Derek Ellis: Lindsay, thanks so much for agreeing to this interview, and for coming to Binghamton to read your work this past spring. For many of the creative students who were in attendance, it was great to hear you read from your first book, What it Doesn’t Have to Do With, which won the National Poetry Series in 2017. I know you have been hard at work publishing poems that are a part of a new, second manuscript you’re actively finishing, but I’d love to pause and ask you a bit about your first book. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like to write that first book, and how you found the thematic center that allowed for you to fully flesh out the manuscript?

Lindsay Bernal: Thank you, Derek, for wanting to have this conversation with me. I loved hanging with the Binghamton writers, a highlight of last year. I recently saw A Real Pain and my affection for Binghamton—and legit upstate—has swelled even more.

I just finished what feels like a final-ish draft of my second book! Hopefully, I’m not jinxing myself by sharing that news with you and all the Harpur Palate readers.

Of course, I’m always happy to talk about What It Doesn’t Have to Do With and its hellish, soul-crushing, character-building, humbling evolution. After years of my manuscript almost winning various prizes but ultimately getting rejected during the final judge phase, winning the National Poetry Series still feels like a miracle, holding the actual book in my hands a dream.

Writing it, the part that I tolerate far better than sending work out, the part that makes us poets (as opposed to the biz side), was equally arduous. What It Doesn’t Have to Do With, like so many first books, began as my MFA thesis. I wrote the earliest poem in it, an ekphrastic response to a John Currin retrospective at The Whitney, before the MFA, for Jean Valentine’s workshop at the 92nd St. Y in 2004. This nonce sonnet experiment became the seed and the fourth section of the sequence, “The Pre-Raphaelite Effect,” which, for a while, was also the title poem.

Basically, I kept redefining—as my lived experience changed the poems I was writing—the thematic center of the ms. With each new rupture in my life, I’d have to reorient myself within the collection and rediscover its arc. First, there was my assault, reimagined in the long poems, “The Pre-Raphaelite Effect” and “Venice Is Sinking,” which each tell the same story very differently. “The Pre-Raphaelite Effect” is my first publication that Jericho Brown took for a 2008 issue of Gulf Coast. Up until its appearance in Conjunctions in 2017, I was eternally tinkering with “Venice Is Sinking,” the first draft of which I wrote for Joshua Weiner’s long poem course at Maryland in 2005. The thesis version of the book attempts to bridge “self-elegies,” stemming from my assault, and the elegies for my paternal grandfather, a second father to me and my brothers, who I cared for and sat beside as he died.

The fall after I earned my MFA, on Friday, October 26, 2007, my sister-in-law committed suicide in the apartment she and my older brother shared in Manhattan. After her death, none of the poems I’d previously written seemed to matter. It took me several years to figure out how to memorialize her, how to ethically navigate her death in a poem. I researched the elegy as a form throughout history and read stacks of “indirect” elegies—Catherine Barnett’s Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced was an invaluable guide during this period. Once I finished “No Echo,” the longest sequence in the collection, I’d found the core around which the rest of the poems could radiate.

DE: Something I am always interested in is humor within poetry, how it is accomplished, but also what it is up to rhetorically. There are many humorous moments in your first book that, to me, seem to help navigate a tough subject for the self-as-speaker, but also for the reader. But much of it seems to happen in the first half of the book. For instance, in an early poem “Postcard from the Villa Catullo” you write “Did you have a real cool time at the discotheques?” in a poem whose emotional undercurrent has a quiet anger. How do you see humor acting in your work?

LB: I’m relieved when the audience at my readings laughs at that particular line. My poem is a rewriting of Pound’s “Blandula Tenella Vagula,” set in Sirmione (like Pound’s poem), where Catullus lived.  I wanted to invoke both Pound and Catullus, who I consider a humorist—I wanted to flirt with comedy like Catullus does.

The speaker of my poem is heartbroken and, yes, angry that she’s been abandoned in paradise. I prefer dark humor, and I often use humor to offset the sentimentality of grief—in my life and in my poems, though the speaker of my poems is wittier and much cooler than I am in real life. Her comebacks are better because they’ve benefited from revision and slow thinking. I could never do improv.

DE: This leads me to my next question, which is a rather basic one, but one I am interested nonetheless, especially with your book. There’s mention of “paradise” throughout the book, and I see it as something that mingles with the concerns of those poems, how they are interrogating ways in which the speaker perceives time, their surroundings, their sense of self, and even religion. How do you see the different sections operating and informing one another within What it Doesn’t Have to Do With?

LB: I agree that paradise is a leitmotif, the concept of earthly paradise, unlike heaven or a Judeo-Christian afterlife that has always haunted me. Now we’re all hearing Belinda Carlisle in our heads “Oooh, Heaven is a place on Earth. Sorry, I’m an eighties kid. My second book confronts my Catholic upbringing/education more explicitly.

