Category: Interview

Saturnalia Books: First, my friend and I were looking at GRE vocabulary practice questions, and “apocryphal” was one of the multiple-choice answers! I helped her get the right answer because of your unique book title, Apocryphal Genesis. What does the title and titular poem name mean to you for this collection?

Travis Mossotti: I don’t know how many times I’ve told some version of a story where there’s no definable, knowable, publicly available way to validate the story as true. Hearsay, eyewitness reports, my own memory? I think the title poem is interested in these things and sets some kind of a premise for the rest of the book.

Really, I’m fascinated with the idea of singular truths, parallel truths, relative truths, half-truths, mosaic truths, and competing truths. Capital “T” Truths and lowercase “t” emotional truths. How we all carry some iteration of a spiritual life that runs alongside our concrete physical existence in a world that pulsates with versions, variations, amalgamations, conflagrations of truths. How the wildest theories can give rise to a new personal reality—born from the tiniest kernel of truth.

SB: Religion comes through as a focal point with your book title, Biblical section names, and many poems’ references to scripture and God. And yet, it doesn’t feel like a religious book. I wish I could just read off your poem “Apocryphal Genesis” to fully show how it humanizes the creation of the world by describing its destruction through global warming, while God is “laying two-dollar pony bets” and drinking bottles in paper bags. What inspired you to include religion as an integral element in your book while also centering humanity?

TM: Poetry is not a religion, but I can’t shake some of the overlaps, like how poets centralize poetry foundationally in their lives, or the governance structures and the schisms and power dynamics and hierarchies and canons that result. How work gets praised and curated and shared.

I’m also fascinated with the magical elements that permeate both religion and poetry. The parallel between alchemy and metaphor, for example, or how the ordinary and mundane are capable of transcendence. The sublimation of the flesh into pure spirit and the word into sublime imagination.

SB: In your poem “Universal,” you contemplate how generic your poems need to be to achieve relatability. You decide to just lean into your own life through poetry, whether that’s using your wife’s name or writing about where you got your wheelbarrow. Interestingly, some of these poems address the speaker as “I”, and some as “you.” What are your thoughts on drawing the line between your experiences as the writer and ours as the reader?

TM: It doesn’t matter if you’re the writer or the reader; being a human is strange. The fact that we walk around and pretend that ordinary things are normal is also strange. Like breathing! We breathe each breath every waking and sleeping moment. Constantly breathing. Through our nose holes and mouth hole or all three! Some 98% of human existence can be summed up thusly: we are born and we wake up and go to school or work and eat meals and entertain ourselves and have sex and pay taxes and go to sleep and eventually die.

I focus on moments of the more-or-less ordinary human experiences in a world that the writer and reader actually live in. I like to put things together and see what happens. Sometimes the second person anchors the poem in a certain way that feels right for the poem. If I’m lucky, I manage to stay out of the way of the poems and let them show me what they’re up to.

SB: “Animal Manimal” stands out from your other poems. It’s sentence after sentence of fun phrases and words that veer into the gross and unusual, with lines like “camper, saunter, / scamper, and stauncher. Loons / and logic and messy meconium.” Do you enjoy exploring more experimental poetry like this, and what made you decide to fit it into this collection of poems that are stylistically so unlike it?

TM: I know a poem like “Animal Manimal” pushes a boundary or reader expectation a bit further to the frayed edge, and yet, I don’t think the result is an accurate measure of intent. I rarely start off with a plan—It just sort of happens during the composition. I write under the premise that every poem is an experiment. I mean, writing a villanelle is experimental. Syllabics or afters or prose poems—all experiments.

I try to remain open to poems of all stripes and try to let them come into being. I also try to not think too hard about whether or not a poem belongs in a collection. I start with the premise: if the poem hits, it hits. If a poem wants to make it into the collection, it’s still going to have to audition just like the rest of the poems and make a case for why it wants to be there.

And even then, editors are going to have some thoughts about whether a poem belongs or not, too.

SB: Any projects you’re working on that you’d like to share–Anything with writing, teaching, or I saw in your author’s bio you’re working in biodiversity and animal conservation?

TM: I’m the program coordinator for Poetry in the Woods and we’ll be back again this spring at AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) for a poetry hike at Runyon Canyon! Registration (with rideshare options) is up on the website.

I’m currently working on a collection of poems titled Wildfire. I recently won the Wales Poetry Award and will be using a week-long retreat this winter or spring in the south of Wales at the writing cottage at Literature Wales’ Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre to put the finishing touches on it.

