Interview with Jessica Pierce (Part I)

Jessica E. Pierce is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee as well as the author of Consider the Body, Winged by First Matters Press. Her poems are in many magazines including CALYX Journal, Tar River Poetry, Euphony, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Nimrod International Journal selected her as a finalist for the 2020 and 2021 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She was a finalist in the 2020 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize from CALYX Journal, a finalist in New Ohio Review’s 2019 NORward Prize for Poetry, a finalist in the 2019 MVICW Poetry Contest, and the recipient of a 2019 MVICW Poet Fellowship. Her work can also be found in Issue 82 of Bellingham Review.

CAITY SCOTT: So to start off, I want to say again, congratulations on publishing your book! It’s a big accomplishment and I loved reading it. It was an absolutely gorgeous book too, which makes it even better.

JESSICA PIERCE: I mean, I think it’s not bad to have other folks have some sort of fulfilling experience while reading it. That’s pretty life-giving to hear!

SCOTT: Yeah, and I want to talk a little bit about that because a lot of art takes time to produce, but specifically something like a book takes a very long time. As you’re working on writing a book, you—as a person—change as well. Tell us about your personal journey writing this book. When you look at this collection, where’s the heartbeat? What’s the thing that kept you steady as you were working on this collection?

PIERCE: Well, the book started coming into being in 2020 at the end of August/beginning of September. The editors of First Matter Press reached out to me. They had seen my work in a local literary magazine, the Timberline Review (which is published by the Willamette Writers here in the Portland area), and they encouraged me to submit a manuscript for consideration. It started off with 150 pieces from the first poem I published outside of a school literary magazine. Being a student at University of Oregon and publishing, these were, my gosh, I think the Northwest Review published my first poem in 2005 or 2006?

So I had that piece, all the way up to poems I had written in August 2020, and I put together 150 pages and just kind of cast it out to the editors and said, let me know if you think there’s a collection in here. And they got to yes, we do. There’s a lot of work to be done in terms of bringing this into focus and finding that heartbeat. From September through January/February 2021, I did three different revisions sessions and revised probably 75% of the poems. I wrote a handful of new poems, so there are poems all the way through December 2020 that made it into the collection, and a lot of pieces that didn’t. I really honed it down on a cellular level. 

It was incredible company during that fall and winter parenting during a pandemic. I’m a public school educator. I’m not in the classroom. I work in systems to dismantle the racist discipline policies in our district with a team of amazing humans, but it was in a system that was under incredible stress and strain and continues to be. Just navigating that is kind of a constant. There was just so much turmoil watching my own children struggle and try to navigate the pandemic. My marriage was falling apart (I’m even in the middle of the divorce now), and so it was just extra! The election, too. It was just extra on a global scale; on a personal scale. This book became my anchor and it really was this powerful opportunity to both reflect and look forward, and then come back to the present and think, what is the life I’m building now, and how does this book help me understand that? 

In the end, when my editors and I talked about how to craft the arc of the book, we thought a lot about creating eddies. It’s kind of this movement through existential distress around these roles that are put upon women and femmes in particular. For me, some of that also comes through having been raised in Catholicism, the pressure that puts on you, then how you come back out of that. And that’s where the insect poems throughout the book became that touchstone. They help me come back out and see my place in the world beyond these roles. What do I need to shed in order to be my full self? As a parent, what does that mean about what I would like my children to be able to see? What does it mean to be a parent, a mother, a poet, a human?

Really, what this book helped crystallize for me is the power of community and the power of a collective; rejecting isolation and rejecting this notion that you have to do it all especially in this particular society. You think about the pressures of white supremacy and patriarchy, and what that puts on individuals and communities. How do you step into your fullest self and find some kind of liberation from that? I think by the springtime as the book was really coming into the final proofs, it really was an incredible gift.

SCOTT: I love hearing that story behind it. I’m a huge process person. There’s so much with how the work comes about that says a lot about the work itself.

PIERCE: I laid it all out on the floor for days and just listened. I think my favorite part was my last step. I committed to reading every poem in the collection out loud to myself. I just went poem-by-poem-poem-by-poem and read each one and was like yep, okay, you’re speaking to each other in a way that I think might say something to someone else. Let’s give it a shot.

