12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tracy Zeman

Writing at the intersection of ecology and culture, habitat and habitation, Tracy Zeman’s work traverses environmental crises, documents disappearing species, and mediates the moral and ethical implications of this age of ecological unraveling. Her previous collection of poems, Empire (Parlor Press, 2020), received the New Measure Poetry Prize. In 2027, she will travel to the Arctic Circle with 30 other artists and scientists. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives outside Detroit, Michigan, with her husband, daughter, and dog, where she hikes and bird watches in all seasons.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Interglacial is a continuation of what I began in my first book Empire. In Empire, I was figuring out where we were, environmentally, through reading about extinction stories, colonial destruction and displacement of peoples and animal-others, and the evolution of natural history. Interglacial is a continuation of that education. Though with Empire's underpinning, I was also interested in thinking about what it means to watch the world move further into these crises and how having a daughter changes what's at stake. Empire also helped me think about how to use form in tandem with subject. Because of that, the process of developing the form for Interglacial was more intentional from the beginning of the project.   

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Growing up, I loved reading, though I didn't really start reading poetry until high school. In high school and college, in the 90's, friends and I would seek out book stores and record stores to hunt for new books and albums, in our own town and nearby towns too. We would swap the good stuff we discovered. Emily Dickinson was foundational for me then and still is. Also, I just don't think in terms of character or plot. I'm more drawn to images and moments. I have been experimenting with nonfiction. I have some unfinished essays that I need to return to eventually.  
 
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?
My process is both fast and slow! It can take me a year or more to figure out a project's subject and form. That process involves lots of reading and notetaking and experimenting. Once I have those pieces sorted out, the remainder of the work often comes more quickly, like over the course of a year. First drafts of early poems often do not look like their final shapes, but once I sort out those early poems, then I can write with fewer major revisions. 

My work does come from copious notes! I read many books and articles before and during the writing of both Empire and Interglacial. Nonfiction, criticism, poetry, natural histories. I also spend time in the field--hiking, walking, birding, driving. I probably filled about 4-5 notebooks during each of those projects.  

4 - Where does a poem 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?
Similar to my answer above, at the beginning, I'm experimenting, but then once I have the form and subject I write into it. I have a hard time writing short poems--I love sequences because you can stay in the subject and keep working it from different places, repeating images and language in different contexts. The poems in Interglacial are mostly divided by specific places. 

After that initial period of searching and experimenting, I am working on a book. And it's usually based on something I want to know more about--like the prairie in my first book and the Great Lakes in my second.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings are not part of my process. I do enjoy people though so I like giving readings and attending readings and then chatting with other creative people at those kinds of events. I think community is really important to creative work.  
 
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 have many theoretical concerns: What are the origins of our current environmental crises, and how are they entangled with power and empire? What does it mean for us and for other species that humans are disappearing so many other forms of life, ethically, morally, for our survival and the survival of other lifeways? Why can't we address any of our current problems, environmental or otherwise? What does it mean for my daughter? What comes after, what remains, and what will it mean? How does language shape our perception of all of this?  

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 think one role for writers is to notice and make connections. Notice events and phenomena and connect them across time and history and communicate those observations and entanglements to others so we are aware or will remember and more people will notice too and think about those events and phenomena. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I usually think working with others who are reading your work is exciting. But I think you have to know when suggestions are being made that improve the work of the writer rather than shape the work into something else.  

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Hmm, to believe people when they tell you things, to be realistic when setting goals, to let yourself feel joy even when things feel bleak. Those are kind of self-helpy, but they are things I think of regularly! 
 
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I tend to write in bursts over a few months or a year, and then for periods of time I'm just reading and taking notes towards something new. When I'm in the middle of a project I tend to start by reading either NF or poetry, then I write for an hour or two and then maybe edit some previous work.  
 
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to other writers, like many writers do, and I always have my notebook to fall back on.  

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Hmm, I don't think I have one. Flat fields and rural roads sort of remind me of my childhood home. I live in a pretty urban neighborhood now, but I have some native plants in my yard and bird feeders and those things make my house feel like home. 
 
