JULIA BOUWSMA, MAINE POET LAUREATE
Interviewed by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine where she works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. She is Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate, currently serving a term from 2021 to 2026, and is the author of three poetry collections: the forthcoming Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, June 2025), Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). Honors include a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and two Maine Literary Awards. Her work can be found in various publications including Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Kenyon Review, Plume, and Poetry Daily. Bouwsma has taught in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington, serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and works as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME.
SBD:
Julia, thank you for making the time for this interview which will focus on your third book, Death Fluorescence, Sundress Publications in 2025, but will also look a bit at all three of your books, which include Work by Bloodlight, Cider Press Review, 2017 and Midden, Fordham University Press, 2018. I am interested in how one book evolves into the next.
Before our analysis of Death Fluorescence, I wanted to note that each of your books offers some epistolary poems. I am curious about the degree to which these poems relate to the creation of the Epistolary Poem Project you are spearheading as Poet Laureate of Maine.
Congratulations on receiving funding from The Academy of American Poets for your project!
JB:
Thank you so much, Sally! I feel incredibly honored and excited to have received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for the Write ME Epistolary Poetry Project. A statewide epistolary poetry project was one of my dreams when I began my term as Maine’s Poet Laureate in 2021, and it’s very exciting to see it coming to fruition.
I do think this project has some roots in my book Midden, which explores Maine’s 1912 forced eviction and erasure of an interracial island community and which contains a threaded series of epistolary poems that are letters to ghosts. One of the greatest lessons I learned from writing that book was that because history is always forgetting and repeating itself, a book about the past inevitably becomes a book about the present. We end up living the same terrible stories over and over.
So, as I moved into thinking about new poems and projects, it was with the question: how could I take what I had learned from writing about history and apply it in my approach to the present? And I think following this question ultimately led me both to the Write ME Project and to my new collection Death Fluorescence.
SBD:
Can you tell me about choosing the title Death Fluorescence? What does the title hold for you and how would you like your readers to use it as a window into your poems?
First, could you explain the concept of “death fluorescence” for those who are unfamiliar with it?
JB:
“Death fluorescence” is a term I came upon while researching the C. elegans nematode, a microscopic worm that has been involved in several epigenetic research studies and is also the first organism to have had its entire genome sequenced. Another notable quality of the C. elegans, as well as of some other worms, is that they emit a blue glow as they die. This takes place at the cellular level, so with a microscope it is possible to watch death spread as a wave of blue fluorescence traveling through the gut of the worm, and to essentially map its death in live time cell by cell.
At a time when there is so much disruption and uncertainty—climate crisis, pandemic, political turmoil—I have found my poems turning themselves toward the question of what it means to try to navigate a dying world. What it means to potentially navigate one’s own extinction as part of a dying world. So when I learned about this worm—whose existence contains a working map of its own death, a death that is simultaneously a map and a phenomenon of great beauty—I was, of course, transfixed. Ultimately, the C. elegans’ death fluorescence serves both as guide and question: something to look to as we ask ourselves how to engage the present moment and the ever-looming soon with eyes that are open to beauty and possibility as clearly as they are to catastrophe.
SBD:
Could you read the except below from your title poem?
From “Death Fluorescence”
Didn’t you always want a blueprint for your own annihilation? Well here it is,
beautiful one: you are a Bunsen burner, an orchard budding azure flames,
two leopard slugs entwined upside-down on their helixed rope of mucus
as their alien-blue penises unravel from the sides of their heads,
an intimate twirl that spins and spins like light through blown glass.
Within you is an entire universe of starry luminescent decay—a web-work
of indigo highways connecting each galaxy to another where there is nothing
left to do but step forward, step out into ocean, gemstone, peacock, dragonfly,
planet, ribbon eel, this horizon you are and are not yet without.
SBD:
If I had to describe your book most generally and in brief, I might say that it is the speaker’s quest to understand her relationship to herself and to the world around her with the goal of inflicting as little damage as is possible in this complex and fragile world.
JB:
Yes, I think that’s a pretty accurate description. Most of the poems in this book were written with an ever-building sense of panic about the political condition of the United States and informed by current events that felt like an unending barrage of serial crises. And they were written on the heels of Midden—a book that explores the intergenerational effects of historic trauma and started me thinking about those patterns in my own family and genealogy. Accountability for my complicity in violence is a theme in my work since my first book. As a farmer who raises animals for food, it could not be otherwise. So Work by Bloodlight studies that question of accountability on a personal level and Midden studies it on a historic level and Death Fluorescence is attempting to bring the two together.
