Folklore, Politics, and Poetry

KARAN

Nick, these Baba Yaga poems are extraordinary. You’ve taken the folkloric witch and put her in a Kroger parking lot, in call centers, cleaning hotel rooms. “This whole country is a blood-stained floor / covered in rich, shag carpet. The carpet is so soft.” Oh these are great! What made you want to bring Baba Yaga to contemporary America? How does folklore help you write about the present?

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NICK

I was first introduced to Baba Yaga as a kid, when I read a collection of Russian fairy tales that included illustrations by Ivan Bilibin, and it’s Bilibin’s image of her that’s always stuck in my head, but she has continued to pop up now and again in various media I’ve consumed throughout my life. In the manuscript I’m working on now, I’m pulling language and iconography from folklore, and when I decided to write some persona poems in the voice of a fairy tale figure, I knew pretty much immediately it had to be her. One of the reasons I find her compelling is her ambiguity: in some stories, she’s terrifying, but in others, she’s helpful. That’s more or less where I want my poems to operate, tilting back and forth between dread and comfort. I’ve come to think of it as a very Xennial sensibility, which is exactly where I sit, generationally. And folktales and fairy tales in general are very good at being both horrifying and comforting at the same time, so it seems like a natural fit to me.  

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KARAN

“The Boy” is chilling. He makes it illegal not to love him, walks around with a sharpened screwdriver, orders drone strikes. “No one could do anything / about him. Why would they? Everyone loved him. / He’d made it illegal not to love him.” What a biting diagnosis of authoritarianism. Where did this poem come from? How do you write about power without becoming didactic?

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NICK

A decade ago, Trump said that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters. I think about that a lot. “The Boy” is partly inspired by Trump, especially the sense of helplessness so many people feel about him. But to the point of your question, I wouldn’t find the poem interesting if it were narrowly or directly about him, or any particular politician. I’m interested in exploring a sensibility—in this case, a malevolent entitlement, the world’s seeming inability to cope with it—and I’m trying to craft a character that readers might identify with authoritarian leaders but also maybe with people they know in their private lives. Poems come off as didactic to me when I can feel them trying to convince me of something, and oddly they come off as most didactic when they’re trying to convince me of something I already agree with, or inform me about something I already know. If there’s a trick to avoiding didacticism, it may be in letting go of that intention to instruct, to persuade. When writing a poem like this, I assume the political implications are familiar to any reader who’s bothered to read it in the first place, that the reader has seen this kind of person and understands how they operate. I’m not trying, on that level, to teach them something they don’t already know. The specific narrative and descriptive manifestations can still be surprising, but I’m not setting out to teach a moral lesson. Readers can usually tell the difference.

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KARAN

In one Baba Yaga poem, you write, “I’ve seen it before, a hundred / times. A twitch of a tsar’s mustache, and there go / a dozen shtetls, up in flames.” Baba Yaga becomes a witness to violence across centuries. What does it mean to have an immortal narrator? How does that long view change what the poems can say?

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NICK

My poems are often inspired by something happening in the moment. In the case of the poem you just quoted, the images haunting me at the time were of ICE occupying American cities, using the parking lots of local businesses as staging areas for their raids. But something I’ve grown aware of is that if I write a poem about some specific, terrible event, by the time the poem sees the light of day (if it ever does), ten more specific, terrible events much like it will have come along. If I write a poem about the United States bombing another country, by the time the poem is published, we’re bombing a different country. I don’t mean that as some sort of “why bother” pessimism, just that terrible events seem to echo each other. An immortal speaker like Baba Yaga can bear witness to whatever is happening right now, but she can also stand outside of history and see some of those patterns, because the mythic time of folktales is a perpetual present. Is it comforting or distressing to know that humanity has survived these violences before? Both, I think, that’s another reason Baba Yaga feels like the right persona for these poems. 

