As is my practice from time to time, I've interviewed Traci Brimhall about her first book, Rookery, which won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award, and was one of my favorite books that I read in 2011. Without further ado, here's the interview, conducted via email:

Let’s start with first book questions: Did this book go through many versions before it found its current form? About what percentage of it comes out of your MFA thesis? Did you enter it in many contests before winning the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award?

Like many people who go to graduate school for writing, my thesis was the backbone for my first book. I’d say roughly half of my thesis ended up in my first book, which according to a lot of other writers I’ve talked to is a lot. Sometimes I look at the poems in the first book and feel embarrassed—it’s like my middle school yearbooks are open to the public. I can see how hard I was working in each poem. I hope it’s not as painfully evident to readers.

I double-checked my Excel spreadsheet and I’d entered Rookery in 16 contests before it won the Crab Orchard prize. I’m glad that it won when it did because I’d been considering only sending the manuscript to one more round of contests before retiring it to a drawer.

Please talk about the title, Rookery, and the way each section opens with a different definition of the word that is a prose poem all its own. How did you come to that title for this collection of poems? And the definitions that add so much?

The title Rookery came from a building in Chicago by the same name. I saw it on an architectural tour, and I was enthralled by it. I loved the tension of rough red granite exterior and light, airy, even whimsical interior. I love any good contradiction.

Originally the three sections were divided conventionally with numbers. I tried using a fragment of a line from within a poem to title each section. One of my thesis committee members didn’t like it, so I looked up the definition of the word rookery, and there they were, three definitions that seemed to encapsulate my obsessions—family, love, and violence. The definition poems came about because I was trying to challenge myself to break away from my strong narrative impulses and leap. The freedom of the lyric is often frightening to me. Exhilarating, too.

 There’s a series of aubades, a poem traditionally written to a lover before parting in the morning, that subvert the form in terrific ways, illuminating the speaker’s betrayal by her lover.  Please talk about your use of that form.

I kept returning to the aubade because I was forced to—not because my obsessions led me (because I was certainly afraid of that) but because a friend told me I had to.  I’d been scolded kindly for writing poems without risk. A friend of mine had me return to my most vulnerable poem (originally called “Aubade” and became “Aubade with a Fox and a Birthmark”) and keep rewriting until I’d said everything I was scared of. I think form provides a kind of safety, a set of rules I can play inside that helps me feel contained.  I need to feel safe enough to risk, and form often provides that for me.

  I’m fascinated when poets write an ars poetica. Please discuss yours, and what the writing of an ars poetica means to you.

One of my friends approaches her reading of almost every poem as an ars poetica. I wonder how much of that is true—how the every struggle in every poem is also the struggle to shape it into something beautiful, honest and controllable.

When I lived in Madison, WI, my apartment overlooked a busy street. The day this poem was written, I heard an accident. A car had come up onto the sidewalk and struck a lamppost. It sounded sharp, loud, terribly real. People had already run up to the vehicle and begun trying to help those inside. The sirens started. I watched, but there was nothing left for me to do. I was a witness with no responsibility, and it was awful. I feel that often, that terrible powerlessness. I want to be worthy of the life I’ve been given, and sometimes all I can do is acknowledge the suffering before me.

Here is the poem:

Ars Poetica

It happens as we set down one story
and take up another. We see it—the car,

the skid, the panic, the woman’s body, a stain
on snow like blood in a dancer’s shoe.

People bend over, afraid to touch her
in case she might rise, a bird startled to find

there wasn’t more light on the other side
of the window. The body in so much pain

the soul can no longer keep it. This is how
it happens—something in the earth awakens

and summons us. You feel fingers on your neck
and say, Take me to the snow, and it takes you.

 Please talk about how gender figures in Rookery, the way love and power intersect in relationships within and across gender lines.

I’ll admit I love strong women (who doesn’t?). While I’ve loved several men very deeply, my relationships with women have been one of the great joys of my life. I’m not totally sure how explicitly that love and those relationships (with men or women) inform the book. I do know that last fall when I was doing a class visit at a local college a young man told me that the gaze of the speaker in the poems made him uncomfortable because of the female speaker’s sensual view of the male subject(s) within the poems. He said it made him realize how uncomfortable women must be under the male erotic gaze. That wasn’t an intention I had when writing the poems, but it is a pretty satisfying result.

Some of the poems in Rookery seem to point toward the direction your work heads in your forthcoming book, Our Lady of the Ruins, which features a chorus of female speakers wandering an apocalyptic landscape looking for something, or someone, to worship. Lines from Rookery like, “God is a ghost / we inherit. God, hanging from a beam in the attic.” from the poem “Restoration of the Saints,” and “All I know of heaven is the fragile heat between / two bodies.” from the poem, “Requiem with Coal, Butterflies and Terrible Angels” and even some of the titles, like “Fiat Lux” and “Discipline with Lines from First Corinthians” all point to this tension between an apocalyptic view and the reach toward the divine in some form. Please talk about the movement of your work from book one to book two, the connections and differences between them.

I’m really fond of using relationship metaphors when talking about creative work and often say that I broke up with my first book but my second broke up with me. I knew I was tired of my first book. I spread all the poems out on the floor, put them in three sections, and then broke up with each section by writing a break up poem. I tried to have it out with my obsessions, and the final poem in each section is my break up poem with the ideas in each section.

I knew I was onto the second book when the way I was writing felt different. It felt different the way a new love feels different—mysterious, new, exciting. Of course my obsessions followed me, even though in many ways I tried to consciously move away from them. I knew it was over with book #2 when I couldn’t write the poems anymore. I tried. I loved writing those poems. It was awful to feel shut out of that imaginative space I’d written from for a couple of years, but just like the fate of love sometimes, the spark was gone.

 What are you working on now?

Since I finished Our Lady of the Ruins, I’ve tried a handful of things (you know, dated around lyrically), looking for what sparked next. I think I know when I’m onto something new when I find an imaginative space—questions, speakers, language—that are compelling to me, that resist me a little, that make me excited and a little afraid to sit down and write again. Lately, the poems I’ve been writing have taken place in or near Puraquequara, Brazil, where my mother was born. My obsessions are there in the river, there in the jungle, there in the animals, food, myths and language. I don’t know what it will amount to—if anything—but for now I’m enjoying making a big, thrilling mess.

Thank you so much for doing this interview with me, Traci. It’s such a pleasure to feature your book here at Frontal Junkyard and I can’t wait for Our Lady of the Ruins to come out in the spring! 

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, forthcoming), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (SIU Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, VQR, New England Review,and elsewhere.  A former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she’s currently a doctoral candidate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow  at Western Michigan University.