NEW LAURELS:

Weston Morrow

The New Laurels interview series dives into the poetic minds of our recent Open Competition winners. From thoughts on their writerly influences and habits to the intimate, often complicated process of writing their manuscripts, New Laurels invites readers to get to know the hearts and minds of these poets with an inside look at their upcoming publications.

 

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How did you first get involved in poetry? Was this your first writing genre or something you came to over time? 

We studied some poetry when I was in high school—mostly Shakespeare—and all I really remember from the lessons were how focused they were on meter. We learned a lot about iambic pentameter, and I remember our assignments were largely assessed on our ability to maintain iambic pentameter without padding. I loved this kind of language puzzle, but I felt suffocated by the limitations of meter.

At that point, I didn’t know that poets writing in English had liberated themselves from the strictures of meter and end-rhyme a long time ago. It was kind of like I’d learned to paint while pretending that time stopped with the Renaissance. So, while the creative act thrilled me, the limitations made me feel like poetry wasn’t an art form I could ever fully inhabit. There was still something about poetry that tickled my brain, though. My classmates and I had a little forum where we helped each other with homework, and I spent more time on there writing joke couplets than doing homework.

In college, I took one poetry class, but it was a literature survey that—if anything—confirmed my feelings that poetry wasn’t for me. I think there is so much value in literary study, but I also think we need to be careful when studying poetry not to kill the poem. So often, the tools we use to analyze poems seem to obscure what makes them beautiful and resonant.

I didn’t really think about poetry again until maybe five years later, in 2015 or 2016, when I was working as a reporter at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. We used to get all sorts of ARCs (advanced reader copies) sent to the features section, and the features editor at the time, Gary Black, told me I could read anything from the stack I wanted. I remember picking up a copy of Susanna J. Mishler’s Termination Dust and Jeremy Pataky’s Overwinter and the Fall/Winter issue of Alaska Quarterly Review and being really surprised by the poetry. It was nothing like the rigid iambic pentameter I had been taught in school! It was this powerful, evocative use of language that spoke to me as a living, breathing person. Up until that point, I think I had associated the beauty of poetic language with archaic diction, but here was contemporary language (my language!) just infinitely more precise, with a meter tied to breath and the sonic patterns of language. That was the moment I realized poetry’s potential.

What are some of your writerly habits (e.g., a daily practice, a preferred beverage at your side, music, writing analog)? 

My habits have changed so much over time. When I first started writing poems, I made a habit of writing one new poem every single day. I’m glad I did that, but I definitely could not do that anymore. I don’t think it led to great finished products, but at that time the process was infinitely more useful than the products I was capable of producing. Now, I like to spend a lot more time with a poem, giving it more time to arrive, not feeling like I need to finish a full draft that same day.

I write best when I have a long stretch of time where I can focus without worrying about an imminent commitment. So, I try to write first thing in the morning, after eating breakfast and making my coffee. If I’m lucky enough to have the time (like on days I’m not teaching) I’ll try to spend the entire day drafting—sometimes I’ll work on that one draft for eight to ten hours that first day, trying to take it as far as I possibly can while I’m still in that initial mindset. Increasingly, over time, I’ve found that I’m less able to finish a draft in that first day; I used to try too hard to finish a full draft in that first day, and it would lead me to make decisions that didn’t serve the poem’s best interests. That desire would sometimes lead me to settle on easy endings or false epiphanies as a way to exit the poem rather than forcing myself to dwell in the uncertainty and continue grappling with the complexities of the poem on its own terms.

Manuscripts often come together slowly, but sometimes all at once. How did this collection begin for you? Did it take you in unexpected directions? Can you describe how you ordered the poems?

I wrote the first poem for what would eventually become Cloud Builder in 2020, during lockdown. After many different manuscript orders and iterations, that poem, “Skying,” actually ended up becoming the opening poem of the manuscript. I started that poem because I had just finished a different project, and I didn’t know what to write about. I had been really interested in clouds ever since my friend Eva Holland told me to read Jon Mooallem’s incredible longform piece about the Cloud Appreciation Society in 2018, which led me to John Constable’s many “cloud studies.”

Over time, the manuscript evolved and changed direction. For a long time, I was writing poems about both Constable and J. M. W. Turner, and my wife used to describe the book to people by saying, “It’s about two dead cloud painters who hated each other!” which was such a good logline that I almost wish it were still the case.

Ultimately, the book became more and more about the living world than the dead, as I forced myself to interrogate my own fixation on the past and how that fixation served, at times, as a means to remove myself from the anxieties and responsibilities of the present.

So, in that respect, the order of the manuscript was dictated by the change in my own understanding of its aboutness. I changed alongside the manuscript, through the act of writing and revising it, and I think the arc of the manuscript tries to reflect that change. There is no clean, simple “growth” to be found here, but I think it would be silly for a book about clouds to not, in some way, embody change.

What sort of craft elements and themes can readers expect from your work? Why do you find yourself drawn to these things? 

