Reyumeh Ejue

Interviewed by Yolanda Kwadey

What prompted you to write “Natives”?

I promise not to let this response get too longwinded because it’s a favorite chew-bone of mine, haha! I’m from Nigeria, but I now live in the US. When I was in Nigeria, I couldn’t wait to leave, just like other people my age can’t wait to leave. And then I came to the US and discovered that Americans are obsessed with home. There are Americans who are proud of the fact that they’ve never lived outside of where they were born. In Nigeria, we move from our villages to our cities, and then from our cities to the rest of the world. It goes without saying that when I came to the US, I began to miss home. I realized that I was aching for every morsel of home, including the bad bits. So, I wanted to see what it would look like to have a character experience that. This was my entry point into the story.

Why did you choose to make Emem, the Nigerian, the side character? Does it have anything to do with demonstrating range instead of being bound to societal and industry expectations?

I feel bad that my answer isn’t going to be as interesting as all that. This story is one part of a triptych, each from the POV of a major character.

The way that a woman and her experiences are the focus of “Natives” is almost reminiscent of Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, especially because you mention New York at some point. As is suspected of Thurman, are there any aspects of yourself that you write into your main character? Would anything be lost if your couple were men instead?

I’ll reveal some of my ignorant ways by saying this: I only heard about Thurman’s novel when it was referenced in the Kendrick Lamar song. I’ve since read it, but it’s a book I should have known about way earlier than 2015.

As for your question about characterization, when I was a moody teenager in Calabar, I planned to live all over Northern and Western Nigeria as soon as I turned eighteen. That never happened, so it was fun to allow my character to hit the road on my behalf. Another story in the triptych is from the point of view of Tawo and his partner Gabriel. Writing about them was different, not because I was writing men, but because I was writing characters with different preoccupations and anxieties from Sara and Emem—the women. 

I’m glad you mention Calabar! I know that writers normally write places that they know— for example we see the Calabar mention in “Natives” when it comes to Emem. As an Iowan resident, what made you decide to set your story in a little Vermont town rather than somewhere in the Midwest? And have you been to Oregon, Texas, and all these places your characters have been, or is that still you living vicariously through them?

Haha! Before I was in Iowa, I was in New Jersey, and I used to travel up to Vermont to visit family and friends there. I haven’t been as far west as Oregon, but I have been to Idaho and California. That’s close enough, right? I have visited Texas and Georgia as every Nigerian in the US does at some point. And there was a very cold winter that nearly made me swear off New York for good. Anyway, back to your question, I set the story in Vermont because the people I visited there were the initial inspiration for the first story I wrote in the collection.

Yes, I have a whole collection of stories exploring the sheer absurdity of Nigerians in New England!

This New England collection of stories sounds interesting! Is that something you are still working on? Should we anticipate seeing them soon, or are there other projects that you are currently focused on?

The collection is more or less done now. Three stories have been published, including this one, of course, and a fourth might be joining them soon. I’m also working on a novel in the style of Javier Marias about young people in Calabar. There was a lot of ennui and dissatisfaction when I was a young person in Calabar. Our parents are stoic and dignified, we are self-absorbed and very brittle. I’m asking, what is wrong with us? Or is there even something wrong with us?

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Ernest Hilbert

Interviewed by Chloe Cook and Taylor Light

“Swimming South Off Key West” and “Unruled” exhibit a subtle and pleasant attention to sound, especially with internal rhyme. How do you employ prosody in your work? Do you actively reach for the rhymes, or do they subconsciously make their way into your poems?

