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Since Mississippi has been around me for most of my life, every poem I write is Mississippian. I couldn’t avoid that even if I wanted to. John Ashbery has said of New York that it’s not a place he writes about—it’s a large, in a sense “empty” place that makes his poetry possible. Hattiesburg, with its community of writers, has made my poetry possible. It’s a source of energy. As such, it is mostly invisible in my work. But always present, the way a loved person is always in one’s thoughts—non-specifically, wholly.

My most recent book, Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds, has been called (by my friend Jian Zheng) “a conduit for many dream voices that talk about psychological landscapes of mind.” I wrote it in a difficult time. Poetry was an island I could escape to. I was hurt and vulnerable but wasn’t interested in complaint, instead in seeing the world through the lens of this vulnerability, taking things past and present as they came. After writing several poems in the new voice, which seemed to me to be celebratory as well as sad, I thought of the New York School and began re-visiting its poems. This was like the rediscovery of a family I had always had. Though I began, true to my Southern Ohio roots, as a pastoral poet, I have always loved poems that embody playfulness. Back in 1979, Kenneth Koch’s poetry had eased the difficulty of making myself at home in a new place, Hattiesburg. And Ashbery and O’Hara’s work had always been in the back of my mind, like strokes of color half seen. But now they moved to the foreground, along with James Schuyler’s precise evocations of urban landscape, his small poems bursting at the seams with feeling.

Like the poetry of the New York School, the book constantly points toward other works of art that radiate energy and persistent delight. Obviously, I’m a fan of William Blake. His double vision of humanity as innocent and ironic seems true. That we have to apprehend both states, in order to see—the two lenses creating a third reality. The paradox that wonder and innocence coexist with unfathomed human and natural violence is a contradiction that art must try to sort out, though it must always fail. I think we would all like to talk sense into our experience. Because of this, I want my work to voice as many kinds of experience as it possibly can.

I’ve always been interested in daily life’s constant departures from the plot, its digressions and rabbit trails. Jean Rhys, deeply depressed and thinking of suicide, is attracted by a stationer’s display of brightly colored pens and decides to become a writer. Or a rather self-absorbed man is hit by hunger pangs in his wife’s hospital room and leaves to get a sandwich. Meanwhile, she dies. We’re surrounded by accidental intersections of people and the forces that act on them in ways both trivial and momentous. Nonsense and meaning are constant dance partners.

A hotel clerk is in a position to witness and record human incongruities. He or she also has lots of time for reading! Actually, I think of the book itself as the clerk, witnessing night and its guests, who may or may not give their correct names.

Oxford

While it’s obviously untrue that poetry doesn’t exist outside the halls of academe (this writer is, I hope, an example), writers not only flock to campuses for the teaching opportunities but also for the cultural life college and university towns offer. One such place is surely Oxford--a single visit to Square Books will make you vow never to place an order through Amazon again but to use their web page or call their enormously helpful, well-read, and stubbornly independent-minded staff. A pilgrimage to Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s large but decidedly un-grand home--I particularly love his “office,” which he refused to call a “study” because, he said, nothing was studied there; instead, work got done--is certainly in order. (And so is a look at a plethora of new books about Faulkner himself and his little postage stamp of native soil: Becoming Faulkner, Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art, and Yoknapatawpha: A Photographic Study of Faulkner’s County.)

Oxford has long been associated, of course, with some of the best fiction ever written in America. I’ve been beyond fortunate to know two of its most astonishing practitioners--how I miss the steadfast and loyal friendship of the late Larry Brown! Barry Hannah won a permanent place in my heart by purchasing my first collection at Square Books and leaving a note asking that it be signed, a place widened when I read in an interview that he won’t read a story or novel if its prose doesn’t “scan,” a word that many if not most of those who write in those genres connect with computer functions, not language. Yet when Richard Howorth, founder of Square Books and now the town mayor, kindly invited me to read there in 1992 and 2000, I had the distinct feeling that my audience consisted of hastily assembled staff members. Of course, the small number of those in attendance could betray a lack of interest in the poet, but my sense was that it had more to do with a lack of interest in poetry itself. Things have changed:

Beth Ann Fennelly and Ann Fisher-Wirth, all by their own selves, as we say Down Here, are two women who have transformed Oxford into a verse-friendly place through various programs with their students, as should be implicit in the following conversation. In addition, I wanted to learn what they were after in their own new work.