13 - 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?
Nature and science both influence my work, also experiences out in the field, walking, birding, driving--the visuals and bodily experiences of all those. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe, Lorine Niedecker, but also science writers and essayists like EO Wilson and Barry Lopez, and theorists and critics like Donna Haraway, Lynn Keller, and Joan Retallack. I try to read a lot of poetry and am mainly interested in poetics that are experimenting at least a little. I read fiction for fun--where I'm not thinking as much about my own work but getting lost in a story. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Regarding writing, I've mostly participated in experiential residencies. I'd like to try one that is just for working where they feed you! In May 2027, I will be visiting the Arctic Circle with the Arctic Circle Artist and Science Residency Program. I've wanted to visit the far north for a while since working on subjects related to climate change for the last 20 years--I'm very excited to do that. I'm looking forward to traveling more with my daughter now that she's gotten a little older. I'm going to Glacier National Park this summer with my family and my brother's family. 

16 - 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 was interested in international studies as a student or publishing. Strangely I've also thought about nursing because of the interpersonal dimension, field biologist, maybe?

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I've always had to do "something else" as most writers do and those other things have alternated between teaching and nonprofit programming and fundraising, and I've just kept writing on the side--I've had some windows of time where writing became a bigger part of my time and times where it really was relegated to the sidelines. I imagine maybe that will continue to be the case in future!
 
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Instead of last great book, I'll mention two interesting books I've recently read: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano--it's wild. And then Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore which is a kind of eco-suspense book, a real-page turner. Re: film, late to the game, I recently watched Sinners with my husband. A great film, many intersecting themes and genre-mixing, working on all sorts of levels!

19 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on a book-length series of roadkill poems based on notes I accumulated while commuting over the last four years. It approaches some of my writing themes from a different angle. The first half of the project is sort of singular and composed of many firsthand observations. I'm thinking more about the commons and the collective in the second half. I'm also reading texts about the Arctic for my trip next year, starting with A Woman in the Polar Night, a memior by Christaine Ritter from the 1930s and Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. I've been studying some pelagic birding field guides too. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Tracy Zeman, Interglacial

 

I wake early & in all that black    leave home
moisture in the air made visible by clouds      blue coolness
rogue waves borrowing form from the troposphere
harlequin in flight      floating world of coots canvasbacks
& hooded mergansers      white moon ringed with black
we peddle the rocky berm counting ducks 

census of species in a long series of signs 

                        daughter’s stars thinly inked
she sings while she draws      cattail      tree swallow
song sparrow’s burnt streaks a sunburst from beak to chest
like the cumulus along the lake’s perimeter
drifting & flattening into nothing into
a smooth white haze (“POINTE MOUILLEE”)

The second full-length collection by Michigan-based poet Tracy Zeman, following Empire (Anderson SC: Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2020), is the Great Lakes book-length suite Interglacial (Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2026). “Her little scrawl at the edge of my notebook / while I am away,” she writes, as part of the short sequence “SUPERIOR,” “watching brown waves / crash against cold beach [.]” I’m intrigued by these lyric moments held in temporal and geographic space, in stasis; held and turned in the light, in the blink of an eye. There’s a narrative thickness to these pieces, a density combined with light touch, writing out landscape and ecology, habit and habitat and habitation. A way in which this poem-sequence extends into a single piece across the length and breath of the collection. While there are comparisons one can make to such as Lorine Niedecker’s infamous “Lake Superior,” the lyrics of Zeman’s Interglacial are more delicate, lyric; offering a particular tone, certainly, but one that extends across a far broader landscape, setting precisions against each other, from stone to the narrator’s daughter and dog to the water’s edge. “Sand everywhere,” she writes, as part of “THEANO POINT,” “morning white pine mist / floating over point    ocean-sound // mined crater on overlook [.]” Zeman’s lyrics, as well, echo variations I’ve seen over the years on the English-language adaptation of the utanikki—a poetic journal that includes haiku chasers—with variations over the years by Canadian poets Roy Miki, bpNichol, Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka, among others, combining these elements with articulations of accumulated fragment, sequence and the book-length lyric meditation. There is an enormous amount of detail here, with much to admire and appreciate, allowing the phrases and sentences to roll like waves, perhaps. Or, as part of the sequence “NORTH”:

Shale shaped by water into river valleys
my canoe seemed as if it hung suspended
in that element        rough-hewn forts built by fur-traders
& black robes      longboats portaging
smooth gray & pink undulated rocks whirl up
to the forest surface      Precambrian remnants 

 

gneiss shot
with granite

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Martha Ronk

Martha Ronk has had intersecting careers as a professor of Renaissance Literature and as a poet. She received her PhD from Yale University and has written numerous articles on Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on the interplay of the verbal and visual—a topic in her poetry as well. Teaching classes on 17^th century literature and on modern and contemporary poetry revived her practice of writing poems leading to poetry workshops at Bennington College. She has taught at Tufts University, Immaculate Heart College, Otis College of Art and Design, and for most of her career at Occidental College in Los Angeles where for many years she taught creative writing and coordinated the campus-wide Creative Writing Program.

