Meg Reynolds: As a mode of introduction, Diana, I am interested in the role that poetry plays in your life—is it a mode of processing or understanding, an expression, record-keeping, whittling and ruminating? And in your ravenously beautiful collection, Dark Beds, what were you trying to do? Do you believe you succeeded?
Diana Whitney: You’re starting with some tough ones, Meg! Poetry is a way I make meaning in my life, transmute memory and emotion, relationships and landscape, into something new, something I can wield. It’s definitely a mode of processing my lived experience and also a form of self-expression, which exhilarates me no matter what happens to the poem draft.
In Dark Beds, I wanted to show the arc of the speaker’s emotional affair, how motherhood can exist alongside a secret world of pleasure and danger. I wanted to immerse readers in Vermont’s natural world, the intensity of the seasons, and the ongoing work of the “sandwich generation”—tired adults caught between the demands of growing children and aging parents. I used a 3-act structure to sequence the poems into sections—conflict, crisis, resolution—but I don’t know if that’s how readers experience it. The one poem I feel succeeded is the last one—“Current.” There’s often a charge in the room when I read it aloud.
Your new book, Does the Earth, contains a fierce feminist sensibility, full of heat and want, hope and urgency, love in the face of mortality—ours and the planet’s—“the whole earth soft with perishing.” The poems are deeply embodied, I felt them alive in mine as I read. Where did this collection begin for you?
Meg Reynolds: Thank you! And it’s interesting that you say that because the body is where these poems began. I believe it is also where they end. The impulse for each poem was rooted in an unspoken desire, fear, or confusion, looping through thought and language to land back in the body again. It is usually the whole of my body that tells me when a poem is done and when what needed to be said was said. A poem is a bodily thing that requires the garment of language to move from the body and out into the world.
At the start of the book, I am on my own, seeking companionship and care and harboring a deep desire to both love and be loved, as well as to be parented and be a parent. I collected my longings in the container of each poem and got to witness, vividly, when I fell in love, grieved a miscarriage, and contended with the unabashedly hopeful uncertainty of a new pregnancy. I was lonely at the start and the poems were mirrors, companions, and records where I was able to understand what it was that I thought, felt, and wanted. Through the poems, loneliness became solitude, and work became solace.
And I hope that they offer the same to readers too. I think you and I are similar in this way.
What do you want readers to feel in their bodies when they read your book? Who is your audience? What do you think about art and poetry’s capacity for healing or even harm, for that matter?
Diana Whitney: Your poems do bring me solace. I felt an immediate kinship in how they illuminate the interior of the female body, in the intimacy of the speaker describing her uterus: “a rainforest / with its own electric plans.” Although I’ve never had a miscarriage, I’ve gone through serious pregnancy complications and two traumatic emergency c-sections. I’ve also had two abortions—one as a teenager and one at age 40 (which I grieve in the poem “Wild Cider” in Dark Beds). Your poems became companions to me, affirming that the lived experiences of pregnancy and pregnancy loss, grief and new motherhood are legitimate literary subjects.
When I read “To Mother,” I felt deeply seen, and my body exhaled a sigh like releasing a held breath. This is a vital book for a post-Roe world, complicated and unapologetic in the face of today’s anti-choice, misogynistic rhetoric and policies. I keep returning to your metaphor of abortion as “unhitching / a lunar cluster from inside you before it can turn / into anything”—a transformative image, one that will stay with me.
I believe that poetry has the power to heal. Sharing a poem and connecting with even one gentle reader is good medicine. I want my readers to feel less alone when they read my work, to free some tension trapped in their bodies, especially when I write about stigmatized topics like depression, maternal ambivalence, female desire and rage, the intoxication and torment of an extramarital affair. I used to think my audience was mainly women but people of all genders have responded to this book.
What do you think about the word “confessional” in the context of poetry? How does it relate to gender? What kinds of narratives are valued in the literary world, and which are denigrated?
Meg Reynolds: It gratifies me to no end to hear you say that. You picked up on everything I’d hoped one would take from the book. I am really grateful for your generous reading.
To your question, I feel like I have a received story around the word “confessional” and how, in the 1950s and 60s, it was typified in the work of Robert Lowell, WD Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. I can feel in my bones the ways in which Lowell and Snodgrass are held up and respected while there’s always an air of hysteria surrounding Plath and Sexton. Some might say the difference lies in the tragedy of Plath and Sexton‘s deaths, but another view is that much of the source of Plath and Sexton‘s unique agony is the patriarchy; because their poems so pointedly criticize it, it benefits the status quo to dismiss them as overly emotional, compelled to confession. In reality, both were completely disciplined practitioners of their craft, and their views of the interior gave permission to generations of poets to apply similar voraciousness to their self-examinations and poetic practice. And, sure, today, when a woman’s work is called confessional, it is dismissive. I know this. However, when I am in the midst of making a poem, the misogynistic derision of an imagined audience is really none of my business.
