A Conversation with Rosalie Moffett
BY JIM WHITESIDE
Rosalie Moffett is the author of the poetry collections Making a Living (Milkweed Editions, 2025), Nervous System (Ecco, 2019), which was chosen by Monica Youn for the National Poetry Series Prize and listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, and June in Eden (OSU Press, 2017). She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, POETRY Magazine, New England Review, and Kenyon Review, among others. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Indiana, and the senior poetry editor for the Southern Indiana Review.
Jim Whiteside: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview, Rosalie, and congratulations on a gorgeous third collection. I try to limit my book-buying when I’m at the AWP Conference, but when I saw this book at the Milkweed Editions booth in the book fair, I picked it up immediately. Making a Living is a really tender and at times unflinching look at Americanness, consumer culture, and capitalism, and critically, concerns of motherhood and parenthood. I’m struck by how the book’s title gestures to these things simultaneously—how we are called upon to create value in society in order to “make a living” for ourselves and our families, but also how the speaker of these poems is considering making a new life by becoming a mother. How did these poems and themes come together in this volume?
Rosalie Moffett: What a good introduction to the work of the book, Jim, and thank you for the VIP spot in your AWP luggage!
So, despite my relatively un-remunerative career path—poet, academic—I have always anxiously understood money in America to be about managing the future, which is to say, managing the unknown. Our country’s mechanism for this is baffling—the demand that we predict the level of disaster that might befall us in order to choose the proper insurance premium, that we map out retirement investments for an unestablished life’s length in a market so fickle its daily fluctuations are news items, or—for most, that we buy a scratcher and engage in that other method of managing the future: saying a prayer.
Pregnancy, or merely considering or trying for pregnancy, demanded an attention to the future like nothing else had before. I felt the present slip out from under me. I felt the length of time I needed to imagine stretch out the way you might, on a hike, round a bend to an expansive vista and have your breath taken away.
Of course, the senses of making a living might have been irrevocably fused upon googling the cost of giving birth (outlandish and wildly unpredictable), but to me, they are parallel and conflicting aspects of my ability to consider the future, my ability to manage and manufacture hope. I wrote much of this book in the devastating and uncertain time of the pandemic, when America’s rudimentary economic cruelties, though they have always been there, were laid bare.
JW: What was writing Making a Living like for you?
RM: Writing the book involved taking stock of the extent to which capitalism is suffused into the fabric of our moments. It is a record of the path I took through these moments to imagine the future and a record of the things placed in my path—the consumerist bait, inequality, gun violence, the attention economy’s traps, etc.—that felt like existential threats or mollifying sedatives that distracted from grasping the reality of American life, American motherhood.
JW: You’re taking on such large topics—motherhood, capitalism, the complexities of insurance and the medical industrial complex—but I love how you channel these things through such an attention to smallness. A flock of backyard chickens, a crushed styrofoam cup, “a windowsill full / of roly-polies,” flowers growing by a highway—each of these things contains its own small lesson about something big. How do you find your poems accumulating such a population of small gestures made so resonant?
RM: Sometimes, the first stanza of Louise Glück’s “Rainy Morning”: “You don’t love the world. / If you loved the world you’d have / images in your poems” begins again to make the rounds in my head as I’m trying to do—and this is another phrase haunting me lately—justice to the place I live in, via image, via these small moments of sight. As I said, a lot of Making a Living came into being during the pandemic as I was largely isolated to my house and neighborhood. I think some, given that squeeze, found themselves more and more occupying their interior, their engagement with the abstract or the virtual, whereas I found myself so starved for something new to look at, some new perspective, that I was looking closer and closer at things—down to the ditch-litter, to the beetles and dandelion seeds. It did become almost a hopeful or prayerful meditation, to walk and scour the street for some discovery. But also a penance, because I was sick of our country, bitter about its clownish malice and superficial ideals, and I felt in need of the punishing reminder: this place is your place.
JW: Many of these images also feel so rooted in place. How does place—not just America, but Indiana and Murfreesboro, Tennessee, etc.—fit into these poems?
RM: The emphasis on particular cities or regions might also come from my sense of the rootlessness of my generation and of the people I know best, who are victims of the ballooning gig economy, of adjunct and “visiting” livelihoods, “remote” work, etc. Our economic forces result in an alienation from place, community, self. And to go back to Glück’s stanza and to the beguiling expression to do justice—isn’t looking, at least, one beginning for love? One beginning for obligation, for connection, for justice? Oh, I have my doubts about that, but that’s my hope, and why I’ll stoop to see, for instance, if the scratch-off thrown in the weeds might have seemed, at first, like it was a winner.
