Gina Williams

The Interview

Your recent collection An Unwavering Horizon (Finishing Line Press, 2020) employs a more personal approach, “unfolding a world of emotion from the often-overlooked minutiae of everyday existence.” Yet the core themes of that book (loss, sorrow, struggle, and cultural empathy) can be found in these poems, just in a strikingly different manner. What are the threads that bind your past and current poems together? How do you feel your voice and approach has changed over time?

The poems in An Unwavering Horizon reflect a deep dive into personal experience and all that life tends to hurl at us. An awakening of sorts. I’d been writing rather obtuse nonsense poems before that. An editor suggested a more concrete approach, so I tapped into my journalism background to put story to experience. I’m used to telling other people’s stories. It was time to tell my own, even the difficult ones. The hard stuff. With these newer poems, I tried to take the same unflinching approach, but with a broader perspective. I began with a theme, which I’ve never done before. I put a lot more effort into structure and language. In previous work, I let the stories tell themselves and just kind of spill out. With these poems, I was much more deliberate and tried to be careful with every sound, every word—the rhythm and symbolism and structure. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I wanted to really tap into the power of language with this work. Because language is what we gather around when the lights go out.

The work you present here is painfully aware of the hardships in the lives of others. In what ways and voices do the protagonists/historical characters call upon you to demand that they be honored on the page? 

A few years ago, I turned to Walt Whitman for hope and inspiration. I remember reading Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” I love the poem and I love Walt, but I thought, “I hear America crying. I see America bleeding.”

I couldn’t get it out of my mind and at the same time, the American divide(s) seemed to be intensifying exponentially. I turned to history and found so many lost moments and silenced voices. Details stripped of color. I turned to current times and found the same. I tried to pull myself away and look at my own country as an outsider, through different viewpoints. I wanted to see “us” more like an outsider than an insider when considering what the hell’s gone wrong and why. I think it’s important to step away from ourselves often so we can see and imagine multiple dimensions and perspectives. All of the voices seemed to be shouting and begging to be connected, heard, and respected. 

The poems employ such drastically different formats. How do you decide what format is right for a given poem? 

I typically decide to tackle a particular structure and then look for a poem that has potential for that format. Probably because of my journalism, background, I do well with specific challenges, assignments, and deadlines. For example, if I’m referencing sharecropper ledgers in a poem, I may try a multi-column structure. Sometimes the subject matter finds its own structure. For “found text” pulled from letters, a structure that mimics correspondence seems to work well. I’m pretty new to experimenting with structure, but I enjoy the challenge of finding just the right fit—a structure that works well for the page and for all the ways a poem can be experienced.

Is there something in common between many of the social injustices your struggle with? If there is, what does it reveal about the human species? 

I think it boils down to several main issues that are the core of injustice and inequity in our society: the racism, intolerance (hatred/ignorance) and greed that are at the core of the pain and these poems. From the very beginning with Native American genocide and land theft, slavery, and failed reconstruction to today with hate crimes, police brutality, racially motivated voter suppression, “let them eat credit” economic policies, and mass incarceration (as a few examples), America has never been the “shining city on the hill” as politicians love to say. I’m not a sociologist, but I think what it reveals about the human species is that we have a lot more evolving to do, for one. Second, a society such as ours cannot move forward in dealing with systemic inequality until we come to brutally honest terms with how we got here and why—and truly, truly reckon with it.

How did you come upon the overarching concept of using numbers to unify and explore various historical and contemporary socio-political struggles?

I began with a poem I wrote about a Holocaust survivor with a Nazi tattoo on her arm. I’d already written the poem when I started thinking more about the tattoo. What does it say about a society when we assign numbers to human beings? What do numbers in general say about society? What do numbers tell us about ourselves as Americans—where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed as people, as a society? Immigration numbers, detainee numbers, slave census books, sharecropper ledgers, social security numbers, slave brands, lashing scars. Miles of pipeline, smallpox scars, gravestones, wagon tracks, acres of tribal reservations, uncounted children taken at the border, square feet of redlined city blocks. Time served, borders crossed, ship’s logs, broken bones, lashing scars, bullet casings scattered on classroom floors. What do numbers say not only about our collective history, but our present? About inequality, systemic racism, and the ongoing fight for justice, dignity, and true freedom?

I don’t have numbers present in every poem, but I used them as a kind of scaffolding to climb around in history and in the present to look for voices, stories, clues, and answers. The numbers offered a path forward. From there, I tried to let language help me put flesh back onto the bones.

Your work walks a tightrope between intimacy and abstraction. You hold the reader close by employing the first and second person points of view. You repeatedly speak of corporeal things. There are “bodies” everywhere, both conceptually and in flesh and blood. However, as grounded as they are in real world tragedies, these poems also feel quite universal and slightly abstract. There’s a hint of everyone’s shared struggles within these specific historical instances. Tell us about this juxtaposition: how it comes about in your writing and what impact you feel it has on the reader. 

I come from a Raymond Carver sort of background. I grew up in a blue-collar family in small town Oregon. Fished with my grandfather. Caught tadpoles in creeks. Lived on a small farm. Fought forest fires during college. I earned a journalism degree with an English minor but did not specifically study poetry. So, when it comes to telling a personal story, I tend to go back there. Like Carver wrote, “Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on.”

But I also love language, believe in the power of art, and really wanted to expand my own understanding and ability with language in the sense of finding universal themes in sometimes abstract ideas like the despair of a landscape or the violence of a pipeline and create poetry that can be beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Because that’s what we’re dealing with. Beauty and terror.

I think the juxtaposition comes from those two approaches and perspectives. I hadn’t really tried to combine them before. I hope it works. I hope I can keep finding ways to bring it all together in meaningful ways. My goal was to offer a sense of earthy reality while also letting the spirit and language of the poem lift the work up.

I read an interview recently with Pierre Joris, who is a longtime translator of Paul Celan (Romanian-born, German language Jewish poet who lost both of his parents in the Holocaust and spent two years himself in a forced labor camp). Joris discusses why it is important for Americans today to “wander around in Celan’s landscape.” Because, Joris says, Celan would look at the rise of populism and antisemitism here today and say, “I told you so.” And Celan can show us how to acknowledge and navigate the dark places we inhabit. “Truly innovative poetry, such as Celan’s, can show us how to proceed,” says Joris. “Can teach us something about these complexities while also reassuring us that there ‘still are songs to sing beyond mankind (Jenseits der Menschen).’”

Celan also described language as a kind of saving force. 

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language.”

What is your philosophy of literature, if it’s not too pompous a question? 

It’s not a pompous question, but I’ll try not to offer a pompous answer!

My philosophy of literature and all art is that it is alive and powerful. The multiverses we create with our verses have energy that goes on and on beyond us. Maybe it even goes back to where it came from. Maybe it permeates cells and souls. Maybe it can help heal generational trauma and prevent future horrors. I believe that literature should be accessible, but not easy. I also believe that those of us drawn to creating literature and art have a great responsibility to speak truth to power and look for ways, even as we celebrate literature and freedom of speech by having fun with it, to harness it for good, for change. There’s too much at stake not to. 

I agree with what celebrated writer Alice Walker wrote this in a 1976 essay about the artist’s life: 

“It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about. Whether we are ‘minority’ writers or ‘majority.’ It is simply in our power to do this….We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.”