Tell Tell Poetry is thrilled to share this conversation with Meg Day where we explore writing poems, the benefits of teaching creative writing, and staying in the present, generative moment. We dig into healthy strategies for getting published in the right places and talk crowns of sonnets, taking a look at their recently published “Boy Corona” and seeing the value in a more “loosey goosey” approach to publishing poetry. “Focus on the making, do what you do, and do it on purpose, do it as best you can.” Meg Day is here to help us get our poetic lives on track, and has some beautiful recommended reading to help inspire us on the way! Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level which won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle’s 2015 Audre Lorde Award, and was also a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Day is the author of two chapbooks: When All You Have Is a Hammer (which won the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest), and We Can’t Read This (which won the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest). In 2019, Day published an Unsung Masters volume, Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (which came out with Pleiades, in 2019), and they co-edited that volume with poet Niki Herd. Day’s poems appear in The Nation, Best American Poetry 2020, The New York Times, and many many other journals and anthologies. We’ll be linking to their website where you can find a longer and truly impressive list of awards, and Day is currently an Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Pennsylvania.
Be sure to check out all of Meg Day’s book recommendations here!
Video Transcript of interview with Meg Day
Layla Benitez-James
All right. Hey, Welcome, Layla Benitez-James here for Tell Tell Poetry, very excited to be connecting with Meg Day to chat about poems. Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level which won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The Publishing Triangle’s 2015 Audre Lorde Award, and was also a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Day is the author of two chapbooks: When All You Have Is a Hammer (which won the 2012 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest), and We Can’t Read This (which won the 2013 Gazing Grain Chapbook Contest). In 2019, Day published an Unsung Masters volume, Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (which came out with Pleiades, in 2019), and they co-edited that volume with poet Niki Herd. Day’s poems appear in The Nation, Best American Poetry 2020, The New York Times, and many, many other journals and anthologies. We’ll be linking to their website where you can find a longer and truly impressive list of awards, and Day is currently an Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Pennsylvania. Meg Day, thank you so much for joining us today and congratulations on your recent publication of “Boy Corona” in The Nation!
Meg Day
Thank you so much for having me, this is delightful to connect with you this way this morning.
Layla
So I’ll be linking to two other conversations for context [Whenever We Feel Like It 2019 reading and the recent 2021 “You Get Proud by Practicing” conversation for Poetry off the Shelf], but I’d love to start by asking you a pretty big question, which is what does your poetic practice look like right now? And where is your aesthetic focus and, in part to connect to some of those questions that you were asking in another interview, and so these are your questions, they were: What is deaf poetics when writing in English? What is deaf poetics when you read aloud in English? Is there a space for American Sign Language on the page? Is there a space for interpretation and translation? So in some ways, I feel like when I was reading “Boy Corona,” I felt like that was in part an answer to some of those questions. But I’d love to hear about how you’re writing poems these days.
Meg
Thank you. And I think that’s generous to name “Boy Corona” as, as a kind of answer to those questions. I hope that it is; it took long enough. I’m in a funky spot with poems right now. I mean, who isn’t, you know? COVID has shifted many things for me. And among them is how I’m dealing with my imagination and my creative impulses, where I’m putting my energy and how I feel a little—a little bit like I’m relearning my life, which is both sweet and challenging. I love the decisions that are available to me right now. And I’m working through the reality, obviously, of so many choices I don’t get to make. Right now I’m teaching the Senior Thesis Capstone for my creative writing majors at my home institution. And teaching always informs my poetics, but that group of young poets and writers, what they bring to the table, and the kinds of things that they’re thinking about as soon to be college grads in the middle of a pandemic, it’s really impacting my process. We’re on an adjusted schedule, this is a lot of, like, side logistics, but we’re on an adjusted schedule because of the pandemic. And I see them multiple hours a day, every single day. Instead of like meeting, you know, for three hours, once a week. So we work together a lot. And we schedule blocks, also a few times a week outside of our class time to share space online and just work together, just make. So this is perhaps the most regimented my poetic practice has ever been. Maybe, maybe since graduate school. I’m in it constantly. And I like it. It’s pushing me in new ways. I’m coming off of this large project “Boy Corona,” the crown of sonnets that took me a number of years to work my way into and then out of—and my aesthetic focus. That’s such a big question. I can tell you what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking a lot about consent, and about coercion, about manipulation and choice. I’m thinking about desire. And the way desires are shaped, or altered, interrupted maybe by power, or oppression or even good intentions. Issues of gender and of disability of deafness of race are at the forefront of my mind when I’m working. But I do think that often, I feel that the stakes are rather high. High stakes isn’t really an aesthetic. But I think it acts as kind—as a kind of levy. Right now for me, I’m so rarely writing what would be easiest to write anymore. And I feel far more interested in figuring out how to not sacrifice the complexity of anything. I don’t . . . Can that be an aesthetic? Yeah, that’s a little bit where I’m at.
