The Natural World is a Grief Machine: Emily Pittinos on Created Form, Confession, and Obsessions
Emily Pittinos is a Great Lakes poet and essayist currently teaching in Boise, ID. A Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boise State University, Pittinos has received a 2022 Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, as well as support from Vermont Studio Center, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and Washington University in St. Louis, where she served as the Senior Fellow in Poetry. Her recent work appears, or will soon appear, in Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day, The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Last Unkillable Thing (University of Iowa Press, Spring 2021), is a winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize. Her short collection of creative nonfiction, Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone (essays), is forthcoming from Bull City Press.
On March 16, 2022, Emily Pittinos joined The Interlochen Review editors Neva Ensminger-Holland, Lucy Dale, Kaydance Rice, and Avery Gendler for a conversation about her debut poetry collection, The Last Unkillable Thing.
Neva Ensminger-Holland: What did the writing process look like for The Last Unkillable Thing? Did you set out to write a collection or did you write the poems individually and then make a collection?
Emily Pittinos: I guess it's both. There is a version of this book that was my thesis in graduate school and it had the same title. Although recently, I went back and looked at the PDF of what I turned in as my thesis and there are like five pages that are the same, everything else has changed. I think that I tend to write poems individually. Then once I have some that feel like they are connected in some way, I can start putting them together and start kind of thinking about it as a manuscript. I try to be careful with that because that moment of realizing something can be a book can be a little scary and psych me out at times.
I had a professor who described it as cartoon physics, where like Wile E Coyote doesn't know he's going to fall off a cliff until he looks down and then he falls. I think that as long as I don't look down too much it's okay. For this one, I think that because I was working towards a thesis, which is a book-length thing, at the time I knew I was writing a book. But I was still able to trick myself into not knowing that.
Avery Gendler: I really like how the imagery within the poems, specifically “With Key in the Door” and “I Would Let Go If Only It Came Naturally,” are often interspersed with confessional moments. How do you balance these elements in your work?
EP: I think that I started off as a really image-based poet, like a neo-imagist kind of deal. But I think there's something really nourishing about being able to just look up and say exactly what it is that you mean. I think that I tend to root an image and then once there is a sense of place and a person with a body in the world who is seeing things, feeling things, then it feels like I can look up and say. I think it's important to kind of root oneself before you make that leap into what is basically abstract language or ideas or that idea of confession, being really honest.
NEH: The collection combines a lot of imagery of the natural world with narratives of grief and loss. Why did you choose to put the two side-by-side and how did you go about blending them when you were writing?
EP: I just can't help it. I'm from this area and like all of you, I was a student here so a lot of the early poems I wrote took place in this landscape. A lot of that has continued to be true. I actually came back here when I was in grad school to do a residency close by in the winter when there was snow up to your shoulders. I think that it's just naturally inspiring to me. I don't know if you all have that too. If you're from a place and you kind of end up writing about it or something that gets into the blood of being somewhere.
Then, too, my family is from here so when my father passed away it was in this area. I think that the memory of the loss, the experience of it, is probably fairly intertwined with being in this place, which is complicated but also rich. The natural world too is kind of a grief machine within itself. I mean things are living, things are dying all the time.
Lucy Dale: Something I struggle a lot with as a writer is approaching the art of writing about loss and death. What challenges do you find most difficult when writing on these subjects?
EP: I think that on a personal level something that might be underappreciated is the need to take care of oneself when writing about difficult subjects. I teach nonfiction as well as poetry and write both. I think particularly in nonfiction classes, it can be that people want to tell their big story sort of right away and feel like they have something important to say, but sometimes they're doing that without having really processed things. I think writing can be part of the process of processing, but I do think that it's important to know that the poem isn't the most important thing. The person is the most important thing. So if it feels like approaching a subject that is difficult is too much or too hot, I really recommend backing off of it. I think it can be easy to feel like you have to do whatever is hardest or that sacrificing some kind of stability in your mind can be worth the poem and culturally that might be the thing people believe. But I think you can have both. I think it just takes longer.
As far as writing about grief goes, I think one of the hard things to keep an eye on, once you are ready to write about it and you’ve drafted things and you're looking at the final project, is being able to look at it from the lens of someone who isn't you. I think [this] is true for all work, to kind of again trick yourself into thinking that you're a reader and not the writer, and thinking, is this a thing that has been said in this way before, and if so how can I adjust it so it feels stranger or more moving or funny even.
