Hannah VanderHart : part five

How does a poem begin?

It begins with time. I have to slip away from my young children, and somehow stay uninterrupted for five minutes. I wrote a poem recently after watching my spouse till our small backyard garden—it reminded me of the red diesel tiller, a monster of a machine, that my father used to drag from the barn and drive through my family’s (very large!) garden. I had that thought while standing in the afternoon sunshine, holding the electric tiller’s cord to keep it from the blades. Later, when cleaning the roots from the blades. In the next day or so, I finally made it to my computer, upstairs and tucked in one of the quieter corners of the house. The poem, “Watching My Love Till the March Garden,” begins:

It’s nothing like the red, diesel-powered tiller
that my father steered each spring—the light,
electric blades in my lover’s hands, beset by roots.
The red tiller roared and flung dirt, trailed a cloud
of blue smoke like an angry god in the garden.

Hannah VanderHart : part four

Why is poetry important?

In the recent podcast episode of Between the Covers, David Naimon interviews Jorie Graham, who talks about the possibility of “the awakened reader.” Poetry wakes us up. I think it especially wakes up the writer, and the reader can experience the writer’s wakefulness as an asynchronous contact-waking. I’m grateful now to several years of not writing poetry—when I was having my children and finishing my PhD program—because it allowed me to experience the transition from not reading contemporary poetry and writing poetry to doing both again. I remember I was bewildered by one of the first books I read, Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property, but I knew I loved it, even if I couldn’t say why or put my thoughts into coherent order. So I kept reading, and six months later reread the book, and the world and the language seemed to fall into place. There is a literacy of having a reading practice that is undervalued sometimes, I think. Similarly, taking up writing again made the whole world a poem—everything I saw, I suddenly noticed I was noticing. This was right after the 2016 presidential elections in America, and it was a devastating time. I felt like I would explode if I did not write. Poetry saved my life then.

Hannah VanderHart : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

In the abstract, I usually find conversations about music and poetry aspirational rather than practical (and of course many of us have heard the expression “poetry aspires to the condition of music,” which is a lovely axiom, but hard-earned in any poet’s life—the full quote, from Walter Pater, acknowledges this difficulty: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”) But also, three of my poems (confession: I wrote “songs” first, so Freudian slips are calling me out this morning!) in What Pecan Light steal their titles from Alabama songs: Song of the South, Dixieland Delight, and High Cotton. And soon I’m leading a workshop titled Digging up Bones: Writing Your Past (a nod to Randy Travis), so country music is a source text for me, and runs deep.

Hannah VanderHart : part two

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

I’m a temperamental reader, and often wander through the house holding a stack of books. Jean Valentine has been renewing me lately—she is a poet who lets the gaps and the windows of logic into her poem, so that there is always room for the reader to wonder and think. Iris Murdoch’s novels are a great source of mental vacation for me, when I need to change genres. Or criticism/philosophy can function the same way for me: Wittgenstein, Simone Weil—recently, Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form and Carl Phillip’s The Art of Daring. Interviews, too, are a great resource for reminding me how and why writers live and work in the world—I love The Paris Review’s interviews (the Toni Morrison, Kay Ryan and Geoffrey Hill interviews are three of my favorites), and podcasts with writers (Between the Covers, Commonplace Podcast, the Iris Murdoch podcast). We live by way of conversation.

Hannah VanderHart : part one

Hannah VanderHart lives in Durham, North Carolina, under the pines. She has poetry, essays and reviews published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, AGNI and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021).

Photo credit: Della Hethcox

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

C.D. Wright showed me how disjunction and narrative work, and also showed me that I was a Southern poet in a way I had not acknowledged or understood for many years (you don’t see the water you swim in, or the language you have been discouraged from using, the accent you have been taught to harden over the years). Claudia Rankine taught me that hate and harm were personal—the power of the lyric I / the lyric we. Elizabeth Bishop showed me that describing the world is itself poetry: that poetry is attention. And long ago, e.e. cummings got me started by offering me language play, when I did not come from a particularly playful background, but from a sober and religious one. Linda Gregg made the world beautiful for me again.