In his letters and lectures on painting, John Constable refers to the sky as the “chief organ of sentiment” in a landscape, and in her essay “On Tone,” Ellen Bryant Voigt compares the role of tone in poetry to the role of color in painting. In his 1810 Theory of Colours, Goethe expresses his belief that color, ultimately, arises from chiaroscuro—the interplay between shadow and light. I think that in Cloud Builder, my own landscapes (particularly those around Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest) and the speaker’s inscape are all inflected by the musicality and rhythms of the language. For me, it’s that sonic texture in the language, syntax, and use of line that helps draw forth the emotion that’s asleep inside ideas and objects.

In these poems, I’m very invested in the belief that poetry can be nuanced without being obscure, that it can be complex and still make sense to someone who doesn’t read much poetry.

I’m interested, in this book, by the question of art’s capacity as well as its limitations. At its core, Cloud Builder is about two questions: What do we owe the dead? And what do we—who will soon be dead—owe the living?

I think of art as a time machine—through which we can communicate with the dead who came before us and the living who will come after we are gone. And, of course, both of these can be incredibly hubristic goals! The dead can’t hear me, and those living in the future will have much better things to read than anything I ever wrote! But, still, we make our little offerings. And that, I think, has value in itself.

Do you have a favorite poem in this collection? Why is it your favorite? 

Oh no, I don’t know if I could possibly answer this. I like them all in different ways! But I think the poem that my friends like most, and which I have a strong affinity toward, is “The Aroma of Tacoma.” Writing this poem just felt like going home, like—in the process of writing it—I was back in that place that feels like a part of me and also, now, unfamiliar somehow.

Was there a particular poem that you struggled with in these pages? What was complicated about it, and what did working through the challenge look like for you? 

I think the poems I struggled with the most were probably “The Galloping Ghost of the Pacific Coast” and “A Summerland.” I think any answer to how (or if!) I solved the problems in these poems will ultimately be a retcon I’ve constructed post hoc to try to make sense of the chaotic process of revision. But I think part of why I struggled so much with these poems was that they both provide important insights for the manuscript—narrative and emotional touchstones that I think are important for how they transform or modulate ideas elsewhere in the collection—and I think the hardest poems to write are ones where you think you know what you want to say. I always find it risky to enter a poem with a plan, and (for me) it’s these sorts of “tent-pole” poems that take the most work, because it takes a long, long time to revise away their certainty.

Looking to your future writing, are there forms, subjects, or themes you want to engage in that you haven’t yet? 

There are lots of things I want to write about that I’m not sure I have the ability yet to articulate, but I’m currently at work on a second manuscript about fear—which I think has been, at times, the guiding force of my life.

Who were the poets, artists, or other individuals who most influenced you? Do you find yourself most influenced by a particular form of art? 

When you aren’t writing, how do you fill your days? 

I have a sort of obsessive personality, so I really enjoy diving headfirst into something obscure that I previously knew very little about and trying to absorb every possible bit of information I can. So (other than writing) how I fill my days changes drastically depending on what I’m currently obsessed with.

As of very recently it’s been running (because grad school, grading papers, writing at a desk all day, and aging can apparently have serious negative effects on both physical and mental health?) but in the past few years it’s been a number of other things (baseball, curling, chess, Starcraft, rock climbing). I have a passion for obscure sports. When I watch a sport and have no clue what’s going on (or why anyone would enjoy watching it) I develop an intense desire to understand why people love it, and that usually leads to me loving it too.

In terms of hobbies, I love anything I can practice and study and get better at. I find it incredibly thrilling and rewarding to noticeably improve at an activity, almost regardless of what that activity is. During my MFA, my friends and I invented a game called shuffle key that we would play using the long table in the Ninth Letter office, and I would secretly go in during my spare time to practice.

What advice do you have for aspiring poets just starting out? What were you told, or wish you were told, in those early stages? 

I could give lots of advice, but my first bit of advice would be not to take any advice as gospel. What works for one person might not work for you, and that’s OK. I love gathering advice from other poets, though, and I like to think of it like gathering a bunch of raw material that I can consider and draw on when needed—comparing it against my own beliefs or practices and using or discarding it as necessary.

My beliefs about how to write a poem have changed over time—and I don’t necessarily think they’ve matured or anything like that. They’ve just changed based on my own priorities and skillsets and values. I think if I could give one piece of advice it would be to stay open to changing your mind—about what poems are for, what they can do, how they can accomplish those things, how they are made, etc.

Oh, and this: I think the best skill a poet can cultivate is cognitive dissonance—the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in your head at the same time. In order to keep writing, I needed to convince myself that I was a great poet (even when I wasn’t), but in order to get better I needed to convince myself that I was not a great poet, not yet, that I could only become one if I kept working, kept practicing, kept focusing on being better today than I was yesterday. I still believe both of these things are true, and the day I stop believing either one will be the day I’m finished.

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Weston Morrow is a poet, teacher, and former print journalist. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MA in English Literature from Central Washington University. From Tacoma, Washington, he teaches at The Ohio State University and can be found online at www.westonmorrow.com.