#maya popa

[rachelspoetrycorner]

Dear Life (2020) by Maya Popa

In Episode 390, Rachel brings a poet who's thesis is all about wonder! 

Rachel: There was an interview in McSweeney's in 2023, and she said, "Recollecting wonder on the page presents an inherent generative challenge for poets who must, in a sense, narrate the conditions for wonder while accommodating wonder's inherent disorientation, its sense of surpassing or breaching usual language and life. A poem that too conclusively tries to explain its wonder risks forfeiting the feeling."

Griffin: [...] I also think about the fact that like if by talking about this thing, am I going to like make its… specialness like abstract in a way that it no longer is special, or like I can't communicate it effectively. Sometimes I will scrap stuff entirely because it's like, I—there's no way to make clear how much I like this like picture that my friend sent me the other—like I can't possibly do a segment on that, because I can't verbalize that or communicate that.

I'm still trying to catch my breath back because just those two first lines knocked the wind right outta me. Make sure you check out Maya Pop'a Substack, and if you’d like to hear more you can do so here:

We’ll Smell Some Ice Bags and Get Back to You from 7:00 - 16:00

[pwpoetry]

Q&A with Carrie Fountain

M: Can you talk a bit about the epigraph in relation to the poems? Did you know right away that this passage from Rilke would serve your purposes?

C: Epigraphs are mysterious. I’ve never once intended to include an epigraph in a book, yet here they’ve always come, trotting across my path. I love when they do. It’s as if the humming universe of other writers, voices, thoughts across the ages, asserts itself. Hi there! And it’s a comfort to know that, whatever thread I’m following has been followed before, in a totally different way, unique to another, yet utterly recognizable.

When I came upon this passage in reading Rilke, I had that experience, that thwack of recognition. This bit addresses the tension—the “ancient enmity,” as Rilke puts it—"between our daily life and the great work,” that centers the question at the heart of my collection: What is holy?

The epigraph came after a first draft. It helped me navigate through subsequent drafts.

M: I love the idea that an epigraph can do that. What was your writing and revision process like for this book?

C: I wake very early, before my children, and do my poetry reading and writing then. These poems mostly came out of that morning practice: writing in the dark, sipping coffee, letting whatever comes come. Some of these poems, like the poems “The Jungle” and “Self-Help” carry a little of that actual practice inside them, as narrative.

Here is a very simple, perfect practice I learned from the poet Naomi Shihab Nye: write down three things you remember from the last 24 hours that you’d forget in the next 24 hours if you didn’t write them down now. If there is a more elegant spiritual exercise for planting one’s self in the moment while simultaneously accounting for the fleeting, groundless passage of time, I have not found it. I recommend this to all my students first thing. There is no beginner who cannot benefit from this practice. There is no master who cannot benefit from this practice.

During other hours of the day, I can often eke out work on other writing: novels, screenplays, kid’s books. I’m writing a TV show with a friend and I can dip into that world any time of the day, whenever our schedules align and we can huddle for a while in our respective writing rooms, he in New York and me in Austin. I can revise poetry in the afternoon, if pressed. But the focus and attention that is required of writing, for me, wanes as the day goes on. That attention is concentrated in the morning hours, between 5:00 am and 8:00 am. That’s why the morning hours, for me, are for writing and reading poetry.

M: God and the spirit figure prominently, and yet the poems are very much rooted in the daily--a pitch-perfect balance between the concrete and the abstract. How do you see the two relating to each other, the physical and the spiritual, on the page?

C: I’m a disciplined writer when I’m disciplined. Disciplined enough. When I’m not, I am waiting to be. Waiting feels wrong to me, and it makes me uneasy. It doesn’t feel like work, even though it is likely the most important work: the work that happens beneath the mindscape of everyday life.

Now that I’ve been writing this long into my life, I’ve lost the utter fear that used to accompany long stretches of Not Writing. I’ll never write another word. This fear used to grip me hard, especially in the time right after a book came out. And it still comes around a little even now. But not as existentially. I think that’s probably because I’ve come to understand writing and revising in a different way.