AFW: I have two new books out this year, Carta Marina and Slide Shows, and they are as different from each other as could be.

I wrote Carta Marina, a book-length poem, while teaching on a Fulbright in Sweden. It was inspired by the first geographically accurate map of the Northern Countries, completed by Olaus Magnus in 1539. This map, the Carta Marina , explodes with phantasmagoria—trolls, sea serpents, lions, warriors, monsters—and in my poem they become metaphors for the wildness, dream, and terror that haunt our constructions of order. When I began to write my book, I had no idea of the events that would soon shake my life, when my distant past came alive once more, and so the poem unfolds as the year unfolded.

Slide Shows is set in 1950’s Japan, where I lived with my Army family. It is a chapbook, containing nineteen ten-line poems that hover formally between sonnets and haiku, and that create my story of those years. I started the series after rediscovering the thousands of slides my dad took with his Leica cameras—slides that bored me as a kid but that I treasure now as a window into his life.

BAF: My new book is called Unmentionables, published by W. W. Norton, 2008. This, my third collection of poems, explores the unmentionable--not only what is too bold to be mentioned but what can't be said because the intended listener is unavailable, or because our language is insufficient. These poems investigate the mystery of human relationships--between lovers, family members, individuals and society, ourselves and our perception of ourselves. Four sections collect shorter narratives--the adolescent prank of cow tipping, the footie pajamas worn by babies, a memory of a favorite babysitter. They attempt to question our human foibles, such as national imperialism, limited gender roles, and the cruelty imbedded in our everyday interactions.

Between these sections of shorter poems are three longer sequences. The first, "The Kudzu Chronicles," presents the transplanted kudzu weed in all its gothic beauty and convoluted history to investigate how landscape influences psychology and to explore my role in the American South.

I confess I’ve been writing more nonfiction than poetry lately--some essays on craft, some personal essays, some pieces on food and music for the Oxford American, and some freelance writing on home design for magazines.

AFW: We complement each other. I have been coediting an anthology of contemporary American ecopoetry and teaching seminars in environmental literature as well as poetry workshops. So though our poetry has certain things in common—and though we are fans of each other’s work—each of our special interests also extends the range of what we can offer our students.

BAF: True—and because our program is small, if we duplicated each other’s interests exactly, things would get pretty boring for the students.

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AFW: I have wonderful memories of going to Junior Kimbrough’s out by Holly Springs, dancing and listening to him play with R.L. Burnside. Even before that, though, my husband and I saw Otha Turner and Lonnie Pitchford play once on campus, and they just blew my mind. We have been in Mississippi for twenty-one years. Shortly after we moved here, Matthew Johnson—who later founded Fat Possum Records—was my student. I’m so grateful to him and others for saving so much great music, but I miss the blues musicians who are now gone.

BAF: I love living in a town with great live music, and living in a state with such a beautiful tradition of it, but I do feel that blues traditions are vulnerable right now, as a lot of the old juke joints are closing and the old musicians dying. But Ole Miss is home to the biggest blues archive in the country, and a lot of scholarship is being done here to record and preserve these musicians before they pass.

Though the Oxford American, which Fennelly mentions, is now located in Arkansas, the resplendent quality of the work, both prose and poetry, that editor Marc Smirnoff publishes hasn’t suffered from the relocation. The multi-talented J. E. Pitts, author of The Weather of Dreams and the magazine’s former poetry editor, labored for years to make essential the poetry the magazine now prints. Smirnoff himself wrote an excellent piece on Pitts’ artwork--he’s also a musician--in a back issue; to put the matter bluntly, if you haven’t already treated yourself to the Oxford American, what are you waiting for? Or, for that matter, The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing? Two of my all-time favorite pieces, on the music of Burnside and on Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys, remain, respectively, the incomparable Sven Birkert’s--see his praise, which he does not dish out indiscriminately, on the front cover of the paperback edition, reproduced here, of Hannah’s last novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan--and Anthony Walton’s.  (Author's note: the cover photo of Yonder Stands Your Orphan is "Dog in Fog" by Maude Schuyler Clay) As for the archive mentioned above, for many years it was overseen by William Ferris, who was head of the NEH under Clinton. His new book, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues, which is accompanied by a CD and DVD, gives an initial and obviously heartfelt acknowledgement to B.B. King, whom he interviewed--and quite memorably--for Southern Cultures.