SCOTT: That actually brings me to a question here: your use of sound throughout all of this. I kept coming back to that. I stopped and read some of the poems out loud just because they needed to be heard, like the first part of “Bargain” on page 48.

Dear clenching and unclenching heart: / Know that I know that I could become / a meteor shower of fired synapses / at any time that this frail construction / of cells will hold for a finite number of / electron leaps. 

I wanted to ask you about that. Considering word choice, considering line breaks and all of that, how much do you let sound guide you? Or is that something that comes up more in the editing process later on? Is it kind of this tug between both sides?

PIERCE: Well, when I  write, I start all of my poems longhand in a blank artist journal (11×17) so I can just take up as much space as I can. That has become even more and more part of my practice over the past few years—taking up space. Take up space in that rough draft—just go. Then I start to move over into a Word Doc, and that’s where you really consider enjambment and stanza breaks. Then there’s reading things out loud to myself, thinking, and really listening to know. Am I getting so caught up in the sound that I’m losing track of the heart, or are the sounds helping the heartbeat of the poem come through in a way that could connect with a reader clearly and directly? I have a tendency to try to make every poem do everything—fit every image into every poem—and I sometimes get really caught up in imagination. I’m trying to ground myself back into what this poem is asking to be, and how I can be a part of that crystallization process. So certainly, by the time I’m getting to the final draft, I’m thinking a lot about assonance and consonance, the interplay of shorter words and longer words. Where am I allowing the reader to breathe? Where am I forcing the reader to move into a place of discomfort a little bit and not letting them breathe quite yet? In the original writing process, it’s almost never there. 

When do I know when a moment is a poem? Or worth attempting to see if it’s a poem? For me, it’s a lot about discomfort. When is there a moment where there’s just an edge—there’s something that leaves me with that brow furrow, you know? Like how does that happen? How is that part of the human condition…why? Why, my seven and ten-year-old have been asking the whole time I’ve been lucky enough to be watching them be humans. The “why” is this brow furrow that starts the process and then over time, the sounds and the line breaks are what helps me figure out if  this is a poem or if it’s just a journal entry and needs to sit at my desk for a while.

SCOTT: Oh, I love that. So the poem that really made me ask this was “Did you see the sky open when she descended?” on page twenty-one. It’s about this bumblebee, this apocalyptic flyer on your car, and this beautiful moment where they collide. You mentioned the moments that cause your brow to furrow as being something that pushes you into writing, but what about other moments, like moments of delight, wonder, and grief— that kind of stuff? Talk a bit about when you think, I need to write a poem about this. I just need to write.

PIERCE: I think Kim Addonizio wrote once about how a poet lives in many different directions. I hope I’m attributing it to the right poet. If I’m not, someone else really great said it, and Kim Addonizio is great and I’m sure she’s said other great things. But I always have loved the reality that poets are in the world. I was lucky enough to study with Dorianne Laux at one point in my career. She was a waitress, and she was a single parent, and she didn’t publish her first book, I think, until she was in her forties. Amy Clampitt didn’t publish some of her first books until she was in her sixties, and very much lived in the world outside of academia. 

I’ve chosen explicitly to live a life that is not tied to an academic institution—to have children, and to be in community with lots of different humans, and to learn from them and how they see the world. I think that just provides an incredible abundance of interactions with people that are both joyful and astounding in a way that’s connected to revelations of wonder, and then just revelations of, I can’t believe humans do this. Why do humans do this to each other? And then it’s trying to find that space. Especially as a parent, I look at my children, I think, oh my god. I brought you into this world. What was I thinking? But then to look at the world and go, you know, it’s okay.

There’s so much to discover, and there’s so much to learn, and so much to give, and so much to receive, and if it’s for nothing else, that’s why I write, then: to just remind myself of that. The sixth-grader me who is writing “life’s a bitch and then you die” on the front of her notebook in math class—honey, it’s okay. I think a lot of this book, for me, was about embracing the “both, and,” by rejecting an “either, or.” This is a “both, and” book.

