“A Shift in Emphasis”: An Interview with Poet Erin Hoover https://ift.tt/OKckReo
The first poem in Erin Hoover’s latest collection, No Spare People, ends with the line: “I open my throat” — a fierce opening to a book seething with anger and love. These poems reflect the contradictions, complications, and heartbreak of living in the world, particularly as a woman and as a mother. They are sharp, determined, tender, and open. The choices we have and do not have in “this festering boil we live inside” are highlighted again and again as the poems discuss everything from income inequality to elections, parenting to OJ Simpson, power and who wields it.
Many of these pieces seem to recognize the rage that sits just beneath my skin these days — especially living in the South — such as in “White woman”: “some days, I’m the pioneer wife, / keeper of the homestead, but others / I’m absurdly educated for a uterus.” And yet, the speaker keeps living, keeps navigating reality, saying: “Now / I perform small charities, like not / being a shit in what ways the day / offers,” and “I experience joy / because I have made room for it.”
Erin Hoover was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She is the author of two poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), which won the Antivenom Poetry Award and a Florida Book Award, and NoSpare People (Black Lawrence, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and The Sun. Hoover lives in Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts a poetry reading series, Sawmill Poetry, and produces the “Not Abandon, but Abide” monthly interview series for the Southern Review of Books.
I first met Erin when she pitched her series for the SRB, and have delighted in reading her insightful interviews with female and genderqueer poets in the South. I admire her community work and also very much admire her writing, so I was excited to chat with her about her latest collection. We caught up over email in early 2024.
Can you talk about what led you to political poetry? Has your writing always been political or has it crystallized in the last few years of the “festering boil we live inside”?
I’m astonished by how my priorities have changed over the years for my writing, and yet I’m still producing first-person, persona-driven, largely narrative poems. The further along I get, the more complicated dynamics of political and social inequality feel to me; or even as they simplify—as increasingly our autocrats-in-training say exactly what they mean—there’s a complexity in wanting to understand how we got here. Between both of my books, I’ve created a speaker who is constantly asking what her responsibility is within toxic systems and taking her own failures really personally, but with No Spare People that’s a little more outward-directed…it’s not about me and the various scumbags I’ve been subjected to or my rural Appalachian town but how am I going to be an adult, a teacher, a parent. Each of those positions I just named hold some power. I don’t think my own position within various hierarchies is inherently interesting, but the process of negotiating power is always interesting to me, and my point of access is usually that shift between irony and complete earnestness you’ll find in my poems because it’s how I get through life. All of us inherit a world in which there is so much wrong — and especially recently with Covid, and with Ukraine and Russia; and with what’s going on in Palestine — and you have to move through it with some kind of awareness. You can’t behave as if you are as fucked as you feel, or at least, as a moral being, I can’t.
Tell me about the different forms of the poems in this collection. I’m thinking particularly of the right-justified “The power of passive voice” and the anecdote section of “Forms and materials.”
No Spare People is super interested in couplets, in making them and breaking them apart. I like the way Robert Hass puts it in A Little Book on Form: “One line is a form in the sense that any gesture is a form. Two lines introduce the idea of form as the energy of relation.” And I guess with form, I’m always thinking about the incomplete and the complete — that’s the puzzle of lineation in general, from my perspective. The personal explanation for couplets in No Spare People involves the complete biological pair that my daughter and I make, but also the incomplete social pair of myself as an unmarried parent. Everywhere, I’m trying to affirm the former and downplay the latter. At minimum, they’re in tension in poems like “Homewrecker” and “Death parade” (the second appearance of that title), “Proof of impossibility” and of course, “Forms and materials.”
