“Lean into Desire”: A Conversation with Amie Whittemore
Interviewer’s Note:
Amie Whittemore and I like our drafty poems with chips and guacamole, with sliced apples and Gouda cheese, with a glass of prosecco or sometimes a Dutch crumb donut. For seven years we lived only four miles apart, as the sparrow flies. When I heard she was the latest poet to move to my growing city in Tennessee, I invited her to be a feature at the reading series I host. We met for the first time shortly before her reading, under the cozy string lights of the Green Dragon Pub. I thought she was a shy creature, a little skittish (to be fair, I sometimes offer hugs to strangers much too fast). But from the moment she stepped up to the mic, I recognized her fierce heart, and my role as her fan began. Soon we became community collaborators and trusted critique partners. At her maple-topped dining table and on my back porch, I had the pleasure of seeing most of the poems in Nest of Matches in draft form, to witness this gorgeous collection from Autumn House Press take shape. Amie has an intentionality in process that I so admire, and that I think results in masterful world-building across the poems in her collections. I’m delighted to talk with her about that and other elements of her latest book.
Kory Wells: Amie! I miss you! Let’s jump in and talk about how this book began: with you challenging yourself to write about each of the full moons of the year as they occurred. In one of the early moon poems in the book there’s the line “Do not fear what you will grow / into.” There’s also a recurring idea in the book of patiently waiting, and on the other hand, of sometimes resisting cycles and time. As it applies to the writing process itself, how do these ideas inform an intention which takes months or years to fulfill? How did setting your intention for the moon series affect other poems you were writing concurrently, and ultimately the world of this book?
Amie Whittemore: Kory, I miss you and eating delicious food while working on poems together! I love this question, though I think you give me a little too much credit for my intentionality since I feel like so much of my drafting process happens on a subconscious/intuitive level. When I first started drafting the moon poems, I honestly didn’t see them as poems I’d ever publish. I wrote them because I was Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro (a title we both have shared!); I needed some poems I felt comfortable sharing with the community and who doesn’t like a moon poem?
However, despite this lack of deep intention at the start, my laureate year coincided with the start of the pandemic, so marking that slow, swampy, lonely pandemic time through the phases of the moon took on more weight. In 2020, I found myself reflecting more and more on ideas of interdependence and connection and the moon poems became touchstones for these questions: How do we love ourselves? Each other? The world?
Once I leaned into the moon as muse, the sequence emerged as the spine or throughline of the book.
As for how this push and pull of patience influences the writing process more generally, I’d say the shape of a book only emerges with time. I wrote the dream poems in Nest of Matches for years before seeing them as part of something larger, for instance; it was only when another critique partner, Allison Hutchcraft, saw how they were in conversation with other poems that I began to see how the dream poems, moon poems, and other poems could work in concert.
KW: Yes to that conversation! Any pair of poems in this collection could be two young girls walking through an enchanted meadow, whispering to each other their secret obsessions. One reason for that is that Nest of Matches is full of nature—milkweed and moons, bears and foxes, fields of corn and poppies—but it’s also a book about home: what is home, who is home, where is home? When I reread Nest of Matches in light of your recent move back to Illinois, closer to your family and childhood home, the recurrent motif of the nest stands out even more to me. In “The Tunnel” you refer to an entrance “almost a nest. Almost / an escape route.” To what extent did writing these poems usher you toward a new home—both literally and metaphorically—as you enter midlife?
AW: Yes, I’ve returned to the “nest,” so to speak, haven’t I? For much of the last 20 years I’ve lived outside of Illinois, though you might not know it based on how much of the midwestern landscape infiltrates my poems, dreams, conversations, and even the tattoos on my arms. I’ve long wanted to go back and have often encountered people who didn’t understand that longing or critiqued it. It’s hard not to internalize those critiques. I did wonder if maybe I was idealizing the past or falling prey to some sort of romantic impulse about “going home.” I think the poems helped me to stop pathologizing my own desires, to trust them more. Once I leaned into that trust, and really felt a deep readiness to go home, the universe responded: a job opened up at Eastern Illinois University, allowing me to return.
KW: Lean into desire—I have the urge to write that at the top of every blank page in my notebook! Let’s talk about a desire we share that’s particularly challenging to pursue, which is to address, as Major Jackson has written, the “dearth of poems written by white poets that address racial issues.” I saw your poem “Another Queer Pastoral That Fails to Address White Supremacy” several times in revision, and I kept encouraging you to work on it, despite how awkward it felt to you. Can you talk more about the poetic moves you discovered to help you keep a poem like this one, or “On the Banks of Sinking Creek,” grounded in the very specific world of this particular book while also stretching to address big issues such as privilege, colonialism, and existential crisis though the lens of your identity?
AW: First, thank you for your help with the many drafts of “Another Queer Pastoral That Fails to Address White Supremacy.” It was a tough poem to write and your help, along with the support of an antiracist writing group we were both part of during the pandemic, were essential to the drafting of the poem.
I think the most useful poetic moves in both of the poems you mentioned was to start with myself and my own experiences and let that be okay. I can’t write about someone else’s experience of white privilege and race, so it made sense to write about my own experience of my whiteness and to reflect on my experience reading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the poems you mentioned.
In our antiracist writing group, we read “The Second Person” by Jake Adam York, and I think York’s discussions of race are a useful model, always grounded both in his experiences and in research and reflection. I think some white writers are nervous to write about whiteness because, well, it’s easy to mess it up. It creates a weird vulnerability to admit one’s own privilege and complicity in an unjust system. But, I think, as with many challenging things in life, it’s only by sitting with the discomfort that we can find a way through–ideally to a more just and flourishing world.
KW: Thank you for all the insights you’ve shared, for all your beautiful words! I’ll close with this: I’ve been enjoying the Spotify playlist you made for Nest of Matches. Could you pick just one song that most represents, to you, the book’s vibe? (My choice is “Hummed Low” by Odessa.)
AW: Oh, I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed the playlist. I’m inordinately proud of it. I think “Hummed Low” by Odessa is a good choice. I’d also add “Love Survive” by Michael Nau. Thank you so much for the conversation!
