Malachi Black is the author of Indirect Light (Four Way Books, 2024) and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Paris Review, among other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God (Yale UP, 2013), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). A 2024-25 Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Lithuania, Black has also received fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black’s work has been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including several musical settings and translations into French, Dutch, Italian, Croatian, and Lithuanian. Black is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: “How can I mourn them?” the speaker asks right away in “For the Suburban Dead,” the first poem of your recent collection. And perhaps Indirect Light offers one option: with six title poems that serve as elegies for friends lost in their teens, 20s and 30s, it speaks to their ghosts, or shadows. These poems detail fairly quotidian childhood experiences: playing in sprinklers, carpooling to school, sneaking out under streetlights, tagging an alley wall, etc., but with the word “indirect” come associations of deceit, and I can’t help feel cheated on behalf of the speaker and those lost, given how brief life was. Is. At the same time, what’s indirect can also just be roundabout, so to begin, I’m hoping you’ll share how these “Indirect Light” poems operate, and how they serve as polestars for the collection?

Malachi Black: I certainly hope that they enact and sustain the ambiguity (or ambivalence) you cite, perhaps also quietly querying the weight of the distinction between that which is “indirect light” and that which is “in direct light.” I love what Whitman posits in his preface to Leaves of Grass: “[The poet] judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.” This is wonderfully consonant with what Simone Weil, from whom the book borrows an epigraph, offers almost a century later: “Not to judge. All faults are the same. There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible.” Light, for Simone Weil, is grace, or what we know of it.

I’ve had the chance to remark on my aims for the “Indirect Light” poems elsewhere, and the most of it is this: “The serial elegy of ‘Indirect Light’ was born of the braiding of these hopes: to find a keening pitch adequate to the tasks of resuscitating unrecorded moments, of exhuming the past from its insubstantial grave, and of bestowing a dignity upon the deceased more lasting than their abbreviated lives. It is my hope that the cascading form of these poems embodies the double-consciousness of grief—its now shuttling back and forth into its interruptive then—the constant dissolution of time’s ephemeral increments, and the dizzy liquidity of mind engendered by confrontation with the permanence of loss. It is my wish, moreover, that the words of these winding staircases will, as in some enchanted spell, climb beyond themselves to reach the dead.”

Of course, each “Indirect Light” poem is a cell in the larger organism of a book which bears the same title, and I’d like to think that the tensions staged at the individual textual level(s) are also characteristic of the dynamics of the collection as a whole. If the book dramatizes a life, then the “Indirect Light” poems constitute its memory, which intervenes as a fragmentary cross-stitching against the unraveling fabric of a more linear temporal trajectory. Each of the “Indirect Light” poems occupies a point in something like a coming-of-age chronology, but the sequence is askew, with every instance arriving almost of its own accord as an interruptive flashback to a past that reflects or informs the present in a parallel vitality. My hope is that this structure is mimetic of the onset of memory as it occurs in routine life—as time encapsulated within time. The advent of recall is rarely complete in a novelistic way; instead, it arrives in luminous or backlit shards of sensation and image that reveal the past’s ongoingness.

I also hope that the “Indirect Light” poems support a claim made elsewhere in the book: that “the arc of history / is webbed.” Between us there are ligatures of which we aren’t always aware. We may experience ourselves as distinctive, autonomous, and whole, but we are also, at any given time, unwitting digits on an indistinct hand. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger suggested that “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown and what appears to be the plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing.” Each of the “Indirect Light” poems testifies in its own way to the unity seeded in that plurality, and to a speaker’s belated awareness of his continuing extension of an arc from which others have been severed by death. The speaker has become cognizant of himself as a facet of memory as fully as he is an agent of memory, someone whose task is to perpetuate. The book’s last words are “it was, it was, it was, it was.”

CL: There’s so much here, but to begin, I’d like to discuss verb tense. That final line of the book, though in the past, feels present in the way repetition insists on remembering—on being again and again, with each breath.

