“Greater Ghost” Connects Death and the “Intimate Relationship One Has with the Body and the World” https://ift.tt/fA8MxDY
I had the pleasure of interviewing Christian Collier around the release of his chapbook, The Gleaming of the Blade, in 2022, which I described as being “fierce, tender, and full of ghosts.” His first full-length collection, Greater Ghost, is all that and more. This exploration of grief communicates the way that losing someone is a continual shifting stream of love and pain – “the wound remains an open border.” Full of striking images, both lovely and grotesque, like a bullet that “broke through all the fine china in his chest,” “two arrows welded in the fat, teal tube of her neck,” and “you arrived in a picture, unthreaded, wearing only lamplight,” what comes across in every single piece is the weight of love.
These pieces are heavy, intimate, and raw. Though they discuss deaths both violent and quietly ordinary (but no less devastating), these losses emphasize the speaker’s appreciation and hunger for life. Moments like the pre-funeral basketball game, “sink[ing] a cube of butter into the navel of grits,” a midnight encounter with a fox, and the alchemy of pregnancy glow all the brighter amid so many ghosts. In “Leaving the Earth,” the speaker reflects: “I’ve so loved this sun-groomed globe, / each minute bit I’ve been served / … I don’t know how anybody dies easy.”
Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.
I love the covers of both The Gleaming of the Blade and Greater Ghost! You’ve touched on it a bit in Electric Lit recently, but can you talk about how they speak to each other?
I think my perspective on how they are speaking to each other is multifaceted. I’m the maker of the work that they are the literal faces of which means that I’m also aware of all the writing, thinking and living that went into each book becoming whole. For me, I see the covers as representing a particular journey and a particular self that has changed.
I also feel that the covers are in conversation regarding micro and macro-obsessions. The focus of The Gleaming of the Blade was race and the South. In Greater Ghost, the work is much more rooted in death and the interior. The common denominator for both is the intimate relationship one has with the body and the world (physical, spiritual, etc.) around it that impacts it.
What was it like to work with the editors at Four Way Books? I think editing can sometimes be a mysterious process, so we’d love to know more!
Working with Ryan was interesting. When I made my chapbook, Ross White and I were very much under the hood together. This time, when Ryan sent back his comments and suggestions, there were very few and nothing laborious (he asked about word choice in a few places and recommended cutting a few poems to tighten things up). For a while, that gave me a little anxiety, because I figured if people don’t like Greater Ghost, they 100% don’t like the choices I made or the way I write. I had to reach a point where I was fine with that and reaffirmed that I executed what I intended to in the manner I most believed in.
How did you decide where in the collection to place your “Ghost [____]” series? How did you land on the titles?
Originally, the book was in sections, but after talking with Tyree Daye, he recommended braiding the work together. In doing that, it allowed me to hit different refrains and, especially in the “Ghost [____]” poems, create and sustain a direct address of a specific you. In 2021, it dawned on me that, in order to make that address more apparent to a reader, I should probably have something to serve as a signal, so I decided to give them a common title. The original titles are what appear in the brackets. I wanted to keep them to help differentiate them from one another.
What were your obsessions during the writing of this collection – what were you watching, listening to, foods you were eating, places you were going?
I had so many, but I’ll pare them down! I’ve talked about this before, but when I started writing the collection, I’d just been bowled over by visual artist Mark Bradford and his work. I credit Mark for completely changing the way I approach making work, so I was heavily immersing myself in all things Mark Bradford that I could find.
I started working on the book in the summer of 2019, so I was still going to a place in Chattanooga called Big River most Friday nights. That had been my favorite bar for a long time. I was also going to an open-mic at our local Barnes and Noble each month to see how the poems I was making were landing.
In an interview with William Woolfit onSpeaking of Marvels, you talked about how everyone carries ghosts, and sometimes they’re past versions of themselves. What’s your favorite ghost of yourself?
I love this question. I’m currently at work on my thesis for grad school, and that work is interrogating my past. As a result, I’m thinking a lot about the me I was in 2002 and 2003. So much of my life was new when I was eighteen and nineteen. I moved to Tampa for school and got a crash course in learning how to advocate for myself in a different environment. I’m looking back at that former self with wonder, pity, a broader perspective, etc., so today, my answer would be that ghost.
We’ve talked before about the parts of the South you love showing up in your writing, and we see that here too, in focusing on your loved ones and in the opening poem which describes a classic Southern breakfast. Are there any other ways you think your Southernness shows up in your writing or your worldview?
