How did you decide that What Haunts Me would be your next book? Did the concept for the book come to you first and you focused your poems on it, or did the concept naturally develop from what you were already writing?
I would say the concept naturally developed from what I was already writing, though some of the poems in What Haunts Me
date back more than 20 or 25 years. This was actually supposed to be my first book. As I was writing the poems, they started coming together as thematically linked by the thread of understanding that we are each influenced throughout our lives by our memories and our ancestry. I started submitting the manuscript to contests and open reading periods back in 2003 and had some early successes with it being a finalist or semi-finalist. But then I started writing new poems that came together rather quickly as The Scabbard of Her Throat, so the first manuscript got put on a shelf for a while.
How does What Haunts Me compare to your first publication?
The Scabbard of Her Throat really fluctuates between a variety of voices and personas, in addition to a wide variety of poetic styles. There are many poems on the topic of motherhood, as well as ones that incorporate aspects of fairy tales. That book really emerged from all the experiences I was having as a new mother seeing the world in a very different way and experiencing a wealth of new emotions. What Haunts Me, however, stays closer to my own voice and is much more unified in that respect. The collection as a whole is more personal as it sinks its teeth into the questions of how we become who we are because of − or even despite − the influences of family and society.
How long does it typically take for you to get your poems to a satisfactory state? — How much do you revise, reread, or wait to look at them again?
Most of the time, I will write a draft in a journal and dogear the page if it’s something I think I might want to come back to and explore further. Then I usually forget about the draft for weeks – if not months. So I end up “batch editing” several poems at a time. I’ll scan through my journals looking for the dogeared pages, then I’ll type these drafts up and print them out. At that point, I start playing around with them on a regular basis. I don’t think I’ve ever been the kind of writer that has adhered to the “first thought, best thought” concept. It usually takes a while for me to even figure out what my thought is, and even longer to really explore that thought and bring a poem to the point where I believe it has achieved its purpose.
What was your most effective method for gaining inspiration for these pieces? Did the poems come to you in solitude after reflecting on familial ties and the history of places you visited, or as you were in the moment?
I definitely need time and mental distance from any triggering event before I can look back and write about something that inspires me. Many of these poems were inspired by photographs that I’ve had in albums for decades. Solitude is very important to my writing. But I don’t have to hole myself up at home, shut away in my office space. I can definitely achieve solitude in a crowd – be it on a train during my morning commute or sitting in a hotel bar or cafe. The important thing for me is that I need to know that no one will bother me and I am not expected to engage in conversation with anyone. I need uninterrupted mental space to just stare and think. This helps memories surface and swirl together, which is usually when the words start coming to me and I get to channel them onto paper.
Does the book have a single poetic voice or are there tonal shifts? How does the voice in this collection compare to your everyday language?
I believe this collection to have a strong single voice that carries through it. As I mentioned, it’s a very personal collection and there is a lot of “me” in here, but it’s not my everyday language, and it’s not the voice I use when talking with my friends or family members. It’s the voice I hear inside my head when I am thinking or having a conversation with myself. It’s a voice that’s full of doubt and wonder and searching. It’s the part of me that doesn’t show through on a regular basis. Not because I “keep it hidden,” but because my poems are the landscape in which this voice really lives and where I have the opportunity to let it run free.
Which piece do you connect to the most? Please share as much as you would like.
It would have to be the poem “Ksiazek,” whose title is my maiden surname, which is of Polish origin. The poem was inspired by my first visit to Warsaw and my wonder at seeing variations of this word everywhere. It was my first exposure to the land of my father’s father’s ancestors. I had been in a Polish dancing group when I was younger and had grown up in a small Pennsylvania town that was divided almost entirely into Polish and Italian descendants. There were two churches – one for each nationality – and at the church my family attended, we often sang Polish religious hymns during the holidays.
To visit Poland was an incredible experience, and I took tons of photographs. I was actually there for work, so I had a local guide to show me around and offer insights into the history of the parts of the city we visited. It was only years later that I thought back to the experience and began to write about it. The poem has eight sections, and here are a few of them.
v.
City of thin beet soup, vodka,
and everything in aspic. City
of beauty pageant contestants
with my same exaggerated teeth.
City whose name was born
from the love of a fisherman
for a mermaid. City that would later
become a sea of rubble.
City rising up. Phoenix city.
vi.
Unaware of meaning, I photographed
anything with a word resembling my name.
Bookstores, streets, even a memorial
I would later discover was placed to honor
the Księgarzom Polskim, “Polish booksellers,”
and others who, during the Nazi occupation,
rescued books in order to defend
and maintain their national culture.
viii.
I look through my Warsaw photos,
grateful for the guide who included me
in so many of them: posed at sunset
on the Old Town wall, smiling
from a seat on the city tram,
solemn in a Ghetto doorway.
Sometimes a name is all you have
to prove you once existed.
Sometimes a photo, the only record.
Here, right here. Let me show you.
I feel like this poem also brings together all the themes I explore in this collection, which contains several of these multi-sectioned meditations on various related topics.
What does it mean to you when you leave something behind or take it with you?
In 2013, my husband and I moved with our daughter from the U.S. to Berlin, Germany. We sold our house and nearly all the contents of it before we moved. We actually brought relatively few of our possessions with us, which was necessary because we were transitioning from a four-bedroom suburban house with multiple living spaces, closets, basement, and garage to a four-room city apartment with a small storage unit in the basement. As you might imagine, it was quite a Herculean task to go through all of our possessions deciding what to leave behind and what to take.
That process taught me that most of the things we own are just things. I’ve learned to not become too attached to objects. Of course, some things have their own meanings attached, which makes it easier to decide to keep those things – unless they are negative meanings. But there are many things we carry with us internally − thoughts, feelings, memories. We can’t always leave the negative ones behind, just as we can’t always guarantee that the positive ones will stay with us our entire lives.
These are really the ideas that I tried to explore in the poems in this book. There are things we do to try to keep from forgetting – like taking pictures, or writing in journals, or passing our stories along to others. For me, writing these poems has been my way of keeping these memories with me.
Bernadette Geyer’s poem “The Long Man” was published in Common Ground Review’s last print issue, Spring/Summer 2020, but you can find that poem in What Haunts Me.