There is that interesting paradox of the weight of what it’s like to be the child of professional musicians, but also the intrinsic beauty of the music itself.
Introduction
I felt then what I felt more recently as we sat down for our interview—safe. She takes great care of the spaces around her and honors them the best way she knows how, through writing.
Hollander’s work has appeared in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, and The Best Australian Poems of 2015. Her second full-length collection, Nocturne (Liverpool & Oxford University Press, 2023), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize in nature writing. Hollander is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa. She is also the originator of Poetry in the Parks, free poetry workshops sponsored by several national parks and monuments in the U.S., to encourage people to craft a deeper connection with public lands. She currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Safety is very much her goal in the collection Nocturne and in forthcoming work. Together we mind the musicality, the landscapes (or lack thereof), and the trauma in her work—how nature serves as refuge. Hollander smiles when she speaks about the natural world and even as she calls writers to care more about our changing climate. I think back to that day of sweat and irritability, and I believe in the power of discomfort. Hollander grapples with these two forces: safety and discomfort, and she writes to reconcile the tension of being uprooted from pain that accompanies both. Nocturne is a lyrical guide for those exploring these very themes.
In my own writing, I’m looking at nature as a space of healing in the aftermath of trauma.
Interview
Cymelle Edwards: I enjoyed reading the praises for this collection and seeing how others interpreted your work. Susan Wicks said, “The underlying emotional urgency of Jodie Hollander’s poems is undeniable—but it’s their tone that makes them unignorable. This meeting of searing family dysfunction and poignant metaphor with her matter-of-fact American vernacular strikes sparks.” Can you talk a little about where you’re from, where you were raised that punctuates the sobering candor used in your work?
Jodie Hollander: I was raised in Milwaukee in a family of professional classical musicians. So, music was everywhere in my childhood. My father is a pianist, my mother was a cellist, my sister a soprano, and my brother a violinist. So, I had music everywhere around me and it inevitably found its way into my writing in these first two collections—not only in subject matter but also in terms of learning how to use sound and meter and finding a way to make my poems euphonious… make them closer to song than prose. At least, that’s what I’m trying to do.
Cymelle Edwards: You wrote about “my colossal weight” in the poem “Monstress” and had a piano attached to you in Dream #1. There are lots of weight-bearing images and yet the music the piano produces is light, as are the moves of a gymnast, thinking of “Gymnastics Class.” There’s a lot to say for things which bear weight but produce light things. What do you make of this juxtaposition in your work?
Jodie Hollander: I think you’re right. There is a lot of weight, particularly with the piano in Nocturne. I think that relates to the weight of trauma and family dysfunction and just this sense of it always pressing me down, weighing over me—me trying to figure out a way to get out from underneath it. Trauma is something you can live with for many years and drag around and carry with you as a burden, sometimes for an entire life. So, that’s something I’ve been grappling with quite a bit in Nocturne. But at the same time the music itself is so beautiful and inspirational to my writing. I’ve been so lucky. You know, I was born to the music of Rachmaninoff and my whole childhood I was surrounded by classical music. That was a real gift and a real blessing in my life. So, there is that interesting paradox of the weight of what it’s like to be the child of professional musicians, but also the intrinsic beauty of the music itself.
Cymelle Edwards: I spent time trying to draw parallels between how melodic horses are and your previous collection, My Dark Horses, plays into this as well. But words like canter and cadence overlap worlds. And your parents passed these “horses” down. What can you say about the relationship between horses and music and how your inheritance of both shows up in your work?
Jodie Hollander: I like Joy Harjo’s poem, “She Had Some Horses,” and that horses symbolize what it is we carry. In some ways horses can represent trauma, pain, and the weight of the past, and those things that have been inherited through generations. On the other hand, there’s something escapist about horses that I love. There’s a sense of otherworldliness and almost a magical sense of something other than being human about horses that I’m very drawn to. Like music, there’s that paradox going on with the horses, its issues, weight, and heaviness but also beauty, magic, and escapism. Also, there’s the cadence of horses, the trot and canter and all those different rhythms that you mentioned which echo, I think, in the music of my work. It’s not deliberate necessarily. But now that you mention it, I can see how it works.
Cymelle Edwards: There’s an overwhelming feeling of uprootedness throughout the collection. Of course, it begins in a storm. It’s visceral, this feeling of being lifted. My mind instantly went to The Wizard of Oz—Dorothy. What sort of separation was happening between the person, the persona, and the earth? Were you even thinking about physical separation between land and human?
Jodie Hollander: A lot of those storm poems were written when I was the poet-in-residence in Key West. There were incredible storms during that period of time. They were super intense, wild, and almost otherworldly feeling to me. I had to stay inside, which was fine, and watch those storms go by. In the morning after the storm had passed, I would see all kinds of things on the ground like rolling coconuts and fallen mangos. There was something about experiencing that storm that seemed to echo a sort of trauma or personal emotional storm that I’d been through. I think there’s also a sense that trauma and emotional pain can lift you up and carry you away from your roots and your sense of being grounded. The physical storms, in a way, are meant to mirror an emotional storm.
