Interview with Talvikki Ansel

Talvikki Ansel is the author of the poetry collections My Shining Archipelago (1997) and Jetty and Other Poems (2003). She is the recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and is the 2014 winner of The OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize in Poetry for her collection Somewhere in Space. Two poems from this collection are included at the conclusion of this interview.

Recently, she spoke with poetry editor Mikko Harvey about the natural world, Finnish culture, and her process for putting together a full-length collection.

Mikko Harvey: Reading your poems, it becomes clear that nature—landscape, birds, trees, weather—is a key influence. I wonder if you could share any thoughts about how nature plays into your writing, and perhaps into your life. You have a poem in My Shining Archipelago titled “John Clare,” after the English poet known for his engagement with the natural world. How would you characterize your own engagement with nature? What are the pleasures, and challenges, of channeling it into poetry?

Talvikki Ansel: Yes, the natural world does work its way into my poems, and into my life, too. I’m pretty happy when I have a chance to muck around outside; that world is a source of surprise and depth and revelation. Growing up I have fond memories of freezing my butt off before school and on weekends, looking for winter ducks and shrikes. And in the past I was lucky enough to have a chance to volunteer on projects for scientists studying birds in a variety of landscapes. I think that the kind of attention required in doing fieldwork can train one to pay attention, particularly to the natural world. Of course, there is a sense of the elegiac too, and that can be disheartening: John Clare mourning the enclosure of land, and today’s development and the disappearance of habitat. But yes, I like the unfetteredness of being outside, and that world does come into the poems.

Writing and the natural world: it’s hard to say. The pleasures are multiple, but the challenges are there, too. It’s not always an easy transfer: I could fondly and happily note down observations till the cows come home (“sun on the woodpile,” “semipalmated plovers on the beach, in the dried weed wrack, one calling,” etc.), and I like noting that those things are there in that rich world, but the observations need to be right for a certain poem. They have to work, have to fit the shape and overall expression of that particular poem. There’s always the element of crafting a poem that needs to be in balance with the material.

MH: I won’t ask you to name influences, as I know that can be a fraught task, but who are some of your favorite artists, poets or otherwise?

TA: Oh dear, okay, I’m just going to glance over at my messy bookshelf for this one: Marianne Moore, Henry Beston, Emily Dickinson, Eugenio Montale, two copies of Hamlet, Henry Moore’s sheep sketchbook (I am, of course, selectively glancing, choosing books that can stay the course, and there are other shelves I will regret not looking at later). And my music stand: Bach’s concerto in D minor for two violins. I’ve been trying to learn this piece all fall (yes, 5 year old children play it competently on YouTube, as do adult violinists, I might add). I don’t know how his intertwining, rising and falling passages will influence my writing, if at all, but to echo Tranströmer: “ after a black day… I shove my hands into my haydnpockets.”

MH: Your poem “Origin Charm Against Uncertain Injuries,” from Jetty & Other Poems, engages with The Kalevala, which is regarded as Finland’s national epic poem. Elsewhere you mention “pülla,” a type of Finnish pastry. Your name includes the Finnish word for winter, “talvi.” What is your relationship, personally and creatively, with Finnish culture?

TA: You are quite an astute reader, Mikko Harvey! What is my relationship? Tenuous, but in the blood, perhaps? My mom is from Finland, and though I was raised in this country and don’t speak Finnish, it does seep into the blood a bit: domestic details & objects, stories, the sound of the language—its rhythms familiar like a song sparrow’s call when I hear someone pick up the phone.

MH: Related to that, are there any Finnish or Scandinavian artists you admire?

TA: A few writers from that part of the world that I read and admire all capture that landscape, though not the language—they all happen to be writing in Swedish, and I’ve only read them in translation, anyway: Tove Jansson, Tomas Tranströmer, Edith Södergran. In Somewhere in Space I have a poem partly inspired by Edith Södergran, a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet who was born in St. Petersburg, before WWI.

MH: You’ve now published three books, and won both the Wheeler Prize and the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. What is the process of assembling a collection of poems like for you? Do you have advice for poets who are putting manuscripts together?

TA: It can take some time before a collection of poems feels like it is of a piece, that the poems belong together in a manuscript, so, I’d say, don’t rush it; do the work, keep going back to it, but allow the time to let the book happen, to grow and metamorphose into a collection where the progression feels natural, or the combination feels interesting, a collection where you don’t find yourself averting your glance from some of the poems (those probably need to go bye-bye). Have patience.

I tend to write just poems for years, and then think of assembling after I have a good number of poems, which is obviously different from some writers who begin with a vision for an entire book. (And really, these notes just apply to me; some people write much more quickly, all in a rush.) Assembling a collection can be that dance between what one thinks the manuscript should do, and gut instinct, hoping for some unexpected coincidences—I try not to feel like I can always see the wheels turning, or the chicken going for the worm.

In practical terms, when I’m thinking “book-length,” I spread the poems (printed out) over all the flat surfaces of the house, then I can see them, move from last line to title, etc., see the poems as made things on the page, and experience the white space of section breaks; and the process feels like shaping something. That stage is so much fun. This is what has worked for me so far, but I’m also a person who still uses a manual typewriter for poems—that sense of each line as a line, followed by a carriage return; the speed of typing suits my need in making and revising the poem.

MH: What can readers look forward to—in terms of content, theme, form—in Somewhere in Space? Do any differences between this book and your previous ones jump out at you?

TA: A little hard for me to say—this is the most difficult question for me. Well, easy response: no section breaks in this book vs. the others; it just moves from poem to poem. History, half-told histories, feral cats, beached boats, sails in trees, fragments of phrases from old torn trading cards with paintings of birds, memory, and botanical forays—all these make an appearance.

Excerpts from Somewhere in Space

!50!!50!!10!Quail

!50!Quail’s instinctual dash
!50!through wet grass, rain puddles
!50!bobcat, fowling piece.

!50!Limp bird
!50!pillowed on scalloped feathers, puff
!50!cream to chestnut to horse-flank

!50!brown, helmeted

!50!on a bed of leeks, browning.

!50!I, deadly element

!50!sack’s leather straps
!50!criss-cross the chest,
!50!three dropped onto the plain table

!50!handsmell of plucked bird
!50!reached to face,

!50!wishbone too fine to want to try.

!50!!25!History of Private Life
!100!!100!!50!(Pagan Rome to Byzantium)

!50!From November to May
!50!they didn’t travel, it took a half year
!50!to get notice of an event. A baby
!50!was born, damn the inheritance
!50!diluted again, your earthenware ewer
!50!and city plan on a marble slab. Wait
!50!the letter boat, fresh berries and milk.
!50!Extra babies put out, exposed, for recycling
!50!or not, those no nonsense days. The Roman frieze
!50!of a couple making love, and here’s the servant
!50!bringing a pitcher of water
!100!!100!!50!& where does that take us
!50!in this robust field: buttercups,
!50!egg-yolk-yellow nape of the bobolink.
!50!Wind unceasing from the river, the aspen
!50!saplings lean, leaves blown to small buttons
!50!all withstanding the force, shirts blown
!50!up bared backs and columbine heads
!50!tormented. I miss you though they doubted it
!50!it took so long from writing to the unfolding.

Mikko Harvey is a student in the MFA program for poetry at The Ohio State University. His poems appear in journals such as The Pinch, New Ohio Review, and Best New Poets 2013. He is a poetry editor at The Journal.