Interview by: Natalie Solmer
I first became interested in Rosalie Moffett’s work after serving on the committee to decide the next poet laureate of Indiana, and Moffett was a finalist. I began delving into her work and read her wonderful and accomplished books. I was very happy when she agreed to talk to Indianapolis Review.
Rosalie Moffett is the author of the poetry collections Making a Living (Milkweed Editions, 2025), Nervous System (Ecco, 2019), which was chosen by Monica Youn for the National Poetry Series Prize and listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, and June in Eden (OSU Press, 2017). She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, POETRY Magazine, New England Review, and Kenyon Review, among others. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Indiana, and the senior poetry editor for the Southern Indiana Review.
We recently conversed over email:
NS- In an interview with Indiana Humanities, you talked about how your family members have influenced your way of thinking and shaped you as a poet. You mention that both your parents were biologists and your grandparents were artists and musicians and that you “became a poet because I wanted to do everything. I wanted to make art and music and study psychology and history and science and culture. Poetry was a way I could do all of that; it seemed like a snowball I could roll over anything I was interested in and pick it up. I could be curious about everything.” You also say that during your high school days you didn’t know anyone who was writing poetry and there was a certain private joy to it that you miss. I loved reading this interview, and I have a couple follow up questions. I wanted to hear more about how your grandparents shaped your poetry practice, since they were artists but working in other forms. I also wondered about how you ended up following the often difficult and winding path of having a career based around poetry and teaching it.
RM- Rather than showing me, say, a creative path, I think both my parents and grandparents offered me sort of a creative atmosphere I could be in, breathe in. As a small child, on some nights there was a string quartet that would come and practice with my father in our living room, or he might be doing a woodcarving in his basement shop and my mother would be at ballet class, or they might be driving me and my brothers to the lab to feed the caterpillars, or check on an experiment. A visit to extended family was to be immersed in a bunch of ways of being: an instrument was always at hand, paint and paintbrushes, books to the gills. And virtuosic storytellers, all. I think it gave me the sense that art in all its variations was a primary way to interact with the world, not something you did on the side as a hobby.
Some of these finer, more leisurely artistic activities (the quartet, the ballet) fell away when I was six and my parents bought a hundred acres in a canyon by the snake river to undertake a wonderful but labor-intensive homesteading project, for which they had little prior experience. In their late forties, full-time professors of Biology, they began planting an orchard and vineyard and enormous garden, turning their ingenuity to irrigation and trellising and building and, to be very clear, some miserably non-romantic drudgery, literal back-breaking and sometimes dangerous work whose worth and appeal it took me a long time to understand. In summer, the days at their latitude stretch long, and still, I have vivid memories of us all working under industrial flood lights and the moon. I mean, it was madness, really.
But there was something creative and artistic and poetic to this wild endeavor as well. An invaluable lesson in the deviation from the expected or predictable rut—even into a realm whose challenges and work were immense—that made it possible to imagine all kinds of things for myself, for my life. Growing up, I felt very apart and different from my peers—there was no TV in the canyon and no one else I knew was doing all this manual labor as a family, or, as far as I knew, eating squirrels—but the canyon is a stunningly beautiful landscape into which I got to steal off and roam, to have close calls with rattlesnakes, to find wild currants and salamanders, to spend time utterly, utterly alone, and all this was ultimately freeing; I believe it made it possible for me to consider poetry. And still, as an adult, it hits me anew sometimes: a life can let a marvelous volta in.
NS- Speaking of snowballs, as we head into yet another terrifying election, I can’t help but think about the images in a poem of yours published in 2020 in Poetry Northwest, “Ode to Casting a Vote,” wherein you use the image of a snowball to show how “Under / one thing is always another thing you can’t see”. In the poem, you begin with the thoughts of the speaker, who has just undergone knee surgery. The speaker’s mind quickly jumps from the fiery pain of the operation to white supremacists and their fiery tiki torches to the murder of Native Americans by White colonizers in your home state of Washington. At the crescendo of the poem you write:
I mean to say I was myself. I was myself
on fire in my country on fire. I mean
to say I am my country. Broken, I reveal I owe
what I have to the death of someone I’ll never know—
and the gratitude my flesh musters is pain.
What should be grace is fire, is torches. I am
American. As such, I have somewhere,
something that resembles nothing
if not a detonator. I have a button I can press
which has a small effect on the present
though nothing it can do
about the past.
I greatly admire the way you are able to artfully braid all of these topics together and create a political poem which still surprises and makes the reader think. This also takes me back to an interview you did with Four Way Review wherein you talked about the dangers of writing a political poem with an overly simple message, “Which makes a boring poem. A hallway you can see the end of from the beginning. But to let sound in as a guide gives that hallway some doors, some new avenues. There are then things behind doors that I have to shift in order to see. It opens rooms in my thoughts I didn’t know were there.” I’ve been thinking about these ways of writing a lot because of this particular moment in our country, as well as our state (for example, the new law re: tenured professors). I guess this is more of a reflection and lamentation than a question, but do you ever feel that there are topics you cannot write about or should not write about, especially in regards to your positionality? What other thoughts or advice do you have for poets in writing about the political turmoil of our day?
