Dueling Pianos: Nicholas Molbert and William Fargason in Conversation https://ift.tt/GCPrIvn
Nicholas Molbert’s debut book of poems, Altars of Spine and Fraction, explores the theme of being an outsider in the place you’re from. With a backdrop of the American South and the threat of natural disasters, Molbert tries to navigate a family that feels as distant as the landscape. This book attempts to answer questions of identity and the inheritance of a complicated family in an even-more-complicated setting. Instead of rooting himself in this place, Molbert finds himself in a lover. It is through this lover the speaker is able to move away from the South, both literally and figuratively.
Velvet, William Fargason’s second collection of poems, wrestles with his familial inheritances of violence and white supremacy. Fargason’s poems suggest that, even when the body turns against itself, tender vulnerability provides a key to healing. Whether it be through the louder lenses of construction and shooting or family vacations and phone calls, this book assures that change is possible, but not without honest and arduous grace and unlearning.
William Fargason: Hi, Nicholas! I’m really excited to talk with you about Altars of Spine and Fraction. First off, I really enjoyed it, and I was impressed by the consistent tone and voice throughout, especially for it being your first full-length book. When writing my first book, it was both very easy and very difficult to pick which poems made “the final cut,” so to speak. On the one hand, I had my entire life’s worth of poems to choose from, but on the other hand, sifting through that amount of work and trying to pick the best poems (that also speak to each other) was very difficult. What was it like putting your first book together generally, and what was your process for selecting which poems made it into Altars?
Nicholas Molbert: First, thanks for the kind words about Altars. I felt similarly about Velvet — and a certain kinship with the poems’ themes. I’ll first say that Altars evolved over years. First, it was a manuscript full of poems similar to those in the first two sections: ones concerned with home, childhood in the South, and family. Eventually, because of very wise words from mentors, I added love poems that provided levity and a bildungsroman-esque narrative arc. The speaker could show how the traditions and mores of his Southern upbringing affect his current life and relationships.
I’d like to ask a question about (what I see as) the organizing images/acts of Velvet: hunting, hunters, and the velvet of antlers. When in the process of compiling this book did these emerge as organizing images, and what about them enables you to capture the broader themes in the book?
WF: I originally wrote the title essay “Velvet” without any intention of putting it in a book of poems. I wrote it also because I was, at that time, feeling very frustrated by the limits of poetry, and that essay let me work through my chronic illness and my issues with my father in a different medium, thus achieving different results. I had a new laboratory — non-fiction. It was only after I wrote the essay that I realized all the poems I’d been writing in that same time period were circling around it, like a star system. So I made it the Sun, with its own gravity, and let the other poems organize themselves around it as planets would. But even with the essay “Velvet” being an organizing principle in the book, I think that the themes of change (through the growing and shedding of antlers, as you mention) is more central to the arc of the book than hunting itself.
NM: That’s fascinating how the frustration with form — that is, wrestling with poems not being an always-apt container — is now built into the arc of the book. We get poems until “Velvet,” the middle of the collection, which then feels like a shedding has occurred and something more calcified, more mineral, emerges after we’ve passed through the shedding phase. Just as the deer sheds their velvet because there’s not enough blood flow (i.e., enough lifeblood), the poet-speaker must shed something, must write “Velvet” differently in order to change.
WF: I know both our books are situated in the American South, so I wondered how you see Altars as interacting with the American South currently, either thematically, literally, metaphorically, and/or politically?
NM: The South in Altars is, of course, the South as I’ve experienced it. Political themes like climate change may be perceivable, but I wanted the book to have a coming-of-age arc. I tackle climate-based issues more in my second manuscript, stillcoast, but ultimately I wanted to showcase the speaker wrestling with what he’s taught to be and how he’s taught to act as a child of the Gulf Coast and how he carries that through familial loss, through joy, and through loving a partner away from the Coast.
WF: I did sense the threat of natural disaster throughout Altars, as you mention. I think climate change is often seen more directly and more bleakly in coastal areas, where hurricanes hit the hardest.
