Rachel Mennies is the author of the poetry collections The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021) and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has recently appeared at Poetry Magazine, The Believer, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Mennies’s essays, criticism, and other articles have appeared at The Millions, The Poetry Foundation, LitHub, and numerous other outlets.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: My enthusiasm will betray me soon enough, so right away I have to admit: I’m a total letter junkie. I’ve loved mail for as long as I can remember—sending it, receiving it, holding something come a long distance in my hands and feeling connection. Many of my dear friends live far away, and so some of my most meaningful relationships come from a robust correspondence, both via digital and snail mail. So it’s no surprise I gravitated to your latest collection, The Naomi Letters. At the risk of simplicity, I’d love to begin by hearing some about your own relationship to letters and letters as the form for this book. Did the poems take this form initially? Or more broadly, how did these missives come to be?

Rachel Mennies: I am also a total physical-letter-lover, and I cherish the sliver of my childhood and young adulthood that was protected from email and the internet—even though I’m also a total internet over-user, and I’m glad for its presence in my life. I sent and received a lot of letters as a young person, mostly through snail mail. I remember making envelopes out of magazine pages, crafting collages, sending them with snippets of poetry to friends—so I definitely have always felt an intimate connection to that form. I came to epistolary poetry much later, though. I believe that my early introduction to the form was through prompt work in college, and I don’t remember at the time feeling like there was anything generative for me in the middle of the Venn diagram between poetry—especially more lyric poetry, like I usually tend to write—and letters, where the epistolary sits.

When I sat down to start writing what became The Naomi Letters in the summer of 2016, I was in a funky creative place, with a stagnating manuscript that never ended up finding a home (and has since been lovingly taken apart for scraps) and was looking for a way to write through some difficult personal times, particularly related to my sexuality and a then-undiagnosed mental illness. I began to write it without really thinking, like, Oh, I’m sitting down to write a new book. The early drafts of The Naomi Letters were much less mediated by any thoughts of form; that came a bit later, I think, when I realized what this project could be. But in the beginning, I would say they were not “true” epistolary poems, in that they were more just letters than anything else. They were not like literally shaped like letters—there was no signature or salutation—but they were always written to/wards the woman that became Naomi.

CL: I’m fascinated by that Venn Diagram—often times it seems as though the circles nearly overlap with only a sliver of space separating the letter from the lyric. The impulse to speak, cry out, or bridge our lonelinesses seems foundational in both modes, since the very act of pen to paper makes a motion ‘toward.’ But I’m curious what you see as key components of that letter-poem diagram, especially in the overlap. How does the way you think about a second person ‘you’ differ for each?

RM: You know, I selfishly feel very lucky that you’ve asked me this question—I’m in the process of working on a new manuscript, and I’m writing this long poem, or poem sequence (to be determined), that utilizes the second-person address. This is the first time that I’ve written in second person since The Naomi Letters, except for maybe in a couple of individual poems here and there—but this poem, long poem, or poem sequence, whatever it will become, is distinctly not an epistolary poem.

Some of the Venn diagram overlap is unquestionably formal, as in The Naomi Letters, where it is explicitly drawn to the attention of the reader over and over that what is being sent, and what is theoretically being received by the speaker from Naomi, are letters. I’m awaiting your letter. I’m sending this to you at dawn. There’s something about the invocation of the writing process—of the labor of creating that letter, of sitting at the desk and writing or typing or drafting, and including that labor in the poem explicitly—that feels distinct from other poems of direct address, perhaps more broadly, that would fill the entirety of that one side of the diagram.

I wonder if some of the distinction between poems of direct address and the epistolary also involves the level of intimacy that’s invoked—not so much a formal preoccupation for me as it is a timbre, or a pitch, perhaps?—an intensity of building the relationship between the speaker and the “you.” The poem that I’m working on now differs from the epistolary in part because it is not certain to whom it is writing: the “you” is unstable. Whereas The Naomi Letters’ speaker is obviously so focused, so obsessed with the “you,” and naming the “you” as Naomi, over and over in the book. I really want to keep mining this in my own work, because it’s going to unlock something for me, I can feel it!, as I keep working on this new project.

