with David Mahan

Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old, growing up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and Western Colorado. She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and an MAR in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School, Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

She is the author of three collections of poetry, including her most recent Arabilis (Sundress 2019), and was the co-editor with Lee Herrick of the anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison 2020). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books.

To read more about and by Leah Silvieus go to: http://leahsilvieus.com/.

DM: First I want to thank you for taking the time in the midst of all of your projects to speak with us, Leah. It’s a special pleasure for me because of the opportunity we had to work together when you were a student at the Yale Divinity School.

LS: Thanks so much. It’s an honor!

DM: In keeping with our focus on writers at work, I want to begin with your poetry. You kindly sent me your latest collection Arabilis, which I found remarkable for its lyric urgency. I’m thinking of the lines “How I prayed to wake up believed in” from the prose poem “Self-Portrait as Secret-Heart-of-Gold Boy,” or the plaintive “We imagine voices calling to us … memory is not a keeping // but a forgiving, the thresh and burn / of what we cannot salvage” in “Aubade Before Storm.” Can you talk some about the dramatic impulse that energizes the poems in Arabilis as well as your other collections, and where you hope to bring readers who journey with you through your work?

LS: I often say that I wrote Arabilis for my younger self. These were poems that I needed at 16, at 21 in the thick of a spiritual crisis. To put it lightly, I think I was (and still am) full of dramatic impulses that drive not only my poetry but also my life. I’ve always had a keen and sometimes tortured drive to ask “big” questions—about existence, meaning, the nature of the divine, our ethical responsibilities to other living beings and to the natural world. As a young adult too, I felt torn between the traditions of my faith that I held dear and some of the ways that the institution of the church perpetuated injustice and oppression. Many of these poems grew out of my urgent desire to work through these questions—and it was poetry that eventually gave me the language and aesthetic tools for engaging with them in a way that felt honest. 

To me, poetry opens another dimension for engaging with these big questions. Poetry’s interstitial spaces—whether they are embodied in the brief pause of a line break or one of Emily Dickinson’s dashes, the muscular turn of syntax in a Carl Phillips poem, or the open space on a page—invite the reader and the writer alike into a mysterious space of unknowing that, I think, can yield to a kind of deeper knowing. 

I don’t aim so much to bring readers to a certain destination as I aspire for my poems to serve as companions along whatever journey readers are on—whether it’s amid a spiritual crisis or just the struggle to feel at home somewhere in the world. Writing these poems has transformed me; they have given me a tenderness for who I’ve been, who I’m becoming, and the difficult work of transformation. My hope is that my poems might make that kind of space, even if it’s just for one other person (or a version of my younger self who felt so desperately lonely in the midst of my struggle between faith and doubt).

DM: Thank you for those reflections, and your vulnerability. I was just in a conversation with other literary scholars where that promise of addressing big questions was discussed, and why it is that we need to teach to these rather than limiting ourselves to certain critical agendas. Your views totally resonate with this, and I love the idea that your poems can serve as companions to someone’s journey.

I mentioned the prose poem, and there are many different forms you deploy throughout the collection, which also explores a diverse range of subjects, images and points of view. The overall effect was luminous. Do you consider yourself, not necessarily an ‘experimental’ poet, but an experimenter, and why do you feel that formal diversity is important to what your poetry enacts?

LS: Thank you so much for your generous and attentive reading! I suppose that the formal variety is an outgrowth of experimenting, though “experimentation,” to me, suggests an element of control that I rarely feel like I have in my writing process. The process of arriving at the “final” form of a poem (I can never say this without the words of Auden’s oft-quoted paraphrase of Paul Valéry haunting me: “a poem is never finished, only abandoned”) has felt to me more like “listening,” “feeling,” and “discerning.” I’ve been fortunate to have an array of wise and generous teachers who, in their own way, have taught me different ways of listening—whether it’s my MFA thesis advisor John Murillo who taught me so much about the music of poetry and the beauty of received forms (especially the sonnet), or my Kundiman mentor Jennifer Chang who admonished me to acknowledge my own knowingness, or Maureen Seaton who taught me the joy of play through exercises dealing with collage and erasure, or Jericho Brown who taught me the power of subverting and reimagining tropes and forms. 

When I write a poem, I feel as if I am listening or feeling for what form each poem wants to take. Often, the poem will seem to long for a certain metrical rhythm, soundscape, or physical shape on the page. The poems’ embodiment feels largely outside of my control. When I do try to force my will on a poem, it often feels flat and uninspired. The revision process is never linear either; it’s a journey of starting, stopping, going back, leaping forward, splicing poem fragments together, dividing one longer poem into two shorter poems. To me, poems feel like they have a living shape that requires patience, nurture, and responsive care to grow.

DM: That reminds me of Denise Levertov’s notion of ‘organic form,’ that the subject itself guides the creation of the poem, which becomes its embodiment. 

