An Interview With Lyd Havens, in Celebration of "Chokecherry"
Lyd Havens | Chokecherry | Game Over Books | May 2021
Some two years or so ago, by way of a friend, the work of Lyd Havens, whom I did not know at the time, fell glowingly into my lap. The poem, titled “Notname,” published by Glass Poetry, was a grandiose, thoughtful, and mesmerizing take on the balancing act of history, family, and love. It moved me, the way Lyd used legacies of grief to unravel their own surrounding the death of their uncle. I, too, had lost an uncle to suicide, and I, too, had tried writing about it. And when I found this poem, I was already deep into a manuscript I was uncertain would ever get finished. But then I read the lines “this is what I know: I am from / a family of writers. Most of us / can barely draw a childlike sun, / or our own faces” and looked at my own line about a family member’s inability to draw even the sun, and felt full for the first time in god knows when. Because the best poetry is not what moves you, but, instead it is what affirms you that you are not singular.
I have spent nearly two years eating up every poem Lyd puts out. Whether it was their Fleetwood Mac poem my beloved Flypaper Lit published, or their stunning “Fourth poem for Nexplanon” in Ploughshares, there is a fragrant buzz in watching your heroes succeed long after they became so. When Lyd’s new book, Chokecherry, was announced on Twitter, I felt the same joy about a collection of their poems going into the world through a single tweet that I would have if we were celebrating in person. I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with some of the best people in the world by way of poetry, so I am helplessly in love with the accomplishments of the people I have been categorically lumped together with through sheer coincidence.
Now five years after losing my grandmother to dementia, Chokecherry has become a book I hold close—for the way it so beautifully paces alongside dementia and memory loss, and for the way it champions the mission of remembering. It is one thing to reflect on what was forgotten, but it is another thing to open yourself up to the promise of reclaiming what was forgotten. The book possesses a brevity that is abolished by the six-page, penultimate poem “UNSAYINGS,” and I’m moved by how the text’s sequencing also beckons the grief it’s interrogating. From start to finish, Chokecherry hinges itself on what comes next, inspiring us to look inwards on our own tomorrows, and to hope what we produce can one day also fall into someone’s lap.
Chokecherry is celebratory for all of us. The book is not just a culmination of Lyd’s stunning poetic bibliography we’ve watched swell with stardom, but a touching placemat that sets the table for their future—which will surely be brimming with a dozen more books, each one lighting a fire in everyone, sending us on our collective ways, inspiring us to gift the world a story so generous.
I chatted with Lyd about Chokecherry, which you can read below.
Matt: There are a few recurring devices and objects circulating throughout Chokecherry, but the most prominent ones are teeth and your grandparents. When you write about wisdom teeth, I think about growth that is unprepared for, and I think about how that growth connects to the narratives in some of your poems where the speaker is backpedaling through memories in different landscapes and ruminating on a familial past.
Lyd: I didn’t even realize how often wisdom teeth are mentioned in Chokecherry until I gave a reading in April and had to stop myself and be like, “Oh wow, lots of teeth here.” But you’re absolutely spot-on, and getting my wisdom teeth removed actually preceded a lot of the griefs that Chokecherry is about. Three weeks after getting the stitches taken out, I cut off contact with my dad. Six months later, my grandfather was suddenly very ill, and my grandmother was remembering less and less. My life, and my family, completely changed, and quite frankly I was a mess. It’s clichéd, but my heart was absolutely broken. Even though I wasn’t speaking to my dad anymore, I still had a lot to unpack from my childhood, and my grandparents were two of the best people I’ve ever met. Writing Chokecherry meant simultaneously acknowledging how much pain I was in, while also celebrating my grandparents and how much they shaped me.
Matt: I’ve always kind of seen a chapbook as a reader’s introduction to not just a poet’s work, but also where the poet plans on going in a future release. Are there specific moments you wrote about in Chokecherry that you want to continue pursuing in future projects, or are there specific adjacencies that you didn’t get a chance to include in this book that you might want to include in your next?
Lyd: I will probably always be writing about my uncle and grandparents in some capacity. But beyond that, there’s probably a whole book about my grandmother specifically that could be written. I don’t mention this in Chokecherry, but for years she worked on and off on a memoir about her upbringing on a potato farm in Northern Maine. I’d really like to try and find those drafts and write something that’s in conversation with them. It probably won’t happen for quite a while, but it’s blossoming in the back of my head.
Matt: I’m a big cover guy, and Catherine Weiss did a beautiful job on yours. I especially love the small star we can see cutting through the sky just above the ‘k’ in CHOKECHERRY. A beautiful little detail in a book so dedicated to details. You two also collaborated together with Game Over Books for I Wish I Wasn’t Royalty, the press’ playing cards-slash-poetry book. How did your first book land with Game Over Books, and what’s it been like for you working with them and Catherine to bring Chokecherry to life?
Lyd: Oh, working with both Game Over Books and Catherine is a dream. While I Wish I Wasn’t Royalty was still in the works, GOB had an opening reading period, and I had recently figured out what, exactly, Chokecherrywas supposed to be. Josh (editor-in-chief of GOB) had encouraged me to submit in the past, so I sent it in. GOB is super dedicated to treating both their staff and authors well, so I knew if it got picked up, it’d be in good hands—and it absolutely is. Chokecherry had a handful of other names before it became Chokecherry, and Josh was incredibly patient in helping me find the book’s true title. It was difficult not to overthink a book that’s so personal and important to me, and the whole GOB team were so compassionate yet firm in getting me to break that cycle of overthinking.
