To Have No Voice
Allison Hutchcraft interviewed by Adalae Beam, Abby Crawley, Josie Moore, and Lyle Schlegel
Could you talk about the two epigraphs for Swale? Why did you choose them?
The epigraphs are from two poems I’ve long loved: H. D.’s “Oread” and Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place.” Quoting these poems felt natural from the start. H. D.’s merging of forest and sea, and the wish to be inundated—“hurl your green over us, / cover us with your pools of fir”—seems kindred to many poems in the book, perhaps especially the blurring of water and land in the opening poem, “Calenture.” I equally love how Niedecker in “Paean to Place” considers environment as part of the self: the speaker feels one and the same as the shores, leaves, and water by which she was born. To me, the lines “Anchored here / in the rise and sink / of life—” describe what living feels like, its constant flux. In my poems but also as a person, I try to remember that I’m anchored, too: that whatever joys or sadnesses might buoy or sink the days, here is the world, life, living.
In “Sometimes I Am Permitted to Return to the Sea,” I found these lines to be very beautiful: “The sea, where I am/ no voice, am voiceless….” The poem evokes a sense of peace and connects humans to the stillness of nature. Could you talk about this?
Thank you for your kind words. I do think this poem is interested in stillness, one that particularly arises, at least for me, when observing the natural world. My mind can get very cluttered. There are so many worries that are so urgent, and yet about which I feel powerless. (How pronounced this feels now, in our current moment of crisis on crisis.) Looking outward, to something beyond the human and the self, is a welcome way to focus, to slow down into stillness.
I first drafted this poem while a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon. Sitka is a dream of a residency, and quite remote: perched where the Salmon River estuary spills into the sea, and steps from a national scenic research area. I saw more elk than people. One of my favorite spots was an overlook on the Cascade Head trail, which juts out dramatically: cliffs falling to ocean. I hiked up there often and wrote in my notebook, which is where this poem began.
To have “no voice” is, in other contexts, deeply troubling. On that overlook, it felt more like a shedding of the need to speak, of the pressure to act as a public body. It created a kind of peace, as you describe. I like to think of how a sense of stillness can emerge from an outer world that is far from still. There was so much non-human activity out on that trail! The waves hitting the rocky cove, the wind racketing, birds swooping in and out of view. There, looking outward, I felt my field of vision expand. As a kid, I loved being able to yell or sing out while walking along a beach, knowing my voice, caught up in wind and waves, couldn’t be heard. There’s probably some of that in the poem, too.
The poem “Sometimes My Body Lifts a Wave” continues with the first line “and I name that wave Alice.” In the second section of Swale, there are poems with a protagonist named Alice in various scenarios and narratives. How are these poems connected? Have you placed yourself in them with a shortened version of your own first name, or is there another reason Alice is featured so prominently?
I do think of the Alice poems as connected, which I wrote first as a series (only half of which made it into the book). They emerged during a time when I was feeling particularly anxious in the world, and unhelpfully inward. Frankly, I was exhausted with myself, and was having little luck writing through a genuine, first-person “I.” Alice became a kind of remedy for all that, a way to focus and make use of the tension I was feeling. The use of third person, and the creation of a character who was both drawn from my experience and also separate from me, was freeing. Specifically, the figure of Alice allowed me to create a certain tone and stance that I found generative. I could be tougher with Alice than I could with myself, see her in a more ironized light, and swerve between empathy and something sharper. The vehicle for this tone became a particular syntax, accretional and paratactic, which helped me write the voice that I hope carries through from poem to poem.
I wrote the first Alice poem after a trip to the Cloisters, the Met’s medieval collection in New York, housed in a reconstructed abbey in Fort Tryon Park. It is so beautiful there, and also so strange and surreal. All that artwork, pillaged from Europe, and often grisly: plagues appearing, crucifix after crucifix, the famous tapestries chronicling the bloody hunt of a unicorn, the herbal gardens with poison plants. Eventually, she appeared in other poems and settings, including Key West and the Sierras in California. Alice became a way to interrogate my emotions, as well as the idea of travel, which can be thorny. In some ways, I could see my experience in those places better through the veil of Alice; she allowed me a distance, an irony and self-critique, that I couldn’t access on my own.
