Three Poets, Four Weeks
Back in the late spring of 2020, a time that seems so distant now, we at The Seventh Wave brainstormed ideas for interviews. Among the ideas was to strike up a month-long correspondence with some poets, a once-a-week note with a question that they each could respond to in the moment. The idea was that it would act as a time capsule, adjacent to our Mind Capsule project, but also adjacent to everything that is talked about/created/happening right now, in this time that feels extra potent, extra life-and-death. How are a few poets, who have new or recent books, experiencing the world right now? What are they holding onto?
Three amazing poets agreed to this experiment. E.J. Koh’s A Lesser Love was just re-issued by Pleiades Press this past spring, closely following the release of her memoir, The Magical Language of Others (Tin House), in January. Koh is a Seattle-based poet, memoirist, love letter writer, translator, and photographer, whose rhapsodic writing often explores the ideas of home, immigration, family, and love. Minnesota-based torrin a. greathouse’s debut full-length collection, Wound From the Mouth of a Wound, is forthcoming on December 22 from Milkweed Editions. In it, they center the queer disabled body, and the viscerality of the body in general, in paradigms of beauty, rage, and love, with language that bites (in the very best way). And New Mexico-based Benjamin Garcia’s debut collection, Thrown in the Throat (Milkweed Editions), dropped in August. This work pulses with electricity and sex, with humor and joy, anger and hope. Queer feelings, diaspora, smelly cheese, styrofoam — all of it is rendered here in poems that grab at the heart.
All three of these poets are making brilliant work. Over the course of one month, they answered a question every week, over email, and did not see each other’s answers. It is beautiful and telling to see the themes that arise, including love, fear, and, surprisingly, falling trees.
September 14
The Seventh Wave: What does September mean to you this year? What does this particular seasonal shift bring up in your life, poetic or otherwise, in this specific year? Where is your creativity in this seasonal shift?
E.J. Koh: September is the month I was born; it’s the month I meditate on my death. At my death, I won’t bring anything with me. There is a lightness here: nothing matters enough to bring — except oneself. This speaks to the purpose and work of human life. Then, what I fear is not death but, at the moment of death, meeting myself for the first time.
torrin a. greathouse: For me, more so than January, September is the point at which the year folds over on itself. We get the first few good brisk days of the coming Fall and Winter, and everything that stitched itself up over the world in the spring slowly unravels. Perhaps though, as a September child, I have a particular bias. This year though, it has represented the strange shift of returning to grad school in the midst of a pandemic, learning to navigate both teaching and learning while in this new environment. It’s also required a kind of emotional transition with my work. After spending the summer revising Wound from the Mouth for a Wound, it’s finally time to let that project go and move in the world, and to set my sights toward working on my MFA thesis. At the same time, I’m doing promotion and readings around the book. Just like the beginning of 2020 has seemed to stretch on forever into the following months, as a poet I very much feel the sensation of living at the blending point of two moments — of two worlds.
What I fear is not death but, at the moment of death, meeting myself for the first time. — E.J. Koh
Benjamin Garcia: September always makes me a little nostalgic — for spring, for summer — but this one seems particularly loaded with yearning, perhaps because it’s not so easy to travel or visit family this year. When I lived in New Mexico, it wasn’t the leaves changing color or pumpkin spice coffee that let you know it was fall but the smell of green chile roasting and filling your entire house or any grocery store parking lot. I guess I miss the small interactions with the outside world that I used to take for granted, be it with family, friends, food, etc.
I’m trying to remind myself to appreciate the present, which is hard to do when the world feels like or actually is on fire. It’s hard to focus in the middle of so much chaos. It’s hard to celebrate in the middle of so much violence. Earlier this month I texted a friend because I had a poem featured in a publication that I’ve always admired. I told her that I felt grateful for the publication but it was hard to be excited. She told me that it was okay to be excited, to have joy. When I asked why, she said, “because who benefits from that?” So now I ask myself, who benefits from that? If I deny myself joy, who benefits from that? If I don’t share this poem I wrote for a queer audience, who benefits from that? If I don’t buy this book from a small bookstore and get it on Amazon instead, who benefits from that? If I’m not writing or reading, who benefits from that? So this is how I’m going forward.
