The Beat: A Reading and Conversation with Anna Laura Reeve

Alan May: 00:10

Welcome to a special episode of The Beat. Today we have the poet Anna Laura Reeve here with us. We’ll begin by hearing her read several of her poems and we’ll follow with a conversation. Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, which was published by Belle Point Press last year. She won the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, and she was a finalist for the twenty twenty-two Heartwood Poetry Prize and the twenty twenty-two Ron Rash Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, Cold Mountain Review, and others. She holds a master's degree in Literature & Poetry Writing from the University of Tennessee, and she lives here in Knoxville. Welcome, Anna Laura. Thanks for being here today.

Anna Laura Reeve: 01:03

Thanks for inviting me. The first thing I want to read is part of a long poem from my book, which is based on a questionnaire that doctors in hospitals give to new moms to gauge their mental health called the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. It's made up of ten statements about the previous week which you're supposed to answer "never," "sometimes," or "often," that kind of thing. It's too long to read in its entirety so I'm just going to read a few sections, each of which start with one of the statements on the scale.

"The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale"

The most common measure to screen for depression related to childbearing is the EPDS. This self-report instrument contains ten items ranked from zero to three that reflect the patient's experience over the past week. The EPDS has been validated extensively for use in the postpartum period.

—Dorothy K. Sit, MD and Katherine L. Wisner, MD, MS

1. I have been able to laugh

and see the funny side of things

Steel, so much steel, and cold

since the heat in the delivery room was either off or sweltering.

The husband faded behind pain, reappeared, again faded.

Then I was close enough to see over the cliff of terror and jumped—

she was out of my skin and in the world. She opened one gray eye.

Who in the world

One more thing, OB talking again, blood clotted

in uterus, bring it out by hand,

this will Hurt

and fingers—blocky man's fingers—swept me,

like when you empty your bag into the trash,

scooping, shaking, I was,

body flexed tight as a bowstring, teeth crushed together

for how long how long, then chattering

and very cold.

She cried like she was hoarse—just whispers.

They pricked her heel every two hours, squeezing out her blood.

Lying beside us, my husband looked over at her

and she was blue— only for a moment.

Have I laughed ? I smiled a lot at people who smiled at me.

If something funny were to happen, I would laugh, I think. Nothing funny

has happened.

2. I have looked forward to things

with enjoyment

—as much as I ever did,

though I deliberate over this statement

with confusion, and a familiar

sense of dread.

In the center of my body is a river

of fear and whispering;

unknown shapes and sharp edges

slowly roil.

At the hospital

I broke open, exposing the wincing skin

of a baby, three weeks early, to cold air

and bright lights. I was sorry for her

so sorry.

The midwives had bragged

about their discharge time: 4 hours

after delivery. You'll want to be home.

After the baby turned blue,

then pink again, and my milk hadn’t come in,

I knew differently. My husband more rattled

than I. His Méniére's diagnosis, strange symptoms

of tinnitus, balance problems, deafness

casting a slowly-ballooning shadow

When he goes hack to work in a week,

I thought, I'll be completely alone

with this

my own body sewn back together with steel

or plastic, still bleeding.

3.

I have blamed myself unnecessarily

when things went wrong

I have blamed myself correctly

when things went wrong.

I’m a marionette,

limping home with a blown glass infant

balanced on my wooden arms.

4. I have been anxious or worried

for no good reason

A new picture window suddenly cut

in the corner of the house. Private rims

and edges cast plainly in naked light,

the mind tired and redrawing, feebly in new

flashes of illumination.

Our new rental turned out to be a half-buried rusty bucket:

galvanized steel top above a lace

of uneven brown teeth, deep in soil.

Attic flies emerged in a warm February

but camel crickets and cockroaches scoured the floors

every night. Earwigs scuttled

by the living-room baseboards.

Twice I found slugs on the kitchen toe-kicks.

Yes I’ve been anxious and worried

for very good reasons—babies stop breathing without warning

I am shredded and unstable

in my pelvis and there are roaches there are slow

black flies like carrion flies.

I saw a sign inside the birth centers bathroom door:

Sleep deprivation has been linked to PPD!

Make sure you're sleeping!

But at the hospital they told me to feed her every 2 hours

till she reached her birth weight,

they said breast is best

so I latched her every 2 hours night

and day.

