Interviews
Curious Obsession: an Interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Lee Gulyas
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, award-winning writer and Associate Professor at State University of New York-Fredonia, ventured west for a reading from her latest book of poetry, At The Drive-In Volcano. While on Western Washington University’s campus, she visited Oliver de la Paz’s poetry students and discussed aspects of writing ranging from inspiration to the importance of how a poem looks on the page.
After lunch, Lee Gulyas sat down with Nezhukumatathil for a conversation about poetry, curiosity, and wonders of the natural world.
CONVERSATION
L: In Oliver’s poetry class you mentioned an assignment you give your students where you have them walk around with a notebook and capture smells for seven days, “just to check their pulse.” You urged them to consciously ask, “Do you have your poet’s nose on?”
A: It’s true though, people kind of forget. With poetry it’s all the senses, and not just sight and creating the sonic or visual image.
L: Right, any way that you connect with the world. That reminds me of earlier today when you said that you always find inspiration for writing your own poetry after reading nonfiction.
A: Yes, I talked about that in the second class, too. Their ideas were so fantastic it made me want to find a moment to write. The students were so inquisitive about their own subjects. They would use things like LP recordings paired with an entry from Wikipedia, but also with a poster, so not just one source and not just looking at books. I was seeing so many directions they could go.
L: Students are often embarrassed to admit what keeps popping up in their heads, what they can’t stop thinking about—a recurring image, or a subject they find fascinating.
A: Exactly. In my class they know even within the first week that they’re dealing with a teacher who is supremely obsessed with the natural world and they should be conscious of that. Right now I’m teaching a mythology class. I was talking last week about the way cats weren’t always revered as in Egyptian mythology. They were very much present in ancient Grecian temples, and they were also reviled, but that doesn’t get talked about so much in myth, it’s just history. Then I brought up the vampire squid in every one of my classes.
L: How can you not? I love that you mentioned the Dumbo squid when you were talking to students about curiosity.
A: So few people have seen that picture or know what it is.
L: It looks like a Pokemon.
A: It does, it look like Japanese anime character. I find a way to bring that in, to show them by model. Maybe they think I’m weird, but I try to show them that it’s okay to be having these kinds of obsessions even if they’re not about whatever current pop star or rap star. It’s okay to be interested, genuinely curious, and you should be. If you’re not, that’s a problem. If you’re not curious about your family’s history, if you’re not curious about what trees live in your backyard—you should know the names of trees that you grew up with. There’s so much with this generation that is just media, media, media, and zoning out. Bless the iPod, but it’s such a zone-out. I tell them, “Take off your frickin’ iPods and listen to things.” You don’t get to use your poet’s nose if you’re in your iPod.
L: It’s all about being open to things you don’t know about, trying to figure out what’s going on around you when you have no idea.
A: I tell my intro classes—triple genre, double genre, people that are music majors and from other areas—that I can only take so many poems about the first time somebody gets wasted, or when someone loses their virginity. That’s why I love Oliver’s class on research: it forces students outside themselves in a very systematic way, but I think the end result will be really organic and I can’t wait to see what they do.
L: You mentioned that you didn’t have children’s books or literature in your home so you looked through medical books.
A: Yes, the Physician’s Desk Reference. My pictures books were pills. My sister and I, my mom would be so mad, we’d draw in them. There were some heart-shaped pills. We’d circle them and color in pills with our crayons. It’s kind of a running joke—my parents are both in the medical profession, my sister too—but how in the world did I become a literature major, a writer? They never read bedtime stories to me. They took us to the library, but they certainly never took the time to sit down and give me a book. But my dad was so gung-ho with all kinds of different field guides, then my mom’s PDR’s, diseases of the body, it was so fascinating. I thought those were so forbidden. I saw my first pair of adult breasts, but one of them would have polyps on it or something like that. Totally fascinating and disturbing, but it made me more fierce about the scientific and biology.
L: Do you remember your first encounter with a poem, or, what was the first poem you remember?
A: That’s a really good question. I remember things here and there, but the first time I was conscious of a poem . . . My elementary school years were in Phoenix, Arizona. We were introduced to acrostics, haiku, you know, stuff like that, but I remember it being so revolutionary of an idea to know that a poem doesn’t have to rhyme. So I took to the haiku really quickly because it was a flicker of a moment. I think I wrote haikus about rainbows or unicorns, but I love that it didn’t have to rhyme. It was just capturing a sensory image in a moment and it was really refreshing. I was surrounded by ‘80’s pop culture, MTV was blasting. You weren’t anybody if you didn’t know the current MTV videos. I retreated away from that and started getting into haiku, those quiet bursts of time where I could be reflective and read about a frog splashing into a puddle and that’s it, but it was perfect for a kid who didn’t have a whole lot of attention, just to get a glimpse of nature that I was not exposed to living in a desert area. Reading about water, frankly, was such a revolution. I was really drawn in. It was the haiku. I wish it was monumental. I wish it was the sestina first, but it was the haiku that I was really drawn to.
L: The haiku is monumental. Maybe not by reputation in America right now, but as a traditional form. . .
A: The form I’m obsessed with right now is the haibun. Do you know the haibun? I love it—my two favorite worlds, the gerund-block poem and the teeny bit of prose poem smushed together. That’s what I’m working on right now. I love the whispering act of the prose poem and I love the intensity of almost tumbling over the sensory detail, and you get that pause, that brief reflection of the haiku. I’m on a one-woman mission to bring back the haibun.
