Looking Past a Difficult Present: A Conversation With Adam Clay
Hope abounds in Adam Clay’s poems, but it arrives like sandpaper, rubbing the soul down to its truest form.
Last year’s To Make Room for the Sea (Milkweed) finds Clay pursuing particular trains of thought concerning grief, doubt, delight, and regret. Clay is especially nimble as he handles time, both its passing and standstill. His poems traverse life and death and all that comprises the dash between.
“The birth / of a child on the day you will die isn’t something / to think of ahead of your passing, but in that moment / we’ll all welcome the missing pattern of rain,” he writes in “Elsewhere.”
In “A Joke About How Old We’ve Become,” the seasons of life come with the rotation of a vinyl record, the transition from minor to major keys, and the music’s hurry to restart without you.
Clay takes in all manner of moments, but everything he notices is accompanied by a strangely alluring contentment. The poet knows what he knows and what he doesn’t, and looks forward to watching these states align.
“I am forty years old and just realized / I barely know myself and those / around me, but how much / hope lives within the fact / of what’s to come,” he writes in some of the book’s final lines.
Over email, Clay and I discussed what he makes of Mississippi (the home state he came home to), the influence of rock and roll on his poems, and how an invocation of grace reshaped the book.
Aarik Danielsen: Every artist loses some control over their work once it hits the atmosphere. It becomes open to interpretation, filtered through the lens of other experiences. Still, I wonder if you feel a particular lack of control over how this work is read now, with all of us at home wading through personal and political crises all day. Are you aware of or able to qualify ways the work has evolved in the context of this year?
Adam Clay: You’re right—one’s work does its own thing once it’s out in the world. I’m not sure if I’ve felt a lack of control necessarily, but I think the poems (and the book as a whole) might have become even more apt because of the circumstances we’re all finding ourselves in. The manuscript I sent to Milkweed back in 2016 ended up changing a lot due to the end of my marriage, and I had to figure out if I wanted to just publish the book as is or if I wanted to change it. I went with the latter, but then I had to decide if the book was going to focus on grief and mourning or move past it.
In the end, I wanted the book to be a hopeful text and look past the moment I found myself in. It took a lot to see past the difficult present I was living on a daily basis—and maybe that’s the biggest lesson of the book (and reading it now)—but there was something about the imaginative quality of writing some of the new poems in the collection that helped me forge a way forward and try to create a book that’s less interested in grief and more interested in what life might look like after an initial rupture.
AD: From an outsider’s standpoint, “Mississippi Elegy” is one of those poems that changes for me with every day. You write about “what going home means / now that I’m here again,” attempting to reconcile what lives inside you with where you live. Mississippi has been in the news for, among other things, finally reckoning with its state flag. How has the last year shaped the way you see your own home and poem?
AC: I never imagined I’d live here again. Saying you’re from Mississippi to someone not from here is always an odd thing. They’re usually shocked or apologetic when you reveal it. “Mississippi Elegy,” a poem I wrote after reading Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, is thinking about what human violence can do to a place. Elegies are meant to be for the dead, but the dead don’t read them—they’re for those of us making sense of what comes next, and I wanted the poem to reckon with the difficult past of Mississippi while at the same time imagining what Mississippi can look like in the future. The state is obviously judged by outsiders, but there are a lot of progressives living here who are fighting for positive change. It feels like the place to be if you want to be on the front line.
AD: The first lines of “Mississippi Elegy” continue to ruin me in all the best ways: “The real wilderness is not out / there—it’s in here, deep inside / the quick run of blood.” That opening carries an almost religious connotation—before we can remake the world around us, we have to deal with the sin and hurt and untamed spaces within. Looking back, how does a line like that reveal itself? Was it something that you turned over and over before it hit the page, or was it more instinctual than that?
AC: Definitely the latter. Poems usually begin with the music of an opening line and go from there. I rarely know or understand where a poem is going when I start it, and this poem worked that way too. I wanted the poem to acknowledge the past of a bloodline (both personally but also broadly, too). I tend to write poems in bursts (sometimes a poem a day over the course of a month) and this poem came late in a long stretch of writing. It always feels like I’m training my brain in those times of writing, and the payoff (if I’m lucky) comes in the form of these opening lines.
AD: One of my favorite lines in the book comes in the middle of “Where the Map Is,” where you simply state “The Walkmen covering Nilsson who covered Dylan.” In the environment of that poem, that line is more than a nod to terrific music. But there and elsewhere (I’m thinking of the gorgeous passage about major and minor keys in “A Joke About How Old We’ve Become”), you really sit in the company of music. I’m curious about musical influences on your work, and not just what you might listen to while writing. What artists take up space in your brain? Are there artists who’ve shaped the way you think about cadences and rests in a poem?
