The Brooklyn Rail

Poets Willa Carroll and Tony Leuzzi were born and raised less than ten miles from each other, at roughly the same time, in Rochester, NY. Due to this proximity, as well as their shared experience growing up in working-class families, one could expect they’ve known each other for years. In truth, they first met at Leuzzi’s Fog Notes book launch in December 2023. Carroll, whose first book Nerve Chorus was released in 2018, had just returned to Rochester after living for twenty-five years in New York City and had recently published a chapbook, Demolition Suite. For these writers, the meeting proved auspicious: their mutual admiration and respect for one another’s work culminated not only in warm camaraderie but in collaboration.

Perhaps a better word is instigation. As a result of the kind of immersion and habitation that results from deep reading, these poets were compelled to respond to each other’s work through their own poems. In discussing how such a project might take shape, Carroll and Leuzzi decided to swap poem titles. Carroll chose five titles from Leuzzi’s Fog Notes; Leuzzi chose five titles from Nerve Chorus. But the process of writing poems from pre-existing titles wasn’t as straightforward as it seems. As both poets make clear in their discussion below, an intimate knowledge of one another’s poetry influenced their own procedures. Additionally, writing poems where titles were determined in advance impacted process as well.

The following conversation shows two poets inviting each another into their creative spaces, allowing draft stages of their work to be scrutinized through careful, patient reading. The subjects of the discussion included, as they must, matters beyond craft. Personal stories and issues relevant to national conversations also emerge. In the end, Carroll and Leuzzi hope this conversation promotes collaboration and inspires other writers to see it as a fulcrum for individual growth.

Tony Leuzzi (Rail): Hello, Willa. I am so glad we have been given this space to discuss our recent collaboration. We’ve only known one another for a year, yet from reading your work I feel a strong connection. When we decided to start this project in July 2024, it had been a few months since I’d read your first book, Nerve Chorus, consumed it in a weekend. Of course, I have favorites. “Occupational Hazards” and “Lamentation Street”—two very moving poems about your father—as well as “In Situ” about your brother and “Matriarchive” about your mother, left a lasting impact. Clearly, I was (and am) drawn to your presentation of family history, its particulars, its universals. When we decided to work on our collaboration, I chose not to work with those four poems because I wasn’t ready to imagine their titles serving different contexts. Thankfully, Nerve Chorus has many fine poems with evocative titles; I picked “Emergency Room,” “Role of Girl as Tree,” “Coda,” “Dear Tormentor,” and “Green Room.” Each title functioned as a useful point of instigation for creating new work. In doing so, my process felt quite different than what I’m used to. Normally, for me, the poem comes first, then the title—if there is a title at all. (Sometimes a title feels like an unnecessary burden.) Poems often originate as fragments, through bits of language that may spark a first draft. Only once the draft is done do I have sense of what the poem is “about.” This time, however, I found myself writing poems towards a concept. I thought I would hate this but I didn’t. The resulting poems behave a bit differently than my usual ones. They know and cluster around the seed ideas they serve. They have clear agendas rather than emerging from a haze. I can’t wait to discuss each of them with you here. But first I’d like to know what your overall experience was like working on this project. 

Willa Carroll: Thank you, it’s interesting to hear about your experience and see behind the curtain. And I’m grateful for the good words on my work. I also felt a kinship after reading Fog Notes, and then your previous three books, especially Meditation Archipelago. I’m struck by your rigorous attention to language and craft, elegant musicality, and painterly use of white space—all balanced by wry wit. Your writing on family, especially your father, moves me.

In writing Demolition Suite, many of its long, idiosyncratic titles came first—flashlight beams into the dark. Initially, I was drawn to your longer, highly inventive titles: “The Bridge Between: A Psalmody,” “Orange: A Life in Fragments,” and “Nine Detours in Place of An Exit.” I then realized that these titles are uniquely and utterly yours. I chose to work with your titles that are more universal: “My First Drawing,” “Life Sentence,” “Called,” “I Confess,” and “For What It’s Worth.” Before writing, I revisited these poems. I realize now that I chose shorter poems that allowed for a brief inhabitation before finding a new space in response. I admire your longer poems, often in sections, as well as your brief lyrics. Seamus Heaney comes to mind as a master of both the sequence and the terse piece. It’s rare for poets to handle both expansion and compression with equal aplomb. Among my responses, I wrote one very short poem and one longer poem, influenced by this range of scale in your work. And since you often employ traditional (and invented) forms, I was compelled to cast one response as a sonnet. Throughout this project, I aimed to be in conversation with your body of work. I’m also rebellious by nature, as many writers are, and this impulse was also at play. In balancing both, the process proved energizing and rewarding.

