An Essence of Being to Survive the Present: An Interview with Joe Wilkins about poetry and his latest collection of essays Every Sky at Home.

Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family | Bison Books | $26.95

I know Joe through his poetry; Lyric that achieves a cinematic stillness, electric spaces of totality like summer on the side of a highway, or the grown man that falls to the ground soundlessly in the memory. When I reached out to Joe about contributing to Boor Soirée, he made me aware that his next collection would be a book of essays. A man of many writerly hats, I wasn't surprised, but I also wondered whether there was a place in Boor Soirée's project for a work not of poetry. I opened the pages of Every Sky at Home with hesitancy. Then, I nearly fell over with delight. Here was the same lyric, the energy, the quietness of everything all at once that Wilkins masters. In a work dedicated to space and place, I too found space for Every Sky at Home in our project. In our interview, we talk more about the idea of genre pollution, pause, and the physical, transferable being of place.

Whitney Koo: Boor Soirée is a poetry-focused project, and you've spent a good deal of your career writing poetry. Today, we aren't talking about poetry, though; we're talking about your new book of essays, Every Sky at Home. As someone who writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, I imagine the creative space in your head is incredibly rich and varied, almost as if you are deciding which type of sweater is best for the day's weather: what genre best suits my mood or needs today? Lucy Schiller wrote for The Paris Review an essay on a new kind of "formality" that has made its way into nonfiction, questioning at one point whether this might be the result of poets, or at least their Lyric, entering the genre. It made me think about how rigidly we hold on to the idea of genres and their characteristics, and if poets could pollute one of the prose genres or vice versa, and what kind of risks there are in doing so. As someone who writes successfully in all the major genres, I wonder how you view yourself, the author and the poet, and whether you find different personas to write from in each genre or if the shift between registers is more nuanced? Does Lyric find a place in all your work?

Joe Wilkins: When you get right down to it, we have, as writers, the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and a handful of punctuation marks—and that’s it. Everything we build is constituted of those few materials. Poem, essay, story—in the end it’s all about language, all about how we can combine those few bits of magic we have. The lyric notion, the attention to diction and syntax—when I first started reading as a writer, reading not just to inhale but to understand something of the making, I was astonished to see that some of my favorite prose writers—John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Willa Cather—were operating from this same understanding: they weren’t writing novels or memoirs, they were writing sentences. Language is smarter than us. The power of the lyric is language, is following where the language might take us.

Now, that’s maybe the theoretically answer. The more practical answer is that I don’t write from different personas so much as I write from different motivations. Stuck with an image or moment, wanting to play with how I might bring that image to life—I write poetry. Confused by myself or my children or the world around me—I turn to essay. Wanting to imagine where worlds might collide or stretch or rupture—I write fiction. But I’m always writing sentences. I’m always pushing on the language. That’s where it all begins.

Finally, I love the idea that the other genres could be polluted by poetry. I think more things should be so wonderfully polluted!

WK: Nature is a major thematic element throughout your body of work, but particularly in this new collection of essays. I recently saw a clip of Ocean Vuong talking about nature writing and how traditional mimesis "would collapse everything" because the descriptions would be what we already see and know. He stressed the importance of subjectivity, the writer's interior world projected. I was reading your book of essays when I stumbled across this clip of Vuong. The brilliance I can't get away from in your writing is that your essays do not observe the landscape; rather, the landscape is an observation of the people. More than a projection of the inner world of the writer, the landscape doubles back to observe the writer as a separate actor. It creates this incredible tension of both surveillance and recognition (we might think back to the prologue essay "Into the Mountains" in which the narrator is too afraid to look out the window at night, knowing something was likely watching him from the other side, and the deep howls that the narrator and his wife investigate before discovering them to be wolves). I wonder if you might speak more about how you write through and about nature? What sort of role do you see the landscape having in your writing?

JW: Often, I’ll open a literary magazine and begin reading a piece—and I don’t know where I am. So I quit reading and turn the page. To borrow Vuong’s phrasing, those kinds of poems, essays, and stories strike me as wholly subjective. They lack—pick your metaphor—ballast or an anchoring taproot. Without the physical world, there is nothing to measure the voice or experience or question or character against. The world around us allows us, as human beings and as creators.

One of the first questions I ask myself as I start scribbling, no matter the genre, is where am I. Now, of course, this is not always an easy question to answer; place is manifold and dynamic. And in the essays of Every Sky at Home this is exactly what I’m exploring: the place itself, its many layers and mysteries, and my own experience of that place. We’re in it together, the places and me. When I teach summer workshops, my first lesson is on language. The second, always, is on writing place.

WK: Something I love about your poetry is your use of pause. It is so sophisticated in its appearance; you almost don't realize it is happening; you almost don't understand why you leave a short poem and can't leave it, as if you've left something behind there: "He had leaned down to me/ and started to say something./ Then held on as he fell."(from the poem "Visiting"). Similarly, memory seems to work this way in your essays: scenes you continue returning to, to get something back. I'm thinking of Louis Glück, who wrote on pause, "what a speaker wants is presence, not union, dissolution, but the condition which preceded it." How does pause reflect presence, memory, and space (both in the physical landscape and the concept of time) in your work?

JW: Even as a boy, I was someone who looked backwards, who liked to listen to and retell the stories. Growing up in rural Montana, though, I didn’t know being a writer was something you could do (I sort of thought all the books had been written, and now we just read them.) In college, in my super-senior year, when I finally had a little room in my tight engineering schedule, I took a poetry writing class, and that class—well, it changed everything. Poetry was a way of truly returning—to a memory, to a place—and opening up the kind of space Glück talks about where actual presence might occur.

Though I’m not sure I’ve thought of the pause as a conscious technique until now—thank you!—I am acutely aware of the movement and texture of a piece: the flow, the melody and refrain, the plot or associative motion. The line break is a powerful tool for redirecting movement, for regathering and plunging on; syntax, repetition, and white space can do similar work in prose. I’m an avid fly-fisherman, and when you’re on the river what you want to look for are stretches of water where the flow is troubled, interrupted, where the river bends, eddies, and pauses—before tumbling on. That’s where the big fish are.

WK: We are grateful to have recordings of several poems from your latest poetry collection, Pastoral, 1994, for Boor Soirée's audio library. Pastoral, 1994 is an interesting take on the tradition of pastoral poetry, which we've come to know mostly as an idyllic recasting of the past, often in response to the present conditions; a way to indicate that something is amiss in the present way of living. I also think of the uses of pastoral in the elegiac tradition, and how it is the ultimate tool for preservation; we can keep those we've lost in a poetic snow globe of sorts: to bend down to view, admire, tend to... In Pastoral, 1994, the past is both idyllic and a "coming-to," in which a reflective speaker can note the tension, the discord in moments that as children we can't quite register, though we feel it, such as in the poem "Certainty Is Another Word for Despair " that recalls a battle played with mud clods as children with the ending:

                        This one war

            over, my brother

            will carry a pale squiggle

            of a scar. The older boy

            will carry in the wet

            of his bones the threads

            of an inoperable cancer. I

            will carry in the dark

            pocket behind my heart

            the sure, terrifying sound

            of my own voice—

            Get him, get him, get him!

The poems don't rectify or resolve these moments either, despite the wisdom we know the speaker may possess. Instead, the poems read as a "sitting with" or a companion to a past self, which I admire greatly. In Every Sky at Home, I recognize a different version of pastoral: a reaching to pull the past into the present. It is not a visitation to escape presence; it is an attempt to pull from the landscape and memory a situation of self to navigate the present, an essence of being that is needed to survive the present. Am I reaching (no pun intended) here to suggest that the pastoral is at play in these essays?

JW: Wow, what a deep and thoughtful reading of both the poems and the essays. Thank you, Whitney.

As much as I find myself drawn toward the classic pastoral, I’m attempting, with the poems and the essays, to make of the pastoral something more honest and charged. As you note, the poems don’t attempt to explain or pronounce—they are not concerned with passing judgment; judgment is often the death of anything literary—rather, the poems of Pastoral, 1994 are concerned with holding the gone world up to the light—in its glories and injustices—so that we might know our own world as ephemeral as well, and thus we would do well to pay even closer attention.   

The essays do this work as well, but I do think you’re right that they extend this work, that in the essays I am trying to find “an essence of being that is needed to survive the present.” Yes, yes, yes! We are, whether we are conscious of it or not, the sum total of our ten-thousand ancestors, of their loves and troubles and places, and wouldn’t it be amazing to have all their ten-thousand stories to help us navigate our own loves and troubles? I know I’m always trying to understand more fully the lives and lessons of my parents and grandparents, and in the essays of Every Sky at Home I’m trying to live into those stories and gift them to my children. There’s a reason we remember things; it helps us survive. Want to know what you should do with your life? Look back. Listen.

WK: What place do you think "rurality" as a subject has in our contemporary moment? It seems, more and more, that metropolitan settings and concerns dominate literary interests, particularly in prose writing, and rural "escapes" are written by those bogged down by city life, not as a place one writes from. Thoughts?

JW: There was a moment in 2016 when everyone suddenly wanted to try to understand rural America, but that moment quickly passed and passed without very many folks getting their hands on literature that was actually from rural America. So, yes, I think you’re absolutely right. A quick story: A few years ago, my first novel was up for a big prize. There were seven of us finalists, and while we all met and cheerfully toasted one another at the prize ceremony in New York City—it really was a lovely evening—I couldn’t help but notice that three of the seven finalists lived right there in the city. Two more were on the eastern seaboard just a short train ride away. Of the remaining writers, one lived in San Francisco. Then there was me. And except for my college years in the modest city of Spokane, Washington, I’ve lived in small towns—from Montana, to Mississippi, to Iowa, to Oregon—my entire life.

All that said, right now there are some amazing folks making amazing work that is from and about rural spaces (the kind of stuff you should read instead of some New York Times reporter if you really want to understand rural spaces). In my class on the literature of rural America, for instance, I’ve recently taught Bonnie Jo Campbell, Maurice Manning, Nickole Brown, Kent Haruf, Emily Danforth, Tina Ontiveros, Nina McConigley, Michael McGriff, Corrie Williamson, Jesmyn Ward, and Jake Skeets. And there are also so many great organizations supporting writers and building literary communities in the interior; folks at places like Fishtrap, the High Plains Book Awards, and the Skagit River Poetry Festival have been integral to my career as a writer.

WK: An easy question to take us home: what are you getting inspired by these days, and who are you reading that's having the most impact on your writing?

JW: Over the summer, I try to spend as much time as possible in the garden and on the river. Loads of inspiration in both places. And when I’ve been out, I’ve been packing around two books of poetry I’d highly recommend: Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter by H. G. Dierdorff and The Last Beast We Revel In by Noah Davis. Finally, though I haven’t had a chance to start it, I’m super excited to dive into Claire Boyles’s debut novel, Appraisals.

Thank you for this chance to talk. I’ve really enjoyed it!

Joe Wilkins is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers; and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds. His latest book is Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family. Born and raised north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana, he lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon.