Interview / Traci Brimhall

Traci Brimhall

Edi­tor Brooke Har­ries: Traci Brimhall’s Love Prodi­gal explores states of feel­ing in close rela­tion­ships along­side tex­tures from the nat­ur­al world. Brimhall arranges images, facts, and allu­sions with a lyri­cism that soft­ens and star­tles; it is impos­si­ble to read her lines and sen­tences with­out notic­ing the rest­less music of sub­tle rep­e­ti­tion and allit­er­a­tion. These capa­cious poems prove that there are infi­nite ways to explore the many-sided nature of love. They are less inter­est­ed in pain and assign­ing blame than in the lumi­nous every­day world—and spaces with­in it—towards which the speak­er directs a rich life of the mind. In these spaces and stan­zas, love is always leav­ing, gone, or sim­mer­ing just out of frame. The book shows us that chal­leng­ing ideas sur­round­ing love is insep­a­ra­ble from being human: “—my heart // in its bone ken­nel, shak­ing, con­vinced it can hear you from / that far, from here, from this home I can­not live in or leave.”

Dur­ing our inter­view, Brimhall shared thoughts on mul­ti-dimen­sion­al truths, jux­ta­po­si­tions, metaphors, what gets to go in a poem, and why artists make art and writ­ers write.

BH: Light, includ­ing fire, is a con­stant theme in Love Prodi­gal. What new insights did you gain about the way you thought about love in its var­i­ous forms from putting this book togeth­er? Did you notice any new obses­sions, para­dox­es, or recur­ring words that the sub­ject magnetized?

TB: Ear­ly on in these poems I knew I hat­ed the phoenix. It’s such a stu­pid metaphor to some­one deep in their suf­fer­ing. It’s like the tox­ic pos­i­tiv­i­ty of ancient cryp­tids. But the more I dug into the actu­al his­to­ry, the more true the metaphor also became. I read a book on the cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the phoenix and found out all sorts of strange ori­gins, like in one the pyre isn’t a self-immo­la­tion but burn­ing its father and then climb­ing into the fire, which cre­at­ed the self-burn­ing cycle after that. How many of us feel like a part of us dies when a par­ent dies? And in anoth­er ver­sion the phoenix doesn’t start again as an egg but as a worm. When I found out that the c. ele­gans worm sur­vived the Colum­bia shut­tle break­ing up and burn­ing upon re-entry to the Earth’s atmos­phere I had anoth­er strange truth in the com­plex his­to­ry of the phoenix and its metaphors. I nev­er want the two-dimen­sion­al ver­sion of a truth. I want its whole, weird, grief-strick­en and wormy truth. One of the best parts of any obses­sion is get­ting to real­ize how gor­geous­ly com­plex the world is—how there’s always more to know, more to under­stand, more truth beneath the flat­tened out facts you learn.

BH: One won­der­ful fea­ture of your poems in Love Prodi­gal is their ground­ing in a con­crete and seem­ing­ly every­day world (of “mask­ing-tape Xs,” “the bot­tom of the fridge,” “brass bands and free boat rides,” “Lego bricks,” “machchi­atos and Ore­os,” “jeans on sale,” “mail-order lemon trees,” “choco­late sheet cake,” “your man­i­cure click­ing across piano keys,” “a patient copy­ed­it”) that allows for a clear depar­ture into vivid imag­in­ings of images often relat­ed to the world of science—specifically of the nat­ur­al world that has been stud­ied and recorded.

It is as if the poems move from one con­scious­ness to a dreami­er (yet more aca­d­e­m­ic) one, and this hap­pens quick­ly, not only from line to line, but from clause to clause. This move­ment empha­sizes the every­day expe­ri­ence of the imag­i­na­tion. Was a kind of real­ism a con­scious anchor when com­pos­ing these poems?

I used to think that putting an air­plane in a poem was putting some­thing wayyyy too con­tem­po­rary into verse. I want­ed trees and stars and things I believed to be time­less. But a) noth­ing is time­less, and b) all things can be the fit sub­ject of poet­ry, includ­ing Legos and Ore­os. Sure, I’m made of star dust, but I’m also star dust going to Kroger and binge­ing Net­flix. PLUS, I’m always on the look­out for ways for lan­guage to make inter­est­ing fric­tion in poems. Fic­tion has con­flict and plot to dri­ve the read­er, but for poet­ry, our sur­pris­es come with lan­guage and line break. I love fig­ur­ing out which lists to build or which adjective+noun pair strikes sparks to build some heat in a poem. So whether it’s high and low dic­tion next to each oth­er, philo­soph­i­cal mus­ings next to my Star­bucks order or the every­day next to the sub­lime, I’m look­ing for ten­sions and jux­ta­po­si­tions that will ener­gize the poem. Carl Jung said hold­ing oppo­sites with­out con­flict is the clos­est we come to the spir­i­tu­al, which I think is anoth­er ver­sion of Keats’ Neg­a­tive Capa­bil­i­ty. As the world becomes fric­tion­less and AI will give us all our answers and rein­force all our opin­ions, this is one of my favorite gifts of poetry—contradictory truths and pro­duc­tive fric­tions and not hav­ing to answer for any of it.