RM- Oh, I’m here for your lamentation—
My metaphor of the hallway is one that is useful to me because it’s a visual accompaniment to Frost’s “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” or James Baldwin’s assertion that you write to find out “what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway,” and I think it’s objectively right to say that if I already know something, it’s likely a reader already does too, and me putting it in lines and stanzas doesn’t change that. However, often, there are hallways we could see the end of from the beginning and there’s a necessary art in poems that will march us straight down those hallways, that will pull us from a refusal to see. The first stanza of June Jordan’s extraordinary “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.” is one that comes readily to mind these days. Too, there are poems whose moments of clarity are so stunning because it’s as if we’d already been staring right at them. I’m thinking of Dionne Brand’s “Nomenclature for the Time Being” which even has these lines: “there are no secret hallways waiting for / the transcriber of great portents; it’s simple / the wars they recorded were the wars they won / let me be plain with you…”
As for positionality, I think there are topics where the stakes are higher, and the risks are greater. I think a poet should be very careful with another’s suffering, another community’s suffering. I think Mark Strand’s contention in his 1998 Paris Review “Art of Poetry” interview is useful: “a poet’s focus is not quite what a prose writer’s is; it’s not entirely on the world outside. It’s fixed on that area where the inside meets the outside… a poet describes that point of contact: the self, the edge of the self, and the edge of the world.” I hold that swiveling camera in mind, and I think if a political poem feels like it is failing, it’s often because it has headquartered itself far from what Strand here calls “the inside.”
Relatedly, I reject the idea that poets with privilege like mine (I’m a White, straight American) should retreat solely to the sovereign or, let’s call it, “un-cancelable” ground of their subjective interior. That, for fear of misstep, one’s art should abdicate the world outside themselves. That’s a false idea. Note, even, my inclusion of the word sovereign, which drags with it a whole train of historical and present-day resonance, a testament to the automatic conversation language—or, for me, since I have no other, English—makes with time, with suffering, with money, and with power. For all its beauty, for all that makes it what I have chosen as the material for my art, my advice is to remember that English (as the etymologies attest) is like a weighted die: out of habit and design, it tends to roll in particular ways. In Making A Living, I have the lines: “That the word unfair does not furl up / the great machinery of America’s various tilt-a-whirls, // ferris wheels, and shooting galleries, means language is working /for The Man.” It is. It does. But it is my hope that the art of poetry, in part simply by heightening our sensitivity to words—their sound and feel, how they route our thoughts—can help us see that, can help us pull against the ways language is cast in favor of oppression and authority, is utilized to dehumanize. And to work for the recognition, embrace and respect of humanity is a political act.
NS- I saw that you have a new collection of poems, Making A Living, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. Congratulations! You’ve stated that this collection is about motherhood, consumerism, and mass shootings, to name a few things. I recommend that readers peruse your Writer’s Notebook essay over at New England Review which touches on the influences behind this writing project. In that essay, I was particularly taken with your reflection on Millennials (your generation): “I think one of the things that characterizes my generation is a grand dissolution. (And yes, disillusion…) What seemed to be solid ground is dissolving. In addition to literal ground—the rising sea levels eating away at the edges—I’m thinking of things like the idea of a career, democracy, of objective truth, which are disintegrating into the instability of gig-economy, decentralized armed militias, and whatever’s the opposite of a shared sense of reality.” As a late Gen X-er (1980), I relate to a lot of this, even though my generation is known for being cynical and pessimistic (Reality Bites), it’s still horrific watching things become worse in ways that weren’t previously imagined. Can you tell us more about your process in writing and shaping this book?
RM- The bulk of this book was written in 2020-2022, when, like many, I was beset upon by an extra dose of anxiety and bitterness. The pandemic was felt tragically and differently by each generation, and, in a million different ways, I am lucky. But, it did feel like this particularly elder-millennial double wallop: to graduate from college smack-dab into the “great recession” and then, just when I felt like I was at last starting “real life” as we tend, erroneously, to call it, the global pandemic began.
So, while it doesn’t bring up the pandemic specifically, the book grew out of that particular time of fear and disgust when, not only could I not look away from America’s profound absurdities and class cruelties, our clownish politics and marketing and propaganda, I was looking at all this and thinking about having a child, trying to have one. The way I found to write about this was through, largely, an economic lens: considering the ways that capitalist sensibility—debt, profit, mortgages, scarcity, competition, threatening forces the pandemic laid bare—leaches into the spaces of love, motherhood, reverence, and nature.
