A CONVERSATION WITH ERIN BELIEU
By KEITH KOPKA
Erin Belieu is the author of six poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including her recently published Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems. New work from Cocklebur has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, On The Seawall, and Switchyard. A recent recipient of the Mari Sandoz Award, given by the Nebraska Library Association to Nebraska artists who’ve made significant contributions to literature, Belieu teaches in the MFA-Ph.D. Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and for the Holy Family Low Residency MFA in Philadelphia.
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Keith Kopka: With the release of a “new and selected,” there is often a critical conversation about a poet’s “legacy.” I think that is an important conversation to have. Still, I also think it is just as important to understand how that idea of legacy is operating in the poet’s own head, and how they are engaging with their work across decades and from various distances. To this end, I will start with perhaps my most serious question for you framed in one of culture’s most fruitfully complex legacy-based constructs: Fuck, marry, kill—which three poems in the collection and why?
Erin Belieu: Oh dear. I guess we’re diving right in then.
As for the first part, I’ll admit the project of a new and selected—despite the evident privilege of it, the sense of milestone—I don’t find thinking about “legacy” comfortable. Because the selecting process is firmly outside of the vitality of making, which is (as Plath says) the blood jet that keeps an artist growing. It has you looking backward at your art rather than forward to what else is brewing and becoming.
Then again, comfort is overrated, most especially for an artist. I’m glad to be blessed with especially brilliant poet friends who kindly gave me their feedback when choosing poems. And as I enter into my next work, having taken a very careful look at where I’ve been, it’ll probably point me toward a deeper part of the forest I’ve yet to explore.
Let’s start with the kill, which is easy. Because if a poem’s not in Cocklebur, it’s already met Madame La Guillotine. Though I like to think of those poems as well-loved and worthy ghosts contentedly haunting the books in which they originally appear. They’re still there and eager to talk, just waiting to be séanced by a reader.
As for a poem that can get it, maybe “Your Character Is Your Destiny,” that opens my second collection, One Above & One Below. It’s an erotic (if steely) poem doing the poets’ ancient job of wooing a lover. Of the first three poems ever composed, at least one of them must’ve been the equivalent of a mating dance. It’s such a fine tradition, isn’t it? Ben Jonson, Marvell, Herrick, Donne—I love all those Renaissance and Metaphysical poems that are the most elegant equivalent of the “hey grl u up?” text. The horniness in those poems is delightfully evergreen.
As for marry, I suppose “Instructions for the Hostage,” which leads off my last book, Come Hither Honeycomb. I waited for that poem to come find me for a long time. And it has good steady habits, a faithful heart, and it was willing to do its half of the labor.
KK: “Cocklebur” is such a specific, stubborn title image. It’s a burr that hooks onto whatever brushes past it and won’t let go. What made that the right name for a book that’s essentially your life’s work in poems? Is there a bit of metacommentary here on the stubbornness it takes to have a life in poetry that is long enough to bring you to a new and selected? Or are there other things that drew you to this title?
EB: Yes, I think that’s spot on. It takes a thorny stubbornness to keep going, to stay awake inside a system that very much wants you to go nighty night. You know, schlep to work, pay your taxes, maybe one week for vacation (if you aren’t forced to spend your PTO when you catch the plague du jour). Then rinse and repeat. It’s not new news that Capitalism wants us compliant, scared, scrolling, emptily consuming, and utterly numb. Art is the Stay Alive Machine to the billionaire’s Death Machine.
Poetry, as the poet Hayden Carruth told me when I was in my twenties, is a long-distance race. I quote this often as it was an invaluable thing for me to understand as a young writer. I’ll add it’s a marathon run against your own best personal time. Things and people I loved have come and gone in my life, but poetry sticks. Like the cocklebur’s vines, it’s wound around me so that I don’t know where I stop and it starts. Which makes me think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” and how much that poem enacts exactly this reality of living over time as a writer. By the end, her speaker’s lost so many things she cared for so deeply…except the poetry. Which is another interesting way to think of what her famous parenthetical “(Write it!)” is doing in that poem.
I immediately thought Cocklebur was the right title. It’s a word I’ve loved since I was a child, and a poem in the new section is triggered by the memory of falling into their wicked hooks. I was visiting my friends and family in Nebraska when it came to me, so I tried it out on my people there. And they were like, “Oh! That’s perfect for you and your poems.”
