Chris Miller
in Conversation with Collier Nogues
CHRIS
MILLER: I love how you begin your book, On the Other Side Blue,
with an observation from an airplane. Can you explain the challenge of
"distance," and maybe even "proximity," when trying to
write about the loss of a parent? And would you mind sharing a little about
your mother and your relationship with her? Did she also write poems?
COLLIER
NOGUES: My husband pointed out once as he read the manuscript that for a
book ostensibly about my mother, there wasn’t much of her in it—she wasn’t easy
to get to know from reading the poems. I realized he’s right. The book’s not
exactly about her, although who she was, the kind of person she was, is very
important to it. Her mother was an English teacher, and so was she, and her
whole side of the family is bookish—they’re all teachers or librarians or
ministers. She wrote a master’s thesis on Poe, and always wanted to be a
college professor, but she got married instead. She was a junior high and high
school teacher, and she was good at it. But she loved being a student, too. She
was always taking summer classes, ranging from Arabic to instructional
technology. Once while I was in college she went to a summer poetry program,
and came back demoralized—she said a famous poet (she wouldn't say who) had
told her she would always be an amateur. I hope that poet has ashes in his
mouth, whoever he is. In many ways, I think she would have liked to lead the
life I do—as a writer and a college teacher. In terms of feminism, she was of
the generation that saw my generation enjoying the turned tide. Her generation
turned it, but she didn’t participate early on, and her later feminism
developed very much through her experience in an unhealthy marriage, and
leaving it. I don’t think she ever imagined writing as a possible career for
herself, but she took a lot of pleasure in my wanting that.
MILLER: I'm
curious about the role or significance of the structure, especially section II,
in this collection. In terms of the arc, there seems to be a highly
thought-out movement through the five sections. You begin with the immediate
moments before and after the loss of your mother, and then move into a
description of a temporary living space in "The Barn Apartment."
Next, the poems explore a world of memory and family. The last two sections
seem to focus on faith, wilderness, and continuance, or the way grief can
become "less frighteningly central." It seems as the book progresses
you are able to begin to talk/think about other things, but the loss of you mom
or others you know, still pervades the poems. Am I getting at something with
this description of the book's structure? Is this, at least partly, what you
had in mind?
NOGUES: I think
you’ve nailed my intentions for the structure. I like the way you describe the
second section as being about a “temporary living space,” especially. That poem
is about the building that my father moved into in his last years, when he was
retreating from the world. I was sixteen when he died, and wasn’t living with
him, so his motivations and experiences are less available to me than my
mother’s were. As I was writing the book, it did seem strange to me that here
was all this material about my mother, and my dad appeared not at all. That
poem is for him, and about him. As I was arranging the manuscript, that poem
seemed to belong by itself in a single section, and seemed to fit best just
after the intensity of the poems in the first section. There was a vast space,
to me, between the tone of those two sections, and the fact that “The Barn
Apartment” is one longer spare poem balanced the multiple short lyrics in the
first section. There was also no other way I could see to move forward from
that first set of poems. “Anthurium,” which launches the third section, is too
flip to come immediately next, but I knew it belonged at the beginning of the
next move, in terms of the chronological and emotional arc the book has. So
“The Barn Apartment” solved that problem, too.
This may actually be a way into answering your first question,
the one about distance and proximity when trying to write about the loss of a
parent. “The Barn Apartment” is so detached, comparatively—many of my friends
had no idea it was about my dad (though my great-aunt did immediately, and
wrote me a few memories of visiting him in that apartment). My mother was a
much more proximate subject, and I knew her much better. I was a caregiver for
her at times in my twenties, which meant our roles had switched earlier than
they do in many families. We were friends in what seemed at the time a more
equal way than many of my female friends and their mothers were. Also, I was an
only child, and my mother and I lived together just ourselves after my parents
divorced. This made us very close, though not always in a way I was happy with.
So my relationship with each parent, and the circumstances of their deaths,
were very different in terms of literal and temporal proximity.