CL: This is so interesting—I often advise my business writing students against the second person ‘you’ which can sound aggressive or presumptuous, given the level of intimacy it assumes. In poetry though, since we typically want intimacy, ‘you’ abounds: the ‘you’ that stands for the speaker, or the ‘you’ that stands for mankind, or a ‘you’ we presume is the reader unless, like in The Naomi Letters, ‘you’ has a specific name.

In your collection those named moments start immediately and are so intense: Yesterday, Naomi, a man jumped to his death from the bridge beside/my house; I told someone about you, Naomi; I cannot fit his name in my mouth and still breathe./ Instead, I will write you another letter./ It begins and ends like this: Naomi, Naomi, Naomi. And we hear it again and again in the collection, since who doesn’t want to forever have a beloved’s name on their tongue?

Without Naomi’s responses though, the beloved becomes a mirror for the speaker, an alter-ego of sorts. Since much of the time poems do address younger versions of ourselves, the dead, the divine, etc., I’m curious about this new piece being emphatically non-epistolary. Without pushing too much into the realm of a project still taking shape (so perhaps in terms of The Naomi Letters) how does the idea that a specific person will read what you’ve written change the nature of what’s included? Does it heighten (or lower) the stakes?

RM: I’m fascinated by your example of business writing, because this same issue came up when I taught first-year writing as an adjunct, which I did for about a decade. I talked all the time with students about exerting caution over the second person in introductory academic writing because it makes assumptions about the reader that usually were not correct or were too specific—it absolutely is a question of assumed intimacy, and that can ostracize a reader in certain contexts. Yet, as a poet, I’m fascinated by playing with those assumptions, and I certainly did so in The Naomi Letters.

However, a specific person that could be the you reading what you’ve written, and then that fact changing the nature of what’s included, is not something I thought so much about with The Naomi Letters. Naomi is not—in the most literal sense—a specific, real person who exists that I, the real Rachel Mennies (inasmuch as she differs from my speakers, which is…not wildly so!), was writing to; Naomi exists as an amalgamation of past loves, and I rendered/imagined a singular version of them to create her. She has certainly since become her own singular character, but in terms of thinking about like, oh, a specific Naomi-person will read this, and I am worried about the stakes of that—this was less of a concern.

(My primarily-felt stakes with the release of The Naomi Letters, in terms of a you, had more to do with a slightly broader and real/numerable readership: those friends and family who I hadn’t yet come out to as queer. I feel very lucky that their reception has spanned everything from joy to a knowing shrug.)

This new project is a little different. It’s very much in process, and a lot could change, but what I’m experimenting with right now is writing to a you that does not yet exist, which is to say, I’m writing into the future. That’s a new space for me. This project, even more so than The Naomi Letters, is a book about mental illness, specifically obsessive-compulsive disorder and a version of OCD that is incredibly future-focused. What’s going to happen, what bad things are going to happen? Can I prevent those things from happening? Can I make certain things happen? My therapist calls those sorts of obsessions fortune-telling or magical thinking, and while I really struggle with these thoughts in my day-to-day life, I am fascinated by them as a writer.

In this case, the you lives in those imagined or feared futures. I guess it’s possible that there is a future person, or people, who could read the work and feel that I was talking to or about them, but it is very different than The Naomi Letters’ exploration of you. This new project is dealing with intimacy, and maybe even presumptuous levels of intimacy, a little bit differently because of this new element of the imaginary that I am exploring—with great excitement and with great fear, which I suppose is probably the right space to begin a writing project.

CL: Oh, yes! I did assume Naomi was an amalgamation. But even while a specific person’s response wasn’t a worry, the book’s [unsent drafts] seem to indicate the speaker has some concern about disclosure. Often we write and delete the text, cross out the line, trash the note, revise the piece, etc. and so these [unsent drafts] are some of my favorites. Often they have intimate details like “the summer light returned and in it I watched / your pale belly hairs lower / raise / lower / with your breath”; or potential missteps like “I haven’t heard from you lately // Who will I tell of my student—who yesterday requested a book of Sexton’s poems to read—”; other times confession, like “I did nothing kind with my wakefulness”; or insecurity, with the draft that reads in its entirety “I noticed you didn’t say STAY—”

Naomi doesn’t read these poems but we do; their inclusion reveals more about the speaker and her impulse of composition. Temporality feels key here: to write and not send seems to suspend time; to write and send captures both writer and reader in time, especially with dates as titles. For The Naomi Letters and also the new project writing to a future ‘you,’ how does time shape both form and content?

RM: For The Naomi Letters, I felt deeply invested in an archival approach to time—as you said, there’s this interplay between capturing and suspending time in looking “between” the letters at the unsent drafts, in addition to the drafts that are pegged to time with the dates. The book covers a year that you could point to on the calendar; this relationship couldn’t have happened at any other time.

I love your question of how time shapes both form and content because, as I poked at a bit above, the new project is explicitly about the experience of time as a mentally ill person. In The Naomi Letters, the reader’s experience of time comes through the speaker’s rumination, in her obsessing over things that have happened, and how they have happened, what the way that they’ve happened means for the speaker, and how the speaker will carry that meaning into the future. In that sense, time shapes the literal content, right, not just in the form of dated letters, but also in the direction that the reader is nearly always looking, which is backwards.

In contrast, most of my new work is oriented in the “opposite” (an oversimplification, to be sure!) direction, towards a future or futures. I recently said to a friend of mine, as I’ve been working on these poems, that I’m struggling to tangle with more conceptual nouns when heading “this” direction. I am writing about (and naming) time; I am writing about hope. I am writing about fear, and joy, and obsession. In some ways, it’s been a challenge for me to zoom in, within (an) imagined future/s, like I did in The Naomi Letters, to the pale belly hairs, to the dog-eared book on the writing desk.

And the way that the reader will experience time in this book, whatever it will be, will be different—the future doesn’t yet exist, and it will forever not exist yet in the collection, with the exception of a few poems that are definitely rooted in the way that the speaker experiences time during the 2020-2021 lockdown. But the rest of the collection grapples with how a person with anxiety anticipates time in these sorts of distorted and recursive ways. The reader engages with a speaker that is constantly anticipating something that may or may not happen, instead of in The Naomi Letters, where the speaker is ruminating on something that has happened, even if her own retelling of it is distorted, and that shapes both form and content profoundly.

CL: Lineation also enacts that backwards-looking: the majority of the poems’ lines endstop, which has the effect of finality. And one of my favorite excerpts actually addresses ambiguity directly:

The problem with certainty lives in its instability: how this afternoon
I sliced open a peach at its seam, finding it gone to mush.

I licked each wet wrist before I threw the peach in the garbage.

Yesterday it would have been delicious—the day before, inedible.

What I’m trying to say, Naomi, is you found me at the exact right time.

Here even in describing an uncertainty, the lineation’s reportage cements past occurrence. It seems one of the primary drivers of poetry—in composition and eventual form, both—is a fundamental uncertainty and instability. For me, I think of how often homonyms or puns creep in, not for the sake of cleverness, but because things really are both at once; or how sometimes only a contrapuntal will do, to illustrate separate and simultaneous realities. Anticipating a multiplicity of futures may result in a recursive rut or distortion; at the same time it might enable plasticity. Earlier in that same March 19, 2017 poem a man questions the speaker’s discernment, asking “do you just want to fuck everyone then?” to which the speaker replies she sees it “more as a narrowly diverse certainty.”

It’s less an absence of preferences than an expansion of them, of the options beyond A and B, beyond the linear or binary. And so, I wonder if you might touch on the ways queerness, with its inherent multiplicities, has shaped your own epistolary form, and also informs your work moving forward?

RM: Before I came out, I struggled with languaging my sexuality—and my experience of knowing my own queerness was both limited and expanded by its instability. My understanding of my sexuality has not only deepened with time, but also changed, and I think it’s something that I as a bisexual person—and I would broaden that language to say, as someone who loves beyond the binary, who does not see gender as a limitation for the possibility of romantic love—have welcomed into the very definition of my sexuality: it is mutable. It cannot be pinned down, even in language, though of course The Naomi Letters is very much a journey through trying to language one particular love at one particular moment in time that helps to define or shape that sexuality powerfully for the speaker.

