate to grow up as a young person adjacent to New Orleans writing institutions like the Poetry Forum, the Maple Leaf series, and others, and to know writers in the city who I admired. The writing community of the city was and is so deeply welcoming. And, finally, I have family and friends in the city and return about once a month, so New Orleans is always on my mind.

DPR: What is your writing practice and process? Are you a scheduler or are you inspired more sporadically? Because of or despite your own process, how do you encourage your student writers to keep on writing? I’m thinking here of the young writers who think they haven’t lived a life yet worth writing about plus the many (bless their hearts) procrastinators—and most of us have been in Procrastination Plaza at some point. How do you explain the importance of risk and witness to a writer who believes they have little to document or can’t get started?

NC: I had a writing teacher during my MFA—poet Marvin Bell—who said to me, “If you have writer’s block, lower your standards” and it was truly a lightbulb moment. I realized: I can always write something if I give myself permission to write badly. (And I love to tell my students that if the worst thing you do all day is write a bad poem you are having a very good day.) I embrace writing terrible first drafts.

     The other thing I do—and I share this with my students—is that rather than write a poem, I write toward something. That single word helps liberates me. I never sit down and think “now I will write a poem.” (Side note: why does it always seem like poem has a giant capital P while fiction has a small f? I discuss this with my students too.) I sit down—at a desk, on the floor, on the subway—and just write something. I write in class with my students, I write on NJ transit, I write when I don’t feel like writing. I always have something in process. But I consider it all raw material—and I go back and look to see what might be a poem.

     The process of writing my most recent book MOTHER WATER ASH was indicative. After my mother’s sudden death in 2018, I came home from several weeks in New Orleans and just started writing, produced about 50 pages of awful prose (never printed it out in fact), just junk, wrote a syllabus for a class on grief I will never teach, wrote down anything that crossed my mind in those hard weeks. Then after a few months I looked at it and saw pieces of language that might spark poems. And I started writing the poems that would become the book.

     One last thing: writing is the only area of my life where I allow myself to be messy. I am a very regimented and ordered person (typed to-do list every day for the win!). I love a schedule. I am very inflexible and plan everything in my life (ask my family). But with writing I am none of these things. I want to surprise myself in my writing, to write poems I could not have imagined I would write. In my drafts, I play and experiment. This has also made my writing practice much more fun, which is very needed to keep going as a writer.

DPR: Titles and covers for a collection of poetry are often a difficult decision. Sometimes the publisher decides, sometimes it’s the author’s choice, and often it’s a collaboration. How did you finalize both “Mother Water Ash” as the title and the fabulous cover art for your collection?

NC: Yes! Huge shout out to Sibylle Peretti! She created the amazing image on my book cover. Thanks also to my childhood best friend Elizabeth Zervigon who I asked for help, as I wanted a living female artist in New Orleans for the cover. Elizabeth put me in touch with Sibylle. And LSU Press also loved the image, so we were set. The book cover makes me really happy.

DPR: The title poem of your collection is deeply moving. The poem expresses so many griefs that can pull us akimbo all at the same time. Would you tell us about particularly the matrilineal conflicts that you express, and how you managed to so beautifully braid these tensions between generations?

NC: I wrote this poem late in the writing of the collection. The book title came to me first. When I began working on the poem I had the line “Mother gone to ash” and worked from there. My mother, for a long time, but especially since Katrina on August 29, 2005, was deeply wedded to the city of New Orleans and often told me that she would never leave the city, no matter what, and that she would die in her house (which she did). These words are not in the poem, but they haunt it.

     Much of the book is about being a mother and a daughter, and being a mother without a mother. My mother was essential to the raising of my daughters who were very close to her, and for a long time, I could not understand how to be a mother to my daughters without her. I think the poem speaks to that too.

     And the last image of the poem came to me in a dream about my mother.

Nicole Cooley's Poetry and Bio

Nicole Cooley's Book Review