When I lived in New Mexico, it wasn’t the leaves changing color or pumpkin spice coffee that let you know it was fall but the smell of green chile roasting and filling your entire house or any grocery store parking lot. — Benjamin Garcia
September 21
The Seventh Wave: Birth, death, and rebirth are cycles we can witness in nature and inside our own bodies. Sometimes it’s violent, devastating, full of grief, like the fires and storms of climate change. Sometimes it’s beautiful, like the smell of dying leaves in fall or cherry blossoms in spring. What kinds of cycles — poetic, corporeal, political, interpersonal or otherwise — are you experiencing or witnessing right now?
Benjamin Garcia: It’s difficult to articulate the swing of the pendulum when it feels like the weight has rolled off entirely. So, instead I will share a poem by Dana Levin that does a great job of enacting how “the Great Wheel always turns, but/so much damage done as ash and seed/change places, as they always do — ” I’m hoping for “greater days when No/would blossom into Yes,” though the poem itself is titled “No” and reads like a circular riddle. You can check it out here.
It’s hard to focus in the middle of so much chaos. It’s hard to celebrate in the middle of so much violence. — Benjamin Garcia
E.J. Koh: Sometimes, when I can’t see an answer to a question or a problem, I draw a circle on the page. Without lifting my pen off the paper, I continue to circle inward. Over and over until I get to a center. Somewhere, inside the drawing, is a perfect circle. Though I can’t see it, it’s unmistakably there. My work is to see the circle. Of course, I’m wondering about everything, everything, everything, but at the same time, I have to see love.
torrin a. greathouse: Having just turned 26, my birthday is kind of an inevitable reminder of cycles, though one I often like to forget. Growing up queer and mentally ill, each year was a benchmark I expected not to reach. At this point, I’m about eleven years past what I thought my expiration date was. Each new year, then, gets to be — for better or worse — an exercise in improvisation, inventing a future for myself that I formerly believed I was not intended for.
Ultimately, though, it’s difficult to hear the term cycle right now and not think immediately of the election cycle. I began writing Wound from the Mouth of a Wound in 2016, and several of the poems are the direct result of violent policies enacted against disabled people, trans people, neurodivergent people, and survivors during the Trump presidency. Only four months ago, the Trump administration rolled back all public healthcare protections for trans people — meaning any doctor or insurer can deny me service. The collection comes out in December, and while our fight for justice will be far from over, I desperately hope this means it will release into a future where Trump is not the president.
It’s difficult to articulate the swing of the pendulum when it feels like the weight has rolled off entirely. — Benjamin Garcia
September 28
The Seventh Wave: What is something you did this past week that involved another person?
torrin a. greathouse: I think that the sense of social isolation that has marked most of our lives is something that took far longer to sink in for me — maybe a side effect of being physically disabled? Because of my chronic pain flaring in the cold and damp, nearly every winter for me is lived in isolation. If people do not choose to visit me, then I do not see people. This meant that the beginning of isolation due to COVID-19 was simply a continuation of my winter.
When it finally did sink in though, somewhere in mid-August, it hit extremely hard. I’ve been incredibly thankful lately for the presence of my roommate, and fellow poet, Tarik Dobbs. Our routine of sharing morning coffee, working together in afternoons, and watching abysmal television at night, has become a sanctuary. This last week, we started some banal British dating show, which wrapped filming just months before the virus would begin spreading. There’s a strange comfort in these brief forays into the time capsule this represents; all of the contestants are so casually intimate, unconscious of their bodies in a way that few of us are now — and I don’t believe I’ve ever been.
Of course, I’m wondering about everything, everything, everything, but at the same time, I have to see love. — E.J. Koh
E.J. Koh: I encountered a tree. I was on my regular walk along the shoreline of Lincoln Park. I thought it was thunder at first. But I saw the trunk, the branches falling above me and into a telephone line and a parked car across the road. I wasn’t hurt. But I didn’t move. The tree was now at the height it must have been before I was born. Somehow, I went home with a hole in my heart.
