CARPE NOCTEM BOOK INTERVIEW WITH: Geraldine Connolly

Terrapin Books, 2018 THINGS WE’RE DYING TO KNOW…
Let’s start with the book’s title and your cover image. How did you choose each? And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately come to mind?
Wings. Feathers. Flight. I wanted to express the notion of staying aloft while heading through turbulence. An aileron is a hinged flight control surface on an airplane’s wing. It provided the central metaphor of the book which is trying to find balance, to stay aloft in the midst of tragic events.
 
Finding a cover for an abstract idea like endurance was difficult. So I first went with the idea of representing the lost family farm with a photo of a barn. Fortunately, my wonderful editor, Diane Lockward, came up with more exciting alternatives. She found the work of a feather artist, Lewis Grimes, and one of his pieces was very striking. It haunted me. It’s an explosion of fanned white feathers set against a black background with a scatter of blue dots. It seemed metaphorically perfect.
 
I did an entire interview (read it here) just on the process of finding the right cover. 
 
What were you trying to achieve with your chapbook/book? Tell us about the world you were trying to create, and who lives in it.
Aileron is a collection about facing loss, of a rural childhood, a family farm sold to a mining company, the fracture of our family that ensued. Memory is a key motif (memory “the weight of stones” from the poem Aileron) and staying power, after the weigh-down of tragedy and disappointment. The collection is firmly rooted in the natural world, the landscapes of a Pennsylvania childhood, of Montana summers and a move to Arizona, to the Sonoran Desert which offers a strange but healing landscape, a mixture of oddness and wonder. Birds, Wings. Trees. The elements of air rule this collection. The central metaphor of the aileron, which controls balance on an airplane wing, suggests the importance of not surrendering to sadness but finding new direction, staying on course. 

Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection? Do you have a favorite revision strategy?
I try to write freehand every morning. I empty my hand into a notebook. Then I put the poem away for several weeks and come back to it looking at the writing with a critical eye, as though someone else had written it. I circle the parts that are working and cross out the weak parts. I write more if I have to. I often read a poem into a tape recorder and play it back to hear if there are any problem spots.
 
I feel that as William Matthews used to say: “Revision is not cleaning up after the party It IS the party.” I have a writing group that meets on a weekly basis. Having their input speeds up the revision process. I have a tendency to go metaphor crazy and to overwrite. My colleagues help me find the metaphors and similes that work well and the ones that don’t,  so I can cut out the excess. Endings are always a challenge. If the ending isn’t working, I leaf through some books of poets that I admire and try to figure out, craft-wise, what different options might be for ending my poem. Sometimes the ending doesn’t happen for a long while. It is hard to be patient but one must be patient with an ending. It’s a very important place in the poem.
 
How did you order the poems in the collection? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
For me, organizing a collection is intuitive. I knew I wanted to have a story arc for Aileron and some central motifs.  I sought the strongest poems for the beginning. They had to be poems that set the theme. Since the theme of losing my inheritance of the family farm is sad, I tried to intersperse some praise poems to lighten the mood. I also like the idea of “dovetailing’, taking a word from the ending of one poem that links somehow to a similar word in the next poem. For the final poem, I wanted to end the book on a positive note,  so the final image is a swing flying upward into open space.
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read – did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart?
This is a poem that is the book’s heart. It describes the emotional drama at its core.
 
Legacy
 
They covered my mother’s farm
with drilling rigs,
 
knocking down the house
like a stack of blocks.
 
So we must live now
without the hayfield and the creek, 
 
without the silo, the corncrib,
the orchard, the creek bed.
 
We will breathe the summery
air only in dreams
 
where we make soup with water
and bits of stone,
 
slash the onions
into slivers of regret.
 
A plume of smoke
rises grimly from the barn.
 
Since someone has forgotten
to latch the gate,
 
a thief has entered  
the garden,
 
grabbing the carrots,
ripping onions from their beds
 
while we watch from
our distant dwelling,
 
dreaming the past
still exists,  
 
floating on its raft of broken bread.
 
If you had to convince someone walking by you in the park to read your book right then and there, what would you say?
This is my new book, Aileron. It tells a story. It’s a love story about loss, in this case a lost and destroyed farm. And there are poems of praise about people and places I’ve loved. It’s accessible, written in plain language and I’ve been told it’s a good read. I think you’ll enjoy it.
 
For you, what is it to be a poet? What scares you most about being a writer? Gives you the most pleasure?
For me, writing is about making. I enjoy making things and poetry offers me a chance to make something that both searches for truth and attempts to make sense of  chaotic events.  I know that’s impossible but I enjoy trying. Poetry is where I put the emotional overflow of my life. It’s a calming lake on which I place my carefully crafted paper boats.
 
The scariest thing for me would be not being able to write. It is so necessary in my life. Without my writing I would feel aimless and unfocused. My life would feel empty and without purpose.

And I am gratified when someone finds my work and writes to me, telling me that they were moved by it. Connecting that way with another person is enormously satisfying.
 
Are there other types of writing (dictionaries, romance novels, comics, science textbooks, etc.) that help you to write poetry?
Dictionaries, novels, guidebooks, atlases all have wonderful, unusual words that are sources for poetry. Reading specific guidebooks can help enrich the word choice and increase the authority of a poem.
 
What are you working on now?
The next poem. Always, the next poem.
 
What book are you reading that we should also be reading?
I’ve been enjoying Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems. She is so imaginative and honest and her work has a wry knowledge of self, a sense of humor about accepting what it means to be a flawed human. I also loved Stepping Stones, a book of interviews with Seamus Heaney which serves as a book-length portrait of Heaney and offers his reflections on his writing and career.
 
Without stopping to think, write a list of five poets whose work you would tattoo on your body, or at least write in permanent marker on your clothing, to take with you at all times.
Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, C.D. Wright.
 
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Purchase Aileron. Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of four poetry collections: Food for the Winter, Province of Fire, Hand of the Wind , Aileron  as well as a chapbook, The Red Room. She is the recipient of two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework and The Sonoran Desert:A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. 

Visit her online at ​www.geraldineconnolly.com.