Ryan Walsh was born and raised in West Virginia. He is author of the poetry collection, Reckonings (Baobab Press), and two previous chapbooks, Reckoner and The Sinks. His poems have also appeared in Blackbird; Ecotone; Field; Forklift, Ohio; jubilat; Narrative; and elsewhere. He earned a BA from Warren Wilson College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives and gardens in Pittsburgh, PA.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: At the risk of simplicity, I’d like to begin with the title of your first collection, Reckonings. My mamma’s family is from Georgia, and so the phrase “I reckon…” comes naturally to me, but a ‘reckoning’ is much more complicated than a notion or a thought. Can you discuss what sorts of reckonings this book undertakes, and maybe also how poems can start to do that work?

Ryan Walsh: The title, and really the organizing structure of the whole collection, sprouted from the nuanced definitions of that word, ‘reckoning.’ It turns out to have four parts, all moving in an interesting direction: from calculating and computing to tallying an itemized bill to a settlement of accounts (as in “day of reckoning”) to a kind of navigational process of discovering the position of a ship or plane. Where I’m from in West Virginia, folks also say “reckon” in that way that means some combination of recollection, guessing, and figuring. So there’s that colloquial undertow in there, too. But also a coming to terms with several factors. Many of the poems began in memory and of wanting to connect back to the place where I was born and raised and the story of the zinc smelter there and how it shaped the community of Spelter. West Virginia is a place to break your heart with so much beauty and agony, so going back there via writing was a kind of personal reckoning. And then there are the political and environmental reckonings that are happening or are imminent all around us, due to a combination of forces: global capitalism, climate change, the current mass extinction, and pervasive distracting technologies to name a few. Modern life is so deeply unsustainable; I keep wondering, who is going to pay for all this? And the form my wondering most often takes is poetry.

As far as how poetry might do this work, I believe poems are inquiries in which we can “dwell in possibility” as Dickinson put it. How can we make sure that our destructive powers are held in check and outdone by our creative powers? How can we bring care and transformation into a poem? I can’t say if my work accomplishes this, but I’m aiming for a literary art that can dream forward a better world we could truly inhabit, while commemorating and learning from the past. Just like gazing at the stars for guidance, turning to poetry and stories have been around as long as humans. They feed us. They help us know how to live, where we are, and where we’re going.

CL: I love words that have these accreting definitions. If reckoning is a counting, your poems, as you mention, are true reckoners in that they both recount and demand some account. I think of a poem “In the Frame of Innings, Pendleton County, WV” which early on has both elements of beauty and despair, beginning: “Remember it shin-deep, that coppery, sulfuric hue / the North Fork of the South Branch— // the way it caught the summer glow / and threw it back to us tarnished? Your book does this: catches the wonder of a place and highlights the ribbons of ruin. The same poem goes on to reminisce nights of pick-up when too-old young men play despite “loss arriving / in rehearsal for departure, hauling out the pieces.” I’m drawn to the imagining-forward impulse of these poems, and wonder how hindsight factors in? I ask because these poems do not idealize the past as a pastoral might, nor do they deny nostalgia’s pull. For example, “Fable,” a haunting poem, reads in its entirety:

Once upon a time
there were rivers and streams
you could drink from

Which is chilling because of the future where we’ve arrived. How do you see yourself operating in the pastoral tradition? What sort of pastorals interest you?

RW: Well, first I should say I don’t know as much about the pastoral mode as I’d like. When I fell in love with literature, it was mostly a pastoral and sublime writing that I gravitated towards—that of Keats, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dillard in particular. But I don’t know if it’s possible or makes sense to operate in a “pastoral” mode anymore. The nightmares of industry and technology aren’t simply emerging threats anymore. We have much less wilderness and wild life and far fewer human-scale farms than in the past. And we live so disconnected from the non-human world. Nonetheless, I’m in love with the world. With life. Even while most of life is quickly wiped out by our modern mode of living. I believe in writing about my experiences and imaginings in nature, and I’m drawn to writers who write powerfully about emotional responses to nature. Those include my desk saints, poets whose work is always in reach: W.S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Ruth Stone, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Jean Valentine, and Ross Gay.

With regards to the pastoral mode, I’d say I hold to a view articulated as “dark ecology” by the English fiction writer and essayist Paul Kingsnorth, which I would say is rather anti-pastoral. Something akin to what Robinson Jeffers was after when he wrote, “I would burn my right hand in a slow fire / To change the future … I should do foolishly.” More likely post-pastoral. In his very fine collection, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, Kingsnorth defines this “dark ecology” as a kind of reckoning with the complicated feeling of fearing the disasters that technological progress leads to while also acknowledging there’s not much you can do to stop it. He goes on to spell out a five-step plan for sanity and purpose: withdrawing, preserving non-human life, getting your hands dirty, insisting that nature has a value beyond utility, and building refuges. That feels true for me many days, and poetry can be a kind of refuge.