Layla
I think, I mean, high stakes as an aesthetic. And formerly trying to not, you know, get out of any complexity. I feel like those are both aesthetics, not normally the way we speak about it. But I mean, in thinking about Last Psalm at Sea Level, like your—high stakes is definitely—all those things you mentioned: race, deafness, and gender and ability, all of those are present in the work. But not as formally as I think they are in “Boy Corona,” it seemed like “Boy Corona,” the way the progression of the sonnets works, you’re asking readers who are unfamiliar with Sign Language, you’re like pulling them a little bit farther into Sign Language by the end of that series, which I thought was really wonderful, like you have, at the end, you know, the little you had you know, subscript or superscript, of the “question mark wiggle,” and that kind of thing. Like, I feel like, you know, you weren’t doing that in the book. But “Boy Corona” is bringing us in just a little bit deeper. Which I feel like if you’re reading things online as well, like I did, I wasn’t familiar with those. But it was like, you know, it just takes a quick search for me to get a visual.
Meg
Mm hmm. That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about it in that way. But that it’s easier to Google. And that it’s easier to maybe access what it is that I’m trying to do with those sort of altered ASL glosses. I love that. I have to think more about that. Thank you.
Layla
Yeah, it was really great to read. And so I love the idea too, that you’re just spending so much time with your students, and it’s making you work more. But what does that look like in terms of assignments or exercises? Like what are you doing when you feel like you can’t write? Or what are you doing to jumpstart your writing?
Meg
What do I do when I feel like I can’t write? I so rarely feel as if I can write, I don’t know that I’m meant to admit that. It doesn’t get easier for me. I don’t know if it does for other people. But it hasn’t for me, for the last few years, I’ve been traveling a lot and teaching a lot and giving talks, but not doing a lot of writing. And the pace of things has altered drastically in the last year. So and I think I was going through some major growing pains as an artist and as a person. I felt as if my politics were evolving, and my poems couldn’t keep up. So I suppose half my answer, then is that when I feel as if I can’t write, I try to pay attention to why. Then I try, or have tried, to really protect whatever is going on for me to let it happen and to trust that poems will come out of it or that they will, they will follow. That takes a lot of faith sometimes. And I think the second half of that is that I try to give myself a really difficult project. One that can follow me around and help me feel as if I still have my fingers in poems without having to like start over with a blank page again and again. Does that make sense? Like this project most recently, obviously, was this crown of sonnets. It took me about three years to write and it underwent incredible revision, and I too underwent renovation. That was primarily why it took so long to finish. My politics at the beginning of that writing shifted and more. But it kept me company. And it kept me believing that I was headed toward something. I think writing can look like a lot of things, it can look like doing the dishes or driving your commute or thinking about how to talk through something difficult with your students. Or reimagining your life without someone’s negative energy in it. All of these things are kind of poiesis, a kind of making, they all count. And I think I take comfort in that. And so I’m at this point right now, where I’ve finished one large project, and I think I’m ready, I think I’m ready for little poems, again. Working with my students, has reminded me that I’m not alone in my own anxiety about what, what comes next. And I’m certainly not alone in having, you know, different voices or pressures or oppressions, like perched on my shoulder as I’m trying to write. They have such earnestness about them, and they’re deeply vulnerable. Like, intentionally on purpose, they’re excited to be open and, and sort of wrecked by the process. So that’s, you know, I don’t love the word inspiring, but it is, it inspires me in a way that I’m like, Okay, all right, let’s just make a mess. We can clean it up later. So those are some of the approaches that I have. But I’m still very much in, in the space these many years out of not always feeling competent, that I know what I’m doing until it is that I’m doing it. And then it’s like, I don’t know, muscle memory takes over or I get my confidence back, and things start clicking into place.