NM: I’d also like to ask you about the influences the American South has on Velvet, but perhaps through the lens of vulnerability. What role does vulnerability have in the poems in Velvet and your poetics at large?
WF: I also agree that my writing about the South is largely from my own (privileged, white, cis) vantage point. I do trace my own inheritances of violence, white supremacy, and abuse through each man before me (father, grandfather, etc.). I also hope it’s clear how I aim to dismantle those systems, by first unlearning what I was taught.
Vulnerability is key to my poetics. I should be naked in my poems. But I hope that vulnerability in my poems isn’t just some post-confessionalist pity party — I want the vulnerability in my poems to speak to the deep need for men to express any other emotion but anger, to be allowed to feel sadness, longing, pain, fear, to be able to process that on the page and heal from pain instead of internalizing it into systems and patterns of abuse.
NM: It’s absolutely not a pity party when you say, in “When My Alabama”: “I know I can // only hear the music if I listen when / I listen I must listen to overlay the song / I was taught with the song I must pass on.” That honesty about unlearning your own inheritances of violence, white supremacy, and abuse is inspiring.
WF: I want to circle back to hurricanes, as I was mentioning earlier, which figure largely in Altars. In two poems, the opener “The Hurricanes Explain Their Aesthetic” and “Drill, 2001,” the idea of Manifest Destiny is brought up. In “The Hurricanes…,” you state “we begin as exiled winds riled west / in fits of manifested destiny,” and in “Drill, 2001,” you state “The drill named after a state / known for football, for the stiff-arm of manifest destiny, dirt, dust.” I always think of Manifest Destiny as inextricably linked to promoting white supremacy. So I’m especially curious about how the idea of Manifest Destiny is being used in the first poem, where the hurricane that hits Louisiana is linked to Manifest Destiny? Do you mind unpacking that, and how you see Manifest Destiny operating in this book?
NM: I also think of Manifest Destiny as central to a white supremacist project: the white colonialist’s “duty” to expand and conquer. In “The Hurricanes Explain…,” I’m playing on Manifest Destiny with “manifested destiny,” which changes the meaning a bit — especially since it’s being spoken by the hurricane chorus. Just as the historical instance is essentially a racial (racist) claim, “manifested destiny” can also be read for its race-based valances. We know that communities of color have, are, and will continue to be most affected by climate change. We also know that it is the oil and gas industry that has both exacerbated climate events and changed the landscapes to suit their profit at the expense of preserving features of the Gulf Coast that naturally protect coastal communities from damage. “Manifested destiny” becomes literal: the hurricanes suggest that coastal destruction is the destiny we have manifested.
WF: That makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate you unpacking those ideas a bit more for me. I think it’s important, especially as two white writers from the South, to actively investigate and pull apart ideas about race that are so often accepted without question. As someone who spent the first 23 years of my life in Alabama, I do try to discuss this in Velvet, and specifically in poems like the one you quoted from, “When My Alabama.” I hope to be honest in my poems, even if that honesty is uncomfortable. What are poems for, if not a space to be honest, to ourselves and to others?
NM: As I round the corner toward my last question, I just want to say that I so admire Velvet and have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. To conclude, what do you wish Velvet would spark in readers?
WF: I’ve really enjoyed our chat as well, and really admire the work you put into Altars. And to answer your last question, I hope Velvet sparks readers to be honest with themselves—about their own struggles, about their own experiences being victims of violence, and/or about their own complicity in systems of violence. I think poetry can be all of those things — a balm, a comfort, and a call for action.
NM: Thanks so much, Will, for your generosity. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and hope our words can be a balm to readers!
POETRY Altars of Spine and Fraction
By Nicholas Molbert
Northwestern University Press
Published September 15, 2024
Born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Nicholas Molbert lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of Altars of Spine and Fraction (Northwestern University Press, 2024) and two poetry chapbooks from Foundlings Press: Goodness Gracious (2019) and Cocodrie Elegy (2024).
POETRY Velvet
By William Fargason
Northwestern University Press
Published May 15, 2024
William Fargason is the author of Velvet (Northwestern University Press, 2024) and Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He lives with himself in College Park, Maryland.
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