Featured Interview: Alicia Mountain
Alicia Mountain, photo by Libbie Early
Up the Staircase Quarterly: Hi, Alicia! Thanks so much for joining me for this interview. I would like to start by discussing your debut full length poetry collection, High Ground Coward, which won the 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize.
You begin High Ground Coward with a quotation from William Carlos Williams: “no one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car”. When did you first discover this quote, and how does it relate to the tone or story of the collection?
Alicia Mountain: The poet Joanna Klink pointed me in the direction of that passage from Williams’s “To Elsie” as we discussed an early draft of the manuscript that would come to be High Ground Coward. I think that was in the spring of 2015. I grew up in New Jersey and had read Williams as a young person. When I was in first and second grade I had a wonderful teacher named Mrs. Charles who photocopied poems for us each day—some were poems for children, but many were canonical “grown up” poets. I first read “The Red Wheelbarrow” with that teacher at age six or seven. The epigraph to High Ground Coward has something to do with the speakers in my work looking for their roles, navigating solitude, trying to drive away, trying to bear witness. I appreciate the way negation works in these lines. We can see the actions being taken, even when they don’t actually come to pass. I also admire the way the line breaks act as hinges in meaning-making, and how that last line stretches out long, not beholden in length to what has come before. As a poet, I feel that I’m so often in the passenger seat of the poem, with some other force—the poem itself—at the wheel.
UtSQ: As UtSQ is largely conducted from North Dakota, I find myself drawn to poetry from the northern mid-west. Although High Ground Coward pulls from other places as well, I saw several references to Montana in these poems, including in one of my favorites from the collection, “The Smallest Thaw”: “A Montana tundra farm / outside of town, quiet, well chewed at / by two swollen goats.” How does the concept of “place” impact your work? In what ways did the northern mid-west in particular inspire High Ground Coward?
AM: Landscape is a living part of this collection; the hills and forests and plains and weather and sky keep the figures in this collection company. Place plants images in my poems. Place also inflects the language. I grew up spending summers visiting family in Montana, so even before I lived there I had some of those images in mind, but the poems I wrote when I lived in New York were different than the poems I wrote in Montana. Sometimes the Montana poems take the long way home.
UtSQ: Your poem "Little Rectangular Earths" , which appeared in the 90s themed issue of Up the Staircase Quarterly, also makes an appearance in High Ground Coward. I was thrilled to see it found a home in the collection, and upon re-reading, I was reminded how immediately drawn I was to the peculiarity of the poem's concept. Can you tell us a little more about how you shaped this poem to life? What role do you feel this poem plays in your book?
AM: A few times a year I try to write a poem each day for a month. I do this in a shared google doc with my poet-friends Caylin Capra-Thomas, Mackenzie Cole, Rachel Mindell, and Allison Linville. Sometimes others join us, too. I think I wrote “Little Rectangular Earths” during one of these writing binges in July. The first stanza is the memory of 4th of July in my hometown in New Jersey. It’s about being a kid in a crowd and feeling different from others in ways as yet indefinable. The second stanza looks at that young self from this distance, articulating how desire and identity inform one another. Queerness isn’t just about partnership or sex. It can be about aliens, about feeling like an alien, and how everything that’s scary about that is also beautiful, also lets us glow.
You begin High Ground Coward with a quotation from William Carlos Williams: “no one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car”. When did you first discover this quote, and how does it relate to the tone or story of the collection?
Alicia Mountain: The poet Joanna Klink pointed me in the direction of that passage from Williams’s “To Elsie” as we discussed an early draft of the manuscript that would come to be High Ground Coward. I think that was in the spring of 2015. I grew up in New Jersey and had read Williams as a young person. When I was in first and second grade I had a wonderful teacher named Mrs. Charles who photocopied poems for us each day—some were poems for children, but many were canonical “grown up” poets. I first read “The Red Wheelbarrow” with that teacher at age six or seven. The epigraph to High Ground Coward has something to do with the speakers in my work looking for their roles, navigating solitude, trying to drive away, trying to bear witness. I appreciate the way negation works in these lines. We can see the actions being taken, even when they don’t actually come to pass. I also admire the way the line breaks act as hinges in meaning-making, and how that last line stretches out long, not beholden in length to what has come before. As a poet, I feel that I’m so often in the passenger seat of the poem, with some other force—the poem itself—at the wheel.
UtSQ: As UtSQ is largely conducted from North Dakota, I find myself drawn to poetry from the northern mid-west. Although High Ground Coward pulls from other places as well, I saw several references to Montana in these poems, including in one of my favorites from the collection, “The Smallest Thaw”: “A Montana tundra farm / outside of town, quiet, well chewed at / by two swollen goats.” How does the concept of “place” impact your work? In what ways did the northern mid-west in particular inspire High Ground Coward?
