T. Liem in conversation with Jami Macarty
T. Liem: The Whole Catastrophe was a pleasure to read. With my pencil in hand, I was tracing ideas, underlining phrases, and noting recurring lines. There is also so much sound-joy in reading it aloud, hearing your patterns of assonance and slant rhyme. It is this musicality that lets readers draw themselves along the earth with your speaker. These are poems which also feel like invitations. Congratulations on this publication and thanks for taking the time to talk about it with me!
Jami Macarty: My pleasure, T.! The image of you reading with your “pencil in hand” makes me a happy poet. I love that you read the poems aloud, for aloud was part of their compositional process and that allowed you to hear the poems like ears hear birds, their words song. A “sound-joy”! Hurrah, your compound, your reading aloud, and your pencil! Thank you for the gift of your attention to my poems. I am excited for this chance to talk with you about The Whole Catastrophe.
TL: At times, the first poem, “Allowing for Betweens,” felt like a villanelle, that is, if a villanelle could explode like a star. Phrases, like “As given as gone” and “As driven as drawn” repeat and vary while holding steadied in their shared rhythm. Would you talk about if and how you connect repetition to grief or loss?
JM: Wow, your idea of an exploding villanelle. Grief, too, explodes, catapulting the griever into shock, aftershock. When closest to grief’s explosive heat, uncontrollable thoughts recur, images repeat, tears replicate cyclically, finding crescendo, spiraling. Grief emphasizes through repetition. Urgent, rhythmic the call to attend to and to feel. To me, that sounds like poetry and suggests poetic form and device.
I do not want to give the impression that I was (or am) thinking so clearly about what poem could be made when in grief’s painful throes. My ability to talk to you about this now comes after the fact and digestion of grief. Reading poetry comforts. Writing poetry attends to grief’s shock. But even “writing poetry” seems overly defined. Initially there is just writing, an inked shorthand of marks and an intermittent stutter of words to acknowledge receipt of grief’s messages.
This was the case for “Allowing for Betweens” which began in close to real time after the death of a dear friend, late December 2019. I was not thinking about writing a poem when I rented two rooms, one in New Mexico, the other in Arizona. I could barely function let alone think. In the first room with a blue door, I stayed awake all night, stared at a fire, took lavender baths, and listened for a Great Horned Owl. From dawn to dusk, I sat outside the red door of the second room in a rocking chair under blankets and watched the light change. It was during a nine-hour drive between the two rooms that kennings of the poem began to whisper.
TL: Interweaved with grief for “my knee-socks-loving friend” there is also an ecological grief confronted in this chapbook. How do you think of the role of poetry, or what poetry can do for us “as industry maybes the forest the river”?
JM: What poetry can do for us? To be honest, this question, at least in this context, sparks questions about whether poetry (or any other art) requires any transactional value. Does it make sense to subjugate poetry to capitalism’s relentless insistence on purpose and product? Try though capitalism may to commodify poetry, poetry, by virtue of its orientation toward process, slowness, attention, and self-possession, among other mighty attributes, resists fast capitalism. I resist thinking about a poem, or at least my poems, as a product that has a function.
As a writer (of poetry), the only thing I am trying to do is change my silence. What poetry “does” for me is offer language and form through which I break my silence. In breaking my silence, I resist who and what tries to oppress me. The alternative: silence, despair, and if not death of the body, a death of the soul.
If I have the courage to change my silence, then maybe my life will serve as an example for others to take such a risk. Maybe. But breaking my silence on painful and taboo subjects starts with me. Poetry is my life’s medium. Poetry is the way I express my love and grief—for a dear friend, for my camping partner, and for fragile ecologies.
The Goliath political, social, and economic systems of capitalism would have me and others give up on saying what I/we have to say, writing what I/we must write, rendering saying or writing anything in protest acts of futility. If I agree, then I am implicated in my oppression. If I agree, then I repress. If I repress, I become depressed. I refuse to be an underdog David of my making, so I resist fast capitalism with poetry’s slow expression and expansive attention.
I am reminded of what Adrienne Rich offered on what poetry can do: “Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire… In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.”
TL: As in the quote above and the title of the first poem, you have a knack for verbing and nouning words. I’m curious about how you compose and edit, would you to talk about your writing process when it comes to this kind of language play?
JM: This is a hard question for me to answer. So much of how I write and revise is intuitive and context-driven. When I write I am within the process, not observing the process. Plus, in responding to such a question, I worry about sounding pretentious. As if there is no mystery within the writing process. But, conversation, like poetry, is an experiment, a trying out of something. So let me try.
As for “verbing and nouning words,” I consider words material; they have physical qualities—dimension, density, texture, temperature, etc. I experience words as bendy, flexible rather than rigid in their roles as parts of speech; their possible contortions more evident when standing next to each other.
In a poem’s revisioning, I ask for and seek language that corresponds to the experiences of the senses and enacts the aboutness of the defined subject. I have another eye on assisting the reader in tracking my transformation of one part of speech to another. Such lines of inquiry and intention arrive well past midnight during the revision process.
As I recall, “maybe” sans ‘s’ originally took that place in the poem, but over multiple readings felt inactive. As I read and reread that section of the poem, searched the thesaurus for an alternative that offered nuance, somehow the addition of ‘s’ suggested itself. A yes followed. To articulate why so now, I think the changed part of speech from adverb to verb, “maybe” to “maybes,” gives off vibes of precarity which fit with the feeling of forests among other ecosystems being on the brink.