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Travis Mossotti’s previous collections are About the Dead, Field Study, Narcissus Americana, and Racecar Jesus. He’s been the recipient of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the May Swenson Book Award, the Christopher Smart – Joan Alice Poetry Prize, the Alma Book Award, and others. Mossotti currently serves as a Biodiversity Fellow in the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University. He lives and works in St. Louis.

https://www.travismossotti.com/

Interview by Leah Boris

Saturnalia Books: Your book of poetry, In Another Country, won Saturnalia’s 2022 Book Prize, which is how we know you. However, your art traverses genres and mediums, and I was struck by how fluently this collection of poems travels through different realms, both concrete and spiritual. You mention on your website that your visual art explores “imagined geographies,” a concept that seems to manifest in your poetry through dreams. How do you view the role of the unconscious in relation to these shifting perceptions of landscape in your poetic works?

Andrea Jurjević: I left my native Adriatic coast in my early 20s, thinking I’d return to Europe. That never panned out and I never stopped missing the home shores, particularly the sea. I’ve been living in the American South for over two decades now, and while I have learned to see its beauty, along with those of other places I have traveled to, it is the Adriatic that I carry inside me primarily. Agnes Varda put it perfectly: “If we opened up people, we’d find landscapes.” Inside me, this would be the sea, the shores, ports, docks, woods, and rivers.

And this memory of places comes out in my creative life. There is an obvious connection between painting and poetry—focus on imagery and tone— but for me this link has also been very personal. I came to writing poetry through painting and music. Writing in a nonnative language is hard work and visual expression offers a relief from the world of words. Painting is also a great way to loosen up the creative flow and engage more physically with one’s creativity. Both practices require a kind of attentiveness, attunement to the world, and seeing the “aesthetic reality within the actual reality,” as James Agee said. More than anything, visual expression is a language, too.

As for the unconscious, intuition is a big part of the creative process, and that intuition, I imagine, feeds off the memories, experiences, sensations, perceptions, and dreams we carry within us. The ability to make creative choices and to respond to the work on paper—be it a poem or a drawing—is part of engaging the unconscious intelligence with imagination and technique.

SB: On the topic of landscape, In Another Country marries nature and eros. Sexuality extends beyond the body as a perpetual undercurrent in the environment. In “Nastic Movements,” the ocean takes on a sensual quality; in “Mouth Gags and Shadows,” the narrator describes the universe as “nothing / but a broken sex toy.” I am curious about the role of the erotic in your poems, particularly within human-nature relationships.

AJ: I grew up in a culture and time that didn’t censor sexual content from TV, film, music, print media, arts, etc. In addition to that, my father was a passionate nudist who believed that human bodies were natural and nothing to be ashamed of. My mother was a nurse her entire life, and she often took care of old people with chronic skin conditions and family members who battled cancer. Her attitude toward the human body was one of care and healing. So, between the two of them I saw the human body as a fact of life. When you go to nudist beaches you see bodies of all ages and shapes. It’s not a sexualized environment. Same with hospitals. And same with art.

People often confuse nudity with erotica, and eroticism with beauty. Eroticism doesn’t hinge on nudity or on whatever notions of perfection or beauty are currently trending. In fact, eroticism requires imperfection. (Perfection is plain, there is no tension in it, no point of interest.)

For the erotic to exist, there has to be some limitation. This limitation engages fantasy, which in turn opens up space for experience that goes beyond the ordinary. Eroticism shakes us from the daily life and potentially offers transcendent moments, and in turn, those moments can prompt artistic expression. So, erotic moments in poetry deal primarily with transcendence. I suspect that’s why inspiration feels a lot like lust. The Greek god Eros, after all, personifies creative power.

As for nature, sexuality never finds satisfaction within itself and tends to project outwards. That’s why it’s easy to pick up innuendo or sexual metaphors all over the place—in kitchens, in laboratories, in hair salons, in churches, not just in nature. To me, this is life recognizing itself.

SB: Similar to eros, war is a lingering presence in many of these pieces–sometimes explicitly and sometimes as “a wandering existence. / Or in a body.” How has your relationship with darkness or tragedy in the world been shaped or changed by creating poetry?

