I first met Molly Spencer in a poetry Zoom room that bloomed during the early days of the COVID pandemic. A few months later, upon meeting her poetry collection, Hinge (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), I burnt through a few sleepless nights studying how the verbs sparkled as they shattered the world. This is what poetry can do, when it does what poetry can do best: it skewers the known.
The speakers in Molly’s poems implicate me; the world of the line abrades my boundaries. For an instant, separate bodies are contiguous. The one who poses the first question puts me in question (to paraphrase Jacques Derrida), and the question enacts a relationship between the reader and the written. My commitment to criticism emerged from the space of wanting to share how such books alter what we imagine of the world; and, in turn, the way we are known by it.
Molly’s writing has been awarded the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and a faculty fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, where she currently teaches writing at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. If the House, her debut collection, won the 2019 Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. Her second collection, Hinge, was also published after winning a prize.
Molly and I chatted across the circuitous chasm of emails for a few months, and the following interview about Invitatory (Parlor Press, 2024), which won the New Measure Poetry Prize, is the result. It is impossible to speak briefly of contronyms and fragmented hymns in her invitatory. Instead, I invite you to join us somewhere between “my heart and the supple cage,” in Molly’s words.
Alina Stefanescu: I have to begin with the word that marks the threshold of this book: invitatory, “pertaining to an invitation.” It comes to us through liturgy, as in a sung psalm that invites congregants to prayer. There is music in it, a soundscape of invitation. How did the repetition and convocation of liturgical modes shape these poems, if at all?
Molly Spencer: Although I’m not a practicing Catholic anymore, I was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, and really, the liturgy—its rhythms and repetitions, its gestures of departure and return, and its mysteries and silences—that was my first poetry. And I think this influence—of the liturgy and of sacred texts, too—is present in all of my writing to an extent, but perhaps in Invitatory more than my other books. The poems of Invitatory exist, in some ways, out of time and in a liminal, or maybe infinite, space, yet they are not free of the desires time presents, nor of the desire to find a different (better, we hope) way to live in time. The liturgy, which we’re often reminded in the Catholic tradition is “the work of the people,” is just the same to me: both boundless and temporal; both desirous of eternity and rooted in the human world. All this said, Invitatory is a “religious” or “Catholic” book only in the loosest of ways.
AS: This liturgical part expands the resonances of these poems for me; I can hear music in them, or the absence of music. Ghosted music? Usually, repetition tends to build a sense of solidity or to create an anchor, but here repetition seems to uproot us, to make the space of the poem more ethereal. Is that what you intended?
MS: “Intended” would be a stretch because, when I write, I have no plan other than to follow a bit of language or image or rhythm that interests me. But, you know, sometimes happy accidents unfold—we do our work, and at some point, notice that the poems we’ve written seem to be overhearing one another. The work, taken together, starts making… gestures, I guess I would call them. And then the poet decides whether to amplify those gestures, or to undermine them, or both. So the nature of the repetition in Invitatory was not strictly “intended,” but I did eventually notice and make use of it as the manuscript developed.
And I agree that the effect of repetition in Invitatory is counter to the usual, anchoring effect of repetition. To me, the important repetition in Invitatory involves the cycles of departure and return to language as subject, to particular images, and to the speaker’s perseverance. It’s repetition that’s rooted in an anxiety about meaning; about the world we live in; about the limits and failures of language, perception, and humanity. Because there is no answer to this anxiety, we are unmoored. What I hope the repetition in Invitatory does for the reader is give them space in which to be unmoored, to be accompanied by these poems in that unmoored place.
AS: I celebrate your description of our unmooring. But, speaking to Molly the critic rather than Molly the poet now: isn’t there a way in which sound does this labor of ontological exploration? I’m thinking of the gorgeous section “Of contranyms” (from “Of Wind, or Air”) and how language is undone at the morpheme by line breaks, as with “un- / tangled,” and how this fractures sound and asks us to listen to the fragments of sound.
Turning back to Molly the poet and ontological anxiety, the flow is so lyrical, but there are variations in punctuation, where some poems use periods to designate the end-stop and some poems abandon periods entirely. I am curious about this.
MS: Well, yes, I hope sound, and every element of craft, helps create and enact the ontological searching in Invitatory. And as much as the poems ask the reader to sometimes listen to fragments of sound, they also ask the reader to listen to, or wait in, silence, and to stay in the unresolved. Those gaps, that waiting in uncertainty… I believe it’s a real and important part of human experience and of figuring out how to live, but it’s something our culture would rather we skip over.
As for my decisions about punctuation, a dear teacher once said to me, “You know how to stop talking in a poem? Put in a period.” So, where the poems seemed to want or need to stop talking for a moment, I used periods; and where they didn’t, I didn’t. Other non-standard punctuation choices were mostly to orchestrate the rhythm and pace of the poem or to delay the resolution of meaning. I think periods and punctuation are most noticeably absent in the title series. That’s because those poems reckon with eternities—love and war and suffering and child-rearing and violence and planetary movements and climate crisis and history and mortality. These eternities have always been with us, and they always will be. They’ll never stop talking.
AS: Tommye Blount described the way these poems develop as “muscle memory.” His reference to a memory of the body that invokes motion, or how we move, struck me. Sometimes I imagined you looking at an image as you wrote. Did any images or art orient you visually in these poems?
