2011 AWP Conference in Washington, DC. | February 4, 2011

Episode 14: Light, the Common Denominator: A Conversation with Eric Pankey by Brian Brodeur

Eric Pankey, the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University, is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008.

Published Date: April 26, 2011

Transcription

Intro/Outro:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This interview originally occurred at the 2011 AWP annual conference in Washington DC. The recording features Brian Brodeur and Eric Pankey.

Brian Brodeur:

Hello and welcome to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Podcast. I'm Brian Brodeur and I'm here at the 2011 AWP annual conference in Washington DC with poet, Eric Pankey. Eric is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1994-2008, published by Ausable Press in 2008. His work has been awarded numerous honors, including grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. For the last decade, he has taught in the MFA program at George Mason University, where he is professor English and the heritage chair in writing. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia with his wife and daughter. Eric Pankey, welcome.

Eric Pankey:

Thanks a lot, Brian.

Brian Brodeur:

I'd like you to start off by reading a poem, if you don't mind. Would you mind reading The Pear as One Example?

Eric Pankey:

Certainly. The Pear as One Example. Light, the common denominator, does not conceive, but cloaks and covers, and by wrapping, reveals. The pick chips a sliver or ice, the weed shadow-swept by a storm front glows gold. The pear curves the lines the blinds let through. Ask to name it, who would not say pear? The pomp and dimpled base. The blunt stems, woody accent. The green that is green. He closes his eyes, closes his hand around the pear and says, "This is it. This I would know without metaphor." But his touch rubs off the pear's perfume. A bit of honey and magnolia, grape and almond. None of it the pear, but the otherness that is the pear. And then, his mind wonders to Eros, as if the unknown made intimate or the known masked by light's flimsy veil. When he opens his eyes to see if what he hold is what he has held, he holds what anyone would call a pear.

Brian Brodeur:

Thank you. So that poem appeared in The Late Romances, a book that is part of the triptych which also includes Cenotaph and Aprocrypha. Could you talk a little about the triptych form in poetry, how it is similar to and different for its Medieval counterpart in the visual arts, and how you arrived at this form in your own work?

Eric Pankey:

Sure. First of all, I wanted to think in that visual art way, that is, by places three panels next to each other and seeing, I what ways, they would speak to one another, and yet stand independently by themselves. And so, the central panel is The Late Romances, and it is the most positive, I think, and uplifting of the three books, very much about the body and the pleasure that the body can have, the pleasure of intimacy, of appetites, of food, of wine, all the good stuff. And the notion of romance, that is, that in those Shakespeare romances, there are lots of problems that go on, but in the end, they resolved themselves like comedies, that is, in people coming together and community coming together in marriage.

The opening panel, the Apocrypha, was really an investigation of questions of the spirit, of the possibility of salvation, the possibility of even having a soul, I guess. And most of those inquiries were really philosophical and theological, I think. The third panel, Cenotaph, is really about the decay of the body, the way the body falls apart on us. And there are lots of elegies, lots of meditations upon death. What I was hoping is that no one of these panels would necessarily dominate, but together that they would give a kind of world vision. But perhaps only in retrospect, was anybody holding their breath for a decade waiting to find out what happens next? I think they're pretty conventional concerns. But it allowed me to, in each book, really focus on a certain kind of content, for lack of a better word. And those given contents allowed, then, possibilities for different kinds of forms.

Brian Brodeur:

Obviously, you view those three as maybe one book or one object or something along those lines. Do you view your work, as a whole, as one extended book or do you view them as distinct projects?

Eric Pankey:

I guess more distinct projects than one whole work, but I tend to like poets who spend their whole lives writing one long poem. Wallace Stevens, Charles Wright, say, it seems to me they continually write the same poem over and over again, and it's a really good poem, and each attempt is an attempt at that larger poem. If someone said that about me, I wouldn't be insulted by it, I guess. But I do think that the first two books, For the New Year and Heartwood, were really dealing... Well, they seemed to me to be a young man's books, and they're really autobiographical, trying to understand what it is, really, in many ways, what it is to be a son. That seems to be the position of the speaker in a lot of the poems. And the primary mode of those poems is narrative, maybe narrative meditative. They're really poems, and what, at that time I was writing them, was called the plain style. Maybe it's still called the plain style. And that was really what my teachers were encouraging me to attempt a kind of clarity and a kind of transparency in my work.