Two elements in your story that are vital to your poetry, as well as your advocacy, are your Korean heritage as a bi-cultural American and the fact that you are adopted. In your and Lee Herrick’s introduction to The World I Leave You, you write that, as two poets who share this same background, “we found solace, light, and space to consider our lives and our spiritual condition in poetry.” You conclude this piece, “Poetry endures. Our faiths and spirits endure too,” and in keeping with the book’s main title, commend the poems found here as “artifacts to be explored, contemplated, and savored as gifts.” I’ll ask about the element of faith presently, but can you share more about why you feel it is important to support the work of Asian American poets especially, both as sources of ‘solace and light’ and as voices whose ‘gifts’ should be better known?

LS: The anthology began with a scholarly impulse; I wanted to examine the influence of religion on contemporary Asian American poets, but when I started my research, I found very little written on the subject. I wanted to understand the forms that faith and spirituality are taking in the world of contemporary American poetry, and thus the idea for the anthology was born. Luckily, my friend (and it turns out, distant cousin!) and mentor, poet Lee Herrick was also excited about such an endeavor. 

I often think that the sphere of what people think of when they think of spiritually inflected poetry is often narrowly drawn and tends to overlook the work of many excellent poets. There’s a wealth of gifts that Asian American poets offer to those wanting to think more deeply about the intersections between religion and poetry, inflected by their myriad and varied experiences—dealing with, but of course not limited to, negotiations with identity, immigration, familial and political history, and interpretations of myth and scripture. 

I think that the anthology lends a valuable glimpse into the kaleidoscopic ways that Asian American poets grapple with issues of faith and spirituality—through reflection, faithful devotion, subversion, and reimagining. My hope is that the anthology is just a point of departure for wider conversations about the role that religion plays in contemporary American poetry and the Asian American voices that can contribute valuable insights to that conversation.

DM: Your Christian faith is also an important part of your identity, both in your own poetry and, as you note, the poetry featured in The World I Leave You. In Arabilis, this emerges in what are for me some of the most striking moments in the collection. I’m thinking of the faith struggle depicted in “Confession,” where the speaker talks about getting drunk before church, and confesses that what she wants, what she “once asked of God,” was 

not to forget but to hover outside myself 

just far enough to surrender to being held.” 

Or that remarkable declaration in “Prayer to Saint Martha,” “Faith is not feast / but desire, not beauty of the table but what drags us starving there―.” In what ways is your faith important to the persona we find portrayed in your poems?

LS: In a workshop I took with the poet David Waggoner, he mentioned that the natural environment in which one grew up affects the way one writes poems. As I recall, he said he grew up around a swamp and so many of his poems had a sort of “swampy” quality. In some ways, Christian religious tradition was akin to that kind of environment for me. For better (and sometimes for worse), Christian ritual, tradition, song, and scripture created the “soil” in which I (and thus my poems) grew.  

I don’t really think of the speakers of the poems as “faithful” or “religious” necessarily, and I have frequently had a fraught relationship with Christianity itself. I see my poems as haunted by faith. Sometimes it shows up in the images or metaphors used, the way a fragment of scripture or a hymn might float up within a poem, or the ethical framework with which the speaker might engage with a certain situation. I find myself thinking a lot about the last half of Emily Dickinson’s poem “373”: 

Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -
Blushes, if any see - 
Plucks at a twig of Evidence - 
And asks a Vane, the way - 
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -
Strong Hallelujahs roll - 
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul -

That remarkable (and so creepy!) image of the nibbling Tooth is one way that I think that faith lives in my poems, to the extent it does. Whether or not the speakers in the poems are dealing explicitly with matters of faith, I sense they’re all being nibbled (at least a little) by that unstillable Tooth.

In regard to my sense of how all of this comes together in my aspirations as a poet, I don’t know if I have a cogent vision for my work as much as an intention to try to be as honest as I can about, again, the fraught relationship I have with faith and to be faithful to the ways it haunts my life and the questions it provokes in me.

DM: While you were at Yale you and I spent a good bit of time studying Christian poetics together, which is a main focus for Among Winter Cranes. Much of what we came to was a set of more refined questions, as we struggled to comprehend what a Christian lens or Christian sensibilities bring to poetic creation and criticism. We also talked about what place these interests have not only in literary criticism but also among today’s readers more broadly. What place do you think ‘faith-informed’ writing has in the world of contemporary poetry and at this moment in our society?

LS: On the level of contemporary poetry—I interviewed Travis Helms about his Logos Collective gatherings and the hunger there is for gathering, ritual, and creating space to welcome the sacred—by religious and non-religious people alike. I think faith-informed approaches to poetry can offer a way (though not the only way) of wrestling with some of those big questions, for understanding our society (so much of American history has been formed and shaped by various Christian traditions, for better or worse), and ourselves. 

At its best, faith-informed writing can create a space of welcome that invites us to slow down, to connect with ourselves and others, and to contemplate the mysteries that surround us.

DM: I’m grateful for the contribution you make to creating those spaces, Leah. And many thanks for offering such rich and thoughtful reflections on your work. We look forward to seeing how it continues to blossom!

LS: Thank you so much for the opportunity!

Leah Silvieus

Books Editor, Hyphen magazine
Associate Editor, Marginalia Review of Books
leah.silvieus@aya.yale.edu

David Mahan

Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School
Co-Director, Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts
david.mahan@yale.edu