Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife and Two-Headed Nightingale, and coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, her awards include an NEA fellowship, the Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize, among others. Shara was the inaugural Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College and currently serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Acre Books. She lives in Oxford, England.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: Your first collection Two-Headed Nightingale puts the natural world on display often in conjunction with or via female performers, a vantage point rarely assumed. In your collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, I’m entranced by a different type of performance: that of an outsider alternately acting as ambassador, tourist, homemaker. Displacement showcases place almost more than belonging, and so—I’m hoping you might begin by addressing the importance of place in your work?

Shara Lessley: The California of my childhood and early adulthood—I grew up in the Central Valley, attended undergrad in Orange County, and moved to San Francisco after graduate school—were radically different, and I suspect the particularities in geography, culture, economy, weather, populations, politics, (even the vernacular!) of those regions sparked an interest in the contradictions and tensions of place. Recently, Bruce Snider and I spent about three and a half years co-editing on an anthology of essays, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice. It was a remarkable process—soliciting writers we admire and asking them to explore their own complex relationships with place-based poetry as it relates to issues of technology, faith, ecology, craft, nationalism, sexual identity, war, and the imagination, among other subjects. Editing the anthology really made clear the extent to which we all experience the same places differently and how our identities (gender, sexuality, cultural, religious, etc.) influence how we see our home towns and home countries, not to mention the rest of the world.

My children were born in the Middle East. We currently live in England. I spent a decade and a half moving between in Washington D.C., North Carolina, New York, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Virginia. As addresses accumulate, you begin to question not only how you define a particular place, but also the extent to which that place (re)defines you. Drafting The Explosive Expert’s Wife, which primarily takes place suburban D.C. and Amman, where we lived for three years, brought up issues not only of displacement, but of representation. Although I fell deeply in love with the people and culture (I often say that I will grieve the country the rest of my life), the Jordan of The Explosive Expert’s Wife is an American’s “Jordan.” Certain privileges, hang-ups, prejudices, sensitivities, curiosities, and understanding (or lack thereof) come with my being an expat, and the country of the poems in The Explosive Expert’s Wife certainly reflects my imperfect perspective. While Two-Headed Nightingale is mostly situated in America, I suspect my poems about Amman, Arab Spring, Petra, Umm Qais, Wadi Rum, etc., actually reveal more about how and what we, as Westerners, think of as the United States—united, of course, being a misnomer.

CL: It’s interesting because people often advise to “write what you know,” but sometimes what we know we fail to convey, or fail to convey compellingly to someone unfamiliar. Your poems compel through their particulars, through their details, and do reveal an American mindset. I think immediately of the poem “They Ask Me to Send,” a piece detailing all the requests from the States, like coffee mixed with cardamom or pickled pomegranate; mud masks and Dead Sea salts, etc. The speaker doesn’t quite comply, for example “my father’s friend wants a dishdasha to parade around in / at parties. I ship him a pendant to ward off the Evil Eye […],” “her neighbor wants proof / I’m not giving birth in a cave. I send them painted ostrich / eggs, billboards of the heir apparent,” which highlight both ignorance and distance, the need for more intricate detail. How or do you edit your details, given that they serve both as reportage and symbol, that they have incredible power? What role does a list have in bridging that gap of un-knowing-ness?

SL: “They Ask Me to Send” takes stock of the many care packages I shipped from Jordan. The boxes were filled with good intentions (along with Dead Sea products and a lot of coffee), but failed to convey a life lived. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t send what makes Amman so magical—the generosity and dignity of its people, for instance, or the experience of breathing “the air at Aaron’s tomb” after a long hike. Lists are tempting because they rev the poem’s engine. With accumulation comes speed. Too often, though, they overpower the sentences and stanzas that house them. If you’re not careful, the catalog doesn’t add up to anything but a whole lot of “stuff.” “They Ask Me to Send” moves quickly in the poem’s upper half via a series of stateside requests and then shifts almost into slow motion at the end when the fire balloons drift across the night sky over six-thousand-year-old columns at the Temple of Hercules. In fact, that was the very image that inspired the poem. We’d only lived in the Middle East a few weeks when I first saw the “paper chambers” Elizabeth Bishop so perfectly depicts in “The Armadillo,” the ones that “flush and fill with light / that comes and goes, like hearts.” I couldn’t believe my luck. I had to move to Jordan in order to experience some semblance what Bishop encountered a half century ago in South America! Those moments were incredible, especially since I couldn’t initially make sense of what I was seeing. As with the fire balloons in “They Ask Me to Send,” I try to choose images that carry charge or have texture, ones that resonate in multiple ways. But I also want them to ring true so the lines don’t feel overly lyricized or labored. It comes down to finding and then isolating the most telling details, I suppose.

