Julia Thacker’s debut collection To Wildness was recently awarded the Anthony Hecht prize by Paul Muldoon. The book makes its way through the wilds of New England, grieving the family born and buried there. To Wildness is enamored with the world of sense, yet lingers close to the realm of the dead. It is elegiac, yet fiercely vital, prizes holiness as much as irreverence. It brings all of these loves to life through exacting, brilliant language.

Julia Thacker was published in Issue 26 of Four Way Review and is interviewed here by Amery Smith.

FWR: To start – To Wildness is your first book, but it’s also (as you mention in an essay you wrote for Women Writers, Women’s Books) the first sustained bit of poetry writing you’ve done since grad school. What do you think you learned about yourself as a poet after finishing the book, and returning to poetry after so long?  What differences (craft, writing philosophy, etc.) have you noticed between “MFA Julia” and “To Wildness Julia”? 

JT: My return to poetry was entirely intuitive. The desire to reengage with the genre simply came over me like a fever. What became clear to me at the outset was that as a mature person, I had access to a voice with more tonal range. As a young writer, I’d recognized that my poems, though well-written, were stilted by what I’ll call their “high seriousness.” Then and now, I admired the work of Denis Johnson, especially his collection The Incognito Lounge, which moves from a high register to the vernacular, from ironic to lyric to self-effacing in the course of a single poem. While few of us will ever hit those heights, as an older writer, I have access to a fluidity and range of tone I didn’t possess during my first go-round as a poet.

Completing this collection also confirmed for me that I am a miniaturist. For years, I wrote and published short stories in journals and magazines, and tried many times to weave these pieces into a full-length novel. When I picked up poetry again, I vowed not to quit until I’d published this book. Bringing To Wildness to fruition taught me I’m best suited to the short form across genre, and I’m fine with that. I learned to be true to myself.  

FWR: When you say that “as an older writer, I have access to a fluidity and range of tone I didn’t possess during my first go-round as a poet,” what specifically about getting older do you feel gave you that tonal range?

JT: When I was young, I considered poetry the highest form of literature. I was intimidated by the genre. My early poems don’t reflect the wit and humor present in spoken language. Now, with a wide range of experiences behind me, I’m more at ease in juxtaposing lyric with the vernacular.

FWR: I wanted to ask you about To Wildness’s structure. Paul Muldoon praises the book’s four-part structure for its range, both thematic and formal. How did that structure emerge? What did you feel like the poems were telling you about how they wanted to be ordered?

JT: Indeed, as you suggest, I did listen to what the poems were telling me about how they wanted to be ordered. They are often smarter than I am, and I follow their lead. Most of the pieces in the first section were written early in the composition of the manuscript. They’re foundational. They establish the world of the book, its subject matter and elegiac stance. And in these initial pages I wanted a variety of styles and forms, a sense of surprise from poem to poem.

My work is dense with imagery. The Roman numerals announcing each of the four sections offer a pause, breathing room, the calm of white space. My hope is that each section stands as a unit with a distinct narrative and emotional arc. Part II is a six-page sequence in the guise of “notes” in fragments, each with a parenthetical title. The sequence depicts a mother/daughter relationship over a lifetime, but the chronology is fractured. The elliptical nature of this piece required a section of its own.

 Part III of To Wildness further interrogates their themes and formal experiments in the previous two. Here, for instance, are what I call the “backwards” poems, with hard right hand margins and ragged left hand margins such that the lines seem to be floating on the page. Part IV is noisy with ghosts. Often referenced in previous sections, they come alive in this final suite, as though they’d been conjured.

To Wildness opens as the speaker is in late middle age. In the final poem of the book, she is a young woman living on Outer Cape Cod, a spit of land at the edge of an ocean, learning to be an artist. Over the course of the book, time is collapsed and fluid.

FWR: I think one powerful example of the many dichotomies To Wildness bridges lies in “Soul Wears a Crown of Milk Thistle”. We usually consider the soul to be the body’s direct opposite, separate from all the goods and bads we associate with embodiment. In “Soul Wears…Thistle,” though, the soul romps up and down the coast, isn’t afraid to get intimate or “vulgar” (“Washes her unmentionables / at the sink. Bleaches her mustache” and “swims in her drawers”), and — paradoxically — even has a body of its own (“Sand makes a dune of her body”). What led you to think about the soul in ways like this, in both this poem and in others throughout the book?

JT: I was brought up in the Southern Baptist church. My grandfather was a preacher whose dramatic and beautifully delivered sermons were something to behold. I am a secular humanist. And while I don’t subscribe to his system of belief, I am quite attached to the trappings of my childhood: the language of the King James Bible, the hymns, the paper fans decorated with reproductions of Biblical scenes and stapled to Popsicle sticks. The speaker in my poem “Doxology” declares “I am my own God, my own high priestess./Mine own book of timothy./… Protector of sayeth, goeth. It came to pass.”

