~ Delta Poetry Review ~
An Interview with Andy Young
by Susan Swartwout
DPR: How did you come to poetry—or how did poetry find you?
AY: Growing up in
Southern West Virginia, I grew up with my dad singing old mountain
songs, filled with stories of murder and longing and the loss of
home. These songs are haunting and very lyrical, and I believe that
they shaped my brain. I was not really around people who might
identify as poets or artists until college, when I found my people
in an artists’ community. And I took a poetry course as a random
elective. After that, I was hooked. When I came to New Orleans in my
twenties, when people would ask me “what do you do?” and I’d say
“I’m a poet,” they did not, like anywhere else in the U.S., ask some
version of “what do you really do?” (ie how do you make
money), they’d ask things like “what do you write about?” The
message was that being a poet in New Orleans was a valid pursuit. I
moved here soon after and have been writing poems steadily ever
since.
DPR: How has your writing changed over the years in terms of style,
voice, and subject matter?
AY: I think there’s
been a trajectory of looking at the world with a more global lens,
exploring the interconnectivity of the personal and political. I’ve
also become a mother, so the theme of motherhood has become part of
the mix. As for style and voice, I’ve strived to become more clear
and precise with my images and to trust the reader more in making
leaps and accepting juxtaposition without my interpretation.
DPR: Robin Behn once told her students at Knox College that we all
have our linguistic talismans that we carry for their beauty or
other meaning to the individual writer (mine are persistence,
crapshoot, and undulant). I know that this is as difficult as
answering, “What is your favorite book?”, but what are your favorite
words? Did someone gift them to you, or was it love at first sight?
AY: succulent,
tentacle, transcendent
They are neither gifts nor love-at-first-sight words, but a gradual
accretion of awareness and tenderness toward them. The list, were I
to keep it, would be constantly shifting.
DPR: What is your feeling about the concept of poetry as
survival—for both writer and reader?
AY:
Poetry
has certainly helped me to survive in the sense that it has helped
me find meaning and expression during extreme emotional tumult,
which is essential for someone like me with a tendency toward
depression and extreme emotion. Poetry can also humanize our
experiences and our concept of other people who might not be
familiar to us. It can unite people in some ways, as when poetry has
become part of chants and slogans of uprisings. I am careful with
the notion, though, as poetry cannot help one who is unhoused or
surviving war or disaster except in the most abstract ways. That
person needs their essential needs met in that moment. Meanwhile,
poetry itself survives, witnesses, and sings in the dark. As Seamus
Heaney said: “In
one sense, the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a
tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in
the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left
speechless and renewed.”
DPR: Tracy K. Smith, in her essays in Fear Less: Poetry in
Perilous Times, writes that engaging with poetry is a pursuit
that activates “essential life skills critical to the integration”
of mind and body, logic and emotion, and accountability to others.
Your poem “Bone Saw Villanelle” is chillingly beautiful, very
timely, and an example of the need for such skills. Tell us about
the inception and intended impact of this poem.
AY: First of
all, thank you so much for those kind words about my poem. The
inception of the poem speaks to a process for many of my poems, I
think. I heard about the horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and it
shocked me, as it should, and remained with me like a pebble in a
shoe I kept walking on. Whatever part of my brain tries to process
these unprocessable moments of knowledge and awareness began to
attempt to find language for it. The notions of cutting to the bone,
of the physicality of the bone saw, of the literal idea of
amputation and its mirroring with authoritarian power and its wont
to excise that which is not under its influence: these things began
to dance around and repeat and haunt. The villanelle form allowed a
container for the obsessive cruelty of the act and contemplation of
it.
As for impact, I can’t think about intended impact as I write, or
everything will shut down, but looking back and thinking about it
being shared with people, I guess it attempts to force the reader to
slow down and really stop and think about the ghastly, calculated
actions used to silence that journalist.
DPR: What is your writing practice and process? And what are you
working on next?
AY: The most challenging part of my practice
is finding the time and mental space to work. I am a full-time
teacher and mother, and most of my attention is necessarily on the
needs of others. I got my MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for
Writers while teaching part-time and when my first child was an
infant. I finished just after having a second child, with the first
one still a toddler. Among the many ways that program shaped me, one
of the most memorable was when its director, Ellen Bryant Voigt,
talked to me about really practical ways to get the work and writing
done in the margins of my life. Now, when I have half an hour to
write, I can manage to make some progress on something. I’ve learned
to be incredibly practical about creating and shaping my work. Other
than navigating time constraints, I keep a little notebook with me
at all times and write scraps in it, usually without knowing what or
why. Later, with a chunk of time, I harvest the scraps and weave
them into something, or the beginning of something.
I am working on many things now. I’ve finished my third manuscript,
and I’m looking for a home for it. I now have some individual poems
which are floating around my personal ether, as well as two
chapbooks I’d like to get out there. I made a short poetry film
based on a poem in Museum of the Soon to Depart (“Pharmacy
Museum Tour Guide”), which has done well at film festivals and won
some awards, and which has encouraged me to keep going. I’m working
on a second poetry film now, as well as creating some
literary-leaning audio tours of the city, learning metalworking,
writing some nonfiction, and looking toward a new project which
involves the voices of the dead.
| Archive | Submissions | About | News |