Between Containment and Freedom

KARAN

Ethel, these poems move seamlessly between dream and document, intimacy and report. They read like transmissions from someone who’s lived through both personal and collective catastrophe and is trying, tenderly, to name what remains. I’m struck by your ability to hold grief and clarity at once — “I made space for the loss by putting away so many others I’d lost count.” Let’s begin there. What do your poems allow you to keep, or to live alongside, that life itself doesn’t?

ETHEL

Dreaming life and waking life have always felt closely related to me; my dreams tend to be vivid, and I often live alongside them throughout my day. Similarly, my poems are always with me. When my life is quiet enough, I hear poems throughout the day, and even when I’m not hearing them, they’re brewing just under the surface. The brutal realities of daily life work their way into dreams and poems, but it’s there that they become mutable. We have to dream and think our way out.

KARAN

I sense an eerie calm in your work, a kind of composure that’s constantly aware of collapse. “Kismet” feels like the news turned inward: a world watching its own destruction, quietly preparing for it. How do you navigate writing about catastrophe (climate, violence, loss) without losing the intimacy and strangeness that make a poem breathe?

ETHEL

I never start off with the intention to write about a certain topic; meaning emerges organically from registers of thought and feeling, so that the voice of the poem remains close to my breath and heart. Ideally, my poems are flexible enough to contain elements from daily life (even catastrophe) without imploding.

KARAN

Your syntax often moves like thought — recursive, haunted, punctuated by hesitation and repetition. In “Vignette,” the speaker says, “Meanwhile, I could hear my own assassin and realized this was beyond strange.” It’s surreal, but it feels emotionally exact. How do poems begin for you — in image, rhythm, or sound? Will you walk us through your writing process?

ETHEL

My poems always begin in rhythm and sound. I hear the lines first, write in long-hand in a notebook, put them aside, come back later, transcribe them multiple times, begin to revise them, type them up, continue revising, rinse, and repeat.

KARAN

I love “Notes on Survival” — a poem like this revitalizes my love for the fragment — it reads like a fragmented manual for a broken civilization — darkly funny, prophetic, and intimate. It feels both deeply American and somehow post-nation (I don’t know if that’s really a term). Let’s speak about form: on the one hand you have prose poems and then this poem in fragments which too can be read as a prose poem. I’d love to know what it is that appeals you to the prose poem?  

ETHEL

I love the term post-nation. I’ve been working with fragments for a long time, and the prose poem was always the form I turned to when my lineated poems were driving me up a tree. Now, however, I’m consciously writing a book of prose poems. I love the way the form suggests a narrative without necessitating the development of a traditional story. What really is a story? the form seems to ask. I also love the way prose poems look on the page: often like boxes or containers. The dialectic between containment and freedom is something that I’m increasingly exploring.

KARAN

I like, too, your persistent attention to the ordinary — lamps, sinks, ferries, nutshells — and how these objects keep vibrating with metaphysical weight. The poems seem to believe in small things, even as they mourn large ones. What is your relationship to the domestic and the everyday in your work? Is it a site of refuge, or revelation, or something else?

ETHEL

The domestic and everyday have always been foregrounded in my work. I almost don’t trust poems that avoid these topics, since for me poems need to be experiential, as well as somehow transformative. I also happen to be a person who relies on home and ritual as refuge. There is no revelation without reflection, and reflection seems increasingly rare in the busyness of everyday life. So, I suppose, daily life functions as both the poison and the cure.

KARAN

“Roam” turns the gaze outward again — toward governance, violence, geography, and language itself. “It’s everywhere—the melodrama, the question of the real, the feel of things increasingly tinny.” That line feels so contemporary, almost diagnostic. How does the world’s noise enter your poems? Where do you think politics and poetry intersect? What are your thoughts on political poetry?

ETHEL

I sometimes feel that it’s a difficult task to create out of all of the noise and despair. However, at best, our increasing connectedness with the news, for example, gives us an opportunity and a responsibility to reflect on realities beyond our own. There is so much wonderful political poetry, and this has never been my terrain, per se. My poems have simply become more political in the “urgency of now.”

KARAN

I love the sense of inheritance and ghostliness in these poems, not only in “The Prophet,” but throughout this portfolio. The dead don’t so much visit as persist. How do you think about voice and presence in your poems? Do you see your speakers as continuous selves, or as shifting masks through which different consciousnesses move?

ETHEL

Yes, I see my speakers as mutable and shifting. Having experienced a series of personal losses over the past several years, I have also come to believe that the dead do persist as presences (as well as absences). We are all more connected than we think.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it moving elsewhere?

ETHEL

My word for soul is mind, and my work tends toward that axis. I also hope that mine is a poetry very much of the heart. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I hope to achieve by writing poems, and my preliminary answer to that question is:  to offer some semblance of recognition, solace, and surprise.

KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing-related advice you’ve ever received — something that’s stayed with you or shaped your approach to making poems, or moving through the world as a writer?

ETHEL

Keep heart.