Short Conversations with Poets: Carol Moldaw

One of the many pleasures of Carol Moldaw’s seventh collection, Go Figure, is its fidelity to description. “Bulbous ropes of kelp,” begins the poem “Northern California.” “Sandstone sea-break cliffs” and “A bluff of salt-pocked Monterey cypresses / twisted in the same configuration, like ’50s teens, / the boys, with windblown ducktail flattops.” But that description is never quite an end in and of itself. More often it sets us up for the devastation of the psychological—for the emotion that lasts—as in the ending in this poem, six tercets, descending like Dante’s Inferno: “No sooner had I finally let on to myself / that this was my psyche’s landscape / than it burst into hellish, unquenchable flames.”

Moldaw, who grew up in California, returns not only to the modern dire states of things, but travels the world and travels the times—catching the anxiety and premonition of a teetering moment. “Road Trip to Planned Parenthood,” for instance, ends chillingly: “Up and down the path, everyone wore a mask / but with no legal necessity, not yet, to hide.” There are trips to Agra and to W. S. Merwin’s Maui oasis, captured in lyrics that describe and detail and gently—or sometimes more firmly—resist. “Poetry in the morning, planting in the afternoon,” she quotes Merwin, “I can almost imagine it / though it’s not my way.”

The book is, then, an evocation of a way, a life in poetry, a life in art—and the means by which a life invested in the lyricism of language navigates the griefs and ordinary miracles of a twenty-first-century life. The poems tell stories in flashes and limpid, easy music:

I layer packing tape on the corners
and over the label of the box

of makeup palettes I’m sending you
as though the surplus correlates

to protective layers of love.

The fierceness of the love in these poems, and the lithe music of it, is part of what makes them powerful. Love for a child, love for dying elders, love for the burning world where “Bear scat gums the long grass,” where “the apricot bears fruit,” a world where “inside windswept is wept.” Part of the moral fire in the work is environmentally minded. Part of it is addressed to a sexist literary and artistic world. And the strange beauty of these poems is in the ease of the forms—their presence often muted, elegantly and artfully—which means you for a moment forget the harder truths they are confronting you with. Watching a plover with a group of friends, the voice in the poem speaks of one friend who “channels everything—rage, / fear, grief—into wall-scale / drawings precise as etchings.” These poems do something like the reverse: They take what is vast and gather it in brief poems that channel everything, precisely.

JESSE NATHAN: I like the formal variation in the book. And I love the consistent intensity of the speaker of these poems. A vivid, evocative voice articulating the sublime and the painful. Does poetry, in your mind, have something unique about it that’s conducive to grief and grieving? I’m curious how you’ve found your way to forms for something like grief, sonnets, villanelle, free-verse stanzas—how you find your way to the rhythm of an experience like grief. Maybe connected: what does the first person offer you, or allow you? It seems to me you make it rich and compelling, invigorated even in sadnesses.

CAROL MOLDAW: This is such an interesting set of nested questions—I’m not sure where to start. The usages of the first person and variation in form—and the hunt for the right form for each individual poem—all greatly interest me, but before I go in those directions, I want to note that when I was writing the poems in Go Figure I never posited to myself that I was writing poems full of grief. Let alone the sublime! It must be because I approach poems granularly and don’t sort them into themes while I’m writing. At some point, though, I do let myself acknowledge obvious connections between poems, and I saw that the poems regarding my mother and her illness took up a substantial portion of the book. I also became aware of many poems’ preoccupations with questions of art, and myself as a woman artist, as well as poems of grievance. Grief itself felt so embodied, so relational, I hardly registered it as grief.

While grief and the elegiac are not one and the same, the long, rich tradition of elegiac poetry certainly suggests that poems, if not conducive to grief (in the sense of promoting its existence), are an ample conduit—and container—for the griefs that do exist. When we want to articulate what at first seems impossible to parse out in words, when we want to probe, where else are we to turn, but poetry? Whether it’s through poetry’s drive to distill essence through compression, or its transcendent ability to weave a long winding cloth, whether through its use of the resonant image or emotional onomatopoeia, what other form of expression offers so much? Poems may not always console, but when they don’t, it’s unlikely anything else would.

Whenever I get a glimmer of a poem, I experiment with the little I have, so as to suss out what shape—call it form—it seems to want or need. I do feel that every nascent but as-yet-unwritten poem has its ideal self, and that it’s my job to find it, as best I can. Line length and lineation are crucial early indicators of a poem’s sense of self, though they are subject to change—everything is subject to change, as a poem develops. For reasons I can’t explain, the earliest poems coalesced at fourteen lines. Perhaps fourteen lines is a good place to start when you’re not sure what you’re doing—there’s such a poetic wealth in the tradition of the sonnet that the poetic unconscious can operate naturally at that length. I found shaping poems into fourteen lines soothing, and I suppose if I’m really to answer your question, I should know why, but I don’t. Then I started writing poems in multiples of fourteen, and even considered committing to that practice for the duration, but at some point, the poems broke free.

The “I” in my poems is a big stake. It holds me accountable to the honesty of expression in a personal way. The idea of congruency between myself as a poet and myself as a person is important to me. The first person forces me to ask myself if I can stand behind what the poem expresses as well as how it expresses it. I also want those two things to be one and the same. In a way, every word is on trial when writing a poem, and sometimes I feel that I’m on the witness stand being interrogated by another part of myself, trying to get to the bottom of things. And I’ve sworn to tell the truth. Poetic truths are hard-won, they are complex and multidimensional, they include the imagination and linguistic sensitivity as well as facts and emotional intelligence.

I also believe that poetry is an intimate art, that comes to us individually, even as it can resonate with communities and through time. The use of “I” is one way to acknowledge that—each reader mouths the “I” and tries it on for themselves (though in some poems it’s easier to identify with the “you”, the one being addressed). Poems aren’t limited to the personal, of course, but that’s often the level of discourse through which my poems operate.

I also think of my “I” very much as a gendered “I.” I am aware of writing from my perceptions and experience as a woman, a woman formed at a certain moment in certain conditions, which my poems have become more open about. Perhaps not with today’s male poets, but traditionally and for the bulk of English poetry’s history, male poets have used the first person with an entitled sense that it is nongendered, all-encompassing. I use “I” knowing how particular mine is and yet having belief that my consciousness and expression can resonate with others. It’s poetry’s tools that enable the “I” to signify.