JW: There is such a beautiful sense of careful looking in these poems—which, I think you’re right to say, is one step towards doing justice for a place, for an experience, showing a place and the people who inhabit it real love. In such fast-paced lives we’re often asked to live in the modern era, pausing long enough to pay attention is its own form of love. You’ve mentioned taking a walk or things you might find along a walk. Walking is such a crucial part of my own drafting process, both as a clearing of the mind and an opening of the self to new images and things. I’m curious a little about your writing and drafting process—where do your poems take form? How, also, did the various forms in Making a Living find their shapes?
RM: My second book, Nervous System, is a single long poem composed of fairly careful and spare sections. And it’s quite an interior book, focused on the nature of thought, on the nature of language. I wrote it quickly and emerged from the writing process a bit like walking out of a dark matinee, blinking in the glare of the first Trump presidency and the pandemic. The cultural and political moment collided with the moment in my life, my desire to have a child made precarious by the precariousness of everything around me, and this seemed to demand a poem that had a different architecture, a different sensibility. The book began to take shape via dense, rangy, more demotic poems—really, many early poem drafts were too crowded, too unwieldy, but I was trying to shake myself into a new way of being on the page, a way of reaching outside of myself that felt more like talking to people.
I think, too—and this goes back to your question of place—my desire is often to establish a shared physical world, to populate the book with recognizable concrete markers: billboards and expressways and products as a way of insisting on a now that we share, on a reality that we inhabit together. I think this urge only gets stronger as I, in my online life, go from contending with slippery news headlines (like the pilloried New York Times coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, whose contortions resist sense-making) to, say, an AI-generated clip of a kangaroo holding a boarding pass in an airport. God knows, I do not want poetry to shoulder the task of providing an objective reality—I want headlines to do their duty to democracy, I want AI regulated, I want science funded, etc. etc.—but in Making a Living I was reaching for forms that were capacious enough, and that moved in such a way as to get at the alienating onslaught of the present, where not just our hours, our bodies, but even the “real” is polluted by commodification.
Speaking of that present, I was once quite habitual with my writing, but having an infant/toddler/child has made me looser, and to be honest and to deploy a toxic market term, less productive. But I gravitate toward routine as useful to my process. I remember when my previous dog finally passed away, I had prepared to miss his presence, but had not prepared to miss the organizing principle he had on my life: my day punctuated by his needs to be fed, let out, the regimental morning and evening walk. This feels related to my attraction to poetry, to my early encounters with it, my sense that some principle was shaping it in a way I wanted to understand. Saying that now, after pointing out the intentionally disorienting chaos made for us by headlines and AI, and again considering what feels to me like the moral chaos made for us by Instagram, the way the image of a live-streamed war crime seamlessly slides by next to an image of someone’s plate of food or a shoe ad, I have always felt my poems come from needing a way to confront what troubles me, to shape it into something I can bear, and perhaps it is just the relief in the space left unmarred on the page that piecemeals the thought into something I can manage, that ultimately shapes the poem.
JW: For sure, the constant shifting of our attention from horror to atrocity, atrocity to TikTok dance or cooking video or cute cat video; we’re in a constant state of cognitive shifting and distraction. I’m so glad you brought up Nervous System—it’s a book I absolutely loved. It’s interesting to hear that you wrote it so quickly, because I also read it quickly. I think I read it in one sitting, which is a rarity for me. The poems feel so immediate, so necessary, and so formally unified. (I’d love to hear your thoughts about the function of the tercet.) Although the poems look quite different on the page, something connects Nervous System and Making a Living: motherhood. Do you feel like Making a Living is a continuation of your thinking in Nervous System, considering the speaker’s mother’s loss of memory and faculties naturally leading to her own capacities as a mother?
RM: As I was writing Making a Living, it was irresistible to dwell in the dual meanings of conceive—to form a thought in the mind, to form a child in the womb, to form, in fact, a thinking child—and to consider the overlap of these acts of creation. So, though the books feel quite different to me, there is an essential relationship between them.
In a way, they have the same architecture of interest: in a Nervous System the relationship between the unseeable inside of the brain and the outside of it—language—and, in Making a Living, the relationship between the seeable present and unseeable future.