SBD:
Speaking of the personal past and before we return to Death Fluorescence, I want to ask a question about your first book, Work by Bloodlight, in which you write openly about your father who has some psychological struggles.
I think it would be helpful for many writers, myself included, to know the questions you asked and answered in deciding to write openly about him, especially as he is still living.
JB:
I think this is an extremely individual question that each writer must answer for themself, and perhaps more than once at different times in their lives. But in my case, with regard to writing about my father, it became very clear to me as a graduate student that these were poems that I had to write if I were ever going to become a poet who could write anything else.
I’ve always seen the work of poetry as the work of survival. And part of survival for me—as both poet and human being—meant confronting memories, stories, mythologies, philosophies, etc. that had I been given, unconsensually, as a child, and which had actively harmed and were continuing to harm me.
It was a matter of agency, of detangling my own sense of self and of the world from the delusions and abusive behavior of another. I had to dissemble those inherited stories and mythologies—to dissemble their power over me—so I could write my own.
So I could essentially write myself into existence (which is the foundational exercise of most first books). I think for a writer, the biggest question you ask when deciding whether to write about something is: Is the harm caused by NOT writing this greater than the harm caused by writing it? And for me the answer to that question felt clear.
SBD:
Thank you for your, candor, Julia. I love the idea of a first book allowing the poet to write themself into existence.
Now back to your upcoming third book!
I noticed that the poems in Death Fluorescence are engined by many opposing forces that seem inextricably bound. Your title illustrates this: the homophonic “floral” in “fluorescence” which seems fitting in a book that conjoins death with birth. And for example, when speaking of dying worms in the title poem, you say, “six hours of bursting skylines, their dying an epidemic of cells exploding/in bluet, bluebonnet, whole fields of cornflower or hydrangea.” Life and death images right up against each other.
Was the homophonic nature of the book’s title a conscious choice?
JB:
I slid into the title sideways, really. The first draft of the book was under a different title, and then I chose a second title and worked with that for a while, but it still wasn’t right. I could feel that the right title was there, but I just wasn’t seeing it yet—like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue. Then I was out walking the dog one day and the phrase “death fluorescence” (which at that time was only in the book as sidenote in a preface for a different poem) kind of landed into my brain, a little flash of light.
And all at once I knew it was the right title. It was one of those moments where the thing you’ve been looking everywhere for turns out to be right in front of your nose the whole time. So the homophonic aspect of the title—it’s not why that title occurred to me. But once it did, I think it’s how I knew it was the keeper.
SBD:
To me, Death Fluorescence depicts the speaker’s struggle to locate the self in relation to language, history, genealogy, those she loves and to the natural world. The boundaries between self and the aforementioned are extremely thin and so powerfully wrought. In particular, your use of alliteration, the music of your poems, is stunning, Julia. The sounds themselves create a feeling of seamlessness, smooth in the ear, slippery with sound.
I was wondering if these sonics were designed to echo the thin and often permeable membrane around the self?
JB:
I had a lot of fun with sonics in this book. There are some places where it gets pretty ridiculous, over the top really (in “After We Wound the Land to Maps,” for example: “a stand of ash rose from a single stump, snakes studded / themselves into the splicing silences of the stone walls and slept.”) One of the central craft questions of the book was: can I write into horror, into grief, with a sense of expansion? Midden had approached it with concision, which felt right for that book, but this time I wondered if I could effectively do the opposite. So there is a lavishness to this book, and it definitely comes through in the way I engaged sound. Call it an extinction burst, maybe, leaning toward hysteria, the sense that if it’s all going down you might as well roll around in it first.
The idea of sonics as a measure of permeability is very interesting to me. As a farmer-poet who often begins poems as a sift of words through my brain while digging in the ground or carrying buckets along some uneven path, I’m used to thinking first in terms of topography and muscularity. What is the physical terrain I’m creating in a poem? How does it feel to move through it? How can the poem’s sonics aid me in capturing and making tangible for the reader the feeling of navigating that terrain? The terrain of these poems felt inherently unstable, fragile, porous. Like when you’re walking on the snowpack in early spring and it suddenly goes rotten beneath you, and you punch in up to your thigh.
The whole time I was writing this book I kept carrying around a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay: Set the foot down with distrust upon the crust of the world—it is thin. So I think these slippery sonics developed very organically as a result of the way I try to use language to build a poem’s emotional landscape.