But once I shared it with my close writer friends, they were like, “Cockle…what?” Who knew so many people didn’t grow up with that word? Someone said, “Oh, yeah, we called those ‘stickers.’” Which, no disrespect to any of our fifty nifty United States, but who wants a boring ass “sticker” when you could have the wonderfully baroque texture and historic resonance of “cocklebur.” Such a missed pleasure for them.
Then my editor Michael Wiegers and I decided, even if you don’t know what a cocklebur is, it’s an intriguing word, and people who read poetry, I’ll venture they’re people who love language, so it’ll be fine. Plus, I’m deeply impatient with people grumbling about not knowing what a word means while clutching their devices that instantaneously spew out the entire history of human knowledge. “Oh no! How will we ever find out??” I mean, c’mon now.
KK: Putting together a new and selected means going back through thirty years of your own writing and reexamining poems you wrote, in some cases, as a completely different person. Can you speak a little bit about this experience of walking in and out of your past poetic subjects and voices? It seems like this process could be a very uncanny valley. Did you find yourself unexpectedly detached from some of the content or engaging with poems differently because of the psychic distance? Did you want to exclude things, rewrite, or defend any of your younger self’s choices, or did you mostly just let her be? Is there a poem in the book that you’d actually put into witness protection if you could? Give it a new name, a new life, hide the poem from readers entirely? What did it see that makes you nervous?
EB: Are we ever really a different person? That might be nice. Maybe some folks are.
I’ve been the same soul for as long as I can remember. What bothered or elated me at four years old, those things remain the same for me—I still smolder at bullies and injustice. I’m still a magpie who wants all the shiny pretties for my nest. I remain happiest in or near a tree. Then and now, I’m quick to laugh, though more easily wounded than I appear. And I’d still rather cut off a body part than admit it. I have a poem in Cocklebur that thinks about this notion of what (if anything) of us is actually subject to change, “In Which the Therapist Asks for the Gargoyle Who Sits on My Chest.” In looking at thirty years of my poems, my gifts and challenges as a consciousness seem to be fundamentally the same over time.
I thought I’d want to re-work a lot of things when I got to putting the book together. You and I were just listening to Adrian Matejka discuss this at one of his lectures for the Holy Family Low Res MFA, talking about his (absolutely wonderful) new and selected, Be Easy. Adrian is the kind of writer who keeps reworking poems written many years before. Robert Lowell was famous for this too—he’d read new versions of what were his most iconic poems at that point, Lowell scribbling away in his book margins even as his host was at the podium introducing him at the reading. I don’t think this is uncommon for many poets.
But apparently, I’m the other kind of writer. I found, when I got to my first three books especially, it felt to me that the poems as they first appeared were the authentic portrait of who I was as an artist at the time. It was tempting to go back and make myself somehow…better. But that felt like an erasure that made me instinctively uncomfortable. Those poems have a joie de vivre I wouldn’t want to polish away. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been aggressive with my shoe shine rag to begin with. So I fiddled with a very few bumpy lines, a word here and there, but surprisingly, I didn’t want to change my Erin representative living through that specific moment in time.
I suppose the poem that makes me a little personally nervous is my long sectioned poem, “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral” from my third book, Black Box. Because even from this distance, it is a brutally vulnerable poem to me. The speaker is walking around naked and bleeding under very unflattering overhead lights. But it’s also a poem I know has meant much to readers who are going through their own period of brokenness and overwhelming pain. People still occasionally write to me about that poem twenty years later now. So I toyed with just leaving it out. But really, I always knew it had to be in there, personal discomfort aside. To quote one of my favorite television detectives, Tony Baretta, when it comes to life and poetry, my dictum is “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”
KK: Copper Canyon describes Cocklebur as circling gender, inheritance, and the stories that teach us how to live. I agree with this description. However, I also think that the use of the word “circling” is interesting here. All poets have poetic obsessions. We circle subjects endlessly. Looking at the arc from your first book, Infanta, all the way to these new poems, what do you notice has stayed obsessively the same for you, and what’s actually shifted in how you approach those questions and subjects?
EB: I suppose my interest in power structures, class and economics in America, the underdogs, why humans do what we do–my interest in these subjects never fades. Also, our degradation of the natural world, our unending cruelty toward animals and children. What it’s like to live in a woman’s body, to live as a woman in this violence. But also the great pleasures of that mind/body and the comedy (in all senses of that word) of living as a human animal too. A lot of my early romanticism has burned away, as is fitting for a grown woman. I was 28 when my first book was taken for publication, so I had a lot of active becoming ahead of me. My interest in poetic structures, why a free verse poem makes the shape that it makes, these remain the same. Though I think there’s a greater ease now to the structures, the work of a carpenter who’s spent thirty years building her chairs. It’s nice to feel the sense of how comfortably the tools fit into my hands now.
