In Conversation: with Poet Julia Bouwsma - Part Two
Julia Bouwsma
In Conversation with the Poet - PART TWO
Poet + Farmer + Librarian + Editor
Sometimes you come upon a writer (or poet) whose prose transcend the moment. When I discovered the work of poet, Julia Bouwsma, I immediately felt a connection to her work. This was a visceral reaction, one that I acted upon! I knew that I needed to learn more about this poet, how she lives “off-grid” and her methodology for working creatively.
Julia and I have begun a collaboration that will culminate in an exhibition in 2021. As the Covid crisis has resulted in quarantine and institution closures, a collaborative art installation (the original intention of this collaboration) became a difficult proposition. Instead, I am making Thread Paintings using excerpts from Julia’s prose and large abstracted oil paintings that directly respond to Julia’s newest poetry. Updates on my progress will be In the Studio.
All collaborations have a beginning and this one starts here, with an ongoing conversation about life, choices and making creative work. This is Part Two of a two-part conversation. You can read Part One here.
As part of our working together, Julia has shared with me her new work, Sugaring at the Start of Another War. These poems were written right before the Covid-19 pandemic began. Yet they are startlingly relevant as we find our way through this turbulent time. Julia gets deeply personal in these written works which have greatly impacted my own approach to the paintings I am currently making. Bouwsma is fearless in tackling her biggest doubts, fears and experiences. Through her writing, one senses a shedding of the superficial and a buoying of one’s own sense of their truest self.
If there is one poet you should be reading, it is Julia Bouwsma.
About Julia:
Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic, and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is the recipient of the 2018 and 2019 Maine Literary Awards for Poetry Book; the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver; and the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Linda Pastan. Her poems and book reviews can be found in Grist, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. A former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, Bouwsma currently serves as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.
Julia Bouwsma’s latest collection of poems, Midden, explores the history of Maine’s 1912 forcible eviction of an interracial community from their home on Malaga Island. Midden received the 2019 Maine Literary Award for Poetry Book and was a finalist for the 2018 Julie Suk Award
Other People’s Words:
““Julia Bouwsma’s chilling tale of the quietus of Malaga Island is shattering in its simplicity. The ease with which an ‘undesirable’ culture can be summarily disappeared is not a grim aberration relegated to a long-ago past―it’s a monster of the here-and-now. This is a chilling commentary, compassionate and character-driven, penned by a poet who is resolute and relentless as witness.””
In Conversation:
with poet Julia Bouwsma
Part Two:
How did you discover the story that your book, Midden, is based on? What about that moment in history inspired you to write Midden?
I first learned about the Malaga Island eviction—the state of Maine’s 1912 forcible removal and erasure of a community of Black, white, and indigenous people from their home on Malaga island—in 2006 when I saw a ten-minute Maine Public Television documentary about it. Shortly thereafter, my father-in-law told me a story about meeting a descendant in a book store when he was younger. As a fairly new transplant to Maine, I was haunted by what I was told about the Malaga eviction, and when I started doing some initial research to learn more, I became even more haunted by the fact that there were so many missing and conflicting pieces of information, by discovering that the Malaga archive is a deeply fragmented archive.
I think that all writers, but perhaps especially poets, have learned to intuitively identify and follow their obsessions, to instinctively write into them and to take leads from them. This was also true for me in my first book, Work by Bloodlight, though the questions I had in that book felt much more personal. In writing Midden, I began the book with the idea that I would learn to write beyond my own experience, that I could try to break some of the silence that surrounded this harrowing piece of Maine history. And in some ways I have done this, but projects shift on you as you work on them, and ultimately I ended up writing a book that was also much more personal than I had originally anticipated. The history of Malaga Island is a tangled one with many threads. In retrospect, I think I was drawn to it instinctively because I have often felt like an outsider myself, and because I, like many, carry my own family histories of erasure and silence. These were feelings I tried to write into. And also my growing attachment to my own land, which has become so central to my own sense of identity and narrative—I tried to imagine the immensity of the loss I might feel if this were taken from me.
Some of your poetry is in documentary form, in which history is cloaked in a poetic voice that is tantalizing and evocative to read. This feels to me like a new form of storytelling, merging perception with facts that are hard to digest and realize. How did you arrive at this particular way of writing poetry? Was there a moment that you realized this was how you wanted to express yourself?
When I began the project of writing Midden, I knew that I was writing a book that I did not yet know how to write. So I did make a few initial rules for myself. I knew that I was going to write way more poems than would ultimately end up going into the book. There are probably thirty or forty poems that never made it in: some were just plain terrible and others simply were no longer necessary by the time the book was fully realized. I also did as much research as possible, in as many different ways as I could. I watched video documentaries, listened to radio documentaries and interviews. I read old newspaper articles. I papered my walls with images of Malaga and its residents. I visited the island on multiple occasions, took photographs, even drew my own images of Malaga. I visited an incredible exhibit at the Maine State Museum. I read everything I could find on Malaga from dissertations to a children’s novel. I also read any poetry book I found that struck me as even tangentially helpful: collections that dealt with race, books that investigated specific histories, “subject matter” books that revolved around a single topic. And I experimented heavily with different types of forms, many of which ultimately found their way into Midden: persona poems, erasure poems, sestina, prose poems, interviews, lists. After Midden was published, my mother said, “It’s like you were writing about this thing that was so terrible you didn’t know how to write about it so you just tried every single way you could think of.” I’m not sure I knew I was doing that at the time, but she was spot on.