But beyond that, I like that you generate this question from
that first poem, “The Woman Who Left.” There is a sense of extreme, surveying
distance in that poem, and also a sense of surprise and at the same time a
defensive displacement—it’s not me, it’s not my funeral suit this time. But of
course it is, too—that speaker can’t shake the funeral-suit feeling. The
speaker in that poem has a kind of exhaustion-induced third-person view of
herself moving in the world, but also wants
to be the narrator at a far remove, seeing everything. Immediately after my
mother died, and for a few months, I was aware that my life was moving forward,
that I was moving forward, with less control over what was happening than I’d ever
had in my adult life. I understood I couldn’t hope to understand much—and in
retrospect, it was exactly like when I found out my father had died, except
that with my mother I was grown, and there when it happened, which made it even
stranger. It felt like I’d been swamped by a wave, and was left standing
neck-deep watching the wave go into the shore. I was too deeply in it and also
at the same time the force of it was gone, I was apart from it, too calmly, so
that I didn’t trust my observations of what I felt. In fact I took some
pleasure in being beyond what I could observe and put down on paper. I wasn’t
worried, and it was the first time in years I hadn’t been worried. Around this
time I talked to a friend whose father had died a few years before, and she
said that while he was ill it had felt like a betrayal to imagine her life
beyond his, to make plans more than a year in advance, for example. When he
died, she could, and it was a relief. I felt something like that. Suddenly my
horizon wasn’t in the same room with me anymore. And then later when I was able
to write about what it was like losing her, my mother was both absolutely
distant because she was gone, and also even closer, in a sense, because all I
had of her was me. I was very drawn to the photographs I have of her in which
we look like each other. And the poems I wrote then were very focused on single
details at a time. I could only look at that much, and that single thing would
unfold hugely. None of those ended up in the book, except “Hydrangea, Best Blue
Flower.”
MILLER: There are
quite a few eggs in the first half of the book? Any special reason?
NOGUES: I hadn’t
noticed! Chickens, though, make it into my poems frequently. Also other farm
animals, and cats. Perhaps this is because I lived in rural Texas
MILLER: I was
particularly intrigued by "Train Prayer" and also the line / idea,
"I hate not having a faith", from your poem, "After the
Avalanche." You also mention living uncles who are pastors. Can
you explain more about your faith, or desire to have one, and how that entered
into or shaped your experience of loss, and also your poetry?
NOGUES: My parents
grew up Presbyterian and Methodist in southern towns where denomination
organized social life, but when they married they didn’t go to church. I never
did as a child, except occasionally with friends. My mother later explored
Siddha Yoga and then Okinawan Shinto Buddhism (we lived on Okinawa during my
teen years). I didn’t talk to her about her faith, or her search for it, though
I think we shared the same general curious agnosticism. I like what Augustine
has to say about talking about God, which is that language is no good, both
because it’s temporal and successive (you can’t say everything at once) and God
isn’t, and because language can’t describe God accurately anyway. So the only
appropriate intersection of human language and God is speech to God directly:
via prayer, or confession. The one-on-one communication experience is also what
I love about poetry. A poet, really, is only ever talking to one person at a
time, and that relationship is pretty odd. There’s a privacy about poetry and
prayer both that appeals to me.
“After the Avalanche” talks about faith not so much in terms of
believing in God as of having a specific denominational faith. I want “a
faith,” with the indefinite article, in that poem because being a believer in a
community of believers would ease grief, or help it make sense. But that poem
also refuses to agree that it would be the belief making things easier—instead,
the key is what’s made possible by shared belief: the comfort of a group of
people grieving together, understanding grief the same way. I think I may have
thought I’d grow into faith, or “a” faith, of the sort people like my Methodist
pastor uncle have. I sort of hope I will, but I can’t imagine it.
MILLER: If you
would like to share any thoughts about "The Party," I would love to
hear. I thought that was a fantastic poem.
NOGUES: Thank you. I
really like that poem, too. It owes a lot to the poet Sarah Manguso, whose book
Siste Viator I was reading again when
I wrote that. “The Party” is really a protest against unfairness, a protest
which knows it’s being unreasonable, or at least that it’s looking in the wrong
place for justice. That poem is interested in the unwelcome envy that comes
from watching other people’s loving (despite being still messed-up) family
relationships. And it’s interested in the unexplainable and arbitrary elements
of the Bible—the elements that are so, anyway, to someone who is not a
believer. Genesis offers no clear reason why God dismisses Cain’s offering of
his harvest in favor of Abel’s of his flock. I absolutely sympathize with Cain.
