Zachary Eisentrager: Today, we’re having a discussion with Tina Schumann, award winning author of four poetry collections and appearances in The American Journal of Poetry, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, and more. It’s great to have you here with us today.
We’re here to discuss Tina’s most recent poetry collection and winner of the Moon City Press Poetry Award (MSU), Boneyard Heresies. This collection is an investigation of personhood as seen through the prisms of magical thinking, grief, the dreamland of memory and the vagaries of love.
How did Boneyard Heresies come about? Did you write these poems with the intent of putting them together in collection or did the themes slowly start to put themselves together over time?
Tina Schumann: The pursuit of this collection itself was intentional in that I knew I wanted to put together a second full collection, since my first full collection, Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press) had been launched into the world in 2017. However, over the next five years while writing the new poems for what would be Boneyard Heresies I had no idea of its final shape or form. I do not want to typecast a collection too early on and not allow myself the open-ended freedom of creating and seeing what manifests. I think the overarching themes of a collection come with time, experimentation and surprise. While waiting for that to gel, I write poems and trusting that at some point I would have enough poems (60 or so) to coalesce into a full collection of poems that speak to each other in one way or another.
During this period of writing I fell into a mini-obsession with the poetic devices of Self-Portraits and Epistle. Both of these loose forms inspired and spurred me on to building a kind of scaffolding for the unknown collection to come. So the bones of the collection started to become clearer around year four. When I was writing the poem “Self-Portrait as Unreliable Narrator” the line boneyard heresies popped into my head (surprise!) and down the road that became an obvious choice for the collection’s title as it supported the elegies that make up the other third of the collection. I find that I am almost always writing elegies, because isn’t there always something to mourn? Either in anticipation or in retrospect. The other surprise during those years of writing was the pandemic. So that experience has woven its way into the book as well.
ZE: Boneyard Heresies is broken up into three sections, each starting with its own “Self-Portrait” poem. These sections are then seemingly broken down into subsections by more of these “Self-Portrait” poems. Can you explain your methods of organization? What inspired you to break up the collection in this way?
TS: Yes, each of the three sections in Boneyard Heresies begins with a self-portrait and ends with an epistle. Within each section there are other self-portraits, epistles and elegies that hopefully speak to each other beyond the title similarities with a more pointed internal theme (loss of parents, mortality, time, etc.). I did something similar in my first collection as well. In this case each section ended with a day of the week poem (Sunday, Wednesday and Friday) and the sections were held together more by topical content rather than a device such as a self-portrait. The only similarity is that the title addresses events during a particular day of the week.
One reason for my sectional choices in Boneyard Heresies is that the repeated use of devices like epistles were so obvious to me I could not resist placing them in a somewhat predictive pattern within each section. It just made sense in my head to disperse them that way. As opposed to have all the epistles follow each other one after the other. That idea was not stimulating to me, and I assume would not be to a reader as well. There are nine self-portraits and eleven epistles in total. I think it may have looked odd if they did not form a loose pattern within each section. In the end they became their own stations of the cross as it were.
Another reason for this choice is that I am a reader who enjoys seeing that a writer gave some thought to structure and set up some directional signposts to be revealed to the reader as they travel the road of the collection. Nothing too obvious or constrictive but something that creates a kind of corroboration with the reader, something that says I see you and want to involve you in this experience beyond simply reading the poems. My hope is that I am creating a sense of stability and trust between myself and the reader.
I know other poets will disagree with that and some say you could throw the poems on to the floor in a game of 52 pick-up and the poems would still speak to each other and create their own patterns. Patterns that perhaps even I could not see, being too close to the work. In any method of assemblage the overriding theme or connective tissue is always that of the writer’s voice. Their own particular way of saying and seeing things. Who knows, I may just play 52 pick-up with my next collection.
ZE: Another repeated theme through Boneyard Heresies is the letter poems. Starting with “Letter of Introduction” you implore the reader to understand that they own nothing, that they can be free. You end the letter poems with “Letter of Resignation” where you explain it all no longer meets your way of life, that the loss has gotten to be too much, and that your resignation is tendered to be done as soon as it can be done. To my reading, it seems as if the speaker is coming from a changing position of authority. Can you talk about how you use speaker and audience in this style of poem?
TS: I did experience a kind of authoritative freedom in writing some of the more prosy epistles. To break the third wall between reader and writer and let myself go verbally and emotionally, especially in those two poems. Selfishly I think I write in this unrestrained direct prose style more for myself and my own need for release, than I do for the reader. I do trust that if I feel these things that need to be stated plainly than other humans must feel them as well. Do I want the slings and arrows of life to just cease sometimes? (knowing full-well they will not). Yes. I think many of us do. I did not want to say that truth in a restraint manner or via too many metaphors, but instead just say it. I suppose in some way I want to give the reader permission to feel these extreme emotions as well. To not fear their own angers or resentments or even the reality that life will end, and that we do tend to fill our time with illusions, the illusion of ownership being one.