Absolutely. Being a Southerner is integral to my identity, so it informs the way I write a great deal. I feel like “The Men in My Family Disappeared” and “Blood” are very Southern poems. The former deals with preparing to attend a Southern funeral. The latter deals with the speaker having a walk with his grandmother and her spirit imparting wisdom on what it means to be family. The poem “Wolf River” takes its name from an actual river in Tennessee.
One thing that’s interesting to me beyond the book is how my writing about the South is expanding. In The Gleaming of the Blade, my debut chapbook, I wrote about the South with an emphasis on race. In the work I’m doing now in preparation for my thesis, I’m looking at Hixson, Tennessee and Chattanooga, specifically, and that is allowing me to write more about myself, the people I grew up with, the things we did that we can’t undo, etc. If the new poems end up turning into another collection, I think it’ll be interesting to see how all of my professional output is commenting on the South I know and have known.
One of my favorite poems in the collection is in “The Men in My Family Disappeared” — it made me think of the funerals of my own ghosts, and how the most crystal clear memories I have of them are the non-funeral bits, like hiding in the church kitchen, drinking gin and Fresca out of a gas station cup, listening to my brother’s friend try to flirt with another attendee. My favorite lines in the piece are: “in the South, we sacred all we can to stay living, holy what is ours / before some rabid hand wrestles it away.” Can you talk more about this poem and these lines in particular?
Absolutely. I started writing this poem around 2006. Many moons later, after I had what I refer to as my second great epiphany thanks to the practice of Mark Bradford, I saw all text as being malleable. A “finished” poem still has something it can say and contribute to a work in progress, so I jumped back under the hood to see what more this piece could say.
Regarding the lines you highlighted, pretty much everywhere I’ve been in the South has had its own history with resourcefulness. From farming to fishing to industry and beyond. I worked for almost ten years with the Head Start program, and, every year, my caseload was filled with clients who had so very little but made the most of it and called it a decent living. At any point in time, sickness, an injury, an act of God, etc. could have significantly changed their lives and livelihoods, so I think the lines from the poem really speak to that fragile relationship Southerners have with possession and possessions.
In “Passport,” the lines “I, too, pine in the open for my dead / when I feel nothing else is watching or close enough to hear” really encapsulate the loneliness of grief, yet this book is a very public, open exploration of grief. How do you feel about that juxtaposition?
I feel like the juxtaposition is, in a way, how much of poetry works. In many of my favorite poems by Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa, John Murillo, to name a few, the inner or insular world is in conversation with the exterior. In that dynamic, the personal is where the universal (if there is such a thing as the universal) lives. The confession, the secret, the most intimate detail is often what hands the reader a thread of commonality. I also think it provides the writer a way to surprise the reader if they don’t anticipate it.
There’s a lot of nature in this collection. Do you intentionally go on writing walks, or do you just enjoy hiking and the poems come to you later? How do you go about noticing your environment?
It’s funny. I’ve not been hiking since elementary school. When the pandemic hit, I started spending a lot of time in nature. I’d go for walks and runs, and often, I’d encounter something that I’d write down in the notes app on my phone. I distinctly remember writing “Passport” in February of 2021 after a short walk and taking inventory of what I was witnessing.
I think concrete detail is always a powerful tool. One, it helps to anchor abstraction in a way that a reader can really see an object, place, person, etc. Two, it allows the worlds we build through text to become more alive. The natural world I was experiencing helped inform the natural world I was constructing in the collection.
You’re in the midst of getting your MFA; can you identify any ways your writing habits or style or fixations are changing because of that experience?
My MFA experience thus far has really reawakened my desire to write and publish in other genres. When I was in undergrad ages ago, that was my intention. My senior year, one of my professors told me that I was a really good poet and that I should just focus on that. I think that left a stain, because for almost twenty years, I would write essays and stories on occasion, but they were largely just for me. After taking fiction and nonfiction in my current program, I feel like I can stretch out and send things out and find good homes for them.
Beyond that, my habits and fixations haven’t changed much in terms of poetry. Being in a program requires one to do everything at an exacerbated pace, so I’ve had to crank out work faster than I would naturally. However, I have found my way in seeing what another full-length collection could or would probably look like from me. The thesis will give me the chance to bang a lot of work into a shape, so I’m excited about that and where my obsessions and fears are taking me in the writing.
Do you have any events coming up, virtual or in-person?
I do! I’ll be embarking on my book tour starting in the middle of September. Dates are on my website and my social media. More are coming, too!
Visit Christian’s website to find his social media handles and events here.
POETRY Greater Ghost
By Christian J. Collier
Four Way Books
Published September 15, 2024
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