AC: I always tend to have music on when I’m writing and references find their way in when I get stuck with a line or an image. I didn’t know Harry Nilsson’s “Pussy Cats” records at all, and one day I found that Dylan cover and put the record on. The track that follows it was what really floored me—it’s a song called “Don’t Forget Me” that I thought was a Neko Case original for years, because I only knew her version of the song. I started thinking about how one can make someone else’s work feel so authentic and real (in the way that Neko Case does through her cover). In some ways, it’s the opposite of what Plato was saying about copying art.
The other reference to music you touched on is Gillian Welch’s “The Harrow and the Harvest”—all of the songs on the first side of the album are in minor and the second side uses major chords. I don’t know if Gillian Welch put those songs together chronologically or not, but I like to think that flipping the record is mimicking the act or change of looking at grief and moving on, which was in line with some of the ideas of the book. I wrote that poem in 2017 and had no idea that I was foreshadowing what the book might become.
AD: One of the other truly staggering lines in the book concludes “Only Child (I)”: “I am / drawing a self-portrait / and trying to remove the self.” At first blush, that line might feel self-deprecating or even melancholy. But it seems more like an attempt to find something objective, to be influenced as much or more than you influence. How might that line apply to the path of fatherhood, which you discuss in the poem, or the pursuit of poetry itself? Does removing the self seem desirable—or even possible—to you?
AC: In some ways, this might circle back to the first question a bit. My first book has personal poems in it, but I used personas to couch those experiences. In my next book, I felt a bit more comfortable writing about my own experiences, and it’s something my last two books have leaned into especially. My favorite poems tend to be those that are highly personal and specific, and I think I’m drawn to those poems because the specific seems like the surest path to the universal.
The experience in that poem is about fatherhood, but it’s my hope that the specific details within that experience can become a metaphor for the reader to consider something within their own life, even if they haven’t experienced parenthood. I haven’t really thought about this poem being about writing poetry, but I like that concept coming to the surface for you. And, of course, you’re not wrong to read the poem in that way.
AD: Your work beautifully threads this needle between everyday concerns and more timeless or existential ones. “Domestic Barbarians” especially leans into this; it’s both a poem about chores piling up and the way we order the greater chaos of our lives. How do you see this reflexive relationship, between the immediate and the sort of abiding or eternal, shaping this book and your work more broadly?
AC: I find a lot of solace in repetition. Meditation is like that (as is running, something I do almost every day). Some things might feel mundane or empty, but they do provide a sense of order or structure. One of the things I love about the months when I drop into writing a poem a day is that it trains the mind to take things in and think about how they might fit in a poem. That simple act provides a heightened way of looking at the world and, perhaps, experiencing things on a different level.
AD: You include two epigraphs at the book’s beginning, and I want to end there. The latter, from Robert Hass, reads, “Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.” And I simply want to ask: Did you? Does one or more of these poems feel like a means of grace to yourself, or to someone you needed to show grace to? If so, why did you need to do this and how might you see your need even more with a little distance from the writing?
AC: The Hass epigraph was added at the very end of the process. I’m not even sure how I came across “Faint Music,” but the poem floored me. I called my friend Ada, and I asked her if she had ever read the poem. She instantly started quoting the poem to me from memory. It’s a stunner. The poem poses the choice between grace and whatever the opposite of grace might be—maybe rage? The poem leaves that “Maybe…” line behind at the ending, but the frame really does a lot of work.
That epigraph became a way of thinking about what I wanted the book to be. Should it be a collection of generosity and grace? Or should it be a book of despair? And maybe we’re circling back now to your opening question, but the Hass poem really made me rethink the book at the very end. I pulled a few poems. I added a few new ones. And I think the book is better, in the end, for those changes. “Where in a moment / is the music of a dying leaf?”—there’s something to be said for the music of the leaf falling, even if what causes the music is the turn to fall or winter, like how Merwin’s poem “Place” opens: “On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.”
Adam Clay (@adamclaypoet) is the author of To Make Room for the Sea (Milkweed Editions, 2020), Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Boston Review, jubilat, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He is editor-in-chief of Mississippi Review, a co-editor of Typo Magazine, and a Book Review Editor for Kenyon Review. He directs the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Aarik Danielsen (@aarikdanielsen) is the arts editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri and teaches at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He writes a weekly column, The (Dis)content, for Fathom Magazine, and has been published at Image Journal, Plough, Entropy, EcoTheo Review, and more.