Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Once Removed (Persea, 2015), Approaching Ice (Persea, 2010), Interpretive Work (Arktoi/Red Hen, 2008), and the forthcoming Toward Antarctica (Boreal/Red Hen, 2019). Her awards include a Stegner Fellowship and the Audre Lorde Prize. Founder and editor in chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist locally, as well as on expedition ships around the globe, and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University. www.ebradfield.com. Her poem “First Walk on Sea Ice” can be found here. It appears along with three other poems in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.
Your poetry alternates between blocks of prose and lineated sections, what does your use of form mean for your subject?
These poems and images are part of a book that will be published in May 2019, titled Toward Antarctica. The book explores my work as a naturalist/guide on ecotour ships in Antarctica. Since 2004, I have worked as a naturalist on ecotourism expedition ships—ships with 120 or fewer passengers upon which the primary objective is to experience a wild place through on-site explorations facilitated by a team of experts in various fields—botany, geology, history, ornithology, marine biology, and the like. In the past, this has been my main occupation; more recently I have balanced “ship work” with teaching. Traveling with others for weeks at a time aboard a ship, working as part of a team to help connect people to ecological and cultural subtleties of a place, feeds me profoundly as a poet and a citizen of the world. I am grateful to have found my way to this work, even with all the complications it can embody.
Until my first contract working in Antarctica, however, I had not been able to write while working as a naturalist. The two modes of thinking, observing, and connecting were at odds with each other. In “naturalist mode,” I was too busy being present and answering questions and keeping to schedule. I could not drift and look inward in the way that writing poems requires. But working in Antarctica felt different. In part, it was because the longer voyages and days at sea allowed for a bit more down time. In part, it was due to the place itself. I knew my voyage would be an opportunity to ground-truth what I’d written in my 2010 collection of poems, Approaching Ice, which investigates “golden age” explorers like Shackleton and Scott as well as the contemporary lure of the high latitudes.
But how to open myself to writing and remain present in the manner that my job required? Having begun a study of haibun before joining the ship, I thought this form could help. In haibun, jotted diary-like prose is interspersed with and interrupted by short poems, usually haiku. As the Poetry Foundation says, these two modes allow a writer to explore “the external images observed en route, and the internal images that move through the traveler’s mind during the journey.” The form has a fascinating history. In 1682, the renowned poet Matsuo Bashō started journeying by foot into remote areas of Japan for months at a time. Along the way, he wrote, and in trying to depict what such a journey meant on both a practical and an emotional level, he invented the haibun form.
As with much classical Japanese poetry and art, Bashō’s work is infused with allusions to poets, stories, figures, and tropes that add resonance to his writing and which his contemporaries would have recognized. Given our diverse contemporary world, I have used footnotes here to offer readers access to that undercurrent in my own work.
For me, the writing of Toward Antarctica demands that I break away from prose when the experience becomes more emotionally resonant—usually as yearning and awe tinged with melancholy. The poems are vulnerable moments to me. The prose holds all the armor of getting through a day. But don’t we hope to have those moments when our routine is broken by heightened emotion? I do.
How do the images relate to your written pieces? Do you feel that they are complementary inclusions or do they exist as a much more necessary element for your work to be received as hoped and intended?
Bashō’s collections of travel-inspired haibun are interspersed with calligraphic paintings, and the dynamic between image, prose, and poem create a deeper, more mysterious rendering of his experience. I took the photographs as I usually do when working: as documentation, with an eye toward use in illustrated lectures, not with poems in mind. Upon returning home, though, I realized that some of them revealed something else. Something emotional. A visual counterbalance to the classic, heroic images we often see of that kept-wild place. On my second contract working in Antarctica, I went south with the intention of returning with more and better images. Truthfully, I’m not sure that second, more deliberate effort is better; I only ended up using fourteen of those photos and the book as a whole has just about fifty. The majority of the images I ended up using are from the time before I knew I’d need them, the time before I was looking with self-awareness.
Photography has an important history in Antarctica. For Shackleton and his cohort, the images they brought home to be printed or used as lantern slides were what paid off the voyage and hopefully rebuilt coffers for the next venture. Now, images of Antarctica have become icons of climate change and also “wildness.” I am not sure if the images in Toward Antarctica are looking back or forward. Ultimately both, I think. It’s my hope that, alongside the text, the images provide another lens and gateway into the experience being shared.
How has your writing or writing process changed since you started out?
I am so much slower! I used to think writer’s block was a myth. I still have my doubts about it, but I can see how things can interrupt a steady flow of writing. And I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I feel as if what I’ve written in the past demands that I consider where I step forward. I want to try new things, to have the work build, to feel like what I’m writing now is as daring (or even moreso) than what I was doing in my twenties. I also notice that I’m much more interested in layering or interweaving sometimes-contradictory threads of knowledge and experience into poems, which makes them more complicated. These poems require, for me, a lot of perspective and spaciousness, which means they come into being more slowly.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
My work as a naturalist and the community of researchers and educators from the biology world I am fortunate to be a part of most influences my writing. In honesty, I couldn’t have one without the other and I feel very fortunate that I’ve been able to stay connected to both worlds. Writing and natural history are both more than careers for me; they are vocations, callings, passions. It’s funny, though—I don’t write very often about animals as a central subject. I do write about animals as seen through social lenses. There are amazing writers who take on animals as subjects. When I’m out in the field, what I most love is that the self falls away, and I am wholly turned toward looking, searching, trying to see clearly. When I come to the page, though, I’m more interested in exploring how we see, how our age, race, gender, class, sexuality, regional history and more all come into shaping what we perceive and how we interpret it.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I am working now on a collaboration entitled Theorem. The Chicago-based artist Antonia Contro and I have created a book together which will be published in the fall of 2019 by Candor Arts. The book is made up of Antonia’s images and my text—both independent yet resonating alongside one another, building an atmosphere and story together. Theorem explores the legacy of a childhood’s secrets—not with an eye toward exposing them, but with a curiosity about their influence on the adult self.
Antonia and I are now working with an amazing composer and violinist to turn Theorem into a performance/installation. It’s been a thrill to collaborate with smart, creative women and to think about how a poem can be enacted, how a book can become an immersive experience, what qualities of the original can be expressed differently to both amplify them and to create countercurrents. Animation, sound, setting, and more will need to be explored, which is quite exciting for me. I’ve always loved to build and make things, whether it’s carpentry or sewing, and I have not been able to really push that exploration that in my poet-self.
I’m also at work on a nonfiction book that stems from the natural history side of my life.
And, always, there is Broadsided Press—the collaborative publication I founded in 2005 and still run. At Broadsided (www.broadsidedpress.org) we publish monthly original art/literature broadsides that are distributed on our website, free, for anyone to download, print, and post. We want to help people get literature and art into their communities. The thrill, each month, of seeing what a visual artist responds to in a poem or short piece of prose still gets me. I feel lucky to work with such amazing artists and editors who bring curiosity, skill, dedication, and fierce joy to their work.