NM
It is a real treat and honor, not only to have been published in Plume Anthology 10, but also to be in this sustained conversation with you, which has been very lovely.
SBD
Thank you, Nathan, for taking the time to talk with such care and depth about your beautiful book, Previously Owned.
SBD
But first, a little background. Was there an event or circumstance that started you writing poetry?
NM
Yes! When I was a community college student, my creative writing professor, challenged his workshop to spend the semester writing in an unfamiliar genre. At that time, I’d considered myself a prose writer (short stories, essays, in particular), so I spent the semester writing poems. Bad poems, mind you, but poems nonetheless. It certainly helped that I was dealing with an ugly breakup at the time..
SBD
Sounds like the break-up offered good soil for poetry to take root. For me, it was my father’s death. I think of the Yeats line… “What hurt you into poetry?” and of Octavio Paz who said something about pain requiring transformation to make its existence bearable in a way that joy does not.
SBD
Was there a poet who took you under wing and encouraged your writing?
NM
A Minnesota poet, Steve Mueske, seemed to see potential in my work. I mean, he truly engaged with it! It was incredibly meaningful and offered me a tremendous amount of confidence at a time when I most needed it. Steve and I have never met in person, but I would not be the poet I am had he not taken personal interest and invested in me. I’ve never forgotten it.
SBD
Can you articulate what qualities Steve Mueske mentioned about your work that made you feel seen, and if so, do those same qualities apply to your work now?
NM:
Yes. I think there are certain aspects of what was in my work then that are still very much applicable. I would say that I feel like I’ve always been a poet who has mostly worked in a very quiet register. But I will also say that the poems he was privy to were more experimental in their approach than I would say my poems are now, though my “Alternate” sequence certainly has an air of experimentation. I think there was something about the way that my poems were trying to really reach out and utilize the imagination that was interesting to him.
It was big for me because Steve struck me as a very serious poet. We have maintained a friendship since I was in my early twenties, and I’m forty-three now.
SBD
What changed in you that made you turn to poetry in a more full-time way? And does the writing of poetry offer something that writing stories and essays does not?
NM
I really like these questions. I was living in the desert of Joshua Tree, California and attending Copper Mountain Community College there. There wasn’t a huge in-person writing community. It was difficult to actually find other writers, particularly poets. Once I started writing poems at my teacher’s behest, I got linked up with some writers over the internet. I was introduced to a number of online forums and was able to submit poems and start to read other people’s work.
I started writing when I was nineteen, but it wasn’t until maybe my mid-twenties that I had a first real publication in Poet Lore. It was a relationship poem. Then Rhino picked up a poem, and that was when I felt, “Wow, these are pretty real publications.” The Rhino poem had to do with my relationship to fatherhood. It was called, “Poem in Which a Hobby Is Mentioned.” The poem goes on to talk about fishing as an activity that I have never done, but that a lot of people do with their dads. So the poem conjectures towards a father who leaves and how one then learns to be buoyed in the water only by oneself.
SBD
It sounds like you had no tradition to tell you what it means to be a father.
NM
Exactly. Relationships and fatherhood, those subjects became really pivotal for me when it came to feeling that poetry could offer something that prose did not. I mean, I still very much love writing in prose, though I write essays more than fiction. I love reading fiction, and I particularly love reading short stories, but there’s something about the level of resonance and nuance and emotional heft that a poem offers which I don’t know if it is possible to receive from a novel or from a short story.
SBD
Maybe there is a more intense burst of feeling in a poem than is offered over the course of a novel? Do you know Jhumpa Lahiri? She certainly, with a poet’s hand. can evoke a character in a single gesture, but for me, there is something in poetry that is even more powerful, that enters song.
NM
Yes! And it’s that song that does the work… it’s been scientifically proven that a certain progression of chords will make someone cry. The music taps into something for us. Poetry has been described as a spontaneous overflowing of emotion, something that can’t be contained, and I love that. My poems I think tend to be a quieter version of this idea.