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Houston, TX

I’ve long admired the work of several native Texans and those who teach there: Catherine Bowman (I can’t wait to receive my copy of The Plath Cabinet, the first laudable cycle of poems on the poet since Ted Hughes’s The Birthday Letters), Mark Doty, and Bin Ramke, to offer a trio of worthies. And I’ve heard many approving things said about the faculty at the University of Houston, Doty and our valedictory poet, Bruce Smith, among them. Yet all I know about Houston is that I’ve driven there en route to New Orleans a few times and liked it not even a little bit, despite its reputation as a center of cultural riches. But my introduction to Anna Journey came through one of the poets in the first installment of this series, Molly Bendall. And, to return to the initial theme of doubling in this piece, Journey could be Bendall’s beguiling and slightly dangerous younger sister; oddly (perhaps), they are both connected to Richmond. Journey is something of a prodigy, having had her initial collection If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series while completing her second book and her Ph.D. at the University of Houston. Journey’s background is fascinating: she spent her early childhood years in less-travelled corners of what we generally refer to as “overseas,” before she moved to Virginia.

DB: How did growing up in Bangladesh and India affect you and your work?

AJ: Growing up in the developing world made for a pretty Victorian childhood. We had no regular access to television, and my mother read to us constantly from British children’s books. I even picked up certain British affectations from the fairy tales. There’s a Christmas video of me raising one august finger in the air, going, “I say, Mommy…”

Peer Gynt was my favorite fairy tale character. He’s such a brassy, adventurous imp. During the monsoons, my sister and I launched our own adventures as our sun-bleached garden rumbled alive with rain and toads. After the showers, our elderly gardener, Gopal, helped us scoop up slimy toads and place them in old pickle jars with air holes pierced through the lids. We’d stare giddily at the toad-jars for a while, and then let them loose. It was a magical place.

Of course, there were also darker aspects of my life in Dhaka and New Delhi. I saw wretchedly poor and homeless people with missing limbs in the market, addicts spitting chewed betel nut—a stimulant—in red swaths on the public walls, spindly cattle and goats in the roads.

This is all to say that I’m not exactly sure how living overseas affected my writing. There’s a lushness and a peculiarity to the images in my poems that may be rooted in that mythic garden—its bougainvillea, hibiscus, and black-eyed pea patch.

DB: How is it that you seem to have crept gracefully out of a swamp rather than being from two of the strip mall capitals of the world: Northern Virginia and Houston, Texas?

AJ: Although I grew up in suburban Fairfax, I moved to Richmond as a be-sandaled eighteen-year-old to go to art school at Virginia Commonwealth University. I planned to be a potter, live in the Blue Ridge, and maybe venture off my mountain once in a while for a Phish concert.

Toward the end of art school, I realized that poetry better served the images and ideas I wanted to explore. So I finished my art degree and then got my MFA in creative writing at VCU. I ended up living in Richmond for eight years. Despite my various travels, I feel the strongest ties to that city: the laid-back folk, the James River, the ancient magnolias. It’s mostly this landscape that haunts If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting rather than bourgeois mega-malls and Olive Gardens. In Richmond, a person can peep through holes in the cobblestone alleys and glimpse other centuries: a whole underworld of exposed brick. This kind of visual layering of history seems essential and right to me, and it’s a similar kind of landscape, perhaps, that takes shape in my own head.

DB: How does someone your age--everyone else is forty- or fifty-something--view the contemporary scene?

AJ: I suppose writerly egotism isn’t anything new. I mean, look at Wordsworth. Now there’s a guy proud of his own humility! I’m less disturbed by the machinations of garden variety self-promoters than I am with the real dangers posed by the current zeitgeist of irony and cleverness. I think such modes, when overused, can sometimes stifle emotional urgency in a poem.

That said, though, I feel like it’s a good time to be a poet. There are many young poets whose work continues to invigorate and surprise me, such as the poems of Sarah Vap, Ashley Capps, Kara Candito, Nicky Beer, and Joshua Poteat. I was recently kept up late reading a stunning debut collection by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Father Dirt.

DB: Do you think it's a Southern thang to be intrigued by superstition and coincidences?

AJ: Aside from greatly enjoying my cheese biscuits and fried okra, I don’t know that I could (or should) speak with Faulknerian authority on Southern-ness in literature. In an essay on the lyric, though, Northrop Frye writes that all poems are either like puzzles or magic spells. I’m drawn to poems that have qualities in common with magic spells: mystery, music, potency, danger, strangeness.

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