Ronk has published eleven books of poetry, most recently with Omnidawn Press: CLAY bodies + matter 2025, The Place One Is 2022, Silences 2019, Ocular Proof 2016 on photographs, and Transfer of Qualities 2013 (the title a quotation from Henry James), long-listed for the National Book Award. Also in 2022 Parlor Press issued A Myth of Ariadne. Her book, Partially Kept, published with Nightboat Books, is in dialogue with Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus; Vertigo, a National Poetry Series selection with Coffee House Press pays homage to W.G. Sebald, and why/why not, UC Press, plays off to be or not to be and is indebted to the play, Hamlet.  In a landscape of having to repeat, influenced by Freud’s essay on “Screen Memory,” won the PEN USA best poetry book of 2005.

Often in dialogue with other authors, Ronk sees her work taking shape in the spaces between various forms, vocabularies, and genres, each volume operating as a coherent whole rather than a series of individual poems.  Besides the profound influences of other authors, Ronk has also focused her poems on paintings, photographs, ceramics, and photograms, and many of her books include ekphrastic poems. Her collection of short stories, Glass Grapes and other stories, utilizes a variety of obsessive, unreliable narrators; and her book on food, Displeasures of the Table—semi-autobiographical, satiric, appreciative of all cooks—recommends reading over eating.

She has received a NEA award, had residencies at MacDowell Colony and Djerassi. She received the Sterling Award for scholarly excellence at Occidental College. Ronk has had readings at numerous bookstores and other venues, was a visiting writer at the University of Montana and at George Mason University. She was an editor of poetry books published by Littoral Press, and has had work included in eight anthologies, most recently North American Women Poets of the 21^st Century, Wesleyan 2021.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote CLAY bodies+matter when I returned to the potter's wheel after a long academic career at Occidental College. It is the practice of making pots on the wheel that is the change in my life. The Clay book is different since it focuses on a specific practice, on the merging of hands and clay, on the emptiness inside a bowl, and on another form of practicing as writing poetry is a practice. I found myself working at both, revising in both arenas, doing research, and thinking about the ways in which they reflect one another. Clay is far messier. I so much enjoyed reading about Japanese practices, their long tradition in clay.

2 -  How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I taught 16th and 17th century poetry, wrote a dissertation on Milton, taught Shakespeare. I love John Donne. I was always drawn to poetry even as a child. I wrote one book of short fiction, Glass Grapes, because I wanted to create an obsessive narrator. I am not sure why this seemed to me to be fiction, but it did. I also find that poetry, for me, has to wrestle more with my interest in the visual. Although many poets don't like to use imagery, I do; I also like to write about photography and paintings: ekphrastic poems 

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 has depended on the particular project. Some come quickly or in tandem with an experience. Right now I am writing poems that seem distinct from one another,, but it is early days. A book usually takes 4 years and I mean for each project to be a unified book.

4 - Where does a poem  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?  
I write drafts and individual poems until I have a fairly firm sense of what "book" I am working on; most of my books have been in dialogue with other authors: W.G. Sebalf, Henry James, Shakespeare's Hamlet, or specific places. I like having a partner, another to influence my narrow views.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 
As I've gotten older I've been less and less interested and able to travel to give readings. I always enjoyed them, but recently not so much.I always liked listening to the others I was reading with. I'm reading for Omnidawn on Zoom on July 13 with others published in the fall. 

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?
It seems to me that many recent books concern gender, immigration, grief & war, and displacements of various sorts. There are so many gifted young writers from other countries. It is important for poetry to address these issues. I have written an unpublished manuscript on climate change; I will continue to write more about trees, birds, drought, and the environment. (A few poems to be published by The Colorado Review.) As a past teacher, I find myself interested in my relationship to past authors. I am interested in fragility (bodies, clay pots, cultures), in poetry that manages to include conceptual as well as linguistic work: that is, work that asks for deep engagement and thinking. Work that I want to re-read.

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?  
See #6 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I wish I had an editor. I do have a poetry group that meets every few weeks and I get good critical readings from the other poets. It helps enormously to have other poets respond to one's work before it goes public.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"To be a good poet you have to have a good seat." That is, show up. Practice. Show up again. Etc.  It is also good to wait some time to review one’s work.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal? 
As an academic I wrote academic articles on Shakespeare's plays; I also got up early to write poetry before leaving to take my son to school and me to class. I like that both require precision, research, reading, revision etc. I do less academic work now.

