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Veda Carmine-Ritchie in Conversation with Jeff Whitney
Jeff Whitney is the author of multiple chapbooks, most recently Good Things are Happening (Green Tower Press), winner of The Laurel Review’s Midwest Chapbook Contest. He is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and his poems can be found in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, and Verse Daily. He lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon. For more info, visit www.jeffwhitneypoetry.com.
NDR: The poem of yours featured in NDR, “What Thou Lovest Well Remains American” shares a title with three other pieces of yours published in 2026. “What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American” is the title of a Richard Hugo book published in 1975. Then in 1948, there is the passage, “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross...” in Ezra Pound’s, “Canto LXXXI”. What does this continually evolving phrase mean to you, and how did your personal iteration of it arrive as a repeated title?
JW: I first encountered the phrase reading through Hugo’s collected poems, Making Certain It Goes On, and it’s always stood out to me; why did he decide to use the antiquated “thou” in the title? Why can’t I stop repeating it to myself like a prayer or mantra (What thou lovest well, what thou lovest well...)? I didn’t know about the allusion to Pound’s “Canto LXXXI” until an embarrassing interval of time later.
I’ve gotten to mid-life crisis age, but instead of driving a convertible or getting really into fly fishing, I’ve just gone really nostalgic. This poem, and the others you mentioned, along with a handful of others that also share the title, were written around the same time, and at the center of them is that idea that if you (are lucky to) live long enough, the country / world you were born in is not the same as the one you wake up in. There are a lot of different ways to consider that. For me, under Hugo’s influence (I got my MFA at the University of Montana, and there was a framed picture of him in one of the classrooms, staring at us all day), I think about my hometown, old friends, relationships that once meant the world to me with people I no longer hear from or see. So I wanted to bring them back, and that’s how this poem and the others got their start. Hugo’s poem of the same title and his oeuvre in general are constantly evoking nostalgia—for places, the people in those places, a time he can’t get back to—so it’s no wonder I’ve adopted the title for my own purposes here.
Oh, and how did it arrive as a repeated title? That came after. A lot of the poems mentioned above originally had different titles, but once I changed one, the dominoes just kept falling, and now here we are, with a full-blown series on our hands.
NDR: What is the role stylistic form plays in this series? Does it interact with nostalgia? Does it interact with inevitable change?
JW: The longer I’ve been writing poetry, the longer my lines have gotten. I don’t know why that is except that it matches my preferences as a reader. I rub my hands together and say, “oh, boy!” when I come across a poem in a journal or collection stretching its little fingers across the page. The poems in this series follow that trend (though now having said that I feel the immediate urge to rein this impulse in).
This poem’s triggering subject, to use Richard Hugo’s term, was the memory of a friend (not actually named Martin) who had a bad trip and spent all night in a bathtub, and never quite seemed the same afterward (though this was likely due to other things going on in their life, which I recognize now). It started with that line “Martin once ate mushrooms and smiled in an empty bathtub,” and from there developed into the poem it became, though during composition I had no idea where it was going, just that I was thinking about this moment. As far as form goes, once I had that first line, I tried to keep a fairly uniform line length as I composed. I’ve heard of some writers who will write their first drafts without lines, then go through and lineate after, but for me, breaking the line while in the flurry of composition is part of what keeps the momentum going, the surprises coming.
I consider myself a pretty boring writer formally, so in this series, and a lot of the poems I value, story and imagination are the predominant temperaments. I’ve come to understand that plainness in form allows me to tell a story, and from there make leaps and connections (for example, the connection to the movie The Prestige) I wouldn’t have thought to make, or to compose a mural of images that together form their own logic.
I guess I’m saying the simplicity of the container demands that I make the poem strange and interesting in other ways, which leads to the brain’s natural exploration of memory, grief, the meaning of anything, and also allows me to take those leaps in topic and thought that themselves enact a kind of change. Is this making sense? I don’t know.
NDR: I want to focus on the last thing you mentioned, “topic and thought that themselves enact a kind of change.” I see this with the way you begin the poem with the mushroom trip of course, and then bring in earthquakes, moments in childhood, even the act of a magician revealing his secret—things that once they happen, feel as though they can never be reversed. How has your view of linearity changed while writing this series? Do you believe that time moves ahead relentlessly or is there another form of magic that manipulates aging?
JW: That’s a good way to put it—the nextness of events, and a great question about time, linearity, all that. I’m really taken with the idea that whatever is happening, was happening, and will, is happening all at once. There is no time. We die but we don’t. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’m drawn to poems. Richard Hugo isn’t dead, Lucille Clifton and Li Po and Rumi and Dickinson and whoever else we might visit on the page, take your pick: poems allow for us to inhabit their time. I can’t remember who put it this way, but I once heard someone describe a poem as a “little empathy machine,” and I like that, but I would also call it little machine against time, improbable flying peach, stuck hand on a clock.
Paradoxically, being a person entails being strapped to a dying animal, to put it in a way I heard Kaveh Akbar say recently, so I also think time marches on, and changes the world around us utterly (remember Pangea?). After all, all those stars that had to die so we could be here took a long time to fusing hydrogen, or whatever it is they were up to, before they could burst their contents all over the universe, the stuff of which we’re made. And I like that idea, too. It gives me great optimism in a time when it would be very easy to go full-cynic in response to the challenges of our day.
I don’t think my view of linearity has changed, but then again, what do I know? Maybe I’m changing all the time in imperceptible ways. And yes, I guess I believe both that time marches on relentlessly, but we have this amazing technology—the poem—a powerful time machine without the need for flux capacitors, flashing lights, or concern about tearing a fabric in space-time through our human need for meddling.
NDR: Who are some writers, or artists in general, whose work has struck, inspired and/or propelled you into creation recently?
JW: I’ll focus on just the poets to keep this from going on too long, and since fiction, television, film, and other art forms already have a lot of PR wind at their backs. At the risk of getting linear with time, some recent collections that have struck and inspired me are: Sasha Debevec-McKinney’s Joy is My Middle Name, Andrew Hemmert’s No Longer at This Address, Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993, Cortney Lamar Charleson’s It’s Important I Remember, Threa Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen, Yuki Tanaka’s Chronicle of Drifting, James Allen Hall’s Romantic Comedy, Rosalie Moffett’s Nervous System, Kinsale Drake’s The Sky was Once a Dark Blanket, Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things, Kim Hyesoon’s Poor Love Machine, Rob Macasia Colgate’s Hardly Creatures, Rebecca Wadlinger’s Terror Terrible Terrific, John Gallaher’s Brand New Spacesuit (This is my North Star poetry collection, and the single largest influence to my writing over the past 6 years.)
Oh, I also listen to music while writing, and these albums are great inspiration and accompaniment: Julien Baker’s Sprained Ankle; Sand Duney’s Plant Material; Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead; A Silver Mt. Zion’s Horses in the Sky; Mono’s Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined.
Johannes Göransson in Conversation with Sarah Vap
Vap is the author of six collections of poetry. Her book, Viability, was selected by Mary Jo Bang for the National Poetry Series, and was released by Penguin in 2016. Her first book, Dummy Fire, was selected by Forrest Gander to receive the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her second, American Spikenard, was selected by Ira Sadoff to receive the Iowa Poetry Prize. Faulkner’s Rosary and Arco Iris were released by Saturnalia Books, and Arco Iris was named a Library Journal Best Book of 2012. End of the Sentimental Journey was released in 2013 from Noemi Books, initiating their Infidel Poetics Series. She is recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship for Poetry, and a Research Enhancement Fellowship from the University of Southern California for a year of writing and research in West Africa. A special portfolio from Gospel of the Lots of Lucy is featured in issue 61 of the Notre Dame Review.
NDR: Your new manuscript The Gospel of the Lots of Lucy is a long series of discussions between “Questioner” and “Lucy.” For those who have not read the manuscript, who is Lucy? How did you make connection with her? For that matter: Who is the Questioner?
SV: Lucy is the australopithecine hominid whose skeleton was dug up in Ethiopia, one of the oldest hominid mothers ever found. I don’t remember exactly how I started hearing her. It was about a decade ago that I/we started writing this. She was a clear voice that became clearer, and we wrote together for a long time. Maybe she’s more than one voice that I heard across that time, or else she changed or I changed across those years so that I could hear her better and differently. Maybe all of that. The Questioner is what she calls what we might call the “reader.” She’s an elder and an oracle, and she assumes we’ve come to her with a question. That we need help.
NDR: What’s the role of grief in this book? What is the relationship between grief and temporality? What might grief do to our sense of time?
SV: I spent awhile thinking about your questions; Lucy has been grieving for three million years. She knows we are grieving, too. In the book, she’s—as our protomother—grieving that we will each die soon. She’s also grieving that our entire species will die. Like hers did.
The best way to approach this book is to be grieving on any scale. To be sad, or hurting, or tired, or in agony, or baffled. To approach this book hurting may automatically transform us into the Questioner she’s speaking to.
For Lucy, time and grief might be the same thing. For me, too. Like, time is the bladder we each throw into the river and as it fills, it holds everything we love and lose and remember in our lives. But it’s also the river, filled with things to love and lose. Lucy’s bladder is 3 million years full. She can’t let go of it.
Grief might both flatten the scales of time and exaggerate them. Time might flatten the scales of grief, and exaggerate them. I don’t know if I can pull apart time and grief.
NDR: Time has already come up several times. You have, as you noted, spent a lot of time writing this book. How has your relationship with Lucy changed over that time? How have you changed? How has Lucy changed?
SV: I love this. I think I could say poetry’s become time for me. When I was young I would fall in love with particular words. I must’ve been two—I say that because of the house I was living in at the time—I loved the word yellow. And I loved the words red and blue. And that continued across time and many thousands of words. Then when I started to write poems, I loved gathering both fascinating and flat words together into interesting lines, which I could say are maybe just more time than a word. Then time accumulated in lines and became stanzas and then poems. For the last few books of mine I’ve said that I wasn’t sure if I was writing a book of very short poems or if I was writing one booklength poem in small parts. And now that books have accumulated, and I’m older, I’ve started thinking in chunks of books. Or even a career. What did I end up writing? What did that time become?
So how would I connect that to Lucy in particular...something like this...the reason I worked for so long on the book was because I couldn’t write it. I didn’t have the brain to write it. Nor the nervous system. Nor the personality. It was too hard for me. It required me to work at several scales of time/language/ audience simultaneously—even those that, as a human being in my finite 90-year (fingers crossed) lifespan, I’m not going to have encountered. However, I like to do things that are too hard for me to do. So as I worked on the book, I came to understand that, for example, the audience scale included exactly one person I’d never met with their exact question to ask Lucy that day, and also the audience included anyone else across all of human time who needed that same question answered, and also the audience was anyone who eventually read the whole shebang as a book, and also (because of Lucy’s 3-million year old beyond human-life scale) all of Humanity, meaning not just homo sapiens but, let’s say, all hominids or sentient beings. I’m still not sure. As I wrote the book and rewrote it and re-scaled and un-scaled it for a decade, my brain changed. My personality shifted. My nervous system became different. Of course that kind of thing happens to all humans all the time, with every large learning and loss. For me, in the case of writing this book, it was quietly and personally dramatic, and it allowed me to write (with her) what I/we ended up writing.
Lucy did change across time, too. But maybe that was me getting out of the way. I inserted myself more. Initially, in the writing, I’d hear something from her, and I’d embellish or fix or tweak it, as I’d been doing to my own writing all along. As time went on with the collaboration, I went back and removed some of that when I could. Other times, she definitely enjoyed a tweak of mine and wanted it kept in. By the last few years we were more collaboratively simultaneous and less push and pull. But we did both change. I think she was sharper at first, and more annoyed with humanity. But, oh, halfway through, I kept being given images of and language around the Pietà—either that’s how she really felt about us, or aspired to feel about us. Or that what we needed from her was to hold us while we die, individually or collectively. That image of the Pietà became a kind of tuning fork for the book as I shaped it.
NDR: Returning again to time—we usually think of “length” as the mark of “the long poem.” From Pound’s The Cantos to Berryman’s The Dream Songs, we tend to think of page numbers. But here we are discussing your poems in terms of time instead. Do you see this poem as a “long poem?”
SV: Yes, I do see this as a long poem. I see my whole career now, by which I mean everything I’ve tried to write in my life, as a long poem. I hope it gets a lot longer.... I’ve made some peace with time, which takes away everything.
NDR: Who are some writers who have inspired you lately, or whose work you feel close to?
SV: Hmmm. I read so much during the years I was writing Lucy, hundreds and hundreds of books, so now that the manuscript’s done my reading’s gotten weird. A hodge-podge. I’ve been reading through Elizabeth Strout’s and Claire Keegan’s work. Re-reading Marilynne Robinson and Jon Fosse’s works. I just picked up One Hundred years of Solitude again. Strout and Keegan and Robinson and Fosse and García Márquez make me think I’m searching for a tone. And I’ve lived basically for decades on a steady diet of murder mysteries...nothing realistic—too scary—just villagers primarily in Europe murdering each other over rose-growing contests, art forgeries, etc. I’m re-reading a lot of my favorite books from childhood for a different project I’m working on. A lot of ancient poetry, but I always read and re-read those. Right now Norman Fischer’s translation of the psalms. Job, always with Blake’s illustrations. There’s never a time I’m not reading Tao Te Ching.