It’s hard to articulate, and it feels vulnerable because part of me still finds it ridiculous, but for me, the discipline that returns with my writing practice is a spiritual discipline. When I’m awaiting it, I’m awaiting the spirit. When it’s here, I’m attending to the gifts of the spirit. It’s not really about making books, though of course it is. But, more essentially, it’s about returning to the attentiveness of that discipline. Which is merely taking a breath and feeling it. Looking around and seeing. It’s the easiest and the hardest thing to do.

What is holy is all around. Isn’t that the most difficult thing to come to terms with?

It’s all around and all the time.

The discipline is hard for me to come to. Like sleep, it is about relinquishing. You can do lots of things to make it easier to fall asleep, but you cannot force yourself to do it. Writing, in some ways, contains the same elemental conundrum. It requires a step back. A release. An assessment of the Worst-case Scenario.

When my daughter, who sometimes has trouble falling asleep, starts to get panicky as the hours get later, I ask her: Has anyone ever died of not sleeping? I ask myself the same question about writing: Has anyone ever died of not writing? And somehow knowing that the answer is no gives me the solace—the release, the emptying—I need to stay in the vicinity of my writing practice.

M: Are there any other works of art of texts with which you feel the book is in conversation?

C: Oh yes—don’t you think all our work is in conversation with others? I’m very glad that I really like reading poetry, as much as I also love writing it.

Some of the books I read while working on these poems surely informed their creation. I was really taken with Ada Limon’s The Carrying. I read through both Merwin’s and Clifton’s Collected while working on these poems, reading a bit each morning. I read Rilke, of course—and it’s strange, because I am never particularly drawn to Rilke, and yet here he always comes to shake at my soul. I’m always reading Jane Kenyon, who didn’t live long enough to fully express her gifts, which is a tragedy on top of the tragedy of her death.

A poet I’ve read all my writing life, who is scarcely translated into English, is the Brazilian poet Adelia Prado. During the time between my last book and this one, she had a second collection translated by Ellen Watson. I got to meet her when she visited Austin with Watson. I can’t explain her poetry and what it means to me. But she is a spiritual master, and reading her poems feels like a visit to church. Full. Complicated. Nourishing.  

[lifeinpoetry]

At night, you sleep with something like your gifts: to anguish and ascribe a language, music. To slice a fig the long way and linger. To grieve for a country. To grieve without a country to grieve.

Maya Popa, from “Broken Periodic”

[violettesiren]

Things assume a sort of peace if you accept life’s limitations.

That’s more or less the lesson the beloved taught me

believing in collusions of inanimate objects,

the knife twice broken in his hand. Still, I miss him

knowing them, the things I know, a poem by Housman

for this time of year when the sun won’t gamble

past the horizon. And how, May afternoons, he stroked

my palm and spoke of days like this one, not this one.

Things by Maya Popa

[redshift-13]

"Saskia was never quite of this world to me, as it true for many whose mentors occupy a hallowed place in the heart-mind."

...

"I first met Saskia in 2008. When she read my poems, she was interested in the mind behind them, as though language were merely the veil through which something more permanent might assert itself. I was a sophomore in college--the idea that I might have a mind considering, not merely an aptitude for language, seemed an entirely different understanding of the practice of poetry. It took a while for me to move the needle from assertion over words toward something quieter, something more akin to what Saskia calls in All Souls, "the place where two kinds of time intersect, moments successive and moments infinite." But I could already see--if not see, feel--the careful intelligence of her approach."

...

"Saskia loved teaching elegies--Frank Bidart's "The Yoke," Linda Gregg's "Saying Goodbye to the Dead," even Scottish murder ballads. Of course she loved elegies, with their singularly calibrated measure of pleasure and grief, of love and pain ongoing, of sheer feeling--yes, she had the most courage to feel of anyone I have ever known. trusting that somewhere, a page had been written that spoke to the organization of that particular emotion and could offer some clarity, relief."

...

"She taught me that curiosity was a sort of currency that made one hunger for precision, and that this could be the place where poems come from."

...

Popa, Maya C. "Remembering Saskia Hamilton (1967-2023)." Poetry, March, 2024.

[booksquared]

by Maya C. Popa

[coreyque]

[iwirenews]

Maya Popa, Sam Nester https://ift.tt/2RcFmfF