Benjamin Garcia: My partner and I were finally able to clear enormous maple limbs that fell in our yard after a sudden burst of wind. Maple wood is heavy and our trees are 60–70 feet tall, so we’re lucky to have only lost part of our garage. We couldn’t have cleared this debris without our neighbor, who was kind enough to saw a ridiculous amount of wood into manageable pieces.
We enjoy occasional chats across the yard with this neighbor, but we’ve avoided talking politics so as not to jeopardize our convivial arrangement. I still don’t know his politics. What I do know is that trees crushed one of his cars. Trees crushed his newly erected fence — a fence he did a second time over because it wasn’t straight enough the first time. And trees crushed his American flag. When it dried, a stray cat clawed it before curling up for a midday nap.
I am not sharing this as a story about how we should forgo all political differences for the sake of unity. BIPOC and LGBTQI folks in this country, trans women especially, not only have their civil rights threatened because of extreme right-wing ideology, but we often live with genuine concerns for physical safety. I’m not sure why I am sharing this story. Maybe because as a writer, my brain is wired to seek metaphor. Maybe I was just relieved for the extra help. Or maybe it’s because I want to believe in good neighbors over good fences.
Each new year, then, gets to be — for better or worse — an exercise in improvisation, inventing a future for myself that I formerly believed I was not intended for. — torrin a. greathouse
October 5
The Seventh Wave: What’s the brightest future you can imagine?
E.J. Koh: A future of jeong comes to mind. The so-called untranslatable word is the Korean for a bond, attachment, or love for a person, place, or thing. Though the word is Korean, the feeling of jeong is universal, shared. That jeong for one another, for the land we live on, and the everyday things — the coffee mug, the notebook, and the chair, reflecting to us the values we admire such as goodwill, steadfastness, and service — we hope to mirror with care. Jeong is the umbilical cord between us and life, not to be apart but recognize the primordial state of being a part of life.
Benjamin Garcia: Speaking of neighbors and writers using metaphor as a way of processing the world, I had the most bizarre quarantine dream. Pre-tree incident, pre-election chaos, I dreamt that after the pandemic ended, my partner and I took our neighbors (husband, wife, and one-year-old daughter) to, of all places, an old-fashioned “all-American” hotdog stand. We sat across from each other on a weathered picnic table on a warm, sunny day and ate hotdogs and ice cream.
Now, if you know me, then you know this Americana-fantasy-nostalgia-BS is not my scene. However, because it’s been so long since we’ve gone out with another couple due to Covid, because we have avoided eating out, because I don’t know how we move forward as a country, because I don’t even know how I can sit at the same table with family members I know voted to re-elect a fascist, because it’s hard for me to imagine a bright future, this small vision is what I can manage.
Somehow, I went home with a hole in my heart. — E.J. Koh
torrin a. greathouse: On a personal level, I want to hold my partner’s hand again. I haven’t seen them since March when the pandemic began, and I miss them dearly.
When I turn outward though, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed. There’s a scene that has stuck with me since I first read it, where a group of horrified school children are taught a history lesson about the prison — now an artifact of the past. When I imagine a better future, it is one where abolition is something we speak of in the past tense. Where prisons and police and the overinflated american military state are no more. And every dollar they took is given back to give people homes and put food in their mouths.
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018) and assistant editor of The Shallow Ends. In 2020, they received fellowships from Zoeglossia and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Their work is published in POETRY, Ploughshares, & The Kenyon Review. Her debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in December 2020.
Benjamin Garcia’s first collection of poems, Thrown in the Throat, was selected for the 2019 National Poetry Series by Kazim Ali. He is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow, was the 2017 Latinx Scholar at the Frost Place, and was a 2018 CantoMundo Fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2018, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review. Garcia received his MFA from Cornell University and currently works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
E.J. Koh is the author of the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020) and poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry. Her co-translation of Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle is forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review of Books, Slate, and World Literature Today. Koh is the recipient of The Virginia Faulkner Award and fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, Jack Straw Writers Program, Kundiman, MacDowell, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the editor of Pleiades: Poetry by Korean American Women. Koh earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Literary Translation and Creative Writing. She is completing her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle for English Language and Literature on intergenerational trauma throughout Korean American literature, history, and cinema.