LD: Are there any authors that have inspired you when writing about loss and grief?
EP: Yeah, a bunch. I'd say one of them is Allison Benis White. She wrote a book-length poem called Please Bury Me in This which is about losing a lot of people, specifically women in her life. Another one is Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen, which is about the loss of her brother and is a recent book that used a lot of mixed media as well. If you’ve ever taken a look at that book, she uses family photos and photos where her brother has been cut out and then writes into those absences and then writes around that absence in a concrete way, physical way. So it feels like a kind of collage or experimental writing process which has turned out really quite beautifully.
It's also true that I think that those influences change over time. When I first started writing about grief, I think I was probably thinking more about the narrative poets that I became familiar with in my time at Interlochen, like Larry Levis or Jim Harrison or Donald Hall, who wrote about the loss of his wife who is also a poet named Jane Kenyon. So I think all of those writers have had something to do with everything.
AG: You've touched on this a little bit with the idea of grief being part of a place, but I love the imagery in The Last Unkillable Thing and all the flora and fauna. How have the different locations and ecosystems that you've lived in, Michigan and Idaho, affected the imagery of your work?
EP: Well, there was a while I thought I was going to be an ornithologist, a scientist of birds. And I believed that in part because I took an ecology class here when I was a student at Interlochen with Michael Chamberlin and it was pretty amazing. We’d go around in a bus and look for birds and listen for birds and memorize calls.
And so I think that knowing those things about the world right around me felt really powerful and made me interested in ecology. But then I got to college and there had to be chemistry and calculus involved and I ended up changing my mind. I think that as an amateur ecologist, this thing still feels moving to me—just knowing what’s around and then being able to see the natural metaphors in image and then use them to express the inside externally. I think that when we look at a landscape, everyone sees the same landscape in a different way in part because of what is going on inside. The perception of the outside world is really just a reflection of the interiority of a person and a writer. So when I was writing The Last Unkillable Thing and deep in my grief place, then everything looked like death or loss or absence and it might not have looked like that to someone else. Now I have been living in Idaho for a time, so The Last Unkillable Thing was seeded in the Midwest and that was the material I used, but it was finished in Idaho. But now, working on a new collection, there is a lot more high desert landscape in there, foothills are there. It's a strange project. There's a character in it who travels from the high desert to the midwest and back again and kind of so those things are part of it too.
LD: As young writers we are always looking for insight into how more experienced writers like yourself make decisions regarding their work. Could you speak on the process for formatting and ordering your collection?
EP: Oh that’s my favorite thing! You just have a bunch of poems until you put them together in the right order, so I think that it can be really exciting to decide what order things go in. And actually this project I'm working on now is a book-length poem and I think I spent like two years just kind of moving the pieces around. And I think too there’s a kind of removal like I mentioned earlier. There's a kind of removal that has to happen where you can just kind of be looking at the same project you’ve been looking at for years and years and try to see it new again. Then to think, if I were approaching this for the first time and I was reading this from start to finish, what would the ordering of information tell me about this book or long poem or sequence.
I think a lot about color theory. I mean there are a lot of elements to color theory, but one is that one vivid color put next to another vivid color will look much different or be perceived differently than if it’s put against a pastel. I think about that in terms of ordering, so if we have a poem that like “Edge of Ruin,” which was written about being in a grief state and imagining people dying all of the time. It’s like a thing that happens if you have a sudden loss sometimes, but out of context that poem can just be a sad love poem where there isn’t necessarily death in it. I think that [many of the poems in the book] could be about love lost or about break-up or something, but then if you read them in the context of the whole thing it takes on a second meaning of a person in the midst of grief and trying to figure things out. But I think that having the poem next to other poems that are grief-y kind of makes it happen.
AG: There’s a wide variation of form in this collection including couplets, nonets, sonnets and even a totally unique form that I think you’ve created. I felt that this really reflected the fluidness and wildness of the natural world. Can you talk about what prompted this variation in formal decisions?