JW: This is the function of poetry, though—at least for me it is—to explore an ambiguity, to exist in an in-betweenness, to define the undefinable. It’s in the exploration of these ambiguities that the speaker of every poem, as our teacher Eavan Boland said, must be transformed. I’m curious to know your thoughts on the function of poetry not only in your life, but also in the present day—this time, as we’ve said, where we live in sound bites and 30-second TikTok videos, where the ephemeral is the norm and where we’re in a constant state of distraction. Where does poetry fit into all of this for us and for our students?
RM: And, to add to what you’ve articulated so nicely already, the function of poetry for me is thinking. Writing poems is how I make sense of my life, the context of it, the significance of what troubles me and the questions I come to the blank page to sit with. Of course I love beauty, music. Once, I’m sure I thought their role was solely pleasure. Even though I regularly teach now that they (like form) are part of meaning, it still surprises me how essential sound, for instance, can be to the full articulation of a thought, how it reveals more than it ornaments. So, the function, in short, for me, is to keep from feeling lost in my own life.
And yes, I do think poetry pulls against the reductive snack-ish nature of sound bites, the grabby faux-pith of “content.” I sometimes forget that Google is terrible now, and still try to use it to search for poems I remember a line of. I feel a sinking feeling and a sick satisfaction when I am served the just rock-bottom attempt by the “AI overview” to digest a line of poetry, its presumptive desire that I want this “interpreted.” Searching for those wonderful closing lines, for instance, by Diane Seuss: “where’s the melody / to remedy the melody, the remedy to remedy the remedy?” coughs up some “possible interpretations” like, “The poem could be interpreted as a spiritual quest, with the ‘remedy’ representing a higher power, a deeper understanding of oneself, or a path to enlightenment.” How bereft, how drained of magic! And also, LOL. I love to give my students Geoffrey Hill’s Paris Review answer to whether difficult poetry is “worth it,” which I pull some good points from here: “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. […] Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?” He goes on to talk about difficult art as democratic, as resisting tyranny—it’s really superb.
But all of this attention-shredding screen-addiction is having an impact on all of us—my students especially, I think. We’re alienated from real time and the kind of interaction that feels fulfilling. Reading difficult poetry, I have to sell that. But, by and large, writing poetry? Making some kind of mysterious, musical, vulnerable bridge from one interior to another? I think we’re all hungry for that, if we can sense it even for a moment on the page.
JW: I think we do hunger for that! Poetry as pause, poetry as empathy machine, poetry as connection. I often say that I want my own poems to depict brief moments of human connection, and in doing so to help the reader feel connected with. I’m so glad you invoked Diane Seuss. I just picked up the UK edition of frank: sonnets when I was in Europe, and it’s just gorgeous. I think she’s a great example of a poet who shows us truth through a kind of familiarity in language and image, but she brings in that complexity of syntax, structure, and association that Google’s AI companion just can’t get. Perhaps a place to close, then, is a question I often invoke in these conversations. What excites you about the contemporary poetic conversation; what’s great about what’s being written today? Who, if you might name names, is writing the poems you can’t wait to read?
RM: To stretch your question a little, I’m interested in the future poetic conversation, to see how the current acute political crises will make their way into American poetry. As I read submissions as part of my editorial work, I am seeing poets, who perhaps have not undertaken this kind of poetic task before, begin to grapple with what role American artists have now to engage with issues of great injustice, with our historical and continuing role in atrocities. (As a side note, I’m also feeling a dreadful inability to look away from the attacks on free speech in American universities, so I also have a sick-to-my-stomach sense that we’ll never know what art by students and faculty is, even now, being curtailed in this environment.)
But now, to name a name in the present! I am looking forward to reading Karen Solie’s new book Wellwater (whose Pigeon I loved, among her other books) which I believe is out already in Canada. Her poems have a scouring attention to overlooked detail and, to me, a great charm. I’ve admired how she brings these to bear as she gathers up the wonderful absurdities, comic failures, and absolute tragedies of human life—there’s a documentary-ness to her poems that sometimes feels more real than real life to me. In her poems, you can’t escape the realities of economic inequality, and, in this new book, the economics of environmental degradation. I love to follow her mind and eye on the page—even when it hurts a little—and can’t recommend her enough.
And while I’m talking about Canadian poets, I’d also love to point anyone who is unfamiliar towards Dionne Brand. My favorite of hers is Ossuaries, and here’s a new poem by her I just saw yesterday.
JW: Amazing! I always love coming away from these conversations with new recommendations—and with new energy and excitement around all things poetry. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.
RM: Thank you, Jim, for this wonderful conversation, and for your poems in the world as well.
