An Interview with Amie Whittemore – Writers House Review

By: Lindsay Croken and Mary McIlvain

Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore, ISBN: 9781637680896

Introduction:

Amie Whittemore is a poet, educator, and the author of multiple collections including Glass Harvest, Star-Tent: A Triptych, and her most recent release, Nest of Matches. Within this 2024 collection, Whittemore ruminates on the complicated inner workings of familial relationships and love affairs, specifically those dealing with her queer identity. Whittemore’s adoration for the natural world shines through in Nest of Matches, where the poet challenged herself to write about the occurrence of each full moon for the duration of a year. Whittemore’s playful and imagistic style throughout her newest release sings of transformation, desire, and the powerful resolve for love.

LC and MM: We’d like to start with something we read on your website before reading the collection. Eric Tran writes about the exploration of queer identity in Nest of Matches, “The poems in Nest of Matches struggle with understanding the queer self as lovable, as desirable, even as worthy of life. Yet, at the same time, this book celebrates and anoints this confused, combustible self.” This juxtaposition is poignant throughout the collection and serves as an exploration of such a complex dichotomy in many queer lives. Can you share a bit about your journey navigating this contrast in Nest of Matches?

AW: Writing a poetry book is strange business. The process–for me at least– requires both conscious intention and a gut-level intuition. I certainly didn’t realize these themes were what the book was about until I printed out a stack of poems and started laying them out on my office floor. From there, I could start to see my own preoccupations across poems.

For so much of my 20s and early 30s, I struggled with how to make sense of my complicated love life, my queer identity, my longing for home. I certainly didn’t know how to write a poem about one of these issues without considering the others. Thus, this book came about from an interest in letting go of trying to make sense or resolve these tensions but to see them as interwoven, to let them be, in their sometimes contradictory, often inexplicable states. To just let myself be someone who loves more than one person at once. Who yearns but also accepts the limits of yearning. Who grieves and rejoices. In other words, the book emerged from wanting to find peace in life’s patterns and repetitions rather than feeling like I should be other than what I am.

LC and MM: One strength that shines through in your writing is the effective manner in which you implement a callback. This skill is especially apparent in the third poem of the collection, “Tornado Song”, where the imagery of a bathtub is introduced in the first line “Still as bathwater, I slept” and returns in the last stanza with “I dreamed tornados, torn shingles/ rainwater pooled in bathtubs”. “Tornado Song” chronicles a range of experiences with the character James Hull and grounds readers with the recurring image of a bathtub. Do you have any advice on how to create a successful callback within a poem? How do you know when a piece would benefit from a cyclical moment, and how do you keep the idea in question feeling fresh?

AW: I’m so glad that this callback worked for you! I think the callback is partially a result of obsession–sometimes, I get stuck on a word or an image, and find myself repurposing it across poems as well as within poems. It’s only through the revision process that I can begin to see how often I’ll return to an image that I can begin to understand why I’m drawn to it and how to weed out unnecessary repetitions.

I think one way to keep a callback or repetition fresh is to consider how it’s working syntactically. For instance, in the example you cite, the bathtub begins as a metaphor for the speaker’s sleep. Then it accomplishes different work in the second occurrence, becoming an image in the speaker’s dreams. I think asking yourself how to repeat something with a difference is the key. You might accomplish this by making the word take on a different task or see if you can “verb” a noun or “noun” a verb, for example. The key is to pause and reflect on what is drawing you to integrate a callback and then consider strategies for how to do so effectively.

LC and MM: Many of the poems in Nest of Matches play with avant-garde form, specifically in “Another Queer Pastoral That Isn’t a Time Machine,” “Blue Moon,” and “ Wind Poppy, Fire Poppy.” The structure of these three pieces struck us, due to the multiple interpretations that they afford readers. It feels as though there are multiple poems intricately intertwined, highlighting the complexities and flexibilities of the themes of identity, desire, and love. What drew you to experimentation with playful forms as a way to express different meanings and interpretations?

AW: I’m so glad you enjoyed these poems! The forms certainly emerged through revision, through a dissatisfaction I felt with earlier drafts of the poems. For instance, “Another Queer Pastoral That Isn’t a Time Machine” began as a much longer, more narrative piece meditating on my experiences with early desire and the pasture behind the house where I grew up. I realized I didn’t want to tell a story as much as leave impressions, convey the layers of feelings I associate with the pasture: a sanctuary to which I can no longer return, a place where I didn’t see myself as queer, even as queer longings were emerging within me. That constellation of associations and emotions required a more restrained, impressionistic touch and the form began to emerge.

My journeys in “Blue Moon” and “Wind Poppy, Fire Poppy” were similar. Often I will find myself dissatisfied with an early draft and ask myself, how can I radically change this poem? And through experimenting with structure, through being willing to tear it apart and build something new, I can sometimes find a new path toward the poem.

LC and MM: The moon is an integral image and symbol throughout Nest of Matches. Often it serves as a metaphor for the self, (“Is it possible to love one’s own tattered self, treat it like a switch-queen, a bright hoof? A blue moon” / “I’ve left more times than I’ve arrived and, yet, like this moon the bucket fills again” ) but also as a sort of mentor, like in “Hunger Moon” (Marry me, moon, marry me. Teach me how to live with such lack– how not to hunger, never thirst.) The moon is something that has always resonated with us as well, so we’d be interested to hear how your personal relationship with the moon and all its symbolism was nurtured and more about what it represents to you in all its complexities.

AW: I’ve always been a fangirl for the moon. In 2020 I was Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro Tennessee and part of that role required writing poems that would be shared in public spaces. So I tasked myself to write about each full moon of 2020. This practice deepened my appreciation for the moon and its phases as well as its reflective and metaphoric capacities, which you note in your question. Each month I considered my life under the light of the full moon. In doing this, I was able to more deeply commune with the moon as a guide and a mirror–something so familiar yet strange. In other words, by paying attention to the moon, I was able to pay better attention to the present moment–to be more attentive to my own life.

LC and MM: Finally, we notice that many of your poems, like “Future Elegy of My Grandmother” and “Solstice Swim”, seem to be a meditation on the thoughts and feelings that arise when the speaker interacts with family members, lovers, or friends. Despite the intimacy these relationships seem to hold, the characters are introduced in third person, instead with a pointed address of the second-person ‘you’. This tendency prompts us to wonder if you share your poems with the people that you write about or if your typical writing process remains more private until you are ready to publish your work.

AW: The choice between second and third person is so much one of distance; I am not sure I fully realized that until I read this question. Thank you for that insight into my own creative practice!

Generally, I don’t share poems about the people in my life with said people until they are published, with the exception of love poems for friends, family, and lovers, which I will share with the recipients but generally don’t publish. Perhaps that’s also why the published poems that feature such people are often in third person–these poems are not for the characters in them. Rather, these poems are trying to use human interactions to reach a broader understanding of the messy, sad, joyful experience that is life.

Lindsay Croken and Mary McIlvain conducted this interview as part of a project in Joanna Fuhrman’s poetry course in which students talk with poets about their new poetry collections.