EP: Again, it’s just my favorite thing! There is so much to do with form and it’s sort of one of my obsessions. I’m actually teaching a class on obsession right now at Boise State and it’s sort of about how you can make your personal obsessions, which can feel like a burden sometimes, and creating long term projects out of them but then using formal innovation to make the subject matter feel new again. I think that there’s so much that a poem on the page can say before you have even read it and the subtleties of those things like line break and what a prose block will do as opposed to a really long monostich. It’s fun, it’s like nerdy fun, I’m sure you all know what I'm talking about. I think that I’m not sure if that actually answers your question Avery, but I guess it has to do with enactment. A form can enact the content that it’s talking about. So I have that poem “After,” which has a prose block with all these caesuras in it, and that’s the part of the poem and the part of the book that’s actually telling the narrative of the death. It’s the most narrative part of the book but it’s all broken up in a grief-like way, and then we have the long monosticks which feel like the kind of anxiety that’s spawned by loss, and then we have this kind of moving back and forth between narrative and anxiety. I split those up in the book so that it would create kind of a narrative arc throughout and keep people from getting lost, but when you read them all together it’s doing that flipping back and forth thing.
Kaydance Rice: You kind of touched on this briefly but with all of the poems and varying forms, they’re all like creating their own effect, so I’m wondering how you decide on a form for a particular poem and then when would those formal decisions come in your writing process?
EP: Yeah I think it kind of tends to be a last thing, because the form is meant to support the content, so if you have something that you’re working on then you have some kind of language to move around on the page. I mean I’m shocked by how much writing poetry is just hitting the spacebar and tab bar on your keyboard and moving things around. I think that once I have an accordion thing, once I have something to say, then I’ll start a notebook. I’ll put it into a document, then I can start moving it around and seeing what am I trying to say here? And how can I bring that out through how it looks on the page. Once that happens things are added and shaved away. When I have the form for the piece, that’s when I really know it’s close to being done—it just kind of snaps into place, feels right.
NEH: In a similar vein to that, a lot of your collection has prose poems in it, specifically in that “After” section but in other sections too. What makes you decide not to lineate a poem and how does your writing process change when your poem is not traditionally lineated?
EP: I think that it’s just another tool that we have. If I’m writing a prose poem there needs to be some other element of form within that prose poem that’s giving it some kind of poetic structure. And so if I think about “Loss Becomes Me,” which is a prose poem that has some lineated lines in it too, I think that poem is interested in fragment; I think it also is sort of interested in tricking you into being told a story because I think that’s what prose does too, or that’s the expectation for prose. Often there will be some narrative element so I think you can use that to your advantage when you’re not actually telling a story but you want someone to feel like you are. I was still fiddling with the margin on the page to make it those tiny blocks, so I think all of that stuff remains, it all has to do with whether I also want to be playing with the isolation of line and deciding if that is something that feels important to that piece in particular or if I just want it to feel like a smoother process of reading. But even that poem I think I did it so that even if you got to the margin of the prose, the line still broke in a place that made sense for me, which isn’t the expectation for prose poems. The whole thing is that the margin decides the line break.
KR: Your collection has a really unique approach to page breaks, often using separate pages to draw attention to certain stanzas, specifically in the “After” poem. How do you approach these page breaks?
EP: It felt so bold to me. I was obsessed, I still kind of am obsessed, but particularly back then, with concision. I was writing these small poems, these little distillations and I ended up writing a lot of the sequences that are in the book all in little bits, for the most part. “After” might be the exception, but “Subnivian”, “Holding Back the Year,” “She Must Have a Little Green to Look At,” they’re all in sections. At first I was trying to cram the sections onto the same page because I think I felt a little self-conscious about having these little things be on their own pages, but once I let go of that and split them up and just let them breathe, it made so much more sense to me. It also felt like enacting what I think a lot of this book is simulating going on a long walk, especially the poem “Subnivian” is about augmented reality, it’s high drama, because it’s poetry. I think a lot of that comes from a fear of taking up space, which I think is sort of a gendered thing, sort of a mentality thing, and I think that was sort of getting in the way of making those poems have the white space they needed in order to do what they needed to do. It felt pretty freeing to let go of that and to stand behind this idea that I truly believe that you can say so much in very little.
AG: I’m going to bring us back to the poem “After”—was that originally one poem and then separated throughout the collection? What was the process like for writing that poem?