Above, you discuss some of your experience of our collaboration. Through our exchange, I’ve come to view titles as doors and poems as rooms. I chose your titles that allowed me entrance, as through a portal, to another space. Notably, you chose to work with my titles “Green Room” and “Emergency Room.” And in a striking passage from another response poem, you write: “allowing / one entrance to / cavernous rooms.” This makes me think of the resonant phrase, “a palace of the possible,” from your recent book, Fog Notes. I’m interested to hear about your process and the windows our project has opened for you. 

Rail: In an interview with Grace Schulman called “Transcending the Self,” Stanley Kunitz explains the “archetypal images” Schulman sees in his poems are not deliberately introduced: “They occur naturally. At a certain depth of exploration, private images—those that belong to the daily self—gravitate toward and cohere with the buried archetype, [with] everybody’s heritage.” While I do not consider myself on the same level as Kunitz, I think what he says of himself in this instance is true for me as well. Or maybe it’s because I’ve read him so often and deeply over the years that my approach to poetry is forever influenced by his process. Whatever the case, some of the language in your question certainly tracks with my key images. Doors, rooms, and entrances haunt a lot of my poems. To the extent they are universal, even mythic images, I suppose they resonate with everyone. But architectural features have always fascinated me. My second full-length book is called The Burning Door. That’s no accident. In Meditation Archipelago, there’s a poem called “Novaya Zemlya” where I imagine building my own house among the puffins and polar bears. Beyond my imaginative life, when I travel to far-flung locales, I often take pictures of doors, of buildings. Houses—each a collection of rooms—have their own personalities, too. I grew up in a moderate-sized, split-level home with four siblings and, until I was ten, two parents. That meant there were seven of us under one roof. Privacy was a luxury. Because I craved it, I found creative ways to enjoy it. I’d wait until my siblings were watching television to hang out in my shared bedroom; I used to sit in our damp garage and imagine how nice it would be if the space were converted into an additional room. Though not possible in my childhood, having my own room became an aspiration. So, to an extent, I equate “room” with “self,” with finding space to be true to that self.

But there are public rooms, too, shared spaces, where people interact with one another. One way to explain it: certain rooms encourage certain aspects of our personalities to emerge. I act one way in a church confessional and another way in a high school gymnasium. The way I conduct myself in a high-end restaurant differs from how way I might do so in a fast-food chain. When I saw those titles “Emergency Room” and “Green Room,” I knew I could write poems different not only from each other but from my work in general. My poetic responses to your poem titles are less formal and meditative than most of the poems in Fog Notes; they are—for lack of a better word—chattier, more extroverted. At least it seemed so to me as I wrote them, as I allowed myself to throw a little more levity into one (“Green Room”) and more anaphoric phrasing in the other (“Emergency Room”). I also knew I could (and may still) write ten poems called “Green Room,” another ten called “Emergency Room” and they would all be radically different from one another. Somehow the image of a room created possibilities. By definition, rooms have boundaries; they hold; they confine. Still, the well-defined walls I imagined for each of them in this instance allowed me a certain freedom to act as I wished inside them: What happens in “Green Room” stays in “Green Room”!—that is until it doesn’t. I suppose a true poem is one that recognizes its boundaries but somehow transcends them.

But back to you: I wasn’t surprised when I saw that one of your response poems (“Called”) was a sonnet as I am thoroughly envious of your sonnet “Occupational Hazards” from Nerve Chorus. There and with “Called,” I wasn’t even aware I was reading a sonnet until I completed the poems, then studied them a little more closely. In both, I was swept up by the stories you tell through the form. “Called” is remarkable. Here it is in full:

Everyone needs a calling.
Hold the line, longing is mine.
What a body does in the trying.
Call me anytime, sang Blondie—
Call me, we can share the wine.
I miss the days of notes quickly
jotted on scrap to say who phoned.
The Beloved’s name, scrawled
by another’s hand—Billy called.
We made a date eaten by the wind.
Only the note remains, ink talisman.
Read the double ll’s as yellow street
lines—unrolling their lonely gold.
Parallel lines will never meet.

What struck me first about this sonnet was the pop-cultural reference: I’m focusing on the iconic Blondie and her sexy, daring, yet oddly blasé anthem “Call Me.” But soon it’s the terseness of those initial five lines that grabs me: each of them end-stopped and, in a sense, isolated from the others. This linguistic isolation (or containment) reflects the speaker’s separation from “The Beloved”—a separation that time and physical distance have ensured, though memory calls Billy back. So, in a clever way, you have evoked a timeless sonnet theme of love—its assertion, its loss, yet its ongoingness—without strain, in an idiom easily accessible to a contemporary English-language reader. At the start of the sixth line, when you have entered memory space, your lines grow longer and, gradually, more enjambed and lyrical. The final five lines of the poem are pure poetry gold, especially this couplet: We made a date eaten by the wind. / Only the note remains, ink talisman.” I’m totally jelly! Can you recall how this poem came to be? Do you remember your process while writing it? Or were you in a trance? I’m itching to know more.

