Amanda Newell

Weird, Wild, and Fabulous: James Allen Hall |
In Conversation with Amanda Newell

 

AN: James, thank you for joining us here at Plume—I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation! But first, some congratulations are in order. This has been a pretty exciting year for you in poetry already. You just won a Pushcart Prize, you were recently awarded a Civitella Ranieri fellowship in Italy, and—and!—earlier this year, you received another National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Poetry. Such exciting news!

 

You received your first NEA grant in 2011, and you’ve said it helped you complete your latest collection of poetry, Romantic Comedy (2023), which went on to win the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry. Can you tell me what the recent grant means to you, particularly at this incredibly precarious political moment?

 

 

JAH: I’m so glad to be in conversation with you, Amanda! The NEA literature fellowship’s ultimate meaning really was: keep going. Keep writing. There’s so much in this world that wants to silence people at the margins, particularly now at a time when queer and particularly trans and gender nonconforming folks are under attack. The fact that 5 other poets and poetry-lovers gathered in a room and found work worthy is an honor. Most of the poems in my application came from my most recent book. And publishing Romantic Comedy wasn’t easy–it took a long time for it to find the right screeners, contest judge, and press. It’s a book about the cisheteronormative patriarchal scripts that we (or at least I) unthinkingly internalize. That toxic rulebook.

 

Queer people have to reinvent their lives because our histories are erased, outlawed. Romantic Comedy is a queer book that was not written for a straight audience (though of course it doesn’t exclude them). The years and years it took to publish were ones of self-doubt and second-guessing, and, yes, of persevering. I’d almost given up on it when a friend and editor extraordinaire, Miguel Murphy, offered to read it–and his suggestions electrified and transformed the poems. I’m so grateful to him (and his incredible poems).

 

 

AN: What shifted for you—that is, what was it that “electrified and transformed the poems”—or transformed your approach to them?  Can we talk about the importance of having a few good and trusted readers?

 

 

JAH: Just being able to see how the manuscript was landing for a smart reader was helpful. Sometimes you can’t see outside the storm of your own making. Miguel helped to clarify for me what I was after and where I was falling short in the pursuit of argument and emotion (which I think maybe are the same thing).

 

Trusted readers are very important–and for everything, not just books or individual pieces that you finish. It’s so hard to select 10 poems to send with a grant application, or to know how to navigate some academic and nonprofit grant spaces. A trusted reader can help to encourage you and to quiet those voices that tell us (too much, too often) we’re not going to win, we don’t deserve to even apply, shouldn’t we just go clean our kitchen, be useful with our time? We often trust our friends to tell us the truth we can’t see just yet–and it’s because of these friendships and readerships that we grow.

 

 

AN: These friendships and readerships do help us keep going, do encourage us to, as you say, “keep making” and doing what we’re called to do. This is a point you recently discussed with Brenda Hillman in one of your always-brilliant episodes of Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast, which you co-host with the poet Aaron Smith. In your conversation with her, you and Aaron spoke a lot about artistic freedom and the importance of “doing the thing . . .  your soul is calling for.” I know I needed to hear that, especially now.

 

What was it that inspired your podcast, and can you tell me what it has meant to you in terms of building community? I’d also like to follow up on the idea of doing, as artists, what we’re called to do. Can we dig a little more into what it is you feel called to do? I mean, you touch on this when you say that “[q]ueer people have to reinvent their lives because our histories are erased, outlawed.” What was it—or maybe who was it—that first called you to poetry?

 

 

JAH: Maybe there is a little blessing in encountering an erasing force–you learn who you are, and what you’re capable of overcoming to claim it. It turns out, suppressing yourself can cost your life–which is why we see astronomically higher self-harm, drug abuse, and mental illness incidence rates among queer populations than in cisheterosexual counterparts.

 

I love Brenda Hillman’s poems because they follow their calling. There’s a precision in her work that rides the same carriage as her genius thinking. I think along for the ride is also her love of (and gift for) pyrotechnic language. I get the feeling, reading her, that uniqueness isn’t the goal–it’s a byproduct of wrestling with the questions that haunt her. (Maybe that’s a way of saying what an identity is….)