In “The Lapis Lazuli in Which She Dreamed,” when referring to the nun, you write, “What’s it like / to be gone for good -- / name sandblasted // from the registry, brain for the last / time hauled up / from sleep?” What is it about the nun’s story that inspired this poem and its existential questions?
A few years ago, news outlets picked up a story about a chance discovery: scientists, hoping to learn more about medieval diets, discovered traces of lapis lazuli in the 1000-year-old teeth of an anonymous nun buried in Germany. This was remarkable for several reasons, particularly its revelation that the nun likely illuminated manuscripts as a highly skilled artist, something for which we have scant evidence. For days, the same image of the nun’s jawbone and teeth, tinged with blue, was popping up everywhere online. I felt immediately drawn to this person, and wanted to imagine her experience in a poem.
I love history for its presence, its still-hereness in our lives. Imagine those scientists: pulling the jawbone from the earth, holding it in the lab. That fact of bone, even when everything else—her name and dreams, her body’s heft—has been rubbed out by time. The body is evidence, living or dead. That we now have proof of her life and her art—that she existed, that she labored over pigments and manuscript pages—is incredibly moving to me.
“Ghost Forest” leaves the reader with an eerie and unsettling feeling. At the end of the poem, what’s represented or meant by the dog and the woman whose “legs [are] more and more / submerged / nearly up to her hips now”?
Endings can be so hard—hard to write, and sometimes hard to give name to as a reader. In a class I’m teaching this fall, we spent a week thinking about endings in poems, but that hardly felt like enough time. They are slippery, nuanced things!
It’s great to hear that you found the ending eerie and unsettling. That’s how I feel about it, too, and it was the mood I was consciously writing into as I worked on that poem. In some ways, “Ghost Forest” is based in direct experience. Once, in Oregon, I went to a “ghost forest,” which is the name given to the ancient trees, long buried by shifting coastlines, that have begun to re-emerge on some beaches. I walked the beach, studied the trees’ jagged remnants, and saw a woman carry her small dog across a creek. The woman and dog were not in peril. It was cold, a little rainy, nothing to cause alarm. Yet later, writing, I felt alarm. It became part of the poem.
I’m interested in ways to hold two things in mind at once: in my mind while writing, and in the mind of the poem. How can I attend to personal experience while also thinking about larger histories? In “Ghost Forest,” there is the present moment on the beach, but there is also geologic time. There is the tide moving in, and also the knowledge of climate change, how the seas right now are rising. In my mind’s eye, remembering the woman walking across the creek, the self felt very small, and deeply imperiled. A kind of dread stepped into the scene, and I tried to write into that feeling.
Swale seems to focus on environments more than autobiography. As you write new poems, are you finding new ways to do this? In what ways are they continuations or departures?
While Swale may not be autobiographical in a straightforward way, it feels very personal to me. The poems reflect who I was, how I felt, and how my mind worked—its fixations, questions, and struggles—during a particular time in my life.
I suspect I’ll always be interested in how environments shape thinking, and how the mind encounters the natural world. To write “in the field” was an important process for the book, and it is still a sustaining practice. When I’m writing directly about a place, I need to be patient with how quickly (and even if) those experiences will lead to poems. Very often, there is a gestation period.
A couple years ago (before the pandemic), I traveled up the California coast. The absolute beauty there arrested me, and yet it took more than a year to write about it. Research became my primary way back in, sifting through early twentieth-century newspaper articles of shipwrecks (the glories of digital archives, free to the public!) and reading about cattle farms along the Point Reyes peninsula. I needed to be in that place, but I needed time away, too. These things seem bound up with each other: direct experience and research feeding the imagination.
My newest poems continue to think of the natural world, and about environmental harm. At the same time, I see them as departures from Swale, in part because I am different, the world is different. I look forward to following where these poems will lead me next.