So yes, there’s a ribbon of ruin even in the nostalgia. I was raised in a wild and wonderful place, even though it’s been spoiled and taken from nearly its whole history. I keep looking back to West Virginia, where my family still lives. Beauty and despair feel like a kind of braided inheritance in Appalachia, so I do find myself writing from that place. That poem you cited, “Fable,” it shouldn’t have to be framed as a fable. It was literally true. We really used to be able to drink safely from rivers and streams at one point, but we polluted them. And of course you can purchase bottled water. I just read somewhere that scientists have discovered microplastics even in the deep ocean. The truth is that by all the senses I have, the world appears to be measurably more damaged and imperiled now than it was in the past, even in my youth. Is that nostalgia? Or is it a reflection of how the losses are accelerating and piling up? But there is the beauty, too. That’s real. And that’s why we write and we sing and we share. We have to remember what we’re for. And what we’re willing to fight for.

I love poetry for so many reasons, but part of what’s dear to me is its quiet, unrelenting demand for our attention. You simply cannot skim through a poem on your screen and have an experience. It’s a slow art, and slowness is anathema to flashy technology or unlimited growth. So there’s a little revolution happening every time anyone anywhere reads or writes a poem. I love that. And I think this connects back to the pastoral tradition, as I understand it anyway—all those shepherds lounging with their flocks, daydreaming and idling, creating songs and poems and stories. Anyway, it sounds more appealing to me than, say, working to a nub in an office just so I can purchase the latest distractions. My allegiances are with what is slow and life-giving, poetry chief of these. Does this make me a pastoralist? I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t reject that description.

CL: I’m so interested by the idea of the poem as refuge, or of the building of them as refuge. And yet the refuges here aren’t those of escape; here I recall your poem “The Cloud” which, even as “gathering tweets swallow the skies,” reminds readers “the cloud / is not a cloud. Ventilated warehouses devour rivers. / Colonies of servers buzz / in their rack space,” continuing on to ask “What are you serving?” and “Where are your friends tonight?” This refuge is relentless, naming friends as a “patch of roadside thistle, / clover, asters, heather— / like the weeds we’ll be / when we die—” You are not afraid of direct interrogation or of jarring juxtapositions, often through use of multiple lexicons—the natural, the technological, the corporate, the scientific. How do you think about weaving various registers? Does employing them serve as a way into some of these difficult, ultimate questions? A way out?

RW: What a great and complex web of questions! I’m not sure that I do think of weaving these various registers you mention, but I recognize that they’re there. I think it’s more that they’re simply available to all of us, so I tap into them. Maybe it comes from an awareness of the various textures of language we’re immersed in daily. When I think of writers who mix registers and tones with real mastery, I think of Ruth Stone and Hayden Carruth. It was as though Stone had some astral antennae and could tune into several channels at once from our deep cosmos, bringing stardust into conversation with something as minute and specific as the biological workings of the gut, with memories, imagined voices, scraps of radio dialogue. She wrote, “This is not poetic language, / but it is the language of poetry.” And I feel that this could be applied to her methods. The language of poetry has changed since the mid-twentieth century because our daily experience of language has changed. I find her work startling and deeply refreshing. Carruth, of course, was a master of melodies, tones, improvisation, and invented forms. Reading him, I learned to consciously work between narrative and lyric modes and mix the two, but I’m not sure I’m able to access anything like his or Stone’s tonal ranges.

I believe in being direct but doing so via the “jarring juxtaposition” you mention. I’m drawn to poems that hit me with emotional force that I can almost feel physically. There’s a directness to that reading experience, even if the language itself is somewhat abstract (“Tell all the truth but tell it slant—” Dickinson advises). Her poems are like lightning strikes that sizzle my scalp. There’s an immediacy and an urgency full of life.

One of the ultimate challenges of this information age is navigating the tide of data so as to make sense of things. Back to the idea of multiple lexicons, we’re inundated daily by a storm of lies and false claims from so many fronts: advertisements, tweets, corporate jargon, political spin, and even, sadly, the media. Not to mention all the self-promotion, bantering, trolling, and subterfuge on social media. It’s a discouraging cacophony, which is one reason I stay away from social media. But it also drives me to try to find a way to cut through the clutter, the empty language of the million emails and texts we exchange, to get to a place that feels right and real—the refuge of poetry. Which is never trying to sell us anything, except perhaps a moment of beauty or reflection or verbal excitement. A gift, not a pitch. Fortunately, I’ve crafted a happy life where I don’t need so-called “social” media to help me be in touch with the people I love, to read and share poems, to carry on correspondence. That’s a kind of directness I cherish.

In my reading life, Galway Kinnell and W.S. Merwin stand out for what I consider a certain quality of earnestness that feels direct. There’s a kind of plea I feel behind their words to the human and wild worlds, as well as to the reader (perhaps to the writer himself?). Something like a prayer—though I suppose that notion is out of fashion, and I’m not a religious person anyway. Though I do love some old time, gospel, and bluegrass music. What’s the old song lyric? “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” Talk about jarring juxtaposition!

