Collagist Interview: Brian Simoneau

Brian Simoneau's poem "In the Months After His Death You Move Through Moments Like a Mountain" appeared in the April issue of The Collagist. He grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Boxcar Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Poemeleon, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Boston with his wife and their daughter.

Can you talk about the inspiration for "In the Months After His Death You Move Through Moments Like a Mountain”? What was on your mind while you were writing this poem?

I was thinking specifically about my father’s death, but I was also thinking more generally about the process of grief, about the human reaction to loss. In some ways, death is the only experience that all humans truly share, and yet grief can be such an isolating experience, a moment of alienation from life. In Jay Hopler’s poem “Meditation on Ruin,” he writes: “The death of a father — the death of the mother — / The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive!” I love this poem, but my own reaction to loss was very, very different. In April 2004, my father died from a brain aneurism. The shock of his death—both its suddenness and its finality—stunned me. Returning to California a couple weeks after the funeral, I spent a lot of time alone: watching TV, hiking in the Santa Cruz mountains, reading. I felt separated from the world around me, not only from the people in my life but also from the world itself. It felt like life was happening all around me, but I felt completely cut off from it. About a year ago, right around the sixth anniversary of my dad’s death, I was remembering those first few months—the pain, the loneliness, the sense of isolation—and I sat down and drafted “In the Months After His Death You Move Through Moments Like a Mountain.”

Death is certainly a topic that yearns to be written about again and again, even though it’s been written about so many times before. I enjoyed the way this poem took those monumental bodily reactions and feelings about death and conceptualized them in a global way, pressing them into this large metaphor as a mountain, a place. What are your views on death in poetry and how did you navigate that when writing this poem?

You’ve described what I wanted the poem to do better than I can. Before writing the first draft, I reread my journals from the months after my dad died: detailed entries about the funeral, lists of things I’d found in his bedside table, stories of things we’d done together, complaints about my inability to sleep. Trying to make sense of a world that suddenly seemed so much bigger than me, I’d tried to gather every detail I could. There was some genuine self-discovery in those pages, but there was also a lot of self-pity. When I started writing this poem, I wanted to move beyond myself, to think about how grief can remind us that we’re part of something bigger, part of these huge processes that we can’t even begin to understand.

I often tell my students that all literature boils down to either love or death, and that even when it seems to boil down to love, you just boil it a minute longer to get to death. I’m only half joking. So much poetry does seem concerned with death, and I don’t think it’s because poets are a particularly morbid bunch or because poets have any special insight into dying or grieving or anything like that. I think it has a lot to do with the process of writing poems itself—a solitary act of the imagination which, at its best, becomes an act of communication with an audience. That process seems similar to how grief can be both an isolating emotion and a reminder of our part in a larger community. In certain parts of “Song of Myself,” Whitman might have written about this better than anyone—the individual as part of whole, death as part of life—and he was definitely on my mind as I wrote this poem.

The language is stunning here. Lines like the beginning, “waiting in the wind and wishing for mist to gather you in, gravity and weather to work together to keep you in place, the weight of water to contain you, hold you to yourself, for fog to rob you of vision and make you invisible,” are remarkable for their total assault on the musical aspect of poetry, from the alliteration to the lyricism of the fragments. How do you see these types of poetic language working in this poem and your writing as a whole?

Thank you. I’ve been working lately to indulge in what one of my teachers liked to call a “poetics of excess.” I have a tendency to overthink things, to spend too much time in my own head, to let reason get in the way of imagination. So I have been making a conscious attempt to allow my language more freedom, more play. In my first drafts of “In the Months After His Death You Move Through Moments Like a Mountain” I tried to let the sounds and rhythms of the words tell me where the poem should go. I wanted sound be the primary connective tissue of the earliest drafts, and then I would go back to revise for sense. In general, I hope that the beauty of language works to reinforce my desire for beauty in all of its forms to be a source of comfort or consolation. 

This title obviously does great work in informing the reading and subsequent emotional impact of the poem. How does titling poems work for you?

Thank you. It usually doesn’t. I usually have a terrible time with titles. Knowing how much I struggle often leads to more time struggling—like an insomniac who starts thinking about falling asleep—but it also leads me to new strategies. Sometimes I just study a draft until I find a phrase to use. Sometimes I jot down twenty or thirty possible titles, letting each one suggest another in a sort of free association game. I went through a phase in which every poem was titled “Poem with [an image from the poem].” I’ve sent untitled drafts to my best friend and told him to come up with something. And I’ve stolen lines from songs and other poems to use as titles. Dobby Gibson consistently gives amazing titles to his poems; especially when I read his book Polar, I learned a lot about the different types of work that a title can do. In this case, the title came pretty quickly. In the first draft of the poem, “In the months after his death you move through moments like a mountain” was actually the last line I wrote. I almost immediately recognized that it should be either the opening line or the title. Honestly, I wish it could always work like that. It almost never does.

What other writing projects are you currently working on?

Like a lot of poets out there, I’m currently working on the poem-a-day challenge for the month of April. Last year I managed to write twenty-two drafts (including the first draft of this poem), and I’ll probably end up with about the same number of drafts again this year. That’s huge for me; I’m usually lucky to write one or two poems in a month. More importantly, the challenge of writing a brand new draft every day helps me refocus my energy on writing as a daily practice. For now I’m resisting the urge to tinker with my first two poetry manuscripts, which I’ve just started sending out, so it’s a perfect time to turn my attention to new poems. I’ve also been working on translating the Anglo-Saxon riddles of the Exeter Book, and I’m constantly starting new nonfiction projects that I never manage to finish, including an essay about teaching Shakespeare that involves a comparison of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Scooby-Doo.

What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

I just read Luke Johnson’s first book, After the Ark, and I’m going to read it again in the next couple of days. It’s terrific. I also read Major Jackson’s Holding Company last week and enjoyed that too. Back in December I finally tracked down a used copy of Jon Anderson’s The Milky Way: Poems 1967-1982 and have been going back to his poems a lot. My to-be-read piles are out of control, so I’m trying not to notice any upcoming releases. But I can’t wait to working my way through the books I’ve picked up recently: The Cloud Corporation by Timothy Donnelly, The Alchemist’s Kitchen by Susan Rich, Lighthead by Terrance Hayes, Space, In Chains by Laura Kasischke, Ideal Cities by Erika Meitner, Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder. The list could go on and on.