12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lisa Olstein

Lisa Olstein is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Dream Apartment (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), and two books of nonfiction. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, and Writers League of Texas Award. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Publishing a first book helped me continue to have a life in poetry, a new mooring of starting out. It allowed for the possibility of being in conversation with readers, those unknown beloveds, and it brought me into relationship with Copper Canyon Press and my editor there, Michael Wiegers, who I’m lucky to be still working with 18 years later. All of which I’m very grateful for. Comparing my first book (2006) to my most recent (2023) is like trying to compare myself then to myself now—much continuity, much difference, much more experience.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

During my early adolescence, I remember my mother reading poetry aloud to me sometimes when I was very upset. So I assume it’s her fault.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It varies quite a bit. I’d say my writing comes quickly, over long, slow periods of time. When a voice, its music, arrives things tend to move along but this quickness is part of a much slower process. Drafts and notes vary, too. I rely on both but at the same time, anything that sticks—whether a few lines or a whole draft—tends to have a lot of its energy from the start, though this doesn’t mean revision isn’t also crucial.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

It begins in the ear. I have to hear a the music of a voice or phrase, the rhythm of the thought, to borrow Oppen’s line. Without it, I’m thinking not writing.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings are separate from my creative process, they’re a different thing. Having the opportunity to share work and be in community can be quite lovely, and I definitely hear the work differently when reading it in front of people. But my creative process is quite separate, quite solitary, private.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I hope everything I write asks and answers this question in its own way. Of course there are certain obsessions, fascinations, ethics and aesthetics that stay with me, evolve with me. But writing is where I go not to deposit answers or prove conclusions, but to pursue questions and urgencies, to discover—in collaboration with language, that extraordinary medium—what I didn’t know I knew or didn’t realize I needed to ask.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I kind of shrink from monolithic singularities like “the writer” or “larger culture.” Writers. Cultures. Roles. We need writers and writing in so many different ways. It’s kind of like asking what is the current role of the scientist. We’d never ask or answer that singularly, or at least I wouldn’t. We need scientists to do science, in myriad ways toward myriad ends. We need writers to write, in myriad ways toward myriad ends.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

For me, a few trusted readers are essential and I get their feedback first. Then an editor’s role can be many different things, from pretty hands off to pretty hands on. I’ve been fortunate to work with insightful, keenly intelligent people, so I try to listen to what they say, however overarching or specific, while preserving my inside sense of the work, what holds it together, what is and isn’t malleable.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Don’t try to make a happy baby happier.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction to collaborative epistolary prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

In many ways, I found shifting from poetry—my home base—into lyric essay terrain surprisingly smooth, at least in the two books of prose I wrote/cowrote. In those cases, the sentence felt like the right unit, and I was happy to realize that I was as obsessed with its music as I tend to be with the unit of the line when writing poems. That said, the rigor/abandon of poetry is where I like to live.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Both my health and my days—what they demand and allow—vary quite a bit, so I try to be a flexible forager. On a good day, I’ll slip into my study with a mug of coffee before doing anything else or talking to anyone and not emerge for at least three or four hours.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Certain authors and books, of course—some predictably, others of the moment sprung—but just as often other interests: film, music, performance, visual art; cooking; landscapes; natural science; textiles.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Peonies and the soil they grow in. The air at about twenty degrees after four inches of snow. A german shepherd’s ruff. Cape Cod bay. I could go on…

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

All of the above, indispensably. Other disciplines and mediums—their content and form, their parallels and differences—are as essential to my creative/thinking life as reading and literature.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Too many to name! But I always return to Li Po, Bishop, Dickinson, Plath. In the contemporary space, Anne Carson, Alice Oswald, Jenny Erpenbeck, Renee Gladman, Leni Zumas.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Crisscross Iceland on horseback.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d have loved a life that put me on or in the water a good deal of the time.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It didn’t feel like a conscious choice, exactly; it felt like a pull or a pressure in the chest, which is how Grace Paley described it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I love Jane Miller’s new poetry collection, Paper Banners: exquisite, full of restraint and abandon in equal measure, brilliant. And I thought the film, American Fiction, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel, was pretty great.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on my contribution to a project called Delisted 2023, which invites artists, scientists, and writers to engage with animal and plant species that have been recently removed from the US Endangered Species List due to extinction.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Lisa Olstein, Dream Apartment

 