Similarly, tense shifts can jolt readers out of a poem’s moment or place them more squarely inside another; for example in an early piece, “La Vita Nova,” a teenage speaker recalls smoking while driving in a snowstorm with his sweetheart. While it begins in past tense, the poem changes midway as they stall for sex in the present: “…your palm sweated in my own. We know…We park,…they glow…we / churn, and slur, and hum.” Eventually the poem moves into the future, then back to the present: “Too soon, // your womb will coil with a vine / fed of our blood: a clotted son…Help me, Rhonda: these are words / you know by heart. We are young.”

We think of lyric poems as suspended moments or, as Frost’s maxim goes, “momentary stay[s] against confusion,” so I wonder how your use of tense makes for different sorts of suspensions and productive confusions, especially within individual poems? How might poems change the way we think about memory, or time?

MB: That’s such a rich question, and one whose rewards can’t be easily exhausted. I might start by plugging George T. Wright’s fabulously original essay “The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems,” one of the very few texts I know that concerns itself exclusively with poetic verb tense. It does a marvelous job of teasing out the atemporal, nonhistorical, mythic indefiniteness of the simple present tense, foregrounding its suggestions of eternity. Though only gods can live in the perpetual now, it’s true that many poems provide us with temporary access to the unchanging moment.

I won’t be the first to observe that a poem always has at its disposal at least two axes of temporality: one of chronology, which I conceive as horizontality, and one of suspension or simultaneity, which I conceive as verticality. These axes aren’t, of course, tense-dependent, but they encompass, respectively, ways of hurrying time along or slowing it down. However conscious a poem may be of its own manipulations of time, narrative or otherwise, it seems to me that most poems I love play with temporality in some way. It could be that the rhythms alter, or that syntactic variations push and pull against the line, or that the speaker’s attention dilates and contracts. Of course, many a memorable turn has been effected on the basis of a change in verb tense alone—one thinks immediately of “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” (from simple present to present perfect). Changes in grammatical mood can have a similarly bracing effect, as in “[This living hand, now warm and capable],” where Keats shifts from indicative to subjunctive and then back to indicative all in the unfolding of a single sentence. But what makes those disjunctive moments really matter to me is the extent to which they achieve something analogous to live performance, something happening not so much in the temporal realm of the poem—the time being described—as in the temporality of the poetry, the utterance. Those poems feel alive because they can (and do) change; they render dynamic speech acts reflective of the motions of consciousness and interiority.

A poem like “Those Winter Sundays” remains in the past tense throughout, but it puts that tense to different purposes; a sense of the present emerges in the concluding couplet, when Hayden’s speaker turns away from the work of memory and hangs his quartz-like rhetorical question in the here and now: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” The speaker’s presence—in both senses—rises at the exact moment that we partake in the knowledge he’s gained from cold experience (the answer to the question, we know, is “Nothing”), knowledge that distinguishes his adult perspective from that of the boy he has just described. All contiguous sentences contain a disjunctive space between them, but in Hayden’s poem, there are decades in the distance between the period at the end of line 12 and line 13’s first word.

I wanted something similar to occur in “La Vita Nuova,” though perhaps in inverted form: a rising intimacy that, yes, corresponds with the events being described (the characters’ increasing closeness), but one that adjusts our understanding of the speaker’s relation to those events. If the past tense constitutes remove, then the speaker, midstream, loses his capacity to remain aloof: temporal distance collapses, and the past becomes present as a cinematic reel that fully transposes the younger self of the speaker onto the (older) one who remembers. They are the same, and the older carries the younger’s culpability into a future interwoven with the past. The poem consists of circles in—of—time, interlocking like Olympic rings. This also mirrors, I hope, the logic of generational transmission; the poem concludes by revealing that the “sweetheart” character, Rhonda, was herself the product of a high school romance. Together, Rhonda and the speaker are unwitting agents of historical repetition, inserting the past into the present and the present into the past. In the same way, the speaker is addressing the historical Rhonda in the now.