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KARAN

“The Death of Koschei the Deathless” mixes fairy tales with contemporary political commentary. “Every day, I hope / for a death, / and when I post / ‘Today might / be the day’ / you all know / I’m speaking / about death, / and whose.” I wish I wasn’t on an impermanent visa and name the motherfucker. Anyhow, how do you balance hope and despair in political poetry? Is there room for optimism here?

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NICK

Yeah, there’s some reassurance in the fact that all authoritarians come to ruin in the end—“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” and all that—but that can be cold comfort to anyone who’s being harmed right now. Twenty years ago, I had a narrower view of political poetry—I assumed it was all about persuasion, convincing the reader of a particular worldview, but poetry isn’t actually very good at persuading people. If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with someone on social media, you know just how entrenched our beliefs can be. Poetry is many amazing things, but it’s not a magic spell for radically transforming a reader’s politics. It may be that the more significant function of “political” poetry is to remind the reader that they’re not alone, that someone else sees the world in the same way they do. I know it’s not unique to post-pandemic life, but it feels like we’re increasingly isolated from one another. The phenomenon that someone on the internet can just say “Today might be the day” and with zero context I can guess what they’re thinking about reminds me that what I’m experiencing isn’t unique, and that’s reassuring, in its own grim way. A poem is like the imprint of the poet’s mind, and when the reader recognizes themselves in the poet’s idiosyncratic way of thinking, that’s a deep solidarity. 

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KARAN

Baba Yaga works so many jobs: at a resort, call center, chicken processing plant, and as a school bus driver. “I learned there’s nothing sweeter / than letting a phone ring and ring and ring / and ring.” These poems are about labor, about invisible workers. What draws you to write about work? How does class intersect with the folkloric in your imagination?

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NICK

Many traditional folktales are certainly concerned with class. They have their kings and peasants, fortunes won or lost. But late capitalism comprises its own unique set of absurdities and anxieties, and I guess I just want a folkloric narrative that addresses those specific concerns. This is honestly something I’m still working on in my writing. Class is always there, but it’s not something I’ve consciously written towards until very recently. So I’d call some of these poems exploratory in that regard. 

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KARAN

In “Folklore,” the dissidents feed bread to a cat with “an open wound / in the shape / of a comet. The wound / never healed, just got bigger / and bigger.” That image is haunting. You mix the absurd (soup in my fly) with the unbearable (the cat’s wound). How do you calibrate tone when you’re writing about violence? When does dark humor deepen the horror rather than deflating it?

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NICK

In a folkloric context, laughter isn’t always about humor. Many cultures use laughter for ritualistic reasons, to signify spiritual transition or secure divine favor, for example. These are often contexts for which American popular culture might find laughter odd or even deeply inappropriate. In that poem, for example, mourners fill a child’s coffin with laughter before sealing it up, like offering grave goods. In some of these poems—and this one very expressly—I’m trying to push on our notions of what laughter can do, how it might function. But in terms of how to calibrate that tone, I’m guided mostly by instinct, my own sensibility. I try to go just beyond what I can tolerate, push the borders of my own comfort.   

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KARAN

One Baba Yaga poem ends, “I know what you’d like me to do. / I’ve been there before. That’s my sweat / in your sheets. That’s my hair on your pillow.” You’re implicating the reader. We want Baba Yaga to save us, to use her magic against the hawks dressed in soldiers’ skins. But she won’t, or can’t. What’s the reader’s responsibility in these poems, if any?

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NICK

Well, you’re of course right that Baba Yaga isn’t actually going to save us. But I understand the implications of that moment a bit differently, I guess. It’s not exactly her telling us we’re on our own. She wanted someone to come to her in her sweat-soaked, anxious nights and gather her in a terrible embrace, and even though no one came for her, she is here for us, ready to break us with her love. I think she’s trying to be comforting, though as usual, her version of comfort is a little unsettling. And she is implying something about the reader’s responsibility, by way of positive example. She’s showing us how to do it. You should be there for others in the ways no one was there for you. Care is an entropic system, always losing energy. We have to put in more than what we received, just to keep it working. 

