Photo by Camille Farrah Lenain
Carolyn Hembree is the author of the new poetry collection For Today. Her other books include the poetry collection Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague. She is an associate professor in the University of New Orleans MFA program.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your new collection?
A: I worked on this collection for 10 years; four of those years were spent on the long title poem. Of course, in reality, projects overlapped, and life intervened to make those years less contiguous.
An outlier and the oldest poem in the book, "August 29, 2005," responds to Hurricane Katrina and was completed in 2006.
Q: The poet G.C. Waldrep said of the book, “For Today is a sensuous, extended meditation on intergenerational succession: the perils and ecstasies of raising a child in a time of dying parents, of trying to care for dying parents while raising a child.” What do you think of that description?
A: Thank you for this question. I think it's a perfect description.
His complete blurb goes on to acknowledge literary predecessors whose writing helped me shape my poetics and this collection in particular: "Inger Christensen is Hembree’s day-sign here, and Rilke her night-sign, but the title poem is very much its own achievement, one of the most ambitious long poems in recent American poetry. It is an extraordinary testimony of resilience, troubled immanence, and the ferocity of love." I am in GC Waldrep's debt.
Q: How was the book’s title (also the title of the long concluding poem) chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The book's title, a happen-so, emerged during a residency at Twisted Run Retreat in Mississippi when I completed the first draft of the manuscript.
A Luddite of sorts, I went offline for the trip, lugging my books and hard copies of poems to the cabin. While there, I used Post-it notes to track what I worked on when.
In a moment of exasperation, I used "for today," the note affixed to the long poem, as a provisional title, which then transferred to the whole.
Given the idiomatic usage (for the nonce, for a fleeting time), it seems just that the title remained provisional until the final weeks before galley production. Ultimately, I couldn't best it—not without a more strained or fancy poetry title.
I enjoy the plasticity and openness of For Today and that it can function as dedication or idiom.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the collection?
A: I hope that they want to read the book again and that they find something alive in the language—some fluttering or rippling that makes them feel less lonely.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Oh, I'm not sure. I'm just building up a big mass of material so that I have something to grope around inside. Though frightening and awful at first, this process ultimately leads to greater joy for me than a more prescribed way forward.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: That I deeply appreciate your making space for other writers of all stripes through your blog. Thank you, Deborah.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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