BH: Ear­ly in the book, the lines in the title poem, “What’s bro­ken can­not be / healed with any­thing but super­glue / and imag­i­na­tion. Still, let it be tend­ed to” read like instruc­tions for read­ing the col­lec­tion. Sim­i­lar­ly, “I’m ready for a love with hope in it—” from “Cold, Crazy, Bro­ken” also instructs us how to inter­pret the sen­tences and lines … pos­si­bly to see atten­tive­ness as a type of love and the imag­i­na­tive capac­i­ty as affec­tion for real­i­ty. How much did you think of an imag­ined read­er as you wrote and revised these poems?

TB: I usu­al­ly don’t think about a read­er at all as I draft. I’m still work­ing out the dif­fi­cul­ty of being a human in drafts zero, one, and two. But once I’m pol­ish­ing, I always think about the read­er as some­one I love. I want to be care­ful with how much I’m reveal­ing and care­ful with how I’m reveal­ing it. I want poems to be ugly and uncom­fort­able some­times because that’s what being a per­son is. But I also don’t want to play vic­tim in sit­u­a­tions I co-cre­at­ed or ask read­ers to hold trau­mas for me. So I hope I am reveal­ing some real and occa­sion­al­ly hard things about life as I am liv­ing it, but I also hope that I don’t hurt any­one with a poem. I hope they feel restored to them­selves in the end.

In a 2020 inter­view with Lisa Olstein, you shared that a favorite test to hear a poem’s music is to “read it back­wards line by line.” Love Prodi­gal fea­tures a sec­tion, “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Son­nets.” Each poem in the sequence con­tains a sat­is­fy­ing four­teen sen­tences. Excit­ing­ly, your debut book of essays, The Grief Artist, is just out this fall from Sara­bande Books. When you write prose, how do you deter­mine the right rhythm and sound for sen­tences? Is it dif­fer­ent from your poet­ry writ­ing process? 

Ooh, I love think­ing about sen­tences! W.B. Yeats said in his lat­er years that he didn’t revise any­more except towards a more pas­sion­ate syn­tax. I love the idea of becom­ing more and more in love with the sen­tence and all its pos­si­bil­i­ties. I do use some sim­i­lar poet­ic forms in both. For instance, you men­tioned “Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Son­nets” in which each sec­tion of the essay is 14 sen­tences rather than 14 lines. The cou­plet titles can also be read across the top to cre­ate a more clas­sic rhymed son­net. There’s a prose son­net crown in The Grief Artist as well, but the sen­tences are much more essay­is­tic than poet­ic. I try to turn the dial away from the intense­ly poet­ic when I’m work­ing on essays. Of course, I can’t help myself (or I could, but why?), and I do let my sen­tences be a bit spell­bound by beau­ty some­times. But in poet­ry I’m singing more than say­ing, and in prose it’s the opposite.

An over­ar­ch­ing theme in The Account Mag­a­zine is the act of offer­ing “an account”—of bear­ing wit­ness, or car­ry­ing and offer­ing tes­ti­mo­ny. How do you see the poems in Love Prodi­gal inter­ro­gat­ing these ideas? 

Per­haps it’s only a tes­ta­ment to my own life, but I feel that’s also worth wit­ness­ing. I think, for me, every poem is a ver­sion of prayer, by which I see it as a devo­tion, an act of atten­tion and inten­tion. To deeply see any­thing is one of life’s prin­ci­ple plea­sure (imo) and it’s also some­thing that was taught to me by oth­er poets. I am less alone when I pay atten­tion or read great poems or look at great art. And I am so glad. So glad so many artists make art and writ­ers write. And every­one who helped and helps keep my soul awake in this life. Tru­ly, what else is there besides distraction?

Traci Brimhall is a pro­fes­sor of cre­ative writ­ing at Kansas State Uni­ver­si­ty. She is the author of five col­lec­tions of poet­ry, includ­ing Love Prodi­gal (Cop­per Canyon, 2024). Her poems have appeared in pub­li­ca­tions such as The New York­er, The Nation, Ori­on, The New Repub­lic, Poet­ry, The New York Times Mag­a­zine, and The Atlantic. She’s received fel­low­ships from Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, the Nation­al Park Ser­vice, the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets, the Guggen­heim Muse­um, and Pur­due Library’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s cur­rent­ly the poet lau­re­ate for the State of Kansas.