Featured Writer #132: Kathy Fagan

Zachariah McVicker (ZM): Not only is the first line of your poem “Alternative Elegy” a great one from Hass, but the borrowed line positions the speaker, almost before the poem begins, in an indebted position. The poem then goes on to embody that indebtedness to its subject: the passing parental figure. A number of poems in The Unbecoming share a similar positioning. How have you been thinking about the position, or role, of the poet or speaker in tough yet indebted moments like this one?

Kathy Fagan (KF): That Hass opening line is to my mind one of the most memorable, in part because I was still young in the practice when I first read it—and it hits even harder as one ages and loses loved ones. The indebtedness you detect is to my poetry forbears, of course, and to those lost loved ones as well, but it may also be just another way the book is thinking about larger love and what we owe the world and one another for this astonishing miracle that is life. Sometimes what we owe someone takes the form of elegy, as is the case with this poem, dedicated to an older friend whose death and its circumstances I learned of a year after she’d died. I struggled mightily with the poem because of the many conflicting emotions one has when faced with the shock of a dear one’s untimely passing. It wasn’t until I turned away from myself toward her, imagined sitting with her in those final moments, respecting her decision, and abiding, that the poem made its way. And yes, it was my hope in putting these poems together into a book that the focus would be as outward facing as possible while avoiding assumptions and objectifications. The book opens with a sequence called “Listening to Others” that very deliberately moves between the extremely personal and what the meaning of the person becomes in community with others on a fragile planet.

ZM: “Alternative Elegy” offers a look into a lyricism consistent across the book—a lyrical moment that isn’t static and continues moving forward but still maintains the intensity of the paused moment. And so, when it’s very easy for a lyrical moment to become, I guess, too entranced with itself, these poems seem very cognizant of both the limit and the duration of their time. For example, the immediacy of lines such as “the morning’s verity, its diesel and harsh light” followed later in the poem by: “we choose a joined solitude instead / apart from, apart with, a faith in—” show a kind of push-and-pull of the momentary. How have you thought about this poem, and perhaps the collection, as complicating or pushing lyrical moments further?

KF: After my 2022 book, Bad Hobby, which I consider a memoir in verse, I wanted to carry what I’d learned about narrative and see if I could make a book that more fully contained elements of both narrative and lyric. Many of my favorite poets do this—it’s not a magic trick—but for me what there was left to discover had everything to do with sequencing, in the framing long poems obviously, which contain both personal and public histories braided together, but also in the stand-alone poems in which I do some of the same work in ekphrastics, elegies, period pieces, etc. The longer I work with poetry the more it seems clear, in my own projects anyhow, that the quotidian and transient share with art whatever it is that memory is, and memory is narrative and memory is lyric and all of it is beautifully mortal.

ZM: “Alternative Elegy” acts as a sort of inverse of the poem that precedes it in the book: “Naturalism.“ In both poems the subjects are starkly depicted in their stillness and quiet, but also marked perhaps by “long life and pride.” There’s a number of other ekphrastic poems in the book, but also other more personal poems that feel ekphrastic in their depictions of the body’s sensuality and also its breakdown. I’m wondering here about how ekphrasis informs your depiction of human subjects, how you’ve managed to avoid their objectification in the presence of ekphrasis, while also depicting the very human breakdown of the body.

KF: I love this question because I was thinking about it nonstop when making The Unbecoming and I’m still learning what I think about it, so thank you! I’ll say immediately that a tension between art and life is a current throughout the book, one hundred percent. There are the speaker’s childhood vs adult encounters with Renaissance art, for example, which “Naturalism” explores. Michelangelo’s iconic “Pieta” at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, a capitalist celebration of the future built quite literally on the backs of immigrants and working-class families like the speaker’s own. Then there’s the sculptor himself, patronized by the wealthy, outliving his peers and, in old-age, continuing his labor to release from marble his vision of the body. Relatedly is the depiction in the book of Nazi-occupied Florence, where great art was often prioritized over human life. The analog to art in the 21st century is money. I hope the book questions what we treasure most and why in light of our current historical moment—and how we may individually experience our changing values over time.