The next three books, I decided I was going to be a little bit more loyal to the poets that I first fell in love with, which would include people like Hopkins and Donne and Stevens, Keats, for whom there's a real, I don't know, surface density, if nothing else, a complexity of sound, not transparent. But at every moment you're in their poems, you're aware that you're in a poem. It doesn't pretend to be just somebody talking. These last three books then, maybe I'm too near them to really know what they did, but they were written in this past decade and I don't know, I guess I don't know anything about them. Maybe you'll ask me questions that will help me-

Brian Brodeur:

Sure.

Eric Pankey:

... know something more about them.

Brian Brodeur:

Yeah, actually, after the publication of your first two books, For the New Year and Heartwood, which you both mentioned, both of those seem dominated by poems sort of in the narrative lyrics autobiographical mode. But after that, your works seems to have become more hermetic or meditative. Is there something that prompted this shift or was it, I suspect, just something that you naturally slid into? You mentioned that the two books were sort of in the plain style, which was maybe a style that was advocated by maybe Donald Justice or Marvin Bell, some of the other great poets you studied with at Iowa. So was there that conscious shift to say, maybe as a rebellious son, to move on into the trilogy, or sorry, triptych?

Eric Pankey:

That seems like you probably saved me many hours on the couch with that analysis. I think yes is probably the answer to your question, that is, that it was a move towards trying to learn how to write poems on my own. I feel like Apocrypha is the first mature book I wrote. And now, even so, it still seems like a very young man wrote it to me.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, he did, after all.

Eric Pankey:

But it also had to do, I think, with different reading, as well, and learning, in a way, how to marry influences in a way that I hadn't quite figured out when I was in my 20s. And so, really, for instance, in Apocrypha, probably the two dominant influences on that book, well three really, one would be Czeslaw Milosz, the other is Wallace Stevens. And then, the other is reading the Nag Hammadi library texts, the various Gnostic gospels. And somehow, I put all of that into a blender and came up with what seemed like a new voice for myself. And one of the things that I immediately did in that book was to use the third person more often than I used the first person. And so, even though I think many of the poems are still autobiographical, I was looking at myself as if I were another, as if I were a figure in history or a figure in a myth. And some of that pose I think I really got from Milosz, where he's constantly seeing himself as not only this poet who's living in a contemporary moment, but a poet who has witnessed history, and in that witnessing, is almost bedeviled to be its chronicler.

Brian Brodeur:

Stevens, too, has many poems from the third person point of view, so maybe you consciously employed that POV. Did you employ it as, maybe, some kind of a distancing technique from difficult material, or if not difficult, personal material? Maybe did it help you become a little more comfortable discussing or engaging in some of these philosophical inquiries that you mentioned?

Eric Pankey:

Yes. I think that is true, and what I admired in Stevens a great deal, was how each poem is, in its ways, a vehicle for thinking. He doesn't necessarily come to final thoughts. He'll spend endless amount of time in a long poem making an argument, only to undo that same argument in the next poem. And so, it helped me learn that the poem wasn't so much a container in which to store memory, but a kind of place, a location, in which I could do a certain kind of thinking. And the third person did allow me to distance myself and to consider... I don't know, to have the advantage, I think, of an omniscient narrator, that is that you have a certain wisdom that your character doesn't have, and you can be aware of what they know and what they don't know.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm. Maybe even especially because that character is much closer to you than you would like to admit or something.

Eric Pankey:

Certainly. And it's not as if I've abandoned the first person, of course, it really comes back, especially in the book Reliquaries, which I sort of see as almost a revision of my second book, Heartwood, but in a much different method-

Brian Brodeur:

Yes.

Eric Pankey:

... of speaking and thinking, but dealing with the details of one's life. But thinking a lot more about when I was in my 20s writing about that past, it was a very recent past and, from my 40s it was much easier to see more pattern in my past.

Brian Brodeur:

Sure. And I actually wanted to talk about Reliquaries for a moment, if we could. So Reliquaries, which was published by Ausable Press in 2004, I'm sorry, 2005, seems a bit of a departure for you, in many ways. I guess the most immediate being formal, that every poem in the book is arranged into four of five line stanzas. At what point in your composition process did you make the decision to sustain this form throughout the manuscript? Was it a conscious choice or was it something that surprised you?

