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Day ends at noon. You blackberry, you darken. Evening—shimmer body, shimmer breath and materialize. Salt-ground, your dress high above your ankles, the world splitting open. You are happy. You think you are the happiest you have been. God-tongue, mouth of Greek and mud. The field kneels. It is yours.
Season by Caitlin Neely
All night long, snow-struck. Lake song, the bouquet behind the dress of a bridesmaid. All night long, winter. Bury your hands in him, bury him. Having come from field, having come from rust. Hands shut in prayer. All night long, scraping of heaven against pine.
Bride With Violets in Her Lap by Caitlin Neely
NO FEE Submission call + editor interview -- Reservoir, DEADLINE: May 15, 2017
NO FEE Submission call + editor interview — Reservoir, DEADLINE: May 15, 2017
Reservoir is a new semi-annual, online literary journal. They publish poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and art. New issues are released in the summer and in the winter.
I wondered how and why this press came to be, so I asked editors Caitlin Neely, Cady Vishniac, Minda Honey, and Kenzie Allen a few questions to find out. See the interview and a link to their submission guidelines below.
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The Banango Interview: Caitlin Neely
Caitlin Neely’s “After Sappho” & “Tinder Language” appeared in the tenth issue of Banango Street. Neely’s poems also appear in DIAGRAM, Thursh, & Devil’s Lake. She’s an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia. I had a great time emailing back & forth with her for this interview. Keep reading if you want to know more about poems & MFAs & writing.
Carter: The works of other poets are integral to both of these pieces. "After Sappho" uses language from Anne Carson's Sappho translations & "Tinder Language" is a response to Brenda Hillman. I'm a big fan of work that relies on other poets, but I'm always worried, when I write these types of pieces, that they aren't doing enough to rise above merely being imitations. One reason I loved "Tinder Language" so much is that I could feel the Brenda in it, but I didn't feel overwhelmed by the Brenda. How did you find the right balance of your voice/ the other voices in the poems we published?
Neely: I constantly struggled with balancing my voice and these "other" voices. When I'm reading and engaging with a poet's language, it tends to creep up in my own. I try my best to embrace multiple voices in my first drafts. If I shut out something that's happening organically (like these voices) it's going to be that much harder to get at a poem's center. Once I begin revision I start working on balancing it out—making sure the poem sounds like "me." This usually involves playing around with individual words/phrases and punctuation. Sometimes line breaks as well. It's also a lot easier to maintain balance when I'm focused on the voice as a thematic entity. For example, I embraced Brenda's use of fire imagery and scientific names in Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire as I was writing and revising "Tinder Language."
Now I'm writing a lot of persona poems so I tend to channel the voice of whoever the language is embodying, as opposed to a specific poet.
Carter: I started a project where I was going to write my own version of one of my favorite books, but I felt, after three poems, that I couldn't sustain the project without letting too much of her voice take over the poems. It's tough. What voices are you using for the persona poems? Persona is one of the things I almost never experiment with, because I feel just--so bad at taking on the voice of someone/something else. I'm always worried that I won't be able to do those voices justice.
Neely: That sounds like an interesting project! Sorry it didn't work out. I can definitely understand the difficulty; especially when you're covering an entire book.
Mostly female voices from religion and mythology: Merope, Persephone, Undine, Eve, Mary and others. I also have a Chopin poem which fits and doesn't fit. In undergrad I was dead set on not writing persona poems. I didn't think I could do it. I was very much on the personal 'I' path with my poetry. Anything outside of that realm felt impossible. But I gradually changed my tune last fall. Maybe it was the new environment. It started with a poem called "Season" which is half addressing Sylvia Plath. Then I wrote a poem mostly from the viewpoint of Persephone (I say mostly because I don't think it's possible to write persona without injecting some of yourself into it).
And it felt really freeing. I was saying things in my poems I never would have said otherwise. I also sometimes worry I'm not doing their voices justice. At the very least I hope I'm bringing a different perspective to their stories.
Carter: That reminds me of a few things: Mary Biddinger's chapbook about St. Monica, & Caroline Crew's recent book about saints. Mythology has always been this well that all poets are supposed to draw from, but it surprises me how little that well is actually used. Good to hear you're drawing from some of those voices! So, you run a blog called The MFA Years, where MFA students blog about their experiences. Can you talk a little bit about what that entails/ what you've learned from doing it?