If we look at the history of letter writing and certainly in my own life, the format presents itself as a way to reveal and not conceal. To use the limited space and uninterrupted time you have to get across vital truths in hopefully a lyrical but no-nonsense fashion. Thus, I suppose the letter writer is the singular voice of authority in that moment.
ZE: Birds and grief of those passed are intertwined in many cultures around the world. Boneyard Heresies not only features birds in poems like “Self-Portrait as Barn Seen From the Freeway” and “Just Yesterday the Crows” but also on its front cover. How have birds influenced these pieces for you? Can you talk about symbolism in your work and how birds serve as a vehicle to access grief?
TS: I would not call myself a birder in the traditional sense, I keep no notebook of sighting, but birds have always been a life form I notice and respect and feel an affinity towards. Not only their physical beauty but there adaptability, intelligence and variety, but of course in their representation of all that is fleeting. I think that is their highest presentation of symbolism in poetry—birds represent life that is vividly present and on the verge of disappearing at the same time. I don’t just mean as in the extinction of species, but in their very presence on a branch or wire or in flight. They are here and gone at the same time.
I think we humans are jealous of birds. We covet their ability to take flight and rise above it all. Perhaps this is why we use them as the embodiment for that which cannot be articulated aloud.
Poe’s “The Raven” was the first poem I memorized as a child. Don’t ask me to do it now. I think even Poe would admit that the raven did not possess some mythical power that it wielded on us gullible humans. It is the grief-stricken narrator in “The Raven” who is wallowing in his sorrow for the lost Lenore. The narrator is delusional in his grief and is imagining the raven repeats Nevermore. In reality, it is the narrator’s own psyche that is attempting to convince himself that Lenore is nevermore, never to return. He has placed that responsibility in the mouth of an avian figure that might be from the underworld or is simply a fever dream.
Do we as reader’s find what emanates from the spirit of a bird easier to believe because they are not influenced by emotion? Perhaps.
I have experienced one instance in my life of the sudden appearance of birds representing a personal loss and moving me to tears. Only once, and while I knew intellectually that their appearance was not intentional at the moment, emotionally it hit me like a ton of bricks, I was sure it was a message from my recently deceased mother. In that moment you could not have convinced me otherwise. I write about this in my poem “Self-Portrait with Flying Omens.” I know it is my human need imbuing the flock of petrels with that power. I do not believe birds have any woo-woo magical powers they cast on us by their own will. I think they live their lives impervious to us. Which only makes them more endearing to me.
As Whitman said about all animals “Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.”
ZE: Another theme or common touch point in these pieces is music. From Guns N’ Roses to Chuck Berry. Some poems hinge on the music, others just mention it in passing. Will you discuss how music has shaped your work?
TS: Music has shaped my entire life, starting at a very early age. My father was a drummer and attempted to teach me. My parents played records in our house daily—from Dave Brubeck, to Mozart, to Beverly Sills, to Latin Sambas. One of my older brothers plays several instruments, wrote songs and sang in the San Diego Opera. Because I am the youngest of five I soaked up the bands and musicians my older siblings were listening to, and I started buying my own records (aging myself now) as a ‘tweener in the mid-seventies. I also spent a great deal of time playing my parent’s record collection—from The King Cole Trio to Ella Fitzgerald to the Mills Brothers. I would play those records and then switch over to Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, The Doobie Brothers and Jackson Browne to name a few. Those were my first poets and writing mentors. I read their lyrics and liner notes on repeat. This was how I learned what lyrical meant. The progression of instruments within a song, the repetition of lyrics within a refrain were teaching me about form before I knew what a poetic form was.
So yes, modern popular music has had a huge influence on my writing and my view of the world in general. My internal dialog always includes a soundtrack. There is music playing behind my thoughts. In addition I think music speaks to all of us as the touchstone of a certain place and time in our lives, as benchmarks for seminal experiences. We take it into our bodies, and it becomes part of our DNA. After three years of progressive dementia my father could not remember my name, but he could sing any song from the 1940’s verbatim. We are music and music is us.
ZE: This collection as well as a few of your previous collections have dealt with very personal grief. Can you talk about grief as a subject of poetry? How does an author know when writing like this is more for the self versus something to be shared?