The sound of a poem has always been of paramount importance to me, both as a reader and an author. “Swimming South Off Key West” is written in a free verse that settles into iambic pentameter at times, as in the line “The wind is up. I dive. I rise to find . . .” or “It breaks and glides to hunt in deeper blue.” This is the type of roughly decasyllabic line I used for most of the poems in my first two books, which were rhymed sonnets. I set this poem in tercets simply as a way of gaining control and managing the material, though I thought of the trinity as swimmer, bird, and sea. Its basic rhetorical structure is one of ecstatic imagery borne on a musical current to evoke an experience of wild motion—swimming in all that water. There is a sense of immersing oneself in the primordial ocean and of struggling to move determinedly within the sway of a greater force. This is a kind of allegorical realism in keeping with my most recent book, Storm Swimmer: the realization that, while we may be able to exert some control, we do so only within a medium larger than we are—one that at times will move us against our wishes, that may refuse to give us up or allow us to leave. That medium can be a family, an economic system, a job, a political situation. To answer your question more directly, I do not deliberately plan the sound of the poem. I wish I could. It arrives sideways, somehow, from the periphery of thought. I can’t decide when or how it will happen. My writing style is more a matter of feel than intention. I can’t summon the creative act at will. I must wait for it to happen, though I enhance it through revision. I really can’t write until the correct sound occurs to me. It begins with the sound, with a line, a set of rhymes, a stanza, in my mind. The sound precedes the poem.

“Unruled” is an example of what the modernist poet and illustrator David Jones referred to as the “poem as object.” It concerns the ways in which the imagination fashions new laws from old ones, reimagines how the pieces of one rubric or pattern might be used in another. To summon this process, I used iambic feet set in varying constructions—trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter—along with occasional rhymes—squares/stairs, sunlight/height. Again, it came to me more or less naturally in the moment. I picked up a notebook while my son was playing nearby and took notes in verse that I later used to make the poem. My son’s creation of a new game using old pieces of other games inspired in me a heightened sense of the ways in which play is vital to both art and life, but also how we often must suppress such unhesitating childlike impulses in order to function on a daily basis, get through our days, address our many responsibilities. It is also a poem about how poems are made, about bricolage, the way art is created from parts of the art that came before, from what is available to us, reassembled, envisioned in new ways.

“Barred Island” is cast in a higher register than the other two poems—a cold, classical style befitting the mythic setting. It is set in a free verse that relies heavily on iambic runs throughout, freely arranged, but easy to detect, as in “each time I fail, return, and wait. / I keep my watch as sunlight goes.” I sought language as flinty and forbidding as the setting itself, moving forward in starts, like the swimmer unsure if he will be able endure the freezing water long enough to reach the island he sees in the distance. It may be obvious that I feel more comfortable in the water than on dry land. It’s inevitable that some of that experience will get into the poems, even if the act of swimming stands in for something else. In that poem, the detailed images of the mainland display what the speaker knows because it is where he has lived for so long. No aspect of this frozen landscape is beneath notice. What is unknown is what lies on the island, the place longed for, seen in the distance, but never reached.

Both “Swimming South Off Key West” and “Barred Island” offer indelible imagery tethered to location. To what degree do geography and travel inform your work? Where is your favorite place to write?

The poems were inspired by real places, usually from notes taken at those places. The first poem is set in the warm, teeming, amniotic waters off the southernmost point of the continental United States, at Higgs Beach on Key West. The second is in the boreal, almost lethally cold waters at Goose Cove on the southern coast of Deer Isle, Maine, across from Barred Island, which can only be reached at low tide. I swam at both places. While working on “Barred Island,” I also had in mind the painting “Die Toteninsel” (“Isle of the Dead”) by Arnold Böcklin. In the first poem, the experience is more general, an elemental submersion that returns the swimmer to a time before the emergence of human thought, or to a place beneath it, a primal moment of intense, non-cerebral experience. The second is set in an entirely mythical realm, beyond history. Both poems are about life lived intensely but also about endless struggle, and, ultimately, confrontations with death. Like “Unruled,” they are attempts to re-spiritualize a despiritualized world, to shock it back to life.

I don’t have a favorite place to write or a routine of any kind. I’ve never really had time to write. From 6AM when I wake until I fall asleep again at night I have no time in which it is appropriate for me to write. Far from preventing me from being a poet, this struggle to find time has become the very thing that allows me to be a poet, because it compels me to be a poet all the time, to think about poetry every moment I have, and to write poems in my mind, on the tongue, so to speak, jot down whatever I have in fugitive moments among other demands. If I were given time to write, with no distractions or other concerns, I might spend the rest of my life staring at a blank page or screen or encountering only silence in my mind. I write wherever I am, on the bus, the trolley, at work, getting dressed, or, most fruitfully, when swimming. I need the sense that I’m pushing against forces arrayed against me. Writing a poem is one of the few things that has consistently brought me happiness, but the time spent working on a poem is also painful. I throw myself so fully into poems that it becomes a real struggle to get myself back out again. I suppose one might dismiss it as an elaborate form of escapism.

