WRITING YOUR WAY INTO MEANING: Iain Haley Pollock on his new poetry collection, All the Possible Bodies and writing, reading, and living through poetry.
You’re tackling issues in this collection that are big, like racism, class, and culture. But you’re also using anecdotes and parts of your life that are much more personal, smaller, and tangible to the reader. What do you think is the importance of using methods like that to communicate these bigger ideas?
I think there’s that idea that writers can use the subjective to get to the universal, and I think I’m in that mode. I want to see what the conversation and the traffic is between my personal life and the social, cultural, and political issues that are in my world. So, sort of embedded in your question is the idea that I feel like if I tell a story from my life, I think it will be a more authentic exploration of an issue. I think it also allows for a little more nuance in a discussion of a broader social or political issue. And that’s important to me. To see the conflicts and the contradictions that are related to an issue and that are embedded in me. I think most of my speakers are flawed, and part of the flaw is what I wanted to deal with. Like, some of my own feelings of complicity in the larger political structures that I find unfair or rampant with injustice. And then sort of recognizing that I’m part of it even as I push back against it. So I think story allows me to do that in a much more active and nuanced way than getting up on my soapbox and hammering it in. Not that there isn’t a place for that, I think there’s always use for political language in poetry, I would never cut myself or any other poet off from that, but I think in this collection I wanted to tell my story as a way of opening up stories for others to see their own relationships with these social and political issues.
So, going off of that, maybe looking at the poem about you and your kids walking down the Aqueduct trail, are you going into a poem with a larger idea in mind, and then something like watching your kids on the trail makes it click? Or is it more that you’re standing there watching your kids and all of the sudden you realize you’ve been thinking of a certain question or idea maybe subconsciously?
Yeah, I mean I think each poem comes in its own way. Which is to say “both.” Not in that specific poem, but I think I’ve set out to write about something and I think I’ve realized there’s a story or a specific moment from my life that I can use to explore that topic. Other times, I think that I have an experience and I have this felt sense that I can write a poem about it, that there’s something there, and maybe I don’t quite understand what it is, but that’s some of the joy and pleasure of writing. You write your way into meaning. I write to navigate the world, to figure things out, and in doing so to survive the world. But I do recognize that my writing needs to do more than that, that it needs to make a bridge to the reader. So I think that, often, there are experiences that I want to figure out, things that I want to write about, and sometimes it’s just for me, and they go in the trash can (I don’t really put them in the trash can!) but you know what I mean, but other times I know if I keep going I know that it’ll make a connection with a reader.
So you’re talking about the personal and political aspects of your work that you’re trying to balance. When you’re making a piece of art, there’s a lot on the emotional side that you have to work with. How do you balance the political with that other, more sentimental or personal side? For example, you have a poem about the murder of George Floyd that also ends up being a pretty personal and singular experience.
I think it’s a balancing act. I think you first need to reject the binaries between the personal and political, and the political and the artistic. You just have to let them all exist together. I just see art, politics, and life all together. I think I always wonder ‘How will the reader react to this poem?’ Like, if I wanted to write a political speech I’d be writing for a different audience, right? Audience is obviously tricky, because that abstract idea of ‘audience’ is something I don’t even get. Sometimes I have someone in mind when I write a poem and other times I don’t. But when I’m thinking more broadly about audience I do try to make a bridge to them. I think I would just publish something different if I wanted to just make a very pointed political statement. I think in my poems I’m more interested in bringing my artistic self, my political self, and my personal self all together. So I use all of these craft things, language, and rhetoric that I’ve picked up over time to make something that is meaningful and beautiful (beautiful, different than pretty!) “Beautiful” in the sense that it’s moving, and I’m definitely willing to use political language if I think that it will have an emotional impact so it all kind of mixes together.
So, answers like that, ideas like that, can sometimes contribute to the fact that a lot of people feel like there is a barrier to entry when it comes to poetry. It is much less daunting to the average person to bring a novel to the beach than a book of poems. You talked a bit about the “audience” but how do you feel poetry can become more accessible to people, because your poems never seem to read like there is that barrier?
I think accessibility can be a pejorative to poems. I mean, some of my “imagined audience” are people I grew up with, my neighbors, people just in my life, and I just believe firmly that if art is presented in a way that captures their imagination and emotion, people will read it. I do think that poets sometimes can pitch high and become elusive, and the many references in their work can become a lot. I’m not immune to it either, of course. As you saw in the first poem of the book, that first stanza has a heavy dose of Greek mythology because my mother was a classics professor, but I think I’m not afraid to make those references. Because I do trust the reader, and I do trust myself to balance the intellectual and the emotional. I think some of the problem is also educational. I think people are taught poetry that is really just from a different cultural and even linguistic milieu than they’re used to. I think all art should start retrospectively, as in, you know, you should start with where we are in the moment and then work our way backwards to figure out how we got here. So, having taught high school and middle school, there’s a real focus on twentieth-century, nineteenth-century, eighteenth-century poetry. Which I love as a practitioner of the art, but I don’t know if it’s a good starting point, and it seems distant from many contemporary readers. You sometimes need a degree of scholarship to “unlock” some of the poems. And people might be more inclined to do it if they sort of understood where those poems sat in relation to poetry in their own world. Which is all to advocate for teaching living poets. Especially at this moment, there is such a flowering of contemporary poetry in this country, so if folks were taught to read whole collections of poems, I think they would see their world and their lives reflected there. In some forms of poetry, obviously. I think some people want to be more heady and cerebral in their poems than others, but what I love about poetry is that there are so many different types of poems being written, and I think that’s some of what makes it so vital and so strong. As long as you’re doing it well, you can really do whatever you want to do in contemporary poetry. And obviously some styles of poetry will alienate some readers, but I don’t think the contemporary audience knows the full breadth of everything being written, and I think if they did they could easily find poems and poets to fall in love with.