SBD:
I want to touch on this same theme of depicting thin boundaries between the human world and the natural world in your second book, Midden.
In the opening poem below, “I Walk My Road at Dusk,” which is addressed to Malaga Island’s former residents who are dead, I sense that the line is very thin between the natural world and the human world, the living and dead, the speaker and the ghosts of those whose lives were destroyed. I sense that this same thin line between the speaker self and her environs that is often evoked in Death Fluorescence through the alliterative music mentioned above, is accomplished in Midden by blending human terminology with that of the natural world:
“light dances /animal-eyed among the trees. Every bending/branch becomes a torso…… the road spines/”
I Walk My Road at Dusk
The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear
that a dog will become a wolf
—Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love
Now is the hour between: light dances
animal-eyed among the trees. Every bending
branch becomes a torso. Every mouth opens
into another running tooth, woods stripped
naked as a fleeing child—
what leaps the downed logs, what sudden antlers
clatter the brush heap?
I walk to the clear cut—discarded
limbs, silvered softwood. I trace
this trail of quartz crystals, vertebrae—
morsels dropped from a torn pocket and blazed
to bone dust. The road curves toward
and away. The road spines
the stone walls. My feet stumble inside
ruts my feet have worn.
All I ever wanted was land: something to press
my fingers into, a flat weight to pin my breath
into the sockets of my hips.
What body doesn’t hide secrets from itself?
I strain to see the path, stones sleeping in the road
like fallen dogs—
the sun drops its animal rush
into my throat, and I call out
to you, the erased, the in-between,
islanders, whose bodies still wear your moment of dusk
as a skin of rusted dirt you cannot
crawl out of, you
touched and turned, tossed by the phantoms
others saw as they gazed from the mainland, the white eye
of the sun falling into the dark mouth where river
meets ocean, a rupture of self
from self, our otherness a shadow that pitches us into
the blue hour from which there is no escape—
the dog rising from its bed of dust
to take the wolf’s heart in its mouth.
JB:
I think this resistance to boundaries—between human and animal, between individual and environment, between living and dead, between past and present—is really kind of a cornerstone to my poetics, with each book building on the last in an effort to push further.
In Work by Bloodlight, one idea I was grappling with is how people like to distinguish between human and animal as a way of avoiding their own violences, to put human infrastructure in the way to create more distance from their harms. Many of the poems in Work by Bloodlight intentionally try to blur the line between animal and human bodies by focusing on physical, elemental experiences. In poems that confront the more gruesome aspects of farming, for example, humans and animals are depicted as engaged in a violent, necessary act together—labored breath, blood, excrement, dying—serves to equalize and connect the human and animal bodies with one another.
The blending of human and animal language and image you note is something that really started in that first book and has been a characteristic of my work ever since.
In writing Midden, I tried to look at what happens when the human tendency toward compartmentalization extends even further. My research on Malaga Island helped me identify compartmentalization as the logic by which people can commit or become complicit in genocide. And I realized that poetry, as an art form that is simultaneously engaging as many different dimensions of language as possible, is inherently resistant to compartmentalization.
In Death Fluorescence, I think this permeability, this resistance to boundaries and compartmentalized thinking, extends to time as well—where there is often no real difference between the past and the present and even the presumed future. And where the speaker is not separate from their environment.
SBD:
In Death Fluorescence, besides the “blue” in the title poem, I noticed that “blue” or words that mean “blue,” like “indigo” and “aquamarine” or descriptions like “blue dinner plate’ or “blue day” are sprinkled throughout the poems.
Is all the “blue” meant to be deepen the effectiveness of the title? It does for me.
JB:
I’m glad it works that way for you! And I hope it does for others as well. But really the blue showed up in the book first—one poem and then other until it started spreading like an invasive species throughout the book culminating, I think, in the title. That the blue became so prevalent that it sort of developed into a character in the book was startling to me, and powerful. It’s a blue that is vibrant, full of grief and life at the same time. I believe it began with my grandmother’s blue dinner plates, which I inherited after she died, and which I wrote into the sonnet crown about her. The glaze on each of those plates is slightly different, and the darkest shade of blue is one that always captivated me as a child and still does. The kind of deep blue you can stare into, get lost in. So the blue, I think, is a bit of a stand-in for my grandmother, a kind of guiding light (sometimes ancestral, sometimes forward-pointing) that threads itself through the book.
