Steven Leyva is the author of the new poetry collection The Opposite of Cruelty. His other books include the collection The Understudy's Handbook. He teaches at the University of Baltimore.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your new collection?
A: The poems were written over a four-year period. The earliest were written in 2018 while I was waiting for my first book to be picked up—I had a manuscript I was trying to get published, and I was writing all these other poems. I was in that sort of purgatory. I didn’t know I was writing a second collection. I was trying to keep up my writing practice.
Once the first book was published in 2020, it was like the breaking of a levee. One of the best publishing years of my life was in 2021. People were asking for poems. I was really fortunate I had been writing. And this was the result.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: It was a bit of a process. I had conversations with Marion Winik, a colleague at the University of Baltimore. She was a first reader and is a dear friend. Then I went into a fruitful dialogue with my publisher, Blair. When we were signing the contract, it had a different title.
We went through a process of pulling lines from poems, thinking thematically about what the poems were trying to wrestle with. The title comes from the poem “Halo.”
It is a central question of the book—what is the opposite of cruelty and how do we answer that without saying “compassion” or something trite and glib. At a time with a lot of chaos and madness in the world, pithy answers are dangerous. We have a lot of thinking to do. The title is trying to think about how poems can be a prism, how you can see a multitude of answers.
Q: The poet Valzhyna Mort said of the book, “The book emphasizes Leyva's range—he is a poet of cities, of fleeting time, a love poet, a friend poet, a father poet, a community poet, which is to say, a historian of the American heart.” What do you think of that description?
A: Valzhyna has always been a very good reader of my work, very insightful. The description is quite personal, and it makes sense. Valzhyna was one of my teachers in graduate school and has seen the maturation of what I’m trying to do as a poet over a decade.
I always learn something about my own work when I hear Valzhyna talk about it. I love the phrase “historian of the American heart.” I’m concerned with histories of the heart, the part of humanity that is not simply intellect, the place where poems might be more persuasive than a white paper.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the poems would appear in the collection?
A: I thought about movement and variation, not just the narrative arc. I wasn’t particularly interested in a Homeric journey, but something more like a collage, the affect of pointillism, what you see when you step back. I was thinking about positioning things.
The beginning includes poems to do with migration and colonization. The middle are odes and references to pop culture. I was thinking of something like a triptych, with three sections. When you look at it, you can see the collective affect. I tried to move in those realms.
Q: What was the third part?
A: The last section has a quote from Lord of the Flies. That section is trying to get a little more granular. It’s a section with more interpersonal poems. It tries to end the collection close to the earth, bringing it down from the top-level concerns in the first section and making them tangible.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A book about 50 free Black towns in pre-territory Oklahoma. Oklahoma is where I went to college and where my brother and his family live. I was on sabbatical last fall, and I went to Tulsa.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m grateful to the University of Baltimore. I teach at the MFA program where I was a student. I can’t say enough about the way the education I got here and my work as a tenured faculty member contributed to this book. Sometimes there’s poisoned discourse around MFAs, but I’m a big believer.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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