It appears that these poems derive from book projects that are currently under construction. Could you speak to what we might expect—thematically, formally, geographically, or otherwise? How do “Unruled,” “Barred Island,” and “Swimming South Off Key West” represent those projects?

“Swimming South of Key West” is part of April Arsenal, a book devoted to meditations on the kinds of decline and renewal, decadence and reinvention, that occur over the course of a human life. In many ways, it is about the experience of entering an altered state, even one made up of memories, as part of that process of renewal, but it is also about how difficult it can be to escape from that state.

“Barred Island” and “Unruled” are part of a more ambitious book called High Ashes, a work of complete madness that has consumed me for nearly half a decade. It is a book that questions its own existence, that calls itself into being with help from the reader. It contains a playable D&D module with maps by fantasy artists, word puzzles, bibliographic entries, legal documents. It includes sigils and emblems from a noted heavy-metal logo artist. Some of the poems have been set by composer Stella Sung for baritone and symphony orchestra. That piece, titled “High Ashes,” was commissioned by German baritone Maximilian Krummen as a companion song cycle for Gustav Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen” (“Songs of a Wayfarer”). Another composer, Montreal-based Christopher LaRosa, scored a piece for crystal pyramids and recorded it as atmospheric music for the book. A digitally engraved staff for that piece appears as one of the poems, “The Music Heard Above.” A third, an English EDM artist named Charlie Philips, is also creating a soundtrack for parts of the book, music that may become part of a spoken word album. He worked on Radiohead’s Kid A album, arranging for them to record a portion of the album at Batsford Manor, the former home of the infamous Mitford sisters. I toyed with the idea of commissioning someone to create a new font specifically for the book, but I’ve since backed away from that.

“Unruled” and “Barred Island” are both about unknown worlds, the creation of new worlds from the old, about traveling to an undiscovered place, which works alongside the notion, conjured throughout the book, that author and reader work together to create something that hasn’t existed before, that departs from what is known but also makes use of all that came before. Because it is about a book that may not exist, as well as a place that may not exist, it is also my attempt to understand poetry as a way of conjuring, of imagination used as a kind of real magic in our lives. I’ve been tangled in the book for so long it’s become comforting to work on it. I dwell in its pages. I never want to stop working on it, but I fear the end is near for the book. The process of creation and revision has a natural conclusion, and I must accept that. I miss a book when I’m done working on it.

What are some books that have recently influenced you? Who are some poets to which you find yourself returning?

The last four poetry books I’ve read may be divided neatly between the late modernist and the late-this-very-year variety. I revisited Geoffrey Hill’s first few books as collected in Somewhere is Such a Kingdom, Poems 1952-1971, with an introduction by Harold Bloom. The hieratic, lapidary, almost palpable language of his early books appeals to me, as if I could touch and hold the poems as physical objects. I spent a few weeks reading and rereading David Jones’s Wedding Poems, a “Prothalamion” and “Epithalamion” (titles as nods to Spenser), which he wrote for two close friends who married in a small ceremony during the 1940 bombing of London by the Luftwaffe. The poems were lost for many years and only published in 2002 by Enitharmon Press, along with a lavish apparatus of footnotes, notes on revisions, foreword and afterword, and reproductions of drawings he made at the time. Meanwhile, in 2024, just last month, I found Amy Glynn’s Romance Language a delight, the very epitome of wry elegance, combining passion and intellectual playfulness, as well as a forceful sense of longing and regret, all in verse finely turned with an ironic wink. The last, which I’m midway through, is Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles, a sequence of gravity-defying leaps of intuition, imagery, and emotion, which I’m finding myself gripped by. It is a powerfully moving book. I also read at least one poem by Emily Dickinson each morning, just to keep her in my ear. I find her gnomic hymnody beguiling. 

Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers?