SBD
Quiet, but powerful. Your voice is modest, but wise. “The World is Full” ends with the line, “As if my love was worth anything.” The reader, of course, knows what it is worth and is so grateful for all the care and attention that you give to the world, which is a form of love.
NM
Yes, a turn in that poem, the line about being good for something, that was a surprise. Originally when I wrote the poem, I wrote past that ending. It was only in revision as I was working on it… I wrote, I mean, probably another good half a page past that stanza. But as I was sitting with it in revision, I was just like, “No, I think the rest of this turns into something else.”
SBD
What was the first poem you read or heard that made you wish you had written it?
NM
For a long time when I was young, I was convinced that all poets were dead, that we were reading the ruins of a bygone era. One of the first books I read from a living poet was The Art of the Lathe, by B.H. Fairchild. I wish I could have written any of the poems from that book, but the one that comes to mind is “Beauty.” The boldness to open a collection with a long poem! And it was stunning, tender, and beautiful. I still think about it. I revisit that collection to this day and it was published in ’98.
SBD
I love “Beauty” too. How the poem explores one word, “beauty,” how the taboo of speaking the word relates to the taboo of homosexual love, and the whole world and culture that those interrelated taboos carry. Thank you for reminding me of it. And yes, the courage to have such a lengthy poem open the book.
SBD
Which poets would you say most influenced your work?
NM
Hmm… that answer changes all the time. But consistent touchstones for me would be Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Carl Phillips, John Murillo, and Larry Levis, to name a few. But I trust, there are more.
SBD
Would you say that this group of poets share something in common for you or are you drawn to each for a particular reason(s)?
NM
I feel like Murillo was influenced by Levis. I can feel and read Levis in his work. In the same way I can feel Bishop in Carl Phillips’s work. There’s very much a lineage. And I feel Bishop in Kelly. I aspire to have the kind of modulation that happens in their poems, the kind of patience to very slowly and meditatively move through the materials.
SBD
That’s really interesting. Elizabeth Bishop was the first poet I read whose mind I could hear thinking on the page. Bridget Pegeen Kelly, the same, but in a far wilder way.
NM
And I feel like Carl Phillips does that as well. I feel like when I read his poems, I’m reading someone thinking out loud. And then I love the doubling back, clarifying a thing, re-clarifying it, re-seeing it, revising one’s own vision even in the middle of a sentence.
I read Levis when I was in grad school. Winter Stars completely knocked me out…. gutted me when I was working on all these poems about my own father and our relationship.
Kelly was interesting because she was able to take a lot of the same landscape, same material, lots of circling of the same kinds of details that enter into her poems, and yet her poems don’t feel stale. They feel very new and fresh. She was very much a poet’s poet and like Bishop, she didn’t publish a ton.
That’s one of the things that I’m thinking about now with regards to a next project. I’m really happy to take my time. I’ve drafted maybe a poem or two since writing this book. I’ve mostly been working on essays. But if my next book takes another eight to ten years, I think I’m okay with that.
SBD
A little aside. A poet friend, Eamon Grennan, taught at Vassar for many years. He invited me up there to have coffee or something, and he took me down to the basement of Vassar’s library where there were boxes of Bishop’s poems. A gray shoe box filled with only drafts of “The Moose,” another shoebox dedicated to drafts of “Sestina” etc. She was meticulous about her work and yes, so spare in terms of what she published.
SBD
Whose work do you find exciting that you are reading now?
NM
I love this question! I’m excited for Vievee Francis’ new collection, The Shared World. I’m looking forward to A. Van Jordan’s forthcoming collection, as well as Oliver de la Paz’s Diaspora Sonnets. Sumita Chakraborty’s B-Sides of the Golden Records poems are wonderfully exciting. I’m also excited about James Allen Hall’s Romantic Comedy.