SBD:
I am really interested in the topic of epigenetics in Death Fluorescence, the idea that trauma is passed genetically through generations. There are a few poems on this topic. I was particularly wowed by the poem below:
Study in Epigenetic Memory:
Flower and Petal
Researchers spray the scent of cherry blossoms
while administering electric shocks to the feet of male mice
in order to trace the bow of the mind’s sticks and shoots—
how trauma twists our DNA. Once the mice learn the smell
of pink tumbling only as pain, they are bred, their pups
fostered out to mice who’ve never encountered
such honeyed deceit, but when the cherry blossom odor
is released into the air, the young show alarm, grow jumpy
and nervous. These offspring of perfumed damage,
of bright spring weeping—their bodies remember, their bodies
distrust. The fear fades in second and third generations,
yet lingers on. A sensitivity, the researchers say.
Most of the flowering cherries sold in stores are abominations,
weeping Higan limbs top-grafted to a straight cherry trunk.
An ornamental cherry lives no more than forty years.
When the researchers dissect the mice, they discover,
in the small buds of their brains, a greater number
of neurons able to detect the cherry scent.
But still, we know little—just the small cruelties of fact: they sugar
and helix and drift, graze contorted branches, our outstretched
fingertips, as memory drops its petals all around us.
SBD:
From your strong poems, I am sensing a kind of epigenetics not just in our bodies, but in the land which passes on its history to each of us as does the language we speak as well. Do you think there is a way to describe the epigenesis that occurs when you write poems, Julia?
JB:
Hmm. Well, one thing I know is that everything we shape in turn shapes us. And I mean this figuratively, of course. But I also mean it physically, from a practical standpoint. Anyone who has ever tried to work a piece of land can tell you what it has done to their body. The way I started to twist to the right after carrying so many buckets on one side, for example. But it can go further. The way we shape the land shapes the way it shapes us, and the legacy of that carries past us too. I developed plantar fasciitis from walking the woods trails up here. Trails which were created by skidders and other logging equipment when a previous owner clearcut the land. The trails are basically just two giant tire tracks and walking inside them requires one’s ankles to turn as you walk. So I am walking inside ruts someone before me left as the result of an injury done to the land, and I am reinforcing those ruts with my own footsteps, and that pattern then leads to a chronic injury in my body.
Each spring new sherds work their way up through the soil. I find rusted metal; old bottles and cans; entire pieces of antique farming equipment; trash that probably still literally contains the DNA of strangers who were here before me; even an old driver’s license once, so worn it was basically translucent.
I think the same thing happens on the page. That I mark it, and it marks me. I write the poem and writing the poem changes me. So when I return to it later, in revision, I am already not the same person anymore. Which is why revision works as an iterative process—in cycles of shaping and curing and shaping. Just like the land or the body, the page is not an inanimate object but a constantly evolving ecosystem, one that carries the traces of those who were here before us, just as the traces we leave will affect whoever finds our own marks.
SBD:
In another poem on the same theme, “Study in Epigenetic Memory: A Mediation on Parasitic Infection,” you touch on two topics mentioned earlier: that death is confluent with a kind of life force or blue beauty, and that epigenetically we pass on our pain to later generations. In this poem, a pig is dying from an infection in its eye:
“conjunctivitis bluing the pig’s eye to gemstone:/Milky Aquamarine, Fire Opal, Selenite, Angelite, always some glowing jewel at the heart/of the damage we carry, the pain we pass on without intention, hurt carried deep inside ourselves, so often invisible until/it isn’t.”
There is a sorrow that the speaker of these poems expresses that is related to epigenesis, “the kind of shame you can’t / shake no matter how hard you scrub under your fingernails”.
I am sensing a deep desire in the speaker to come to terms with her past so as not to inflict harm. If I am on the right track, Julia, can you talk about that a little?
JB:
The thing about history is the fear that we’ll end up right back where we started, no matter what we do. And there is no outrunning that. We see it fail, time and again. Block a wound off, compartmentalize, pretend the past can stay in the past, and it just comes back later. And it’s always worse when it comes back.
The speaker wants to be able to look at the past in a clear-eyed manner without shame. To see it, name it, expose it, acknowledge it, address it (perhaps even directly, which brings us back to the epistolary). Even the parts that can’t ever be seen or known, especially those parts.
And I should say, too, that I do not believe that it is possible to exist without creating harm. But I do think that the more open-eyed we are able to be, even to the impossibility of being truly open-eyed—the less harm we will commit.
