âI wanted to be a web of lightning:â An Interview with Ginny Wiehardt
This month, our most recent former poetry editor, Douglas Manuel, interviewed our most recent poetry winner, Ginny Wiehardt, on her Gold Line Press chapbook, Migration.
Douglas Manuel: I especially enjoy the titular poem âMigration.â I feel it really sets the stage for the way the book explores motherhood, family lineage, place, fleeing, and finding/creating home. Could you talk about this poem in relation to these themes and perhaps discuss why you chose this title for the book?
Ginny Wiehardt: Youâre right that this poem does set the stage for the bookâs major themes, and thatâs one reason I chose the title for the book. Thereâs this circling that goes on in the collection, between fleeing home and returning to itâeither physically or through thoughts and habitsâand the word migration encompasses that circling. I also like that migration connects to the restlessness expressed even in some of the poems that donât deal with family, like âIn Search of the Green Flash.â Iâm interested in how that restlessness propels our lives, whether weâre escaping something or seeking something out.
More than other poems in the collection, âMigrationâ puts that restlessness in the context of femininity and domesticity, starting with the first lines: âA girl only needs / a certain amount of learning / a certain amount of worldâ and continuing with the metaphor of the unthreaded needle and the plaster eggs. Men are expected to go out into the world and make a place for themselves, but a woman really has to justify choosing that path, since her world is supposed to be at home, taking care of people. So itâs not only home and family that the speaker longs to escape, but also this cultural destiny.
DM: In some ways, one could read this book as a depiction of female coming of age/maturation. When I say this, I am immediately thinking of the poem, âSecond Thought,â which has one my favorite first sentences of all time: âI would like to ask that everyone / from â94 to â98 / retire their memories of me.â Could you talk about the role, if any, growing up, changing, moving on/away, motherhood, and, dare I say, acceptance play in these poems?
GW: Iâm glad you like that line! And I like that you mention acceptance. Iâve thought a lot about the tension that comes of starting a book with poems like âMigrationâ and âThe Clan,â which critique family and domesticity, and ending with poems about motherhood. Some sense of acceptance is necessary to resolve that tension, and the book doesnât spell out how that comes about. But the poems about motherhood donât evoke the same sense of claustrophobia that those early poems do, or at least they balance it with other images, and thatâs important. For instance, âKaleidoscopeâ explores the loss of identity, and the sense of dislocation that can result from new parenthood. But the flip side of that loss is a profound sense of connectedness, which takes the speaker out of herself. In a similar way, âFourth Trimesterâ begins with confinement and isolation, and then shoots out to encompass Antarctica, the entire planet.
DM: âTexas Boys in Dragâ slightly veers away from the bookâs usual subject matter and, in my opinion, serves as a marvelous and powerful grace note in the sequence. Why did you place the poem where you did? What work do you think this poem does for the book? i.e., in your mind, how does this poem inform, complement and/or play against other poems in the book?
GW: With regard to the placement, I made the decision to order the coming of age poems, like this one, more or less chronologically. Any other way of doing it just felt artificial. Then I interspersed those poems with poems that are doing different work, like the poems about grief that precede âTexas Boys in Drag,â or later on, âSalvage.â âTexas Boys in Dragâ seemed to nicely bridge the division between youth in Texas and adulthood in New York. And I wanted something more spirited to follow those two poems about grief.
That said, this poem is an important one for me. I wanted to pay tribute to many of the boys and men I knew coming of age in Texas in the early â90s. It wasnât easy to be different in Texasâit was a very religious place and often a violent one. And the definition for belonging was extremely narrow back then. This was before Will and Grace, before Glee. I donât think the term LGBT even existed. Many people, like the boys in this poem, either had to hide who they were or embark on what was essentially a political project, just being themselves. Looking back as an adult, Iâm struck by how vulnerable my friends were in those years, and at the choices they made anyway.
But you asked how this relates to the rest of the book. In a way, the poem offers a backdrop for the other poems set in Texas. I understood the hostility they were getting because I was getting some of it, too, as a girl who aspired to be like Molly Ivins, say, and not Laura Bush. The poem helps portray the cultural landscape.