I can begin with the advice poets gave in response to this very question when I interviewed them. W. D. Snodgrass answered, jokingly, “if you can be happy doing anything else, do it.” He went on to add, “Everything pays better. Everything is more honestly rewarded. But if you’ve got to do it, then you’re a life-termer.” Donald Hall told me that “life should be lived toward moments when you lose yourself in what you are doing.” He then told me what the sculptor Henry Moore told him, when he interviewed him in 1959: “You must have something you want to do more than anything else, that’s at the center of your being, the center of your life, the one thing you really want. The most important thing about this desire is that it must be incapable of fulfillment.”

My answer to you would be a combination of those two answers. If you’re a poet, you’re a poet for life, and it is a slow, long journey. It can’t be rushed. There are no shortcuts. The rewards are few, if any. In fact, they serve only as distractions to the work. You must serve the art as an acolyte of something greater than you are, something that has existed since the dawn of civilization, and which will go on after you are gone. You are small, but you are part of it, and that is consolation enough. Also, you must believe that the best poem you will ever write lies ahead of you. You simply have to keep trying for it. Be patient. Be aware. Work toward it. Care about it. Believe it is worth doing. Help others. Hope. And wait.

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Brett Hymel Jr.

Interviewed by Albertine Clark

In “Sweepstakes,” you have two ostensibly extraterrestrial characters, Glorp and Thoraxis. One of the things that interests me the most about this story is the role of the extraterrestrial, both within Dean’s internal world and outside of it. To phrase it as simply as I can—in writing, what is the role of an alien?

Well, first off, thank you for this interview and thank you to Subtropics for everything. This was on my list of dream publications and to think that I have both a story and an interview coming out here is beyond surreal to me. This is my first-ever interview and these questions are all so wonderful and thought-provoking and I have a secret suspicion that I’m going to be graded on my introspection and self-analysis at the end of this, and that that grade is going to fall somewhere in the C-F range, so let me just put this out here first and foremost to get ahead of the “he’s an idiot” allegations: I am an idiot. And I have no clue what I’m doing. And writing to me is a practice of f-ing up on the page over and over again until, over time, it becomes something slightly less f-ed up.

Case in point: I think the alien is a sort of extreme example of the visitor allegory. In the past, including, ahem, previous iterations of this story, I’ve used visitor allegory as a way to insert a parable aspect into my fiction—the visitor shows up, points out the ways in which the narrator has ruined their life and continues to ruin their life, and then dips out. And I’ve come to realize that the only people who appreciate fiction that moralizes to that degree are conservatives and toddlers. And so now I regard the alien as a character that is there to observe and suggest things, and that suggestion plants a kernel of something—doubt, reflection, remorse—in a character’s mind. What interests me about “Sweepstakes” in particular—and what was fun to write—is this idea that Dean is pretty much static in terms of his character, and what Glorp and Thoraxis suggest to him doesn’t necessarily readjust his outlook, it just brings back things he’s already known which he’s repressed. And so we, because we are so closely aligned with Dean’s mental process, don’t necessarily see a variation in the route, we just get a larger picture of the fixed track he’s moving on.

To me this is a story about trauma. Is there something about trauma, or other strongly negative or unbearable emotions, that lends itself to a particularly speculative narration? What is it that can’t be said in a more conventional, “literary fiction” form?

I don’t know! I don’t feel like I have the authority to say. I think more conventional forms, realist forms, etc. can do anything that speculative stuff can also do in terms of emotion. I think emotion is a concept that’s going to persist in memorable stories no matter what genre they fall under. I think that the particular benefit I derive from the more speculative stuff is having my attention span tickled enough to finish a story. If, for some reason, I were forced to write this piece without aliens and without glass eyes and without a sort of absurd time loop occurring, I wouldn’t ever finish it and it wouldn’t ever get published. So most of the speculative choice for me is just a matter of personal interest. I don’t want to be in reality. Most of the time, I’d rather be anywhere else. I think that injecting a philosophical reflection on trauma into what might seem like a fairly absurd story on its face is my way of both having and eating cake. I get to write something with real feeling set in a very unreal situation.

