Madelyn Garner

The Interview

As each of these poems is obviously a part of a larger series, can you tell us more about where this series goes beyond the pieces we’ve read? What is the larger narrative? How many pieces currently make up this series?  Are you working on a narratively and thematically linked chapbook or full-length collection in which these form part of the backbone?

The latest version of In All Its Beautiful Wrongness is a full-length collection comprising approximately 50 poems, depending on the day and the weather. It began in 2017 with just a handful of pieces and has shifted focus several times since. I now believe I’m finally approaching a version ready for submission.

The backbone of the book is the relationship between my sister and me. Born nearly ten years apart, we were never close in our early years—our contact limited to the occasional card or phone call. That changed the day she unexpectedly flew to California to be with me as my son was dying. I was blessed to have her by my side then, and in the months that followed.

From that point on, we reconnected—lunches, shopping, even vacations. But then, she was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s at age 52. Her condition progressed rapidly, and she died within three years.

In many ways, the book is a lament for the closeness we never had, for what was lost due to difficult childhoods, diverging paths, sheer stubbornness and ego. But it is also a love song to a sister: smart, rebellious, and wildly talented. The one who defied while I conformed. Who risked what I was too afraid to. There is so much to miss and to mourn. 

These poems are consistently emotionally devasting while never falling into sentimentality. You are always walking that tightrope between narrative clarity and approaching intimate subject matter from the side from a less linear perspective. How did you work to balance emotional clarity with unique metaphors?

In both my books—Hum of Our Blood (3: A Taos Press, 2017) and In All It’s Beautiful Wrongness, (currently in progress), the central subject is the death of a loved one. In the first manuscript, I confront the death of my beloved son from AIDS at the age of 34. In the second, I explore a sibling relationship, from our childhood until the death of one sister from early on-set Alzheimer’s. Both losses were, and remain, emotionally devastating.

To deal with these events as a poet, I choose to approach them through a broader lens. In Hum of Our Blood, several poems address my son’s life and death in the context of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic—specifically, the era before the availability of protease inhibitors. Some pieces examine the government’s foot-dragging to address the crisis; others explore how many of Brad’s friends died alone after being rejected by their families simply for being gay. One poem even details how people with AIDS were treated in medical settings, including early infection-control practices like face masks that eerily echo the COVID-19 era. While the book is, at heart, an elegy, it also serves as a political and social message.

In my second manuscript, I include poems that portray family life shaped by low-income circumstances—families that work hard but sometimes struggle under the weight of that labor. I explore how such conditions can shape childhoods and affect relationships. Writing with this larger context in mind helps me maintain a certain detachment, allowing me to better depict the complexities of my sister’s and my on-again, off-again connection, right up to her death.

This approach has allowed me to create some emotional distance as I focus on the craft of the poems. While the work undeniably reveals raw emotion and personal truth, the speaker—myself—can still occupy a position of neutrality. Thinking about the broader social or historical context often opens the door to experimentation: in form, metaphor, imagery, and theme. This lets me walk the tightrope between narrative clarity and the deeply personal content these poems contain.

You employ a variety of structures, from prose poems to couplets, indented white space in more traditional stanzas, and you also sometimes drop punctuation, other times use expected punctuation, and sometimes you play with it, such an employing slashes, How do you decide which structures and punctuation styles to use for a poem?

In the multiple ways any idea for a possible poem occurs to me, it calls for me to explore the context and contour of it. I engage with it through form, lineation, and punctuation to understand it more deeply—not only literally, but figuratively as well. Rather than relying on established responses or conventional structures, I try to let the poem develop organically.  I think of it as an evolutionary process, one that allows the poem to discover its own shape.

Yes, I admit that sometimes a predetermined format or approach suggests itself. A more narrative or story-like idea might call for the structure of a prose poem, using longer, more fluid lines. On the other hand, a single striking image might ask for something more concentrated or fragmentary—shorter lines, greater emphasis on isolated elements. What I truly delight in, though, are those ideas or experiences that suggest poems which could be simultaneously expansive and spare. That kind of tension is a delightful dilemma—one I’m happy to wrestle with, sometimes for days.

As for punctuation, I often find that the evolving poem presents a range of options. Standard systems, when applied in unexpected ways, can clarify or even amplify the substance and meaning of a piece. Even spacing itself can awaken possibilities—offer a jolt, a new way for the poem to      b r e a t h e.

I like to think that experimenting with form and syntax makes each poem a unique event, one that leads us into deeper territories of body and soul. More importantly, it raises the possibility of engaging readers in a way that invites them to apply the poem’s singular vision in their own lives and meanings. In this way, experimentation becomes a kind of dialogue, an action/reaction that welcomes the reader as a partner in this grand adventure we call poetry.  Why not?

You co-edited the anthology, Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined. How would you summarize this project for our reader.  How did this project affect your own life and your creative work?

The idea for the anthology began over wine and tapas at the historic Taos Inn, during a conversation that had meandered from one subject to another before unexpectedly landing on collecting. As I recall, someone mentioned she collected buttons. Others chimed in with what they collected—telling stories about estate sales, auctions, or searching through storage rooms for what they treasured. 

We kept sharing stories. That lead us to a question: Had we ever read a poem about collecting? No one could think of one. But for some reason, the idea stuck. It felt like it would be fun to search for such poems. In the following weeks, we kept circling back to it—talking to other poets, doing more research. Eventually, it occurred to us: Maybe we could become collectors ourselves—of poems. Why not create an anthology around that theme?

Since my co-editor had publishing experience, I relied on her knowledge. I tried to be a good assistant, although much of the process was unfamiliar to me. Still, it turned out to be interesting and educational—from placing an ad in Poets and Writers, to reading through hundreds of submissions [AM1] offered by well-known poets like Pattiann Rogers, Jane Hirshfield, Denise Duhamel, and Kimiko Hahn, and emerging voices. Then came the work of design, production and distribution. I learned so much. The most important lesson?  Publishing is hard work and often underappreciated. And although I complain whenever I receive a rejection letter, I also value each new issue of a favorite journal or beautifully designed poetry book, knowing it represents so much dedication and perseverance on the part of those who love poetry as much as I do.   

How would you describe your poetry collection, Hum of Our Blood? How did it come together? What was on your mind while you worked on it?

Hum of Our Blood came together in a strange way—but to understand why, I have to go back to junior high. I was lucky to be a student of Mr. Glim, who regularly carved time out of the curriculum so we could we read, memorize, or write poetry. Because of him, I started carrying a notebook. I brought home poetry books for my nightstand. Years later, even as a teacher, I kept writing daily, collecting more books, folding poetry into my classroom assignments.

But that changed when I became an administrator in the local public school system. My 8-to-10-hour days were suddenly filled with writing reports, evaluations, letters to parents. Notebooks were tossed or lost. The poetry books ended up in the basement. For over a decade, I stopped writing creatively—anything at all. 

After early retirement, I was adrift. That is, until I found myself standing in front of a stack of poetry books at Tattered Cover Bookstore. Two came home with me. A few weeks later, I attended a poetry reading. Time passed. On a whim, I enrolled in a poetry workshop. Another workshop. And another.  It would take more than a year before I felt confident that I had regained the skills I had lost.

Then one day, something shifted. I was sitting at the dining room table with a blank notebook in front of me. I can’t explain what was different, but I found myself writing a two-page poem—the first in Hum of Our Blood. Grief and anger flowed onto the page.  Strangely, the poem wasn’t about Brad directly, but about the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The last lines? “So many dying. /All the ways they were dying. /The reason they were.”

The poem told me I needed to tell my son’s story. More poems followed. Eventually, I began submitting them to journals. When the collection was selected for publication in Tupelo / 3: A Taos Press in the 2015 Open Reading, it felt like a kind of vindication-- that I had finally rediscovered my voice and my poetry.  

In these selections, “For months, I have been a trembling heart” is the closest the speaker comes to revealing their reaction to the sister’s suffering. It’s as if the speaker is at a distance from the narrative. Would you agree with this summary, and if so, was this approach intentional?

Yes, I would agree. Writing an elegy raises the degree of difficulty several-fold, because of the intense emotions it stirs, especially when it is about someone you love. To manage that, it sometimes helps to create a kind of distance, or at least the feeling of distance. I’m not surprised when that is reflected in the poem itself.

Interestingly, what helps me the most is returning to Elegy by Mary Jo Bang, (Greywolf Press, 2007), in which she writes about the death of her only son at age 37. The collection offers so many lessons –not just about grief, but how to write through it. One blurb in particular sticks with me. Marjorie Perloff praises the book this way: “Avoiding all self-pity, false comfort, sentimentality, finger pointing, Bang’s terse, oblique poems anatomize grief, guilt, and mourning in pitiless detail.”

If I had more space, I’d include specific quotes from the book itself. But that blurb alone names important “rules,” if you will. I take them to heart. When I write, I evaluate whether to insert images of myself or my grief. I want the reader’s attention on the one being eulogized. I try to avoid even a hint of self-pity, and I never assume anything I write can provide real comfort—except, perhaps, to me. 

Of course, you can write poems that are sentimental or assign blame for the reasons someone died. I’ve written those too. But most of the time, before I begin, I ask myself: If this poem is about the death of a loved one, isn’t the narrative itself already reflective of my feelings? Isn’t the act of writing a kind of comfort? And if so, isn’t that enough?