It took 2 weeks. I slept, woke

to her raw cry,

nursing pillow buckled around me

like a soft closed cervix.

9. I have been so unhappy

that I have been crying

Only occasionally does pain or crying

happen to me. Most of the time

I feel the chill and open space

of awe but without the joy;.

Quite often

my canoe slides down, a river

of threat, a low sky

boxing us in,

strange forms

moving under us.

Often, a goblin crouching behind me sings

grim fairy tales in one ear. I scan the floor for roaches

with one eye.

Husband’s vertigo laps the gunwhales,

tinnitus screaming like a jet engine

only he can hear.

In the night, her cry boxes our ears

like the gunshot

we heard last night from

the next street over.

We string

our nerves around the perimeter

of the bedroom

to cast a soft glow.

10. The thought of harming myself has

occurred to me

When you first gave me this test,

the day after my body ran aground on a reef

and pushed out a baby not a single thought

had occurred to me. Only this shipwreck,

its two bloodied survivors.

When you gave me this test again,

first pediatricians visit at 2 weeks,

I knew what you wanted me to say.

Everyone firm and efficient, and I, a ghost

not entirely embodied, was expected to raise

a human child and, if possible, to get

inside the walls of the cheerful city.

First, the thought never, ever occurred to me.

Second, when I drove her to sleep

every afternoon—freedom of the mind if not

the body—blank mugshots of unhappy mothers

occurred to me, and I recognized them.

My arms so tired I held the wheel with one hand

at a time.

Months later, I allowed it to occur to me

that relief, rightness, and completeness

was a ramp into the sky as the sun set above the interstate,

all three of us exiting our terrible life

in the same car at the same time: instantaneous.

What a drug.

To imagine the end with neither pain nor survivors.

Sometimes, during endless nursing sessions,

I imagined the solidity and peace

of lying in a roomy box

under spring topsoil.

Nothing to pull

or push me, fight me, ask anything of me, or cry

these terrible sad cries. I’ve been fighting

with the husband over housework in the daytime

and we've been screaming. In the night,

the baby cries. Under

the earth

I could lie perfectly still, be perfectly silent. I think

I hear rain felling.

Above me, earthworms

and tiny centipedes tunnel. Grubs rest

in their little caves.

I feel around me the light curtains

of roots, working in their diligent way unaware

of me.

A huge part of my book Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility is perspectives on fertility in its many forms, from pregnancy, to birth, to postpartum, to miscarriage--mostly those. But I do have one poem about trying to get pregnant, which is its own category of thing, and it's called "Trying."

Leaving the party on a pretext,

I return to the second-story apartment.

I could walk out of each window

onto hackberry branches,

or emerge from the bedroom skylight, dimmed

with rainwater deposits and fine cracking,

into the crown of a hackberry;

What do people want, when they want

children? Souls

from the next world, or the previous.

Maybe our lives have not yet been lived.

Maybe our lives have never

been lived.

Little shoots, little eggs,

you wither

and go down with the massa damnata

to the place where the unformed

rest.

In my pelvic cavity

the wheel of the seeder spins,

dropping eggs in furrows. At the farm

I seed clover, vetch,

rye, and oats over four acres

but nothing comes up in the fall,

or our warm southern winter.

A flock of doves bursts into flight

as we drive past—did they eat the seed?

Did early warmth coax the shoots out

and then kill them with hard frosts?

It’s the end of March and the martins

and red-winged blackbirds are back.

A song sparrow tunes

a bow-like syrinx.

My basil seedlings keel over

one after the other, damping off

Our farmer says, “Healthy plants can fight pests.”

“Healthy soil doesn’t need fertilizer

in the growing season," she says.

When the farm's bright February seedlings

faded pink and purple in the greenhouse, starved

by nutrient-poor potting media, we started over,

adding handfuls of fertilizer

soaking new shoots in fish emulsion.

Direct-seeded, though it was early

Tiny seed leaves, opening yourselves, undaunted,

to the glow of my apartment grow-lamp,

what do you want to be?

"Ménière's Disease"

My tea is steeping.

Windchimes clatter whitely on the porch,

banks of bamboo bow

and shoulder into the wind

The inner ear, its coils

its mazes

I forget for a moment which way

the letter z faces, and write it backwards.