SBD
I’d like to begin talking about your wonderful book, Previously Owned. I love the title for its understatement which creates an unexpected slam. I normally associate the phrase, “previously owned,” with used clothes or textbooks, or as an euphemistic and/or glorified way of saying “used”—nothing as horrific as humans who were owned as slaves. Could you tell me how the title came to you?
NM
Thank you. Let me just say, I stumbled towards the beauty of this title… and stumbling toward the title for the book was something of a journey. It had a different title for a long time, and when “Previously Owned” showed up in the poem, “Multiple Choice,” I couldn’t shake it. I loved it for all the reasons you mention, what it means for the poem in which it appears, and what it means for the larger context of the book. It felt incredibly charged, but that has much to do with my identity as a Black poet.
SBD
What starts a poem for you, a sound, an image, a dream….
NM
I have often described myself as a collector, something of a magpie in nature. Pick up a bit of tinsel here, a length of thread there. Twig. Receipt paper. Though I don’t immediately know I’m building a nest. So, it could be much of the above! Well, all except dream. I’ve never drafted a poem from a dream, though I know writers who do, or have. So, it’s possible, I know. I’m often starting poems from things that have been recorded in one of my writing journals, whether it’s a bit of conversation, an image, some bit of syntax or musical phrase, an odd detail—every poem requiring something different, which is all the more exciting.
SBD
For me, the first poem, “Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot,” acts as the front door to the house of all the poems in the book. The speaker is examining the sculpture of a boy “not pulling,/rather, about to pull,/ the thorn finally out.” At what point in assembling Previously Owned did you choose this poem as a frontispiece and why?
NM
I think a lot about the structure of the book when assembling. In fact, I kind of obsess over structure at both the micro and macro levels. “Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot” was first published in April 2018, not too long after the publication of Scale, my debut collection. At that time, I had no idea the poem would be included in the collection, let alone open it, but it certainly makes sense. Deciding that the poem would open the collection came much later in the assembly process, once I had much more of what would comprise the collection. The poem, to my mind, sets expectations for the reader as to major concerns of the collection, though it doesn’t necessarily name any of the important players. I appreciate when opening poems operate in such a way, personally.
SBD
Let’s hear you read, “Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot.”
SBD
Many of the poems seem to exist in this liminal space on a continuum somewhere between pain and relief of pain. Is there something about this in between space that is important to your creative process? Does the writing of a poem in any way relieve the pain?
NM
I don’t know that the writing of poems “relieve[s]” the pain, so to speak, though the acts of writing and revision can certainly be cathartic. Poet francine j. harris put it really well once in saying, “there’s no good way to erase what transpired through writing.” It doesn’t go away. It’s still there, even if soothed for a moment, which can be wonderful, and feel like relief, to be sure. Perhaps I’m trying, in some way, to write myself out of pain, which might necessitate starting somewhere in the midst of it? I don’t know. I am curious, however, with my fascination with pain — my pain or, more culturally speaking, Black pain—and the impulse to put it on display. It’s something I am writing through in prose as well.
SBD
“Naming” comes up as an issue in many of the poems which look at “naming” from many different angles. Can you describe the heft of that concept? It seems to me that there is some essence or beauty of the thing or person that is diminished by naming, but there is also the desire or necessity to name?
NM
That’s interesting. While I recognize there are certainly poems that make mention of “naming,” I don’t know that I fully considered how many, ha ha! Well, I’ll say this: in general, poets are interested in taxonomy, in classification, which requires attention, noticing. And naming is a significant part of that, to my mind. In her poem, “Look,” Solmaz Sharif begins, “It matters what you call a thing.” I believe that. Inasmuch as language can obscure and blur, it can also illuminate and reveal. And there is a power associated with naming, to be sure. A way of exercising or enacting dominion. In Previously Owned, naming can cause harm, but not naming can also cause harm. Race, which the collection at turns interrogates, we know, is a social fiction, though the naming of it, the creation of categorizations, established difference, tiers, hierarchy. And we’ve been wrestling with the implications of such naming ever since. These many permutations of naming, of what a thing is called, and how naming can create context, authority, or disenfranchisement, are what I’m interested in. The many vantages of what appears, on its surface, to be a simple act.
SBD
Can you talk about your alliterative and assonantal clusters and how they come to be? Do they occur unconsciously or consciously or as a mixture of the two? How do you see them functioning in terms of the way the poem is taken in by the reader?
NM
Many of those clusters you describe arrived unconsciously. But I’m also someone who reads aloud when composing, and certainly when revising. Reading aloud, you can hear places where the sonic texture of the poem isn’t as rich or tight in places, or where the rhythm or prosody hitches. My aim, in highlighting sonic clusters (alliteratively or via assonance) is to draw the reader’s attention to certain sounds or, in some cases, to signal difference, when the poem veers away.
SBD
For example, in “Mafia Myth,” are you drawing attention to violence with the alliterative title and then the “gist” and “pistol”? And still more attention to the violence with “whichever wound”? All the earlier-mentioned roles described in the poem do not play with sound in this way as far as I can tell.
In the next poem, “The Country” you have “miss” and “hissing” early on which sonically connect with “gist” and “pistol” in “Mafia Myth.” Was that intentional or am I way off base?
NM
I appreciate the manner in which you read sonic patterns across poems, which I don’t know always happens with readers. I certainly intended to highlight violence, and “urban” violence in particular with the poem, but the game Mafia is also about deception and secrecy and negotiation; it’s an us versus them game, a game in which violence is inflicted and it must be collectively determined by whom. Who is bad? Who gets to say? All of those things were moving around in my head as I drafted and revised that poem. I like that you’ve read “Mafia Myth” alongside “The Country,” which also muses on cities (L.A., New York), however, less about the violence within them, though I suppose one could read a city’s condition, the things the speaker pays attention to, as communicating a kind of violence — what (or who) is thrown out, left in disrepair?
SBD
Yes, exactly. The violence of the city condition is linked to the actual violence in the “Mafia Myth” poem merely through sound.
NM
Much of the pastoral emphasis in the collection is really about troubling the tradition, which has largely been approached and taught from a very male and white lens. From that perspective, the natural world is a kind, amenable place of rest, respite, relaxation, and perhaps it may be, but the perspective doesn’t take others into account. Most certainly not the perspectives of Black, brown, or Indigenous people.
SBD
Yes, a kind of violence to the Black psyche in these pastoral settings.
Many of your poems have a rhetorical structure that uses an evolving repetition. For example, in the first poem, “Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot,” you have “Nothing,” “Nothing,” “Again,” “Again,” “So what,” “So what,” “And what,” and “What good.” Can you talk about how these rhetorical structures evolve? Maybe give an example?
NM
It probably goes without saying, or it should, that I love repetition, and I love repetition for the wide variety of effects it can create or enact in a poem, from providing rhetorical shifts to organizational blueprints. In “Boy Pulling a Thorn…,” which you reference, the instances you point out accomplish several things at once (at least to my mind): the repetition of diction at once creates a visual and syntactic rhyme that creates a certain expectation that is, perhaps, subverted? One can hope. But the repetition of diction also provides opportunities for rhetorical shifts as well which, again, are concerned with movement and managing reader expectation. I also work on how the repetitions are shown visually on the page which helps create expectation.
Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot
Small enough
to cradle. Caught
in the act of concentration,
you see it, chiseled there,
his bronze body curled into
a question
mark, not pulling,
rather, about to pull,
the thorn finally out.
Nothing original here.
Nothing new.
Marble, quartz—the old
masters have, for ages now,
sculpted this scene—you’ve seen
it—and here you
are, looking.
Again the little boy.
Again his insistent
grief. So what
some exhibits in the museum
have already gone
dark? So what
others have moved on
to new rooms? Left
you comfortless,
with your notepad
and pen. And what
have you learned from
standing here so long
examining pain? No
matter how ancient.
