Laura Maher holds an MA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Third Coast, and Cutbank Online. She lives, teaches, and writes in Tucson, Arizona.
Her poem, "Awnings," appeared in Issue Sixty-Eight of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Christina Oddo about focusing the scene while using the energy of the line, mystery, and the strangeness of birds.
Towards the end of this work, what compelled the deviation from four-line stanzas? What about the use of irregular spacing within lines throughout the piece?
There is a lot of movement in this poem, through both image and structure. To balance this, I wanted consistency in voice and stanza. Even as the four-line stanza deviates, as you say, the structure remains consistent through four one-line stanzas. This breakdown is related to the spacing in the poem, too. I wanted the extra spaces in the poem to visually mark caesura. Caesura is a device of movement, and so I used spaces to interrupt the line, just as the thoughts, marked by the parentheses, interrupt the images.
How did voice, narrative, and image interwork for you, especially during the drafting process?
The poem began on its own with the image of a hawk eating a pigeon. In fact, the scene at the beginning of the poem is fairly factual: I was stopped by this gruesome yet strangely beautiful scene of a Cooper’s Hawk devouring a pigeon one evening while I was taking part in the All Souls Procession in Tucson, Arizona. I was really dressed as a bird—a phoenix rising, in fact—and I was surrounded by the color, imagery, and movement of 90,000 people simultaneously celebrating life and honoring the dead. It is a powerful experience to be among so many people collectively mourning individual losses. This is why the triggering image of the hawk becomes a consistent thread in the poem; it is also why I am able to rely on a voice that is less embodied in a personal narrative. The rest of the drafting process was quite natural—focusing the scene while using the energy of the line and sentence working together to propel the poem forward.
The word you use, “interwork,” interests me because I think poetry will often exploit the tension created when elements are not always working together. Such collisions always add layers of mystery—and I love a bit of mystery in a poem.
What prompted the use of the bird as the foundation for other prominent and colorful images like night, movement, and body?
Birds have a way of working themselves into my poems, particularly when I’m writing about the body. I think this is because of their strangeness: birds are light and flexible, the opposite of human bodies—heavy and rooted. Of course, these aren’t new observations—which is another part of the magic, that people have always watched birds to observe their strangeness and similarity—but I am particularly interested in how birds move in the world, and how those movements have changed in order to adapt to human habitats. The hawk and the pigeon, associated respectively with wildness and city-life, inhabit that place of intersection. Structurally, I just love the work repetition can do; I think it is meditative and oppressive in the most pleasant way.
What are you currently reading?
My reading habits are informed equally by suggestions from friends and wandering through my local used bookstore. (A college town always has some great used books for sale in January and June.) I’ve been reading some essays, most recently The Informed Air, by Muriel Spark, and revisiting the poems of Frank Stafford since his Collected came out.
What are you writing?
More bird poems, probably. But really, I’m working on a collection of poems that uses a repetitive lyric structure to examine the experience of illness. I’m also writing plenty of letters and postcards to friends, which I enjoy, and which conveniently helps me be a better writer.