His frustration seems so warranted, and he gets no validation—he’s made to feel
like a child with no power, trying to earn a blessing from an authority whose
criteria are opaque to him. So he lashes out. I like Martin Buber’s writing on
this. He points out that because there was no precedent of death so soon out of
the Garden, when Cain struck Abel on the head he had no way of knowing that
Abel might die. So Cain’s made an example of, but it doesn’t seem like justice.
The speaker in “The Party” feels reduced to an envy she understands is
unfitting for an adult, because it’s an envy of circumstances beyond anyone’s
control, but it overwhelms her just the same. Maybe it is God back there being
arbitrary and cruel; he has been before. The speaker sees Cain as an example,
but she isn’t a confident believer. Here we are back at faith: the lines “I
think there are two promises that will be kept. The first / is that we’ll be
given the opportunity to fail or surmount. // The second is that we’ll have
help” were the strongest statement of faith I could make at the time. I think
they still are.
MILLER: My mother
passed about three weeks after I was married. Your final poem suggests you were
engaged after your mom's passing. Can you expound upon how the theme of
marriage weaves into this collection?
NOGUES: I never
thought I’d get married. My models for marriage, with few exceptions, weren’t
strong ones. I never imagined it working, and how a project like that would get
off the ground I couldn’t see. Also, I was an orphan at 29, which removed me
from the trajectory of life events most people I knew were experiencing.
Milestone events seemed unmoored from their proper order. But then, if your
mother can die after having been alive, why not a wedding after all? So
marriage in the book, I think, I approach with a sense of the unreal, of wonder
that it’s even happening. My husband and I had met a few times while my mom was
still alive, though we didn’t start dating until a year after she died. It’s
comforting to me that I knew them both for an overlapping period of time,
though they never met or even knew about each other. That sense of continuity
feels important.
MILLER: Lastly, how
do you think the loss of your parents, specifically your mom, will continue to
manifest, interact with, and shape your poetry?
NOGUES: For a while
during and after I was putting together this manuscript, I had to work to write
poems about something not informed directly, to the point of mentioning, my
mother or her death. I kept returning to the subject even after I felt I’d
finished with it—it was habit. I wrote a lot of poems about God and ethics,
which were the other subjects I found myself thinking about a lot. I don’t like
many of them now, but they got me writing about something else. It took several
years before I was past the point at which everything in my writing connected
back to her.
The loss of my dad, since I knew him so much less well and lost
him before I was an adult, means that I can imagine all kinds of things about
him. He was a Marine and a Formula One racecar builder, and a country attorney
and a heavy drinker. He liked people, and strangers, and got along well with
everyone. I like it when I feel like him, which isn’t often. I think my
interest in being able to understand something about other people, to reach
them, to enjoy their company, as well as my interest in how impenetrable people
are to each other, and also how deeply they can mark each other, comes in part
from the early loss of my parents and my understanding of who they were. I’m
working now on a manuscript about Okinawa, about the air base I grew up on and
the island’s history as a colonial holding of China and Japan and now the U.S.,
basically. It’s a place haunted by military paternalism, and for me moving
there just after my parents divorced, it was haunted by fatherlessness. The
reason we ended up there was that teaching for the Department of Defense
schools overseas was a great situation for a single mother. And of course my
mom and I learned the place together, so my understanding of it is colored by
that. But this book is not about my life in such an immediate way as On the Other Side, Blue is. So while I
don’t foresee excising the loss of my parents from my writing, I think that my
recent and future poems are likely to be much less directly influenced by that
loss.
*
Interviewer:
Chris Miller is a poet in his second year of the MFA program at
Arizona State University. Film, music, the characters and stories of the Bible,
science fiction, poetry, and classic literature, continually intrigue him.
For your copy of Other Side, Blue, visit us online.