CL: Yes, the generational interlocking comes through here; and many poems highlight patterns of addiction, heartbreak, even national crisis, both through time and across physical distance. Sometimes the poems narrate these repetitions, but even in those that don’t, patterns and sounds echo. Throughout the book you have sonically rich poems; I think of “Last Postcard from Pompeii,” that begins:

The pebbles fell like grapes
or rain, pestering the windowpane
until you were awake.

The moon slid its small blue
hands into the bedroom, past you,
or it used to,

when the couplet of your shutters,
so often closed and opened, was
a butterfly, a flutter,

like the motions of your lovers,
frog’s-legs kicking off the covers,
auguring motherhood…

Here the rhymes are so densely packed, almost claustrophobic, and so I wonder if you might speak some about the way sonic devices operate in these pieces to create an atmosphere of fated-ness, perhaps, or collapsed time? More broadly, how do you think about form in your poems?

MB: It’s challenging to speak abstractly of specific poetic devices in any but the most general of terms, as context is always determinative of the apparent meaningfulness of discrete effects. I will say, however, that there are no more authoritative devices in all of language than those of repetition, and they do, as you suggest, have a strong tendency to convey a sense of “fated-ness” or inevitability. Patterned unities of sound exemplify agreement even as they invite it, soothing us into a deepened vulnerability to simultaneous semantic suggestion and intimating that there are larger structures or forces at work than those of the strictly individual.

In my experience, musical devices also possess a deeply emotive value. Long before the development of writing systems, after all, language was born of human sounds. We are instruments of speech, and the noises we make and receive echo inside of us as do vibrations in a violin. Sound is sensation. I think it’s significant that the only utterances that transcend linguistic boundaries—the scream, the laugh, the groan, moans of pleasure and relief—are those born of deepest feeling. These asemantic or a-linguistic events suggest that the most primordial expressions of interiority are sonic. One might say that the musical features of a poem are part of its EQ, and that they constitute a subliminal messaging. I think, for example, of the many long Os of Milton’s “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” which serve as a score of wails.

Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, speaks incisively about the power of the poetic image to arrest a reader’s imagination, yielding a condition of intersubjectivity that Bachelard compares to a shared daydream. This is in keeping with what Pound describes as phanopoeia, and could be construed as the tendency of language to induce hallucination. The music of poetry offers an analogous but discrete potency, something closer to a state of trance or hypnosis. “Enchantment,” of course, derives etymologically from “incantare,” which has “cantare,” to sing, at its root. The “chant,” in other words, remains at the heart of “enchantment.” It’s a form of ekstasis.

In my view, music, like form overall (inclusive of style), is inseparable from content. The literal and nonliteral are mutually inextricable, and, in any poem worthy of being re-read, each reinforces the other. It seems to me that the life of literature—“literariness”—lies chiefly in the nonliteral: the world of implication, connotation, nuance, and polysemy. I would even go so far as to say that, in the lyric, at least, what we typically mean by “content”—the literal—is just one contribution to the quality of mood, thought, or experience with which the total poem is concerned. To say it more plainly, the best lyric poems, in my experience, are not vehicles for a content per se but for a quality of which content is an expression. It can certainly be the largest flower in a bouquet of meaningful features, but it’s the arrangement, ultimately, that makes the whole what it is. Whole and part commune in endless reciprocity. In my own practice, I find form at different times for different poems, but each remains, I hope, a collaboration between what is being said and how it’s offered. The “what” is the content, the “how” is the form. But, as we all know, how something is said has everything to do with what is understood by it.

CL: It’s interesting to hear you explicitly see the “what” of a poem as in service of a certain “quality.” I get this impression across the pieces titled “Indirect Light” which mainly exist in transitory spaces, like a carpool’s “blurry filmstrip” or twilight with fireflies, where the speaker and dedicatee have some degree of seclusion or anonymity even as the poems recount particular moments and a shared sense of mortality.