Eric Pankey:

It was a conscious choice that surprised me or it surprised me, and then I made it a conscious choice or both of those things. I had the good fortune to be on a Guggenheim the year that that was written, and I had finished up or was finishing up Oracle Figures, the book that came out before that. But at the same time I was working on finishing that book, I found myself having an hour or two to kill almost every day, because my daughter was on the crew team in high school, so I would have to drive an hour down to the river, taking her down to the river. Their practice was three hours long.

Brian Brodeur:

Was this the Occoquan River?

Eric Pankey:

The Occoquan River, yes, which gets mentioned in the poems.

Brian Brodeur:

That's right.

Eric Pankey:

And so, since it was a three-hour practice, if I drove an hour down there, there was no use in turning around and coming home and driving back to pick her up. And so, I would park the car and just go for walks along the river. It's hilly and wooded. And on cold, rainy days, I'd just sit in the car and one of the challenges I gave to myself was I said I was going to write five lines a day while I was at the river. And just the arbitrariness of that challenge, I guess, created that form of the five-line stanza, and what happened was, the first four days, I wrote four of them, and they were interesting next to each other. I hadn't thought of them as the same poem, but when I put them next to each other, I saw a real possibility. And so, the next four days, I tried the same thing, and before you knew it, I was just churning those things out. And I thought, "Why am I doing this?" Because as I always say to my students, "Everyone wants to write a long poem, but nobody wants to read one."

But it became an interesting shape. I found that when I was walking, those stanzas became what I could hold in my head, and that became, in some ways, part of the form, what could be memorable to myself over a period of time. And then, when I got back to the car or got back home, then I could actually write it down, which is not how I ever work at all.

Brian Brodeur:

Ah, I see.

Eric Pankey:

I usually work with notebooks around me and little phrases here and there, and mostly a process of piecing poems together out of all these lines or whatever, that I've written. But with Reliquaries, they were written as those stanza units, and then as four stanzas in each poem. And because of their method, because of walking, because of memory, their subject matter became, in some ways, meditative and about the nature and habit of memory. I often tell people I have no memory at all, I can't remember anything, and yet the poems were a method, in some ways, to get at things that I had forgotten.

Brian Brodeur:

That's great. And also, here, again, I'm reminded of Stevens who, when he walked from his house in Hartford to the insurance agency where he worked, would often compose lines or maybe even whole poems, and I guess you didn't have a secretary-

Eric Pankey:

I did not.

Brian Brodeur:

... to take dictation afterwards. But anyway, that said, do you think, also in Reliquaries, your lines, what? Doubled in length? I mean, many of the lines are, let's say, I don't know, eight beats long, seven beats long, maybe some are more, so since it was a unique process of composition for you, do you think that walking, for instance, had something to do with it?

Eric Pankey:

Yes, I've always been someone who has been easily influenced by whatever my medium is. So like in Heartwood, I was writing on 8.5x11, or 8.5X14 legal pads. And so, almost of all of those poems, originally, were about 33 lines long, which is how long. And then, when I started writing Apocrypha, it was the first time I worked on the computer, and they're little poems, and they were about what I could see on a computer screen of that era. And so, they all became relatively short, because I have a hard time thinking about something I can't see all at once. What's-

Brian Brodeur:

So a novel's out of the question.

Eric Pankey:

Right, right. Yes. No novel for me. But I found, also, with Reliquaries, that I was often writing them across... what am I trying to say? I turned the notebook sideways and was writing along the width, and so that allowed me to write a longer line. I didn't go in intentionally wanting to write a longer line, but what happened was the first few started out and, I don't know, they were probably 15 to 20 syllable lines, on average, and that became something of a habit of that mode of the poems.

Brian Brodeur:

I see.

Eric Pankey:

But yeah, I think the walking helped, and I also decided that if you look at a lot of my earlier poems, they're not terribly discursive. And I thought, in Reliquaries, I was going to, for once, try to use more verbs than the to be verb, say, which is-

Brian Brodeur:

Which can open up whole new worlds.

Eric Pankey:

Right, right. Things start to happen.

Brian Brodeur:

Literally. Or well, on the page anyway.

