Patterns and Poetry in the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Caryl Pagel
Caryl Pagel | Free Clean Fill Dirt | University of Akron Press | 2022 | 91 Pages
Caryl Pagel’s Free Clean Fill Dirt collects poems of place, parenthood, and Anthropocenic anxiety. Patterned to the pace of global catastrophe, these formal procedures think in sound and speak through a self to focus the local and immediate within an unchartable space of apocalypse. Delilah McCrea spoke with Pagel earlier this year about what it’s like to write, teach, and publish poetry under these conditions, tending to life and literature on collective and personal terms while species-level mortality has never been nearer or more apparent. Front door to graveyard, Cleveland to the world.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Delilah McCrea: Something that stood out to me in these poems was the way the speaker would refer to other people in their world with a casual familiarity, often by initials (such as “O” or “H.D.”). This felt to me like a form of world-building. A way of referencing a larger life and world that both these poems and their speaker occupy. Was there any larger narrative intention on your part when employing this particular stylistic choice? Also, was there any intention to the way that the speaker refers to both long-dead authors and, presumably, people in the speaker’s own life with a similar sort of familiarity?
Caryl Pagel: The world-building was partially a consequence of having just finished a collection of essays (Out of Nowhere Into Nothing, FC2) and still wanting to pull some of those voices and texts into what I was writing. A bit of that world spilled into this one. In the essays I was interested in intimacy as affection and in these poems it was intimacy as contrast to catastrophe. I thought if I was going to write about climate change or the Anthropocene I should also be clear about the world I’m living in—I should include what’s at stake, and what’s at stake is some combination of the personal and the global. I wanted this book that’s trying to get at larger questions of ruin or entropy to also include living particulars.
As far as the casual familiarity with people I actually know alongside people I never knew (some of whom are dead) one answer is that while it’s true I feel close to the person in the poems called “O” (my husband), I also feel close to H.D. and Frank O’Hara and Frida Kahlo, all of whom appear in the poems and who I’ve known longer than I’ve known O. Some of the people who’ve influenced my writing the most—who I most want to respond to—are alive and known to me and some are not. I’m thinking of the part in the poem “The Vanitas Fly” that’s celebrating the character Yorick, who was always dead and never real but who’s been a charming and relevant mentor to me.
DM: In writing these questions and reading your book I was trying to think about how to stick to the “rule” of not assuming speaker as author, with the complication of the fact that I know you and so for example, I know exactly who O is.
CP: Yeah, that’s okay, it’s a personal book, the most personal book I’ve ever written, intentionally and uncomfortably so. I don’t know if I’ll ever write a book this personal again—it probably doesn’t even seem that way to other people, but to me it was quite a bit about the daily and close. I felt I needed to include a kind of vulnerable minutiae as foil. And as a bit of levity too. A bit of humor or something.
DM: As someone who was your student and knows enough about you from that, this book came across to me as pretty personal. I really like the balance that you’re talking about because there are such large concerns in this book and in a lot of your writing. And if you’re writing about something like the Anthropocene, for example, like climate catastrophe, then, the question is, why are you writing about it? The answer is the personal. The answer is the intersection of the personal and the global, like you said.
CP: As you know, I was pregnant when I was writing a lot of this book. That was an experience I had not had before and it’s one that brings up a lot of questions that feel dire and urgent and also totally ordinary. The idea of—if you are bringing a child into the world, what does that mean? I mean now, in this moment specifically, but also—what does that mean to anyone (or all of us) ever? These questions are both incredibly overwhelming and totally mundane. So, some of the writing arose from my desire to dwell in the existential and mutual. To explore the universal and in a seemingly unique happening.
DM: Two sets of concerns that really shine through in this collection are those of ecopoetics and poetics of place. Often the poems that forefront one of these also forefront the other. I’m thinking especially of the “Ordinary Strata” poems. Could you speak to the intersection of ecopoetics and poetics of place?
CP: I taught an ecopoetics class about five years ago that you were in and as you know a question of the class was what even is ecopoetics? What is the term trying to get at? What does it make happen as genre or compass? What can’t it address?
The swirl of those questions led me to writing about place as one approach that I could start with or manage. You bring up the “Ordinary Strata” series, written in a form I made for myself that—like any other form—could both contain complexity and adapt. The “Ordinary Strata” poems are seven lines about a particular place through multiple times. They echo the geological form of strata with different layers of visibly distinct rock or soil or trash that show, via cross section, information about different tiers simultaneously. The poems are about the particular accumulated moments that gradually form the history of a place—a street corner or park or a lake, nowhere special, just where I was. I like to think that with ecopoetics, or any theory or form, the point is for the concept to generate an experiment or frame.