As I enter old(er)-age I feel even more keenly the liminal spaces between what is perceived to be present and what comes after. Because I’ve enjoyed a lifetime of paying close attention—my one and only superpower—I feel compassion for our bodies writ large, human and otherwise. Compassion and curiosity. Two epigraphs open The Unbecoming and the first is from the miraculous novelist Ali Smith; the end of it goes: “hello all the everything/ to be/ made and/ unmade/ both.” I wanted to honor life and what’s after in this book, not by valorizing it but by recognizing it.

ZM: You’ve mentioned the opening poem “Listening to Others,” and the place of the person in community. The tension of that idea is beautifully assembled across the poem: an agnostic attending Mass, a child listening through the landline to a parents’ night out, that child yelling and selling chances in the turning city crowd, inherited hearing aides, the yoga instructor: “When she calls for / chest openers, I think of my mother’s autopsy.” These re-hearings of language appear throughout too—I’m thinking of “mother” and “work” and “strike” and “Run like…”—all tied into moments of social cohesion and calamity. I’m just struck that you’ve constructed a poem, and a collection, that includes so much community, its language, and then listens to it. So how does a poem, or a project, or a poet, or however you think of it here, listen?

KF: Oof, this is a big one we could talk about forever, and should, but let’s start here: what we “hear” or otherwise receive—my dad was functionally deaf all his life and wasn’t in any way unreceptive to sensory stimuli, much less to language, which he loved and had enormous fun with—what we experience then, let’s say, when we’re alone is one thing, alone among others another thing, and meaningfully interacting with others yet another. Add to that mishearings (misperceptions or imagined options, maybe), the low hum of memory, the jackhammer of our egos, and whatever else our minds attend to every minute of every day and how can we not have our poems affected by all of that input?

I’ve been living in Italy as often as possible, and because I am only a beginner in the language, I’m often reminded of Frost’s notion of sentence sounds and the sound of sense, by which he means voice and tone within verse sentences: “the animating spirit of the living voice,” “the brute tones of our human throat,” “observation of the voice.” Living inside one language and beside the other, I’m very much a child again, attuned to the variations of the adult voices around me. My solitary and social selves have become reacquainted, and there’s a wonder and terror in that awareness, as there was in childhood. “Listening to Others” was begun in the U.S. but didn’t find its form until Italy. Being in Europe has brought me closer to global issues—immigration, climate change, Palestine, Ukraine, Congo, etc.—and the poems have definitely been changed by that, and by my own more keenly honed sense of my, and our, mortality.

There is so much urgently important poetry being published right now that focuses outward. It may be obvious but is worth mentioning that old-fashioned research is more necessary than ever to craft poems that speak truth to power. “38” by Layli Long Soldier is one superb example. “Measured” by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is another. Both create memorable forms for their subjects, too. As we know, there isn’t a single way or winning formula to make a poem, but exposure to as many as possible during all of one’s life feels key to making them oneself and is another debt we owe our practice and community, in my opinion.

ZM: For me, your poems for some time have felt alive with this churning, internal landscape. But The Unbecoming pulls me into this system of becoming and unbecoming (verb and adjective), between so much that is resolute and chiseled alongside what’s lost and cast off. Then, via Keats, the book ends with “a circle / closing” and the gutting final lines that follow. I’m wondering how, in the churn between the internal and the external, the listening and speaking, and within this system of memories: how did you imagine an ending amid so much movement and story?

KF: Thanks for reminding me of “Perpendicular”; although it appeared two books back, in Sycamore, I think it comes from a very similar impulse or yearning to understand, both intellectually and emotionally. Because of my spouse’s work I’m around a lot of scientists, one of whom asked me about the quantum physics in that poem, which of course wasn’t remotely intended. But your question about the close of The Unbecoming makes me wonder if perhaps wanting it all to be possible at once—the living and dying, the end and the beginning along with everything in between—isn’t in some way one purpose or goal or maybe byproduct of art? The book’s ekphrastics address that simultaneity. And others express the desire that a life’s (body’s) fullness provide a usefulness after death. Change has many forms, and what’s perceived as a conclusion is only one of many. Our stories are one among many. That abundance is very moving to me, and worthy of my endless attention.