L: As a teacher and a new mother, do you even have time to write?
A: I write every day, but not incredibly. It’s on the horizon.
L: Notebooks propel you forward.
A: If you don’t have them it’s so much harder to start again when you get a clear moment, when you don’t have anything to work from.
L: You can’t work from nothing. That’s why you’ve got to get something down on paper.
A: I know I can’t.
L: So what’s your involvement with Kundiman, the organization that cultivates emerging Asian-American poets?
A: Two years ago I was a faculty member there for the retreat. I can definitely point to it as a life-changing moment in my teaching career. I’m tenured now, but I would have to say, it’s kind of ironic, one of the most touching, personally and professionally, satisfying moments as a teacher came was outside of the academy in a not-for-profit group, meeting so many incredibly talented writers under the auspices of coming together through our ethnicity, something that I’ve always shunned, through high school and college, because I think a sense of “Oh, I’m different.” I don’t want to highlight my differences; I want to be just like everybody else. It really wasn’t until grad school that I even delved into anything about my parents’ heritage, so it was very much a new thing, and here I was meeting these students, a few were still undergrad, but through grad school and on, that tackled these huge subjects of duality and trying to fit in, but not fit in, I was blown away and so envious that they were able to tackle these big subjects right away. It was a community that I never had been a part of. The African-American community has some great groups, but for whatever reason Asian-American writers were always so scattered and never found a concrete way to come together and showcase a mentoring relationship. I’m so touched and honored to be a part of this young group that has so much talent and fearlessness, and being able to see that they’re reading books by other Asian-American writers.
L: Referencing your "first-book" interview with Kate Greenstreet on her website Kicking Wind, how did your process and experience assembling your second poetry manuscript differ from your first?
A: By the time my first book came out, I already had a sizeable portion of my next manuscript (what was to be At the Drive-In Volcano) already written. But with that second collection, I think I found myself already beginning to shape it at the same time I was adding and pruning poems to/from it. In my mind I already had a sense of how I wanted the poems to be arranged thematically. In other words—I had a clearer sense of the beginning, middle, and end while composing. It's funny, my third manuscript is so vastly different in shape, content, and form than my first two collections, I already anticipate having mini-dramas over the arranging of the poems since so many are linked poems or were written as a series. But I'm not complaining—it's a fun problem to have! I have almost a hundred new poems and I know I have to do some major trimming down. Right now I carry my trusty white 2" binder around with me all the time, shaping the collection in my “free” time—I'm a mother to an eight-month-old now, so I fiddle with it in between naps and feeding. I change it around almost weekly, each week thinking—maybe this week I'll be happy with the arrangement...okay, how about THIS week? and so on…
L: Currently you are writing a collection of poems towards a theme, with your Niagara Falls project. Is that a different process than writing poem by poem?
A: Well, there's a lot more research involved, for one, and even though many of my poems are research-based, often I find in the initial drafting/composing process of this chapbook that I am looking ahead to the next poem—like how will the last line of one poem brush up or bristle against the opening line of the next, etc. Or sometimes a line will come to me that would be better served in a poem I had already written. Most of the collection is written and arranged chronologically—starting with a poem about the first person to go over Niagara Falls in 1901 until the very last attempt in 2003. It ends with an “afterword” poem, if you will, in the voice of Niagara Falls itself.
L: Do you find any differences when you write nonfiction? Do you find the genre boundaries discrete or blurred? Do you think about poetry and nonfiction differently?
A: I have always thought non-fiction was harder, but ultimately more freeing in some senses. But I still have no idea how novelists and essayists pull it off (all those sentences!). For me, anything over a page long is monumentally scary and I have to constantly quiet the voice in my head that says, "You're too long-winded! Can't you say this in a few stanzas even better?" It's like I have a mild form of ADD when I write essays! Many of my poems could very well be deemed non-fiction. When I give readings in high schools, one of the most common questions I get asked is, “Is XYZ poem true?” And my answer is that while most of the”relationship-py” parts to the poems have been tweaked from actual experience, all the nature and scientific tidbits are indeed factual. Like the bit about an octopus being able to fit through a hole the size of a coin—all true. I like to think of my poems as a place where someone who doesn't usually read/understand poetry can at the very least learn something new (and true!) about the natural world from my poems. So in that case, I think my poems can at least be compared to creative non-fiction. When I write poems, it's a beautiful trance, I don't think about anything else except getting the right words down and the satisfying deliberate click of the “return” key when I know I have made a good line. But what I love (and is also the hardest part for me) about essays is the longer moments of concentration on a particular subject. My eyes laser beaming the page to etch out a cup of ideas and imagery so delicious that will make the reader thirsty. Revising essays is the always the fun part for me, the part where I can really get creative and almost fanciful once the weight of initial creation is lifted.
L: You are the upcoming judge for Bellingham Review's 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. What is your process when you are a contest judge? What do you look for when you are in that kind of position?
A: I suppose the easy way would be to defer to Emily D's wise words of having a poem take the top of your head off, but I would add to that that the poem should feel like it risks something—not necessarily in subject matter, but in form, in craft, in voice, etc. I'm looking for duende, for finding the steamy beating pulse-point of a poem and finishing with a line or 2 or 3(!) I can't get out of my head, not even when I am brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed.