DE:  Hi Cynthia, it was great to hear you read your work here at Binghamton University this past fall, as well as getting to hear you speak more about your work and life over dinner! To begin, I’d like to ask about your poem featured in our latest issue, “Portal.” Given the poem’s structure, it appears to be a contemporary sonnet, especially with it being arranged in three quatrains and a final couplet, as well as a clear volta. For contemporary poets, the sonnet form has evolved from the Shakespearean critique of ideal love, toward more of a ghost of the sonnet, such as Terrance Hayes, who uses the form to critique larger aspects of society that have been idealized or romanticized. How did you settle on the final form for this particular poem, and how do you see your choice of form, as well as other craft choices within the poem, working towards offering a critique of the human relationship to the natural world? 

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MCC:  The pleasure was all mine to meet you. I had such a wonderful time hearing about your approach to poetry and, well, life! “Portal” is part of a 15-sonnet series. As you mentioned, poets have reinterpreted the sonnet through the centuries, and I wanted my first effort to have its own signature. I wrote octave-sestet sonnets and those like “Portal” with quatrains followed by a couplet—in theory, loose versions of Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms respectively—but I also did a couple curtal sonnets and then took Gerard Manley Hopkins’ idea further. I wrote “sonnets” comprised of a quatrain followed by a tercet (essentially the octave and sestet each having half the number of lines than usual) and others with three tercets followed by a single line (that is, a line removed from each quatrain and the closing couplet). Some of the sonnets I wrote without punctuation to vary the texture and create a sense of being out of time. I wanted to portray a post-human world that is fractured yet very much full of life, and I felt these “deconstructed” sonnets were my way into this world. The series also takes advantage of the crown-of-sonnets terminology by using images of crowns, palaces, cities and other physical representations of domination as a commentary on human rule. This Earth without man is meant to feel beautiful and lucid, and I hope that intent came through in “Portal.” The sonnet as both song and transformation felt naturally suited to the subject.

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DE:  As a follow-up to my previous question, many of the images dealing with human beings within your poem are imbued with brokenness: currents are “marled / by broken boats,” a chandelier is “smashed,” and “man’s shame” is ablaze with incandescence. These images, juxtaposed to those of the natural world that are seemingly self-sustaining, convey the idea that human beings are, by design, capable of destruction. Can you tell us about your own experiences contemplating human beings’ natural inclination for destruction in your work, and do you think language is a space where we as humans are capable of repair in the same way? 

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MCC:  Shakespeare, through Hamlet, says that art is the mirror in which we see and understand ourselves, and Naguib Mahfouz in his Cairo Trilogy states much the same. I would hope that poetry’s language can help us understand our own actions and motivations beyond the superficial. Whether that can lead to repair, I don’t know. I am fairly pessimistic, but then again we are also a species capable of surprises. Recognition and knowledge are the prerequisites to any positive change, so careful language, whether or not employed in the artistic sense, is clearly necessary for repair to be possible. (And when I say careful, I mostly mean “full of care”!) I also view poetry and fiction as a respite, a way to form a sense of community with people who find fulfilment in the same things I do within any given poem, story, or novel.

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DE:  I want to shift to asking about your debut collection, Common Disaster, where in the opening poem, “Boreal Time,” the very first line is: “To have evolved.” How do you see that line working across the various threads of your collection, in particular this stake of, “having evolved?”  

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MCC:  In another life, I was on my way to graduate school to study evolutionary biology. While I don’t remember much of the science these days, I do still think about the environmental pressures that shape any particular evolutionary trajectory, whether that’s in the populational, species-specific sense or whether we apply the word evolution more broadly to, for instance, an individual’s life or the dynamics of modern society. In biology, when we talk about evolution, we also have to consider extinction. Perhaps we are the only species to date that can, at least somewhat, comprehend extinction. We can, if we choose to, also acknowledge how we have caused extinction throughout various settings in human history and how we continue to do so. We aren’t asteroids or volcanoes; what we do has intent, is intentional. “Boreal Time” addresses evolution and extinction in the biological sense; the poem came about when I learned of the Iowa Pleistocene snail, a relict species that managed to survive the transition to the Holocene. To evolve for millions of years and then be obliterated by humans in a few decades—it might feel trite and tired as a trope but only because it has happened again and again, not because it isn’t a horrendous loss every time.  The poem “Bosworth Field” comes at the question of evolution and extinction from a different angle. It’s set at the last battle site in England’s extraordinarily violent War of the Roses. Having seen how beautiful Bosworth is today, I wondered about the role of memory in extinction and what sort of “progress” we’ve made since then. In other poems, I tried to understand own reactions to, say, a particular event, by attempting to elicit a strong emotional response from an imagined reader. In “Two-Headed Dog,” I used this approach in hopes of interrogating whether our attitudes toward grotesque experiments, some of which have ultimately lead to in modern life-saving medicine, have evolved. Have they evolved? Have we evolved?

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DE:  As someone who also enjoys movies/film, I often turn to it as a medium when I find myself lacking inspiration or creative drive. What media, film, music, books, etc, have been inspiring you creatively lately?

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MCC:  I love this question. I also have a similar habit of reaching for other creative media and art when I’m in a fallow period. My latest mainstays are audio dramas, which are scripted, full-cast audio shows in podcast format. I especially admire the writing and creativity of Joel Emory and Adam Jarrell (who often work together) and the husband-wife team Lindsay Sharman and Laurence Owen of Longcat Media. I’ve also recently discovered Tim Minchin and have had an amazing time listening to his music; his lyrics are absolutely scathing. As far as visual arts go, my sonnet series found its initial impetus in the Latvian movie Flow by Gints Zilbalodis, which maybe feels a little ironic (or meta?) since the film has no words or dialogue whatsoever. Flow is one of the most gorgeous films I’ve ever seen, and I’m excited to find out what Zilbalodis does next. Of course, I also read quite a lot of fiction and, to a lesser degree, nonfiction. I am particularly interested in how novelists go about world building.

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DE:  Lastly, I’d love to hear about another piece in the latest issue of Harpur Palate, in any genre, that resonated with you and why?  

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MCC:  When I saw the title “I’m trying to hate this stretch of Texas” by Julia Ross, I knew I had to read the poem. I, too, have complicated feelings about Texas. Much about the state feels fraught, like when the poem’s speaker describes a child’s toy car abandoned in a town “with more bans than bathrooms,” as the train then passes a faded, vacant warehouse. Texas is easy to hate, and for obvious reasons. People’s lives have been destroyed here. Somehow, though, there is still beauty: “Skim-coat of ice on the surface/of a pond. Cattle knee-deep in frosted grass…Sunlight glints off the slow trickle of a stream mid-meltoff.” I find it interesting that the poem’s speaker is uncertain how to acknowledge the beauty they see, which flickers in and out as the train runs through the countryside. I suppose we all know what it’s like to feel ambivalent about a particular place. Texas is unquestionably all the things in the news. But, if, for instance, you’ve ever been to one of the Hill Country rivers without anyone else in sight, you know you cannot completely hate it either. There’s nothing else in the world like the Nueces River in summer, its transparent aqua ribbon glittering along the red cliffs, fish shoaling below your kayak as you float by a sandbar and a hawk swoops over. Society may encapsulate and codify ugly behaviors, but that doesn’t change the land itself, which, like the rest of the universe, is fundamentally indifferent to us. It seems fitting that the last part of the speaker’s text to her friend admitting her ambivalence is cut off, the signal lost.

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