Instead I think about my familial history and my connection to Irish Catholicism. I think of the alcove of the confessional and its original intent to be an audience with God. Of course a poem is a place where I unburden myself and I’m humbled. It is a place where I am bold enough to raise my voice to God and audience. Kay Ryan has this wonderful quote about how a poem begins as an aggravation, comparing it to sand enclosed in an oyster shell. The poem is worked and reworked by the tongue until pearled. To confess assumes a fair hearing, a self-witnessing, and the resolution of irritants like doubt, loneliness, shame, and even the delirium of great joy.
Typically, the confessional is a space that is meant to be private between penitent and priest, devotee and God. When I confess on the page, if that is indeed what I am doing, I am not airing my dirty laundry, I am saying to my reader, you too are God, a sliver of divinity and listening, that I wish honor with the rigor of my craft. I am not alone in here and neither are you.
And your “Wild Cider,” of course, places the self and the reader into such a vibrant landscape – “pitchers of light” and an interior “layered dark red, / lush and fluted.” Everything in your work is so alive! There is nothing staid about this space in any of your poems.
It makes me want to ask you the same question—what do you hear in the word confessional and does it ever impact the stories you want to tell?
Diana Whitney: That’s fascinating about the privacy of the Catholic confessional and the poem as an intimate space where we can unburden ourselves. I was raised without organized religion and have never been to confession, though it’s in my lineage: my maternal grandfather, a staunch patriarch, came from Irish Catholic stock. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, I feel that boldness of speaking with the divine when I’m in the throes of a first draft. And I experience the reader’s listening as a sacred act.
I think “confessional” has become a term of disparagement in contemporary poetics, a subtle way to put a woman/femme in her place. She is too emotional, raw, messy, bloody to be a skillful or perceptive poet, someone who deals in “real” literary subject matter. I’m inspired by writers who explore this gendered denigration, like Leslie Jamison’s expansive essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” about wounded women and ways they may be fetishized or dismissed (an ex-boyfriend calls her a “wound-dweller”). I was particularly struck by the moment when a “brilliant and powerful” female poet shames Jamison for reciting Plath’s “Ariel” in a Harvard classroom. “Please,” says the professor. “I’m just so tired of Sylvia Plath.”
I adored Plath when I discovered her in college and it’s curious how she’s gone out of vogue. Her work gave me permission to write about pregnancy and abortion, the body’s wildness and generativity, while paying keen attention to craft. Now I love Plath’s motherhood poems best, in which children are the life force, the sustaining energy of the lyric: “What is so real as the cry of a child?” (“Kindness”); “The blood blooms clean/In you, ruby” (“Nick and the Candlestick”).
My raw material has always been the personal―lived experience like clay to be shaped on the page. And I’m always looking for feminist role models who write fearlessly about the truths of the body. I love Camille Dungy’s Trophic Cascade and her merging of motherhood and the natural world. I love Marisa Crawford’s new collection Diary and her unapologetic take on the confessional mode. And Melissa Febos’ book Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative has helped me view writing about trauma as a subversive act, not a gush of self-pity that should be saved for a therapy session. Her opening essay “In Praise of Navel-Gazing” has become a fortifying manifesto, giving me courage to keep going.
Talk to me about the sense of apocalypse threaded through your book, how it’s in conversation with the speaker’s “love affair with the earth.” How do we write about the state of the world while also holding space for longing and wonder?
Meg Reynolds: That comes from one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Discipline,” and the line that follows is: “Wonder is a discipline/ I wanted you to be good at.” I too have never been in the space of the confessional, which is probably why I can still find solace in the idea of it. This is different, I think, from the experiences of my parents who abandoned the Catholic Church in their adulthood, partly as a result of sexual abuses that occurred within their communities. They were disillusioned and bored and sickened by the hypocrisy. However, while they didn’t raise us in the Church, I was raised in its cultural remnants—the control, the shame around our bodies and sexuality, and, most importantly, the attunement to the divine. In our family, that sense of the sublime was in, as Mary Oliver put it, “the order of things.” I was raised playing outside under the birch trees and lilac bushes of New England. My dad sat down on Saturday afternoons to watch documentaries about physics and astronomy. I remember the vivid astonishment I felt at the edge of my Nana’s lake as a loon silently glided across it. I can’t imagine prayer feeling any different. I love it here and know no other way to honor it except to pay attention.