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KARAN

You write, “I love the wholeness of the old stories.” Then you show how the old stories fail us: sons laughing, saying “It’s just a story,” women disappearing. Do you think about storytelling as both refuge and betrayal? Can stories still save us, or do they just help us deny what’s happening?

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NICK

Story is a mechanism for creating sense and order and containment, a vessel you can pour the dark water of experience into to give it some reassuring shape and stability. But experience can’t be contained that way, not really. The inexplicable occurs. The vessel leaks. That doesn’t mean story is worthless or false. But story is a tool, and it can be used for terrible purposes. We have to be deeply skeptical of the mythology that shapes our culture, especially when those stories serve those in power. But it’s exhausting to walk through life like that, questioning everything. At the beginning of that poem, I don’t think Baba Yaga is being totally honest with herself. It’s not the wholeness of the stories she misses but her uncritical belief that those stories were whole. Even when you know it’s better to be aware of the way the world works, it’s easy to slip into a nostalgia for a time you didn’t have to think as critically. 

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KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, because the answers are always so 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?

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NICK

In writing my responses to these questions, I kept catching myself prefacing every statement with some variation of “I think that…” It’s a bad writing habit, but also probably says something about how I approach poetry. I’m a dweller, a ruminator, a daydreamer. I can be deeply anxious, but I’m never bored, even when (especially when) I’m idle. A lot of my poetry relies on trivia and factoids that have stuck with me. My first impulse when writing a poem is to figure it out like a puzzle. But looking at the actual poems…they aren’t very interior. What interests me is almost always material, corporeal.  It’s the sharpened screwdriver in the Boy’s hand, the comet-shaped wound on the cat’s back, the sweat on the pillow. So my poetry always bends toward the physical. My hope is that my poems draw from contrary impulses simultaneously. 

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Additionally: what would you tell other poets about writing political poetry that doesn’t collapse into propaganda or despair?

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NICK

When I was still in grad school, a professor told me, “You know, you don’t have to write poems that go from A to B to C.” Seems obvious, maybe, but it was a revelation for me at the time. Because I did write poems that way, each detail unfolding from the previous one in some logically or narratively rational way. I think I had a decent eye for detail and a good ear for sound, but my sense of imaginative possibility was really limited. Receiving and understanding comment was a difficult first step in changing how I wrote. I’m still working on it. 

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KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

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NICK

I’ll share something that has worked for me and for many of my students. Get a cheap, pocket-sized journal and carry it with you. Every day, write down at least one detail you noticed. Don’t worry about making it sound like poetry. Just give enough information that the note can call up the full memory later. It’s very important to keep the journal with you and write down the details when you observe them. Otherwise, it’s too easy to forget something that occurred to you hours ago. Anyway, do that for some stretch of time—a few weeks, a few months. Then go through the journal and pick your five favorite details, the ones that interested or affected you most. Write a poem that includes those five details. The trick here is not to pick the details you think will go together well in a poem. As a workaround for that, you can transcribe 15-20 details on slips of paper, mix them together and pull five at random. The number five isn’t super important. You probably need at least three, but you could do ten if you want. The point is, you must weave together a poem out of those details that were not recorded with the intention of going together. This practice has yielded some of my most surprising drafts, and it’s a great way to get over feeling frozen about what to write.  

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KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a song, a painting, anything other than a poem) that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

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NICK

The TV show Heated Rivalry. My wife has read the books on which it’s based, so I have to give her credit for insisting I watch the show. Episode 5 has got to be one of the best episodes of TV I’ve ever seen. 

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KARAN

And finally, Nick, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets or artists who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language?

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NICK

Some poets who were (and continue to be) really formative for me: Linda Gregerson, Terrance Hayes, Larry Levis, Cole Swensen, David Wojahn, C.D. Wright, Dean Young. To that, I’ll add a few poets who are younger than me but whose work has really affected my poetry more recently: Kaveh Akbar, Morgan Parker, Emilia Phillips, Tommy Pico.