Photo by Peter Maczek, courtesy Shutterstock.
Cymelle Edwards: Are you familiar with Jon Batiste?
Jodie Hollander: I know his name.
Cymelle Edwards: There was a lot of critique about his categorization as a classical musician and not “neatly fitting into genre molds.” You mention the composition “Rhapsody in Blue” in Nocturne—a combination of classical and jazz. I wonder if the sort of experimentation happening then and now is also happening in your work regarding form. Do you even think about form?
Jodie Hollander: I was trained in classical meter and form. I studied with Robert Mezey at Pomona College, and he told me I had to learn to write in meter and form if I wanted to work with him. When I was 18 years old, I was like, I don’t wanna learn this. This looks really hard. (laughing). But deep down I knew that I wanted that training for myself, and I wanted that sense of musicality and structure for my writing. And I knew it would really benefit me. So, over the years I forced myself to do as he suggested and learn meter and form. It was really hard. But after a while I just started to acclimate myself to it. I would listen to Robert Frost through my headphones for hours on end just to get the sound of meter: What does trimeter sound like? What does iambic pentameter sound like? Just familiarize myself with it. And once I got familiar with it, I became comfortable in it. Then, I felt it was safe to abandon it and to use it when I thought relevant, but not to feel confined or constrained by it.
In terms of my own writing, I like to build sound in some way in my poetry, but it doesn’t have to necessarily be through meter. So, if I’m writing in free verse, I’m also looking at how I can build sound. Maybe it’s through meter but maybe it’s through other poetic devices such as assonance, consonance, alliteration, repetition, that kind of thing. I think there are all kinds of poems that are really interesting to me. What I’m attracted to the most is poetry that has some strong sense of sound to it. Whether that be through free verse or through meter, poetry that is ear-pleasing and sounds like music and is more pleasurable to listen to.
Cymelle Edwards: Do you think having that canonical foundation of form is important to be able to purposefully depart from it? Like you had to have it to know how to expressively differentiate.
Jodie Hollander: I think so. Just like a violinist has to learn the basics of their scales and fundamentals and then they can let that go and go in their own direction, for me, it’s been really helpful to be pushed to learn it. I don’t think I would’ve voluntarily learned meter and form, but now that I’ve learned it, I’m really glad that I have it. It was extremely important in building the foundation of sound in my own work.
Cymelle Edwards: In “Dream #5” your use of a compound neologism, goodMother, struck me. I studied Toni Morrison’s use of compound neologisms in Beloved. What were you tapping into using that compound form? What does it serve?
Jodie Hollander: Dreams are the structure of the entire book. And then the title of the book is Nocturne which means night music. I wanted to have this sense of “surreal” coursing throughout the collection. Particularly in those dream poems I wanted them to almost run into each other like watercolors. But in terms of that word, goodMother, I couldn’t really figure out how else to describe my ideal version of the mother that I didn’t get. In my dream, she was a really nice mother. But in real life, she wasn’t that way. I wanted some kind of made-up word that would describe this ideal mother that I had in that dream, and something that would also encapsulate the dream feeling. I didn’t know what else to call her because it wasn’t my real mother, it was an idealized version of her. I thought if I just, like, shoved those two words together, they’d describe her.
Cymelle Edwards: Reminds me of Hortense J. Spillers—If I were not here, I would have to be invented. And that’s what you did. You had to invent her.
Jodie Hollander: (smiling) Cool.
Cymelle Edwards: Going back to form, the pieces in your collection take place in a variety of locations. Did the constraints of form impact how you chose to landscape your pieces, physically and figuratively?
Jodie Hollander: Do you mean how did I landscape the collection as a whole, or how did I write particular landscape poems?
Cymelle Edwards: A little of both.
Jodie Hollander: That was really tough for me to figure out how to organize the collection. When I started I had, like, a hundred poems. What do I do with these? When I wrote my first collection, the order just fell into place on its own. I didn’t really have to do anything; it was easy. It just happened naturally. Then with this collection, I thought I needed to be deliberate in how I organized them. And so, I just went through them and I realized I had a lot of poems about dreams. Let me use that as a sort of framing of the collection and let me scatter these dream poems so there’s a sense of being between these two worlds—the dream world and the real world.
I also used some of the Key West poems as a framing for the collection. The easier part of this was that a lot of this collection was about my relationship with my father who’s a pianist. So, I knew that was going to be there. But the framing, really, I worked with the dreams and the Key West storms, and I didn’t work chronologically.
In terms of writing the landscape poems, some of them came out in form and some didn’t. I think some of the really special poems in there were set in Key West where the environment is so different from what I have here in Flagstaff—to see palm trees, and chickens roaming around the streets. I also had a residency in Homer, Alaska at Storyknife. Once again, a wildly different landscape from what I’m used to, and that really impacted the collection as well.