What good
has it done you?
The thorn, thrumming
still. He almost
has it now. So close.
Step back, the guard
warns, his one job
to enforce the distance
necessary, which might be called
perspective, though
not yet.
Previously Owned, copyright 2022 Nathan McClain. Printed with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
SBD
You’re not talking about syntactic rhyme, you’re talking about spatial patterns right? You’re talking how the words appear on the page?
NM
Well, I think syntax too, in terms of just the order in which the information is given. Let’s take a “So what” moment. “So what some exhibits in the museum have already gone dark.”
SBD
Which you know the speaker doesn’t really mean. It is ironic.
NM
Right. So, you get that. And too, there’s a pattern that gets established with the “Again” and “Again,” and then we have the additional repetition of, “So what?” “So what?”’ Which I think also, along with the fact that this is a poem in tercets, allows for a lot of very quick and complicated movement throughout the poem. Additionally, “So what? Others have moved on to new rooms.” Of course, stanza means room so there is that play as well.
SBD
Yes. Hop, hop, hop.
Can I just ask you about one line break that I really loved, “So what? Others have moved on to new rooms, left,” and then that line break, “You, comfortless.” The line break really blew me away. So affective.
NM
I appreciate that. That was one of those moves when the “So what(s)” have set up a certain expectation. It’s a surprise because it follows both of these independent clauses, both of these interrogatives, really with a fragment that breaks the rhythm. We’ve got the exhibits, we’ve got the rooms, and it’s steadily moving closer and closer to the interior space of the self.
SBD
That’s really smart. So what you’re saying is the repetition holds it together so you can jump locales from outside the speaker to inside the speaker, because those stepping stones exist?
NM
Yes, exactly. There’s a way in which the repetition helps us to push further within. Even with the “Nothing original,” “Nothing new.” I was thinking about Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” when I was writing this poem, “About suffering, they were never wrong.”
You’re right, though, that I often utilize repetition rhetorically. A similar rhetorical structure occurs in “The Sentence,” which appears in the middle section of the collection. The repetition of diction in that poem is rhetorical in that it advances the poem’s larger argument, the poem moving from a kind of innocent observation to something filled with more menace. The repetition of “the sentence” shifts in meaning as the poem progresses, from a syntactic arrangement of language to a unit of punishment or judgment. The simple imperative “Track the sentence…” shifting to the more dangerous “tracking” of individuals. I find repetition most engaging and interesting when the repeated phrase or word shifts in how the reader ascribes meaning to it due to all that has happened between said instances of repetition.
The Sentence
begins with its subject,
which is a sentence.
Track the sentence
To find out what happens
or how it will act. It is
the subject, after all. To track,
meaning keep an eye on,
which is synecdoche,
part representing the whole
of a thing. One
may track a package if he pleases,
One may track a person,
though you’d probably want
the whole of him, not only
an eye, or perhaps
only an eye. Look how
the sentence is so capable
of embracing contraction.
A him may function
As a subject, but that depends
upon the sentence, i.e., A man
is subject to his sentence.
You understand.
Such syntax renders it like
a package showing evidence
of having been tampered with—
Previously Owned, copyright 2022 Nathan McClain. Printed with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
SBD
Your poems have such wonderful and surprising turns. As an example, “In the Country,” once you have set up the things you will not miss, you get to the “pink slip /pinned beneath your windshield wiper/ fluttering, the way sadness flutters.” The set up makes the metaphoric turn feel earned.
NM
Thank you for these kind observations about my work. There are several thoughts I have about turns in poems. For one, I am always interested in the manner by which a poem can generate and manage tension; one of the best methods of handling tension is via counterbalance, something that pulls against the established structure of the poem. “The Country,” for instance, is, up until the moment you signal, primarily structured via detail, the speaker simply conveying quite literal information. Once image, or figuration, enters the poem, a shift occurs. Image, to my mind, is about access and interiority. The reader is invited to read the earlier details differently, to gain a new understanding of the poem’s speaker who, despite what he says, not only clearly “misses” the city but also a version of the self tied to the city.