 

Breaking Form was Aaron Smith’s idea–I resisted it for so long! I didn’t need another thing in my life, I kept saying. I was wrong: I absolutely needed to make space for poetry. My day job is  teaching and directing a literary center at a college, and while I love the work I am privileged to do on behalf of my students at the Rose O’Neill Literary House, it is both deeply rewarding and capable of swallowing me whole. Breaking Form gave me back the space for thinking about and writing poetry. Plus, it’s so much fun–we’re irreverent in our 30-minute episodes. I describe the podcast as a quickie in a cheap motel with a fabulous library. We’ve interviewed Carl Phillips, Diane Seuss, Brenda Shaughnessy, Edmund White, and others. We’ve cried on the show; talked about censorship and book bans. I guess poetry for me is always about community–my work wants your work and wants a country of other poets to be in conversation, to expand space for what might be possible, aesthetically and socially.

Poetry is a liberatory force that resists the ways we aren’t free, pushes back against things like compulsory cisheterosexuality, and lets us be our weird, wild, fabulous selves.

 

 

AN: And I loved loved loved your recent episode, too, on Anne Sexton, who is such an important poet to me. I remember listening as a teenager to a cassette tape recording—a cassette tape!—of her reading “Ringing the Bells” and being absolutely haunted and mesmerized by it. She’s also how I first learned what a palindrome is. Do you remember “RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR” from The Death Notebooks? I’m digressing, I know. But I’ll say it again for our readers: if you aren’t listening to Breaking Form, you really are missing something. I mean, who doesn’t need a quickie in a cheap hotel with a fabulous library?

 

We’ve been talking poetry, of course, but I have secretly and very selfishly been looking forward to talking to you about your prose, too. Your collection of lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well (Cleveland State 2017) was the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2016 Essay Collection Competition and also won the 2018 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose Nonfiction.

I listed your book in a 2020 Plume issue as one of my favorite reads of that year. Here’s part of what I said:

 

The book is a series of nine essays, each of which is broken into smaller chunks of prose that are sometimes numbered, sometimes not, and which suggests a kind of compartmentalization—as though by scrutinizing the individual facets of our traumas, we can transform those parts, and maybe those parts of ourselves, into something more whole.

 

I also said I think poets make the best memoirists, and I still believe that. I was really struck (obviously) by the structure and arc of your collection. What was your approach to putting the collection together? In what ways was it similar (or not) to arranging a collection of poems?

 

 

JAH: I love writing essays because the form is itself meditative and can gather various strands while also making leaps, pressing the materials or subjects into surprising interpretive avenues. The trick is always the cohering and shaping force, which is what holds a poem together too. I like to think about unities, and queer ways of making them: rather than place, time, or action (Aristotle’s greatest hits), what other ways can a writer create pattern and wholeness? Compartments, like any hideaways, are queer structures–they keep you safe when you need them, but then also offer a podium from which to announce yourself.

 

I wasn’t really aware I was writing a book. I just enjoyed writing essays and published a bunch over a decade or so. When I finally put them together in the same document, I saw that they spoke to each other, like a mixtape. Various voices coming together to declaim different shades of emotion or to follow various vectors of thought around one thing. For me, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well needed to rough up timelines, though the collection does open with the first essay I wrote and ends with the most recent; but the arc must be emotional, just as the trauma survivor’s allegiance is not to the sweep of time (which is erasing and destroying) but to the eternity of the fragment (which is better thought of as a kind of wholeness anyway).  Each essay is its own world; you leave the world and land on another planet.

 

Which means that the first essay has a different job to do: here’s the map, here’s the guide, now buckle up. And the last essay is tasked with concluding work: what is the synthesis, past summary? I was composing the last essay as the last essay in a manuscript, and so at the end of it, I thought: so what will this mean as a capstone gesture? Conclusions, anyway, force you to enlarge the concerns of the project, and I like to use the “self” as a way to lay bare the layers of power that made that self. As in, here’s the reality for which we have no words, here’s the reality which is outlawed, here’s the time Sinead O’Connor ripped up a photo of the pope, here’s the time Prince shook his bare asscheeks on MTV, here’s a birth certificate where I was named X and engendered XY. All those occurrences marching together under one banner named James. I think making a book is a lot like that. You style and style, until your trying becomes your style.

 

 

AN: I love what you say about “the eternity of the fragment,” and I want to dwell on this for a moment, and your observation that a fragment can be “better thought of as a kind of wholeness.” In “Wholly Fragmented,” which appears in the spring issue of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, you write that “[p]oets love thinking about fragments,” because, as you put it, poets are accustomed to thinking about line breaks. I suppose that thinking about what’s breaking or broken is one way of navigating the ruptures in our own lives and in the world, no?