But your question concerns the four sections in the collection. I cling to the notion that all books are just one long poem. I think I can make the case that What It Doesn’t Have to Do With operates/moves like a sonnet in book form: the first two sections establish the speaker’s melancholic, self-deprecating, wry character, who has traveled the world, moved to NYC, read lots of books, seen lots of art, and yet is disillusioned and disconnected. The third section presents a turning point, the climax, where the speaker’s self-elegizing shifts to real elegizing. It’s also echo-less and creates a kind of asymmetry or dissonance that we discover at a sonnet’s volta.

By the fourth section, the speaker finds romantic love, maybe loves herself a bit more. It may be reductive, too easy, for me, at forty-five, to look back and psychoanalyze my previous self, my twenty-something self who seems like a stranger now.

Ordering the poems within each section was intuitive. The first two sections foreshadow the final section.  “No Echo” and the entire third section are the centerpiece that breaks open the book, initiates a disturbance from which we can’t fully recover even as we encounter the purer love poems in the final section.

Also, my dear friend, the brilliant poet Jennifer Chang, helped me immensely with the order.

DE: What I am always struck by in your work is your ability to earn a reader’s trust immediately through what you disclose, or even what you leave out. This is to say, for me, your poems have this energy that feels like we as the reader are receiving secrets or stories divulged to a friend. It reminded me a lot of what Louise Glück wrote about in her essay, “Against Sincerity,” particularly when she speaks of Diane Wakowski’s work, saying “The ‘I’ on the page, the all-revealing Diane, was her creation. The secrets we choose to betray lose power over us.” I’m not trying to draw parallels between your work and Wakowski’s, but there is the sense of confession the poems of your first book seem interested in and revolve around. Could you speak to this idea of the confessional mode and how you see your work intersecting it?

LB: Glück is a huge influence, and Proofs and Theories is my bible. The Wild Iris the first full-length poetry collection I read.

I think of myself as a confessional poet, perhaps even a lyrical memoirist. I turn to Plath’s poems daily—I’m not exaggerating. I’m interested in intimacy, in creating an emotional experience. I’m not very good at distance: “sometimes the autobiography just creeps in.”

When I was a guest on a friend’s poetry podcast, she (Danielle Cadena Deulen) introduced my poet self as the love child of Louise Glück and Frank O’Hara. That is my highest aspiration.

DE: Forgive me for this selfish question, but it’s one I’ve wanted to ask you since I first read your book and fell in love with so many of the poems, especially with your endings. In particular, I love the titular poem, “What it Doesn’t Have to Do With”, and its ending which reads “A big decision rushed. Another. Then the weather, then the weather.” Which is so beautiful in its movement, how the energy of the poem pulses as if on an updraft, and undulates outward. But what I am most captured by is the phrase “Then the weather, then the weather.” The speaker of your poems is always noticing the landscape in which they find themselves in, both emotional and physical. With this being the titular poem of the book, could you speak towards the idea of “weather” and what these poems are after regarding that term?

LB: Can you blurb my second book?

In all seriousness, thank you, Derek, for reading my book with such care.

I know how to end a poem, maybe too well, but it’s more difficult and more interesting to keep a poem going after you think you’ve reached the end.  In my second book, I’ve worked very hard to resist the impulse to end poems too quickly, to shut down the thought.

“What It Doesn’t Have to Do With,” the titular poem, improved dramatically through my friend Liz Countryman’s workshop feedback. The two stanzas, originally, were swapped. Liz, who was also my housemate at the time, suggested that I reverse them. Only after I reversed the stanzas was I able to write the right ending. “A big decision rushed. And another. Then the weather, then the weather” was not in the original draft that I brought to the workshop.

Weather continues to play a dominant role in my poetry because I grew up in Rochester, NY, where weather is everything. Winter from October to May. Consistently overcast. Lake-effect snow.

DE: In “Against Sincerity,” an essay I believe Elizabeth Arnold had us students read and often referred back to during workshop, Glück writes “most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently.” Given that your first book was a winner of the National Poetry Series and was well received, how have you navigated writing poems for the second book? Have you tried to shift away, aesthetically or otherwise, from the poems in the first book?

LB: Yes, I understand and have endured these torments, primarily the resistance-to-writing torment.

After living so long inside What It Doesn’t Have to Do With, it was exciting, initially, to write poems without a book in mind. But, eventually, the untethered, anchorless state frustrated more than liberated me.  At that point, I forced myself to work toward a book. I wrote an ekphrastic, “Visions,” after a painting by Celia Paul that I first saw in 2016, and a poem for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day in 2019. Both of those poems felt urgent/necessary, but I didn’t think about how or if they fit together into a larger narrative. They’re the opening poems in my second book. The last poem in the second book had been the last poem in a version of What It Doesn’t Have to Do With until I decided to cut it and put it in my pile of strays.

Because I regularly work in an ekphrastic mode, it’s not difficult for me to find subjects. Museum- and gallery-going is a favorite pastime, and I always see art that inspires me to write. I’ve never worried about subject: I keep a notebook and accumulate endless fragments of poems. I’m more disciplined in my reading practice than I am in my writing practice. Reading informs our writing, obviously, but it’s so much more pleasurable than writing. My problem has always been moving from the notebook to the poem, from play/wildness to work. I resist making the poem, probably because it’s hard.