DM: It feels to me like something that place offers in that question of What is ecopoetics? What are its concerns? is a way to look at the effects of the interactions between humanity and environment over time in a very concentrated way because you can look at the changes over time in a single place.
CP: Absolutely. When one has these large existential questions buzzing in their head, questions that we all have, what do you do? You attend to what’s in front of you. You listen. You watch it change. That’s an obvious thought, you know? But it’s one that’s useful to return to.
DM: In addition to those relationships between form and content in the book (one of the more direct examples being the stratified form of the “Ordinary Strata” poems), there also seems to be a relationship between form and process. For example, the poems which have the most obvious amount of research in their construction (such as “The Vanitas Fly” and “A History of the Color Orange”) presumably may have taken the longest amount of time to write, and that length of time is reflected by the length of the poems themselves as they sprawl across several pages of the book. Can you speak to that relationship? To the ways both content and process influence your approach to form and vice-versa?
CP: I think this lengthening was coming out of writing essays where I was enjoying being in ongoing, elastic thought. And you’re right, the longer poems hold more of everything. In this book about fear of and care within potential endings, I still didn’t want to leave. I discovered duration as one path to surprise. Some of these poems, the longer they are, the stranger they get. I’m thinking of “Notes on Notes on Thought and Vision,” a semi-narrative poem that breaks into a wave-like meditation on poetics halfway through. That shape’s difference was a consequence of the length’s spell.
Another content-informed formal detail is the time-signature element to the longer poems, which all have lines of three or seven words, or in some cases three then four to make seven, a perhaps silly measurement that came from being thirty-seven when I wrote most of this book, a way of imprinting something personal onto the core of the poems. There’s a little nod to that pattern in the last long poem “It Is With A Pattern As With A Fortress” (a title taken from William Morris, who you might know from his woodblock nature prints, one of which appears earlier in Free Clean Fill Dirt):
… like one who plates
painted flowers in
the same way—day after day—or
measures lines in
units of threes and sevens to reflect
the age at
which they first became the author of
another (a mother)
as if math could secure a sounder
path—as if
a poem broken open could sufficiently reveal
the circumstances of
the rowdy doubting mind that wrote it
like the rings
of an ancient pine or the stamped
itty bitty lines
of a new fingerprint’s signature…
In printmaking, an image appears over and over again. I was thinking about how patternmaking, regardless of the content of what you’re repeating, can create strength and space. One’s life is made of the patterns they engage in day after day. I personally know this from trying to write, from relationships, from work. Editing and bookmaking is basically doing the same things over and over, year after year. So is teaching. The actual content (image, engagement, conundrum) of the moment is always different, but they all require meaning-making within routine.
This poem tries to attach these process ideas to parenthood. I wrote it when I was eight or nine months pregnant and imagining what it would be like to have a kid, especially a baby, which I was a little bit afraid of—what it might mean for my days. Figuring out habits and schedules and, you know, changing diapers or doing bedtime, things that parents do over and over and over. I was panic-imagining the freedom one might find in the routines that would soon be expected of me, while also acknowledging in the poem that no form (or fortress) can hold forever against chaos or doubt or the wildness of art. No pattern holds forever, it breaks to hold you better. So how to reconcile all that?
DM: A lot of what you are saying here makes so much sense to me given my experience with you as a teacher. It’s why I always thought you were such a good teacher. Because as you talked about just now, this idea that all of life is in a way these kinds of patternmakings and repetition in order to become better at the things you have to—and desire to do. And how you mentioned with teaching that each individual experience teaching a new class, teaching a new batch of students, is different, but there’s a pattern to what you’re doing, to the process. Every year, every semester, I wanted to sign up for a Caryl class. I know the thought that you put into constructing a class. There’s always a very well thought-out theme that isn’t just like for a theme’s sake, but a question that you are genuinely exploring and using a structure to explore with your students. All of that translates into both the book on the page, and into hearing your answers about what goes into your process as a writer.
CP: Thank you for saying that, Delilah. As you know and as I mention in the acknowledgements of Free Clean Fill Dirt, I was grateful for that class, consistently surprised by the conversations we were having. They were generative, challenging, often vulnerable, and they changed me. I guess it makes sense to approach teaching in much the same way one tries to approach writing and editing. The hope is that over time they become part of some unified ethos.