KK: Critics love pointing out how you mix “street talk” with formal poetic convention, like you can’t decide whether to write a poem or throw a punch. I, personally, love this tension in your work. Which poem in the new and selected is the biggest brawler, and which one is wearing its Sunday best the whole time?
EB: It’s funny, I truly never feel like I’m throwing a punch, though I know from reading reviews that this observation isn’t outside of what some of them have observed too, if in more tempered language. I call it writing candidly.
But any woman speaking candidly, directly, well, that somehow can still seem like throwing a punch. The Borscht Belt comedian section of “Red Dress” has gotten a few audible gasps at readings. I have a poem called “Your Failure” that also received some attention this way. I think that also had to do with the fact that it appeared in The New York Times’s “A Picture and a Poem” feature in T Magazine, and the visual artist asked to respond to the poem, Camille Henrot, made an extremely disturbing painting of a giant harpy creature stabbing its beak through the eye of a multiple-penised man on his knees. I suppose you’d call that a 1-2 punch? I actually gasped myself when I saw it. I wasn’t entirely sure what it had to do with my poem. But that’s the thing, if we’re lucky, our poems go off and have their own, entirely separate and creative lives with their readers. As they should.
As for Sunday best, a new poem in Cocklebur, “Late Autumnal, with Cockroach,” is one in which I was trying—in a contemporary way—to meet the elevation and music of the autumnal’s poetic tradition. I was thinking of what Keats might make of this moment, here at the very farthest edge of what Mother Earth is willing to put up with from us. His “To Autumn” has its “wailful choir” of “small gnats” mourning “among the river sallows.” Not strictly autumnal, but I was also thinking of Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” with its “bright/litter of birdcalls” strewing “the same/ Bone-riddled ground.”
In our time, the enormous cockroach that presented itself one morning on my patio felt fitting for such a poem. Plus, it’s solidly within my nature to root for what we’ve designated “vermin.” It’s not their fault that they’re so good at what they do, or that they perhaps remind us too much of ourselves.
KK: The book’s jacket description also mentions “the sustainability of faith in one’s self or others” as one of the threads in your work. That’s a bit of a loaded phrase. It could mean religious faith, faith in a relationship, faith in your own judgment. However, there is a great deal of inner conviction in your poems, and it does seem like something that is at the core of your writing beyond the banality of a jacket blurb. Could you talk a little bit about what this idea of a humanized “faith” actually means to you as a subject to write toward, and how your relationship to it changed across your collections?
EB: Beyond my works’ long willingness to critique and satirize human behavior, I’ve always had an inordinate amount of faith in the potential goodness of humanity. Maybe it’s because being an artist means being a creator, not a destroyer. That is, I want to believe. Despite our collective selfishness, greed, violence, and painfully stupid ugliness to one another, I’m always always hoping those better angels will emerge, working in my own ways to support that possibility in myself and others.
That faith has been sorely tested over my life, as books like Black Box and Come Hither Honeycomb record, but never more than the moment we’re living through now. And yet, I’ve dug my claws in even deeper to that faith as an essential article for my existence. Otherwise, what can we do? Just lie down and pre-die? I would never give the Death Machine monsters that satisfaction.
As I said, I believe art is our best Stay Alive Machine. It’s the most beautiful contribution humans make to the world. Poetry may not make anything happen in any external sense, but it is, as Auden goes on to say, a mouth. It’s that essential to our survival. And, as a teacher, I’ve seen its profound power in lighting up humans from the inside, in giving people the interior landscape they need to imagine something more beautiful being possible.
KK: Ok, things have gotten a little heady. Let’s back this up a bit and get into the really real: It’s the bottom of the 9th, best-of-7 series, tie game, bases loaded, Yankees vs. the Sox, and Cocklebur is coming to the plate. What is this book’s walk-out music and why?
EB: First, I want to address the sneaky trap you set with this question, Keith, in which you’re secretly tweaking me with my (admittedly untenable) position as someone with an emotional attachment to both Sox and Yankee fandom. I see you, Keith.
What comes to mind first is that I’d rather be the closing pitcher. Batters are momentary flash, but closers are silent assassins. I was given a private tour of Yankee Stadium once years ago, and standing alone on the pitchers’ mound remains one of the single greatest thrills of my life.