The same racist neighbors who refer to the Obama presidency with a vile slur are the ones who hauled water to them, unasked, when their well went dry, who plowed the no-plow road twice a day during his six-week radiation commute, who didn’t tell him his medical bills were what the green beer and corned beef fundraiser were for until they dropped off the cash, B. tells us over dinner, dismayed, embarrassed. It’s a friendly place to live, if you’re white. Across the valley, the canola field’s electric yellow drains the just-bloomed sweet clover of all its light. Closer in, the Monsanto new product tester’s square green fields leak chemicals into the wind. He’s a true believer, thinks he’s going to feed the starving world, B. reports. What happens next, I ask hours later gesturing weakly toward the crises, the crossroads, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it we’ve been circling for hours. What happens next, he repeats, what happens next is what we do.

 

Animal, adjust. (“GLACIER HAIBUN”)

Austin,Texas-based poet and non-fiction writer Lisa Olstein’s fifth poetry title through Copper Canyon Press, and the first I’ve explored of her work—beyond her collection of epistolary letters co-written with Julie Carr, Climate (Essay Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]—is Dream Apartment (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2023). Dream Apartment is a collection of poems structured across seven clusters of sharp lyrics, each of which stretch out across incredible distances, as the first, say, forty percent of the opening poem, “FORT NIGHT,” reads: “The snake is / a sleeve the deer / puts on its mouth / a beaded cuff / in the haze men / make of morning / with each release / of their fist-gripped / guns.” There is an element of Olstein’s Dream Apartment that suggest this a collection of dream narratives or dream poems, offering a subtle play on rhythm, sound and internal rhyme covering loss and an ongoing grief, from the intimate to the external, including around climate. “So spring today, bees in the bok choy / bolted yellow before we could eat it,” she writes, to open “TO FLEE THE KINGDOM,” “let them eat it instead, let them carry on / carrying its stardust from place to place, // let us all eat, come future come. Meanwhile, / the cat takes, gives a good long bath.”

There is an interesting shift of pacing and structure across Olstein’s lyrics, from the accumulative staccato of the cluster of poems “ANIMAL,” “SEE IT,” “MOTHER NORTH,” “SPRING” and “GROUP PORTRAIT 1244403” to the five poem prose sequence “GLACIER HAIBUN” to the extended sequence of fragments underneath the title “NIGHT SECRETARY,” and the curve of fragment-accumulation lyrics “AND THEN FOREVER,” “MATERIAL FRAGMENTS,” “KINDER SEA,” “YOUR NAME HERE,” “ALL THIS BRITTLE LACEWORK” and “ONLY A FLAWED HUMAN IS YOUR JUDGE” There is such an interesting shift in tone, rhythm and effect through her evolution of lyric structures, one that allows for the larger shape of the collection to emerge out of shared purpose amid myriad structures. “Sorrow what’s my ration tonight,” she writes, as part of “NIGHT SECRETARY,” “full portion [.]” The back cover offers that this collection is “Devoted equally to the long arc and the sharp fragment,” and each shape and patter attends uniquely to the music of each line, offering a precise and dreamy effect through her examinations, and even negotiations, on how one lives or might live in the world. As the poem “KINDER SEA” begins:

There in the trembling port

            of morning who knew yet what

                        wriggled in the net pulled in the

                                    predawn and slapped down on

                                                the rough dock of fuel-flowered

                                                            air?

 

Julie Carr and Lisa Olstein, Climate

 

Some of it I’ve touched on already, some of it we’ve been circling since our first exchange, some of it this particular twelve days I’ve been feeling all over, messy and vivid and focused and vague: precarity, jeopardy, fear of loss. You felt some breeze of it, I think, that made you worry your letters were somehow insufficient or ill’ received which wasn’t the case in any way. I’ve felt a version of this worry, from time to time, too: what if in a letter or in a real-life scenario I’m stupid or insensitive or one of us realizes, meh, not so much, less than I thought.