CL: One of my principle joys in poetry is the way words do so much work, how they can lift two or three things up for us to contend with simultaneously. I think of the lines of “The Accused Terrorist’s Wife” that read “Water springs / from the outdoor pump, a parasite / hidden in each clear drop (however // she washes her face, it can’t come clean / enough…)” or the mannequin in a bridal shop, model ‘wife to be,’ who has “no task but to stand / in someone else’s design, saying nothing” where the literally rendered does resonate doubly, and doubly gives me shivers, with lineation’s emphasis. Since your poems are so lyrical and visceral but never feel labored, I want to ask about those textured images. Do you have those telling details in mind when you begin a poem, as guides? Or are they ones you discover through the poem’s evolution? How (do) you see double meanings or word play as necessary in poems?

SL: It’s funny—I was anything but a model bride. Or, maybe a typical bride? Whatever that means. When my best friend showed up to help me hunt for a dress, I honestly thought I’d try on a few samples and then pick one. I greatly underestimated the process. I don’t know why I chose the dress I did. I suppose I was exhausted. But the cultural idea of the “perfect” gown—that women dream of finding it, whittling themselves down to fit into it, even though it’s ultimately a stranger’s vision of what they should want for themselves—that interested and still interests me. As for the poem, although I didn’t have it in mind at the beginning of the drafting process, the phrase “[n]o task but to stand / in someone else’s design” seemed to arrive naturally because of bride’s lack of autonomy in earlier stanzas. Both the manufacturer and, later, the window-dresser, see to it that the “figures are made to touch” (emphasis mine). I like that double play with “made,” as in built or constructed for, as well as forced to have physical contact. I also tried to align the dummy and speaker (the mannequin’s hair is human, her “arm fused to shoulder, eye hardened / to a single vanishing point…”). You probably notice more play here between the physical and aural eye/I. To get to your question about multiple meanings, the trick of it, I think, is when ambiguity complicates and enriches the poem’s plot instead of diluting it. As a reader, I love when a word’s initial purpose/definition seems to transform as I revisit it again and again within the context of the sentence or stanza. Imagery (i.e., precision) and ambiguity are two sides of the coin in lyric poetry, which is to say, they’re not entirely unlike those “parasite[s] / hidden in each clear drop” of water in “The Accused Terrorist’s Wife”—only, less menacing. One of poetry’s great gifts is paradox, the way music and mystery can nudge us toward moments of clarity. Another gift is discovery—it’s what keeps writers and readers coming back to the page.

CL: Mystery as the way to clarity, uncertainty as the cornerstone of faith—paradoxes indeed. Another paradox I see often at work in yours is the way we come to understand the self through others—despite this book’s perceptive and acutely present speaker, she (and most all women) are portrayed in relation to another. Sometimes this is comical or practical, like in “Advice from the Predecessor’s Wife,” sometimes dire like “The Clinic Bomber’s Mother,” and sometimes chafing, like the penultimate “Late Epithalamium with Perennials” which ends “Your air is everywhere / they breathe. What’s to regret?—and yet, and yet—” What is helpful, or maybe alternately regrettable in this positioning? What sort of expert does the explosive expert’s wife become?

SL: I’m glad the connectedness between the women rings true. Although they live half a world apart and practice different faiths, I see the American “Clinic Bomber’s Mother,” who attempts a daily penance for her son’s crimes, for example, in direct dialogue with the poem about Middle East’s first all-female de-mining crew, as well as “The Accused Terrorist’s Wife.” Within the book, there’s also more intimate correspondence, as in epistolary poems like “Letter to Rania in Amman” and “Letter to Bruce in Paradise, Indiana.” Perhaps the unwritten poem that hangs above the book as a whole is the implied conversation between seemingly unrelated people who live in and occupy radically different places and positions in the world. We’re more connected than we realize or acknowledge.

A few years ago, I visited a high school in Washington D.C. where a class of seniors asked questions about Two-Headed Nightingale and excerpts from The Explosive Expert’s Wife, which was still in progress at the time. One student wondered whether there was a counterpart for “Advice from the Predecessor’s Wife”; a poem, in others words, in which I dished advice rather than receiving it. It was a brilliant assignment and I tried, but ultimately failed, to write that poem. Looking back, I think it’s because The Explosive Expert’s Wife is more about listening than asserting, especially when it comes to the sections located overseas. On the other hand, I’m not shy about voicing my opinions about the long but often overlooked history of bombings (mainly by white men) in this country. This is an important part of the book—poems like “The Bath Massacre, 1927” and “Found Poem: No Joke,” for instance, housed in the third section.

What is the narrator an expert of? Because the book is so tied to personal experience, I hesitate to make any claim that suggests my own exceptionalism. An expert? If anything…maybe it’s the very quiet understanding that our lives are vulnerable and fraught, that there is terror in the ordinary, that our American indifference to violence is itself a form of terrorism, that throughout our lives and ingrained in every culture there are instances of prejudice and empathy, faith and failure, injustice and regret, brutality, resilience, and love.

CL: To become expert at being human, then and recognizing our shared humanity. If you were to meet someone who had little to no exposure to poetry and could give one poem to him or her, which would you share?

SL: Thank you so much for this conversation, Cate. How about a poem that renders human frailty and our capacity for brutality, one that simultaneously underscores human violence and tenderness and perseverance? Oh, and beauty. A hell of a lot of that…

“Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly.

CL: Thanks, Shara!