G. C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the long poem Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). Newer work has appeared in APR, POETRY, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and others. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch. His poem “American Goshawk” can be found here. It appears in the Nov/Dec 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “American Goshawk”?
I was at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. For many years a female North American goshawk nested on the property, near one of the studios. Goshawks aren’t the largest birds in the sky by any means, but they are among the fiercest, and that summer it attacked a number of the artists in residence whose studios were on that lane, bloodying some. Dinner conversation each night often turned on who had seen it, and/or been attacked by it.
After a few days of this, all I could think of was that I wanted that experience.
As with most of my ideas, I was wrong, but I blundered out into the woods anyway, searching. I had spent the previous three years in the grips of a progressively devastating and long misdiagnosed neurological condition, and I think it’s fair to say I wanted any experience—other than the one I was having, which I did not understand and which I greatly feared. I had just started a new treatment when I went to MacDowell—I had to go to the infusion room at the tiny hospital in Peterborough every two weeks while I was there. I had written hardly anything during the three years I was ill and wondered whether I would ever write again.
I drafted the poem the evening of the encounter, on 7/3/15. The poem has a sibling, that I wrote the following night, about the singing the first poem anticipates. These were the first two poems I wrote as I started the recovery process.
And then I put the poem away for several years, somehow distrusting it. I only brought it back out when David Lynn asked if I had anything for his final issue of KR.
Can you talk a bit more about the ongoing theme of being forgotten after death, but how impossible it feels to disappear while you are alive?
My original academic training was in history, not in creative writing (also some formal training in music—voice). I’ve always had a sense of somehow not quite being in the present moment, of slipping forward or backward from it: even as a child I was obsessive about disappearing things, people and places and things that were, but no longer are. During my illness (which for over a year was misdiagnosed as early-onset Parkinson’s) it occurred to me that we all, sooner or later, become one of those disappearing things. Only, most of us aren’t around to witness it. One of the challenges of Parkinsonian disorders is that you are fully there to witness it, your disappearance, your own dissolution—until, of course, you aren’t. I was succeeding, it seemed to me, at that very difficult thing, being forgotten while still alive: somehow it felt that way, that I was falling out of my own life, while life went on around me. It was a success I didn’t want.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
In the mid-1990s I only had a few poetic models, never having taken a creative writing class in poetry (my two required literature classes in college were both in the novel). Robert Penn Warren I came to through my love of Southern fiction as a teenager, and William Stafford I came to somehow in my early twenties, I think via Wendell Berry. Even close friends tell me they can’t trace the influence of Warren or Stafford in my work. But they are always there for me. Some poets become part of our mental furniture, whether or not we like them (or are like them).
I think part of what sent me beyond what Stafford or Warren could teach was the sense that their poems did not fully acknowledge the mystery of time. Stafford’s poems seem intentionally timeless, fixed in a sort of literary parenthesis. Warren was as obsessed with time as any of the Southern writers of his generation, but his way of handling this was . . . the fiction writer’s way, i.e. narrative. Having stepped away from the academic study of history (shades of Warren’s Jack Burden in All the King’s Men), I suddenly found myself in a dark wood where narrative was insufficient. I wanted a poetry that picked up the pieces narrative drops, and this led me to formal choices that took me far from Warren’s Agrarianism or Stafford’s brush with Deep Imagism.
Perhaps part of the reason I distrusted “American Goshawk” when I first drafted it was that it is one of my more narrative poems. In the 5.5 years since I drafted it I’ve become more at ease with the return of evident narrative to my work, although I remain suspicious of it (except when I’m gorging, as a reader, on fiction, which I also do: narrative is always a seduction).
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Walking and prayer, sometimes at the same time but more often in turn.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
“American Goshawk” is the lead poem in my new collection, The Earliest Witnesses, which is just out from Tupelo in the USA and Carcanet in the UK. Each book for me is an arc of work completed, a set of gestures brought to a rest. I never know what’s next.
That said, I’ve been working on a sequence of long-form, site-specific, environmentally-focused sequences over the last eight years which at some point I hope to place together in a book entitled Glebelands. (My Omnidawn chapbook, Susquehanna, is one movement of this larger cycle.) I want Glebelands to amount to a sort of environmental anti-epic, but I don’t know what I mean when I say that: I am still finding out what I mean, what it means, could mean, should mean.