From another angle, the word “maybe” has lived a life as an adverb to signify perhaps—“maybe I will”—and a noun to signify possibility—“no ifs, buts, or maybes”—why not allow the word a life as a verb? C. D. Wright wrote in The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (2016), a prose collection parts treatise, review, obituary, and homage: “The verb works the hardest. It should be the best paid.” Hurrah, verbs! I love words of all parts of speech, and as I write, I desire to coax forward their substance of sound and meaning and interrelationship. I search for words whose etymological nuances, sound values, and meaning possibilities substantiate the poem’s expression. But again, this searching occurs in the revision party’s wee hours.
Over intensive communing with the poem “Whole Catastrophe,” reading it aloud many times multiplied and then again, dimensions of the poem shifted from wobbly blur to sharp definition, and when things were getting off track, vice versa. I have found that I must read and read and read again to be able to separate what I hope to communicate from what is actually being communicated on the page. It is a clog-busting process to clear the way of and for the poem.
TL: I love the use of brackets with blank space inside in the opening poem. How did this idea and typographic representation of in-betweenness emerge?
JM: “Allowing for Betweens” began in a deeply fractured, torn-from form. Much of the poem seemed missing, perhaps because when the marks of what would become the poem were being made on paper, I was missing someone intensely. She was, as I imagined it, traveling the in-between life-death state as I was traveling the in-between having-losing state. The intensity of these feelings and experiences likely influenced the appearance of the open parentheses.
I recall making those marks on the page of what I have come to think of as a cyanotic spell pre-draft to the poem. There was no thinking that led to idea and choice. The parens were present from the beginning—before many of the words were. In a way, the open parentheses were the beginning. They held. They hold. They offered space.
Space. Ah-ha! It dawns on me that this likely also influenced my writing of “Space & the Unworded,” a treatise on space in my poems for Volume S-Z (3.48, Fall 2022) of The Capilano Review’s 50th Anniversary three-volume glossary.
TL: What drew you to the Mesostic form and/or what about this form was important for the poem “Anser caerulescens Mesostic”?
JM: First, context and gratitude: Scottish poet Alec Findlay introduced me to the Mesostic. Thank you, Alec! Through research, I learned that American musical composer and theorist John Cage pioneered the experimental variant of the Acrostic. Rather than the hidden, extra word accumulating along the vertical edge as it does in the Acrostic, the extra word reveals itself down the poem’s middle in the Mesostic.
In 2020, during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Capilano Review (TCR) invited previous TCR contributors to create writing prompts in “a playful invitation to write out of a moment of distance.” The TCR writing project offered writers a necessary connection within our writing community. The project also offered some teachers a possible classroom practice. On May 19, 2020, my prompt to write a Mesostic posted across socials and caused a poetic stir. Jacqueline Turner took my prompt to her collaborative writing course at Emily Carr University. I had been sharing this form with writers in my courses at Simon Fraser University for a few years, but I had not yet tried to make one. In October of 2020, I took on the challenge and wrote a series of Mesostics.
I think of the vertical word that runs down the center of a Mesostic poem as a spine and the horizontal lines of text as wings on either side. In other words, the form is an expression of a bird and well-matched to a poem “about” a bird. Therefore, “Anser caerulescens Mesostic” (and the other avian Mesostics in my series) which pays respect to Snow Geese overwintering with other waterfowl, including Sandhill Cranes seen in The Whole Catastrophe’s cover image taken at Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area by Dennis A. Boyd. Arizona’s Whitewater Draw and New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge offer the chapbook setting, and more importantly, bird-centric protected habitats managed to conserve food resources that support birdlife during migration.
TL: Finally, I would like to ask about the title. At first, the word “whole” feels like it is meant to emphasize the lament of catastrophe, and its immensity, but this word’s polysemous-ness allows for more interpretations. “Whole” can also mean “unhurt” or “restored.” It’s a fascinating modifier for the word “Catastrophe.” I also sense an exuberance in the title poem, and I wonder what are the possibilities within or after catastrophe as “our future futures thousands more moons”?
JM: When confronted with profound loss, I may be unable to word. Silence may take over for a time. After a while, through no doing of my own, loss transforms. Where there may have been a waning will to go on, the will to live asserts itself. To continue living do we not have to build a certain tolerance for catastrophe? As the lines from “Whole Catastrophe” offer: “the forest / the forest living on its inner thriving / after a controlled burning grows.” Sandhill Cranes continue their millennia-old migration from British Columbia and Alaska to Arizona and New Mexico despite human-made climate crises and repeated habitat decimations.
We have choices, of course, but I choose life. I choose to live. To “sweep out the tent.” To love. My dear friend who took “her leave in all four directions” had a profound impact on my life. She taught me what it means to live and how to be alive in my life. I now live with the presence and absence of her within my loving memory and her essential lessons. To me, to be alive means to engage with life in all its forms, possibilities, and meanings—from spectral loss to cosmic wonder.
O, I hear Magical Raven croaking; I will take that as my cue to go for my day’s walk. Thank you so very much, T., for your gift of engagement with my writing at the level of word. I have very much enjoyed meeting you here.
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T. Liem is the author of Slows: Twice (Coach House 2023), and Obits. (Coach House, 2018). Their writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Vallum, and elsewhere. They live in Montreal / Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.
Photo Credit: Surah Field-Green
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Jami Macarty lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Vancouver, British Columbia, where she teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. Jami also works as an independent editor and a writer of essays, reviews, and poetry. Jami is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit (forthcoming, University of Nevada Press), winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. The Whole Catastrophe is Jami’s fourth chapbook. The previous three chapbooks include Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
To learn more about Jami, her writing practice, and forthcoming publications, visit: www.jamimacarty.com
Photo Credit: Vincent K. Wong