Since Trevor Hoffman owns “Hells Bells” and Mo put his permanent stamp on “Enter Sandman,” the most legendary run-from-the dugout music is taken. But if Cocklebur were brought in to shut it down, and given its MLB ($), I’d choose my personal anthem, “Bitch Better Have My Money.” Which is Rihanna out here doing the Lord’s work, offering womankind particularly a very useful and pithy perspective.
But if she’s heading to the batter’s box, Cocklebur’s music would be RuPaul’s “Sissy That Walk.” She’d stomp out in her kinky boots and shablam a quick dip at the plate. Instantly iconic and definitely rattles the pitcher.
KK: So many of your poems wrestle with what gets handed down to women through family, through culture, and through the stories women are told about how they are supposed to live. You’ve been publishing, teaching, and organizing around equity in literary spaces for three decades now, which is long enough to have watched real shifts happen. But you’ve also presumably watched some things prove far more stubborn than anyone expected in the nineties. If you had to draw an honest ledger of what’s actually changed for women writers during your career versus what’s simply changed its disguise, what would go on each side?
EB: My mind immediately flashed to that meme of the older woman holding her sign that reads, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.” I remember reading Susan Faludi’s book Backlash decades ago when it first appeared, so it’s not like I wasn’t warned that the snake will always keep eating its tail, and yours too. But, putting my absolutely exhausted initial reaction aside, with the more recent generation of writers coming up—I mean, I hope this doesn’t sound corny, but I’m so very proud of them collectively. Their willingness to spend their currency holding the gatekeepers accountable. What seems a natural and fundamental sense of intersectionality in their art and politics and how they organize their spaces and support one another. I have learned a lot from my younger friends—people like Joy Priest, KT Herr, Joseph Earl Thomas, Kaitlin Rizzo, Bo Hee Moon, Leisa Loan, Maria Hiers, Anthony Sutton. Too many great younger writers to name here. Because if you’re going to claim you’re a teacher, you better not stop being a student, right? I feel good knowing there are so many talented, generous, and savvy writers out there pushing back hard through their work and their organizing.
KK: You’ve spent decades not just writing but teaching, editing, and advocating for other poets through VIDA, by publishing anthologies, in your teaching, all of it. Where do you feel poetry is right now, culturally? Are you hopeful about where the art form and the community around it are headed, or worried, or both? It seems like from your last response you’re hopeful, yes?
EB: I never seriously worry about poetry. She’s bigger, older, meaner, smarter, and more powerful than any of us puny humans who like to argue and make our expiration-dated pronouncements, sipping briefly at her trough for our teensy amount of allotted years. As long as there is some little tribe of humans hiding somewhere in their post-apocalypse hut or living in a futuristic utopia in their landfill-upcycled togas, the poems needed for that time, the poems reflecting that time, will get made. Or maybe it won’t be humans at all. Whatever it is that survives, I feel certain their poems will be beautiful to them.
KK: A “new and selected” is a strange kind of milestone. It’s a look backward, but it’s also a book that will introduce you to readers who’ve never read a word of yours before. If someone’s cracking this open as their very first encounter with your work, what do you hope they walk away feeling, and what do you hope it’s not misread as or boxed into?
EB: It’s a good question, but I don’t think I get to or even should decide any of that.
Would I be happy never to hear the word “wisecracking” again? Do I think it’s a superficial evaluation of my work? Do I get tired of some people first framing my poetry as “personal”? Sure. Do I think I have any control over this? No.
As I said, I believe our poems go on and earn the life that they have with individual readers. And there’s often something unexpected but lovely about that, when someone at a reading or by email tells me what the poems have meant to them, taking my poems somewhere I never knew they would go. How wonderful that my little space-time capsules have made their way to a reader who feels moved by them. What an extraordinary and exciting life I’ve had so far, this girl from “nowhere” who could never pass Algebra I, and all of it a surprise party gift from the poetry gods. Publishing a new and selected mostly makes me feel a deep gratitude that I’m still here, still writing, my publisher of 30 years still likes me, and I’m still excited by what comes next.
Keith Kopka’s newest collection of poems, VIA. (2027), is forthcoming from UWSP’s Portage Poetry Series. He received the Tampa Review Prize for his previous collection of poems, Count Four (University of Tampa Press, 2020). He is also the author of the critical texts Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry (2018) and Crossing Disciplines: A Cross-Curricular Writing Guide (2022). Kopka is a Senior Editor at Narrative magazine and Poetry Editor at Philadelphia Stories. He teaches in the low-res MFA at Holy Family University in Philadelphia, where he serves as Program Director.
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