DM: âMourningâ is another poem that deeply moved me. Its precision and fragmented nature really mirrors the process of grief. The section breaks really allow this poemâs form to reverberate its content. When drafting this poem, did you draft many sections and then whittle them down to what we have now? Or was this a larger piece that was all one stanza/section and then you found the section breaks? Could you talk about your writing process with this particular poem and maybe even the role the epigraph from Abu l-Hasan al-Hursi plays in all of this?
GW: âMourningâ is one of the oldest poems in the collection, if not the oldest. I actually hesitated to include it, but it tied in well with the poems on loss and mourning. And stylistically it seemed to fit. I had an interest in Spanish language and literature for many years, and in graduate school I took a class on Spanish literature of the middle ages. During the class, I became curious about what the Arab poets of Spain were writing at that same time. So I picked up a book of translations.
After carrying it around for a long time, reading and rereading certain poems (including the poem from which I borrowed the epigraph), I sat down and wrote âMourning,â taking that aesthetic influence but writing from my own experiences of loss. In a way this poem is a form of time travel, connecting me to the losses of poets who lived so many generations before me, and in a culture quite different from mine. Which perhaps is appropriate, considering the tremendous cultural exchanges taking place in Spain at that time.
Regarding the editing process, I played with word choice and did edit the lines down a bit, but for the most part, the lines on this page were the ones I wrote down that day. The problem I had was that they didnât quite hang together and they didnât play off each other effectively. Breaking them into sections seemed to fix that problem. Iâm glad you agree!
DM: Iâm always into finding reoccurring colors in books of poetry. In your text, I was struck by how often the color white came upâmilk, light, wax, snow, sand, stars, eggs, pelicans, rabbits, water, Antarctica, etc. What role, if any, do you think this color plays in the book? In other words, does this color inform/enrich and/or complicate the bookâs themes in some way?
GW: This is an interesting question. I was raised in a deeply Catholic family, so the obvious association is definitely there. Itâs stated most explicitly in the poem âNeonâ: âThey thought such a white thing would be pure.â However, Iâm also interested in how that notion of purity intersects with our cultureâs ideas about femininity. So, going back to âMigration,â the speaker feels that sheâs been judged impure for her desires: âVice was what I had, / they were sure of it.â But itâs not just the eggs, the symbol of motherhood and domesticity, that are white, but also the images associated with freedom: geese, stars, lightning. Could that be a way of appropriating that color, and that symbolism, for a different set of values?
These notions of purity and femininity get even more complicated with motherhood. Part of that sense of confinement that we talked about with âFourth Trimesterâ has to do with cultural expectationsâhere, the expectation that pregnant women should return to some state of innocence. The reference to St. Lucy, the âsaint who tore out her eyes,â also works on all this. Sheâs one of a long line of female saints who defaced or martyred themselves rather than lose their purity.
But again, the poem doesnât end with that, but with Antarctica. And while there is a sense of purity in the cold, white, barrenness of Antarctica, itâs essentially an image of expansiveness. Thatâs its symbolic importance in the poem. The judge, Anna Journey, picked up on this and suggested I end with âFourth Trimesterââchronologically it should come earlier. It was a great suggestion. Itâs the perfect place to leave the book.
Ginny Wiehardtâs chapbook Migration won the 2015 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals including the Adroit Journal, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Southern Humanities Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Willow Springs. Her work has also been included in Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications 2016). She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers and has been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and Jentel. Originally from Texas, she now lives in New York, NY with her family.
Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a MFA from Butler University where he was the Managing Editor of Booth a Journal. He is currently a Middleton and Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. He was a recipient of the Chris McCarthy Scholarship for the Napa Valley Writersâ Conference and has been the Poetry Editor for Gold Line Press as well as was one of the Managing Editors of Ricochet Editions. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Rhino, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, New Orleans Review, Crab Creek Review, Many Mountains Moving and elsewhere. His first full-length collection of poems, Testify, will be released by Red Hen Press in the spring of 2017.
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