SCOTT: A “both, and,” book. I love that. Yes, definitely. In fact, that actually brings up the next question: there’s a lot of pondering in this book about big stuff like religion, spirituality, life, death—the kind of the big picture philosophical questions—but a lot of this is done through the perspective of your personal experience, your lived experiences, especially with your children. One poem in particular I keep coming back to is called “I close my eyes,” on page 82, and it’s when your children ask you to play dead. I loved that so much.

PIERCE: It’s a trip, I tell you. Really wild when your kids ask you to do that.

SCOTT: Because it’s like, what do you think of me?

PIERCE: How much am I going to read into this, you know?

SCOTT: Yeah, or like, what have you watched on TV lately? So to quote your poem “Tumble” on page 89, I can trick you so you think  / a rock is just a rock a rock is never / just a rock. I’d love you to talk a little bit about balancing metaphor and talking about anthropomorphizing personal experience, because a lot of times they tip into each other. It can be difficult sometimes to balance how much of this is you actually talking about your kids, or you talking about your kids as a metaphor to kind of talk about these bigger things. How do you know where to lean, and which direction?

PIERCE: I think with this collection, it was a really powerful experience to work with a collective of editors who were asking some of these questions, like, is this the direction you want to go? Rosanna Warren, who was my professor at Boston University, said “your imagination is so big and ground us in something.”

To be in conversation with four different editors who had four different perspectives, and to hear what they were bringing about trying to find that balance or some sort of harmony even (because when I think about harmony, it’s about all the different parts working together as opposed to a balance between. Harmony feels like a rich word to me)— they offered a lot of perspective on whether something felt too inaccessible where it was so in my head and so in metaphor that no one else could access it unless they were me. And then, asking where was it getting so general and so broad that it wasn’t me and my poetry speaking our truth. So that gave me a great deal to work with and was something, having never gone through a collection before, I’d never really experienced. I hadn’t been in a writing class or workshop since I was twenty-four or twenty-five. I’m forty-one now, almost forty-two, so it had been a minute. I have a couple of friends I dialogue with about my work, but they’re very far away. This was like a really concentrated period of dialogue, then going back to each poem at a time and not trying to rush into the next one; just saying are you being your truest poem right now? And then, knowing when to just [put your hands up and say], you know what? I’m done. I’m going to let it just go and just stop messing with this, right? It is what it is.

Part of the power of the book is the way in which the poems are in conversation. Coming back to that initial impulse, I sometimes have to have every poem be everything. A collection frees you from that, I think it freed me to say their interplay is part of what’s going to bring together this lifelong conversation I’m having with myself, and the world, about the “why.”

When I think about something like that particular poem, “Tumble,” that line the rock is never just a rock is a line I’ve had sitting since I was twenty-four. Now, it found a poem. Having children brought me back to that line in a new way that I hadn’t understood before choosing to be a parent, and so I think, in the end, that watching my kids navigate the world reminds me to step away from metaphor sometimes and just be.

SCOTT: To talk a little bit about the kind of the footholds that you had mentioned earlier, and even to finding those places to ground you, there’s this harmony between really massive illustrations of the universe and galaxies, like in the poem, “We must soberly realize that various factors exist that can lead to disharmony, insecurity, and instability.” These big themes are juxtaposed with poems about insects building nests and how temporary their life spans are, like in, “I propose we worship the mud dauber.” And, in fact, even the poem that you published with us in issue eighty-two, “What Is Nourishment For Any Of Us?” references bumblebees, photons, and light at work. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about the metaphors and the symbols that haunt you. Why bugs, why planets, why particles, and why these things in particular? Why do you keep coming back to these particular symbols?

PIERCE: I think so much of it is the way in which we are so incredibly small, right? On a universal scale, we are remarkably insignificant as humans. And to the degree where we even talk about animals as somehow being apart from ourselves, even though we are, ourselves, animals. We’re constantly seeking to make ourselves bigger and more important, even though we are incredibly unimportant, but there’s some liberation in being unimportant. Again, it’s really to make ourselves more important, and that’s when I think about the tension in religion and science—there’s just so much in that. 