The aim of all of this was, I think, to try to push myself from the role of a passive observer into an active participant. The silence and distance of history felt enormous to me at first. It was like I was standing on the other side of a window, watching but removed. I wanted to break that plain of glass. I needed to find ways of interacting with the project from inside of it, of confronting all of the complicities, privileges, and hesitancies I felt in writing this book that was about something so far from my own experience. It was a slow process, but if there was a single turning point, it was when I showed the manuscript to a brilliant poet friend, and she very wisely suggested the idea of writing a series of poems that were letters to ghosts. I had written a series of very internal, stream of conscious poems, but the form wasn’t working. I ended up turning these into the “dear ghosts” series that weaves through the book. And once I did that, the book began to become what I had hoped it might. These poems are very interior, almost dreamlike. The ghosts are sort of a composite formed of the ghosts of Malaga, of my own land, and from my personal life. And the ghosts talk to me directly in the poems, sometimes quoting me, but I’m never able to talk directly to them. I tend to think of these particular poems as liminal spaces and merging places, as islands scattered through the book, and as such they offered my a vital way in.
I also should say that I was reading many books of poetry that are documentary in nature in various ways, but that the phrase “documentary poetry” was one I didn’t encounter until Midden had already been picked up for publication. Another brilliant poet friend was telling me that she was teaching a workshop on documentary poetry. And my response was to say, “What’s that?” and then, immediately after, to say, “I think that describes the book I just wrote.”
Do you write from a dark place?
Yes, I think so. But perhaps it’s more that I write to the dark places within myself. The poet Rebecca Gayle Howell (an incredible poet who has taught me so much) talks about “accessing your nighttime mind," and I think that’s really what I try to do. As a reader what I need from poems is to have my heart torn open, to be left gutted, the top of my head lifted off. I want to be jarred into seeing in a way I haven’t before. I want to be disrupted, discomforted. I want that as a reader, which means that I must demand that from myself as a writer. If a poem is too safe I tend not to trust it. If it scares me or makes me feel exposed or uncomfortably seen, I know I’m probably getting closer to a truth I need to write.
So unleashing, yes, but I’ve realized there is no “once and for all,” that any catharsis I feel from writing is usually temporary. For example, I wrote intensely about my father in my first book, Work by Bloodlight. I turned him into an archetype and dismantled him, the mythologies he had given me, in order to create my own. I felt I had to write that book in order to write any books after it and after I wrote it, I hoped I’d never have to write about him again. That proved untrue. After my stepmother passed away in the fall of 2017, I found myself writing about him again. And I suspect he will remain a reoccurring theme in my work, whether I wish to write about him or not.
I don’t think writing poems can purge the darkest parts of one’s mind, but it helps bring them into the light. It helps us see ourselves and one another more clearly. I think the temperament shared by most poets, or at least the poets I admire most, is one of profound earnestness. The desire to expose pain in order to make something beautiful of it. The poet Chen Chen keeps a pinned post on his Twitter page that reads “My poems are braver than I am, but I am continually trying to catch up.” While my aesthetic runs dark, I’m actually deeply idealistic at my core. Can the world or any of us really be saved? Probably not. But I think we have an obligation to try nonetheless. And I think the first step is to work toward identifying what we’re running from in the first place.
Can you tell us about your new work?
In February, at a residency on Monson, Maine, I completed a first draft of a new manuscript, tentatively titled Sugaring at the Start of Another War. It is a book about trying to work the earth even as I see how thin it is, how how precarious. (I’ve been thinking a lot about that Edna St. Vincent Millay line: Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world—it is thin.) It is a book about the contradictions of location and dislocation, about creating a relationship with a piece of land out of a sense of dissociation from the physical body. And it is a book about feeling both disconnected and connected at once—about the experience of being attached to home but also always an outsider there, tethered but also (historically, psychologically, epigenetically) unmoored.
But, more than anything, I think it is a book about fear. I wrote it on the cusp of the pandemic—when I could feel the virus and all its anxiety barreling toward us, but when it still seemed more like threat than reality. Initially I don’t think I mentioned the virus at all in the book, and then later this spring I went back and added a couple of poems that referenced it more specifically. But it’s interesting, because it almost didn’t matter. What I was / am writing into in this collection is that wavelike sense of accumulating fear—that feeling of burgeoning dread that has been especially palpable for the last four or five years now. Fear as virus, fear as fascism, fear as a small rural town divided, fear as historic violence and inequality, fear as the looming danger of climate change, fear as both the known and the unknown, fear as what we love most: it all kind of wove itself together and then entered this book like a low long freight train whistle.
Upcoming Work:
Sugaring at the Start of Another War
(stay tuned!)