But I feel like the poems tell me, Do I want to be written in form? Do I want to be written in a loose meter? Do I want to be written in free verse? People think that it’s hard to write in form, and it is hard to write in form, but I actually think it’s even harder to write in free verse because you have to generate the music by yourself. There’s no preset container for sound, so it’s all up to the individual poet to figure out how to generate something that’s ear-pleasing whereas if I’m writing a poem in loose trimeter I’ve got that container.
Cymelle Edwards: How many residencies have you attended?
Jodie Hollander: I don’t know how many; I’ve never actually counted them up. I usually am very fortunate to go on about one per year, so I’ve been to maybe ten in the last ten years. But they’re really hard to get because they’re funded, and so everyone wants to go on them. They’re really amazing and so helpful for writing. That an organization or a person had this idea of just giving poets a place to write and be free of their daily distractions, and then feeding them and maybe even giving them a stipend, is the best thing on earth for a writer.
Cymelle Edwards: Can you speak more to the conglomerate nature of residencies and the energy in a workshop? What’s happening specifically in that room? How does the energy lend to what’s written?
Jodie Hollander: I was in the very first cohort of women to attend Storyknife Writers Retreat and we had a really wonderful group. There were six of us and everyone was cool. We had the most wonderful conversations. Sometimes we just laughed and would get goofy with each other, but we would also have in-depth, deep existential discussions, as well. And then I’d go back to my cabin thinking of these discussions and see a moose walking in front of me and it would be completely silent. The next morning I’d feel so inspired to begin working on something new. It’s a nurturing, inspirational, quiet, incredible opportunity to really nourish your work and you realize how hard that is to do in real life. Keeping up with house chores and the phone ringing and the doorbell and noises outside, all of that takes me away from the real space that I want to be in—the quiet contemplative space. The residency gives you that space and it’s really special.
Cymelle Edwards: In “Bishops Beach,” the line, “and one lone listener / listening on the shore” takes me back to the image of your father’s hands as crustaceans on the keys in the poem “Hands.” How intentional is this thread and are you minding these connections or are you inventing them as you go along?
Jodie Hollander: I’m always trying to get near the water; I love water. It does something for me I can’t explain. Gosh, those crustaceans. I guess with that Bishops Beach poem it’s transitioning a little bit into the type of writing that I’m doing now, which is moving away from writing about family, dysfunction, and trauma. I think I reached the end of that, which was a weird feeling. In a way I thought I was going to be writing about that for the rest of my life. Then toward the end of Nocturne I was like, Wow, I think I’m out of poems about this and I don’t think I want to write about this anymore. I think I’m done.
In a way that was a little bit scary because, am I going to lose my edge as a poet if I don’t write about these shocking things? But in another way, it was a relief to me because that was a lot. Let’s move on and write about something else. I found myself starting to be interested in writing about nature and the natural world—looking at nature as a place of refuge in the aftermath of trauma.
As human beings we need these natural spaces. Even just the smell of soil can do something for us.
Cymelle Edwards: How does Nocturne function as a site for restoration and recovery from trauma itself?
Jodie Hollander: I think the natural world becomes a safe space and how that works exactly I’m still exploring. I’m exploring this a lot in how I think about the type of writing that I’m going to be doing in the future. One of the things I think nature does for us is it allows us to get out of our small, suffering selves. If we can get out of that and be a part of the bigger family of the natural world, the bigger matrix of nature, that’s one way we can feel restored and healed in nature. This is something I really want to explore more in my future writing, in addition to looking at climate change, among other things. As human beings we need these natural spaces. Even just the smell of soil can do something for us. In one of my poems, “Lilacs,” I’m going through my head with these obsessive thoughts and then I smell these lilacs and it just stops me. I’m suddenly out of my small, suffering self and I’m connected with the larger family of nature.
Cymelle Edwards: What’s next for you? You mentioned your interest in the natural world and how refuge will be explored.
Jodie Hollander: Part of what I’m working on is a poetry in public lands program. This started back in 2018. It was originally a program just in Arizona. But it’s expanded to Joshua Tree National Park in California and Sitka National Historic Monument in Alaska. So I’m doing a lot of these programs as a way to help others find connection and healing in nature. In my own writing, I’m looking at nature as a space of healing in the aftermath of trauma. I’m feeling that we as poets need to be writing about climate change, as well. I know that’s different than putting a million dollars toward it, but at least I can use my voice. I’m working with some of the visual images of Van Gogh in my writing and seeing how that can relate to the natural world. I’m not 100 percent sure where I’m going to go with this new collection, but I know it’s going to be something to do with nature, and nature as a space of healing.
Cymelle Leah Edwards is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from Casa Grande, Arizona, and the author of Coordinates, a chapbook published by Dancing Girl Press. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University. Her work has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review and Sonora Review and selected for translation by the Thousand Languages Project. She currently teaches at Butler University and works in media production in Indianapolis.
Header photo by n_at, courtesy Shutterstock.