I would not describe the poems I’m working on as explicitly queer work in the same way that The Naomi Letters was, inasmuch as the preoccupations of the book largely tilt away from romantic love and sexuality altogether towards other subject matter. But I do think the speaker’s desire to constantly inhabit these imagined multiple futures as a queer person herself connects to a sort of queer approach to possibility as you’ve shaped it above (I love that!). Life taking only one linear path, the book is writing very much against that—the path is constantly disrupted and altered. Of the few poems that have been published from the new project along these lines, one particularly comes to mind, which is “Therapy Worksheet: Cognitive Distortion Analysis” from CODE LIT. The reader has the ability to imagine each line-item as existing in these four quadrant-ed contexts—and online, a reader can literally move them around and affix them to their chosen quadrants, which entirely reshapes each experience’s potentially lived context for the speaker and thus the journey of the poem itself. Is “the birth of your first child” a lived joy or an imagined one? A lived or imagined fear? And onward into each iteration of the future.

CL: What an inventive form! I love the sensations that come from some of these lines. “Peeling a blood orange on your hotel bedspread in Como to share with him, not washing your hands after you finish,” for example, or the line “the inability to birth your first child,” which hovers in the space between the lived and the imagined fear because the life is not finished. Nor is the poem—good poems (to me at least) toggle between a familiar state of being that resonates and an imaginative one that the poet has allowed me to enter. In this new piece, the form makes it clear not only that my own version is temporary, but also that the poem is as multiple as its readers and their moments in time.

With epistolary poems readers largely witness the collaborative nature of correspondence; in this worksheet piece, however, we move from an empathetic poetics to a participatory one. Many esteemed poets may think differently, but to me, a poem can change with every reader, with every day of reading. I’ve long believed they are lived and breathed things whose workings depend on the speaker’s timbre, cadence, emphasis, etc.; also on who hears the poem in the room and what they carry that day, as much (if not more!) than the actual words on the page. This undercuts some of the poet’s authorial intent, or perhaps their control, which itself is tenuous.

In your January 9, 2017 poem the speaker says “love teaches the lie of its singularity and we sing it and sing it to the body in the bed…” But what about the poem’s singularity? The lie of its immutability? What are your thoughts on collaboration or co-creation, and how (or do) different forms or technologies make this possible?

RM: I so agree with your comments above about the poem as a participatory document—and that’s something that is really important to me with this new project, moving from, as you said, an empathetic poetics to a participatory one. Part of why that’s so important for me in this project is that I am, in a section of the book, writing about the pandemic. This project has more found poems, transcribed poems, “technologically mediated” poems than previous work of mine, and I’m drawn to those forms in this book because—as it was for so many of us—the entirety of my interpersonal communication and interpersonal “contact” for the entire lockdown year was almost entirely through digitally mediated forms, Zoom, FaceTime, texting, Slack.

To capture that mediation in the book, I have written a couple of poems-as-voice memos, or poems that are invited to be represented to the reader as transcribed voice memos—though I did use a lot of content from my actual voice memos, some to and from beloved friends of mine, to shape those. I also have one poem in this collection that began as a writing exercise and has turned into an actual draft: one of my friends in my “remote work” friend-Slack group was like, let’s write predictive text poems. And we just took our phones in our separate quarantine spaces and wrote poems, or snippets of poems, based on what our phones were suggesting to us as our most-used words. At this point, I forget how far we were into the pandemic, but we were far enough that my cell phone use had skyrocketed, because it was solely how I communicated with people; on top of that, my actual language-vocabulary-syntax had been affected by the pandemic, with so many new words arriving along with more-needed expressions (Zoom Thanksgiving, symptomatic, I miss you). So the poem became an artifact of that vocabulary, and right now, it is “alive” as a pseudo-sonnet. This, to me, is a collaborative poem, even if the “who” I was collaborating with was some ghosted, AI-memory version of my past selves texting into the void.