Not to start a fight between you and other poets, but do you feel like there is more honesty or truth to a narrative poem as opposed to a more experimental one? Do you feel like you can find the same kind of emotional honesty in both of those types of poems?
Sure. Well a more heady poem can still be extremely intellectually honest. It could be a faithful record of what someone is thinking and how their mind works. I see myself as very democratic in the way that I think about poems. I think aesthetic squabbles don’t get us very far, you know? I would rather have more people writing poetry in the style that they want. I think there’s a false dichotomy between the head and the heart. I think cerebral poems that play with language risk cleverness and risk being glorified crossword puzzles. But I also think that poems that are aimed at the heart, that are trying to punch you in the gut emotionally, risk sentimentality and risk being manipulative. So there’s dangers in both extremes if we want to put things on a spectrum like that. But I think each approach is valid, and I think any approach is valid as long as you’re coming to the page with a sense of craft and purposefulness and respect for your audience and their experience.
What would you say is your job or goal as a poet in society? What do you hope people get out of one of your poems?
It would be hard for me to isolate just one role. I think I see myself as having different modes. You know, in the George Floyd poem that you mentioned, I’m specifically wanting to be a record-keeper and make sure that my perspective on that moment, on that American tragedy, is recorded for the archive. Because I’ve seen deaths like that get twisted and misremembered. So I want to raise my hand and say, like, ‘Hey, this is what this death might mean. This is why it was so tragic, and felt so deeply, and mourned so hard by so many people.’ And I do sort of feel like there’s a documentary impulse to a lot of my work. I’m wanting to record that I was here, and this is what life was like at the opening of the 21st century, and this is what it was like to be a father, or a mixed-race man. Like, these are some vectors of my identity, and this is what this experience was like. And, you know, there are things that are unfair, so it’s also to say ‘There were things that were unfair, and these injustices existed, and there were people who were speaking out against it.’ In their way, trying to improve the world and make it safer. I mean, I don’t know, that sounds a little idealistic. I don’t know that individual poems do that. As in, “change the world”. But I do think, to my earlier point, if there’s a culture of art and poetry, I do think social change is possible. If people are being thoughtful, intentional, and nuanced in the way that art demands, then I think that changes society, which is why I’m sort of not wanting to engage in these aesthetic battles, like I said. If someone wants to write verse poems (which is not me, I’m a free verse poet through and through) but if someone who’s a neoformalist wants to write those kinds of poems, go for it. I know they’re being careful, and thorough, and thoughtful in what they do. But to circle back to your question, I think I have a strong documentary impulse to record “what happened” in an artful way.
So lastly, what’s inspiring you right now? Books, movies, TV, music? And what would you say to an up and coming artist who’s maybe struggling to find that same inspiration?
I think once you put yourself in an artistic mindset and you’re creating, anything can become an inspiration. Which probably seems like I’m dodging the question but I think I mean that art is a conversation. And for me, one of the pleasures of poetry is that I get to log my entry into the conversation of art, literature, and poetry. So in doing that, I’m pulling from so many parts of the larger conversation. But also, my influence has really changed. You know, before I was a parent I had much more time for myself, so film was very important to me. Kurosawa stands out as a favorite. But I think to be a good writer in particular, you need to be a good reader, too. So you know, I try to read about forty books a year. And obviously some of them don’t take, but that’s also a part of the conversation, right? Even a book I didn’t like or that I pushed back against, I reject it on aesthetic grounds. I’m defining my own stance and defining my own art through that. And then there are things that make me want to be a better poet that I aspire towards. Like, you know, every time I read a Lucille Clifton poem, I want to get that level of distillation, right? Robert Hayden stands out to me from childhood as one of my favorite poets and every time I go back to him there’s a clarity to the writing and a crispness to the lines that I really aspire to in my own work. But I think, more importantly, to answer your second question, when students come up to me and they say ‘Where do you get your inspiration from? What should I do?’ I tell them to go live their lives. Get out from behind that writing desk, to get out of their immediate bubble and social media, and go take a walk. Walk through the woods, through their neighborhoods, through a city, or just go to a new place and try to see things anew. I’m personally inspired by my neighbors, my family; I listen to their stories, observe the way they talk and how they act. I pay attention to their viewpoints and all of that gets wrapped up into the poems as well. So I think for me, poetry is an act of paying attention. Just go sit and watch something, whether it’s a tree or a landscape or a neighborhood, like, see how people move through space. Talk to someone, get them to tell you a story. Try to be in conversation with other folks and try to locate yourself in the world. I’m sure you noticed in my poems, but I usually really try to locate myself in the world, I always try to establish a clear sense of place. So I think that sort of anchoring down in the built or natural landscape is important and that’s my advice. If you’re blocked, if you need inspiration, go put yourself in a place and see how human or natural life plays out, and then start thinking about what any of that means and what you have to add to the conversation.
You can find Iain’s work on:
Instagram: @boy_ghost_poet
All the Possible Bodies for sale on Amazon
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