Carroll: Thanks for your enthusiastic, close reading. When I first saw your title, I thought of the epitaph on Emily Dickinson’s gravestone: “Called Back.” Then the cheeky tone in your poem set me rolling. Just as I was riffing on the title and a sense of nostalgia and desire, Blondie called. Her rhymed lyrics coaxed my draft into the shape of a sonnet. I wrangled my funky rhyme scheme, or it wrangled me: ABACBCEEEFFGFG.

The last time I wrote a rhyming sonnet was in graduate school at Bennington, when poet Major Jackson urged his students to work in iambic pentameter. This was not a hard sell for me, a longtime fan of Elizabethan sonnets, thanks to my undergraduate mentor, Steven Cramer. Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt…” and the line, “Since in a net I seek to hold the wind” has lived in my mind for over a quarter century. Of course, it’s lived in the language since the sixteenth century. 

Your poem’s final line, “seeking shelter in a nest of verbs” influenced my final quatrain, which I see as a micro ars poetica. As poets, language is our medium and our material, our refuge and our escape. And of course, poetry and song are ancient bedfellows. Now back to Blondie. My last line nods to their third album, Parallel Lines. Their sound takes me back to my 20’s in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn of the late nineties. Blondie was always on the bar jukeboxes in those last days of my analog youth. My sonnet draws on that era. On that note, I could share the steamy backstory about Billy, but perhaps that’s better for whispers. Let’s just say that he’s a Grammy-winning musician but plays the guitar and not the lyre.

Speaking of the classical lyre, in your response to “Role of Girl As Tree,” you sustain five dynamic sections engaging with the classical Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo. With diverse strategies you explore desire, power, gender, sexuality, agency, and violation. I just recently came across Eavan Boland’s “Daphne With Her Thighs In Bark,” and was struck by how her poem deals with unrequited desire, as does yours. I was excited to read both of your radical takes in tandem. There’s a palpable ache in your lines: “Why run / when I—who wanted an Apollo / or any handsome, boyish god— / would have welcomed his embrace?” Both your and Boland’s poems, in their contrast to mine, make me think more deeply about the self-numbing as a response to trauma that resides at the core of my poem. I’m heartened by this empowering passage later in your poem: “and she appeared to / thicken and rise toward heaven / but her roots / delved deeper.” Your Daphne grows larger and more powerful as she transforms to hold her ground. Certainly, this is the Daphne we need at this political moment. Can you please talk more about power dynamics in your poem, or any other aspects that interest you?

Rail: The two passages you quote are from sections three and five, respectively. Those happen to be my favorite sections. I have not read the Eavan Boland poem, though I will. Your mention of her and me working through you “in tandem” is a very high complement.

Of all your poem titles I referenced in our collaboration, “Role of Girl As Tree” had the most sustained impact on my writing. Initially, I was attracted to the title’s lack of specific or general articles. Not “A Girl” or “The Girl”—but “Girl.” Not “A Tree” or “The Tree”—but “Tree.” I felt as if I were entering the realm of dreams, where images appear without the connective tissue that promotes surface coherence. Rather, coherences established in dreams are instinctive, intuitive.

The phrasal quality of the language also suggested archetypes, categories. I instantly connected “Girl” and “As Tree” with the myth of Daphne and Apollo, a connection you make explicit in your poem when you write: “I go without protest with boy / after boy & a man more than one / Daphne without the chase…”. By inserting yourself into this classical story, you are reframing it as personal mythology, a version which shows the poem’s “I” (you?) accepting the pursuit without chase, a modern-day Daphne who is “in for something rough,” not seeking her father’s protection. Your “I” is curious, has agency. I liked that. As a precocious youth, she does what I would have done if boys had shown interest in my skinny, nerdy, boy-self. Instead, like many gay-identified readers of literature, I understood stories of heterosexual desire and pursuit through analogy. I address all of this in the third section of my poem. The first time I read Ovid’s version I was befuddled: Why would Daphne bolt from such an attractive and impressive god when I would have run into his arms? However, with time and several readings later, I realized my correlation was not so much to Daphne but with Apollo himself. Like him, I desired what was out of reach. I felt tragically doomed to ache and pine for ever-elusive “objects” of my desire. Even today, when it is more socially acceptable for LGBTQ persons to express and assert themselves, there are enormous portions of the population unavailable to us sexually and/or romantically by virtue of deep cultural conditioning and biological hard wiring. Additionally, I wanted this section of the poem to function as self-interrogation, where I question my own behaviors and attitudes about sexual desire. I may be gay but I’m a man and, like virtually every man I know, I have been encouraged—even pressured—to assert my “right” to gaze and pursue. This, of course, the myth deconstructs from a traditional, heterosexual viewpoint. When applying it to me in my poem, I bridged that viewpoint to homosexual longing.