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?  
I write something most days; I prefer early morning. Other poets often provide inspiration. Also form itself can inspire: choosing to write prose poems or epigrams or dialogues or long poems.  Recently, I found myself inspired by memories of paintings , memories of people I've lost track of or lost.  I also like walking: sometimes, if I’m lucky, a word or stairway or song will fall out as I’m walking: also there are all the things one sees: clouds, trash, a window ledge, leaf.

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

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume? 
none.  I watched a child put on heavy make-up to be a cat.

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? 
Yes, paintings and especially black and white photographs: I wrote an entire book on photographs: “Ocular Proof.” My first husband was a photographer. I now look at pictures by great potters; I love the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. I like photographs of reflections in water, the idea of correspondences. New to CA I wrote a book about the desert (and HIV): “Desert Geometries,” and another called “State of Mind.” The paintings of Ariadne by De Chirico influenced my book on A Myth of Ariadne from Parlor Press: focused on the vulnerability of women, women’s bodies.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
W.G. Sebald. Edmund De Waal. most recently. Many poets. The Autobiography of Red.  Shakespeare most especially because his plays were central to my teaching for so long. I was moved by the writer Claire Keegan’s new novels.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
I wish I had traveled more. Scenes fill up the brain: I went to Sicily most recently and keep seeing temples in my mind’s eye. And mosaics. And the view to Africa.

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 think that moving from the east coast to LA had a profound effect on me as I found it strange, “familiar/unfamiliar’ as I’ve written in The Place One Is.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I couldn’t seem to help it. I think I needed to say things I believed I couldn’t say in any other way. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
 I liked the films on tv: Wolf Hall, The Fall.  I listened on Audible to Little Dorrit and have come to appreciate Dickens and his skewering of the wealthy as I didn't in graduate school. I'll never tire of re-reading Hamlet.  

20 - What are you currently working on?  
I'm trying to write about "the specious present" (William James) and time. Trying the operative word. Failing. Etc. Don't all beginnings feel like tripping and falling and feeling as awkward as possible? I keep asking “what is a moment?”  How might I define it or live it or imagine the ends of my own time? Reading his words on time stick with me, pushed me to try to find other ways of expressing the way a moment contains both past and future as well.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Lily Brown, BLADE WORK

 

 

I heard the voice of reason
swerve boneward as it mouthed
the high hills of Art.
I know both sides:
the violence of artifact
and the living tree,
airy branches full of weeds.
Once a sitting thing in a thing
that stuck me back, I walk
straight out in heavy rain,
trying not to aim,
his lungs gum-thick,
each word towed out with a chain
pulled simultaneously back.
I make another motion,
send a jagged gift. (“Venus Transit”)

I’ve been an admirer of the work of American poet Lily Brown, a poet and writing teacher currently based in Maine [see her 12 or 20 questions here] ever since discovering her work through the chapbook Being One (Brave Men, 2011) [see my review of such here]. That particular title was soon followed by her full-length debut, Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) [see my review of such here] as well as a further handful of chapbooks, including The Haptic Cold (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Her latest collection, her second full-length, is BLADE WORK (Anderson SC: Parlor Press, 2025), produced as Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize, as selected by Carl Phillips. I’m amazed at the carved sharpness and meditative distances travelled across her purposeful, tactful lyrics. Through Brown, every word, line and step is deliberately and carefully set, but with such a cadence of ease, composing poems of disruption, description and a hint of surrealism, set in pure stone. “The horse gallops / fog under its chin,” she writes, to open the poem “After Susan Rothenberg’s Untitled Drawing, No. 41, 1977,” “behind a hind leg, / haze in parts erased. / The smudge in the body’s / portioned air. Darwin / threw lizards / by the tail / into the ocean / to find out if they swim.” There’s such a clarity, a density, to her poems, one that allows for stunning moments, the narratives of her poems accumulating with such force into perfect phrases, perfect landings. As the second half of her short poem “Transparency” offers: “All day I splinter leaves / with my feet, conduct them // in, singed flags. / I think I see you in the back window, // waving there, your show moving / west then east. // Torso turns to see // how great a distance / I earned to make.” The underplayed power of her poems are enormous, landing her endings with incredible grace, the click of a latch to know that door is now closed. “Give some back to the mapland.” She writes, to open “The Complete Poems,” a piece composed “after Elizabeth Bishop.” “Material qualities, stammering / repetition. More interested / in atmosphere, leaf and cloud, / than clock-like architecture’s alarms.”