And what we are experiencing now as the earth sickens and potentially dies at our own hands is a great trauma. Mass extinction, wildfires and other disasters, intensifying global conflict, famine—we have an unprecedented capacity to see all of it. We don’t have time to evolve into the capacity to handle it. Against the clock of our own doom, anyone can fall into the trap of despair. Despair and its accompanying numbness may be more comfortable right now than the daily effort of hope, love, and connection. I take pains to sustain the quality of my attention to this earth, to love it and believe in its enduring. And moreover, to bring a child here, now, is an act of absolutely wild hope. This collection is a record of my coming to terms with that—to say that life is worth living, the earth is enduring, that my child and I are beloved despite the certainty of disaster and the vagaries of mortality. It is the unspoken conversation I have with myself each day.
What about your sense of disaster? I was entranced by your poem, “Demeter in Winter,” with lines like: “The earth split and death dragged her / into a velvet chasm and the jaws of life / couldn’t pry her out.” This poem, among others, documents the terror of your children’s potential suffering and their mortality. How do you contend with this in your work?
Diana Whitney: When I read that poem now I see my own innocence, my sweet naivete as the mother of school-age children, strong-willed girls on the cusp of adolescence and its accompanying terrors. The speaker in “Demeter in Winter” is desperate to protect her daughters from harm and suffering, all the while knowing that this task is impossible. I’ve always had a powerful sense of intuition, something I’m only now, in middle age, coming to trust. I think I sensed while I was writing that poem—many years ago, because Dark Beds took nearly a decade to come into being—that true terror lay ahead for me as a mother, that my fearful vigilance back in the Baby Cave, checking to make sure the newborn was still breathing, was only the tip of a deep hulking iceberg.
I intuited that real danger was yet to come and I couldn’t stop it. I could only write poems as a kind of prayer, spells cast on the page. And my foresight was accurate, born as it was from my own precarious girlhood. Since adolescence my girls have gone through terrifying rites of passage including sexual assault, bullying, depression, anxiety, acts of self-harm, a nearly successful suicide attempt, and other, smaller crises of shame and despair. Demeter may be a goddess but she can’t save Persephone from the underworld.
Disaster occurs within the home and the human heart, accompanied by and perhaps inextricable from the great trauma that is the earth’s sickness. How can we bear it? As you say so beautifully, we keep loving, keep connecting. We make the daily effort of hope. Writing poetry is an act of hope for me—when I can pay close attention and channel my longing, when I’m not silenced by depression. I’m grateful for every creative urge and the opportunity to share work with others. Grateful to read poems like yours, about pregnancy as transformation, a form of primal magic. I barely wrote while I was pregnant, and I love being transported back to this time:
“She is close enough to read my entrails for lullabies. / She kicks centuries into the night. These are her delights/ and I am her mother, magnetized / by the tuning fork of her long bones and heart…”
How does it feel to have this collection out in the world?
Meg Reynolds: What you are saying resonates so much—what you know is coming and how there is nothing you can do to change it, how we must steel ourselves or, the great challenge, allow ourselves to remain open. The poems give my blistering hope and fear somewhere to go. And as my child transforms with age, my work now bears the mark of this process and honors what it means to witness someone else’s life.
My first two books were so much about my own life. I gave myself the gift of good faith and listened and recorded and took it all seriously, as though my own peculiar vulnerabilities were evidence of my being alive. Now that they are out in the world, they sometimes feel like very old friends who have moved out of state. They know many of my secrets. We are in touch sometimes. I know they talk about me. I know they are building their own relationships with whomever they meet, and often evidence of those connections finds its way back to me. They form an incomplete picture of who I am and who I was, and it’s scary to have that unfinished truth hanging out there with little control of how it will be received or understood.. But when I wrote those poems, I accepted myself, and that doesn’t end when the poems are published. I look back at that younger woman, see how hard she worked and how much she was trying, seeking, and taking pleasure where she could find it, and I think, “Yeah, that’s it. I did what I set out to do. I was paying attention.”
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Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher from New England. An instructor in writing and humanities at Vermont Adult Learning in Burlington, her work has been published in a number of literary journals including Mid-American Review, RHINO, The Offing, Iterant, Prairie Schooner, New England Review and the Kenyon Review. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, her poetry and comic work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and once for Best the Net. Her first collection of poetry comics, A Comic Year, was published in October 2021 from Finishing Line Press. Her second collection, Does the Earth, was published in May 2023 from Harpoon Books. Reynolds also serves on the Board of Sundog Poetry, a nonprofit organization committed to providing and expanding poetry programming for all Vermonters. Reynolds’ poetry was published in Best New Poets 2023. Learn more at https://www.megreynoldspoetry.com.
Diana Whitney writes across genres in Vermont with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, winner of the 2022 Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of two full-length poetry collections. Her first book, Wanting It, won the Rubery Book Award and became an indie bestseller. Her second, Dark Beds, was released by June Road Press and named a finalist for the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2024 North American Book Award. Diana’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Glamour, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature and many more. She was the longtime poetry critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she featured women and LGBTQ+ voices in her column. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence, she works as an editor, book coach, and writing instructor. www.diana-whitney.com