And, as a last note, I feel honor-bound to mention that I don’t really get a distinction between speculation and literariness and I don’t think it’s very useful for the state of literature as a whole to think of these as mutually exclusive terms. I think anyone trying to carve out a niche for themselves should think of themselves as their own genre, full of its conventions and inspirations and areas of particular interest. Other people can try and define what I write but in my head I only ever write Brett fiction. When I try to brand myself, I describe my fiction as stories for bugs. Bugs are slimy and weird and when I see a crazy bug I go, “Hell yeah.” But I don’t think that really clues people in on what I write about. If somebody were to put a gun to my head and ask me, “Define yourself in terms of genre,” I’d tell him, “Hell yeah,” and then he’d blow my brains out.

This story has an unusual but instantly recognisable atmosphere. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut, specifically Slaughterhouse-Five, but also of other male writers who talk about loneliness and desperation – Denis Johnson, Barry Hannah, David Foster Wallace. Could you talk a little bit about your literary godparents, as it were? Who inspired this particular blend of rage-and-sadness-filled speculative fiction?

Thank you so much for putting my name in conversation with three brilliant writers whose work I love and admire and David Foster Wallace. I got my undergraduate degree at UF, and Padgett Powell was on the way out by the time I got there, but I learned from one of his mentees, so I like to think I’m a grandchild of Padgett Powell and, by extension, a great-grandchild of Donald Barthelme. George Saunders is big with me, same with Barry Hannah and Flannery O’Connor. I’m obsessed with the magical realists: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, Italo Calvino. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of joy from Percival Everett and Dan Chaon. Maybe I’m outing myself too much here, but this story started from a Dan Chaon short story called “The Bees”. I read that story and fell in love with it instantly, and since then Dan Chaon’s work has been formative for me.

Why is this story so funny? Is that something you thought about overtly during writing, or did it come out more organically?

You’re laughing? This guy is stuck in a horrible loop of alien abduction and repressed

memory and you’re laughing?

The woman and the boy add a strange kind of triangulation to the piece, in that they also, in a sense, have an experience of Dean’s internal world—they seem to exist both inside and outside of him. What did you think about when writing those two characters? What are they there to prove or exemplify?

If my introspection grade isn’t already in the gutter, this question will tank it for sure. I

think that I enjoy the hallucinogenic quality that they lend the piece. Everything about them, their presence, their interruption, their fascinations, feels a little off to me, and I like this idea that they’re occupying a sort of uncertain space inside of an already fraught mind. With that being said, I didn’t ever want them to feel too fantastical, too imagined in the piece. I wanted very badly to portray them as real. I love the idea that they’re on their own type of quest, that Dean is simply a secondary character in their particular story, and that they could live in Dean’s world for a little bit before they move on to something else.

The story has a strong sense of place, a particularly American place, in a way that made it feel quite cinematic. What were some of your visual inspirations? Do you watch a lot of movies?

I’m a recent convert to movies; I’ve been watching a lot of horror and dark comedy lately

to make up for a lifetime of not watching as many movies as I should have. The visual inspiration for this, however, were two visits to Albuquerque I made in 2022 and 2023. I grew up in the South my entire life, so seeing the high desert/scrubland/mountains of northern New Mexico was incredible. We got in a truck and zoomed around the dunes and empty arroyos. We hooked the abandoned shell of a car to the truck’s winch and rode it like it was a sled. In the evening, we took a lift thousands of feet in the air to the top of a mountain still covered in snow from the winter. As much as I love Florida, you don’t get that pleasure of topography.

I think about all of the “bad” (learning, growing) fiction I’ve read in undergraduate workshops and as a reader for various literary magazines, and I feel that there’s an archetype of story I call the “tree story.” Somebody sits under a tree, looks at its majesty for three or four pages, and comes to a strong conclusion about their life based solely on the beauty of the tree. I don’t want to be the tree guy. When I write landscape, I try to condense as much panorama into as little space as possible. I’ll give myself a sentence, maybe two, just to set the scene, and then we’re in it.

Who is Dean, to you? Is he a representation of a kind of life, a kind of emotional state, or is he a real person?

