Unlikely Pairings: A Conversation with Allison Adair
The Clearing, Allison Adair’s debut poetry collection and winner of Milkweed Editions' 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, is a fiery, magnificent, urgent debut that reminds us of poetry’s ability to clarify perception, create awareness, and make space for us to connect with our authentic selves as we grapple with life’s chaos. Selected by Henri Cole, this book makes room for otherworldly grace, simultaneously allowing us to see the world around us while helping us find our place in it. In times of trauma, unrest, and upheaval, we need connection and communication in spaces where we can come to terms with life and death. Adair’s poetry provides shelter where we can pause, ask tough questions, and interact with our mortality through poetic language, compelling imagery, and animated musicality.
Madeleine Barnes: The tension between chaos and clarity feels central to this book—do you view the act of writing itself as a way toward clarity?
Allison Adair: I hadn’t thought about the book in this way before, but I think you’ve really nailed it. To me, the tension is the clarity. The book is full of “unlikely pairings.” These are important to me. We tend to speak of things as if they exist in clear, mutually-exclusive categories—rural vs. urban, age vs. youth, safety vs. danger, what’s familiar vs. what’s unfamiliar, the imagination in conflict with reality, even chaos vs. clarity—but everyday experience rarely observes such a hard line. For me, the muddle is the meaning. The Clearing tries to give voice to those moments where things are just…both, like someone trying to walk while straddling a brook. A good deal of feeling, knowledge, and sense defies easy categorization—that’s my only clarity. There’s a moment when you’re stirring milk into coffee and they’re mixing but not yet mixed. If you think about it, a lot of our day is that stage of things: we’re en route somewhere but not arrived, anticipating something, regretting something, that kind of thing. The punchline or plot point is a relief of that tension: Even if something is bad, it’s done, it’s over. By contrast, the sustained tension is what I find most interesting, and The Clearing is devoted to those in-between moments.
MB: When did this book’s title come to you? The act of clearing and “the clearing” as a potential physical or emotional space is a brilliant, vivid thread through the book—it arises in such a magnificent way that I wondered if the concept of “the clearing” was something you began with, something that emerged as you wrote, a theme noticed in hindsight, or all/none of the above?
AA: The manuscript was originally titled Ghost Town, and I liked how that reference spoke to the poems’ hollowed-out landscapes—towns known for times and events long past, pregnancy loss, lost love. The manuscript was already in draft form when I wrote “The Clearing,” the individual poem that eventually gave the book its title. Right before I submitted the manuscript, I reorganized everything, placed that title poem first as a kind of framing, and renamed the book. By then, something about Ghost Town had become too wistful, too focused on the past. The Clearing seemed—for good and for bad—much more forward-looking, as if I were clearing the decks. A clearing renders something vulnerable, but also spurs a confrontation. The many different meanings all seem to apply. Clearing is an action we take, a measure of reclaiming power; or sometimes it’s done to you or near you as you stand witness. It can be a form of erasure, even if it’s happening in the name of cultivation. A clearing denotes a physical, natural landscape, but also one that derives its meaning from what’s adjacent. (Consider: a clearing isn’t a clearing without forest or thicket beyond.)
MB: “The clearing” as a space or as an act of clearing away feels related to revision, or the process of refining or making changes to one’s writing. What’s your relationship to revision?
AA: I spent years during and after graduate school not knowing how to revise. Most of those good workshop suggestions were lost on me because I wasn’t ready or willing to tousle things enough, to generate by slashing and burning. I had a kind of passive loyalty to poems I myself knew were terrible! My husband writes fiction, and—this is a very small thing, but it’s had a huge impact on my process—I noticed once that he saves drafts of his story/novel/whatever with the title, followed by a number in a series, so “[Working Title] 05” or “Chapter 3” followed by the date. Now, when I’m messing around and something catches, I’ll title the document I’m working on “[Title] 01.” That small move establishes right away that there are going to be multiple drafts, many shots at the basket. So there’s no pressure to get it perfect on the first go—revision is expected, built into the process. My average is about 14 drafts for a single poem. Every time I make a substantial change, I save the poem as a new draft with the next number (so, “Title 02,” “Title 03”). That way, I can always go back if I need to. (But I rarely do.) Revision becomes about play and experimentation, rather than restriction, as a means toward refinement—it’s much freer.
Beyond process, any poem has to pass a few tests for me, or it’s not finished. Working on it has to have led to some sort of discovery for me, the writer. If I’m spouting off without any risk of uncertainty, then I’m not where I need to be tonally. The discovery can be personal, thematic, craft-related, anything—but if I don’t leave the poem different than I came in, it’s not done yet. There also needs to be some dose of the weird—something visceral, uncanny, tense, grotesque, or otherwise stirring. If beautiful, then imperfectly so. Something destabilizing. If a poem indicates where it’s going to go and comfortably goes there, then it’s too controlled, too pleasant, and I need to back up and reconnect to its essential weirdness; otherwise, even a good poem will be mere performance, nowhere close to truth.
MB: One thing that’s so hard to do in modern life is to clear time for the things we love or need to do that are so important to us. How do you clear time (even if only a little bit) for what sustains you?
