Beginnings and Departures
A conversation with poets John James and Donna Spruijt-Metz
Donna Spruijt-Metz’s debut poetry collection, General Release from the Beginning of the World, explores a wide range of topics. It grapples with the notions of God and of the Holy, as well as the idea of motherhood. This “endless wrestling,” as Spruijt-Metz privately put it to me, informs her restless relationship to poetic form, which shifts and refigures itself over the course of the book as her verses strive to come to terms with complex and unsettled questions. Many of the poems also investigate the past, sometimes elegiacally, but rarely do they hinge upon nostalgia. Rather, they utilize a host of aesthetic techniques to probe the experience of memory, enacting, if only momentarily, a separation (as their title suggests, a “release”) from the ongoing entrapment of familial trauma — and in particular, that of a father’s suicide. This is an experience Spruijt-Metz and I share, and one I’ve also written about in my own first book, The Milk Hours. In this interview, conducted via email over the course of several weeks, Spruijt-Metz and I discuss her poetics, including how her work manages the aesthetic experience of time, image, and sensation within the material architecture of the poem. We also converse about the nature of loss and what I at least have come to think about as the necessary failure of the poem in the face of this ongoing and irrevocable absence. We conclude by examining Spruijt-Metz’s documentary impulse to include photographs and other forms of media and how that documentation complicates the time and sense of her poetics.
John James: Opening poems often do a great deal to establish an idea or theme in a collection. At the very least, the piece is given pride of place, so readers assume — rightly or wrongly — that the poet means to prioritize it. So I wanted to start with a question about “I Need the Long March,” which commences your first collection, General Release from the Beginning of the World, whose title foregrounds beginnings but also departures from them. This poem in particular imagines a beginning which is also an end. As the speaker states, “When I was my grandmother’s mother I knew / she would be beautiful in the time of war.” Could you speak about your relationship to beginnings, and particularly about how you imagine this curious un-beginning?
Donna Spruijt-Metz: I love this question. And I love it because I'm not sure I can answer it. It makes me think. My book went through a gazillion reincarnations between the first day that I put it together, and two years later (to the day!) when it got taken by Free Verse Editions. But that poem has always been the first poem. I wrote that poem in a workshop with Tyree Daye at Frost Place. Tyree suggested that I color code every important theme throughout the book, taking my lead from the first poem. It was a wonderful adventure, and gave me a bit of respite, somehow, from trying to perfect a manuscript that wasn't ready for perfection. That really exhilarating exercise exposed the holes in the manuscript. But I didn't know how to fill them.
At the time, I was exchanging poems with my dear friend and wonderful poet Allison Albino. She was doing a series of poems using old family photos, exploring her family history. When I told her I was kind of stuck, that I knew I had to write things that were really hard for me, and didn't know where to begin, she said “Try using family pictures–it has been so useful for me.” My husband and I were in the middle of cleaning out my mother’s old archives, decades after she died–when I could finally bear it. There were old pictures and also old documents tucked away in the mess of her troubled filing system. Something in me cracked open. Allison was so right.
All the visual poems were written then, in a bit of a fever. They were the last poems to be added. Right before I went to MacDowell, I ripped apart the manuscript, took out what I didn't believe in and put these where I thought they belonged. This was just, "I trust this poem, keep it, I don't trust this poem, no matter whose favorite poem was, it's out." I interjected the new poems where I thought they belonged, submitted it to a few places, and left for MacDowell. Free Verse Editions was the first place I submitted it, and they took it. First poem magic.
JJ: That’s such an amazing story, Donna. I had a similar experience with the first poem in my first book. I actually didn’t want it to be the first poem, I suppose because it was such a vulnerable one, but it did such important work to stage some of those thematic strands you discuss. I wonder, then, if you could talk about some of those themes. What do you see as the most important intellectual or emotional strands in the book? How do they relate back to, or depart from, that “magical” introductory poem?
DSM: In response to Tyree Daye’s suggestion that I color code the whole damn book, I got very serious. I worked from the first poem. It sort of served as the incubation space for the generation of true themes, and the touchstone, or maybe litmus test, for inclusion in the endeavor. Because you know that can get really out of hand, I mean how many themes run through each person's life?
With colored pencils in hand I developed this "code book" as I went through the entire book. It was an iterative process, going back & forth between each poem and the guiding first poem. Here are the themes that emerged–and by ‘emerged’ I mean either that they were frequent flyers among the poems or loomed large regardless of frequency of appearance. During this process my studio was transformed. Everything was cleared from my desk except the printed out manuscript, colored pencils, and an oversized sketchpad/ journal.
JJ: That’s so eccentric, and I love it. The entire process renders not just the act of reading or writing a poem, but in fact, the assembly of a book into a deeply physical process, one that demands a great deal of space and also, I imagine, kinetic energy. That physicality, that kinesis, reminds me of a number of poems in General Release, among them “Tiny Hammers.” Not unlike the psalm from which it draws, the poem forges a distinct, even physical division between its “I” and an insistent, capitalized “YOU,” who keeps intrusively “rooting around” in (as I take it) the physical space of the speaker. This is enacted, too, in the visual presentation of the first two stanzas, which make great use of negative space on the page. At first the poem feels a bit violent, and maybe it is, but it also takes an elegiac turn, especially in the last stanza, which moves very differently than the rest of the poem — as if the speaker has grown sadder, more sullen. I quote it here for the reader:
I’m standing at the gates
do YOU hear me?
I set up
my finest network, my best
receivers, there is always
a signal somewhere, a bandwidth
for shelter, a wavelength.
Can you talk to me about the physicality of this poem? About that subdued, but not entirely resigned final turn?
DSM: Yes, yes, that is such an elegant way of putting it. Kinesis–‘a movement (often involuntary) that lacks directional orientation and depends upon the intensity of stimulation.’ I am always promising myself that I won't write directly about my experience of the presence (or lack thereof) of holiness (or in my tradition, the Shekhinah). I also promise myself that I won’t write about death. As you can see in this book, I break my promises to myself on nearly every page. I often start a poem in one place and then find myself elsewhere, surprised and naked. But don’t we all? Isn’t that the terrifying–and longed for–poetry experience? In the past (and “Tiny Hammers” is an older poem) I often started from a place of frustration, or even a bit of anger, or sassiness. “Come on right over here, spirit, and wrestle with me. I dare you!” But this was also a veiled place, a place of false protection. And then if things went well, the poem would rip the veil off. In this poem (which started about 10 times longer, and was finally whittled down to its final form), the veil was ripped away. Behind the veil wasn’t anger or even feelings of desertion, but longing–that heart-wrenching longing. And finally a willingness to wait–to relinquish my desperate desire for control. The poem will come in its own time. Or not. It is my job to keep listening. To recognize stimulus and to move towards it when it comes, if only a tiny bit closer.
JJ: We break promises to ourselves all the time, don’t we? As poets, I mean, though I guess also as people. Broken or no, that’s such an interesting limitation, not to write about death. I suppose it gets us to something both of our own books have in common, which is the presence (which is also an absence) of a deceased parent. In particular, both of our fathers died by suicide, which is such a difficult thing to write about. In my own experience, this meant writing around this subject for a long time before being able to finally name it in my work. What was this process like for you? Obviously, you’d promised yourself not to write about this subject more broadly. How did you ultimately come to it? How have your feelings about this limit in your writing changed, if at all? ]
DSM: I wrote around and around my father’s death and the surrounding landscapes for so long. I could barely enter them. I couldn’t find my way in, and I couldn’t sustain it if I accidentally stumbled in through the mist. I knew I had to tackle these things if I wanted to write anything true. I was stuck. Two gifts from two poets helped me through. The first was a workshop I did online with Gabrielle Calvacoressi several years ago. Her first assignment was to draw a map of an event in your childhood that had a big influence on you. At first I couldn’t think of what to draw, and then I thought of what to draw but didn’t want to draw it, and then I finally did draw it: a map of my home when the phone rang–a lawyer calling to tell my mother that my father had been found dead. Gabrielle’s exercise cracked something open in me, let a little bit of light in, gave me a structure. And I love a good constraint. I wrote dozens and dozens of poems using that map. Only one made it into the book; Map of May-July 1956: Living Room with Death Notification. The rest were inching closer, but not yet true.
Fast forward a few years to the color coding experience, and realizing that there were still holes in the book, and working with Allison using pictures and documents. Another structure, another constraint, and also a good deal of information that I didn’t have growing up. Poems finally came tumbling out. Crying was involved.
I thought, or maybe hoped, that I had exorcized the demons. But, you probably know, there is no such thing. Then a dear friend of ours took her own life during the pandemic. I went into poetry clamshell mode. I was writing absolute tripe, until I finally started to write about Sarah. And then Jess died, and I wrote about that. The new manuscript I am working on is full of God and death and nature, and worrying about God and death and nature. I was hoping for something else–more uplifting? As Li-Young Lee said in an interview with Ilya Kaminski, “My hope is that someday I will be a poet of blessing and praise.” But you don’t get to choose, or at least it doesn’t seem that I do. Poetry is patient. I can write all the tripe I want until I finally follow the path laid bare in front of me. I have very reluctant feet sometimes.