This is going to come as a shock, but my family tree has two shiny apples called ADDICTION and MENTAL ILLNESS. A lot of people in my life have struggled with addiction or don’t have to struggle with it any longer because they’re dead. Dean struggles in the same way they do. To answer where he comes from, whether he’s real or not—all my characters are real to me. They get up off the page, speak to me, dictate their own actions when I want to do something dumb, and maybe this is the mental illness talking, but that’s when they become a character for me, not just an idea or a line of witty dialogue. Dean is as real in my mind as my conception of self is. He’s a conglomeration of people I know, and he’s a little bit of intuition, and he’s somebody who at some point has taken the reins from me and written himself into his own corners.

I’ve had my writing described as nihilistic, which I would disagree with. I’m a hater, and a cynic, but I’m also a lover, and sometimes I can even be persuaded into giving hugs. I don’t want anybody to come away from “Sweepstakes” with the idea that things will never get better. Many people get caught in these cycles, but many more break free. That’s a continual process too. I know people who have broken free, are breaking free, and I love and support them in their struggle.

With that being said, I do get a strong urge to apologize to Dean whenever I read this story. He’s f-ed his life up pretty badly, but I still feel for him by the end. If you could help me out in this—maybe when you get to the end of the story you just give the magazine a little wave and say, “Sorry, Dean.” I don’t know if that will make him feel better or not, but that’s not really in my hands anymore, that’s up to him to decide.

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Piotr Florczyk

Interviewed by Jonathan Wolf

You’ve said that your earliest poems (“doodles of thought and emotion”) arrived shortly after you moved from Kraków to California. What can you say about the urge to write? Was there any initial, galvanizing experience that set you chattering? And at what point—and how—did writing become more than a mere enjoyment?

When I moved to Southern California in 1994, it was for sports, as a high caliber swimmer sent to train with the best by the Polish Swimming Federation, not for school let alone poetry. I arrived in September and by December I was so homesick that I wanted to go back to Poland. Writing became an outlet—for making sense of my feelings and thoughts, of course, but also my identity, which began to undergo what ultimately amounted to seismic changes. I didn’t get serious about writing, even though I’ve always been a reader, until midway through college, which, by the way, I attended on a swimming scholarship. It’s hard to write when everyone thinks of you as a jock, but the need to do it came from within. Then, after college, while still involved with competitive swimming, I entertained entering a PhD program in History but changed my mind at the proverbial the last minute, having made the decision to commit myself to literature. I still doodle a lot, but my background as an athlete plays a huge role in my writing life. How so? I try to be consistent, have a plan, goals, etc. In other words, I’d like to think of myself as a poet/writer who gets things done.

I particularly love “People’s Overture.” It’s funny, tragic, aspirational—for me, it ably covers all the ground a good “political poem” should hope to. Can you tell us where this one came from?

I am a promiscuous reader of all kinds of poetry and writing in general. There is no other way to be, I think. Some days I long for brief lyric poems, while other times I am drawn to expansive treatises. What really gets me going is a poem or a piece of writing that I can’t figure out, but that’s not how most people work or read. In fact, we are living in the age of sincerity and immediacy. How else to explain the popularity of the so-called Instapoets? Sadly, this desire for straight-up narratives about this or that has led to the discounting of works that are formally ambitious. Fair enough, I say, but then I remember that literature is also about how things are being said. I like it when a poem, that is, the poem’s form and its language, make me work for it.

In terms of “People’s Overture”—and I can’t thank you enough for your kind words about it—people either love it or hate it. Its genesis is rather pedestrian: it came from my listening to and reading up on various national anthems, and in that sense, it is best thought of as a composite poem. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but one can learn quite a bit from listening to the national anthems of countries from around the world; the lyrics tell us how the nation sees itself and how it wishes to present itself to the world. The poem plays with the idea of nationhood and, by extension, it questions national frameworks, ideals, and stereotypes.

Absolutely. And that’s interesting. I’d recognized the poem as a kind of mazurka (spry and folky, written in threes) but hadn’t made the connection to anthems. Rereading it now, the poem seems almost haunted by a phantom brass section! I always find it interesting when a poem (or any other bit of writing) melds research and experience—as do your last book of English poems, From the Annals of Kraków (2020, Lynx House Press), and your recent book of essays, Swimming Pool (2024, Bloomsbury). Do you think of research as a part of your creative work?