I was afraid of including the arrival of my daughter, who is now two years old, in the book. I was afraid it would weight the book in a narrative way, would bend it toward a pat arc, a happy ending. Like: this American woman was bitter and angry, and then she had a child! Problem solved. But, when I was finally convinced to do it, I found that including her did not undo or temper the other parts of the book, did not film it in a layer of optimism. My daughter—who I feel extraordinary, unearthly, earthly love for, who brings me tremendous joy—does not solve anything; on the contrary, these issues are more raw, are more clear, more pressing, and that is one of the notes I try to hit in the book. My anger, in fact, at our nation’s ongoing cruelties at all levels (from our “defense” spending, to adjunct teaching labor, to untenable wages and evictions) only grows. A budget—perhaps it’s useful to remember, as we talk about the political responsibilities of poetry—is a moral document.
NS- Your last book, Nervous System, which was selected as a National Poetry Series winner by Monica Youn, is made up of an opening poem, followed by one long poem which grapples with your mother’s memory loss which was preceded by a bicycle accident. Your first book, June in Eden, also delves into this subject matter. Your mother’s work as a biologist, in particular, her study of snails (I will never forget the image of snipping off their eyeballs!) is a foundation in Nervous System. You also dedicate both books to your mother and father. Yet there is a line, “Perhaps I have no business / imagining her brain” It can be a difficult and delicate process writing about our family members. Were there any particular challenges you faced in this regard that you would be willing to share?
RM- I was working on very early drafts of this long poem when I was teaching a creative nonfiction class, and in one lecture I was advising a kind of X-ray one could make of an essay, going paragraph by paragraph and answering the question: “why am I writing this” and then we were talking about how that thinking might end up, ultimately and purposefully, on the page. I hadn’t been aware of how much that question was a submerged obstacle for me, was keeping me from allowing the poem to grow. That day, I took my own advice, inserting the question “What does it do to write this?” into the poem. The poetic work and the research that went into the book was a way of blazing a path in my mind: I felt that I wouldn’t be able to confront or handle or approach her real self in our real lives, her real challenges and suffering, her mortality, without this imaginative infrastructure that I built through the poem. Recognizing this, in many ways, let me write the book, and let it also broaden into a wider consideration of the nature of language, of memory, of how we conceive of the unknown.
NS- My last interview question is always Indiana-related. This one has two parts. You live in Evansville, Indiana and are also a graduate of the Purdue MFA program, but you have the added perspective of having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, which I imagine is dramatically different. (SIDENOTE- Growing up in South Bend, Indiana, my dream was to go to college in Oregon, mainly for the horticulture (which was my major. I ended up minoring in poetry!). My mom (understandably) said it was too far away.) Being that you are so far away from the place of your birth, does this affect your writing process in any way? Also, what are your thoughts on Indiana’s place in the larger literary world, and do you have any special Indiana locations, organizations, etc. that you wish to shout out?
RM- I am, inescapably, a place-based writer because I am a relentlessly visual person, so I’m always hoovering up all the visual data of my location. What I see is always how I begin to think. (Which reminds me of these resigned and true lines from Karen Solie’s “Museum of the Thing”: “the objective correlative, tired of me / as I am of it.”) Making a Living mostly arose during a time when I rarely left my neighborhood. In the restless pandemic, I was navigating it daily like a roomba searching for anything, anything new to look at. That was me walking my dog down each trash-canned alley, and in the months postpartum, that was me going round and round the blocks in the shade all day as the shade moved to stroll the baby to sleep, and then to keep her asleep. So, the book frequently mentions my neighbors (Hi, guys!) doing the ordinary things one sees: mowing the lawn, raking petals from the storm drain, getting evicted. The word neighborhood or neighbor is in the book eight times, which is kind of a lot. The Lloyd expressway is in it, Crazy Bob’s Cajun Chicken, the U Haul storage facility, local church marquees.
Of course, I say in the book “How midwestern. Here I am. But I am not / midwestern.” And so that feeling, whether or not it is true, gives me the urge to say that I come with a kind of outside perspective, that I look around me with a keener sense, like a tourist—but maybe it is also just true to say that wherever I am, I always feel like a wide-eyed visitor, an alien briefly on earth, and that I regard the billboard recently put up that says YOU BELONG HERE (it is a billboard advertising advertising on billboards, you read that right) with the same sensibility as I might view something in a museum. And the neighbor who walked out of his house yesterday afternoon and shot his gun into the air? And the football-shaped mushrooms and geodes in the Deam Wilderness? And Marianne Boruch’s front porch? And the Crawfordsville gas station advertising Beer Cheese Breakfast Pizza? (Yes, those words, that order.) And the 24 hawks I counted on the way to Marianne’s porch? And the tornado siren’s forlorn sound? The fireflies? Indiana’s museum! These are its exhibits. And the dogwoods blooming right now in my neighborhood? Just breathtaking.