CL: That’s a fascinating project—the prescriptive text poem—and the idea that one could create a sort of timecapsule for one’s lexicon. It’s interesting also, framed as collaboration with past selves. In contrast, The Naomi Letters explicitly reference or quote other writers; the speaker’s confessions, desires, etc. often get mediated via the likes of Mary Ruefle, Anne Sexton, Pablo Neruda, Silvia Plath, Aracelis Girmay, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich. Do you think about these collaborations differently, and, if so, how?

And more broadly, if in predictive text, the poem only knows what it has known—what does this mean for spontaneity or surprise? Can a device know us better than we know ourselves? What about when the poem becomes more than an archive of a past time, but determinant of the next one (less “I am a part of all I have met” and more “I am a part of all I have texted”)?

RM: In many ways, the references and inclusions of the other writers that you mentioned in The Naomi Letters stem from my drafting process, which, in interesting ways that I hadn’t thought about before, reflects a similarity to the predictive text poem—in that I was sitting down to write and trying to jog my creative brain and engage with other texts as the beginning of a conversation. I think of this practice like stretching before a bike ride, say, where I’m getting my brain into a space where it’s engaging with language in order to create language, or to create with language. As somebody who spends the entirety of my work day working with more…let’s say tedious language, ha—I work as a copywriter and a copy editor, so I read and write a lot of text that’s designed for SEO and for grant proposals and reporting—I need to read and respond to texts that invent and subvert that tedium in my creative writing practice. I see that practice as collaboration, in a one-sided way, but it also does help build a vocabulary for creation that isn’t too many miles apart from working within a phone’s lexicon either.

I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and the various iterations of ChatGPT as it’s been showing up recently in the news and in conversations with other creators. As a writer, I am so vehemently against the way that these companies have used our words to build their AI—but I do wonder about how AI will shape our lives as writers now that it’s here, in thinking about your question can a device know us better than we know ourselves? We constantly engage with these digital and technological mediators that are becoming smarter through our engagement—we’re making them smarter with our own creativity, and we’ve been doing that labor in many contexts without consent. But now that we’re here, I’m noticing it affect my writing practice in certain moments, albeit not yet in my poetry. More often, I see it when I am writing for clients in Google Docs and the software offers a suggestion to finish my sentences for me. When I am writing more predictable language, like I am writing a grant, or I am writing a blog post for a client, the suggestions are usually not wrong—and I am fascinated by that. I kind of hate it, but I also understand that we’re past the point of objection, in terms of its effects on our software(s), in many aspects of our digital lives.

I don’t yet know what these predictive-text and generative-text AIs mean for the creation of poetry. A part of me is excited to see what people who have spent more of their lives in facility with these tech innovations will do with it in creative arenas, but I feel so much less interested—entirely disinterested?—in engaging with work generated fully by AI. In my new project, I am using tools like predictive text and the transcription of voice memos in a narrow way, to attempt to capture how deeply my human interaction was shaped by these technologies during lockdown—how they were my human interactions, really, brought to life via digital mediation.

CL: There is high demand for the convenience of predictive texts for certain things, and our desire for it in many (most) cases wins out. I do wonder what will get sacrificed. Personally, I hope ChatGPT increases our demand for the human: that, in identifying what means to be perilously and quirkily alive, we can cultivate an appetite for that spirit-to-spirit, albeit imperfect, interaction. I also wonder how the ways people encounter poetry will change, as not only its technologies of dissemination but also its modes of composition change. If you were to meet someone who had not really experienced poetry before, what first poem (of yours or others) would you share?

RM: I have been thinking about this question for days and days—not to break the fourth wall of the interview here, but it feels important given our previous conversation to note that we’re communicating via email, and not face-to-face, as much I wish it were in person! Such is life today, no? But—this format has at least given me the gift of ruminating on my answer.

I have known since you asked me that the poem would be by Franz Wright, whose work I found in New Yorker clippings while in high school and have held close to me ever since. I think I would choose either his poem “The Visiting,” which I cut out of a 2003 issue and have saved since then—as a fellow insomniac, it’s the first time I ever read a poem and felt like someone else in the world was having the same experience as me—or “On Earth,” which captures the central riddle of being both alive and human.