 

Could you speak to the ways in which you see the fragment as persisting in ways that time does not, particularly in the context of trauma? I’m also really curious to know whether the impulse to write “a poem” or “a lyric essay” is clear to you from the outset. Sometimes it’s not for me, and I find myself drafting multiple versions of essentially the same thing with different approaches—to lineation and/or chunks of prose. How is it for you?

 

 

JAH: The essayist and poet Jehanne Dubrow says that trauma-engaged writing “can become an extremely insular, oppressive undertaking. This is particularly true when the poet focuses on crafting pieces that mirror the experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, poems of the flashback, dissociative poems, poems that mimic the mind’s inability to look away from a litany of repeating, catastrophic images. Poems that represent trauma as if the event were happening right now can feel terrifyingly immediate as well.” (Dubrow’s craft essay “On Trauma and Taking Good Care” offers helpful tips about self-care when writing psychically sharp subjects–it can be found here).

 

Trauma exists self-contained in a parallel, surrounding narrative that knows it exists. But trauma pretends it doesn’t know anything else exists. For instance, on the day I was raped, I also saw Dr. Ruth in an elevator, I drank a beer in a bar with a friend, and someone offered to take me on a bike ride. It was a beautiful day in New York. But the traumatic event soaks up the spotlight: in memory, the beer in a bar called Pieces, the Dr. Ruth sighting–they want to remember they occurred on different days.

 

Trauma fragments, acts as if it is not part of a whole, because it is also atemporal, refusing to fit together under narrative constructs. It makes us reconsider what a “whole” is, because quite possibly those were two or three different days, those experiences. “I contain multitudes,” etc.

 

What is kind of great about that is: my happiness exists unstained. It is a whole part of me as well. There’s something about writing the fragment, and treating it as a whole that gestures outside of itself, that is important to me.

I think I maybe said it better in the essay that Assay published: “I want to argue that there is a history to trauma, though trauma wants us to think about it as a fragment: a one-off, an isolated and isolating occurrence. To think intergenerationally about sexual assault is a kind of recovery, since thinking about the pattern that is rape culture makes you realize that it’s not (just) the rapist which your work presses back against. In retelling the story of my assault and its aftermath, order is never chronological—it isn’t the sentence that helps my rape to make sense. It is the fragmenting: the order was always emotional, not intellectual.”

 

The shaping force of the trauma calls out for other patterns. I wrote the essay about being raped (“being” is such a weird verb there! – I want to fragment it!) and then I remembered the beer I drank with my friend. I don’t know if I would have remembered, though, had the bar been named something other than what it was: Pieces. To connect pieces, pull them into orbit with each other, is a lyrical methodology, not a narrative one. The fragment suggests a way for us to craft and to consider. And to cope. As Dubrow says in that essay I quoted above, “Self-care can be the poem, too—our mourning given sound and sense—and all the small steps we take to write it.”

I’m sorry I’ve gone on–and I haven’t even answered your question about genre!

 

 

AN: But what you’re saying here is so important—and incredibly helpful for anyone who is writing from trauma, even if they’re not necessarily writing about it. I’m glad you mention Dubrow’s essay. I mean, we’ve said this in so many different ways already, but trauma is such a destructive, obliterative force. One’s “self” isn’t exactly entirely gone. More like blasted into fragments, no? And so the re-making of the self—or should I say re-forming of the self?—must, it must involve the kind of self-care you and Dubrow are talking about.

 

 

JAH: Form and re-form is a great way to think about selfhood and about genre, too! I think genre is just the holding vessel for a question. Like: you enter a room and there’s a glass vase on a podium in the center. The vase is the genre. What’s in the vase motivates you entering.

 

I think a poem can take multiple looks at a thing (certainly that’s the structure of one sonnet variable, with its 3 arguments about a subject that roughly correspond to two sestets and closing couplet). But usually if what’s in the vase wants various multiplicities, I think that triggers the essay genre for me.

 

I almost always know before I write a piece what genre it will be, but I also refuse the piece for a long time–in other words, if something occurs to me to write, I will log the idea, maybe even jot it down, but I’ll let it go. If it doesn’t come back: it wasn’t meant to be written. If it knocks again, and again, then I know I have to write it. It comes with urgency. It whittles itself down. It brings friends with it for the sleepover/orgy.

 

I’ll say one more thing about multiplicity–I realize I’ve been vague and I prefer to be helpful. If a question or problem wants me to bring in multiple tones, multiple vantage points, multiple points of views, multiple time periods (or to collapse many time periods into parallel presents), multiple kinds of documents or experiences beyond the personal–then I know I have an essay on my hands. It’s like walking into that room, but when you open the door, there are other doors into the room, and you’re opening them too. The poem has one door, even if it exits through a window it has carved for itself.

 

 

 

The Dream I Have After My Rapist Views My Online Dating Profile

 

I’m one of many women at the cocktail party,
dressed our identical goddess-best, the room
is museum-cold. We are preserved. Paraded
in halter dresses, our clavicles bared, scimitars
half-sunken in our skin.
 
A choral roar, then men invade the room.
 
Some of us fight back. Some can say she used
a stiletto to hollow a throat.
 
Survivors are sat in a line on stage for the presser.
Red shreds of duchesse satin shine like entrails
in the lights. The enemy is defeated, the sheriff
who looks like my rapist says, aiming his gun
as we’re loaded into a cart.
 
Once on the scaffold, we are handed scripts
to memorize. If each of us complies, they promise
to let one of us live. The last line: Pardon me, sir,
I did not mean to do it!  I step indelicately but
 
not accidentally on a guard’s boot, twist
my heel to blacken his toe. I say all the words
 
minus sir. I wake on this gleaming side
of the guillotine, in my safer male body. And
if, on the other side, they are missing a rope,
a gun, a coven of women practicing kill
shots, tying the death-knots, look here
in my mouth that once was held open.
 
You can search, but I have built no exit.

 

 

 

“Employee of the Month”
—The Sopranos, S3 E4

 

You’re not using the cane anymore,
Tony says. His hand mimes balance,
a blunt object. Even I can see
the irony of a tender mob boss.
 
Dr. Melfi’s bruised face lights,
then remembers the lie she’s told:
car accident. Not: A man raped me
in the stairwell after our last appointment.
 
Tony waves his new blue notebook,
reprobate reformed. Good, Melfi offers
a wan smile. Tony crosses his legs.
An engine is refusing to start.
 
I been thinking about your behavioral therapy idea.
If they can help me, maybe I should go there.
Her eyes hide a grimace in her lap.
The creases won’t undo. Even when
she says No,
 
her voice is like pulling a knife free from
a pink raw thing thawing on a kitchen table.
 
What a shortage there is of refusals
which mean Stay, or Your comfort is
a bruise I will live with, but Melfi wants
to swallow it back. A cry, instead.
 
What’s a matter? Tony pounces to her side.
Under the bruise, the truth is beginning
to capitulate. What did I do? he asks.
Don’t I want to kiss him for knowing
he is if not the god of hurt, at least
its cruelest prophet? He takes her hand
 
in his, utterly unlike a lover.
 
What she wants she can’t say. Instead,
she issues commands: Go sit over there.
We’ll do this. Tony complies,
 
his mind working yellow through to
purple. It’s just my knee. They lock eyes.
 
You want to say something, Tony says, almost glad
to flex, to steel, now he’s shown his tenderness.
 
Melfi considers. She could make Tony her attack
animal; together, they could inflict, extort;
they could mete, subject and strike; they could
pummel, punch, cuff, slug, and would it not
feel right, feel good to make the man take it,
hammer, pipe, axehandle, brick, bat? To take
all of that and go to some deserted dirt grave?
 
 No,
Melfi says, her snarl
surprising even herself,
making it true once
again: what a man cannot
take by force
will only be surrendered.

 

 

 

Prayer for Anal Douching
after Williams

 

So much depends
upon
a red douche bag,
glazed
under shower spray,
dependably
carting the body’s
refuse,
clearing the cave
mouth. Lord,
a month of gutters since
this temple
was cockwarmed. My
empire
is emptiness, the unbuilt
of delight. I
was a better I burrowed
into, opened:
rimmed halo, spill of white
blooms
to where earth waits,
curled tongue
begging for its fuckfill
of god.

