Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?
Locomotive Cathedral is a collection of poems and short
essays that explore resilience
in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a
self, all the while celebrating breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether inspired
by 12th century Buddhist mind training slogans or the
one-footed crow, René, who visits me daily, the poems grapple with the tension
between the speaker’s resistance to change and her acceptance of it as
transformation.
Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why?
Looking for prompts in a 12th
century Buddhist text comprised of 59 “slogans” or aphorisms was a challenge
and source of joy. These slogans which aim to help us cultivate mindfulness and
compassion, and diminish “self-grasping,” can be wise, funny, and without
commentary from scholars, rather puzzling. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed using
them as a starting line for poems, not knowing where the finish might be. I’ve
linked to the audio of one of them, published in print-only in Conduit magazine: “Slogan 38, Don’t Seek
Others’ Pain as the Limbs of Your Own Happiness.” The slogan, which has a
slightly surreal title, is simply cautioning against schadenfreude. I decided
to seize on the title as an opportunity to talk about the ways in which we/I
take pleasure in others’ difficulty or failings, while taking the limbs of the
title literally. “Just
/ look at my backstroke! I'm a water wheel / catching your fall, grinding you
into bread.” This
poem is one of several in Locomotive
Cathedral in which the “I” of the speaker is at a remove from
Brandel-the-author (or is it?). It’s a persona poem but the person speaking is unknown
to the reader or has never been previously introduced.
And which poem/s gave you the most trouble, and
why?
Locomotive Cathedral contains a number of poems where the “I” of the
speaker and the writer are the same, poems replete with autobiography. In these
poems, I had to decide what level of honesty and detail was necessary to elevate
the writing above storytelling, journaling, sentimentality, or confession which
serves to unburden the writer but may be of little benefit to the reader.
How did you find the title of your book?
With difficulty! I submitted
the book to contests, including the Backwaters Press contest (an imprint of the
University of Nebraska Press), where I was awarded “honorable mention” and
publication, under various titles. Early on, my manuscript’s title was Take and Give, which alludes to a
Tibetan Buddhist practice (tonglen) of breathing in someone’s suffering and
using the exhale to send out the antidote to that suffering. Later on, I started
submitting the manuscript as either Locomotive
Cathedral, or Regard Yourself as a
Verb. The latter was the title my manuscript bore when judge Hilda Raz selected
it in the Backwaters contest. Raz and/or the readers mentioned in their
comments that they didn’t think the title was the best fit for the collection. The
University of Nebraska Press was happy to have me swap out Regard Yourself as a Verb for Locomotive
Cathedral, which they felt was going to be easier to develop cover art for.
The title Locomotive Cathedral comes from an essay in the collection called “Now
You Don’t See It, Now You Do,” which is loosely about my distrust of narrative
and linearity:
Take
a tragedy, a system, a movement, a moment and give it an ending. Give it a
terminus in history. Build a station around it. Let it be a locomotive
cathedral of steel and glass. Let it be a monument to meaning with marble
statuary, a fountain, and geraniums.
My friend, the wonderful poet Jennifer Martelli, is
the person who suggested Locomotive
Cathedral as a title, and I immediately realized that this combination of
words in many ways captures the tension the book seeks to mine: between the very
human desire for stasis and eternity as symbolized by the “cathedral” (and in
some ways, by poetry), and the perpetual motion of transformation. The “locomotive” of the title
stands in for the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines
companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on earth. Locomotive
Cathedral opens
with a quote from the founder of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoiser that says: “Nothing is lost, nothing is
created, everything is transformed.” The book closes with a poem about my
one-footed crow, the last line of which is: “Not dying, but molting.”
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/the-backwaters-press/9781496240088/locomotive-cathedral/
BUY THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR
STACK: Bookshop.org
LISTEN TO A POEM: https://www.conduit.org/audio (Recording
is the third one down.)