I must say that without Maud Casey, I wouldn’t have a second book to speak to you about. Because it took five years for the first book to win the prize (I started sending a version of the first book to contests in 2012 and continued sending it out until it won the NPS in 2017), I had plenty of time to work on poems for a different project (though I didn’t call it a project). I didn’t commit to the idea of those poems being part of a coherent book until sometime in 2022 when Maud and I started sending each other work monthly as a record of our progress, not for editorial feedback but rather, for accountability. We established and have stuck to our monthly deadline, even if what we send is a complete mess.

DE: A poem that was published recently in OVERSOUND, “Nor’easter”, and one that I hope is in the second book, you write “Let’s freeze the minestrone / instead of wasting even more, / another drive to the transfer station, // where what we fail to value / will be compressed”. And there’s so much compression in this poem! But also, its concern is less on having an epiphany or having a sense of the self realized within or through nature…it’s not looking for an echo. Instead, the lyrical gesture is aimed outward. How do you see the new work in terms of what it is after, what it “values” and seeks to interrogate or make known?

LB: What can I say, I’m a sucker for compression—aren’t compression and concentration the true joys of writing poems?

“Nor’easter” is part of the pandemic series within the second book. It’s set in Harpswell, ME, where my partner and I lived for a year and half during the pandemic. I was thinking a lot about the naturalistic texts I read in high school and college, how the landscape had become another character in my life. Weeks would pass and I’d see only Nate (my partner) and the harbor seals, the crows, the birches, I’d hear the peepers at dusk. I’d cook too much, and we’d go on long walks. The winter and spring storms were fierce—we’d often lose power and creatively prevent our pipes from freezing. The landscape kept reminding me that it was there, alive, capable of destruction and being destroyed.

My second book is more ecopoetical and more domestic; it’s less interested in the urban world than my first book is.

DE: While I know it isn’t published yet, I heard your reading of a new poem “Ars Poetica for Stanley Plumly” where you write, even confess, to the spoken to, “I keep writing about whales and failing”. How do you see the new work operating as elegy, but also as confession? 

LB: Yes, I did read that poem for Stan at Binghamton. Thank you for remembering and asking about it. It’s now titled Elegy Landscape (after Stan’s incredible book about Constable and Turner) and is part of Georgia Review’s Stanley Plumly Memorial Digital Archive, edited by Joshua Weiner. I’ve always considered elegy and confession connected or one in the same. All poems are elegies; all poems are confessions. Maybe that speaks to my (lapsed) Catholicism. Growing up I had to confess regularly my failings, my sins, to a priest and promise to revise myself. Poems and other writing often emerge from failure, contemplate failure. For my birthday last year, I went to Glenstone (a museum in Potomac, MD) with my friends Maud Casey, Jennifer Chang, and Heather Houser and we discussed the poetics of failure, specifically as it relates to Sheila Heti’s fiction. I can’t stop thinking about that day and that illuminating conversation.

DE: Who are the poets you find yourself obsessed with as of late, and why? 

LB: Some poetry books I’m currently into: Brian Teare’s Poem Bitten by a Man because of its exploration of Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin; Karen Solie’s The Caiplie Caves, which I first read during the pandemic but have been rereading and falling in love with again, long lyrical environmental poems about monastic life; Jennifer Chang’s An Authentic Life, a book about reading and the patriarchy, for which I may be the ideal reader. 

Over the summer, I read Heather Clark’s The Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing of Sylvia Plath. It’s stunning, the best (hands down) of the many Plath biographies. I wish I could write like Plath.

I just read Another Country for the first time (shockingly). Baldwin’s sentences are more poetic than most of the poetry I read and write, for that matter. If Giovanni’s Room is the perfect Paris novel, Another Country is the perfect New York novel, and it should be required reading for all adults in the United States right now.

DE: While I was at the University of Maryland for my MFA I had the opportunity to learn from the poets you were also taught by, in particular Elizabeth Arnold. I remember how, in a workshop, I had a poem up for critique and there was a lull over a moment in the draft people were unsure of how to comment on. Laughing, Liz pointed out my use of “perhaps” and then quoted Pound’s advice to Eliot in his early drafts of “The Wasteland”: “perhaps be damned!”. Since then, I’ve eschewed the word from any of my poems (ha). Is there a piece of writing advice from one of your mentors that sticks with you, or that you see in the work when you look back at your first book or even newer drafts?

LB: I love this question, Derek. How lucky we are to have learned from Liz, Michael, Stan, and Josh.

I always remember three words Stan hates in poems: mist, kiss, giggle. Funny how they half-rhyme. His directives have had the opposite effect on me and my writing: I make a concerted effort to prove him wrong. One day I’ll put mist, kiss AND giggle in the same poem and make it work!