SBD:
Point of Origin
Discussing the problem of origins with my mother on the telephone
again, I watch the frozen lake extend beneath the windowpanes.
A frozen lake recalls blank poster board as in grade school—half the family tree
wizened white after I came home asking nationalities, countries of origin
and my mother said, Just put Jewish and I said, Jewish is not a country
so she tried to tell me what she knew, which amounted to something like snow
falling in a forest that spanned all the way from Austria to Lithuania or Estonia
or Russia, a forest marked by sudden uneven clearings called fields where
bodies might be found, a dark forest pocked by villages no one wanted
to remember the names of so they forgot them or in any event forgot to tell
their children as perhaps they forgot even their own names, stilled and severed
until it became impossible to trace: one name found on a ship’s manifest, another
claimed at entry, a stranger inside a familiar, a matryoshka we don’t speak of until
it’s too late, the ones who know now dead and gone, the documents scattered
and opaque. On the phone my mother speaks of research, suggests a distant relative
who might know more, but like the crusted snow that coats this lake, erasure
has become a skin. Inside me an expanse of ice extends and below that ice
a fish swims slow and dark, scaling figure eights between the stones. In winter
a lake transforms to field. Between pickup trucks and fishing shacks, a lone figure
paces. I cannot see the fish, and yet I know it’s there, beneath this makeshift ground.
SBD:
I want to include your poem “Point of Origin” from Death Fluorescence as it is a powerful evocation of how difficult it is to trace not just your psychological past but your genealogical past as well. Genealogy is something often easier to trace, but this speaker is deprived of that certainty too.
In “Point of Origin,” the speaker is walking on ice and imagines fish beneath the ice.
In a second poem from “Small-Town Parade,” there is another frozen lake on which the speaker walks:
“as I squat to release burning piss on the frozen lake I am attempting to rid myself of fear. Underneath my feet I know a cold writhing likes in wait, the slow bodies of togue, brook trout,
salmon twining the slate outcrops.”
Can you say something about this recurring image? “The makeshift ground” feels deeply symbolic of the speaker’s uncertainty to me, but why this particular image of ice and fish below?
JB:
Oh, I love this fish, these fish. I love them because they exist independent of whether I know they’re there or not. And my existence is irrelevant to theirs. So I think they matter, in large part, because it matters that I know I’m not the only own living here. (I think of a line in Work by Bloodlight: “Stretch your hide / around the fact: you aren’t the only one.”) I think too, that in the metaphor, the fish probably also represent a part of the self—a part linked to the past, to our erased histories—that is still living and moving inside us even though it isn’t accessible.
SBD:
Do you have a particular time of day you like to write?
JB:
I am not a disciplined writer with a strict daily schedule, but I do love the sensation of writing early in the morning. That red light through the trees as the sun comes up. And the weird underwater feel of trying to write one’s way up out of a lingering dream.
SBD:
Could you name three poets who are writing today whose work inspires you?
JB:
Vievee Francis, Franny Choi, Rick Barot. But please note that I find it quite painful to stop at three.
SBD:
Could you name the first poet and poem who made you feel that deep desire to become a poet?
JB:
This is a little tricky for me, because I knew I wanted to be a poet by the time I was eight years old (well, either a poet or a pirate), and I don’t know that there was a single poem that first triggered that urge. But one poem that left a very strong impression on me as a young reader was Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig.” It felt like an invitation. And I wanted to answer it.
SBD:
I just want to end by returning to your Epistolary Poem Project.
What do you think is gained by working with your fellow Mainers on their epistolary poems rather than lyric poems. Where did the idea for this project arise?
JB:
The idea for the project arose from the experience of living in rural Maine through the political polarization that began to reach fever-pitch in 2016 and then the isolation of the pandemic. I felt, feel, so strongly that we need to learn what it means to really listen to one another. To learn to find our common threads. So I wanted to create a practice for Mainers that would be connective—that would invite and allow us to reach out to one another across very different lived experiences and interact with and listen to one another. Poetry is already such a vulnerable and intimate medium. And the epistolary form adds intimacy: a postal letter physically brings a part of someone into the room with you, allows you to hold an extension of them in your hands. It also adds accessibility. I wanted this to be a project that felt open to people regardless of whether they identify as poets. Not everyone has written a poem but pretty much everyone has, at some time or another, written a letter.
SBD:
Thank you so much for talking with me, Julia. Can’t wait for Death Fluorescence to be out in the world, at least in book form.