AJ: My father died at the start of my senior year of high school. At that point the war in Croatia had already been raging for two years and had started in Bosnia the year prior. My world was collapsing, and by the end of senior year, I dropped out of school and proceeded to cope with the circumstances in ways that I don’t want to get into here. The future was bleak, and at the time I didn’t realize that I was very depressed. Even though my father was an avid reader, I was surprised when we, while cleaning his desk in the wake of his passing, discovered that he wrote poetry. There were several poems I remember. In one he imagined his own funeral in a Neruda style verse, and in the other he wrote to his estranged daughter from his first marriage. I wish I knew he wrote while he was still alive. I think it would’ve given me the necessary courage and confidence to try to do the same, as he was instrumental in my lifelong love of books. So, in my mind, death and poetry dance together.

It took years after that before I wrote my first poem, in English. Since then, writing has allowed me to make practical use of difficult experiences—to turn them, albeit momentarily, into art. Writing poetry has also taught me to see value in grief, to accept conflicting emotions, and to embrace uncertainties. Poetry provides comfort not just in times of tragedy but with daily matters, too.

SB: Lastly, these poems are stunning in their ability to be simultaneously grounded in place while maintaining a sense of the foreign. A “citizenry of in-betweenness” forms the narrative frame of this collection, leaving the reader to wonder what it means to be “home.” Where do you find home, either in these poems or yourself?

AJ: There’s nothing I love more, no place I feel more at home than sitting on the shore and looking at the open sea. The pleasure and calm from watching the sea and the sky is immeasurable. What is home to me? My home is my home to me. My place of origin. America is my adopted home. This is where I raised my children and where, as an immigrant working and living in her non-native language, I write as an act of making a home. So, my heart and my home are bi-continental.

Andrea Jurjević is a Croatian poet, writer and literary translator. She is the author of two poetry collections and a chapbook: In Another Country, winner of the 2022 Saturnalia Books Prize; Small Crimes, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Prize; and Nightcall, which was the 2021 ACME Poem Company Surrealist Series selection. Andrea’s book-length translations from Croatian include Olja Savičević’s Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Marko Pogačar’s Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry.

https://andreajurjevic.com/

Interview by Priya Garmhausen

SB: We, of course, know and love you as a poet and our prize winner for your stunning work in “The Day Every Day Is”, but you have credits everywhere. You’ve published short stories, poetry, literary criticism, and a libretto (a libretto!). You also have a forthcoming comedic novel set for 2024 release — congratulations! What drives you to so many varied kinds of writing? Do they each speak to the same writerly itch, or do they satisfy different needs, be they creative or professional?

LU: I think I just like to have a good time. While my first and sustaining love is poetry, it’s a wild and unpredictable pleasure to attempt writing in different genres. Each genre allows for different experiences, different sensations, different apertures. It’s like being a perpetual beginner enjoying this wonderful sense of risk. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that experimenting with a new genre is like gaining an extra sense faculty—your perception changes as you’re summoning or warping a genre’s features. That yearning for language and beyond language, reaching forward and backward into history, continually interests me and, I suppose, provokes me. And different expressive modes allow for other ways to enact that yearning. Yet I always come back to poetry as my primary genre. It’s not like I’m being unfaithful or, as I’ve written elsewhere, a bigamist.

Almost always my entry in any genre is through voice, even when writing literary criticism about other writers and trying to find a voice that registers respect and some measure of understanding. What I learn in one genre translates into other genres, but I have to admit it can be frustrating. For instance, trying to enact cause-and-effect in fiction just about keeps ruining me. You mentioned “needs.” I guess I do need to write in at least two genres almost daily: mainly poetry and fiction. At this point, I’d be unhappy without multiple genres in my life.

Lee Upton’s The Day Every Day Is

SB: While I do want to ask you about the prevalence of martyrs, mythology, religion, and legends in “The Day Every Day Is,” what struck me was how you used them. Several poems feature a speaker reclaiming agency in their own story as opposed to what we’ve commonly come to know. What is it about myth, religion, and folklore and this reclaiming of self and story that led you to explore marrying the two in your poetry?

LU: As a child I attended morning Mass each school day, but at home I was perusing a little book about Greek mythology, with reproductions of oil paintings of naked gods and goddesses. The erotics of those images! Those early forbidden stories, so often bloody and ruthless, continue to be resonant, particularly as reflections on guilt and shame and coercion. Re-imagining the brutality of myths—the injustice and horror and the godly indifference of the powerful—is a way to think about human suffering across time. Those stories are about many things, including the desperate search to explain what resists explanation. The myths from multiple cultures keep happening, in a sense, and there are vulnerable personalities that we can disinter from the stories to let them speak.

SB: In many of your poems, there is a conviction on the part of the speaker that telling, forgetting, and rewriting are each integral to any given story. What drew your poetry to this interplay — the natural fluidity of retelling vs. the possibility that every version (mistruths and all) can be argued as concrete and faithful?