DM: On that subject of your shared approach to teaching and writing, I know as a teacher of creative writing one piece of advice you often give your students is to look towards outside sources as a starting place for writing: researching things like existing literature or scientific phenomena as a means of both inspiration and grounding. Can you speak to how that strategy influences your writing of this book? Here I’m thinking of “The Vanitas Fly” and “Notes on Notes” . . .
CP: I think research—via archives or interviews or reading or fieldwork—brings you other questions. The world outside the self brings you material. Research asks you to incorporate the lives and work of others. It’s a social stance. The two poems you pointed to are pretty readerly, as is a lot of my work. One is interacting with H.D.’s weird book of poetics, Notes on Thought and Vision, and one’s lobbing a lot of Hamlet jokes toward a central, difficult question. The stance of being a reader is the perspective from which I feel most like myself. It’s where my point of view, or my sense of self is grounded, and I think that’s a useful approach to share. Research can tether your inquiries to existing aesthetics or strategies, and it’s naturally conversational.
DM: What does it mean to be a poet in the Anthropocene?
CP: Well, that is a driving question of the book, and I don’t have an answer. I don’t have an answer at all. I hope that you have an answer! [Both laugh]. But there are two things I can think of that writing a book responding to that question led me to consider. One is that being a poet in the Anthropocene has come to mean interrogating the ecological and social conditions of the material I incorporate into poems. So, not just what is the content of my poems, but where does the language come from, and what of existing images or ideas or concerns in the world might be reused, what waste can be incorporated, what old known tunes will carry us through. The other note—which I feel like, it’s a very poet thing to say, but I’ll say it because I feel it’s true—is that I think to be a poet in the Anthropocene means trying to incorporate the structures we use in poetry or the kinds of imaginative, weirdo thinking we enact—the flexibility of our forms, the durability of them—incorporating that into our other modes of coping and relating to each other during uncertainty or crises. Being a poet teaches one to welcome—and to live in—ambiguity and curiosity, and complexity.
DM: I’m thinking of the excerpt we read in your ecopoetics class from Learning to Die in the Anthropocene by Roy Scranton. Something he argues is, we have to think about things differently than how we always have. Because how we’ve always thought about things is how we ended up here, and we aren’t going to get through where we are now doing things and thinking about things the same way. And to me, poetry (all art really, but for me, poetry especially) is the primary medium in which to do that thinking.
CP: Yes, that Scranton book was a definite influence on Free Clean Fill Dirt (as I know it’s been on your work as well). As was Allison Cobb’s After We All Died, Emily Wilson’s The Keep, and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas. As was Nick Gulig’s Orient, Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem, and Inger Christensen’s alphabet. Two more recent books I’ll add to our forever-syllabus are Richard Meier’s A Duration and Moheb Soliman’s HOMES.
But in response to your point, I think maybe my experience with “It Is With A Pattern As With A Fortress,” the poem we talked about earlier, relates to what you’re saying. The end of that poem felt strange to me for a long time. I didn’t understand it. I actually didn’t like it for a long time because I didn’t understand it. I thought I should know what my poems are about, or doing, which of course is totally ridiculous. You can’t, or not always. And you come to new understandings of your own texts the same way you do of any reading. But it’s this moment in the poem where there’s a swirl of language about imagining having a kid in a time of climate catastrophe and it details some of the things that someone born around now may never know or experience, then it kind of cuts off and returns to the scene of putting up wallpaper in a nursery, ending with the repetition of the line: “Let’s stare without purpose at the pattern / for a minute. / Let’s stare without purpose at the pattern / for a minute ...”
I knew this mantra—coming from the Morris—was about the usefulness of repetition, but I didn’t understand its placement in the poem, why it was there, at the end. What I’m realizing is, what was happening just before that was a bit of a dread spiral. And that’s one way we have to react to the Anthropocene—to freak the fuck out. A very reasonable response and one that we all engage in all the time. And what the human brain does to counteract that freakout is categorized as either delusion or hope—choices which are both also ultimately false. So where does that leave us? I think what this poem is saying is it’s not dread or hope. It’s still just process. It’s the work of the day, the material, the behaviors, the relationships. That's an answer that the book gave me. I don’t know if that's my answer for life or if that will suffice, but I think that’s what this book gave me in writing it.
Caryl Pagel is the author of two previous books of poetry, Twice Told and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death, as well as a collection of essays, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing. She is an editor and publisher at Rescue Press and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Pagel teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program.