CL: A gift not a pitch. What a sentiment. Often even poems try to pitch something—maybe an ideal or way of thinking—sometimes even earnestly. Personally, I ask what I’m gifting with every poem I write, and usually that means offering evidence of my unknowing, baring my vulnerable prayer.

This directness, this earnestness, manifests itself in several ways within Reckonings—sometimes it is in a willingness to name or call out and thereby draw attention, like “Spelter, West Virginia” which in part reads: “If they can call us white trash, then it’s okay / to drink up, blot out, mine, frack, and fuck / every hole and deposit. Then dump, / flush, dredge, and spoil away every bit of us, / all we have left. // Unincorporated? It was always corporate: / Ziesing, Crasselli, Matthiessen+Hegeler, DuPoint.” Which contrasts a different type of earnestness in “The Lee Shore,” beginning:

I want a darkness I can remember

Here
Even this

lip of the continent
this garden of whales
this nightwater

arrives mottled like the hides of harbor seals
like the moon clouded over

It doesn’t matter what I want

::

I watched the oats in the pot
breathing

like a man’s chest
rising and falling as he sleeps
like the heaves of hill upon hill
making shadows in the yard

How does it feel
that last breath that turns you
into night
into ocean salt
into coral

So I must ask: what determines how you bring those pleas to the page, either in terms of content, or form? Does this have to do with audience as well? What (if any) distinction do you see between the private and the public poem?

RW: I do believe in bearing witness. Sometimes that’s all we can do and it matters. With the poems that center on the zinc smelter in Spelter, WV, and the slow violence of its pollution on the community, I knew I was entering a more public dialogue, so I embraced that. I used court documents. I talked with family and residents, people who used to work there and who live near the plant. But it was also stemming from a personal place and family connections to that small town and the river there. It felt like I had something to say about this public health and environmental crisis, even if it was one that was slow and hard to discern. It felt like a different project than any other set of poems I’ve written, which are usually sparked by an image or a question. Sometimes a single line I can’t shake. “The Lee Shore” that you quote really began from a set of curiosities: wondering about Melville’s character Bulkington from Moby-Dick (how could “the land [seem] scorching to his feet” if he’s from the Appalachians?), wondering what ultimately happens to your body when you die at sea, and wondering about our tireless pursuit of light and energy from the dark depths of the earth and oceans.

You’ve asked a great and fundamental question here about the nature of art! I suppose I consider poems to be both private and public and that in this dynamic is a bit of magic. Look at what a treasure we have in Dickinson and how she blended those two realms to perfection.

CL: And yet even for the Spelter poems, in that case the image or the question might be ‘why’? or ‘how’? what came to be did. I also think of the various meanings of ‘wonder’; it could mean to speculate, or also to fill with admiration, amazement, awe. While at first glance the definitions seem disparate, to me they meld in your own work—the more you speculate, question, examine, the more you admire, are in awe, are bewildered. Can you talk about the way your work engages with wonder?

RW: Well, again, I come back to those layers of meaning within the word ‘reckoning’ itself. There’s that movement—from looking backwards and tallying, summing accounts and bringing the past in check with the present in terms of accountability, to that navigational sense of determining the position of an aircraft or a ship. Maybe of a planet or constellation. There’s a sense of destination, travel. The blood stirs. The breeze beckons. The doors of possibility open.

Obviously I’m interested, even absorbed by, the idea that a reckoning is overdue for all the forces stripping life from our planet and denigrating human dignity through the brutalities of capitalism. At the same time, I’m also not so interested in reckonings without forgiveness. There has to be a way forward. Empathy, love, and understanding can’t be lost in a quest for justice. Because there is suffering in the world, there must also be a song. My friend, the late poet David Budbill, helped get that notion lodged in me. Do you know his short, beautiful poem, “What Issa Heard”?

What Issa Heard

Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds
singing sutras to this suffering world.

I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,

since we will always have a suffering world,
we must also always have a song.

—From Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse, Copper Canyon Press, 1999.

I try to be a student to wonder, bewilderment, being lost. I read and re-read Thoreau and Dillard often in my younger days, and it lead me to believe that losing oneself, especially in nature, is a rich and valuable experience. Thoreau wrote, “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extend of our relations.” I like to be lost in language. It seems a thirst for wonder is what brought me to poetry and keeps me here in love with the world. This, too, is why the trappings of technology and the futurists’ vision for the world feel so empty to me. Humans don’t calculate, we comprehend. We are moved by our sense of wonder and our capacity to feel something bigger than ourselves. We don’t run on code or even logic all that often; we’re fueled by dreams, stories, poems, the imagination.

More than anyone writing today, I really see Ross Gay embodying this approach to wonder in his poetry and non-fiction. His incomparable Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (just behold the project behind that title!) embodies this need for a song for the suffering world. I think of the end of his glorious title poem from that collection:

“Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. Every day.”

And I’m just moved to pick up what words I can and build a world of language that can be courageous enough to bear witness and speak truth to power and contain love and transformation and gratitude and possibility. Do I pull it off? I’d be the last to know, but I am still trying. I’m grateful to be here and to have poetry to bring us together.

CL: Me too. And thank you—today and every day!