Amy Penne:
There is magic in the way two poets bend toward each other's work that reveals a truth about language itself—that it has never truly belonged to any single voice. In the case of Simone Muench and Jackie K. White, their collaborative partnership celebrates the very act of listening that their work explores. Their 2024 collection The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press) exists in the charged space between individual expression and collective consciousness, where self-portraits blur into landscapes, trauma into transformation, silence into sound.
Simone Muench brings the landscapes of Louisiana and Arkansas to her writing, having authored seven collections, including Wolf Centos, Suture (with Dean Rader), and Orange Crush. At Lewis University, she directs the writing program and advises the Jet Fuel Review, balancing her NEA and Illinois Arts Council fellowship-winning work between precision and daring. Jackie K. White, who discovered poetry through Eliot's "Prufrock" before finding Dickinson and Sexton, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she first encountered Muench. After fifteen years teaching at Lewis University, she now holds the title of Professor Emerita. Her chapbooks include Bestiary Charming, Petal Tearing & Variations, and Come Clearing, with poems and translations appearing in publications ranging from ACM to Tupelo Quarterly.
What emerges in conversation with them is not just the story of a book, but of a practice that questions our cultural fixation on singular genius and offers, instead, the revolutionary possibility of creative communion.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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AP: What is The Under Hum?
Simone Muench: The title came, coincidentally, from observing the work of Urska Sokalowska, a Polish Chicago-based artist. She has this silhouette layered with a city landscape, which felt like what we were doing with words—portraits as landscapes. There's a hum beneath everything: the body, the city, the medical system. A vibration. A pulse. It's always there.
Jackie K. White: The hum is also language. Voices within and without. The poems move from harshness and critique to something softer—like song and praise. The "under hum" rises to the surface and dips back down. We even played with that sound image—like the scary, electric hum of power lines. It's energy. And we wanted to transform that energy into poetry.
SM: It's also the "hum" in "human." The brief beauty and brutality of being alive.
JKW: We all carry landscapes within us. Poems like "Dear Dark Garden" reflect that. We based that one on the Ohio kidnapping case—how tragedy can be hidden beneath an ordinary suburban landscape. Even in safety, there's potentially peril just beneath the surface.
AP: Your collaboration is the heartbeat of this collection. It's seamless. How does that work?
SM: I was stunned the first time I read Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton's "Exquisite Politics" included in the multi-genre collection They Said (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). That kind of poetic call and response felt so alive. Even when I was writing "solo," I was still engaged in collaboration—getting feedback from Jackie, riffing off other voices. Poetry doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's citational. We're fertilized by our predecessors. This project let us dive more deeply into collaboration as art. It's also just natural for us now, since we've been working together for so many years.
JWK: While we were working on They Said, we got asked to write a poem for the Lewis University president's inauguration. Instead of each writing our own, we decided to do a collaborative piece. It felt natural. Since we both teach collaboration in our classes, we wanted to model that ourselves.
SM: People think of collaboration as chaotic or fractured, but we push back against that outdated notion of the "singular genius." We're always collaborating—language itself is collaborative.
JKW: And, if we're honest, all poetry is collaborative. Even when we "borrow" lines, we're acknowledging the multiplicity of voices. It's a fusion. The italics in our poems in The Under Hum mark those citational moments. And then we riff on those.
AP: How does collaboration physically work for you two? Does one of you write a draft and the other edits? Is it line by line? How does it work? We so often imagine poetry as this solitary torment.
JKW: Well, it can be a little torturous too. But, honestly, we've found a rhythm that works for us. We started this round of collaboration with Hex & Howl, our chapbook. At one point I just sent Simone a few lines and said, "Do something with these." We wrote tercet to tercet, quatrain to quatrain, couplet to couplet. Over time, we stopped remembering whose lines were whose. We'd riff on a borrowed line, try sestets, elegies, and some sonnets. Some forms morphed and fractured—what began as a sestet might evolve into something else entirely.
SM: The sonnet is such a beautiful container for two voices—dialogue, argument, and then a turn. It allows us to hold complexity together. We share certain obsessions: trauma, transformation, giving voice to the silenced. And formally, we love to play. Can we do an abecedarian? Can we explode the sonnet? Make a cento feel like an assemblage?
JKW: We play poetry shell games—diptychs, cleave poems, fractured forms. We also reflect voices we admire, like a Pablo Neruda or, say, Terrance Hayes, who both reposition forms like odes and sonnets to address sweeping historical changes but with intimate and personal details.
SM: That's an important part of our creative work—honor our influences while pushing forms, like Hayes does, into contemporary space. Poetry should be both puzzle and play. We want our work to inhabit that kind of dynamism.
AP: You met as graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago and you've both had long careers in teaching. What role does teaching play in your poetry and creative projects?
JKW: It depends on the students, of course, but teaching can definitely fuel creativity. I often worked on the same assignments I gave my students. I taught literature more than writing, but reading strange things, like Kafka, often spurred poems. I read a book about Latin American women writers once, and nearly all of them referenced canonical male writers—Dostoevsky, Kafka—so it reminded me how even women from radically different cultures can find power in those voices, too.
SM: Teaching is a vital part of who I am. All the writing prompts I assign are ones I do myself. My students also give collaborative presentations, and I try to engage alongside them. Teaching can keep the ignition going creatively—though, as grading piles up, it becomes harder to maintain that energy. So I try to incorporate my own writing into the classroom environment. I also have them buy a recent Best American Poetry anthology and choose a poem that speaks to them. Hearing their choices introduces me to new work. I try to model being both professor and learner.
JKW: When students research and present new poets, I'm introduced to voices I might not have found otherwise. Their engagement with form and language inspires me to think differently about language because it's constantly evolving.
AP: What else fuels your creativity and inspires your process?
JKW: Collaboration keeps me sharp. For it to work, of course, you need someone you're compatible with but also someone who'll challenge you—create friction or frisson that enhances the work. You have to care more about what the poem wants than what you want.
SM: I'm still thinking about teaching as creative energy. I have my students write "bad" poems in class—just to get over the fear. Writing can be scary. Learning to trust in creative partnerships can be liberating. That's how collaboration works. It has been such a central feature of my work over the years. In a way, collaboration is its own creative fuel.
JKW: It's play. It works best when you stop trying to create a masterpiece; I love the image of finger-painting with language.
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Amy Penne:
I'm struck by how Muench and White have crafted not just a collection of poems but a way of listening for vibrations that run beneath and between us. Their current work-in-progress, inspired by Surrealist women painters, suggests that their collaborative journey continues to expand into new territories of imagination.
What The Under Hum ultimately offers isn't just a compendium of beautiful language, though it certainly is that. It provides a counter-narrative to our culture's persistent myth of artistic isolation, suggesting instead that the most vital creative work happens in conversation—with literary predecessors, amid tragedy and joy, and perhaps most importantly, with each other. There is something quietly radical in this cultural moment about two poets who have chosen to blur the boundaries between "my words" and "your words," creating a shared linguistic landscape where the "under hum" of human connection rises, occasionally, into song.