Neely: The MFA Years is a blog that follows first and second year creative writing students through graduate school. They blog about their experiences teaching, writing, navigating workshop and basically anything else that goes along with the MFA. We also interview graduate students and publish guest blog posts. I edit everything, manage the social media accounts, occasionally solicit people for interviews and posts, and answer any questions that come our way.
I've learned how necessary it is for students to talk about their experiences. We've received quite a few emails and tweets from people thanking us for sharing snippets of our lives. There are things happening in programs and in the creative writing world that need to be written about, discussed and, most importantly, stopped (more recently—Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith, the list goes on). I'm glad The MFA Years is contributing to some of these discussions. And I've discovered so many people outside of our blog who are talking about what the MFA is, what it does and what it perpetuates. I recommend reading VIDA's columns and features. Misty Ellingburg's MFA Confessions is great as well.
Carter: I didn't know the MFA Confessions site, so thanks for linking that! It's great that you're providing a platform for discussing the MFA-- it's a subject that so often breaks down into a fight between GET AN MFA & LOL BYE MFA, & the focus isn't as much on the variety of experiences in the MFA. Keeping on the subject of MFAs, you're at Virginia, yeah? Which is also where Lisa Russ Spaar teaches, yeah? YOU LUCKY YOU. What are a couple of big things you've learned in your first year of grad school that have helped your writing?
Neely: Lisa and everyone else in the program are the best. Seriously. Some of the books Lisa assigned in her fall course, "The Poetics of Ecstasy," really changed the way I was approaching my poetry and reminded me of how important it is to read, read, read. It's easy to forget this. Brian Teare's Pleasure gave me permission to get weird with my syntax. Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters blew me away in terms of the language. I think she's partially the reason why I started writing more persona poems.
And then during my spring semester I'd walk into Rita Dove's office with a line I felt wasn't original because it wasn't weird enough. And she'd give me a funny look and tell me that wasn't the case. So I also learned I don't have to be strange all the time. It's okay to write things that "make sense" (in terms of my sense-making). I've never thought I was good at writing "straight forward" lines, but I'm incorporating them more into my poetry and it gives me a thrill when I do.
Carter: I love that Teare book. I gave a copy of it to a student to borrow last time I taught a poetry workshop, though I haven't read her work since then so I don't know how the Teare book changed any of her work. It sounds like you're getting the chance to experiment with working in different modes of poetry at once. That's something I often struggle with, & when I put my manuscript together I ended up keeping one of those modes & saving the other for some other project. Do you ever feel like you're writing poems that you can't conceive of eventually fitting together in a manuscript? If so, how do you combat that?
Neely: He's so good! And he has a new book forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. Sometimes I have poems I don't think will fit with the others but not usually. When I decide not to include poems it's normally because I don't have the creative energy/interest to revise them. Or because they're not good. I'm pretty loose when I'm compiling a manuscript. I think my different modes/styles can come together as long as they're connected on a thematic and/or emotional level.
But when I do run into that problem I'll save them for later. Maybe they will never see the light of day again or will be published in a journal but not a book (if that happens!) or become relevant five years from now. I have poems I like but have pushed aside for various reasons and no one else besides me will probably ever read them. It's a little disheartening but it's mostly oh well. There's always more.
Carter: What poets are you currently reading?
Neely: Right now I'm taking a class about sequences and series so: Nick Flynn, Mary Ann Samyn, Claudia Emerson, Bhanu Kapil, Louise Gluck, Greg Orr, among others. I've also been reading a lot of graphic novels.
Carter: Alright, here's a tough one: Why do you write?
Neely: I write because I enjoy messing up and messing with language.
Tinder Language
after Brenda Hillman
Always, fire forming. Always, what you have lost
in the edges of trees, in the mountaintops: violet.
Startle of doe, knocked out dogwood.
The woods muddy, unfurl. What cannot be said
dark like a sky.
Cervidae, Cornus florida. Hills like vowels.
My mouth a sea— the body of a field. CAITLIN NEELY
How had they not been wounded? And wounded they’d convalesced in the same rooms and bed. When at last they knew everything without confiding—fears, stinks, boiling hearts—they gave up themselves a little so that they might both love and scorn each other, and they ate from each other’s hands.
From Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences by Carol Frost, reviewed by Caitlin Neely.