SBD
Can you talk about and give some examples of line breaks you worked particularly hard on? Can you elucidate a couple of these? I found your line breaks to be full of surprises, mini turns in the poems ….
NM
I personally enjoy when a poem’s information unfolds dramatically, and for me, enjambment is one of the ways that’s accomplished, as the details accumulate and build. Our goal, as readers, is to see the entirety of the poem at once; the challenge, of course, is that we read sequentially, line by line. Here are a couple examples of enjambment I thought quite carefully about:
In the poem “Moths,” the lines, in describing the moths, read: “How could they / know better–the moon, tonight, so full // of confusion. Believe me, / I know.” I love managing and subverting a reader’s expectations in a poem, and I feel as though the “confusion” performs the work of subverting expectation.
Another instance, and perhaps I’m thinking about this poem because I read it for our conversation, is the close of “The World is Full.” The poem closes: “I believed // I could save them, or that saving them / meant I loved them, that my love was good // for something.” Once again, I feel as though enjambment creates and disrupts expectation, shifts the poem’s meaning. It introduces yet another surprise.
SBD
How the past haunts the present in “Where the View Was Clearer” and “The World is Full.” Could you read, “Where the View Was Clearer” for us now? Can you talk a little about the relationship of past and present in your poems?
NM
“Where the View Was Clearer
Previously Owned, copyright 2022 Nathan McClain. with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
“Where the View Was Clearer” moves between two specific landscapes: some of the idyllic natural landscape of Western Massachusetts and the lower desert landscape of Joshua Tree, CA. As perhaps mentioned in another response, I am interested, in a number of poems in this collection, in troubling the pastoral, of challenging the manner by which it is considered as we bring more perspectives and lived experiences into the conversation. Is the pastoral landscape inherently safe, beautiful, and restorative to all who enter them? Where might dangers lurk within the psyche, our collective memory? These are among the questions these poems wish to consider. And as a Black poet, personal and individual memory isn’t the only memory that haunts me, especially as aspects of American History, what is true of it, what we’re allowed to remember or learn or pursue, is scrutinized, limited, or censored. The degree to which we want to change the present of our nation is the degree to which we have to come to terms with the history of the nation. I believe that, and I believe my poems want to reckon with that history and its lingering effects.
SBD
Can you talk about how we humans process and cope with trauma in “The World Is Full”?
NM
“The World Is Full”.
Previously Owned, copyright 2022 Nathan McClain. Printed with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
Yeah. I mean, the events of that poem were absolutely taken out of real lived experiences. My wife and I had given a reading out at a friend’s reading series. We stayed overnight with them, and then the next morning we were just all having breakfast and getting ready to leave and I’m looking out and I see this thing just in the yard, and it was around that same time that we were getting a story from our friend’s son about these active shooter drills that they were doing at their school. I think that’s what ended up happening, why I had to take up so much space on the page with the poem, was the process of figuring out what in the world these two things were doing there. There’s this way in which those things just wove into each other. That’s the gift or the magic of the poem. These things arriving together are the gift, and me figuring out how they work with one another is an entirely different thing. This poem challenged me, though, because as well as this idea of processing or moving through or even negotiating trauma, there is this moment in which there is the admittance of delighting in the fact that it’s not your trauma but someone else’s trauma.
SBD
Another quality of your work…You’re not afraid to have the poems be spare, and you’re asking the reader to pay attention, in a way, by the way they’re lined up. I just love that.
NM
I appreciate your saying so, because that’s one of the things that I’m constantly talking to my students about: one of our primary jobs as writers and as poets is paying attention and that is what you are asking someone else to do when they enter your work.