Layla
I love the idea of muscle memory, especially if you’re talking about having completed this big crown of sonnets like for me, that’s like sonnets are such a puzzle, and then having them interconnected is like, you know, exploding that much more of a puzzle. And so are those, are those part of a larger book project that you’re hoping to complete soon? Or is the book project done and you’re wanting to work on shorter poems, or how do those fit into your—what’s going on with publishing now?
Meg
That’s a great question, what is happening in publishing? The crown is definitely a part of this next book. I think that the poems in the last a year and a half, have been the kind of—a kind of research maybe. They’re poems that I’ve started writing in, in the last, I don’t know, six to eight months. Which is not to say that they won’t be useful in this book, but it—but I feel a lot more clarity lately about what it is that I’m doing and the direction I’m headed in. And so I think I would have previously answered that I’m much closer to a book than I currently think that I am. But I also think that this next part is going to go a lot easier. So I’ve worked, I’ve worked out a lot of that. I don’t know how to refer to them growing pains, or, I don’t know, the hiccups. Like I’ve gotten over the speed bumps of the thing. And that feels wonderful, relieving.
Layla
I’m glad! Well yeah, because some, I mean, a lot of the writing process is just like the nuts and bolts, like writing on the page. But then a lot of it is more practical considerations of submitting poems and, you know, how you send out different poems, how you find a good home for them. I mean, that’s really difficult, you know, for anybody, but I feel like if you’re also trying to push against kind of like, more formal constraints or do things that are even more out of the box, it can be—it can feel more complicated. So how—I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about submitting your individual poems versus how you try to get a book published, like what did that look like for Last Psalm at Sea Level?
Meg
Oh, for Last Psalm—I think that I was a lot more loosey goosey my first time around. I’m not the best person to talk about submissions. Like I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t have like dream journals. I don’t have a submission schedule.
Layla
But you’ve published a ton!
Meg
Yeah, I definitely don’t have any idea how many submissions I send out in a year. I don’t know how this comes across. But I just feel so skeptical about these hierarchies and what they mean. Yes, absolutely. I feel grateful when it is that my work finds its way into the world, especially when there’s a phenomenal editor on the other side of it. And I do feel occasionally strategic about these things. I try to imagine what kind of life I want for a poem. And what kind of readership might appreciate it most. Or how much hate mail I can endure. But I feel skeptical of lists that rank magazines or journals, in the same way that I’m skeptical of prizes that rank poets, I think all of our standards. Yeah. From journal rankings, to prizes, to top thirty lists to The Canon are so so imbued with racism and sexism, and ableism and transphobia and ageism, and nepotism. So like, how could one want them based simply on how they are regarded historically. Which is not to say that I’m untouched by this, like, if I feel drawn to a prize or a magazine, because of its prestige, I have to be very suspicious of what’s happening, I have to interrogate why. So lately, I’m, I’m thinking about magazines, I love to read. And thinking about magazines that are beautiful objects, thinking about journals. With excellent and evident politics, these aren’t hard and fast rules, though. Like I couldn’t just give you a list of them. I think publications evolve over time. And, and with their editors, they aren’t really reliable. There aren’t reliable barometers as time goes on. So I wait usually, until I have a sense of like, what kind of life a poem or a group of poems might have. And then I think about where to try to place it. I read a lot I read around a lot. I imagine there are publications I’ll never appear in because I don’t agree with their politics, or because I don’t write poems that want to have the kind of life those publications offer. I wish that we talked more about consent in publishing. For me, it’s not—I think it used to be but for me it’s no longer about trying to give it away to anyone who will take it. I think loosey goosey is a good way to describe some of my, my submitting—submission techniques earlier in my life. But I want to have a conversation with a reader. And finding the right readers can be tough. So yeah, I imagine there’s some kind of like, generally agreed upon rule about publishing problems ahead of a collection. Most of the poems in my first book were published before the book came out, but I think that’s—it wasn’t really intentional. I was just excited to be having conversations at all. It was just like, here, here they are. Though most of them were in different iterations. You know, the poem that comes out in a magazine isn’t necessarily—is rarely, actually the poem that ends up in the book. Oh, yeah. And that’s a nice evolution. Yeah, it’s complicated. Publishing is wild. But yeah, consent. I’m thinking so much about consent being at the center of our practice, and like, what do you want? And instead of functioning it, like, in such a scarcity model of I have to take what I can get.
