Bill Carty is the author of Huge Cloudy (Octopus Books, 2019), which was long-listed for the Believer Book Award. He has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Artist Trust, Hugo House, and Jack Straw. Originally from coastal Maine, Bill now lives in Seattle, where he is senior editor at Poetry Northwest and teaches at Hugo House, the UW Robinson Center for Young Scholars, and Edmonds College. His poem “The Marshes Have No Memory” can be found here. It appears along with another poem in the May/June 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review and another poem, “We Sailed on the Lake,” appears this month in KROnline.
What was your original impetus for writing “The Marshes Have No Memory”?
I remember pretty clearly that this poem began with its title. I was listening to a podcast or news program where someone mentioned the oft-reiterated financial credo that “the markets have no memory.” I found this phrase resonant and wrote it down to use in a poem, and then at some point while working with it, I started to re-hear the phrase as “the marshes have no memory.” That transformation suggested a setting for the poem as well: while thinking of marshes generally, I started to envision the tidal marshlands of my hometown, and with them, a sort of imagined history of natural/human memory (or lack thereof).
This poem employs short, clipped sentences with defined periods. From the first to the very last, these lines punctuate and punch. They speak without explaining and provide what feels absolutely necessary. What motivated these specific syntactical choices?
I think the clipped sentences and the directness of the poem also sprang from that initial phrase. That phrase, and the history I imagined related to it, led to the next sentence (“Man drove horse hard . . .”), and a pattern of occasionally monosyllabic, heavily-punctuated language, intermixed with slightly more lyric passages (“Gray / thoroughbred, half-brother / to Guillotine” and “No marsh remembers its avocets”). Once this rhythm was established, I tried to follow these sounds through the poem. The poem uses more fragmentary language than I am used to, and in the second half of the poem, I initially struggled a lot with finding my way through this rhythm to the ending of the poem.
Throughout the poem, the speaker details how the marsh has no memory of past events, presences, and inhabitants. While the marshes bear witness, they cannot recall or remember. Yet, at the end of the poem, “the marshes themselves move on.” How does the speaker’s sense of memory influence this poem? Or does this poem serve as the acceptance of the marshes’ omniscient yet removed role?
I really like that description—“omniscient yet removed”—as a way of getting into the poem. At some point, and this is rather strange, I began to hear the last line of the poem (“the marshes themselves move on”) in the voice of a narration of an animated retelling of Plato’s allegory of the cave that I used to teach from fairly frequently. There’s a moment when the visuals cut out, and the narrator intones something with great gravity over a blank screen. I think of the last line of the poem similarly—a kind of narrated coda to the poem—while also recognizing the grandiloquence of the ending. Of course, the marshes have no memory. To personify them is ridiculous. I think the poem is concerned, on some level, with the human sense to see a landscape anthropocentrically, while also acknowledging the sense of loss, and sometimes nostalgia, associated with change. I think that the way the natural world supersedes human concerns within the poem is a stand-in for the literal (and perhaps littoral) movement of time, while also suggesting a reaching for something that is more-than-human.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
It’s not writing advice exactly, but one bit of teaching advice that immediately came to mind is from Richard Hugo: “Every moment, I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me. But I hope you learn to write like you.” I think about this quote frequently when listening to people discuss writing and when teaching writing myself, and I think it illustrates the need for every writer to find their own way into writing. For me this is most frequently through reading, and the benefit of good teaching is that it might enable you to read differently.
Just the other week, for instance, I took three-hour class through the Hugo House with the poet Emily Skillings. In that class, many of the readings were poets I teach myself, but approaching the material from a new perspective was immediately valuable, and helped me think of new ways of approaching my own work.
Another thing I like about Hugo statement is the way it can be read to suggest humility. It suggests a limitation on mastery and expertise that other forms of writing and teaching, such as the workshop model, help propagate. I’ve been teaching a thirty-week-long class at the Hugo House in Seattle for the last few years and one blessing of teaching a class of such a duration is that it becomes hard to plan that far ahead. Instead of orienting the class around specific sets of knowledge, we have reading, responding, and putting the pen to paper.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m currently working on my second collection of poems We Sailed on the Lake (the title poem appears in KROnline this spring). My first book, Huge Cloudy, came out two years ago this spring, and the new collection includes some longer poems that I’ve been working on since before then. As a result, I’ve been trying to write some newer poems to intersperse and act in conversation with the longer projects within this book.