JJ: I can relate to those reluctant feet. For me, the subject matter sort of demanded to be spoken about, as much as I tried to avoid it. Eventually, it emerged. I’d like to circle in on the piece you mention, “Map of May-July 1956: Living Room with Death Notification,” which of course is just a few pieces further into the collection than “Tiny Hammers.” The poem seems so invested in the act of depiction, and yet, it is very clear about what it cannot depict: memories lost to the ravages of time, sounds that may also be lost but, more importantly, that stimulate a different sensory apparatus than the distinctly visual activity of mapping. In other words, the poem seems to approach its subject matter obliquely, from the side. As Dickinson instructs us, you “tell it slant.” Doing so allows you to index known absences, which can be identified but can never be made present. I wonder if you could say a little bit about this “slantness” in your poems, about the difficult work of highlighting absences that cannot be filled in. Do you feel that obliquity — sensory or otherwise — permits you to explore subjects you couldn’t otherwise address? Or does it play a different role entirely?
DSM: My husband is a visual artist with a background in empirical psychology. I am a poet who was trained as a classical musician and spent years on the stage, and I also have a background in empirical psychology. We have ongoing debates at home about what visual images can ‘do’, what words can ‘do’, and what music can ‘do’. Is there overlap to their powers? Is it a Venn Diagram? We often don’t agree, but the discussions are rich and fun. According to my husband’s philosophy, drawings and paintings can carry a granularity of emotion and meaning that language can’t support. I don’t agree with him here, although if you catch me in front of a Rothko canvas, I might relent. On the other hand, he thinks that language and music both handle time better than (a single) drawing or painting does. I do agree with that. The theories and ideas of how many senses humans possess have run the gambit from well-researched to folklore–but I will muster any of the senses (five? Seven? Nine? More?) to help me delve into poetry, in different ways at different times. Drawing that map jolted me out of my stuckness–untethered me from my inability to speak of some things in words, let me approach them sideways, without having to describe, or even be able to name, the experience/feeling/premonition. Listening, hearing, playing, recalling sounds and music can do the same. The visual image, sounds, and words all do their part–and all of them stick with me differently. What ‘sticks’ with me returns to me–when I am ready, when I am sturdy enough to withstand the fragile, fragmented, circuitous nature of ‘truth’s’ shock or brush or caress–the surprise of it. They help me find the sometimes oblique paths towards what I have been avoiding, or been too blind to see, or not been patient enough to coax out of hiding.
JJ: Fascinating, Donna. I love your theorization: how different media represent the sensorium from different vantage points. I think you’re right about how both music and language (especially poetry) handle time. Indeed, as we step onto the page, we enter time in a new way — or so I tend to think about it. For this last question, I want to reach deep into the book to ask about your use of documents and images. Several of the poems — I am thinking specifically of “For My Next Trick, I Will Imagine His Death,” but there are others — include photographs, newspaper clippings, and even financial documents. In this poem, the speaker states,“I / am moving towards [her father’s death] rather than / in retreat.” Of course, this kind of trauma, and the love wrapped up in it, never goes away, but what role do the documents play here? I mean this from an emotional standpoint: are they memorials? Are they healing? But also, how do they impact our sensory experience of these poems? Their temporality? Do they change the relationship between the speaker and the memories she explores?
DSM: Ah. The documents (and pictures). Like I said, I was stuck, but ready. Something was ready to burn. It was as if I was a fire stone, brittle, carved, broken, and they were pyrite. Just enough steel in the stone to finally spark the page. For me, I would not say that they are memorials, but I see that they serve that function for many people who have read the book. When people realize there are some graphics in the book, they often flip to those pages (and thus those poems) first. I somehow wasn’t expecting that. Adding visual poetry to the book was a risk–there are still many journals and presses that won’t accept visual poems or books with visual poems. I am forever grateful to Free Verse Editions and Parlor Press for taking this on.
Are they healing? Maybe yes, because they released (unleashed) memories and emotions that I had been unable to access before I worked with them. So they do change my relationship with those memories, because I have more access (although it never feels complete, it always feels like something is hidden), and it gives them context in my life now. My being able to hold these in my hands changed so much. I can now touch these artifacts, hold them, and file them in a folder that makes sense to me, where I can find them back. In a way, touch confers some kind of ownership and some kind of intimacy. As for sight–that experience of seeing the poem written around the visuals, the text wrapped, clinging even, to the picture–Free Verse Editions and I really wrestled with how to do this well. The experience of the poem changes dramatically depending upon how the graphic and the words are arranged/juxtaposed. Finally, you ask about temporality. You know, it’s funny how this book ended up ducking in and out of time as we think we know it. Time gets braided in upon itself, which wasn’t my initial intention, but you don’t always have a say, do you? The one poem, Daughter and Mother, Amsterdam, Tram 4, takes place in one moment of time (or one long tram ride) but is scattered in bits and pieces throughout the book. I hold/own these artifacts now, but they reach back in time. Maybe, like some cultures believe, the past is before us and the future is behind us–after all, we cannot see it yet. Or maybe the use of artifacts like these can bring time into a fine non-linear relationship, a clearer truth.
John James
John James is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two chapbooks, most recently Winter, Glossolalia (Black Spring, 2022). His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and Georgetown University's Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. He holds an MFA from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