The “Anecdote” section in “Forms and materials” is meant to be surprising. Leading up to it, I’ve written a series of couplets that reform and break apart and reform again as I’m thinking about gender, the “coming of age” part of this poem in which the speaker’s femininity is sort of this unsettled question that other people are trying to enforce for her. And I’m like, let’s just make the hardest possible break in this poem, not just a transition to a stichic line but a right-justified version of it, with radical lesbian separatism inserted into the mix, located in red-state Tennessee not far where I now live. Formally, I’m trying to point the reader toward how important that moment was for me. I learned from lesbian separatism that in saying no to a vision of life that you don’t want, you can build another to replace it, which is maybe the whole point of this book for me as its author, which is radical in its optimism. The “Anecdote” section ends with a caesura’d line, a sort of couplet ghost, in the shadow “of Dobbs v. Jackson, / I could use some distance from men.”
I hope that the relationship between the book’s form and its content (its “materials”) is legible for readers, since this kind of play represents something new I was trying, a sort of shift in emphasis since my first book.
One line that really stuck out to me from “To be a mother in this economy” was “my child learned … to shape her body to different earth / for a time.” Do you think this is something we all subconsciously do? What does that look like?
I first thought of that line before we’d moved away from Florida, where my daughter was born. I used to take her to a playground in Tallahassee with fellow poet Tana Jean Welch’s son every week—they were around the same age — and I remember thinking how important the geography of that particular park must be to both of our kids. It was right before we were moving to Arkansas, when I knew my daughter would never see that park again. What we were losing, not just in the sense of a place, but the people we’d surrounded ourselves with, was just so clear; what’s identity without these markers? For me, changing locations, and doing it so often, has been traumatic. I have felt that the person I was in different places is a radically different person — night and day — in the way that I’m not sure someone who’d stayed put would look at prior phases of their life.
You spend a lot of time building supportive, inclusive queer community around poetry in the South with your Sawmill Poetry Series and the Not Abandon, but Abide interview series here at the SRB. Why do you believe this is important? Has the community you’ve built changed you?
Both the poetry series and the interview series matter to people, which sounds like a fairly silly realization, but I began Sawmill Poetry as a place for self-expression in middle Tennessee — I feel like poetry can accomplish things that other arts can’t, sometimes — and I wanted to bring touring poets representing interesting or new perspectives in to visit. In other words, I started it for myself as much as other people. The interview series was also a way of connecting with poets, in this case to have a dialogue about craft. I’ve heard people say that interviewing is difficult, or it’s hard to come up with questions or whatever, but if you reframe it as, I get to ask these questions — well, that’s how I feel about Not Abandon, but Abide. When I think about how literature is received, canon-making work, how ideas are replicated . . . I want to be part of that; I want to platform excellent poets and poetry.
I don’t view such activities as discrete, although some people consider them to be. My history here is long, and there are roles that I barely have room for on my CV that encompassed years of my life, such as years editing the Southeast Review (three years) or working for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (three) or the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference (two). But my success as an author in the long-term has depended and will continue to depend on encountering new ideas. I join communities and engage with other people because this is how I grow, and to be honest, I’m most interested in reading work written by people with that mindset — I think it shows in their writing.
At the same time, I have to modulate how much volunteer work I’m doing. When you’ve developed a reputation for reliable work and a fair modicum of success, you get tapped for everything. I imagine that many of the readers nodding along are women, queer-identified, or BIPOC writers. So, here’s a big difference between me a decade ago, and me now: I’ve become better at putting my efforts in places where my skills or connections are most useful, rather than labor whenever I’m asked to do something. I’ve tried to become better at recruiting help, because I don’t want to shut down. This might come from my pre-academic background working for nonprofit organizations, but I feel like an organizer makes a commitment of sorts to their community when they start a new project. Communities invest their energies in your project when they have a sense that it will continue. One of the moments when I realized how much Sawmill Poetry meant to others was when I mentioned that I might need to stop doing it. The reaction was extreme! So, several months in the future will be guest-hosted. We’ll see how it goes.