Layla
Yeah. No, that’s incredibly helpful. Because, I mean, a lot of what we have been putting together on the Tell Tell Poetry Blog has been advice not just for people who are coming through MFA programs or people who are going to or have already gone through PhD programs, but people that are just like, out in the world, outside of mainstream poetry, who I think it’s really easy to see a list of these like, you know, “ten best magazines” and feel like you have to get in them, and yeah, you know, we do really want to offer strategies of like, this is how you get your book published and get your poems published. But I think it’s also a really important thing to try to press pause and also give people advice that they should try to get published where they love reading poems and not feel so—feel that pressure to get like in the “best top” publications, just because other people say that they’re the best, so I really—I appreciate you saying that. And I think it’s a good thing to just maybe say like, just try to fly by the seat of your pants a little bit try to go on your instincts and see what you love and try to get in good company. I think following poets that you love is really good. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you as well is like, what are your some of your favorite books by authors that people don’t talk about enough? I loved your introduction to the to the Laura Hershey, who I had never read before. And your introduction for the Unsung Masters Series was so good. And yeah, do you have any other people who are just like unsung masters that we need to be reading?
Meg
Oh, gosh. Thank you. And yes, I know, who are people talking about? I don’t think people talk about poets enough so—period. So whomever you’re talking about, keep at it. I love—I don’t know that they’re unsung masters, but I love Gwendolyn Brooks and Adrienne Rich. I love Constance Merritt, oooh I love Constance Merritt and, and Gabi Calvocoressi. I love Raymond Antrobus and Camisha Jones and Ilya Kaminsky and Sam Rush. I love Melissa Crowe and Donika Kelly and Mary Oliver and Taylor Johnson. I could keep going. I love Jill McDonough and Natalie Diaz and Truong Tran. And John Lee Clark. I love D. Lasky and Laura Hershey and Leah Lakshmi and Alison Stein. I love Kiki Petrosino and euf, Francine Harris, and Oliver Bendorf and Keetje Kuipers, and Jericho Brown, Sumita Chakraborty, Kazim Ali, these are all—these are all good people.
Layla
—And what’s your favorite . . .?
Meg
You asked about books?
Layla
—Yeah, you know, I was going there. What’s like, what is your favorite—Like, what’s the last book that you read that you loved?
Layla
Oh, the last book that I’ve read that I loved. Well I’m teaching Tiana Clark’s book right now*: I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood*. And my two books that I’m reading constantly are A Protocol for Touch, by Constance Merritt and The Perseverance by Raymond Artrobus. And Raymond’s book is about to come out in the US. It’s US edition. It’s been out in the UK for a minute. It’ll be out through Tin House, I think, later this spring. So those two texts, I’ve not done you wrong. Those are good ones. But yeah, I mean, I could ramble for forever about books that I’m reading, that I think are doing solid work on the page and in the world. So we’re lucky it’s a beautiful, beautiful time to be a reader.
