I love the line “you wouldn’t like it here.” What makes the speaker so sure there is nothing on the other side of death? Do you agree with the ghost father, who would rather be elsewhere?
Thank you, I love that line, too. Actually, after hearing either my mother or grandmother retell that dream, I knew that that whole exchange needed to be in a poem somewhere. So, this poem was more about pairing that specific moment with other memories or drafts that I had previously written. Both Kailey and the college floormate were parts of poems dating back to 2016-2017. And so, throughout that process, a tension grew between the believer and the skeptic. It’s easy to believe it’s all fake when you get a ludicrous email asking for money, but somehow it’s so real to hear disembodied breathing on an otherwise empty phone call and say it’s true?
With regard to the father’s line about “not liking it” it’s certainly ominous but also really funny in a way. My grandmother was a very neat, regimented, Type-A person, so when I imagine her not liking it, I imagine the afterlife as being crowded or messy, as opposed to something more menacing.
I also love the poem’s beginning and ending because they speak to how we use technology. Everyone is always talking about the uses of AI. In these instances, do you think we will all be revived in a way that suits the people here, but does a disservice to the real deceased person?
I think that this becomes a philosophical question about the self and what constitutes a soul. We’re at an interesting point in history where the degree to which we are living online is almost equal to the degree we are living out in the world. In the way that a great artist could continue to be seen and iterated upon through the way they gave themselves into the work, people can continue to live on in the ways they sent selfies, made blogposts, and fired off tweets. We are constantly creating this shadow self online (that may be more realistic than our true self) and is certainly capable of being iterated upon in the darkness of the internet. I don’t think we’re that far away from AI projections of the dead continuing to push forward. Look at that Beatles song “Now and Then” that was finished with AI. It’s already starting to happen.
There’s an existential theme running through the poems. Yes, there is the theme of death, but I’m also thinking of your poem “First Chair” which you balance with humor. I’m thinking of the line: “Such a violence in hating the things you once loved.” Could you talk more about the poem and that line?
Like most people, I have a complicated relationship with the place I grew up. As a once-avid listener of your Hot Topic variety of emo music, I was barraged from an early age with songs about leaving your hometown for the big lights of a new place. It wasn’t until the teenage rebellion had washed off that I really realized how I had misappraised Vermont. My disdain for the townies was never because I thought I was better than them, it was because I didn’t fit in with them. I saw their deer camp antics as barbarous, found their accents to sound like chainsaws. I hated the leaf peepers and the ski pass holders, up from Massachusetts or New Jersey. There was a lot of violence in the way I painted these people in these early poems. I made them monsters, so I could justify getting out. It’s not a hill that I stand on anymore. I’d take a snowmobile ride through the woods over just about anything else these days.
What was your creative process when writing your five poems?
After I finished my MFA in 2024, I looked at the stack of poems that I had written for my graduate thesis and realized they didn’t really sound like me. (Of course, I realize now that they totally do, and I had just spent far too long looking at them.) So, I set out to go back to my roots and reinvigorate some of the Vermont poems I had written pre-MFA.
Because of that this set of five is really all over the place. “You Wouldn’t Like it Here” is a Frankenstein’s monster of a few old poems from 2017, imbued with some new parts. “First Chair” and “Underhill” have been rolling around in different iterations since about that time as well. “Gossamer” is the lone piece from my MFA that is in this grouping. And lastly, “Method Actors” was the much slipped down version of a longer, crazier project about the disappearance of Paula Weldon in 1946.
Each of these poems needed a little something when I came back to them. For “You Wouldn’t Like it Here” it was the correct inciting incident. For “Underhill” and “Method Actors” it was a severe paring down and focusing in. For “First Chair” it was simply a new name.
What are you currently reading?
I just finished re-reading Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks. It’s one of my favorite books, about a varsity field hockey team in Salem, Massachusetts, that may or may not have sold their souls to the devil to win the State Championship.
Poetry wise, I’m chipping away at, and really savoring, Saturday by Margaret Ross. It’s too early for me to adequately articulate what she’s doing in these poems, but there’s some magic that’s rubbing off on me each time I re-enter the book.
Could you talk more about being a poet and educator and how they inform each other?
I think that both when they are good, are in service of wonderment. When thinking about writing a poem, I love Ruth Stone’s quote about a good poem flying through you, and the act of writing as grabbing it by the tail and pulling it back through your body. I think that teaching, again when it’s going well, is like hitting grounders into the outfield. Offering up interesting ideas and hoping that your students engage with it enough to lean down, have enough skill to get their glove in place, and enough love to throw the ball back in. Both are in service of ideas that energize, and are rooted in the idea of connection. I think all good teaching, like all good poetry, is about giving something away, and giving it away with enough intention and care that it is ready to be received.
Do you have any advice for poets just beginning?
Find stuff that you love and copy it. If there’s a poet that is really speaking to you, try your hardest to sound like them. Mimic their style and tone, while imbuing it with your own imagery. You’re going to fail, probably pretty spectacularly, but you’ll get close to finding something in your own voice. And remember, that the more you revise, the more of them washes off and the more of you appears.
What are you currently working on?
I’m all over the place. Literally, and physically. I’m in the process of moving right now, taking a stop gap in North Carolina while I figure things out. So, during this time I feel like I’m wrapping up a lot of projects and waiting for the idea of the next one to hit me. These five poems are all in a chapbook that I’ve been sending out, and a few are in a full length manuscript that I’m also sending out.
Can you share an interesting fact about yourself?
In high school, I did a lot of theater, and once we got to perform “The Sound of Music” for one of the last living relatives of the Von Trapp family.
What would you say if you could talk to someone on the other side? What if contacting them were as simple as replying to an email with the line “dude, it’s been a minute?”
As hopefully that poem lays out, I’m really skeptical of the afterlife. And maybe even more skeptical after writing it. Communicating with the dead might be a can of worms that I don’t need opened up. So, I’m just gonna quote Jud Crandall from Pet Sematary on this one: “Sometimes dead is better.”
Please share your contact information and let readers know where they might find more of your work.
If you like these poems you can check out more of my work at At Length, swamp pink, or the Harvard Review. You can also email me at eli.j.karren@gmail.com.