 

 

 

We Lived Where the Patuxent Nature Preserve Starts or Ends

 

The summer I spend evenings shredding
the poplar’s red catkins, staining my hands
to externalize the guilt, I find the dead
white cat under my porch, his stomach
hollowed, the others feeding on his body
won’t scare off. By August, he’s an outline
of bones in his last bed. It tries, but place
can’t usurp time. The neighbor couple
liked to say: Perkins doesn’t belong to us;
we belong to him. I wince when care is
surrendered like that. In eleven states
in this country, a doctor can help you
to die. After the catkins, I knocked down
hornet nests, I drowned ant colonies.
They swarmed me in justice. Summer,
two years since the diagnosis, and death
thoughts that don’t leave me, a summer
eased by beauty’s easy ruin. It would fight
harder to stay if it was meant to last,
I reckon. Who will I be without
these kind of days is what I will remember
thinking during these days, and though
by then I will be able to, I will not
count them to know how many good
ones we had together. I was always the type
of ex-lover who laid the man’s suits
on his bed carefully, then poured bleach
on each one. If I could tell what’s coming,
I would insist: dusk is outlawed
memory returning from the future,
shaking its bony finger at me,
asking how could I help you die.

 

 

 

The Minutes

 

Brief rain, ending. June steam rising
off asphalt. Too many speed breaks
on the campus road. Two weeks and
three days after my father died. Slightly
late to an important meeting. The dean
of buildings. The truth was I wanted
to miss the meeting as much as I missed
my dad. Grief locks you inside and
outside of time, the same minute. Like
a campus’s oxidized statues, time stilled,
galleried. An arts college in a town
which once was the geographic center
of the colonies. Brief rain waking up
gasoline, magnolia from sleep, new
again. I’d never smelled the loudness
of the earth’s residues like that. You mustn’t
believe in the nobility of only sensing
the world when mourning. That’s what
I was telling myself about everything,
including how inappropriately I was
dressed for the meeting, wearing
the same pants I wore to my father’s
funeral two weeks earlier. June emptied
campus. Making town fuller, or maybe
emptying the people from their homes
for walks on the lush green. With dogs.
It is a dog town after all. It was theirs
to inherit now. They could piss on all
the blooms they liked. I was going slow.
Late to a meeting we’d been delaying
about renovating the center I directed.
I’d texted apologies. I’m never late.
Everyone knew my father died; they
looked at me in that news through clear
plastic tarp. Near Harder Hall a thin
it’s-wrong-to-call-it-fog lifting
out of the dark road some furred animal,
launching itself up in the air then back
to the asphalt which was steaming,
trying to believe it was the surface
of another planet altogether.
Where did the energy of my father’s
dying take him? How far could it fuel?
The year was 2015 and no one knew
what was coming next for human
history. We live in different air now.
Of course. Brief rain, driving
the campus road, late, but not hurrying,
and late in the world, too, but you can’t
think that way and present budget slides
to principal allocators. I’d had, maybe,
enough life. Even brief. The animal was
a squirrel, in delight, I thought, twisting
its small body up into the air trying perhaps
to catch vapor, as if to smell its dissolving.
My father laughed once, then died,
in my mother’s report of that night. Fourteen
days ago. I want to convert it into seconds
because the number is bigger, gives off
the steam impression of a more capacious
economy. A strong laugh, then nothing
on the walkie talkie she kept in their separate
bedrooms, in the house she moved him to,
without warning from Houston, driving
quickly to Indiana, years ago now. When
the squirrel stopped jumping it just lay down
asleep. Not asleep. What I was watching
the squirrel achieve was not after all joy.
I stopped in my body too sudden, my knee
pitching, the folder flying, raining
projections all over the green lawn. June,
my father burned. Ashes sifting, then divided.
A funeral I sat in the midst of angry, quiet,
like I do in important meetings, daring
not to prolong them. It was the first absence
to wear his name. This ground’s called campus
for two hundred years now, but it’s told
other histories and wore better names.
It will again. You can’t think like that
and keep your father’s death singular.
I’m sorry I’m late but there was a squirrel
dying in the parking lot, I said, coming into
a crucial meeting with an esteemed dean,
surrounded by consequential characters,
a meeting of vital case, the minutes of which
I am submitting here,

 

 

 

photo credit: Claudio Cricco

James Allen Hall is the author of two books of poetry and a book of lyric essays: Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas, 2008), Romantic Comedy (Four Way Books, 2023), and I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2017). They are the recipient of 2011 and 2025 Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Maryland State Arts Council. Recent work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Boulevard, and The Adroit Journal, which published a poem that will appear in Best American Poetry 2025 and in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Along with poet Aaron Smith, James cohosts Breaking Form: A Poetry and Culture Podcast. Find them online at www.jamesallenhall.com