The tiny hairs of the innermost ear,

so innermost it is almost

the brain, so innermost we almost don’t believe in it,

send messages in Morse code:

dizzy dizzy vertigo

nystagmus dizzy ess oh ess oh ess

Husband crouched over the toilet for hours,

then, recovered, driving to work

on gray highways, for hours.

Degenerative and idiopathic means

he is losing his hearing.

That orienting light for the eyes

in the back of the head；

repository

for the alphabet of degrees between music

and silence.

The last poem I was going to read is called "Children Are Not the Glue."

A towhee says sree’ somewhere

and I agree. Spring tips toward summer,

balanced on one knuckle and full

of pleasure.

Ten foamflower stems arc high above flat leaves,

open like kids’ hands, asking for something.

Putting thoughts of my 4-year-old aside,

I draw the breath that kindles

beneath my sternum, and re-enter the world.

How content, in this place, is each-thing

to be what it is. Carolina wrens waiting for a calm

to sing their voluble songs.

Towering maples and hackberries solid

and strange as sliding boulders in the Sahara—

both speaking and secret.

Jays and mockingbirds not caring who knows it.

My heart goes one way; my body goes another.

Children are not the glue to keep them together.

The towhee pair keep a wary distance, always.

One chestnut brown, one boot black,

calling to each other.

Alan May: 14:56

Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility deals with a lot of different subjects: the environment, motherhood, postpartum depression, the pandemic... So, I’m just kind of wondering how the book evolved. Do you remember which poems came along first?

Anna Laura Reeve: 15:12

The poems that really kind of form the backbone of the book for me are the motherhood and postpartum poems. I mean, each one of those does have natural imagery and sort of placed-based language in it. That’s really... I can hardly write a poem without those things in it, but, motherhood was such an enormous event and transition that happened for me that that’s kind of where I was focused. And I think I was haphazardly collecting those poems for quite a while. I think the book collects about seven years of writing. And where I felt most invested were the motherhood poems. So when I knew I wanted to put a book together, I felt like those were the strongest pieces, and I kind of dressed them up with the more place-based poems, I guess. I had never put together a poetry collection before, so I had no idea what I was doing. I was reading advice from the Internet, and what people were saying was that you need to create an arc. I happened to know what an arc is, so that was really good for me. I used, sort of, my journey from pregnancy through a couple of years after my daughter was born. I used that as kind of the arc and also tried to sort of plot it on the four seasons of the year. So I sorta’ start in spring and I sorta’ end in the fall or winter. Those things made sense to me. And I was hoping that they would make sense to other people. I’m extremely gratified to hear that it has made sense as other people have read all the poems together. So, yeah, that’s what I did. I have no idea how to do my next book, if I’m going to do another one, but there you go.

Alan May: 17:38

A lot of the things that you write about, especially dealing with, you know, motherhood and with having a baby. Those kinds of things are... I think it’s even mentioned in the book. There are so many things that aren’t normally talked about very openly. Did you have trouble writing about those things?

Anna Laura: 18:00

I... I did have trouble. Not because I was anxious about the poetry’s reception. Because I’ve always written for myself first. To kind of understand myself and my experience better. And, so writing the dark side of any experience, trying to write into the shadow or the unconscious has always kind of been my jam, for lack of a better word. So it felt very right to put a lot of these sort of taboo things into my work. Now sending it out, and then after the book was published, reading them aloud to actual physical people has been a strange experience but... Because that’s not something I was anticipating. But it’s been cool in its own way because, yeah, things like postpartum depression and some of the, like, grosser parts of motherhood and some of the shadow, I guess, of motherhood, the ambivalence, those are, yeah, things that are not generally rewarded in the public sphere. I think things are changing, though, and I’m very much benefiting from that. I can see that very clearly. So I’m grateful for the women, the writers who’ve come before me who’ve kind of made these topics of conversation that help other women feel more free, so I’m very grateful for that.

Alan May: 20:10

How did you get started reading and writing poetry? I know you grew up here in Knoxville. And I’m just wondering what it was like being a young, developing poet here in this town.