Catherine and I have known each other for about four years, and one thing that helped us bond is that they grew up in Maine, and a good chunk of my extended family lives in Maine, so I have a real soft spot for it. So, when the manuscript was accepted and I was given some names for potential cover artists, I almost immediately knew I wanted Catherine to do it. Like you said, they have such an incredible attention to detail, both in their visual art and poetry (as an aside, their own book is being published by GOB this summer!). The house on the cover is based on a house in Maine that’s special to them, and it just so happens to also look like the house that I would go to every summer in central Maine. That didn’t come up until after the cover was finished, so I like to think that that connection goes really deep for us. They’re just phenomenal.
Matt: I love how a lot of the poems in this text move alongside with music. We get features from players like Fleetwood Mac, Allanah Myles, Talking Heads, and Bruce Springsteen. There are a lot of poets who make referentials too heavy-handed, but your book lets them nestle into the landscape quite beautifully. The poem “I ONLY MISGENDER MYSELF WHEN FLEETWOOD MAC COMES ON” is very much building a world of its own, and I love it for that. It’s as if we, the reader, get to sit in on a conversation we take no part in. When you were working on Chokecherry, was this interactive soundtrack always a part of your story, or is it a product of who you became while writing the poems and looking back on parts of life?
Lyd: It's a combination of the two, I think. I didn’t set out to give Chokecherry that soundtrack, but I realize now it was pretty inevitable. Growing up, I wasn’t exposed to a lot of “modern” music, and instead mostly listened to the stuff my parents came of age to. Naturally, in a book about memory, memories of those songs came up a lot, and some of them are still recent: The summer my grandfather died, “Black Velvet” by Allanah Myles seemed to follow me everywhere. I had never heard it before that summer, and I was just so drawn to the ferocity in her voice. And I’ve loved Fleetwood Mac for as long as I can remember, but got super into them around 2017. Fleetwood Mac’s a good band to get into when you’re in love for the first time. But I also have a lot of very vivid memories of my father being terrible while Rumours is playing in the background—and as much as I love that album, it’s morbidly appropriate to be the soundtrack to that part of my childhood. I am haunted in the best way possible by how close Stevie Nicks is to wailing toward the end of “Silver Springs,” and that’s pretty much how I felt all the time after cutting off contact with my dad. That’s how “I only misgender myself…” specifically came to be.
Matt: Chokecherry is so beautifully defined by its penultimate poem “UNSAYINGS,” which is a colossal 6-page culmination of the previous 30-plus pages that uses the image of light to sweetly transition into the book’s coda, “MY GRANDMOTHER, IN MAINE AT DAWN.” The finale is an ode dedicated to the promise of remembrance, which this book so masterfully does throughout, and there is such a clear and striking grief you are writing towards. What drew you to using a memory as a framework for poems populated by grief?
Lyd: Writing from memory is probably what I know how to do best as a writer. It’s a means of record-keeping, acknowledgement, and coping. I’ve struggled in the past with memory issues that stemmed from trauma repression, so a lot of my work comes from a place of trying to make sure I don’t forget. But when I was writing Chokecherry, my grandmother’s dementia had progressed so rapidly that she couldn’t remember that my grandfather had died. Eventually, she couldn’t even remember that my uncle had died 11 years prior. I told a family friend recently that all I’ve been able to do for the last two years is remember, both on her behalf and for my own sake. And like I said, Chokecherry is also about celebrating the lives of my late family members. There are so many painful memories in the book, but I tried to balance that with ones that I really cherish, like those of my grandmother in Maine. I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence wanting to forget, and now, for better or for worse, I want to remember.
Matt: When you’re in an MFA for poetry, you’re essentially working towards your thesis, your big collection of poems that a committee will deem worthy of a degree or not. And completing that gets a lot of warranted praise. But I also think writing a book while working through undergrad is something that deserves to be equally celebrated. I know you’ve been finishing up your bachelor’s degree at Boise State, so how has it been for you, putting a book together while also balancing an academic life at the same time? And where do you see Chokecherry sending you next?
Lyd: First, thank you so much! Chokecherry really started solidifying itself in 2019, and that year I took multiple poetry classes at Boise State. Some of the poems, including the titular “Chokecherry,” were first written in those classes. One of my professors, Emily Pittinos, read at least half a dozen drafts of “Boomtown,” the 11-page poem in the middle of the book, and gave such valuable and compassionate feedback. Without Emily, I don’t think I would have even been brave enough to write such a long poem, let alone to just keep working at it until it became my favorite poem I’ve ever written. The creative writing faculty at Boise State are truly inimitable, and I feel beyond lucky to get to learn from them, and to grow alongside so many talented peers.
I have a lot of ideas for books, like the one I talked about earlier, but they’re still just ideas. Currently, I can’t vividly picture what my next book is going to be, and that really excites me. It might be a full-length poetry collection, it might be a book of essays, it might be a memoir, it might be a hybrid work. For now, though, I have some time off for the first time in years. I’m going to rest, read as much as I can, write as much as I can, watch all the movies I promised myself I’d watch this summer, and probably rewatch at least one season of Survivor. So, in the immediate future, Chokecherry is taking me toward relearning how to relax.
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Lyd Havens is a reader and writer living in Boise, Idaho. Their work has previously been published in Ploughshares, The Shallow Ends, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Foglifter, among others. They are the author of the chapbook I Gave Birth to All the Ghosts Here (Nostrovia! Press, 2018), the winner of the 2018 ellipsis… Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2019 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Their chapbook Chokecherry is forthcoming from Game Over Books in May 2021.
You can purchase Chokecherry from Game Over Books here: https://www.gameoverbooks.com/product-page/chokecherry