Andrew Hemmert : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Just today, I finally read Magdalene by Marie Howe. It’s an astounding book. Short poems, for the most part, that manage to avoid feeling sparse or lacking. She’s capable of telling these heartbreaking stories, capturing so many details of a relationship in a miniscule space. They feel like shadow boxes, or dioramas. Given I’m exclusively writing sonnets at the moment, her economy of space is very intriguing to me.

Historically I had to focus on finishing one book at a time. Now I’ve found myself able to keep multiple in-progress books on deck. I’ve long suspected that my ADHD changes how it expresses over time, and it may have something to do with that new ability. But there’s an embarrassment of wonderful poetry coming out this year. I just finished reading Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann, which was fantastic. Playful and grave in its approach to letter writing and ode. Before that I read Rise and Float by Brian Tierney,  Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens by Corey Van Landingham, and The Echo Chamber by Michael Bazzett. All spectacular collections, in their own ways attempting to navigate the new and terrifying world with an eye trained on joy.

Andrew Hemmert : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Larry Levis is definitely one such author. At one point I actually had to take a year-long break from reading Levis’s poetry, because it was overtly influencing the direction of my work. If I ever feel like my writing is at a standstill, I’ll read all the way through his bibliography. It’s refreshing to see how different his poems are from collection to collection. And it’s relieving to recognize similar themes and obsessions from the beginning of his career to the end. It makes me less self-conscious about retreading my primary subjects of interest.

Carl Philips’s work operates for me in much the same way. I am constantly astounded by the syntax of Philip’s poems, as well as the way meditation begets scene and scene begets meditation. I am eagerly awaiting my copy of Then the War. In addition to being a book of selected poems, Then the War also contains an entirely new collection, and a chapbook I’ve never read. It’s a rare occasion that I come away from Phillip’s books without some spark of a new poem draft. His work always seems to fire up whatever neural pathways are required for me to write poems.  

Andrew Hemmert : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Katherine Riegel taught my first poetry workshop. The creative writing Bachelor of Arts at USF required me to take a poetry workshop, which I did begrudgingly. Despite myself I loved it and I stuck with it. Jay Hopler taught my other poetry workshops at USF, and encouraged my engagement with imagism and music in language. I think there’s a prevailing narrative surrounding poetry wherein poetry is something that springs from the heart, and initiates from the poet’s early childhood. I had no interest in poetry until I was forced to write it in college. I’m so grateful for that requirement.

Judy Jordan was my thesis director in graduate school at SIUC. She made me aware that narrative was missing from my pieces, and encouraged me to tell my stories. Her own sprawling braided lyric-narrative poems provided a framework and exemplar for the work that became Sawgrass Sky. Brigit Pegeen Kelly was one of the most influential poets that Judy turned me onto to. Her leaping, long narrative poems inspired me to tell my stories with all their mess and music. I distinctly remember Judy giving me a copy of Kelly’s collection Song. Judy’s copy smelled like a lake, which was a good precursor to the dirt and surreality of Kelly’s poems.

Andrew Hemmert : part two

What are you working on?

Right now I’m writing my forth collection of poems, which at present is a book of sonnets. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t directly a result of reading Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets and being absolutely blown away by it. I say “at present,” because any book I write is subject to massive changes down the road. For example, my third collection is a Frankenstein’s monster of a book, the amalgam of two separate manuscripts I wrote a year apart. It took a year of magazine rejections to break down my stubborn allegiance to the original form. I am thrilled with the new manuscript, so I can’t overstate how glad I am I could get over myself.

Aside from poetry, I’m slowly and clumsily attempting to write my first novel. It’s a story I’ve been turning over in my head for about five years now. In 2020 I was able to write 30,000 words, then came to a standstill. In the last year, all my novel writing has occurred in my head. Characters morphed into new people. Narrative threads were added and eliminated. I’m not convinced I’ll ever finish it, but I’d sure like to. It’s a real challenge.

Andrew Hemmert : part one

Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (forthcoming, Pitt Poetry Series) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently serves as a poetry editor for Driftwood Press.

How does a poem begin?

My poems usually begin as fleeting thoughts, little observations or images. There’s rarely a larger vision attached to these first impulses. Often I’m less interested in the ideas than I am in the music that accompanies them (assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme). Any metaphors, similes, or other associations that surprise me are good candidates for providing an entry point into a new poem. Frequently I wait months before returning to these fragments. Distance allows me to see more possibilities for revision.

There are certain themes and obsessions I return to again and again. Climate change, work, what it feels like to belong to a place, how distance changes that belonging. It’s the images and observations that naturally elicit these ideas that seem to engage me the most. And this is of course a trap. What I really want are strange notions and associations, avenues for engaging with themes and subjects that I haven’t yet engaged with in poetry.