On Friday, visiting writer Laura Eve Engel will be joining Northwest Academy’s Zoom lunch event to talk about her poetry collection and first book, Things That Go (2019). Engel has taught creative writing at Fordham University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Houston and others. She is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Engel’s poetry walks the line between reality and absurdity, using the biblical story of Lot’s Wife to champion deeply philosophical themes and imagery. To prepare for her arrival, the Pigeon Press Staff asked her a number of questions about her collection.
How is poetry different from other forms of literature?
This is the kind of question that I’d probably answer differently on any given day; it’s just always interesting to think about what distinguishes art from other art. I could say, “Poetry has line breaks, most other forms of literature don’t!” but that feels like it does more to limit other forms of literature (why can’t fiction have line breaks too?) than it does to define poetry (some poems don’t have line breaks at all!). So today, I think my answer is that genre has always felt to me a little bit more useful to the act of marketing literature than defining literature for its own sake. Publishers need to know what section to indicate on the backs of books so they can price them; bookstores need to know how to categorize the literature on their shelves. So maybe I’m saying poetry isn’t different from other forms of literature—or that each individual piece of literature ought to define itself however it feels. That seems like the most inclusive definition, and I like that.
What’s your approach to poetry? Is it something you sit down and decide to write, or more something that just comes to you?
For the most part, my process, such as it is, goes like this: I write unpunctuated freewrites in a big unlined notebook, and then put the notebook away. The freewrites aren’t entirely unthoughtful; I’m usually working out some kind of consistent theme or interest or exploration, but I try as much as I can not to get in the way of spontaneity and the unconscious mind. After a while, I’ll type these freewrites into one big document dump, where they either sit for a while or immediately suggest something. One way or the other, I eventually get this almost cranky feeling that indicates it’s time to Write Something. At that point, I go to the dump and look for treasure. Essentially, I have trouble looking at a blank screen and thinking “Must write poem” so I try to create the illusion of being able to work with found material, even if that material is mine. It also helps take the ego out of things—I prefer to feel like I’m less the “author” and more the “arranger,” and approaching my own language with a little bit of distance helps me feel that way.
Why do you utilize the abstract and absurd so often in these poems?
Having just described my process, I’m thinking that the absurd is probably present because I try to make room for my unconscious mind (which we’ll be talking about on Friday in [Jada Pierce’s] creative writing class!) as much as I can. The absurd is often a product of getting a peek at the unconscious or subconscious, the place your brain plays when you’re asleep and it’s dreaming. I think at its best, absurdity is kind of like when you say something that surprises you even as it’s leaving your mouth. That’s such a delightful feeling, to surprise yourself, and I chase that feeling. As for the abstract, we’re so often told that the key to bringing a reader along with you is in the details, the particulars—like “show, don’t tell”—but I find I really connect with abstraction in certain contexts, and I try to explore that in my writing as best I can. There’s something moving to me about describing, say, a desert in a non-specific enough way that every reader can create their own relationship with it, while still knowing they’re meant to think of a desert. Instead of describing the Chihuahuan desert, you’re aiming at the idea of desert-ness. That attempt, to me, makes abstraction complex and compelling.
Things That Go is a thematically serious collection, but includes moments of humor throughout. What purpose does the humor serve here?
I can’t tell you how much I dig it when people find humor in my work. I never intentionally set out to be funny in poems, but when I observe or formulate something that strikes me as funny, I don’t keep it out of the poems, and when other people find humor in these moments it genuinely makes me feel less alone as a person. Humor is such a source of spontaneous and visceral connection between people. While absurdism, which you asked about earlier, isn’t always funny, it’s no accident that so much of what we consider absurdist is comedy—both really get you in your gut, before your head has time to figure out what’s going on, and that’s an experience that I find really essential to living, let alone writing about stuff or thinking about stuff. All to say, I don’t know if the humor in my book has an intent or purpose except perhaps to offer opportunities for that kind of connection, whether it’s you (the reader) connecting with your own guts, or with the poem, or with me, or me connecting with you.
A lot of your poems possess an adventurous spirit and references to childhood. Where do you go that makes these feelings resurface?
Oh wow! I’d never thought of my work as having an adventurous spirit! Thank you! I think in some ways my mind has been on more adventures than my physical body has been, but I did spend some time in the southwest, and then some more, which made a huge impact on my brain and my body, and shaped the stuff my poems are made of in big, meaningful ways. I love driving long distances, and I’m also someone who hasn’t yet met a place I couldn’t imagine myself living. I just love everything about places. (Places—another abstraction!) But you can only live in once place at a time (alas!) so I guess my poems are an attempt at venturing beyond that physical barrier in some way.
As for childhood, I’m not sure I’ve ever considered that I intentionally go there in my work, and I’d be very curious to hear what you’re picking up on! I’m intrigued! I don’t tend to think I draw on childhood much for inspiration, but I’m sure I can’t say the same for my subconscious mind.
Your poems come from a wide range of sources and cover a lot of topics. How did you choose the quotes that accompany each poem and what ties them together?
Thank you so much for asking this question! All of the epigraphs that introduce the book’s sections are either the work of Jewish writers, or sourced from Jewish texts. (Bob Dylan being a bit of an exception, in that he converted later in life but was nonetheless born a Jew.) While I’m not sure that my book reads to others as overtly Jewish, for me the story of Lot’s wife is inextricably linked to my Jewish life and education—just as I find it impossible to separate the way I see and interpret the world from my Jewishness. In inviting these other writers and texts to hang out with my poems—really, in creating an opportunity for my work to sit alongside greater work—I hoped to create a small Jewish dialogue within the book. And there’s maybe nothing that’s more central to Jewish thought than dialogue.
What social or political commentary is there in your collection?
Phew, there’s plenty! I’ve got a lot of opinions! But I think in particular a lot of the poems in this book are anxious about and in awe of the act of looking, and curious about how much we have the ability to look at as technology expands our world and our access faster than we can interpret the effects that increased access has on us. “I can watch a man in a cage get burned alive” is a sentence I said to myself in complete wonder, and probably some horror, long before I wrote a poem with that title. I don’t think the poems, or I, have any interest in making decisions about whether or not this access is good or bad—I’m not here to tell you what to look at or who you are—but the poems, and I, definitely think that something happens to us when we look, that something is changed in us by the act of looking, and it seems important to consider this carefully.
My poems and I also share the belief that we exist in the incredible and powerful way we do solely because we are a part of a greater community—whether that community is local, national, human, or simply as a community of living creatures. I believe that a great deal of suffering exists as the result of people or entities that refuse or exploit the notion of a greater good. America such as we know it today was born out of acts of violence that both refused and exploited the idea of a greater good for material gain. We’ve never not been a vile and suffering nation. I don’t mean to sound bleak; we’re also capable of acts of incredible compassion and progress and beauty. I think the idea that we might hold ourselves as Americans to account for the ways we’ve failed to be humble before our small place in a great and interconnected world, and demand that we acknowledge the great suffering we’ve wrought and work to end it, is radically optimistic. Hopefully my poems ultimately come across that way too.
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