Layla
I think so. I think that they’re just I mean, as rough as 2020 was in a lot of different ways, really amazing books came out in that time and I think some really amazing poems were also published. Do you have any favorite poems that you teach or any favorite poems that you get like—that you use for exercises?
Meg
Interesting . . . I like to teach poems that are after other folks, right that are—that are homages. So I like to teach—and I like it for a number of reasons, which I can say more about or not, but . . . like Roger Reeves’ “Someday I’ll Love Roger Reeves” which is after Frank O’Hara. And then Ocean Vuong writes “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” after Roger Reeves / after Frank O’Hara. I love teaching that series from O’Hara to Reeves to Vuong as a way of tracing lineages, certainly, but also trying to show students how it is that they fit into the conversation. And how it is that they fit into a larger lineage. As soon as they take up the call, as soon as they take up the challenge. Right. So I love teaching poems like that, that have this kind of historical connection over time. Yeah, that’s what comes to me right now.
Layla
Yeah I could see that in a lot of your work as well. Like, in Last Psalm at Sea Level there’s—I can’t remember what poem it is—but it uses “and how to like it,” that line [from Stephen Dobyns], and you are in conversation with so many other poets in that book, I mean, not just the John Donne, but there’s a lot I mean, I can really see that in your work.
Meg
I think lineage is really a powerful idea to me. And I—not that folks aren’t talking about it, but I wasn’t really brought up within poetics, like being taught to seek out my elders or to honor them in any way. It was a thing that I learned later, or was taught later, or was encouraged toward maybe too late. And I think that we miss out on so much when we focus on like The Academy, and the sort of like professionalization of art and, and the way that we, you know, have all of these degrees around creative writing, we’ve lost in many ways, not entirely, but in many ways we’ve lost apprenticeships, and those kinds of like close mentoring relationships. One cool thing that I’ve been participating in for many summers now is, is the Adroit Magazine Summer Mentorship where they pair poets with high school students that are like, foolishly, foolishly talented. And it’s, like programs like that, or, you know, like any kind of arts programming that’s community based, not like after school programs, but like larger workshops. I just think those things are invaluable because that’s how you learn not only where you are in poetics, but where you come from, I . . . yeah. . . it’s important to me. It’s an important part of my work.
Layla
And so, I’m thinking about, like high school readers, or just people that are newer to poetry. If you had just like one, one bit of advice for people or something that maybe you wish you could like, travel back in time and tell yourself, what would it be in terms of reading and writing? I mean, I think a good thing is just trust your instincts a little bit more and try not to let those kinds of giant hierarchies, you know, shape us too much. But do you have anything else that you would tell people if they if they’re wanting to be where you are?
Meg
Where I am? Where am I? Listen, wherever you are, is a really powerful place! That’s what I wish to impart. I wish we spent more time helping each other. But especially young folks, or, or folks, regardless of age, just beginning to find their way as poets, I wish that we spent more time helping one another slow down and revel a little bit. There is no—there is no normative trajectory. There is no escalator that’s worth more than what you’re making right now. That’s what I would say to my younger self, and, and what I hope to convey to my students: focus on the making, do what you do, and do it on purpose, do it as best you can. I think so often we’re encouraged to adopt—like I said before—a scarcity model when it comes to writing or making and, and that’s the big lie that makes everybody feel competitive, or irrelevant or left out. And I’m not saying that there isn’t a business to poetry, or that, you know, systemic oppression doesn’t play a huge role in that or that capitalism doesn’t have its filth all over it. I’m saying that nobody can make poems the way that you make poems. So make them. I really do believe that nothing is more important, and that’s not even where I am. That’s where I want to be. That’s what I’m working on too. I mean, the page, it starts out blank no matter who you are. So wherever you are. That’s just fine, but be there, on purpose.
Layla
Wow, yeah. Thank you. I think that’s—I think that’s a beautiful place to end. And thank you so much for joining us today.
Meg
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. This is—I feel very lucky.
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