SBD
What other projects are you working on now, Nathan?
NM
A book of essays that are a hybrid in subject matter, somewhere between craft and literary and cultural criticism. They are often situated in some sort of personal narrative that’s really thinking about current everyday sorts of events, be it a presidential election, be it violent, anti-Black racism and violence to nature. I’ve been working on a number of those. I’m writing this one now that I presented in part at AWP that’s thinking about the necessity of Black art and about the necessity of Black art for Black artists, as well as the necessity of Black art for a white audience. And how those two things wed themselves together.
I have written at least a couple of poems. The one that I’m sort of working on now, though, just off and on working on, is one that actually has to do with when my wife and I were living in Chicago recently. We rented this community garden space, a nice sized plot. We grew a bunch of food on it.
So, it’s a poem that’s kind of beginning to meditate on that whole process of my own negotiation of what it’s been like to work in a field that’s not yours as well, work in a field that’s rented, as opposed to now. We have a garden in our backyard, but we actually bought the house as opposed to renting a plot.
I think my writing about being a parent is definitely going to enter into this poem that I’m working on. And I’m curious as to how it’s going to show up in other work. It certainly has shown up in my essay writing. I wrote this essay that I’m still revising a bit, a craft essay on the art of sustained attention. It opens with this meditation on buying a house and doing projects and all these other things. But particularly thinking about, there was a moment when my daughter was sitting on the floor in our kitchen, and she’s got this little French fry magnet, and she’s sticking it to the refrigerator and then pulling it off and putting it under, or putting it underneath the dishwasher, taking it back off, back onto the front, and she did this for like an hour. So, I was just like, “This kind of attention, how do we enact that in a piece of writing?”
SBD
And circling back to Previously Owned one last time, can you talk a little about the group of poems called, “They said I was an alternate?” Did they come to you as an immediate series? How were they born?
NM: That sequence came as a result of a jury trial in New York that I happened to be selected as a juror for; however, not one of the 12 — an alternate juror, a role I’d never inhabited before. I actually didn’t think or intend to write about it; it just kept presenting itself to me, though in a way I hadn’t necessarily approached poems before, so I was suspicious of them. Initially, I tried the poem as a singular long poem, but that didn’t quite work for the kinds of pivots it seemed to require. So, they arrived piecemeal, surprising me at every turn. It was an intoxicating sequence to work on, particularly as I explored the various absurdities of the criminal justice system as well as the manner by which I have embraced its narrative, or been complicit in perpetuating it.
SBD
I don’t know if you’re willing to answer this or not, but which poems in the book, Previously Owned, do you feel most proud of or have the most heft in your psyche? You know?
NM
Yeah. I love that.
I would say the one I can say right off the bat that I really love and I’m very proud of is the poem “The Ferry.” That one just surprised me at every turn. It’s the first sestina that I think I’ve ever written that I felt was really successful.
SBD
What was really interesting to me, and I haven’t read this one in a while, but if I’m remembering it correctly, is this sort of being in love with loneliness and being in love with love at the same time, and those two coming up against each other in this really interesting way, manifest in how you describe the ferry. I don’t know if I’m off base.
NM
No, no. I think, no, that’s exactly right, because one of the questions that this book wants to ask, shows up towards the end of the book. I touch on it in the poem, “Love Elegy.” There is this question. What would I do as a writer if I were just supremely happy? There’s one thing to write out of misery. But what happens when you find happiness?
SBD
Maybe that will be a theme in your next book. We could go on and on, but…
NM
I’m so grateful for how closely and generously you’ve read this collection. Thank you for this conversation.
SBD
It has been an honor and complete pleasure, Nathan!
Nathan McClain is the author of two collections of poetry—Previously Owned (2022), which was longlisted for the 23rd annual Massachusetts Book Award, and Scale (2017)—both from Four Way Books, a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a graduate from the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Plume Poetry Anthology 10, The Common, Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, and Zocalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.
