H. L. Hix
In this conversation, H. L. Hix asks after poet Cynthia Hogue’s most recent collections, Contain (Tram Editions, 2022) and instead, it is dark (Red Hen, 2023).
H. L. Hix: Your new book, Contain, bears the subtitle “Meditations upon Seeing Morgan O’Hara’s Visual/Collage Contemplative Series, ‘Nineteen Forms of Containment,’” so the reader knows from the beginning that this set of poems is in dialogue with a prior work of visual art. Since of course there are countless art works in the world, I’m always intrigued, with any ekphrastic poem or poems, by the question “Why this work?” So, with your indulgence, let me start us there: what is it about O’Hara’s series that caught and retained your attention, and elicited these poems in response?
Cynthia Hogue: The simple answer is: access and opportunity in lockdown! In the first months of the pandemic, Morgan O’Hara sent me an electronic copy of her series, “Nineteen Forms of Containment.” We’d met at Macdowell, and had previously collaborated on an artist’s book (Ars Cora). In the spring of 2020, she was Distinguished Visiting Artist at Tűbingen University, and there she was stranded for months as Europe shut down. She could paint and she could read the international edition of the New York Times. In this series, she contemplates the experience of “containment” (with all the ambiguities inherent in the word since Whitman’s claim to “contain multitudes”). She read the newspapers and considered a different social, cultural, or medical focus each day in visual and collage forms. Scrolling through her stunning sequence, I had what I can only describe as a profound, visceral response, as if I were lifted out of myself, hurtled down a hall toward a light, and into an altered state of consciousness that lasted throughout the writing of my own sequence. Remember what a heady, confusing time it was! My body would go through my days, but my mind remained in this other consciousness. Intuitively, I focused myself as Morgan had, retracing her process, meditating each day on one of her visual forms, or alternatively, tracking down the articles in the Times she’d contemplated that day. My poems soon found their own form, as twelve (ekphrasis) or eight line (documentary) poems. I remember feeling as if I were channeling both words and insights as I wrote, an inward-outward communion of artist and poet, intensified by the global catastrophe.
HH: Hearing you describe the viscerality of your response (“… as if I were lifted out of myself, hurtled down a hall…”), I can’t help but think of Dickinson’s famous assertion, from one of her letters: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Your description, though, is in a sense an inverse of hers. Her visceral experience comes after poetry, in response to it; yours comes before poetry, in response to visual art. I’m interested in the equal-parts-active-and-passive experience you describe, as if something were happening to you even as you worked (retracing, meditating, tracking down…). Did the “channeling” you experienced in the process of writing inflect what came out on the page in any way that you can talk about?
CH: Thank you for this question! Throughout the writing of Contain, I felt the presence of Dickinson’s influence, how deeply her poetry runs through my life. Dickinson is describing the feeling generated by reading “that,” which she identifies as poetry. One recognizes poetry without being able to explain what it is or why the top of your head was taken off. Maybe it’s similar to having words whose source is mysterious emerge on the page you’re writing on (“channeling”). I had a response much like Dickinson’s, but from seeing a work of visual art. I was moved, absorbing, regarding, taking that in (a different that, to be sure, than Dickinson’s), followed by an actively creative period that began to materialize the responsive trajectory. The poet-critic Jami Macarty described the responsive process entailed in writing poetry—in fact, she is quoting lines from Contain—as “a way / of putting word to something / for which there are no words.” When I read those lines in her review, I didn’t recognize them as my own, but as if someone else had written them. Those words welled up and I wrote them down, however, the exact words the poem needed at that moment, out of a very old memory of reading a poet (maybe Celan) or an essay on lyric theory (maybe Adorno). By using the word “channeling,” I’m trying to put word to the mystical experience of writing the poems in this way, in what I’ve called an altered state of consciousness, because there really aren’t words for it. The words came out of no-words. Yes, my language was changed by the catastrophe, as if a looser vein of sandstone were brought under great pressure and heat, and metamorphosed into gneiss. Dickinson described the condition as “a Soul at the ‘White Heat.’”
HH: Omigod, I love that metaphor of sandstone metamorphosed into gneiss. And those words in your last few sentences: altered, changed, metamorphosed. It happens that just yesterday I read Carl Phillips’ new book of “meditations from a life in writing,” My Trade Is Mystery, in which he advises: “The task, remember, is not transcription, but transformation.” What I’m hearing in your description of your experience is a robust fulfillment of that ideal: Contain is not your transcription for the reader of the O’Hara series from visual art into poetry, but a record of your being transformed by O’Hara’s work, and enough pressure and heat that a willing and attentive reader might be transformed.