Anna Laura Reeve: 20:26

I grew up next to a cow pasture. It was sort of between a cow pasture and a tract of undeveloped woods. It’s like all privately owned, but I was allowed to kind of wonder, and, oh my God, I’m just so grateful for those experiences of walking in the woods by myself, laying down in the leaf mulch and, you know, looking up into the canopy as the wind is blowing, and, you know, I haven’t written about cows yet, but they’re very much in my brain a lot of the time. So these are Knoxville-specific things, but they are specific to my experience of growing up here. It’s a beautiful place to be. You know, we’re recording this at the Lawson McGhee Library in downtown Knoxville. This library is a place that has been very special to me. My mom... I have six siblings, and my mom would bring us, sometimes, to the library, this library. We would go down to the Children’s Room where there used to be a place called the Story Well, which is, like, I’m trying to think of what this is called. It’s like a sunken living room kind of deal, where you step down into this area that’s just for a librarian to read to rows of children. I have sense memories of that concrete wall around it, and might have shed a tear when I saw that it was gone. Oh, my gosh, such special memories here.

Alan May: 22:18

Do you have a writing routine? Do you have a designated space for writing?

Anna Laura Reeve: 22:24

I am not organized enough to have a writing routine. I aspire to. I have a day job, and I’m parenting, you know, just like most other people who are trying to do creative things. It can be hard to make a routine, but my irregular routine, I guess, is, maybe especially on weekends, to go out to part of my back yard. I live on about... It’s one acre. And there’s a section in the back of the acre that is covered by some larger trees, and I’ve done a lot of invasive plant removal and put in a lot of native plants and landscaped it, and it’s kind of a secret garden of sorts for me. I love to go back and just sit there. And it’s a place that I actually wrote several of the poems that are in my book, and quite a few of the ones that I’ve written since.

Alan May: 22:38

Wow, that sounds really nice, at least when you can get out there.

Anna Laura Reeve: 23:42

Yeah.

Alan May: 23:42

I kind of know how that goes.

Anna Laura Reeve: 23:44

Yeah.

Alan May: 23:46

Who are your favorite poets? Which poets would you like to recommend to our audience?

Anna Laura Reeve: 23:52

All right. I am notoriously forgetful. A lot of times when I’m asked this question I go totally blank and can’t remember a single person that I’ve read ever. But I brought a couple of my favorite ones today so that I would not forget them. I have three favorite poetry collections that I wanted to plug here that sort of helped me fall in love with poetry when I was in my twenties. One is Eavan Boland’s book Against Love Poetry. Go read, if you have not. Another is Franz Wright’s book called Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. I love it so much. And then Marie Howe’s collection What the Living Do. I mean, I love everything that Marie Howe has ever written, but that to me is like just a hugely beautiful book. Recently, I actually read this when it was not super new anymore, but I read Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, maybe two years ago, and, oh my God. Two other poets that I’ve been reading recently are Rose McLarney, who's kind of considered an Appalachian poet. I’ve been reading her work. I’ve been reading Maurice Manning’s work, and I’ve also been getting back into Ellen Bass’ work. I really love her book. Especially, I think, Mules of Love. So those are the ones that are on the top of my brain right now.

Alan May: 25:37

What are you working on right now?

Anna Laura Reeve: 25:41

I’m at a fun point where I have collected a good bit of writing, and it’s kind of in a pile in my Google Drive, and it needs to be revised and conceptualized, I guess, as a collection. I’ve been putting it off because that really is the hard work is doing both of those things.

Alan May: 26:08

Yeah.

Anna Laura Reeve:: 26:09

It is exciting to think that I could have another collection together. It just feels like such an accomplishment. I’ve got poetry about domesticity. I’ve got poetry about tarot. I’ve got a series that I started writing that’s in the book that’s already published, is some persona poems that I--I’m kind of riffing off of Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer Poems a little bit. The persona is the mad mother. I don’t know how interesting that sounds to anyone, but it’s... In my mind, it’s very, like, feminist and subversive and a little bit of Baba Yaga in there, and it’s just been very fun to write. I don’t know how many of those will make it into, you know, anywhere. But they’ve been very fun to write lately.

Alan May: 27:09

Cool! That sounds great. I look forward to reading those eventually when they come out in your new book.

Anna Laura Reeve: 27:15

Thank you.

Alan May: 27:17

Well, thank you for being with us, and I’m so glad that we got to hear you read your poems, and we got to talk to you. I’m really glad that you’re here in Knoxville and that we can have you on the show.

Anna Laura Reeve: 27:30

Thank you so much.