Carrie Green
We chatted with poet Carrie Green, who won our contest in poetry in 2013!
H: You write a little bit of everything, for both adults and teens, but we’re chatting now because you won our 2021 Pinch Prize for Poetry. Do you work on projects in different genres simultaneously, or do you devote yourself to either fiction or poetry for periods of time?
E: While I have published more than 20 novels, I started my writing life as a poet. I published my first poem in high school. A few years ago, I began to notice lines or ideas for poems popping up again, so I wrote them down. Then there were more. And I wrote those down. Soon I had a lot of poems bubbling up in me and I began to send them out to magazines and soon enough I had a collection. Now I write poetry every day but in terms of writing in multiple genres, I don't know any other way. Some ideas come to me and they are obviously short stories. Other times I have to tease out whether something is a novel. I worked as a cook on historic schooners, so my memoir/cookbook came out of that experience. My next novel is set in Boston in the late 1800s and based on the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner.
H: The poem that won our contest, “The Math of Cows,” was hands-down my favorite entry this year. To me, it perfectly articulated a mind preparing for grief, but poems speak differently to different readers. Can you give us a little background for this poem? What sparked it and what did you hope the reader would take away?
E: Thank you for loving this poem! Across from my house is a field where I like to walk. Sometimes there are cows there and sometimes there are no cows. I think a lot about the connection between nature and math. Both are predictable and comforting in their own ways. This poem came together over time and what started out as nature became a processing – or a sort of pre-processing – of grief. Anticipatory grief which may or may not be useful but – like the cows – is sometimes there and sometimes not. I write about math and science regularly and liked the idea of the cows being representative of numbers, presence, kindness, and loss.
H: Motherhood plays a large role in the poems in Tell Me How You Got Here, but the poems never cross over from well-crafted and emotionally intelligent to saccharine or overly sentimental. As a mother and poet, I loved reading these. There’s a phrase in “My 8-year-old son” that broke me a little: “agonizing over what to want.” The image you paint of the little boy with the cookbook juxtaposed with the trauma that opened the poem perfectly mixes what it means to parent, how grief and love and daily domesticity are all part of the picture. Can you comment on how motherhood has or hasn’t changed you as a writer?
E: In writing and assembling the poems for Tell Me How You Got Here, I thought a lot about identity – how we see ourselves, our place in the natural world, in our families, what we call our own, and what we keep and what we let go.
I do write about being a parent. I have four kids, so this is a huge part of my identity—but not my entire self. I have many decades of being a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife, a human in the natural world. I come from a family of examiners—taught to look deeply at the world, its inhabitants both lovely and cruel, the natural wonder—and to dig deep into who I am, who I want to be, and how to put good back into the world. So I think the poems reflect the seriousness with which I take my roles, and perhaps I'm asking the reader to consider the role of the poem in their lives, too.
H: I’m currently fascinated with how poets structure collections. Can you speak a bit to the structure of Tell Me How You Got Here?
E: I structured the collection to open on “Japan, Autumn,” which is about memory and loss. I end on “Tell Me How You Got Here,” which is about an African Grey parrot who lived in England and spoke with a British accent – then disappeared and returned years later speaking only Spanish. The journey in between these poems is really what I’m interested in, what is ours – our memories? our bodies? our children? – what do we keep and what might be taken, what do we let go of? I have humor in some of my poems, like “On Spotting Stray Shoes,” based on the reaction from readers, also addresses a question we’ve all had as we drive – how are there so many single shoes on the side of the road?
H: You also run a cooking blog, The Well-Cooked Life. Does your kitchen life feed your writing life (pun intended) or vice versa?
E: I love to cook for people, especially now that I grow some of my own food. I learned how to can and preserve from my grandmother and it’s a lot like writing – the growing, the harvesting, trying to keep what we’ve made to share with others, and ultimately letting go of it all.
H: Do you have any pieces online currently that we should check out?
E:
H: What are you working on now, fiction-wise? Also, any new poems in the works?
E: I am in the process of structuring my second poetry collection, tentatively titled The Math of Cows. My novel, Becoming Isabella, about the life of outspoken Isabella Stewart Gardner, will be published in 2023.
H: What are you reading right now or what recent book would you recommend to our readers?
E: Trophic Cascade by Camille Dungy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket Fantastic, and I just pre-ordered Erika Meitner’s forthcoming collection Useful Junk.