CH: Yes, exactly so! The Carl Phillips quote captures a tension I discovered between ekphrastic and documentary methods as I wrote Contain. In the (slightly) longer ekphrastic poems, I could begin with ruminative, descriptive lines and soon enough the associations would arise out of the process of contemplating O’Hara’s piece. As I transferred them onto paper, they were literally trans/formed. The shorter documentary poems began with excerpting bits and pieces from the NYT articles, sometimes as formal quotations and sometimes as paraphrase. I thought of the process as “language gathering,” seeking evocative or pointed orts and scraps of language among the reportorial and purposeful verbiage. I was actually more interested in transcribing the fragments I chose to quote, but I was also recontextualizing them, which has its own transformative action.
HH: Our focus so far, in thinking about Contain, on transformation and intensity sends me to the acknowledgments (!) in instead, It Is dark. You include there a lovely tribute to Nancy Mairs, culminating in the sentence “Nancy, your words stay with me through life.” If the famous Dickinson snippet speaks to sudden in-the-moment intensity, another often-quoted passage emphasizes duration: Yeats’s “. . . violent energy, which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a few minutes the nervous vitality, and is useless in the arts. Our fire must burn slowly…” Intensity and duration are not opposites, but they’re in dramatic tension with one another. Am I right to feel both ideals, Dickinsonian intensity and Yeatsian perdurance (the staying power you impute to Nancy Mair’s words), at work in your poems?
CH: Another thought-provoking question! The short answer is Yes, both ideals are at work in my new collection, although I did not experience the intensity of generative writing (where both Contain and instead, it is dark have their roots) as a “violent energy.” Yeats lived and wrote many of his best poems in the presence of violence, of the violent fight for a liberated Ireland. It makes sense to me that he would describe a responsive, in-the-moment creative energy as “violent.” The intensity of the generative energy with which I wrote instead, it is dark, however, was catalyzed by sudden fear of looming loss. Eventually, I lifted my head from my sad musings, which were more personal than political. In time, the project took on a broader scope, expanding to include the experiences of others, to create a micro-portrait of civilian experience in war time. I prefer Wordworth’s sense of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility” to characterize the source of both tension and duration.
HH: That is surely one of the reasons for being so engaged by instead, it is dark. I take the poetry world (and maybe the broader “real” world) as having fallen under the sway of a false dilemma, by treating the personal and the political as if they were mutually exclusive. Either one, uncorrected by the other, readily becomes narcissism, vanity, delusion, and so on. So I’m interested in the experience you report in the “Author’s Note,” culminating in “a world-sorrow,” which seems something like an estuarial space both personal and political.
CH: Poems I’ve written in the past that were mainly political were rarely successful. I tend to preach. Finding the balance, anchoring political insight or nuance in the personal, is a way to navigate between two concerns, and it demands a skill I still struggle with, but it’s a poetic practice that feels right to me. I can at times really zone out. Artists do! Being attentive to what’s right in front of me, to ‘lived experience’ takes concentration, but remembering the larger context, the world, others, seems urgent right now. The prose preface that opens instead, it is dark draws on years of researching civilians during wartime, teaching late modernist poets like H.D. and Eliot (who remained in London during the Blitz), and discovering Fletcher’s theory for a new American poetry. Part of my firsthand research in France was visiting Maillé, the burned village near Tours (not the better-known Oradour further south). I had a very eerie reaction to the place, which didn’t register consciously until later. There were no external signs left of the brutality the land had witnessed. Everything had been rebuilt, everything painted shiny white. It was unsettling but inchoate. We were the only visitors that day. It was extremely hot and streets were empty. We went inside the little museum to cool off, but we ended up watching the documentary they’d made of the victims of the massacre. When we went back to Tours, I became violently ill for some days. It seemed unconnected to our afternoon, but later I realized it was the source. Fletcher writes of the vibrational imprint a place registers, which he describes as the turbulence of “the living ground.” I connected my extreme reaction to my generalized sadness about what happened on that site, not only empathy for the long-ago victims of the Maillé massacre, but also for others today, elsewhere. I was shocked to recognize the feelings as what I called “a world-sorrow.” It arose out of a personal experience, but the emotions were colored by history and current events. The preface is situated between the two. I think you said it more elegantly, but awareness of others, elsewhere, tempers a tendency toward self-absorption!
