An Interview with Poet Nancy Eimers

Contributed

Ahead of her visit to Penn State Behrend, poet Nancy Eimers had an email discussion with Ana Avila, a creative writing student at Behrend, about her work. Nancy Eimers's reading will take place Thursday, April 4 at 6 p.m. in the Metzgar Center as a part of Behrend's Smith Creative Writers Reading series. The event is free and open to the public.

Ana Avila (AA): Who are some of your literary influences? Are any of them associated with the historical focus of your poems?

Nancy Eimers (NE): There are so many. I think I sort of grew up (as a young writer, that is) drawn to talky/narrative poets like Larry Levis, poets interested in versions of surrealism such as Denis Johnson (better known now for his novels), James Wright, Neruda; the work of Elizabeth Bishop (she is so matter-of-fact and at the same time so imaginatively precise), Robert Lowell (for whom history and the personal were mostly inextricable). Adrienne Rich believed that what was "out there" is also "in here," personal, in other words.

AA: I've noticed specifically in your poems "Teach Me to Live" and "Pages of Noise and Light" that there is a theme being explored having to do with the workings of time — how the past affects the present and/or future. Is that an idea that typically informs your poems as well?NE: In a way, time seems to be fluid, it has no increments, it flows on and on; and yet isn't time constantly slipping backwards, time as a series of losses, time as what we look back on? It is very hard to stay in a present moment, or even to know what that might be. I think my poems have always tended to be elegiac. Even so, I guess they are made out of a living moment, and a living moment, I have to believe, is an arrival from everything one has lived, if poised before all that is not yet to be determined. History has time on its pages; the future's pages are blank; in the present we are all still busy writing.

AA: The concept of time moving both forward and at times backward — was that an idea that informed your writing about the 1953 atomic bomb tests? I'm thinking here of your mannequins poems.

NE: Apparently, mannequins have been used for military purposes for centuries. Scarecrows in armor lowered over castle walls by Tang armies to trick enemies into "supplying" arrows, dummies placed in trenches in WWI to draw snipers away from living soldiers, and dummy CIA agents in parked cars. Mannequins were also placed inside "Doom Town" houses constructed in the Nevada desert for bomb tests. The mannequins I'd see in department stores during my childhood, were pretty much the same as the ones used in those bomb tests — decorously dressed, casually posed, and their expressions bland. In post-detonation photographs, they've been knocked off their feet, their expressions, of course, unchanged. 

I would say I wasn't thinking about historical themes as subjects so much as I was struck by the images of these mannequins with their exploded life-sized dollhouse town, and memories of the mannequins from my own childhood, and thoughts of those I see now in shopping malls — all body, no head. Seems like the past walks in and out of the present all the time. Offering clues, maybe, of what poet Nikki Finney calls "the history of what the future just might be if we would only...." History, into and out of our personal lives. How far have we come?

AA: Would you say that instead of focusing on themes in your poems, you focus more on the lasting and impacting images you have come across in your lifetime? How do you decide which moments to touch on when you begin writing?

NE: I'd say it's not a matter of choosing a subject or theme or even an image so much as being drawn to, or even bothered by something — maybe a line that comes to me, or an image, part of a memory, or a detail in an article or in the news. Then I sort of find my way forward in the poem and see where it goes. More lines will come, an image or images, a sense of form, things start talking to each other, so to speak, connections I hadn't anticipated are being made. Then I know a poem is happening. I don't mean to say I have no intentions or ideas when I begin. In fact, I often have a strong feeling about something when I begin writing, even without knowing why, and writing the poem feels like a series of discoveries I couldn't have made if I'd tried to reason things out. It seems important to keep an open mind. I do occasionally have "series" of poems, longer poems, and even sectioned poems. I do often return to certain subjects, obsessions, questions—but rather than posing them to myself, it feels like a matter of being drawn irresistibly into them, so I go, and see where I've come out when I get to the other side.

AA: What does your writing and editing process look like, and how does this affect the way you work and the way you write?

NE: I read a lot before writing. I always read poetry. It's really good company. I generally read a lot of fiction, nonfiction, and more poetry. I also tend to work slowly. I revise on successive days and weeks, and sometimes successive years, if that's what it takes. Every now and then a poem happens quickly and says what it wants to say and that is that. Though not very often. As for a process — Virginia Woolf says, "In writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what." Paul Tran says, "Breaking a pattern is the reason for a poem." Finding or making patterns, breaking them, finding new ones, swerving backwards and forwards. On good days, it keeps feeling like new.

AA: You work for or have worked for a plethora of different literary journals. Could you speak to the work you've done as an editor? Is there any advice you'd have for those interested in literary editing?

NE: I have now and then worked as an editor or guest editor for a poetry magazine, and for several years I was poetry editor at New Issues Press. None of these were paid positions but were things I became involved with in connection with my time as a creative writing graduate student, as faculty member at Western Michigan University, and as a result of acquaintances with other writers. Each was a lucky and a lovely occasion and opportunity. Literary magazines and presses are often embedded in undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs, and there are often opportunities to be involved. I know many writers who have started their own magazines and presses. I honor them and am deeply grateful for all the literary magazines and small presses that help to keep poetry alive.

6 p.m. // Penn State Behrend's Metzgar Center, 4851 College Dr. // Free // For more info visit: behrend.psu.edu