Allison Adair’s poems appear in Best American Poetry 2018, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kenyon Review, South Dakota Review, Sou’wester, ZYZZYVA, and the 2019 Pushcart Prize anthology. Originally from Pennsylvania, Adair teaches at Boston College.
Allison’s poems “Mother Figure” and “Waltz to a 3/4 Fracking Beat” appear in the Fall 2019 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
Both “Mother Figure” and “Waltz to a 3/4 Fracking Beat” hold so much energy in their final moments. When do you know a poem is finished?
It’s always tough to know when a poem is finished. Sometimes I even find myself revising on the spot at readings, well after a poem has been published. Endings are tricky because the poem needs to land, but it also needs to take flight. For me, the solution isn’t to resolve that paradox but to serve it, to highlight the wisdom and truth of the paradox itself. “Mother Figure” and “Waltz to a 3/4 Fracking Beat” are on the activist side, so I wanted to engineer sort of a pregnant pause—like, What are we going to do about this?—borrowing from the Modernists’ method of passing the central problem, gently and unresolved, to the reader. In “Mother Figure,” for example, the end of the poem tries to capture the incompleteness of mothers being characterized as simple, smiling forces of self-sacrifice, so it ends somewhat abruptly with the tension sustained. I published an essay on this very topic once, for the Boston writing organization, Grub Street.
“Waltz to a 3/4 Fracking Beat” has this sense of urgency to be told. How do you keep that urgency alive throughout the writing process?
Being from Pennsylvania, I’m troubled by fracking, what we know, what we don’t yet know. It matters to me—the Marcellus Shale is not an abstract resource but literally the bedrock of the region. The issue itself lends urgency, maybe. But “Waltz to a 3/4 Fracking Beat” was initially inspired by an experimental musical composition—Christopher Trapani’s Recession. Trapani’s wheezy, discordant accordions reminded me of fracking’s endless hum, which folks sometimes compare to an idling diesel engine. The surprising connection lent energy to the writing process. In Recession and in fracking, the low-register vibration has no beginning or end, which to me evokes the compression and overlap of a 3/4 beat: by the time one wave is ending, the next has already begun. So, you’re trapped in it. Keats says, “Axioms in philosophy are not axioms unless they are proved upon our pulses,” which is a grand way of saying that ideas are nice and all, but they have to stand up to the body’s own insights, something beyond or beneath language and logic. To maintain a poem’s urgency, I try to test anything I write against the raw knowledge of the body. What does my gut say about whatever it is I’ve just written? Does this music feel right? Are the sounds of the words themselves expressive in the right way? The other thing I do process-wise is to imagine and reexamine a question from multiple angles. If I’m about to arrive at a pronouncement, that’s dangerous. Instead, I’ll consider the issue from a radically different perspective—like that of a cat, a galaxy, a sailor trapped in a submarine, the octopus inching northward.
The descriptions in “Mother Figure” make the poem absolutely vibrant. Where do you find your images?
Just careful observation of the world around us—nothing too unusual. But I do try to pay attention as I move through my day. If something strikes me, I’ll try to figure out why, and to make room for any strange associations the image calls forth. I’ll try to see past what I already know about an image, as if I were instead experiencing it for the first time. So, I’ve smelled vanilla a million times, but let me smell it as if it’s totally new to me. The hawk circling above—if I didn’t know to look for the red tail feathers, what else would I see? Active derangement of the senses, as Rimbaud calls it. Disorganization as a means of heightening perception—or, unlearning as a conduit to learning. Being from a rural area but living now in a city, I also lean a lot on the collision of different landscapes. And I try to tend my verbs. An image can really take off if it’s set in motion, rather than positioned as an object to be observed.
What do you carry with you when writing?
A few lines from Dean Young’s “Faculty Summary Report” (First Course in Turbulence) regulate everything I write: “Are we trying to get the tangible to shimmer//or the intangible shimmer to be like wet grass/to push our faces in?” As a poet’s manifesto, this question keeps me grounded in method and purpose. What else? The shift in scope at the end of Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It” inspires every sudden turn in my poems, while Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” is a supreme model of gradual but radical change over a small area. Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town is my Old Testament, and The Poet’s Companion, by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, is my New Testament. I’ve tried to internalize as much as possible from both books. Some visual artists occur to me constantly, folks who are precise but wild—Vermeer, Frida Kahlo, Kehinde Wiley, Doris Salcedo, Frans Hals, Marina Abramović; and Michelangelo’s Hidden Form Theory is a constant source of help when I’m trying to “hear” what a poem wants to do. Lastly, Gustave Caillebotte’s Les raboteurs de parquet is on permanent display in my brain. If only I could ever make something so beautiful and true.