HH: The way you articulate our double charge, to attend with concentration to ‘lived experience’ and to remain alert to the larger context, strikes me as clear and vital: to bear ever in mind that the two don’t pull apart. The poems themselves are alive to that charge. I think, for instance, of “To Hide a Child,” early in the book. “One day before soldiers came, / the child sauvage arrived // from the blue horizon, hungry,” one voice in the poem says. Another voice asks, “Did the child look foreign?” in response to which the first voice asks, “What does foreign / look like to you?” That last question sounds to me like a mirror-image of Adrienne Rich’s “With whom do you believe your lot is cast?” It makes me think of war as a radical misconstrual of with whom one’s lot is cast, and of poetry as an attempt to true one’s sense for with whom one’s lot is cast. I know that capsule formulation is oversimplified, but is it a way of even starting to think toward what instead, it is dark is thinking toward?
CH: Yes, thinking toward, conducting the interviews and seeing what arises out of them, following those voices and discovering along the way that which you are given to write. It was not a given that I could ever ethically write of race, but once I lived in New Orleans and discovered that I’d been blind to my own white privilege, I found an approach to our fraught, shared racial history. Nor would I ever have approached the subject of civilian experience during war time. My husband’s heart attack became the catalyst for my entry into that arena. I have an imaginative link thanks to the process of researching and writing instead, it is dark. Sometimes, there’s no obvious entrée, or you have to earn it through educating yourself about the history. Sometimes, it just opens before your eyes. The back story of the poem, “memory holds a trace that at times rises into words,” is the moment in which I was suddenly put on alert during a phone call with my sister, who’d begun speaking of covering Columbine as an ABC news producer. Our conversation occurred in the aftermath of the San Bernadino mass shooting, which had brought back her memories of covering the Columbine carnage. I had been half-listening, and then in an instant, my sister had my full attention. As soon as I hung up, I wrote down her words. During the conversation, I’d realized that I was hearing a poem of my sister’s experience. The poem is so exactly her words that I asked her permission to include it in the book, I have found that many poems begin for me in attentive listening, which I learned from the Mennonites when I trained with them in conflict resolution. At a recent reading, I dedicated this poem to my sister and actually the book to the witnesses, the survivors of trauma, those who see, and help us to be responsive to others. Paul Celan, a poet-witness and survivor of the Holocaust, asked a question that haunts me: Who will witness for the witness? This collection is an attempt to respond to that question.
HH: The attentive listening that preceded these poems certainly informs them. Almost the last moment in the last poem in the book is the owl “whose contrapuntal hoots / you hear before you see him.” And the poet’s attentive listening, throughout, grabs the reader’s full attention. As a note of closure to this conversation, would you please speak to the very last words of the book? In our most customary way of speaking, we want a sense of belonging, but the book ends with praise, or at least recognition, of “the sense of / not belonging here.” Is there a way you hear that reversal, or would want a reader to hear it?
CH: There is a sense throughout the book of traversing/discovering places of moment, of something momentous having happened because of human activity, whether it’s war or the disappearance of wildlife habitat (as in the parking lot built on wetlands in “birdseye”). In “The Loire Valley (Solstice 2015),” the last poem in the book, the scene is more hopeful, of art’s capacity to transform a place: an annual music festival established in a fortified medieval grange. The ancient barn had long stood empty outside of town, a ruin. It was once a necessarily protected and cultivated farmstead, but had outlasted its usefulness. Art could reimagine the space. Once a year, humans were permitted to enter the compound as paying guests to attend the music festival. As I neared the end of the poem, I had a sense of an empty space becoming festive and idyllic, but also eccentric, where Bach was heard supplemented contrapuntally by a barn owl hooting during a concert. My vision was of the primeval forest from which the barn was built, its abiding presence in a place where people could meet on common ground in something akin to Northrup Frye’s Shakespearean “green world,” or Milton’s Garden, or maybe Robert Duncan’s “meadow.” In the end, we’re “cast out.” We don’t belong there anymore. For me, it’s a glimpse of a post-human world. So much of the book ruminates on the consequences of destructive or thoughtless human presence, but I wanted to end with that more constructive ecopoetic vision, of a paradisical space, restored and transformed by art.