MS: More than art, landscapes oriented me visually. I grew up in the woodland hills and rivers of West Michigan, and spent summers on the dunes and beaches of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. Later, as an adult, I lived near the Mississippi River in Saint Paul, and later yet, near the Pacific, where I discovered a profound internal calm in the landscapes of Northern California and the Oregon Coast. I’ve been a life-long observer of light through forests and water, and of the movements of water and sand, and of the horizon, too. So many of my poems are oblique love letters to these formative landscapes, or at least attempts to pay my debts to them. And certainly these landscapes live as images in my mind and imagination, and I had them with me while writing these poems.
One example: As a girl, I (rather obsessively) watched freighters cross the horizon on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior (later in my life, it was large container ships on the Pacific)—the way they seem to hover over the water as they go. Of course, we know they’re not actually hovering; that it’s a trick of perception, a limit in our ability to see. So, in addition to shaping my way of being in the world, these landscapes have shaped my ideas about the nature and reliability of perception, an important theme in Invitatory.
In terms of art, there’s no one piece of art or one artist that influenced these poems—well, maybe Bonnard and his incredible handling of light—but I take in a lot of visual art, and I value the possibilities of abstraction: scenes or worlds that we can’t quite make out. I value the same thing in poems: reading and writing toward the blurred edges of a world, finding my bearings—in writing and life—in the not-quite-defined and not-quite-definable.
AS: I meet you in that attraction to blurred edges, Molly. Now, to take you to a different edge. One of Georgi Gospodinov’s speakers tells the reader: “I never forgave Ariadne for betraying her brother.” I loved how this spoke to our intimate engagement with books, that we can find characters that remain unforgivable to us. Are there any characters whom you cannot forgive in literature? If so, who and why?
MS: Well, the God of the Old Testament for starters! Creon. Lear. Orpheus—he had one job! Hades for taking Persephone, but also Persephone for eating the pomegranate seeds. Ahab, but also Starbuck for failing to stop him. Cathy for marrying Edgar. St. John for his desire to control Jane. Speaking of which, Jane’s Aunt Reed. Mr. Ramsay, but also Mrs. Ramsay for staying quiet about his hateful behavior. Anse Bundren is right up there—for forcing his children to be party to the desecration of their mother’s body—but also the Bundren children for going along with it when they were old enough to revolt! Lila, but also Lenu, for various large and small betrayals of themselves and each other.
I think the theme here is that I find it hard to forgive characters who knowingly cause or allow harm and suffering, who turn away from love, or who are untrue to themselves. And especially characters who fail their children (or, in Creon’s case, his niece) by putting their own desires and egos above everything else. And of course, I understand the complexities of each story, that we’re often dealing in allegory and symbolism, and all that. I understand that literature can’t be interesting without conflict and flawed characters, and that we’re all flawed characters. But, yes, I have my little grudges!
AS: Ha! My grudges are cosmological as well. Why stop with a single individual when we can indict the entire system? And isn’t this what poetry has done, or continues to do, across history? Doesn’t poetry challenge the cosmologies and settled beliefs that undergird our daily lives? I felt that Invitatory did this.
MS: Well, yes, cosmologies… and ontologies, too—the stories or frameworks that help us make sense of our existence. I’m going to admit to a fundamental selfishness here: I think the reason I turned to writing poetry seriously is that, once I began to know my own mind, I understood that I had very few settled beliefs, and I was skeptical of the cosmologies and ontologies other people valued. That realization was bewildering, and I needed something to help me navigate that bewilderment.
Before I ever turned to writing seriously, reading poetry had long been an act of joy for me—since childhood, when my mother would read to my brothers and me every afternoon, I’ve delighted in language and image, in the sounds and rhythms of words, and in the ways language can unsettle. Writing poetry, though, came later as an act of survival: I needed (and still need) to get these words, questions, images, rhythms, obsessions out of my head and put them somewhere else. I need a material repository for my bewilderment.
I am glad to know, though, that you feel Invitatory is a book that unsettles. It was written from an inherently unsettled place in a number of aspects—from what was going on in the world and my life, to my uncertainty of how to orchestrate what was in my mind on the page. What I hope most is that Invitatory can be a companion consciousness to the unsettled; a guide, of sorts, to the fundamental bewilderment of existence.
AS: Bewilderment is underrated as an intellectual prompt. I treasure this idea of your poetry book as “a companion consciousness to the unsettled.” Is lyric a more generous vehicle than prose for carrying that radical abstraction known as ‘mercy’?
MS: It seems to me that, if there is mercy in the lyric that’s not as achievable in prose, it’s that the lyric is not beholden to human time. Prose seems more time-bound to me, because it’s trying to get somewhere—to the end of a story, maybe, or to the culmination of an argument. If, through the lyric, we can read and write free of the tick of the clock—the instrument of our mortality—that feels like a form of mercy to me. The lyric wanders away from the timeline.
And another mercy offered us by the lyric is that it engages our bodies. By privileging rhythm, sound, image, leaps, the lyric evokes bodily responses: We catch our breath, our spine shivers, the top of our head is taken off, as Emily Dickinson puts it. What a mercy to be free of human logic, and to to be returned to our creatureliness; to go by the body’s logic instead.
AS: I am still learning how to do this. On that note, I’d like to end by asking a question from the old Proust Questionnaire that originated as a parlor game in the prior century but still beckons the imaginary, much as Proust continues to beckon us from the margins. Molly, what is your greatest extravagance?
MS: Sometimes, I feel like my whole life is an extravagance. I start my day reading and writing by the light of an oil lamp. I take hot baths whenever I want to, and my fridge is stocked with food. Yesterday, I sat on my front steps in the sun and didn’t worry that a bomb might fall.
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Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. Her new poetry collection, My Heresies, is forthcoming from Sarabande in 2025. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.