Eric Pankey:

Yeah.

Brian Brodeur:

So at the heart of many of those poems and, I guess you could say, just many of your poems in general that you've written across your career, is a kind of intense spiritual crisis. What is it like being a poet who explores subjects like spirituality, mystery, and the uncanny, in an overwhelming secular age?

Eric Pankey:

Well, when I first started doing it, in the early '90s, late '80s, especially at the institution I was teaching at then, at Washington University, where the sort of death of God was considered a historical fact and not a philosophical construct, well, people thought it was quite odd and strange. In fact, one person after reading came up to me and said that they liked the poems quite a bit, but they were surprised at how unabashed I was about their content, which struck me as really odd. I am part of this-

Brian Brodeur:

Content being the death of God or-

Eric Pankey:

Or content being-

Brian Brodeur:

... the lack of God?

Eric Pankey:

The hope or the struggle-

Brian Brodeur:

Oh, I see.

Eric Pankey:

... towards-

Brian Brodeur:

I see. Yeah.

Eric Pankey:

... maybe understanding God. And, I don't know, I almost took that on as a challenge then, after that, that one should be embarrassed by that. And there was a sense, really, that one had maybe mortgaged one's intelligence if one was a believer. And I'm not sure if I was a believer or not, I don't even know to this day if I'm a believer or not. I certainly sensed a kind of notion that people... I don't even know how to say this, but it's as if anyone who believed was somehow merely superstitious, and that somehow if you affiliated yourself with Christianity in any way, you were somehow affiliating yourself with people with deep right wing interests and I certainly do not embrace any of that at all.

Brian Brodeur:

Maybe a hopeful agnostic.

Eric Pankey:

A hopeful agnostic. That might be it.

Brian Brodeur:

Throughout your career, you've taught high school at the undergraduate level and graduate level at a few institutions, including George Mason University and Washington University in St. Louis. So how has teaching effected your work as a poet, if at all? Maybe besides the presence of a regular paycheck.

Eric Pankey:

That helps a lot. At least university teaching builds in, in some ways, part of the leisure time one needs to be an artist or a scholar. They expect that a third of your time is spent doing that sort of thing. And so, it's good to take advantage of that. But even when I was teaching high school, a lot of the book Heartwood was written while I was teaching creative writing, contemporary literature, and humanities, I guess, was the other course, and I taught two sections of each, each day.

Brian Brodeur:

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Eric Pankey:

Six classes. And I built in a lot of in-class writing time in my two creative writing classes. And so, while they were responding to prompts, I would write to the same prompts, and a lot of those poems turned up in Heartwood. So challenging students to write often challenged me to write and, as you know, I often write with my students, as well, in courses, whether it's a prose poem class or the meditative mode, whatever assignment they're doing, I try to do it, as well. And so, having a community of people around you who are excited about poems and who are making poems themselves, I find deeply exciting and motivating. What about the job keeps me from wanting to write poems? I would say maybe two things, department meetings where we all pretend like we have skills that we don't have, and try to solve problems that, if we had those skills, well, we might be doing other jobs.

And right now, I'm reading graduate applications and it's really hard to read that many poems in a non-teacherly way, that is, essentially I'm reading to sort of say thumbs up or thumbs down. We're inviting them or we're not inviting them to come. And there are some really great poems, and I learn a lot about poetry reading these great poems, but there are also, sort of, everything that's wrong with poetry or everything that might define mediocre poetry. And in the face of really great poems, one is motivated to write. But in the midst of mediocre poetry, I often feel like, "Oh, don't want to add to this." You can start seeing, in your own work, everything that you find unfortunate in other people's work.

So I guess the application process is a kind of mixed lesson. There are these handful of students who are doing something that seems like the poetry of the future. You know it's the real thing, but it's not like anything you ever see. And then, there's the slogging through. But again, I get paid really good money to do this, so I don't really mind.

Brian Brodeur:

Sure, sure. And so, you mentioned, well, not inspiration, but maybe motivation for writing a little bit in your last response, so what motivates you to write generally? Is it something like, well, you want people to respond to your poems in the way that you respond to the poems of others who you revere and enjoy, like you want to make the tops of people's heads feel like they're coming off? Or is it an itch that you have to scratch, is it a kind of a cleansing or something else? Or...