LU: It’s like there’s an imp within us that controls when forgetting begins and when forgetting stops. Suddenly a memory once safely consigned to forgetfulness can spring out to catch us. The returned memory may be corrupted, but there it is: this full-blown moment appears reborn. Or not. Years ago, I heard words that were so horrible I forgot them immediately. What I recall is the sensations of pain and the actual experience of forgetting, as if my mind erased the words. Or as if forgetting is an active force and opened a trap door and the words dropped. Something in my psyche protected me, I suppose. What I do remember, in high definition, is the room I was in when the words were spoken—a place to which I’ve never returned. Some of the voices I work with are harsh. The right to refuse what’s offered can be something to celebrate and even a marker of freedom.

SB: Something I particularly loved in this collection were those poems where the core witnesses to violence or death were the nearby flowers — the dog violets eyes fill with the blood of the skinned satyr, a mothers failing vision can only see sunflowers, the famous poet who says “let’s hear your pretty flower poems” and is buried by roses. That said, in the poem “After Blogging About Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery,’” we’re told that there could never be a tapestry of blooms in that world, that “Tessie Hutchinson cannot have a unicorn.” It also happens to be the poem from which this collection gains its title — The Day Every Day Is. Surrounded by poems full of flowers bearing witness to death and mythological characters given new agency, this poem intentionally has neither. All this to ask: Why?

LU: It’s tricky to write about flowers, given the common prejudice against them as markers of excess sentimentality, as if flowers aren’t just so achingly strange. They’re mysterious and stern witnesses; they remind us of beauty, and those that resurrect annually may recall our own yearnings for sustaining life. As you noticed, flowers don’t appear for the primary character in my poem referencing Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.” In Jackson’s story, which enacts reflexive obedience to tradition, when Tessie Hutchinson joins her community to perform a ritual stoning she is herself stoned. (It always bothers me that she finishes the dishes before hurrying off to join the townspeople for what will be her own murder.) Tessie Hutchinson won’t see a unicorn or a tapestry’s blossoms not only because of the story’s setting but because of the curbs on her imagination. Duty, loyalty…those have to be re-examined in each context in which we’re summoned to practice them. What partly animates The Day Every Day Is in that poem and others remains a sense of how ideology surrounds us, invisible, conditioning and petrifying what we are able to perceive, let alone imagine. The elasticity of poetry allows for questioning that degree of inflexibility, given that poetry is an especially intensive form not only for paying minute attention but for paying “attention to our attention” and for re-imagining once again what we believe and what we are expected to believe.

As you noted, the title of my collection derives from the last portion of the poem:

How familiar it all is—

choosing what to ignore

and everyone expecting

us to be responsible

and to do our part

The entire crowd waiting

while we hurry

almost forgetting what day every day is

In a possible reading, the collection’s title appears partial: a word is missing. You could supply all sorts of possibilities: The day every day is violent, The day every day is unjust, The day every day ends, The day every day is a lottery… Or the title might be a complete sentence: the day every day IS—if we recognize and grant that each day has its own incalculable presence, its living power.

SB: What do you have going on that you would like to share with us? New projects? Old projects? Latest earworm? Favorite color?

LU: I’m in the process of putting together a manuscript of new and selected poems. It’s time I tried to do that, I think. And there’s the comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, coming out in May from wonderful Sagging Meniscus Press. Tabitha, Get Up | Sagging Meniscus Press The novel concerns a biographer who hopes to restore her self-respect and pay her rent by doing the impossible: writing two biographies at once. Another novel, WRONGFUL, is forthcoming from the same publisher. It’s a twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity and envy at two literary festivals and the ways we can get everything wrong, time and again, especially when we’re certain we’ve discovered the truth. I’m working on other manuscripts, and I’d say more about them, but that might doom them—it’s hard to know if anything will turn out. I can write the things, but they might have to stay home with me rather than meet strangers, as hard as I might want them to become more outgoing.

Lee Upton’s books include her seventh collection of poetry, The Day Every Day Is (Saturnalia); Visitations: Stories (Yellow Shoe Fiction Series); Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles: Poems (Cleveland State University Poetry Center); and The Tao of Humiliation: Stories (BOA). She is also the author of four books of literary criticism; a collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition, Boredom, Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo); and the novella The Guide to the Flying Island (Miami University Press). Her novel, Tabitha, Get Up, is forthcoming in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Another novel, Wrongful, will be out in May 2025.

www.leeupton.com