Interview / Andrew Hemmert 

 

Andrew Hem­mert 

 

Edi­tor: Brooke Har­ries: Andrew Hemmert’s No Longer at This Address is a col­lec­tion of clear-voiced poems that focus on nat­ur­al, tech­no­log­i­cal, and per­son­al his­to­ry. Abound­ing in cou­plets, mov­ing from past to future then past again, with tense shifts that reflect qui­et hes­i­tan­cy and wist­ful skep­ti­cism, these poems invite us to oblique­ly engage with the mod­ern cat­a­stro­phe of inter­fer­ences to nature. They remind me of Emi­ly Dickinson’s order to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Imagery, root­ed in real­ism, shows a way of see­ing; “out­dat­ed phones” and rem­nants of nat­ur­al his­to­ry (“in a thick dis­place case,” / “the skull of a saber tooth tiger”) are both decid­ed­ly not thriv­ing. Yet delight­ful­ly, Hem­mert under­cuts jour­nal­is­tic seri­ous­ness with pun­ny images, such as an umbil­i­cal cord (in a poem fea­tur­ing phones), and a voice that is as wry as it is vul­ner­a­ble: “I no longer / have a cord, though once it was / the only way I ate.”

In our inter­view, Hem­mert shared about choos­ing dic­tion, the beau­ty of the world in ruins, and the nat­ur­al con­se­quence of attempt­ing to write on landscape.

 

I was drawn to “Like Stars, Like Small-Town Church­es.” In cou­plets that spread across three pages, it tells a sto­ry of dri­ving to Den­ver to inspect a house. Nature is blend­ed with the human domain, and the human-made world is anthro­po­mor­phized; an inter­state, “over­com­mit­ted,” is rem­i­nis­cent of the lan­guage of a time-con­strained young pro­fes­sion­al. Hawks “like traf­fic cam­eras, or like stars / above the cheap nativ­i­ty scenes / of small-town church­es” dri­ve home the point that humans have tam­pered with nature—perhaps at their spir­i­tu­al per­il. The final lines refer to church­es “we pass on the way home,” and they present a haunt­ing med­i­ta­tion on options pon­dered, of course, in hind­sight. The pos­si­bly fate-chang­ing turns in life, like choos­ing a new home or geo­graph­i­cal region, are trou­bled by the inter­re­la­tion­ships of nature and humanity.

There is a sparse lone­li­ness in all the poems in the col­lec­tion, yet they feel full, and for me, odd­ly com­fort­ing. Per­haps the pac­ing, how long one image is drawn out, is what caus­es the still­ness, makes scenes evocative.

What are your con­sid­er­a­tions, in pac­ing, when you’re writ­ing and revis­ing poems? What are the voic­es in your head say­ing when you’re decid­ing things?

The first voice in my head is always music, so to speak. I’m writ­ing descrip­tive­ly, but I’m also writ­ing in such a way that the sounds in the words are con­nect­ing to each oth­er. There’s a phrase that Judy Jor­dan taught me called a son­ic lad­der, and by that she meant using sounds that you’ve already imple­ment­ed in a pri­or line to help deter­mine what words will appear in the fol­low­ing line. You’re going fur­ther into the draft on the “rungs” of echo­ing musi­cal­i­ty, so to speak. You arrive at some fun and sur­pris­ing images doing this, focus­ing on match­ing asso­nance and con­so­nance as opposed to choos­ing dead-on diction.

As for pac­ing, I real­ly don’t think about it dur­ing the ini­tial com­po­si­tion. I’m just try­ing to chase inter­est­ing music and sur­pris­ing images. In revi­sion, how­ev­er, I vary syn­tax for dynamism by chang­ing sen­tence length and chang­ing the place­ment of prepo­si­tion­al phras­es in sen­tences. This is a great way to impart a giv­en momen­tum in your poem.