In most of these, lines slalom back and forth, with the dedicatee and speaker understood as the “we.” And a specific “we,” with “our muffled laughter scissoring / the purple dark, climbing / beside us / up the thin rings of a fire / escape and rippling skyward / as we lay / our giddiness against the still- / warm rooftop tar—”, or playing in sprinklers near the “cracked paint / of single-parent / window frames,” for example. It seems the what-ness or who-ness matters—that third vector of occasion—since these elegies are to and for specific, real people. So I wonder how your sense of audience, or who the poem is offered for affects both content and form of these (or other) pieces? What role do shifting pronouns play here and throughout? As indirect addresses to readers and direct addresses to the dead, or vice versa?

MB: “Vector of occasion” is a delectable phrase. Thank you for adding that to the world. To reply, this book is certainly concerned with very “specific, real people,” as you say, and I don’t want to diminish the vibrancy of their actuality in any way. On the contrary, it is my absolute hope that each member of the “Indirect Light” series functions as monument, as testament, as memorial. Even so, in my conception, the medium of poetry is myth, at least inasmuch as the successful poem must, to my thinking, achieve autonomy or separability from the realm of “mere fact.” Its world may closely resemble our world, containing any number of particulars that we recognize from life, but the poem remains representational, and its very creation—each decision that leads to its realization—entails deviation from the external world. If a poem doesn’t succeed in establishing something of its own world, then it has failed, in my view, as a work of art, relinquishing its responsibility to serve, in Dylan Thomas’ words, as “a contribution to reality.” In the end, a text must stand on its own, having made the facts, where it contains them, meaningful in a symbolic way.

Moreover, monuments and memorials are public works, and in this respect they are, like most rewarding poems, accountable (or in service) to multiple constituencies, and thus are multivalent, moving toward several simultaneous ends. They must certainly be made in such a way that they are available to strangers, and to those without immediate knowledge or experience of a given individual or instigating occasion (as in “a general audience”). But they are also indebted to specific legacies, and bear a responsibility to manifest some form of recognizable, resonant fidelity thereto, and perhaps also to pay heed to those who carry traces of those legacies in their continuing lives (as in “an informed audience”). With one of the book’s poems in particular, I was careful to share a late draft with one of the deceased’s surviving family members, just to be sure that my respects were felt as well-placed. I did that largely because I made it on the basis of its emotional and technical interest to me, and with faith that what served my artistic interests might likewise appeal to other practitioners (as in “an expert audience”). I’ve always aspired to be the kind of writer who could engage the groundlings, the queen, performers, and fellow playwrights all at once. I doubt that I always succeed, but, with the poems I keep long enough to publish, that’s the goal. There has often seemed to me a very broad analogy between the quantity of people who could derive pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction from a given poem and the quantity of findings accounted for by a scientific theory. The higher the number, the better for all.

As a reader, I tend to find most compelling the poems that are up to more than one thing at the same time, and I’d like that to be true of my own work. In terms of the “Indirect Light” poems, I hope they serve at least as invitations to the dead to join in the work of remembering, as demonstrations of the sensation of memory, and as efforts to conjure or reconstitute certain qualities of shared historical experience. The subject of lyric address is one that fascinates me, and I’m not sure that I’ve yet found an account that encompasses the lyric’s totality. John Stuart Mill famously claims that “poetry is overhead,” and, from that point of view, there is always something of a triangulation between speaker, addressee, and reader. Barbara Hernstein Smith proposes that a poem is “the imitation of an utterance,” and thus inherently performative. Yuri Lotman goes so far as to suggest that a text’s work is to invent or create its reader. Perhaps my favorite, however, is Thomas M. Greene’s hypothesis that the fundament of poetry is invocation, the act of magical summoning, a gossamer filament spun out of yearning’s core.

CL: I like that idea of magical summoning; it’s sort of where I’ve arrived after reading a lot of epistolary poems and thinking about that triangulation, whether explicit or not: ultimately, the sheer act of writing a poem presumes our desired audience. That reaching out to another, an inanimate object, the divine, a past self, whomever—happens as soon as lines are on the page or in the room.

I can’t help think, also, about how poems do live as sound, in fleeting utterances, though we may write them down. Which is an interesting contrast to a memorial or a monument, which lasts. In your piece “Morristown Memorial,” a second person account of construction worker Beezy’s ritual of an after-work high in 1973, lurches forward to 2013, then hops back to 1998 and the ritual of NA meetings, yet the poem remains present tense as though to preserve the immediacy (and perhaps simultaneity) of this man—hurting and hale and gone. Sound does a lot of this stalling, for me, since echoing lines both still and then allow for re-calibration:

…You tour, and glide, and course the overhead
until you swim down to a curb. There,
as through a basement window, thirty-three
miles due west of Gail’s OD, who is it
that you see, skeletal and trembling
beside you in a metal folding chair
at an NA meeting on the water-
stained flooring of the Calvary? It’s me….”

I wonder how you think of time operating in a poem, and what decisions determine how the poem-clock runs? And given that, unlike many other art forms, it is oral and of the breath, what does it mean for a poem to happen as memorial?

MB: The notion of poetry as preservative has a long and storied history, beginning at least as early as Sappho’s luminous fragment “Although they are / only breath, words / which I command / are immortal (tr. Barnard). Indeed, for her, they are, and likewise for the Horatian speaker of Ode III.30, who awakens the lyric’s audacious (and oft-recycled) claim to serving as monument “outlasting bronze / And the pyramids of ancient royal kings” (tr. Ferry). In each of these cases, of course, the success of the preservative gesture depends in turn on its own retention. In order to succeed as memorial, in other words, the object itself has to be memorable. (Wasn’t it Auden who defined poetry as “memorable speech”?) Here, again, one has to consider the means at least as much as the matter.

I am not, by nature, a narrative poet, and I fear I’ve likely exhausted my rather limited supply of general thoughts on poetry and temporality in our discussion of “La Vita Nuova.” I certainly didn’t have any readymade formulae for narrative arc to which I intended to adhere when I started writing “Morristown Memorial,” but, in contemplating the intersection of histories the poem endeavors to elaborate, I eventually arrived at the figure of the Mobius strip. (This is now embedded in the text just a few lines above those you’ve quoted as “the monstrous Mobius / strip of Jersey roadways.”) This appealed to me as a symbol of the dual time-loops operative in the poem—Beezy’s and the speaker’s—and the time-tangling manner in which they become one.

In terms of the “poem-clock,” I did have at my disposal the device of “the nod” (the liminal, opioid-induced quasi-dream state), which provided a diagetic basis for Beezy’s mode of time-travel (or semiconscious projection) in the present tense. Earlier, of course, it’s the speaker, rather than the addressee, who sees forward on Beezy’s behalf, folding a future of which the younger Beezy remains unaware into the latter’s hopeful 1973 footfalls. This is possible only because the speaker is narrating events from a future that lies decades beyond the poem’s last line, a future made possible by Beezy’s past (i.e., his life in 1973).

The fusion of time-loops, when it occurs, is layered: it takes place both in the 1973 dreamscape (internal to Beezy) and in the eventual 1998 NA meeting that Beezy’s dream foresees (which is, in the poem, the speaker’s present recollection). In other words, Beezy’s dream of the future is the speaker’s memory of the past, and their lives are thus looped together permanently. Not to sound too sci-fi, but it might even be said that Beezy’s past is a part of the speaker’s future, just the speaker’s past is a part of Beezy’s future.