The second passage you cite is from my fifth section, which I wrote in response to Trump’s rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin on October 30, 2024. At that rally, our president-elect said “I will protect women, whether they like it or not.” This hideous distortion of advocacy was the germ for a poem in which I place Trump in the role of Apollo. By contrast, Daphne represents women as a collective. A cameo of woodland creatures occurs, too. They are enraptured by Apollo’s promise to

seize [women] by their hair
and arms to guard them

against the threat
of themselves and they shall be

forever grateful…

Another cameo comes from Daphne’s fellow huntresses (followers of Artemis) who insist Apollo leave them alone, for “neither / she nor we need your protection”—an order Apollo ignores. Meanwhile, Daphne’s roots grow deeper and her limbs grow higher and higher. She is sourcing an internal strength to manage Apollo’s obscene, delusional oppression. I do not normally write overtly political poems, but this one came quickly, in one burst of inspiration, and it is rhetorically powerful in a way that surprises me. A poem of the moment cloaked in ancient myth. Also a poem of a story that is as old as Time.

Usually, I am more inclined to brief/short poems. One of the briefest poems from my book Fog Notes is the second poem in the collection, called “My First Picture.” It was such a pleasure to write that because beginning any poem with “My First…” and inserting any noun has a built-in potential to be foundational. There is a simplicity in that tiny poem which ends with something happening beyond the bounds of the page: the child’s imaginative act prompted by his first creative act. When I saw you chose “My First Picture” as one of your response titles, I was thrilled—and a little nervous: Would I be disappointed? Rightly or wrongly, we tend to guard our creations and worry if what is inspired by them somehow casts a tainting shadow on us. (This is not a reasonable or logical feeling, but I think it does demonstrate the neurotic and super-sensitive nature of those involved in some form of artistic production.) Thankfully, I had no need to worry: your “My First Picture” is positively magical! As with mine, it traces the work of a child to arrive at something much deeper, something implied and greater than anything stated directly in the poem. I love, love, love your descriptions of the drawing:

Stick figures braving a tundra
childhood. My father’s head,

wide as a lunar satellite dish,
mine a smiling dinner plate.

Arms coming out of our ears—
no necks, wobbly bodies

lost in a pointillism blizzard,
loud wind scrawling.

What pleasure I derived from this! There are echoes of Elizabeth Bishop in your handling of detail. I’m thinking specifically of her poem “Poem” (“About the size of an old-style dollar bill”)—an ekphrastic description of a painting that leads to something else. Your poem certainly does this, too, though in an impressively compressed compass. When you end the poem, you write: “See his fogged // glasses—occluded moons / hiding his ice, I mean, his eyes.” The startling connection between the “ice” and “eyes” made me stop, freeze (no pun intended). I was left without words, only those two images—a man’s eyes and ice—and eventually I began to consider what that meant. I don’t want to think too hard about it. I want to keep shivering. I kept asking myself—and ask myself still—how did you do it? How did you find such a powerful exit out of this poem? Like most poets, I find endings terrifically difficult. We brace ourselves for that final line or phrase but we don’t always pull it off. You do so brilliantly here and, in fact, in many of your poems. Do you have a strategy for ending poems, for carving out exists so exquisite that we, as if children having completed a ride on the amusement park roller coaster, want to go back to the beginning and reenter?

Carroll: Working on this poem was satisfying in that it was ultimately a process of discovery. I love your poem’s visual clarity and its final leap beyond the confines of the page, reaching past the circumference of a child’s mind. It strikes me as both personal and universal. I’m grateful that my description brought Bishop to mind. I recall reading her poem “The Fish” for the first time and realizing her descriptive brilliance. I was on the back porch of my college dorm in a rainstorm and when I put the book down, my perception felt acutely amplified, as if I could hear, see, and smell every individual raindrop.

The last line was the result of a slip—I wrote “ice” for “eyes” and kept the mistake, following the sound more than the sense. Yet I also wondered about the meaning. Was it saying that my father’s eyes were cold? His eyes were pale blue-green; he was stoic and could even be gruff. Yet he was not cold. His eyes could grow watery with emotion, though I never saw him cry. I then thought about ice as a substance susceptible to flux, to melting. For me, that whole line speaks to his classic male recalcitrance and his more hidden emotional core. I also discovered that now, in this moment in time, when I think of ice, I think of loss. I think of shrinking glaciers and the climate crisis. I hope some of that might come through for readers. Yet it’s fine if it’s just my personal connection. I love that your response to the line was physical. It reminds me of the Emily Dickinson quote: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry.”

As for endings, I don’t lean on any one strategy. I was reading a great deal of Bei Dao during the pandemic and his endings are often very surprising and sudden. Perhaps I’m still under the influence? I always pay close attention to the endings of poems, novels, films, etc. I hunger for that brief sense of resolution, or the thrill of a mysterious exit. Speaking of exits, my background in performance (experimental dance and theater) comes to mind here. There’s something about making a physical exit from a stage that stays with me—a felt sense of crossing a boundary, of leaving the lit frame. I’m speaking from the embodied experience of surrender, of being moved by movement. Translated to the page, that could mean the poem, rather than the poet, ends the poem.

On that note, let’s turn to your poem, “Coda.” An aspect of your work that intrigues me is your ability to weave strong statements into the fabric of your poems, adding surprising rhetorical texture. Often these declarations speak to the condition of being a poet, an artist. You manage to make these gestures without a heavy hand since your voice registers as both ironic and earnest at once. I have in mind these lines, “as those who carry / myth and memory / wherever they go / like some membership / card to the human race” from “Role of Girl As Tree.” And these lines from “Coda” that have been revolving in my mind for days: “We are godless theologians / Eliminating the elimination of precision.” They form a philosophical fulcrum for your stunning “Coda,” one of my favorites from our collaboration:

After the storm      a confusion of grass

Deconstructed flowers brilliant bladed lawns

We are godless theologians

Eliminating the elimination of precision

It would seem it would seem

Hat announced Hat in a prison of likeness

I admire the opening lines and how you set the scene through fresh eyes; a “confusion of grass” will stay with me. The echoing of “it would seem” gently undercuts the boldness of the previous lines. This pleasing repetition, and the whole poem, reminds me of the famous haiku: “This dewdrop world— / Is a dewdrop world, / And yet, and yet…” by Kobayashi Issa. And then the last line has a strong Rilkean resonance. Yet those middle, hinge lines are all Leuzzi. Can you speak to those lines and any other elements you wish? I’m also curious if this poem arrived whole, or in fragments?

Rail: “Ironic and earnest at once”—I am grateful you see this. While you are talking specifically about my poetic voice, others have told me there are times in everyday conversations when they cannot tell if I’m being ironic or sincere. Perhaps what people react to is my tendency to question my own assumptions before anyone else does. It’s not a defensive measure. In striking a balance between irony and earnestness, I’m not trying to chop my own head off before others get there. It’s just me being the kind of person prone to inquiry, appreciative of clarity while also eager to subject moments of clear thinking to healthy doses of self-deprecation and uncertainty. This balance you speak of occurs a lot in certain non-English language poets I love to read: Dan Pagis, Wislawa Szymborska, Jerzy Ficowski, Aleksandar Ristović, as well as others affiliated with Eastern Europe. So maybe through deep reading I learned their maneuvers. You also mentioned Issa. I love haiku, am obsessed with it. I try to write them. Sometimes I succeed, but usually I am just envious of others who excel at the form.

Regarding my ability to “weave strong statements,” I think there’s something inherently poetic in the language of Philosophy, for instance, where propositions and assertions are the name of the proverbial game. But I also think back on something Jane Hirshfield once stated in a lecture I attended: She said (and I’m paraphrasing) she was committed to including strong statements in her then-new poetry, that she felt the poem should say something as well as show it. William Carlos Williams’ “No ideas but in things” was a fresh and necessary proposition. Then it wasn’t. I don’t want just a bunch of “thing” poems. I want poems that “thing” and “state.” A reduction of Williams, to be sure, but you get the idea.

I’m glad you dig “Coda.” As I mentioned above, it’s the only poem I wrote for this collaboration where the title did NOT come first. Rather, I spent a day walking around Rochester, occasionally stopping to get a drink or take a rest. During those stops, I would open the “Notes” app on my phone and jot a sentence or phrase that had come to me as I ambled. Later, I saw I had written about fifteen lines, each bold and/or memorable in its own right. The title “Coda” was on my list, so I thought it would make the perfect umbrella for a few of those lines. I selected and rearranged them to establish some coherence and voila, “Coda” was born. I do like it, though I’m not certain what I’m saying there. I think it’s better if someone else explained it to me. That you considered the last line Rilkean—I’ll take it!

Let’s switch gears a little bit now. “For What It’s Worth” seems like an unusual poem for you—or at least I think so. It’s about Paula and Carmen, two bartenders at a watering hole in Brooklyn, though it is narrated by an “I” who works at the bar, delivering pints filled-to-the-brim to tables on the floor. Paula seems like a tough, confident, self-assured woman. Carmen, a former beauty who settled for an “estranged” and abusive husband, is quieter, warier. While you expertly handle the unrhymed couplets in this poem, thereby demonstrating your trademark sense of craft, the poem itself feels chattier, a bit more relaxed than most of your work. Did you set out to do this or did the easy-flowing syntax and informal, confiding tone come spontaneously from your reaction to the given title? What can you share about how this poem was composed?