 

In the tit­u­lar and final poem, “No Longer at This Address,” the lines “In the face of destruc­tion / it’s use­ful to keep a run­ning list / of all the good things” offer a pos­i­tive prac­ti­cal tip for read­ers, some­thing a CBT ther­a­pist might sug­gest for sum­mon­ing hope in chal­leng­ing times. How do you bal­ance the neg­a­tive feel­ings that arise when writ­ing about our dan­ger­ous time and the signs of dam­age to nature with some­thing like won­der or hope?

I don’t bal­ance it well! It’s psy­cho­log­i­cal whiplash, but that’s just a nat­ur­al con­di­tion of being aware of your sur­round­ings, aware of the world and what we’re doing to it. I’m con­stant­ly bowled over by the beau­ty of the world, and con­stant­ly bereft at the ways in which we’ve ruined it, are still ruin­ing it.

Just this last week, I was dri­ving through Christ­mas FL on the way to the East Coast. We’d be in deep cool shade in heavy trees, oaks hang­ing low over the road and thick walls of pines on either side. And then harsh light would come through, and we’d be pass­ing anoth­er new hous­ing devel­op­ment. It’s scorched earth, the cleared brush and trees in smol­der­ing piles. The stark scaf­folds of new fast hous­es. It works like that. I’m dri­ving along and I’m see­ing beau­ti­ful things and I’m see­ing the destruc­tion of beau­ti­ful things in rapid suc­ces­sion. I’m most­ly chas­ing that feel­ing in my poems. And there’s no ther­a­piz­ing that feel­ing away.

The hope comes in the idea that one’s depic­tion of the world might cause some­one else to recon­sid­er the flip­pant way they’ve engaged with the world. It also helps, I’ve found, to pick an envi­ron­men­tal action group and send them mon­ey! I’d rec­om­mend the Flori­da Wildlife Cor­ri­dor Foun­da­tion.

 

In a 2022 inter­view with Thomas Whyte, you iden­ti­fied recur­ring themes and obses­sions: “cli­mate change, work, what it feels like to belong to a place, how dis­tance changes belong­ing.” Have these evolved, or have you added any new considerations? 

That’s still the gist of it! Since that inter­view, I’ve added a few more places to my expand­ing poet­ic pic­ture of home: San­ta Fe, the Rocky Moun­tains, Cape Canaver­al. I think there’s always going to be the ques­tion of place ver­sus home in the con­stel­la­tion of belong­ing in my work. And our envi­ron­men­tal sit­u­a­tion hasn’t got­ten any bet­ter since 2022, so that’s unfor­tu­nate­ly going to con­tin­ue to be a fac­tor as long as I’m keyed in on place as a sub­ject. I’ve been writ­ing a lit­tle more late­ly about men­tal ill­ness, though that’s prob­a­bly been in the work all along. The new work just touch­es on depres­sion and ADHD more explicitly.

 

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 No Longer at This Address inter­ro­gat­ing these ideas?

I appre­ci­ate that y’all give your writ­ers an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pro­vide an account with their work. It’s nice to have a lit­tle space to pro­vide con­text or an adden­dum. The nat­ur­al con­se­quence of try­ing to write one place or land­scape in full is being hon­est re: the fac­tors at play in the degra­da­tion of said place or landscape.

In No Longer at This Address, I couldn’t write hon­est­ly about the grass­lands and the moun­tains that encom­pass my new home with­out look­ing at those things that threat­en my home. That means writ­ing about the wors­en­ing wild­fire threat, the dis­ap­pear­ance of native flo­ra and fau­na, and the bil­lion­aires build­ing rock­ets to escape the world they’ve wound­ed. My tes­ti­mo­ny would be incom­plete with­out that, and that’s why those things appear in No Longer at This Address.

Andrew Hem­mert is the author of No Longer at This Address (Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press), Bless­ing the Exoskele­ton(Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press), and Saw­grass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared in var­i­ous mag­a­zines includ­ing Cop­per Nick­el, The Keny­on Review, The Mis­souri Review, New Ohio Review, and The South­ern Review. He lives in Thorn­ton, Colorado.