Above all, what I sought in “Morriston Memorial” was a textual vehicle as elastic and dynamic as the memorialized subject himself, something that might, in its banking turns between takeoff and landing, resemble the Mobius-like flight path of a full life that crisscrossed over a limited geography. While it feels like cheating to reach beyond the boundaries of the text, I don’t mind saying that Beezy was himself a natural raconteur whose “simultaneity” was also manifest in his approach to narrative; the text is, in a certain private way, mimetic of his mode of storytelling, with all of its strolling and slowing, bending and weaving.

CL: I know in hindsight it’s easier to point to a poem’s unique structure or particular resonances it has taken on but, for me at least, a lot of this isn’t apparent (or necessarily intentional) as I’m writing. Most of the time I’m fumbling toward productive mystery, toward some discovery I don’t know will actually occur, and one I can’t envision. I wonder if you might speak a bit about your own relationship to poetic discovery? Is there a poem in Indirect Light that stands out to you in that regard?

MB: Discovery—or whatever else we may name it: surprise, illumination, revelation—is central to my writing practice. What Frost says in “The Figure a Poem Makes” seems to me incontrovertibly true: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” It’s my experience that the best of writing derives not from the deliberate pursuit of preformulated designs, but from submitting to the forces and possibilities that have designs on us. It’s in this way that we can learn from what we write and thus be changed by it. It’s also my experience, as Frost suggests, that the effects of the discoveries to which we are guided through our writing are transmissible, as if there were something co-recorded—a seismographic indication of the firing of a synapse, say—with the language at which we arrive, allowing readers to share in the original event of discovery by way of recreation. I think this bears directly on that sense of “live performance” to which I earlier referred, and to the nonverbal motions below the literal surface of a poem that so captivate and coopt us. The sense of being transported beyond that which we could foresee is surely among the main sources of pleasure in all the arts, and the promise of that transport is much of what motivates me to return to my desk.

I am, however, a slow writer—I almost never draft a poem in one “go”—and so I have time to live with and adjust to a poem as it accretes. Even on those rare occasions when I have a whole writing day at my disposal, most of the good work comes in fits and starts. I get stumped, I get up, walk around, talk to myself, go to the kitchen, return to rewrite the lines I’ve kept word for word, and then, if I’m lucky, stumble into another genuine step. This may sound ridiculous, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to think of writing ever more through the analogy of bull-riding. Whatever skills or wherewithal I’ve acquired are useful only to extent that they can keep me in the experience of responding to the dynamic moment of contact with a force over which I have no control. I get thrown off constantly, and then gather myself to try again, hoping to dissolve once more into the trance of total absorption. I’m deeply skeptical of willing a poem into existence, if only because I’ve found that doing so has never yielded for me the experience of poetry I crave. And if I end the day with more than a couple of lines about which I feel sure, I consider myself very lucky indeed.

There were ten years between my first and second collections, and each of the poems of Indirect Light necessitated its own series of discoveries in order to wend from its first impulse to the printed page. Even—and perhaps especially—when a set of facts is involved, the work of writing is in large part a matter of listening and thereby learning what it is one has to say. My poems fail when and where I have failed to make way for them, foreclosing possibility by imposing the predetermined or readymade. I’ve read that the highest compliment Ahkmatova could offer a poem was to assert that there was mystery in it. I maintain a similar stance with regard to my own work, the best of which is unwound from a questioning—of feeling, image, phrase, idea, form, or situation. The question is a generative form, and mystery its source.

CL: The best of your work, and of most poems, I’d argue! If you were to meet someone who had little to no experience with poetry, what poem of yours, or of another, would you share first?

MB: My favorite thing to do with people new to poetry, or skeptical about its powers—incoming students, for example—is to have them execute a round-robin reading of Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole” line by line. The way this activity foregrounds the collaboration between the silences of whitespace and the arc of Strand’s language is profound, and its distribution across voices dramatizes the universal implications of the lyric “I” with mesmerizing force. I don’t think it’s ever failed to leave the entire room astonished.