Eric Pankey:

Yeah. I think that that's changed over time. I remember when I was in graduate school, I would literally wake up at 3:00 in the morning with a poem being born full-grown from the top of my head, and I'd have to get up and write it down. That doesn't happen anymore. But I guess what I feel is that it's a much more intimate act in writing than almost any of the things... the way that you categorized it just now, it's more like being in conversation with other poets. I often find that what compels me to write is reading other people's poems, and that the poem is often a way of reacting to what I've read in the way that you would have a conversation with someone, and it's not necessarily meant to be broadcast loud of even public, and yet-

Brian Brodeur:

Put on a podcast, for instance.

Eric Pankey:

Right. But nonetheless, of course, anytime you're writing, you have to imagine that there is some future audience, there is a potential audience at least. But I don't do it necessarily to think, "I'm going to take the top off of somebody's head." That's why I go to other poems, that's why I read poems, is I want to experience that. I don't sit around and read my own poems, because I see all the places where I have a bad stitch and all the places where there's a structural flaw, and I think of all the things I had hoped to do in that poem, but merely settled for the poem that we all see. When I read other people's poems, I don't see all that. I just see, usually, perfection and brilliance and uncanniness and a surprise.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, speaking along those lines, you've also, for many years, dabbled in the visual arts, particularly in collage and the composition of shadow boxes akin to those of Joseph Cornell. In what ways have the visual arts, whether your own work or the work of others, informed your poetry?

Eric Pankey:

Well, certainly the work of others has informed my poetry a lot. I find, if I am having a hard time writing, all I really have to do is go down to the Smithsonian and walk around in museums for a little while and look at art, and I come home and usually something happens. I love looking at visual art and, in fact, most of the reading I do is monographs on visual arts or art history, theory of art. In my own visual art, I try to explore different kinds of subjects, I guess, in the visual arts. The pieces tend to be whimsical and sometimes funny. And I think I'm kind of a doleful poet, and I'm not terribly funny.

Brian Brodeur:

There are moments.

Eric Pankey:

There are moments, maybe. But what's interesting is that the process is somewhat similar, that is, to write my poems, I tend to do a lot of reading and jotting down phrases and words in notebooks, and then I go back to those notebooks after some time, to see what I've written down, and it all seems strange and unusual. But suddenly, I start seeing relationships among things that I hadn't seen when I had originally written them down and start, essentially, assembling them. And so, the boxes, the Cornell type boxes or collages, are very much a similar thing, that is, that I tend to spend a certain amount of time accumulating images, stuff, that will go into the assemblage.

And I don't know why I'm interested in those things until I start putting them together, until I start seeing relationships among the pieces. I don't know. That notion of a lot of process in writing and in the visual arts is a time of gathering, a time of just, I don't know, gleaning, picking up stuff, collecting. And then, once I have a certain amount of raw material, I can get going. It's really hard for me to just sit down and write a poem. It's something I rarely ever ask my students do, is to write an in-class poem, impromptu, because I wouldn't want to do it.

Brian Brodeur:

You're married to the wonderful poet, Jennifer Atkinson. What is it like to share your life with another artist, particularly one who practices the same craft?

Eric Pankey:

I think it's wonderful to have someone, one, that sort of understands what it is that you do. I've been in relationships with a person who was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank, and I had no understanding of what her business was. I mean, I still don't necessarily understand how the money markets and what work, how they create money, whatever. But with Jennifer, it's really great, because I have a reader. She sees most of my poems in their earliest showable drafts, and she finds things to like in them, nonetheless, even though they're very early drafts, and is very encouraging. It's also good to have someone who is productive living with you, who is disciplined. So if she's working in the morning, it's much harder for me to try to convince her to go see a movie, say, rather than sit down and try to work myself. And so, there is a discipline built in, as well.

I'd say, over the years that we've been married, our poems have gotten further and further apart. When we first met in graduate school, we were writing, or at least we were under the influence of very similar poets and aesthetics, and I think that, over the years, that's grown a little farther apart, and I think that that's a good thing. Not to be, in a way, stepping on each other's toes, taking content she has dibs on, say.

