In Conversation with Erica McAlpine

By Carolina Julius

Erica McAlpine decorated her office after the flower barn at Versailles—that is, the one she had imagined might exist. ‘I wanted it to be earthy and windswept, but filled only with beautiful things’, the poet tells me. There is an empty birdcage under the window, which looks out over a churchyard on the cusp of bloom. In McAlpine’s dream life, her parrots, Rhubarb and Emily (after Emily Dickinson), are with her as she teaches. Birds have always fascinated McAlpine—'I’ve probably written more poems about birds than any other single thing’, she tells me. ‘I think it’s because maybe of all animals you can most clearly see the human in their faces’. 

Her most recent collection of poetry,  Small Pointed Things, takes pleasure in moments of close looking, finding in animals and plants a spring of revelation, deftly captured in her formal, traditionally inspired lines. I speak to Erica about poetic process, her dual role as poet-critic, and her optimism for the state of poetry today. 

Carolina Julius: When did you start writing poetry? 

Erica McAlpine: I don’t remember ever not writing poems. I remember being eight years old, writing them under the bed, because I thought it was meant to be a kind of secretive act. I began writing poems seriously in high school. I hadn’t read an enormous amount of poetry, so I was really working with Robert Frost and the Latin poets, Horace and Catullus, as my guides—I took a lot of Latin at school. It wasn’t until college that I began reading more widely and thinking about poetry as a more serious endeavour. 

CJ: Would you show people your poems at the time?

EM: Absolutely. That’s the thing. I had to write them in private, but I showed them to my parents—and anyone else. I even started sending poems to magazines when I was in high school. They were so bad, but I had this dream of publishing in The New Yorker. They were very kind. They would reply—I mean, only to reject me. There was a day when I collected rejection postcards from The New Yorker… 

CJ: How would you describe the kind of poetry that you write?

EM:  I would call it formal. I would also call it traditional—although I hope there are elements of it that are subversive to the traditional, too.  I write poems that rhyme, and I often write poems about objects in nature, used as metaphors in some way. I think my poems are accessible to most people—that’s important to me. I would prefer my parents to be able to read them—and my neighbours. 

I also think my poems are a little didactic. That’s something I always thought poems were supposed to be. The poems I read when I was young—by Frost, Horace, Shakespeare—all have a little lesson at the end. It wasn’t really until I went to college that I realised that there were plenty of poems that weren’t trying to teach a lesson—but I think by that time my taste had been set.

CJ: What appeals to you about poetry, rather than prose? 

EM: In general, it has elements in its toolbox that prose doesn’t, and I like those tools. It is language in a different mode, whereas prose—I think the best prose—often sounds like conversation, like the language we speak. I think there is something other to poetry that I enjoy. But I think if you have a story to tell, then prose is very valuable. 

The poem is a made thing and very particular—it’s all about its craft. I like putting a small thing together; I like the act of arranging. You can do that in prose, but you’d never get anywhere—you’d still be writing the first paragraph. So I might as well spend the time on a poem and wait until I have some enormous plot to express before writing a novel. But I will never write a novel.

CJ: How do you know when a poem is finished—how do you let go?

EM: It depends. Sometimes I start writing a poem knowing what the last line is, and so when I have convincingly gotten there, I know the poem is over. But I think you might also be asking how I know when I have fixed a poem enough—or revised it well enough—to stop tinkering… 

CJ: Who was it who said ‘revise, revise, revise’? 

EM: It was Bishop—‘repeat, repeat, repeat, revise, revise, revise’—she was talking about Robert Lowell. Bishop was a poet who revised almost to a fault. If there is a spectrum that begins with Keats—who could write a poem like ‘To Autumn’ in an afternoon—and ends with a poet like Elizabeth Bishop, who would spend ten years revising a poem, I’d put myself somewhere closer to Keats. 

The times that I have sent poems to friends the day that I have written them I always regret. I don’t do that anymore. That first day you have a kind of music in your ear, but you don’t yet have the perspective to know whether that music was any good. To write a good poem I think you need to be able to look at it without what you were hoping for it in mind—to see whether it might extend beyond the initial intention, or have something slightly more special and unexpected going on. 

CJ: What tends to inspire a poem? 

EM: A lot of things. It tends to be some kind of metaphor, or I’ll see something that is analogous to something else and think, Oh, I could do something with the distance between these two things—I could play in that space. Occasionally a poem begins with a phrase. I keep a running list, and when I have time to write a poem I might go back to it. 

CJ: Your collection, Small Pointed Things, draws inspiration from everyday objects. What can we learn by looking closely?