Carroll: You’re right in that this poem employs less compression and linguistic play than my other work. A couple poems in Nerve Chorus feature a similar tone, feminist focus, and narrative engine, such as “Yoga with Monica Lewinsky” and “More Famous Than Andy Warhol.” However, I worked on those poems for years and this one is fairly new. I just revisited this relevant quote by Michael Palmer: “Yet poetry must also always be ‘something happening’—to language, to consciousness, to time and memory.” Action at that level is just not yet happening in this draft. I’m not sure whether this poem will develop more or go on the scrap heap. Either way, I’m grateful for the chance to respond to your wonderful “For What It’s Worth” in which Palmer’s dictum comes to realization, as in these lines: “I haul mother’s boxes / from the basement to the attic. Suspended from the rafter beams / her dresses look like salted fish.” These lines prompted me to think about aging and how a woman’s worth in our culture is traditionally linked to youthful attractiveness or usefulness to family. From there, I moved towards the tragic Carmen of my poem, the former beauty whose life was diminished by male violence. Perhaps I will at least salvage these lines:

Paula always fills her pints to the brim.
My cork-lined tray perpetually wet,

apron full of damp dollars at Teddy’s Bar—
dark wood walls, tin ceiling, smoke & roar

on the ground floor of a brick walkup
where Mae West lived before Hollywood. 

Earlier, you mentioned a natural proprietary feeling for one of your foundational poems. I must admit to that with my poem “Emergency Room.” It’s based on a chilling experience at Bellevue Hospital in New York, in 2001. I wrote it from a prompt that Tracy K. Smith offered in a workshop that she taught out of her Brooklyn apartment in 2006. I developed it in another workshop with Brenda Shaughnessy at the 92^nd Street Y. And it was the first poem I ever published, appearing in Tin House in 2007, thanks to Brenda. I share all of this because much of my personal history as a young writer is packed behind this poem. Yet, the ER is for everyone, and your response is absolutely engaging! You mentioned Wislawa Szymborska as one of your touchstone poets and your sustained reading of her work. I believe that her influence is at play, even beyond the simply tonal, in your “Emergency Room.” Can you share more about the compositional process?

Rail: First, I see why your “Emergency Room” is so foundational for you. It’s a terrific, occasionally terrifying poem. I love how each stanza introduces (in italics) a different stage of the medical procedure, which is juxtaposed with the I’s inner dialogue. (It reminds me, in form, of an Alice Walker story called “Roselily.”) Where you wrote “The doctor is skilled, but you, your touch is wrong, / always has been…” I was startled by the awful clarity of that admission. By comparison, my “Emergency Room” is more hypothetical, conceptual, inviting readers of it to consider themselves the ravenous leeches any audience is as it waits to hear a “good” story—and by good, I mean the horrors, the traumas, the miseries that it (and by extension a universal “we”) consumes and feels from a safe distance.

Yes, the ER is for everyone. I like how you phrased that. We all tell tales about this space where recovery or decline are the only real options. You say you see Szymborska in my poem. Though flattered, I’m not surprised. I’ve read her so often and deeply that her manners and maneuvers are probably internalized in my own process. I’m not saying I can accomplish what she can. She is sui generis. But unlike, say, Dickinson or Hopkins, one can steal a few of her tricks without sounding absurd. Still, the influence you speak of, and which I do not doubt is there, was not conscious as I wrote them poem. (Thank God it wasn’t.) However, I was conscious of a radically different poet: Adrienne Rich. I was thinking of the 13^th section of her thirteen-part poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” In this part of her poem, subtitled “Dedications,” she repeats “I know you are reading this poem,” and frequently refreshes the contexts in which the poem she is writing can be read. In doing so, she creates a world community of readers whose hungers are visceral and aesthetic. I wanted to write my own anaphoric poem so I wrote “I believe you want a story / something…” and went from there. “I believe,” “something,” “about” are frequently repeated in the first two-thirds of the poem. I wanted to create a panorama that included all sorts of possibilities for the function my emergency-room story would serve to those who wanted to hear it. I also wanted to address why people would want to hear it. Let me tell you a story now: For years, I taught a class called “Literature of the Holocaust.” Elie Wiesel’s short memoir Night was assigned as the first text. In its initial chapters, young Elie and his rabbi discuss his religious studies, the importance of the Torah, and how consideration of the Kabbala must be held at bay for years as he works patiently through the Pentateuch. Their discussion is lovely, soulful: pure poetry in prose. While our class was reviewing this chapter, a young man raised his hand and asked “When are we going to get to the good stuff?” By “good stuff” he meant the horrors of the camp. He wasn’t an immoral or demented person. He was just unaware how nakedly he exposed his desire to consume horror as pornography. Presumably, he had signed up for the course to read those stories, to be entertained by being rent emotionally and shocked psychologically. I do not remember what I said to him. 

In “Emergency Room,” the reason I provide for why I have been brought there is intentionally deflating and all-too human: a metal folding table fell on my left big toe. If the audience/reader was waiting for a hair-raising revelation, it doesn’t come. To steal some language from Dickinson, most of us suffer homely anguishes.  

Finally, I want to ask you about your poem “I Confess.” I know you have carried this through a number of revisions, so I sense you already know its power and wanted to access its full potential. It’s nearly a sonnet, in terms of line number and the presence of a turn, though the pivot occurs precisely midway through instead of the traditional two-thirds in, suggesting your poem has two identically-sized bodies chiseled like lovers in one stone. I want to quote it in full:

I Confess

I talk to myself. Or trees, animals, insects,
the dead, the wind, the walls, the moon, the shine.
I talk to myself all the time. Tender counsel

aloud in the open air, address myself in bed.
Half-converse with you, no longer mine.
What a body can do with space-time.

Conduct solar storms over brain waves.
Broadcast, by mouth, extreme weathers,
spilling contaminated floodwaters

& debris downstream. I talk my heart out,
talk my heart out & down, bird in your hand—
wet red beast, endangered, beating time.

Those first six lines are so tender, so sonorous, so passionate beneath the pose of quiet reserve. I hear Christina Rosetti in them, even in the fifth line when a “you” is introduced, thereby turning meditative reflection into a lover’s address to the beloved—or is it an address to the self? Before the reader has a chance to guess, the poem takes a decided turn, introducing a new verb, “Conduct,” which shifts the tonal register by suggesting environmental disturbances that may express the turbulent self on a larger ecological plane. In the final three lines, the “wet red beast” in the hand (whose hand?) is endangered, but still beating, surviving. I have read this poem many times. It never stops revealing new information, never ceases offering new possibilities. I still don’t wholly grasp it and hope I never do. Nonetheless, I’m wondering if you could tell me a bit about it—either your process for writing it and/or what your conception might be.

Carroll: I’m flattered this poem conjures Christina Rossetti for you. A volume of her poems often ends up on my bedside table. That stack always includes translations of Zen poets Ryokan, Wumen, Dogen, etc. Those first two lines seek to channel them. (The backstory: my parents met as young practitioners at Rochester Zen Center, one of the first in the States.)

In contemplating how to work with the title, I amassed a litany of my past transgressions of varying severities. This failed to compel since I was not discovering anything new. I started shaping the first two stanzas, trying to see if they could open into something unexpected. I’m glad that the “you” in line five registers as indeterminate since that was my intention; I was addressing various past selves as much as any lost love.

I’m wary to say more in fear of breaking the spell, but I will share that the poem recalls the pandemic isolation, when I began to embrace audible conversations with myself in my New York City apartment. I stalled after the sixth line for a good while, which is perhaps why the turn occurs there. The ecological language arrived just after Hurricane Helene as I was following reports of devastation (I have family in North Carolina). The second sestet recalls my ecopoetics-adjacent poems in Demolition Suite. I think of those poems as smashed sonnets reassembled into short prose poems. Similar diction returns here but with less fragmentation.

I chose “bird in your hand” to invoke a direct connection with the reader, or a confidant, or the beloved, or the last person I had an awkward conversation with, or all of them at once. I still marvel at how poetry allows us engagement with complexity, with layered meanings and truths, and with our interdependence, all in the space of a few words. I see the final line as an offering of vulnerability, yet also gratitude, in times of widespread chaos and loss, to be here, alive, “beating time.”

Speaking of time, and the impulse to stop, capture, and shape it into poems, I want to discuss you poetic structures. Throughout your body of work, I marvel at your many strong poems arranged in sections. A riveting example is your response to “Dear Tormentor.” Here it is in full:

I.

I have tried to stop
arousal’s wave whenever
I remember you.

No, I have not tried
to stop remembering: there
is a difference.

  

II.

I thought “so ugly”
and longed to be beneath him—

humiliated
by his smirk and smell

his casual amusement
which, at any point,

could turn to boredom.

Sadly, he was grateful. Worse:
warm and attentive.

Not at all like you.

  

III.

You removed your shirt
but kept the thin blue Windsor-
knotted tie around

your wide and shining
neck. Years later I saw it—
fashion weaponized

the very same way
on another man’s face on
a thin, glossy page.

To protect myself
I wrote an essay about
fluid space between

sign and seduction.

 

IV.

Whatever you did or did not do—
am I bound to a rehearsal

of the sordid, sad particulars?

Is it not enough that I have made
a “you” of you to fold into

whenever I feel flattened, safe?

 

V.

You are not the you
I take to bed and cannot be
what you’ve become.

There’s palpable heat in “arousal’s wave” as it speaks directly to the body. We’ve all felt that rush of sensation from crown to sole, and know its power to unwire the brain. The battle between the speaker’s mind and body has a doubling effect, reflecting the tension between the “I” and “you.” This dialectic strategy is enacted in each section and heightens in the penultimate section: “Is it not enough that I have made / a “you” of you to fold into. . . .” The last section is a tight tercet that takes things a step further: “You are not the you / I take to bed and cannot be / what you’ve become.”

Could you talk about the process of writing this poem and structuring the sections? I admire how the sections slow down the poem’s action and create a cinematic effect as they allow for different scenes and spaces of thought. I’ve been trying to approach a long poem in sections yet feel blocked. I’d love to hear about your compositional approaches to this poem and any of your other episodic works.

Rail: “Dear Tormentor”—what a great title! Who wouldn’t want to respond with their own poem bearing this heading? What struck me when I read your poem is how specific the context seemed, and yet, like “Emergency Room,” most humans have “tormentor” stories. Or fantasies.

Initially, I thought I might write a poem in epistolary form and attack the project with a kind over-the-top romantic, almost gothic zeal. But that isn’t me and as creators we are always pulled towards those procedures that suit our temperament. For me, that means writing compressed poems, often in clearly-defined forms. There are probably a dozen or so intersecting reasons for this; however, I don’t spend too much time anymore pondering why. I just know this is who I am. Still, since writing Fog Notes, a change has occurred: often, I am writing poems that braid a lot of tight, terse sections, numbered or unnumbered, to create a cumulative effect. This, I noticed, allows me to expand or develop certain ideas without losing the compression I crave. It’s not entirely new to my writing. In each of my books there are large sections devoted to “series” and/or serial poems. But with Fog Notes, I realized I could do this and sustain a single voice through the sections—something I had not managed before. It’s not a new concept and I’ve read hundreds of poems like this before. But for me it was a fresh approach. In Fog Notes, the compressed units within the serial poem often took form as “notes”—or lyric verse passages posing as notes. One such poem is called “Fog Machine,” which is comprised of three sections, each containing three disguised haikus. I abandoned the 5-7-5 syllabic/line formula and just said to myself “write 17-syllbable fragments of perception and braid them together.” The result excited me. I’ll probably resort to it again.

In “Dear Tormentor,” I embraced the popular English-language version of the haiku-stanza, using tercets of 5-7-5. The first section, for instance, is simply two, undisguised haiku stanzas, with a nod to the traditional nature imagery when I use “arousal’s wave” as a metaphor for desire. The second section is arranged largely as couplets, plus a couple of monostitched lines. However, if you look a little closer, you’ll see these are just three haiku-stanzas and a concluding five-syllable line that have been broken up to appear free—an effect that mirrors the narrator’s ambiguous relationship to his tormentor, a man who disgusts yet enthralls him. Section three is yet again three haiku stanzas and a concluding five-syllable monostitch, only now I haven’t attempted to disguise the arrangement, thereby more openly exposing a self that admits a simultaneous allure and defensiveness. The narrator’s defense is handled as a meta-reference to writing: he composed an essay to “protect himself” from the allure of “fashion weaponized” on the tormentor’s fetishized body. This section has pronounced enjambment, often pushing against natural rhythms of speech. This is intentional. I wanted the speaker here to sound as if he were attempting to break free of his desire, stressing the haiku containers to establish a dissonance that does not liberate.

Section four is the only section that breaks free of the haiku form. Ironically, there the phrasing is more deliberately rhythmic yet sonically unstrained—no weird enjambments; lines lineated largely for breath. Thematically, this is where the narrator is resigned to his situation and in being so prepares himself for a return to form in the fifth section, a single haiku that introduces an eerie objectivity. The self has come to a realization about his tormentor: the object of his desire is no longer enough. “You are not the you”—which is the tormentor, obviously, but also the narrator reflecting on his own gradual liberation: his acceptance of the control his tormentor has had upon him frees him of the tormentor. Did I know this when I wrote it? No, that final haiku just rushed out of me. And as soon as I wrote it, I said “stop.”

And stop we shall! Willa, I want to thank you for being so generous with your time. We spent on a week on this conversation and I feel more energized and creative because of it. I hope we will collaborate again in the future.

Carroll: I’m grateful for our invigorating exchange, Tony. Thank you for the invitation to collaborate and be in conversation. Yes, let’s meet again in future stanzas.