I love what you say about “People’s Overture” being haunted by a “phantom brass section”! Your comment reinforces my belief that poems can be deep and fun at the same time, which was my goal in writing this piece. Like many writers, I came to poetry with the idea of writing Poetry—you know, serious stuff about serious things—but then I realized that poems channeling ambiguity, or humor, can be just as powerful (not to mention that they are, arguably, more difficult to write).

For me, it almost always comes down to how something is written rather than what it is about. With the two books you’ve mentioned, and especially From the Annals of Kraków, which is a volume of poems based on testimonies of Holocaust survivors, the question of how is of paramount importance. Here, the research part is present, directly or indirectly, in almost every poem. The question of why also hangs over the entire project since I am not Jewish. Did I fail to stay in my lane? Absolutely, and I’m proud of it. To limit ourselves as poets to writing exclusively from the personal/lived experience, to not venture out into the past or the world as we don’t know it but long to learn from and about, seems self-defeating, to say the least. So, yes, I think of research as an integral part of my creative practice, including the kind of research that is not project-oriented but simply comes from the reading that I do. All writers should read more than they write—don’t you think?—just as we’re told to first listen, then talk.

Do these ideas—the importance of listening, research, and reading as methods of working outside of personal experience—influence your work as a translator? There seems to be endless disagreement as to the “proper” attitudes and responsibilities translators should have to their material.

Translators and poets/writers are similar in many ways, including in that—contrary to popular opinion, which paints them nearly exclusively as benevolent engines of cultural dialogue—the former pursue glory and fame just like the latter do. Likewise, the main responsibility of translators should be to do their job well. Period.

Of course, there is a lot to be said about the sociology of translation, especially the why of this book or that author being selected for translation, which, by the way, automatically results in others voices from the same literary tradition losing their shot at being translated due to the literary marketplace’s—I’m talking about the US here—inability to handle foreign authors in large quantities. It’s a peculiar situation, and something that all translators should be cognizant of, especially those who translate from the so-called minor languages.

For me, translating has always been about writing. Sure, there was some ambition to expand the canon of Polish poetry in English translation, but ultimately, I got into translation because it’s the best way to learn how to write. This explains, at least in part, why 99% of the authors I’ve translated are my exact or near contemporaries, and then also why their work differs from my own (or did, when I was translating it). 

Zagajewski imagined writers as managing a swarm of contradictions (between irony and ecstasy, beauty and honesty, the inexpressibility of the “inner world” and its need to be expressed through some subject). What contradictions do you think are most pertinent to poets writing today, and how do they work their way through your writing?

I wouldn’t want to speak for others, but in my case, the contradictions I most wrestle with stem from my experience as a migrant. See, I used to dislike visiting Poland—my parents and sisters didn’t come with me to the US, so I had reasons to go back—but now I do, quite often, in fact, which is why I prefer the term migrant to immigrant. Like any migrant/immigrant, I struggle with issues of identity, no matter how sure I am about who I am (on most daysJ). I also, after initially writing only in Polish and then exclusively in English, write in both of my languages, and my bi- or multilingualism creates its own set of dilemmas. Inevitably, this extends into issues of belonging, both as a person but also as a writing artist. You know, there was a time when I wanted to be called an American poet, but then I realized that that would never happen, that the American literary establishment, no matter how good my work may be, would never think of me as one of their own, that I would forever be thought of as someone from elsewhere. It wasn’t an easy thing to come to terms with, but what has made it worse is the fact that the literary community in Poland also sees me as an outsider. There is a lot to be said about the benefits of existing in the margins of whatever community, but it can be a very painful and disorienting place to be.

Lastly, can you tell us what you’re working on now and/or give a word of advice to the eager and wary new poets of the world?

Well, the new poets of the world should—to paraphrase a classic, who believed that great poets do not borrow but rather steal from their idols—never stop exploring. Which is to say: write what you do not know. Or, write to discover something new about yourself and the world. Also, whatever you write about, remember that craft matters. Everything’s already been written—to use another stock phrase—but not by you. You, the new poet, can contribute to the conversation that has been going on for thousands of years, but you have to find a way to do it in ways that makes whatever you say interesting, especially to those who have no personal stake in or connection to your subject or theme. Everything I’m working on now—new poems, essays, a fictionalized memoir—is about helping me learn how to do that over and over again.

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