EM: Objects provide subject matter on which you can map human feelings. Animals are particularly useful because they have feelings, but they don’t have words. Their behaviour is almost a caricature of our own—it feels so available for metaphor.  Flowers and plants come next. They too are living and they have the same sorts of problems that we have as humans: they grow and die, they need to be fed and to drink, they have to deal with one another. I guess all of this is just revealing that what I’m most interested in talking about is human life, or the experience of daily living. For me, analogy—whether to my own life or the human experience in general—is a really rich area. 

CJ: Has your academic life affected the way you write poetry? 

EM: All poets are readers. I don’t think that you could write a good poem without being a reader of poetry. It is the case that having a ‘day-job’—like being a scholar, a researcher, a professor, and a critic—takes time away from the creative practice. But simultaneously, I am so enriched by the environment of this place—by my students, and the scholarship I read—that I think it has only been beneficial to me. But I think that’s because of the order in which I came to this work—I think my criticism is shaped by my interest as a poet more than the other way round, and I think I want it to be that way. 

I like teaching literature as I read it from the perspective of being a practitioner. I do think that writers have something to offer students in that regard—if you happen to be a writer, you might teach a poem slightly differently to someone who isn’t thinking about the concerns of how to make the thing. In general my approach to reading comes from my interest as a poet in learning the craft, so I’m really glad that I can have the job I have, because I would spend a lot of time away from poems if I had some other job. And the more I read and the closer I am to the material the more likely I am to make a good poem, I think. 

CJ: Would you say that there is continuity between your critical writing and your poetry?

EM: They are not similar insofar as I don’t write criticism that sounds anything like poems. I think there is a mode for literary writing that looks and feels a bit more like poetry, especially now that we are imagining the discipline to broaden out. People are writing essays that they might even call lyric essays. I’m imagining the kind of literary criticism that makes the same kinds of moves that poetry makes—that could accommodate rhyme, for instance, and I know that I am not the critic to do it, even though I am the poet who is so stuck on rhyme, even in the 21^st century. My criticism is not formally risky.  

CJ: You mention that Frank Bidart’s Desire is a book that really changed the way you think about what poetry can do. What do you think the position of poetry is today? 

EM: Frank Bidart’s Desire is one of my favourite books. I think because of its utter earnestness and seriousness of purpose. It is a book unashamed of its own shame. The final poem in that book—the Second Hour of the Night—I just am so moved by it. 

I’m not worried for poetry, if that’s part of your question. We are always going to want to hear from our poets—no digital situation is ever going to replace them. I guess the only worry would be that the noise of our everyday life is drowning out their sounds. But I don’t think that poetry is at risk of becoming obsolete—in fact, I think it will be the opposite. When the day of reckoning comes, we will have nowhere to look but to the poets and painters and singers and writers. I continue to feel relieved that I work in the profession I do, and am surrounded by the arts, given how digital our lives are—and how dire things look out there.

I’m so old fashioned. I still print out everything I read. I don’t read on screens. It’s a lot of wasted paper. 

CJ: Yet you write your poems on a computer? 

EM: I do! Can you imagine? The hypocrisy!

CJ: What was the last thing that inspired you in a small way—the last ‘small pointed thing’? 

EM: Oh, I better look at my notes app. This is definitely regrettable, isn’t it? Ok, some of the phrases that I feel must turn into poems are ‘I’m talking to you’…

CJ: That sounds like Frank O’Hara! 

EM: I know. I wish I could have access to the moment when someone looked at me and said I’m talking to you and, instead of listening to them, I thought, there’s a title! 

Here is another: ‘A porpoise is not a dolphin’—that’s very Marianne Moore. I was in Florida on a boat watching dolphins in the bay, when my family friend who was driving the boat said ‘they’re actually porpoises—a porpoise is not a dolphin’. That was it. I didn’t listen to anything else he said, I was thinking about how I was going to write this poem. 

CJ: Animals are very important to your poetry. Do you ever write about your pets?

EM: Even though I write loads of poems about animals, writing about my pets is so hard—it just ends up being sentimental drivel. In one of my poems I compared my dog to Jesus. We can’t see them with the right objectivity.

But I’ve always been obsessed with birds. All of my books have birds on the cover in some way. I think it’s because of all animals you can most clearly see the human in their faces. They really mimic the human—and they are so transparent. I’ve probably written more poems about birds than any other single thing. My spirit animal is the chicken. 

CAROLINA JULIUS reads English at Teddy Hall. She likes to tell people that she is a writer.

Art by Jacob Palmer-Barnes