I am fascinated by often inaccurate but very vivid “flashbulb” memories you talk about in “Death parade” – a lot of my own writing is built on such memories, and sometimes I find that I “remember” different things when I turn them over again and again. How did you come upon this idea? Do you have a favorite fun flashbulb memory, or are they primarily of significant, but difficult feelings/situations, as in this poem?
I was surprised to learn that flashbulb memory is a term from psychology, it’s so evocative, it feels like it should come from poetry. (So many of our metaphors for memory involve film!) When I encountered that idea — I don’t remember how, probably some research rabbit hole found in the process of drafting these poems—it resonated fully with the way I’d returned to my impressions of the day of 9/11 over the years, which had always unsettled me. Both “Death parade” poems are about the echoes of one trauma in another, or maybe the way the mind organizes trauma. Even before 9/11, I was quizzing my parents about the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster (which happened not far from where we lived when I was a baby) and feeling like their recollections and memories were vague and unformed and insufficient considering the serious danger our family had been in; I wrote about my interactions with that event in Barnburner. Although I lived in Manhattan then and had distinct and powerful first-person memories of what happened on 9/11, I was afraid to write about that day in any form, or my personal feelings about it, because as an event it was so symbolically charged. My dreams about 9/11 during the Covid lockdown were very visceral, moments of remembered panic recycled and remixed into a lexicon for trauma, or so it seemed to me. They gave me a good reason to go back again to that terrifying well of feeling for 9/11 that I’d been holding onto.
In an interview with Shenandoah,you talked about the title of this collection, saying, “no spare people” is also an imperative — that there should be no spare people — or maybe an interrogation into the idea of anyone being “extra” at all… Even if we say they are not, is our world built on the assumption that they are?”
This immediately made me think of the “post” global pandemic world we’re living in. I am still stunned at the way we’ve moved past the astounding number of people who’ve died, and it seems that we sometimes treat them as spare people. A lot of my life has changed after having lived through the pandemic, like the way I think about the language we use. Has living through this traumatic global event changed the way you look at small things? Your reading or writing habits?
As someone who works with and cares about language, my horror at Covid is based in the continuing variation in perception around the simple truths of a major world event, a variation created by the myths we have built around and through in some ways to elide the factual dead — myths built out of language, replicated in language. In other words, the story matters, the way we talk about other people in the context of Covid or any large-scale tragedy, for instance, the war in Palestine. You’re completely right, we haven’t acknowledged our Covid-dead politically or socially or in the media, which is very much on-brand for America, but still surprising, somehow; that’s what I meant when I talked about the assumptions our world is built on. The relationship between the truth of Covid and its mythology is worth thinking about and studying and interrogating while we are somewhat close to the events we remember. I guess I think, what is art for? And yet some people groan at “Covid books” or “Covid films.”
Now, maybe more than before, when I think about my art or what I’m writing, I think, is this urgent? Do I need to write this? Not that everything I write about is important, it’s more like a method of approach to the subject, a way of making meaning. The word cruelty has been associated with my work in the past — in that it sometimes has illustrated instances of cruelty — but I think that my true subject has always been the other side of cruelty, suffering. Who suffers, what does it mean, if it ends, what remains of suffering? There’s that section of the first poem in No Spare People, “On the metaphor, for women, of birthing to creative activity”: “I wrote like this for years / to an audience performing the great labor / of the world, not only women but so many of us, we who are asked not to consider aloud / what we become inside / our prisons, schools, hospitals, / our profitable, dick-swinging offices . . . “ I hope my poetry is clever and relatable and generates meaning for any reader, but it’s also my way of working out existential concerns I have, and I think I am doing this for a reader who’s willing to go to uncomfortable places with me and who’s got a stake in humanity. I know I called No Spare People radically optimistic in an earlier answer. I still say it is, however these last paragraphs sound. Of course, the final poem is about ordering a narrative outside of pain: “I’ve operated asa vassal in service to a terrible king for so long.” I want to enact an alternative.
POETRY No Spare People
Erin Hoover
Black Lawrence Press
Published October 20, 2023
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