AA: This is not my strength. Most of the poems in The Clearing were written between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m., once the world was quiet. I traded sleep for writing time, something I do not recommend. I have yet to crack this code, especially for working parents, but there are a few things I’ve been doing recently that help: One is to embrace the crumbs—if I’m realistically not going to get an hours-long stretch, then I’ll make use of the small bits. Fifteen minutes on an image here, ten minutes on this anchor word…over days and weeks, this becomes a poem. Another strategy I’ve come to rely on is what I call “productive procrastination.” If I have a limited window of time and the words just aren’t coming, I’ll give myself a (useful) distraction, so that my mind gets out of the way while the poem percolates. Increasingly, that’s when I’ll work on submissions. There’s rarely time to stare at the wall or the page until the muses are ready to render verdict. Both of these approaches relate to writing as a parent, but the last one I’ll offer has been even more important, and it came to me from my friend Kim Garcia. I was complaining one morning that I’d been trying to write a Very Serious Poem—about a biopsy—but my toddler daughter kept bursting into the room with her stuffed animal screaming, “It’s Zebra’s birthday! It’s Zebra’s birthday!” It’s cute now, but that day I was like…how am I ever going to finish a single poem? Kim, poet and mother of two, said, “Why not let it in? Put it in the poem.” This was, of course, ridiculous—and exactly what the VSP (Very Serious Poem) needed. “Let it in” has become a bit of a mantra for me now. Sometimes it’s not about clearing time, but about reconsidering the clarity of the static, the noise, the clutter.
MB: In a recent episode of Commonplace Podcast, the poet Ada Limón speaks with Rachel Zucker about poetry and breath. To paraphrase, Limón says that when we read a poem aloud, we tend to take a breath before beginning, and a breath afterwards; if there are multiple stanzas, you take breaths in between. She says that poetry is so wonderful because it creates space for us to breathe and pause. The blank space around and within a poem can clear the way for language. What do you think about the relationship between the poetic form (versus more hybrid forms, or prose) and the act of clearing? What can poetry do that other forms can’t?
AA: Mrs. Doughty was one of the art teachers at my large public high school in central Pennsylvania. It was a great school—a mix of college-prep kids, vo-tech students, athletes, layabouts, geniuses, and wanderers. Thank God we were all required to take art back then—that some funding was devoted to beauty, to our inner selves. Mrs. Doughty changed lives. She was old and unselfconscious, and glorious. One of her refrains had to do with the blank space. Drawing, painting—these weren’t a question of situating an object on a page. Art was about creating a conversation, a dance, between the existing background and whatever mark we wanted to make. That always stuck with me.
Sometimes when writing I’ll feel the need for more “breathing room”—intellectually, visually/spatially, and in terms of the somatic breath invoked by Ada Limón. Everything I learned from Mrs. Doughty applies, as does the work of exquisite poets like Limón, as I try to engineer expressive rhythms—using sounds and shapes and the blank spaces of the page to speed up here, to mire in the muck there, to spotlight or cloak, to reveal tension or resolve it. In that way, the intentional breaks we associate with poetry call up a kind of bodily music, a link between what the poem offers and what we receive. I dig it.
MB: What do you hope that readers will take away from this stunning book?
AA: Thank you for calling it “stunning”—and the concept of readers is itself quite a thrill! More than anything, I hope folks find pleasure in the book’s sensory truths: treadle threshers squealing and sea stones raking the shore, the neon green of a firefly’s plasma, the way salt swells our tongues’ tiny pores. Hopefully the book’s images read not just as ornament but as distillations of the paradoxes we all know—how we generate what we fear, how violence intersects with tenderness, how it’s possible to grieve something we never had. The Clearing makes a case for the value of those paradoxes, not despite their illogic, but because of it.
MB: Who are your greatest influences? Who do you turn to?
AA: There are so many. In terms of poetic psychology, I rely on Frost’s notion of “honest duplicity” always, as well as Keats’s “negative capability.” Richard Hugo’s essay “The Triggering Town” is my how-to when it comes to shepherding poetry through the fiction/nonfiction debate. These three make it possible for me to poke around in unswept corners and swampy concepts. As for experimenting formally and pushing boundaries, I turn to Caroline Bergvall, Khadijah Queen, Eula Biss, Amitav Ghosh, Kathryn Nuernberger, Danez Smith, Vivek Narayanan. Contemporary writers around the world are doing pretty urgent work to render complex identities with new forms. In terms of the music of the line, Jamaal May is king. I’m a broken record about his poem “The Sky, Now Black with Birds,” though all of his poems sing. For a jolt of reading to get myself charged up, I’ll turn to Ross Gay, Max Ritvo, Kendra DeColo, Yeats, Auden, C. D. Wright, Edgar Kunz, Ada Limón. Jenny Xie’s Eye Level has gotten a lot of attention, but her earlier chapbook Nowhere to Arrive is as amazing, and it’s a great example of a “project” that still feels spontaneous. The meticulous beading of artist Liza Lou has been a great influence, and I hope to do a series of poems inspired by her work. Probably my biggest source of inspiration is YouTube videos, of all things. Late at night, I watch bees rinsing themselves, sailors tying elaborate knots, the live-feed of an owl’s nest. It’s not just the images that strike me, but the zealous devotion of people around the world who, like me, give themselves over to their obsessions by making these recordings. Playful piety is a good complement to the news—especially stories of cruelty and violence—which also informs my poems.
MB: What gives you clarity at present?
AA: Right now clarity isn’t my goal, at least in terms of clarity as “peace of mind.” We’re smack-dab in a pandemic, people are being forced to protest for basic human rights, and the Constitution is in peril. This might sound strange, but I’m not looking for clarity. I’m trying instead to clear a path for the generative potential of confusion, disruption, disturbance. Let’s see what needs to break to build something new.
Allison Adair’s (@fascicles) collection The Clearing was selected by Henri Cole for Milkweed’s Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Poems from the collection appear in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Waxwing, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals, and have received the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, and the Orlando Prize. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison now lives in Boston and teaches at Boston College.
Madeleine Barnes (@maddsnacks) is a poet, visual artist, and English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of You Do Not Have To Be Good (Trio House Press, 2020). She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists.