By Gillian Cummings
Kathryn Weld’s Afterimage is a luminous debut book of poetry, thought-provoking and heart-opening, gentle and restrained, brave in its confrontation with the things that often scare us: the deaths of parents and of other loved ones, the self in its relation to the more-than-self, the body that we know cannot go on forever. In poems whose forms and subject matter shift and change like the waves of a windblown lake, Weld takes us on a journey, through the seasons and landscapes of a life, naming everything she encounters with a precision so thorough her very knowing seems a tenderness… I was lucky to have the opportunity to interview Kathryn Weld about this extraordinary debut collection.
Gillian Cummings: Afterimage is first and foremost a book of elegies, to a mother lost to Alzheimer’s, to a father gone before her, to a friend and a coworker, to the speaker’s self as it existed years before, during childhood and during her college years. The first poem of the book, “People Learn Glaciers Move Years after a Guide is Lost,” ends by giving the reader first a statement and then a question: “Our lost ones linger halfway down / some blue-walled crevasse, nowhere / to hold. Who knows if they notice / when sun scrapes noon? What part, / preserved by ice, might reappear?” Would you describe your process of writing this collection of elegies? How did you choose which parts to allow to appear and reappear, which persons, personas, and objects to hold at the center and sides of your vision?
Kathryn Weld: The question suggests that the writing process is steered from the top, so to speak. For me, anyway, it is not like that, but instead, more like an exploration during which images reveal themselves to the listener, the poet, who does not know what to expect. It becomes interesting to open oneself to what is not yet known. If I am attentive, poetry can teach me something. This is not a learning of facts, but more a learning that enlarges the intelligence of the imagination. One is attracted to an image, or a sound, and is interested in trying to capture something—ice is a good example from my book—but what is that about really? How is it connecting to the other parts of my life? During the time of this writing, my parents were aging and dying, and so often the images that spoke to me were naturally examined in the light of the coming loss.
Cummings: In the gradual unfolding of this book, certain images and attentions seem to link the poems that pertain to the mother, the father, and the speaker of the poems. How conscious was the decision to employ some of these objective correlatives? I am thinking of the association of the mother with cloth and clothing (as in “When Cleaning” and “The Elusiveness of Being”) and of the father with lakes and fishing (as in “Night Crossing” and “Summer, 1960”) and of the speaker, throughout, with close, scientific observation and precise naming of plants. In writing and sequencing the poems in Afterimage, how did you decide upon the images that would create the associations and connections between and among poems?
Weld: As a poet, I write from my own experience. I am indebted to my upbringing, as we all must be, for the impressions I have received and returned to again and again to examine for metaphoric meaning. In some very simple ways, the images chosen here are ones I grew up with, and the girlhood I lived, in which so much was physical, left its mark. As a child, I spent three months each year living in an unheated summer home with no road access. Every necessity—food, medical care, the post office and mail delivery—required a trip across the water, often in a small boat without a cover. My mother loved to sew, and made many of my clothes, as well as most of her own. As a writer, I went back to that well, relishing the memories but also asking myself why certain impressions were particularly vivid. What does retention of a particular color or sound really say about what I am experiencing now, in the present? This is a large part of what makes writing a journey of interest, at least for me. You use the term “conscious decision.” What do we really mean by that term? If a conscious decision means one that is taken entirely in advance, that was not my process. If you mean the natural evolution of listening and questioning those things poets used to call “their obsessions,” then yes.
Cummings: I know from being somewhat familiar with your bio that you are a Professor of Mathematics at Manhattan College. And in some of your poems, your knowledge of scientific terms shows through, as in “Trust in Not One Night’s Ice,” where in describing a frozen river, you write, “Weight held / in tons—proportional to thickness squared, also to current,” in referring to crossing over ice. Would you comment about how your background in mathematics and science informs your work? What came first for you as an interest in life, mathematics or poetry, and whether or not you see the two fields as linked?
Weld: My early love was for literature, and I actually began my college study as an English major. This was a period of deep inner questioning, and my study of literature was insufficient support. I turned to philosophy, loving the Greeks, and left when I encountered the modern philosophers, whom I found tedious. I was taking calculus and loved the ideas and precision of mathematics, but hoped someday to return at some point to writing, when I hoped to become clear about what I wanted to say. I had a long academic career as a teacher and scholar of mathematics. My poetic voice began to emerge when my father began his decline. Or, at that point in my life, I began to feel limited in what I could explore through mathematics, and took the time to study writing. For a long time, I struggled with a sense of being mute. It was helpful that when I attended my MFA program at Sewanee School of Letters; the poetry faculty were predominantly New Formalist. I learned to listen to meter in a way that revealed the musicality of language and helped me gain access to the expression of feeling.
Are the two fields linked? Not in any direct way, but of course both require absolute clarity about the use of language, and perhaps an interest in the workings of the creative part of the mind. When I was doing mathematics, one of the things I marveled at was how the mind could work at a problem for days, weeks, and then something might just turn and open, revealing the solution, often when I had stopped looking directly. That entire creative process interested me. Now I witness something similar while working on my current project, a book that is in dialogue with the myth of Eve. An idea for a poem will arrive, then below the surface of active thought, it begins brewing. When I sit down days later, the poem often comes quickly, as if nearly fully formed.
Cummings: The poems in Afterimage seem very much informed by place. Of particular importance is the house that once belonged to the speaker’s parents and the surrounding landscape. This is indicated to be an Adirondack landscape in the poem “Summer, 1960,” a poem of a childhood spent in close communion with the place’s “wild berries,” “smallest toads,” and “foxglove blossoms.” Later in the book, the house that once belonged to the parents becomes the speaker’s house (in the poem “The Outer Shadow of Our Leaving”). Also, the poems reference various points in time, going backward into the past and forward into what was a pandemic and is post-pandemic present. Would you comment about how place and time period inform your writing practice in general? Also, how long did it take to write this book? When did you begin writing these poems? When did you realize that they would form a collection?
Weld: The poem “Ascent” was written when my father went into a nursing home as a result of his dementia. There were no “memory care” facilities yet, or none near him. Soon after that, I learned about the MFA program at Sewanee School of Letters, which involved study during the summer, which was possible with a college teaching job. I started at Sewanee in 2006, so this book dates to that year, although the collection took a long time to develop a coherence. You write what you are living. The poems began to feel like a collection during the year after my mother died, as that process of witness had become complete.
As I mentioned before, that summer home in the Adirondacks, where I have gone all my life, is a wonderful and unique place, filled with possessions from former owners (my parents purchased it, fully furnished, at a private estate sale) as well as things my own parents had saved. Impossible not to come away from that life without a strong sense of place, I think. And yet, it was a place we fell into, by happenstance, and so I also always felt myself a stranger in a strange land. To be in question about one’s place is a kind of gift, really. Those questions open up worlds in the feeling.
Cummings: In connection with the previous question: I noted that the book opens and closes with sequences of poems that are set in winter. Was this a natural choice for this book and its subject matter? Why did you choose winter as the season that would set the tone of Afterimage?
Weld: I once asked Martha Rhodes how a poet could know what a poem she was currently writing was really about. Martha’s answer: “Listen to the consonants you chose.” Winter was one of my consonants. My college years at Potsdam, NY, were formative. Winter was ferocious. Weeks would go by with temperatures ranging from twenty below zero at night to just above zero during the day. Snow was endless, and soft. But I think these images came back to me quite naturally as I faced the relentlessness of my parents aging.
Cummings: You have proven yourself here to be a master at a variety of poetic forms: poems set in couplets and tercets, sonnets, a villanelle, a supremely adept abecedarian, and one poem so broken in its form that its telling breaks the reader’s heart and the heart of the very book itself. (In the last reference, I am thinking of the poem, “Gone. Still. Warm.,” in which you describe the moment of death of the mother, and the anguish it takes to endure.) How do you choose which form to employ when you are writing poems? Is the choice natural and spontaneous, perhaps appearing with the first draft, or is form an afterthought that comes to you during the revision process?
Weld: Some of each, I think. “Gone. Still. Warm.” was expressed immediately in that form, unusual for me. But my process more typically involves extensive revision, reshaping, reordering, experimenting with line lengths, thinking about meter. Narrative poems seem to need a longer line, and imagistic poems need more air. I enjoy working with form, because it often forces me into a different voice than I might find on my own, and in a similar way, revision and changing the shape of a poem helps me to see what it needs. Frequently, I find that a poem is not yet in the right order on the first draft. And changing the order can make an enormous difference in tone.
Cummings: Many of the poems in Afterimage are quiet, restrained. And some of them engage with states of mind that seem open, porous, almost religious, as if born from an experience of meditation or prayer. The poem that closes the book, “Shorn,” speaks of how a person can “experience / the self as contained object and the world / as whole.” Would you comment about how the greater-than-self enters your poetry?
Weld: This is the big question: how does the greater-than-self enter any of what we do in our day-to-day affairs? How to bridge the gap between what one of my dear friends called “meditative thinking” and the rest of my ordinary day, with its mundane tasks, reactions, and habits? When I find a way for this question to inhabit a poem, I feel very lucky. At the same time, to work at poetry supports a study of how language can open a crack between these two very different worlds, in part because it is sensory, musical, and in part because it is comfortable inhabiting the world of ambiguity, interrupting the relentless automatic flow of the logical mind. Encounters with the greater-than-self only happen when the unceasing commentary of the knowing and naming mind lets go, just enough to allow an encounter with something not known. Sometimes poetry can give a nudge in this direction, maybe.
Cummings: I want to go back now to my first question about the book as elegy. Were there other books of elegy/elegies that inspired you in the writing of Afterimage? And in the same vein, who are some of the writers you feel have most influenced your own poetry?
Weld: I cannot name any particular books of elegy that directly influenced this work, but certainly books like Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife and Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things had a strong impact on me. Other writers have inspired indirectly but substantively by teaching my ear what it loves. Early influences include Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, A. R. Ammons, Susan Stewart. At Sewanee, I was lucky to study with the great critic Angus Fletcher, toward the end of his life, and I deeply appreciated his vision of poetry as an environment. I began as a narrow reader of poetry, happily now I’ve learned through writing to be much more broadly appreciative.
Cummings: Now that your debut book is out in the world, what are you working on these days? Do you see a next project taking shape?
Weld: My current project began as a short series of ekphrastic poems—written in response to Renaissance depictions of the Temptation of Eve. It would be easy to read these through a feminist lens, but I wanted to see if something more essential and universal was buried underneath the gendered myth. The first poems were letters to Eve, but then they expanded into poems that imagined Eve in our modern world, and included the voice of the Kabbalist scholar Adin Steinsaltz, culled from his great book, The Thirteen Petaled Rose. Inevitably, my poems ask ontological questions. The process has been fascinating, and is still taking shape.
Cummings: And finally, please say something about the title and the cover image of the book. The cover designer is identified as Mica Weld. Is Mica a relative? Is the woman in the cover photograph your mother? I love how the title and image bring us to the titular poem, “Afterimage,” which closes with the lines “What stays? A girl’s finger /tracing her mother’s mouth.”
Weld: Yes, Mica is my brother’s youngest child; and they used a photograph of my mother as a young woman as part of the cover. Everyone immediately agreed that this was the right cover image. I’m very grateful for their help.