I see from my earlier note to myself that I wondered also how much wish infuses this connection, this relationship sprung up between us, its listening and avenues for thinking through. But I don’t feel worried or even really wonder about that today, right now, as I actually write to you. Right now, I feel that this, our collaboration, which is a certain kind of companionship, is exactly as you wrote: an exactment of searching together with, to, through our microclimates, these presents, these I’s and you’s. (Lisa Olstein, July 19, 2018)

I’m very much enjoying the epistolary essays that make up Julie Carr and Lisa Olstein’s collaborative call-and-response, the non-fiction Climate (Essay Press, 2022). Writing to each other in a sequence of letters, Carr and Olstein write out their anxieties, fears and stories around #Metoo, climate change, parenting, school shootings, sexual abuse, Trump’s election crimes, a friend’s suicide, the Paris Climate Accord, and other events, documenting their experiences and fears as two women, two poets, writing directly to each other in an intimate space. “I have no stomach for violence.” Olstein writes, as part of “July 19, 2018.” “I stick on it—snag, catch, fray, fall apart. I think it’s normal, to a point. It’s something, it seems, that varies quite a bit person to person. Kindly, in an email, E. called it a form of empathy, my inability to stop imagining into the violence of Ian’s death, a way of trying to understand—both to literally register and to fathom.” Opening with Carr’s January 7, 2018 “Dear Lisa,” and ending on April 17, 2019, they write the space of sixteen months across American culture through a prose that at turns is breathtakingly beautiful, anxious, grief-stricken, supportive and deeply intimate, weaving in thoughts around literature, politics, culture and their daily lives. As Olstein writes as part of her entry for October 25, 2018, referencing the televised hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm Brett Kavanaugh:

The wound of that testimony. The wound that is Facebook right now, that is my email queue, that is the steady stream of often nuanced and searing think pieces by women. The wound of hearing the cordoned-off voices of the pro-Kavanaugh women they keep digging up to interview. In my “bubble” it’s women split open, all wound. That Rukeyser quote has been going around again—what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life / the world would split open—but the problem is it doesn’t, the world doesn’t split, the woman does.

There is something of the call-and-response, two different voices responding and reacting, that is reminiscent of San Diego poets Sandra Doller and Ben Doller’s collaborative prose-work The Yesterday Project (Sidebrow Books, 2016), both writing in collaboration (albeit blindly) in the shadow of a life-threatening diagnosis [see my review of the book here]. Writing the multitude that “climate” suggests, the Carr and Olstein work through the events and news cycles that permeate their daily lives, writing a climate that would allow for someone such as Brett Kavanaugh to succeed, a climate of gun culture and repeated incidents of mass shootings, and the environmental damage that continues to be perpetrated upon the landscape, and every species set upon the earth. The book is also broken into sections that suggest thematic breaks, offering each section the same list upon each title page, but with different elements highlit, from “Bomb cyclone (Boston, MA),” “#Metoo (accrual)” and “Mass shooting (Santa Fe High School, Houston TX)” to “Package bombs (Austin, TX),” “Trial for sexual abuse, Larry Nassar” and “Women’s March (2^nd annual).” This is a politics lived on the ground, as both are aware of how deeply affected either of them could be through any of this, whether the close proximity to a particular shooting, or witnessing the Special Senate hearings with Christine Blasey Ford through the lens of their own experiences. These events don’t live beyond their experiences or their immediate worlds, but are deeply connected across culture, in a way perhaps more deeply felt, and far better understood, by Carr and Olstein than by generations prior. As Carr writes as part of “November 2, 2018”: “If this were a letter in the mail and not over email, I’d send you a piece of tree bark. My poets all write sad songs, but they also keep believing in poetry’s ‘viewless wings.’ I never really understood why ‘viewless.’ Because poetry doesn’t see the suffering that it speaks of? Because you can’t see poetry’s power, though it’s there?” This is a book that documents grief and trauma across American culture in the immediate moments, existing within a conversation between two friends who are both poets, thinkers, critics and mothers, and articulating a deep connection between living and thinking with poetry and political culture. As much as anything, this book examines how deeply connected these seemingly-disconnected threads of politics, literature and daily life truly are and can be, in a lived sense; their lives propelled by the pure vulnerability of their open, thinking hearts. And that, by itself, is stunning.

You were writing about collectivity: how the work at NASA is no one person’s work, and that even failure adds to the whole. The other day, I was reading something a friend wrote about breath: how we breathe in common. He rejects the notion of the self, the notion of the human, is seeking something more radically in-common to define us. Breath. Earth. Soil. Every version of self is painful to us, he says.

My fingers stopped there, because I don’t know if he’s right.

But still, I would say that the collaborative nature of the Lab reflects something we do want, always, which is to fade away into the project and feel, if nothing else, our sentences as they move in a landscape.

Love,
Julie.