What does it mean to kind of find a little bit of contentment in being insignificant? Insignificant doesn’t mean you don’t matter. I look at my children and they are one of billions of humans on the planet in this moment, let alone considering the scope of human existence, and yet they are wonderful, joyful, beloved humans and creatures right here in front of me, just like the bumblebee, right? I love the bumblebee. She’s so herself. She doesn’t need to be anything other than herself. Mud daubers are these insects who live in these matriarchal or matrilineal communities, many of them operate in sisterhood. I find that really appealing. A lot of my girlfriends and I talked about how we just need a commune. We’ll just all raise our kids together, make cheese and wear hats. It seems like a pretty great way to just ride the wave of humanity.

I would look up at my skylight when I was a kid and think holy shit, we’re all going to die. We’re all going to die: every single one of us. I have a poem in here for my father who really says, with genuine equanimity, yes we are all dying: some just faster than others. And that just is. The older I get, the more I feel that just is. This book gave me an opportunity, I think, to wrestle with fear in a way that then brought me through to more acceptance and appreciation, which I hope I’m able to offer to my own children. It’s amazing how young children are when they start throwing out questions like, why do we die? I mean two, three years old, and they just throw this at you, and you’re like, I don’t know. We all do. The tree dies, he dies, the stars will die. We are looking at stars that have already died. But then, what can we come back to? We can come back to running into the woods together. We can come back to raking leaves. We can come back to picking up a flower. We can come back to sitting under a tree. That’s where we are.

SCOTT: Yes, in fact, that actually brings me to fear and insecurity. They come through here in a lot of beautiful, vulnerable ways, almost like questions. The poem, “the first time I give my two children a bath alone”—that one absolutely haunted me because I think everyone has that fear of losing a child. I can only imagine with parenthood the fear of becoming a statistic after looking away for one second. That one second is all it takes. What’s interesting though is when you write about this fear, a lot of times it’s done in a way that’s more like coming to terms with it. These are really big, difficult topics, and if you’re anything like me, sometimes you avoid writing because you have to work through this stuff. So, you have those moments where you know, when you do finally visit that work, there’s not only the mental labor of writing, but then there’s the emotional labor that goes along with it, and the emotional labor can be a lot harder. Would you say poetry is a vehicle for you to process through some of these emotions and think through them? Is it maybe a place that you go to in order to do that? Or is it a place that you go to once you’ve already done that?

PIERCE: Oh, no. Since the moment I found it as a young child, it was clear that for who I am and how I’m wrestling with the world, poetry gives me a way to wrestle without losing hope and meaning. I think as an educator and having worked with a lot of young people throughout my life who have endured an incredible amount of challenging experiences, sometimes traumatic experiences (I’m always hesitant to label something as trauma. Someone gets to choose for themselves if it’s traumatic. It’s not mine to name), but experiences that would have brought me to my knees, and to see the ways in which young people in particular really struggled to understand—they don’t just accept things on face value. I think that’s one of the things I’ve always loved about working with adolescents. Their bullshit detectors are real heavy and strong, right? I think poetry has been a place for me to wrestle without getting lost in the stress.

The older I’ve gotten, the less I know. My twenty-five-year-old self was very sure she knew many things, and my forty-one-year-old self is like, oh honey, we know nothing. Right? Embrace that. I can look back at poems I wrote in the last year and think, oh my gosh, my poet-self knew I was getting a divorce before the rest of my parts caught up. Okay. She had figured some things out and she was wrestling with some things that other parts of me were not ready to name, and I can see it in my journals, and I can see it in the rough drafts of poems that were starting to emerge. That is really powerful to think about that knowing. How do I tap into that, not just in poems but in the rest of my life?  I think it’s been really interesting for me to hear from so many different people who’ve been reading my book about the way in which they sometimes described my voice in these poems as confident and self-assured, even in the midst of hard things. It’s been really beautiful to think, oh, I have that in me. I am in the midst of a pretty significant life turmoil, I know who I am on a fundamental level while still leaving room for myself to grow and evolve. Poetry has just… I can’t imagine my life without poetry. I just can’t.

You can find Jessica Pierce’s book, Consider The Body, Winged at your local bookstore including Bellingham’s own Village Books. Part II of the interview will be released Thursday, December 16th.