The Language between Worlds: A Conversation with Poet Carlie Hoffman
By Nina Reljić
What does it mean to occupy an “Alaska of the mind”? Is it possible to write into and against the world of your own poems? In her debut poetry collection, This Alaska, Carlie Hoffman maps a vast, sparsely populated, and glacial terrain,choosing this landscape as the place of her reckoning with her childhood, grief, suffering, love, and hope. A poet, translator, and educator, Hoffman’s honors include a 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, among others. In conversation with Nina Reljić, a Columbia MFA student, Hoffman discusses her writing methodology and how some answers exist at the bottom of an endless well.
Snow, winter, and cold climates have a significant presence in this collection. You’ve created this world in which ‘it is winter all the time.’ I took from this a sense of erasure, the brutality of a cold climate, isolation—did you have this landscape in mind when working on the collection, and what did it mean for you to write into it?
When I hear the word “snow,” the first places that come to mind are places of the mind: peace, renewal, calmness. States of being. An image that gives me a strong sense of feeling. So on the one hand, the answer is yes, I had this landscape in mind in the sense that it is part of an image that represented some kind of emotional truth the speaker in the poems was experiencing. On the other hand, I did not set out to write poems that took place in this harsh winter landscape. But rather, the person I was when I was writing these poems was able to express emotional truth in poetry as an “Alaska of the mind,” which was illustrated in this landscape.
Growing up in New Jersey where it snows, I think it’s natural to connect suffering to coldness and winter. Many people suffer from winter depression, and it’s very painful emotionally, something difficult to get through. But also, I think snow is nature’s form of temporary erasure, mainly in the sense that it obscures the familiar. To quote the final lines of Dickinson’s poem “It sifts from Leaden Sieves”: “Then stills its Artisans—like Ghosts— / Denying they have been—” Snow has a spectral quality—what we thought we knew becomes strange, ghostly. And there’s a lot of beauty in that image. Look out your window the morning after a blizzard, and the grass and pines are consumed by snow. It’s a favorite image, and one that has always made me more curious about what it means to be consumed by one’s own emotions. At first glance there’s a sense of rejuvenation and tranquility that comes over you. But then you look more closely at the pine tree covered in snow: It is erased and transfigured at the same time, which is quite luminous. If you keep looking, you begin to see something inside this image that reaches back into your psyche, and suddenly you are looking directly into your own terror.
The titles of these poems feel alive and full of character. Some are place names (harking back to the collection’s investment in place and time), and others are declarative statements, reading like lines of poetry in and of themselves. I’m curious to know how you go about titling a poem and what work you think a title could or should do.
The question of titles comes up often when I am teaching. It’s something I think many poets labor over in the dark. Titles can do so much for a poem; titles can be a framework, context, conflict, opposition; it can ground us in a place, be a catalyst, create double meaning and layers, make metaphors. Titles can conjure the spirits, like prayer. I try to title my poems based on what I think will open the poem up. I also like to be in conversation with poets I admire or nod back to the dead to keep the conversation going. For example, “To Brooklyn and Part Way Back” was inspired by Anne Sexton’s “To Bedlam and Part Way Back.” The poem “As For Me, I Used to Be a Bird” is a title inspired by the late Italian poet Alda Merini.
Binnie Kirshenbaum, who blurbs your book, points to Joseph Brodsky’s suggestion that when we encounter birds in poems, the bird is actually the poet. We assign great emotional meaning to birds, particularly their state of captivity/freedom. This Alaska, despite its glacial landscape, is a book populated with people and animals, notably birds—flying birds, sick birds, discombobulated and dismembered birds. Has that always been a theme of your work, and what is it about birds that draws you to them as a writer?
I feel like the answers to this question exist at the bottom of an endless well, which is to say that why This Alaska is so densely populated with birds is more mystery than, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins’s speaker in “The Windhover,” (whose heart undoubtedly was stirring for that bird), “the mastery of the thing!”
Just yesterday, I randomly selected a book from my shelf and, serendipitously, it happened to be Stolen Air by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, translated by Christian Wiman. In Ilya Kaminsky’s introduction to the selected poems, he writes that Mandelstam didn’t learn Greek, “[h]e intuited it. From the inarticulate comes the new harmony.” This is one place the birds in my poems come from. I intuited them, oftentimes from a dream state that is mysterious and strange to me. In many ways, I see the birds of This Alaska as the language between worlds. In the book, birds have an interdisciplinary quality; the gulls of the “Alaska” world belong to that unknown other realm belonging to the dead and their order, and in the physical world, the pigeons and herons (i.e., in the New York– and New Jersey–based poems) are a reference point for the living.
There is also a premonitory affiliation assigned to birds. For example, in literature and myth, the crow symbolizes tragedy, which, from the perspective of Greek drama, is prophetic, and tragedy is also a viewpoint of possibility toward empathy and understanding. The heron in the book can be read as emblematic of redemption, which motivates the speaker of This Alaska in her search for the light.
Your work is engrossed in the animal world that we are within, and also alongside, and sometimes in opposition to. In these poems we find flesh, gutting, skinning, trout’s spines, and sausage dangling from a thin, white string. The epigraph by Italo Calvino is an excellent entry point into the collection: ‘It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them.’ What is the collection’s relationship to butchery and meat and that strange devotion we have to dead animals?
It’s mysterious to me—that fusion of life and imagination and emotion and strangeness and music that happens from where a poem is born. When I was in college, I worked in a clothing store at the mall. I remember one winter holiday season my coworker drew a picture of a dead deer on a scrap of receipt paper. He held it up to me and said: “There’s a lot of dead deer on the road this time of year.” The conversation we had was a very beautiful moment of attention where humanity was heightened all the more, given that it happened in the middle of a retail store during America’s busiest shopping season. In fact, I think this kind of attention is a poet’s job. And it is the truth. You see a dead deer rotting along the roadside among the gas stations and big box stores. It sticks with you. So I think the collection’s relationship with dead animals has a lot to do with the fact that dead animals were literally what I saw in life. But of course it is not this simple; there’s more to it than simply seeing and holding the image in the mind when it comes to poetry. There’s always something more mysterious about the process.
I also read Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus during this time in college. Lavinia’s character totally floored me. The “dainty doe”—hunted, raped, maimed, silenced. I felt so deeply for her. Thinking about Lavinia’s story revealed to me that there was something more complex to my relationship with deer and animals than simply observer/observed; something shifted in my thinking about what it means to be a woman navigating through the world. I began to find language for gendered violence that I hadn’t previously had language for, and my thinking deepened into something analytical, revelatory. I was feeling my way into a deeper understanding of society’s treatment of women as revealed through literature, particularly fairy tales and mythology, where we see women held captive, butchered, brutalized, poisoned.
When writing This Alaska, I already had all of these themes, images, and messages inside me. It felt natural for the book to speak to this long history of mythology, a tradition that often places women at the center of conflict and violence, with nature serving as a setting to examine humanity, and animal imagery as symbolic of that investigation. The speaker in these poems is devoted to seeing this exploration through, as the Calvino epigraph suggests, and the collection as a whole strives to be in conversation with these aforementioned writers and narratives. My hope is that as a poet I am creating depth and adding something new to that conversation.
Carlie Hoffman is a poet and translator from New Jersey. Her honors include a 92Y Discovery Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. This Alaska is her first book. She lives in New York City.
About the author:
Nina Reljić is a writer and Poetry MFA candidate at Columbia University. She hails from London and currently resides in New York City.