TS: Grief is universal, it will eventually touch every life. As long as the poems contain that under-pinning truth of universality than they should not come off as self-serving. At the same time writing about one’s personal grief is self-serving to a certain extent. There is no way of getting around that, though a poem is not to be compared to a raw diary entry that is also self-serving and should be kept private. If you want to go beyond your diary and invite a reader to relate to and mirror grief on a larger scale, then this is where the use of craft, technique and elevated language come into play. It’s a fine balance between relatability, art and the cliff-edge of sentimentality.
I would like to say here that there are many forms of grief, beside the loss of a parent or partner or friend. One can experience grief over a lost place or time, the loss of childhood, the loss of innocence, a garden, a house, one’s health, etc. All these things and more can trigger a state of grief and may be deserving of an elegy.
ZE: Most of the pieces in Boneyard Heresies are from a first-person perspective, the one large exception to the trend being the first few lines of “Melancholy and Joy Walk Into a Bar.” The first few lines in which the speaker seemly views themselves as both the feelings of Joy and Melancholy distinct from themselves, stand out in the collection. What drew you to depict and distill portions of yourself separately?
TS: It is interesting that you perceived the narrator as representing themselves as both melancholy and joy. I like that and I suppose it is true, but I have to say I perceived the narrator (me) as simply the joke teller speaking for melancholy and joy in the form of an inside joke. Since any aware person knows that melancholy and joy walk hand in hand through our lives. There is no avoiding that back-and-forth game of ruthless tennis between the two. Putting this poem in the form of an overused commonly heard comedic set-up appealed to me. The reader might expect humor, but it goes in a different direction. Just as one might expect joy in life but in comes melancholy.
ZE: One of my favorite poems, and the one I think I related the most to, is “I am a Time Machine.” From what I can see from reviews and statements about the collection, I’m not alone in that thought. I really enjoyed the use of hypotheticals. Can you talk about using hypotheticals to give structure to this poem?
TS: I need to give a shout out here to poet Brenda Shaughnessy. She has an amazing poem called "I Have a Time Machine" in her collection So Much Synth and when I first came across it the poem sat with me for a long time. I so admired what she was doing in questioning how time works and our expectations of it. As though somehow time owes us something and it must adhere to our expectations. The way it moves and yet stays stationary at the same time because we can revisit the past in our memories at will. And of course we can’t help but form a notion of what the future will look like. What we think is the literal forward movement of time is simply a construct we use to balance ourselves (hopefully) though the space time continuum. I thought about this poem for a long time, and along with it at some point floated in one of my favorite Leonard Cohen lyrics which I used as an epigram to my own poem “I got this rig that runs on memories.” Something clicked for me when I looked at the two together, and I realized that I do not have a time machine, I am a time machine. Cohen’s “rig” is himself; our bodies, our minds and our psyche. The whole physiological mash-up. We live within our memories and project our futures. Time is not an outside force but an internal one. In all honesty I think Shaughnessy was saying this as well. Her time machine is operated by her and so they are one and the same.
As for the use of hypotheticals I think I use them as a release valve on a pressure cooker of guilt and sorry and missed opportunities. If I cannot go back in time and change a particular circumstance, I can at the very least imagine how I would have changed the past. It’s a useless exercise I suppose but a very human one.
ZE: The last poem in Boneyard Heresies, “Dear Planners of My Funeral” the speaker seems to portray themselves after death as a robin. Robins are most often interpreted as a comforting sign from a deceased loved one. Can you talk about the choice of ending the collection with this symbol?
TS: Again, an interesting interpretation but not one I intended. The placement of a robin in the poem may be at the most a representation of that which is fleeting, like life or the roses or even Easter weekend which are all part of the poem as well. Portraying myself as the robin feels disingenuous to me. A bit too romantic for my sensibilities.
I think I wanted the reader to be surrounded by beauty in the public park that the poem takes them to. I want the planners of my funeral to be distracted by all that is alive and vibrant and not be mourning what has passed. A robin seemed fitting for the park setting. To end the entire collection with a poem about my funeral was just too obvious not take advantage of. Perhaps an easy out, but its placement elsewhere in the collection did not ring true.
ZE: Thank you so much for meeting with us today. What’s next for you and your writing?
TS: Thank you! Your questions have let me see my collection in new and interesting ways. One of the joys of publication is that once you let go of the work reader’s will bring their own filters and life experiences to the poems and they will come alive in new ways.
Presently I am getting out there and booking readings as much as I can before the year is out. I am letting new poems come as they will and enjoying that. I am taking a break from the hot blacktop of the Pursuing Publication highway. A little bubbling caldron of a chapbook may be in the works, but it’s too early to tell. Thanks for asking!
Check out Boneyard Heresies at Moon City Press.