AM: Landscape is a living part of this collection; the hills and forests and plains and weather and sky keep the figures in this collection company. Place plants images in my poems. Place also inflects the language. I grew up spending summers visiting family in Montana, so even before I lived there I had some of those images in mind, but the poems I wrote when I lived in New York were different than the poems I wrote in Montana. Sometimes the Montana poems take the long way home.
UtSQ: Your poem "Little Rectangular Earths" , which appeared in the 90s themed issue of Up the Staircase Quarterly, also makes an appearance in High Ground Coward. I was thrilled to see it found a home in the collection, and upon re-reading, I was reminded how immediately drawn I was to the peculiarity of the poem's concept. Can you tell us a little more about how you shaped this poem to life? What role do you feel this poem plays in your book?
AM: A few times a year I try to write a poem each day for a month. I do this in a shared google doc with my poet-friends Caylin Capra-Thomas, Mackenzie Cole, Rachel Mindell, and Allison Linville. Sometimes others join us, too. I think I wrote “Little Rectangular Earths” during one of these writing binges in July. The first stanza is the memory of 4th of July in my hometown in New Jersey. It’s about being a kid in a crowd and feeling different from others in ways as yet indefinable. The second stanza looks at that young self from this distance, articulating how desire and identity inform one another. Queerness isn’t just about partnership or sex. It can be about aliens, about feeling like an alien, and how everything that’s scary about that is also beautiful, also lets us glow.
UtSQ: You also included quite a few pop culture references throughout High Ground Coward. This is an aspect of contemporary poetry that I am fond of, so I was thrilled to see references to the Wendy’s fast food chain, NPR, Fight Club, muggles, the Space Jam website, and sports (mostly boxing), among others. What do you hope your work evokes by employing these pop culture references? On a larger scale, what significance does pop culture bring to the poetry world as a writing tool?
AM: I’m fond of this in contemporary poetry, too. I don’t think anything is off limits to poets, or to poetry as a genre. Incorporating references to media and to what some might call “mainstream” or “accessible” artifacts of our present moment may enliven the poem a little bit. I hope these nods act as small sparks that synch up the reader and the poem in time. Of course, these references will become dated—many of them already are dated. That’s okay. This collection was written by a particular person at a particular age in a particular cultural moment. Particularity is more compelling to me than generalization. The particular can scale up more easily to connect broadly than the broad can be applied to each of us as individuals. As a writing tool, pop culture references can be a form of shorthand, signification, and play within a discipline that is often regarded as pretty stuffy or serious by those who haven’t felt invited in to poetry.
UtSQ: I’m curious how your writing journey began. What was your first significant literary encounter? How did this experience inspire you, or shape you, into the writer you have become?
AM: My mom read books to me and to my sisters when we were very small. This was a privilege in so many ways. I also encountered wonderful educators at public schools and libraries throughout my childhood. I remember the feeling of being read to. I don’t so much remember the texts themselves or any particular fragments of language, but I remember that being read to felt warm and carpeted, dreamy and safe. I felt very cared for in those moments. Perhaps it’s not a striking story of revelation that started my writing journey. I wrote non-fiction and short stories in high school and college, but when I think about my move to poetry I think I was seeking that feeling of a companion voice. I still love hearing poetry read. I love reading my poems aloud. Even in my mind they are spoken to me.
UtSQ: How often do you sit down to write? What does a typical writing session look like for you?
AM: Oof! I am working on a PhD and am coming to the end of my coursework, which has occupied much of my time. My writing schedule is a bit varied right now. That being said, I am proud of the new poems I have been writing and they seem to arrive to me more fully formed. Or I just trust them more. Or I trust myself more. Historically, my typical writing session happens in the morning before any other work and, ideally, before engaging much with the outside world. Again, historically, I’d start out writing on a cheap notepad in mechanical pencil—very low stakes. I’d be drinking tea and feeling a bit hungry. Then I’d be 2/3 of the way through the poem and get antsy. I’d switch over to my computer and start typing up the first part, which would probably roll into composing the end of the poem in that word doc. I say “historically” because some of that has been changing. Recently I’ve written a few poems in notes on my phone in the evening. I’m open to different processes if the poems want to arrive in new ways.
UtSQ: What projects are you currently working on? What’s next for you personally and/or professionally?
AM: I am halfway through a new collection, which will be my dissertation. Once that is completed and defended (hopefully in 2019), I’ll send it to publishers. In the meantime, I’m sending parts of that manuscript out to journals so be on the lookout for new post-High Ground Coward poems coming out in the next few months. I’m also teaching. I have been teaching at the University of Denver and I’m interested in teaching workshops in other institutional and community-based spaces. I love talking with student-poets. I have so much fun nerding out about poetry. I feel so, so lucky. Most immediately, I’ll be touring! I’ll be all over the place for the rest of 2018. Readers can find some event information at aliciamountain.com/events.