Brian Brodeur:

And so, is it vice versa, does she show you poems in their relative infancy and-

Eric Pankey:

She does. Yes. In fact, most days, if we have written something, we will share it with one another. Usually with all sorts of self deprecation and, "This is a piece of crap. I don't know what this is. I just wrote it." And then, she's very good at telling me what my poem has said, which I'm not always aware of when I've written them. I'm usually just aware of how this word goes next to this word, but she's very good at giving me a reading.

Brian Brodeur:

Right.

Eric Pankey:

And I think some people think it would be not a good thing to live with another artist. You live with another artist and it seems to work for you. But, for me, it's the best of all possible worlds that, for one thing, we only have to buy one copy of a book. The library grows.

Brian Brodeur:

And so, I assume that it's the same when you both have manuscripts you're working on. But in both of your separate processes with completely manuscripts, do you tend to share them at different stages? So you'll maybe have an early draft of a manuscript, would you then share that with Jennifer, and would she then share hers with you or would you wait until you were further on? Or...

Eric Pankey:

Yes. I think we have shared early drafts of manuscripts. Yeah, we've shared every book manuscript along the way. She says that she's not good at considering full books, a large thing. She feels like she's really good at reading one poem at a time. And, in fact, that's how she goes about the world. When she reads a book of poems, she's not reading a book of poems, she's reading in the book of poems, whereas I sit down and read it from cover to cover, as if it's a single thing, and as if it's my pleasure read.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, it should be, shouldn't it?

Eric Pankey:

It should be. Yes. So she always claims not to be very good, but again, just like in her reading of the individual poems, she's quite good at showing me what poems seem somehow aberrant in the manuscript to not be involved in the same arguments. She also is very good at showing me how I've articulated something by, say, a single image throughout the manuscript, how a repetition changes and complicates part of the argument of the poem. She's also a very good proofreader, so when I actually have had book manuscripts in my hand, I think I have been lucky to have her there to catch all sorts of errors I never would've seen.

Brian Brodeur:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. On that note, finally, you have a new book forthcoming in 2013 with Milkweed Editions. Could you talk a little about his manuscript? How does it differ from your other books, what's it called, et cetera?

Eric Pankey:

Yes. It's called Dissolve, and that's a title, actually, that Jennifer gave me after reading it. She said that lots of things are sort of merging into one another or changing in substance, and that notion, that almost alchemical notion, of an element changing from one property into another is at the heart of a lot of the poems. But what's it about? Well, again, I think it's a book that grew out of a very deep depression, except this time I was aware that I was in a deep depression, and I didn't think that everybody felt like I did.

I think the poems also have a little bit to do with my relationship to alcohol, and a sort of struggle with the bottle. Like Elvis Costello says, "The struggle with the bottle is nothing so novel." But it's certainly not, they're not poems about drinking or they're not poems about being depressed, but I think a lot of the meditations are about how does one, feeling the sort of leaden weight of depression, continue to make something, to make something of the world, whether it's poems or through a day or to be a good parent, to be a good partner, whatever.

Brian Brodeur:

Well, in that way, even though these poems came out of depression and maybe a struggle with drinking, in a way, they're kind of hopeful, because something was made.

Eric Pankey:

Right.

Brian Brodeur:

Something was finished even.

Eric Pankey:

That's true.

Brian Brodeur:

Maybe in the same way that your daughter, Claire, just was married recently, and in a way that's something coming to an end. Not, of course, in a negative way, but an accomplishment as a parent, I can imagine.

Eric Pankey:

Yeah, no. It does feel good, and I agree that-

Brian Brodeur:

It's only natural.

Eric Pankey:

I certainly don't want it to seem melodramatic. I mean, it truly was the condition I was in, and I felt as if my feet were in concrete and as if the world were in slow motion, and as if I could feel every negative thing in the world. And then, in the midst of that, how to write a poem that isn't merely wallowing, but is, in some ways, looking for moments of lightness, both in the sense of light and of not being pulled down by gravity, and that the poems really were a good place for me not to, I guess, as I said earlier, I think, poke at the sore. But in some ways, to move beyond it, and to think really positively about the world. There's a certain contentment in this book that I don't think exists in some of the earlier books. There's a sense of, I don't know, almost forward-thinking and being positive.

Brian Brodeur:

I imagine.

Eric Pankey:

Whether the poems are uplifting, I don't know, but yeah.

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