My family was religious, but far from sanctimonious. They were hysterically funny. My mother, upon being promised she would one day take leave of her corporeal shell and ascend to Heaven in new form, a celestial body, said, “Well, I hope it’s a long, skinny one.” As for me, rather than thinking of the soul as a spiritual essence which requires redemption, I imagine her as independent and not at all well-behaved. In “Soul Wears…Thistle” she is free from the constraints of doctrine and social mores, free from the person to whom she is assigned. She lives as she pleases. I celebrate this world, this moment. What is more holy than wading in cranberry bogs or eating tomatoes off the vine?

FWR: The book switches effortlessly between prose and lineated poems, yet both succeed in using language spare and precise enough to close around the concrete or tangible. What do you think is the relationship between To Wildness’s prose poems and the other poems? What has writing prose poems taught you about line poems, and vice versa?

JT: Without lineation, a prose poem depends upon the sentence, its syntax, diction, rhythm and richness of language. There are writers I respect who don’t believe there is such a thing as a prose poem! I disagree. I’ve always been fascinated by that hybrid animal. One of my favorites is “Lavender Window Panes and White Curtains” by Juan Ramon Jimenez which I first read in a translation by Robert Bly. Here, metaphor, imagery and nuance are embedded in a tapestry of language which announces itself as a poem rather than a prose piece:

“I have been planting that heart for you in the ground beneath the magnolias that the panes reflect, so that each April the pink and white flowers and their odor will surprise the simple puritan women with their plain clothes, their noble look, and their pale gold hair, coming back at evening, quietly returning to their homes here in those calm spring hours that have made them homesick for earth.” *

I enjoy the challenge of varying the shape and form of my poems which are otherwise cohesive in their preoccupations and voice. In To Wildness, there are poems in couplets, tercets, sequences, lineated stanzas and of course the prose poems. Though they appear in various forms, they are all image-driven and in conversation with one another.

I don’t know that prose taught me much about writing poetry except perhaps how to sketch a character in a few strokes. Poetry, however, has informed my prose quite a bit in its particular use of language, concision and resonant detail. My story, “The Funeral of the Man Who Wasn’t Dead Yet” (AGNI 51), for instance, is image-driven and compressed with an attention to musicality.

*Selected Poems: Lorca and Jimenez, Chosen and Translated by Robert Bly (Beacon Press, 1973)

FWR: I also wanted to explore how To Wildness thinks about ghosts, especially as connected to grief. Mirroring how the book writes about the soul, To Wildness’s ghosts are surprisingly tangible. The ghosts populating the book’s final section find joy in working with their hands. They yearn for the fruits of the earth, and even taste them (“Aubade”) — in ways that mirror first-section poems where the living also do these things. I’ve pulled some lines from the first and fourth sections as a comparison:

 To be elbow-deep in a barrel,

arms gloved crimson,

to make of simple labor             

prayer…

……

Today we must work

with our hands until they are

no longer hands…

                                             (excerpt from the poem “Plum Jam”)

Ribbed squash, king-pumpkin with its thick curling

stalk. Persimmons, verily orange and magenta, the weights

of sunsets in my hand. Egg-shaped plums shivering

on the conveyer belt.

….

Let me touch them as they pass.

Let me sweep up the shadows

of my boot prints and store them in a locked box.

(excerpt from the poem “Bag Boy Works Harder Now That He’s a Ghost ”)

What drew you to this way of thinking about the dead? Do you feel like it’s opened up new ways of thinking about (or even processing) grief?

JT: The way I think of the dead goes back to what my kin would call “my raising.” My family has deep roots in Harlan County, Kentucky. And they’re all great story tellers. My mother was raised in a series of coal mining camps, where my grandfather, Roscoe Douglas, was a crew foreman, and later a Baptist preacher. For them, life was precarious and death not uncommon. My great uncle Andrew, my grandfather’s beloved younger brother, was killed in a mine accident at 17. But even thirty years later, when I was a child, Andrew was constantly invoked, his movie idol looks, musical talent, the story of how after the slate fall that killed him, their sister went running through the camp to tell my grandfather before someone else got to him. Then she heard his voice a distance down the tram road and thought, “Well, Roscoe’s singing,” But as he got closer, she realized he was sobbing, and she couldn’t stand it, She hid behind a tree and stopped up her ears. That scene is as vivid to me as memory. My grandparents had eight daughters. One was stillborn. Another died of influenza as a toddler. Yet my grandmother always responded “eight” when asked how many children she had. Their names and the particulars around their losses were told and retold to us. My baby aunts. In the Upper South, Memorial Day is called Decoration Day when we carried picnic baskets, blankets to spread on the ground, and armloads and armloads of flowers to spruce up the family headstones.

In that culture, you might say the dead exist alongside the living. Storytelling is an act of devotion which allows us to process grief.

To Wildness contains so many references to ghosts that by the fourth and final section, it felt only right to embody them in all their eccentricities and desires, to give them voice. Some are benevolent and protective. Others are capricious troublemakers, like members of any extended family.