Traci Brimhall on The Social Distance Reading Series
Traci Brimhall is the author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod(Copper Canyon), Saudade (Copper Canyon), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). She’s an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Here’s Traci reading from her new book COME THE SLUMBERLESS TO THE LAND OF NOD out from Copper Canyon.
With each successive book, there’s even more grandness to Brimhall’s narrative voice. She writes with a commanding sense, with some poems feeling like the voice beaming to Job, and other poems arriving like a hypnotizing whisper at night…Another masterful book from one of our finest poets.
– Nick Ripatrazone at The Millions “Must-Read Poetry: March 2020”
Traci Brimhall’s Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod unfurls like a series of dispatches from the shores of grief, and then the burning wildfire of divorce. I haven’t read her before and yet her poems feel as intimate as a handwritten letter.
– John Freeman at Lit Hub, “10 Books You Should Read in March”
How do you begin a new piece of writing? What conditions help your writing process?
My preferred way to write is to “build a spell,” by which I mean reading the densely musical and mysterious until my sense of time and reality gets a bit slippery. But also, I’m a big believer in writing down what you can when you can. I often get inspired in the middle of writing rather than before I sit down, but it’s also true that I enjoy a second mile more than I enjoy my first.
What was an early experience that taught you language has power?
I actually remember an early power to harm–my dad found a poem I’d written for my mother and teased me because I’d spelled beautiful as “butiful”. But I also remember making up my own language at one point. The only word I remember is “diamo”, though I couldn’t tell you what it means.
What poets or writers do you continually go back to?
This year one of my New Year’s resolutions was to re-read the 20 books that made me fall in love with poetry. They’re sheltering in place at the office, but I remember Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares; Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies; Adrienne Rich’s Diving Into the Wreck; W. S. Merwin’s The Lice; Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses; Li-Young Lee’s The City In Which I Love You; Frederico García Lorca (particularly a book I’ve heaving dog-earred in the collected that I can’t remember the title of!); Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, & God; and Robert Hayden’s Collected Poems.
What is your favorite childhood or adolescent book?
I didn’t grow up with these! I grew up on the Bible and comic books, which maybe explains a lot of my poems. But right now my son and I are reading the Magic Treehouse series, and I’m genuinely loving it.
What are your thoughts/experiences on social distancing?
So far I’m noticing how everyone has such different ways of processing, at least based on what I see in social media. Some people post a lot about what’s going on and trying influence others. Some people try and entertain or distract. And none of these are bad strategies, but I think people also feel a little isolated in those ways, too, not understanding why some people are ignoring them, or are making different choices, or processing in some alternate ways. All of this is unprecedented in our lifetimes and recent history, and I think it will be a long time before we really understand some of what is happening. In the meantime, I hope we all find ways through digital brunches or sharing of statistics or reading of poems to feel connected to others right now.
Where can we find you? Link to your blog or website:
The Social Distance Reading Series
Brought to you by The Vermont School and Green Mountains Review
We’re thrilled to host The Social Distance Reading Series, a collaboration between Green Mountains Review and The Vermont School poets. In the wake of book event cancellations due to COVID-19, this pop-up series is designed to offer poets a platform for launching new collections of poems. At this point, we are focusing on collections by poets whose book events have been cancelled between January through May 2020.
Stay tuned for a new reading each Wednesday and Sunday.
Thanks,
–Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Kerrin McCadden, and Elizabeth Powell, series curators.
–Kylie Gellatly, editorial assistant, interviewer.