EP: That poem is one that I wrote when I was in grad school. It was one of the ones that survived. The first section of “After” is the only one that was written after the fact, a couple years later. But I had to invent a form, which I love. Now I make my students do it, because it’s really hard but it’s so fun, and it teaches you so much about what form can do. I really believe that so much of learning and studying poetry is just about knowing your options like understanding devices, understanding techniques, understanding the effects of what happens when you have a dropped line or a monostick and what those differences are so that you have a whole toolbox of techniques and you can start making decisions instead of writing reactively to what it is you have going on. Which, you know, the first few drafts are always reactive, but I think once you have that language you can make decisions about form and I think that’s really empowering.
So, I had to invent a form, and I wanted to replicate that kind of anxious thought pattern, that circularity. I thought I was so clever at the time, because I called it a convective sequence, like air moving around, hot air rising and falling and then rising and falling again. I was writing a lot of essays at the time about the narrative of my father’s loss. Those essays are going to be part of a chapbook that’s coming out soon called Animal Roadkill, Ashes Gone with Bull City Press. So I was writing these narrative essays, but I also wanted some sort of narrative element to come into the poems. It felt like the only way I could do it was to mess with the way the poems looked on the page, so it was a little stranger than an essay would be. I started alternating between these prose-looking sections with all these caesuras talking about the aftermath of the grief, which is why it’s called “After,” and these three monosticks, which all start with the same phrase. I think it’s not clear perhaps across the whole manuscript because I took something that was a continuous poem and split it up to use as a spine for the book, so that there’d be something to return to, but the poems are also concatenated. Concatenated comes from chained together, like in a crown of sonnets, because in a crown of sonnets, you have a sonnet and then the last line of the first sonnet is the first line of the second sonnet, and so on. If you look at the “After” poem, it’s stealing that too, where there’ll be something in the prose bit that will trigger a series of anxiety monosticks that will start with the same idea and then spool out. Which is what anxious thought can do, it starts here and spirals out, starts here, spirals out, starts here, spirals out and then it ends.
KR: There’s a lot of specific usage of punctuation in your poems, specifically, there’s the poem with all the colons. How do you approach punctuation and how do you think it influences your work?
EP: Punctuation is another interesting tool, maybe sometimes undervalued in poetry because you can do without it. For a long time, I wrote without any punctuation, and I think it was really good to experiment with that. But once I reintroduced it, it was like “wow.” There’s everything, I can do whatever I want. In the poem with colons, I used them to create like little dilations I guess—well it’s both, it’s kind of like putting brakes on the poem, but also forcing the poem onto the next thing. So it was like creating pause, but also pushing forward, which was fun.
LD: What did the publication process look like for The Last Unkillable Thing? How many places did you have to submit before getting accepted and what does the publication process look like for any one of your poems?
EP: Wow okay, so that book took a minute to write, and I think that I knew that the manuscript was a little more ready to go when a lot of the poems were getting accepted for publication. I think I had about half of the poems accepted and published before I started sending the manuscript out really seriously. Which isn’t the process for everyone, I just think I have a lot of patience for that kind of nonsense, by which I mean the waiting, there’s a lot of waiting involved in the publication process. Then once I had those going, I started finalizing the manuscript, arranging the poems, and even adding poems. I had a poem that was added that was written a couple years after everything else in the book. Once I added that one and took a look at it again and everything had its own page and all of that stuff, that’s when I knew it was ready to go. Then I started submitting it to contests, it’s kind of expensive to submit to contests — it adds up. That’s really the way that if you are a poet who’s not a performer and doesn’t have an agent (which most poets don’t) you tend to submit your first book to contests. It’s one of the ways to do it. There are a lot of them, there are a lot of great presses and I started sending out that contest stuff. I got a little grant to pay for submissions at the time. And I have a spreadsheet but I’m going to say I submitted that book fifty times over the course of a couple years. It was a finalist a couple times and that’s when I knew I was getting close to it really happening. And then I just got a call one day from the Iowa Poetry Prize.
I guess it’s just long and it’s just patience. I think it’s important to know that if a work feels ready to you, like really ready, you can feel it. You can also share it with some trusted readers who will tell you the truth. And once you do that all you can do really is wait for the person who’s going to see themself in that piece or see its value. I think at a certain level things just become about luck and taste too and just hoping you get someone who just says “yeah, I get what you're doing and I would like it to be shared.”
KR: As an Interlochen alum, how would you say your experiences here have shaped your work as well as your journey having gone from here to a published writer?