UtSQ: Finally, Alicia, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, what would you talk about, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
AM: I’d love to get a drink with Pat Parker. She was an out black lesbian poet who lived from 1944 to 1989 and was integral in developing a poetry scene for queer women on the West Coast in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I would want to know about that history, that intersectional community. I would want to thank her. Based on Pat Parker’s work, I expect she’d be very funny, wise, and honest. We’d meet up after the streetlights had already come on. We’d talk long into the night. I’d drink whatever Pat Parker was drinking.
AM: I’m fond of this in contemporary poetry, too. I don’t think anything is off limits to poets, or to poetry as a genre. Incorporating references to media and to what some might call “mainstream” or “accessible” artifacts of our present moment may enliven the poem a little bit. I hope these nods act as small sparks that synch up the reader and the poem in time. Of course, these references will become dated—many of them already are dated. That’s okay. This collection was written by a particular person at a particular age in a particular cultural moment. Particularity is more compelling to me than generalization. The particular can scale up more easily to connect broadly than the broad can be applied to each of us as individuals. As a writing tool, pop culture references can be a form of shorthand, signification, and play within a discipline that is often regarded as pretty stuffy or serious by those who haven’t felt invited in to poetry.
UtSQ: I’m curious how your writing journey began. What was your first significant literary encounter? How did this experience inspire you, or shape you, into the writer you have become?
AM: My mom read books to me and to my sisters when we were very small. This was a privilege in so many ways. I also encountered wonderful educators at public schools and libraries throughout my childhood. I remember the feeling of being read to. I don’t so much remember the texts themselves or any particular fragments of language, but I remember that being read to felt warm and carpeted, dreamy and safe. I felt very cared for in those moments. Perhaps it’s not a striking story of revelation that started my writing journey. I wrote non-fiction and short stories in high school and college, but when I think about my move to poetry I think I was seeking that feeling of a companion voice. I still love hearing poetry read. I love reading my poems aloud. Even in my mind they are spoken to me.
UtSQ: How often do you sit down to write? What does a typical writing session look like for you?
AM: Oof! I am working on a PhD and am coming to the end of my coursework, which has occupied much of my time. My writing schedule is a bit varied right now. That being said, I am proud of the new poems I have been writing and they seem to arrive to me more fully formed. Or I just trust them more. Or I trust myself more. Historically, my typical writing session happens in the morning before any other work and, ideally, before engaging much with the outside world. Again, historically, I’d start out writing on a cheap notepad in mechanical pencil—very low stakes. I’d be drinking tea and feeling a bit hungry. Then I’d be 2/3 of the way through the poem and get antsy. I’d switch over to my computer and start typing up the first part, which would probably roll into composing the end of the poem in that word doc. I say “historically” because some of that has been changing. Recently I’ve written a few poems in notes on my phone in the evening. I’m open to different processes if the poems want to arrive in new ways.
UtSQ: What projects are you currently working on? What’s next for you personally and/or professionally?
AM: I am halfway through a new collection, which will be my dissertation. Once that is completed and defended (hopefully in 2019), I’ll send it to publishers. In the meantime, I’m sending parts of that manuscript out to journals so be on the lookout for new post-High Ground Coward poems coming out in the next few months. I’m also teaching. I have been teaching at the University of Denver and I’m interested in teaching workshops in other institutional and community-based spaces. I love talking with student-poets. I have so much fun nerding out about poetry. I feel so, so lucky. Most immediately, I’ll be touring! I’ll be all over the place for the rest of 2018. Readers can find some event information at aliciamountain.com/events.
UtSQ: Finally, Alicia, if you could have a meal with anyone, dead or alive, real or imaginary, whom would it be, what would you talk about, and what on earth would the two of you eat?
AM: I’d love to get a drink with Pat Parker. She was an out black lesbian poet who lived from 1944 to 1989 and was integral in developing a poetry scene for queer women on the West Coast in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I would want to know about that history, that intersectional community. I would want to thank her. Based on Pat Parker’s work, I expect she’d be very funny, wise, and honest. We’d meet up after the streetlights had already come on. We’d talk long into the night. I’d drink whatever Pat Parker was drinking.
Alicia Mountain’s first collection, High Ground Coward (University of Iowa Press, 2018), was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the digital chapbook Thin Fire, published by BOAAT Press. Mountain is a queer poet, a PhD student, and an assistant editor of the Denver Quarterly. Keep up with her at aliciamountain.com and @HiGroundCoward.