EP: Oh yeah — so much. I was a four-year student here, so I started writing poems here when I was fourteen. I think there’s so much to being taken seriously and I think that happens here. And I think it was good for my teaching too because I take young people very seriously. Being here is what made it feel like it was possible to be a writer, to be a teacher, whatever path you want to take as far as writing goes. And also to see the possibilities of how writing can help you in whatever way you need it to, no matter what it is that you do. I went to college after going to Interlochen and I wasn’t a creative writing major in college but I was still going to workshops and I think I did that because I was sure that, writing wise, that was what I wanted to do. So I was going to explore some other areas and just get my MFA later. And that’s what I ended up doing. It’s a little naive, but I also think that if you are very dedicated it’s possible. Getting a professor who sees your work and wants to work with you is really similar to finding a judge or a publisher who wants to do the same. And it worked out. I am very grateful that it did. Being able to know that being a writer is possible, being able to know that being a writer is even a thing, being taken seriously and taking yourself seriously—I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing if I hadn’t started here. I’m pretty certain of that.
LD: As someone with a teaching background at a school such as Boise State University, what do you believe is the most important lesson for a student to leave your classroom with? What is the most important lesson you have learned from your students?
EP: Teaching is amazing. It is so much fun and I think often I am just as much a teacher as I am a writer and I think it can be a very creative process. I think what I want people to leave knowing has a lot to do with the power of form— the shape of a thing can be expressive in itself. If my students leave the class knowing the word “enactment,” then I’m going to be like “great, we’re done here.” I learn from my students constantly and that’s also one of the joys. If you’re not a student anymore, then as a teacher the classroom is still your test kitchen— being on the other side of it. Sometimes I bring something to my students that I don’t fully get, in whatever way that means. “This is a mysterious piece of text to me, let’s talk about it and by the end we’ll get to the bottom of something.” And I think that happens all the time.
AG: As both a poet and a human being, what brings you hope at this point in our pandemic world?
EP: It’s comforting to know that expression is possible and that you can write a thing and spend quiet time with yourself. That kind of experience can be then translated onto the page and find someone who needs to hear that kind of thing. It’s a moving idea to me and it does feel hopeful.
NEH: What were you reading when you were writing the collection and what are you reading now?
EP: One of the books I was obsessed with was Slow Lightning by Eduardo Corral. Part because he is obsessed with form and I think that book really showed me some of the many possibilities and you can be ever shifting. His book and his writing really showed me you can commit to an obsession and that’s okay. Even being obsessed with images—he has images that recur in that book that made me feel like it was okay to do that myself too. It can be an asset too to be like, “Oh, there’s a coyote,” and then thirty pages later to be like, “oh, there’s a coyote again. I wonder if these coyotes know each other.” I only learned that because I had that experience reading his book. That, and Ghost Of and Please Bury Me in This are all books that felt like they were influential, in part because they weren’t afraid of the sequence, [which is] why I think I’m writing a book-length poem right now.
I’m teaching right now and I tend to be reading the same amount that I am teaching. I’ve been thinking a lot about In the Dreamhouse by Carmen Maria Marchado. A moving book, a book that’s interested in form, even though it’s a nonfiction piece. I also just read The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Works that are involving some kind of queer theory and mizing that with personal experience. Also Angels in America we read for my obsessions class. Reading plays is something that I got into during lockdown. I wish I had taken a playwriting or screenwriting class when I was here, but I identified so strongly as a poet I was kind of stubborn about it. But now I’m kind of into plays and incorporating playwriting structure into what I’m working on.
AG: You’ve talked about what you’re working on right now a little bit but I was wondering if you could expand on the current project?
EP: Sure! It’s a book-length poem, and it’s also about grief but it’s taking a bit of a different approach. I talked earlier about being obsessed with something and trying to find another way in formally. So there’s basically a first person speaker who’s really depressed and she’s going through this long, long term grief cycle of not wanting to leave her space. So in reaction to that, she invents a character called Lost Daughter who’s sort of a projection of her—she’s able to be funny, she’s able to do weird stuff. I struggled a long time with the form of that thing but I’ve actually made it so that playwriting structure is incorporated into it—whenever Lost Daughter comes up, it’s in the form of a tiny play that’s sort of an unstageable scene. I think I have a version of it that’s done. Which is great because I’d like to work on something new now.
AG: Do you have any ideas for what’s next?
EP: I have a very small stack of poems that might be something, but I’m not looking down.