I think it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I am the world’s foremost expert on Nancy Miller Gomez’s poetry, having read at some point every poem in every iteration before and after publication over her many decades of writing. From her earliest poems in a kindergarten notebook to existential poems in a teenage diary (both shared proudly by her mother) to first drafts of manuscripts and her recently released collection, I have read and been enthralled by her ability to take seemingly mundane experiences and illuminate the extraordinary strangeness hiding beneath the surface. She is equally comfortable writing about the beautiful and the bizarre.
I first heard Nancy’s poetry at a reading in Los Angeles over forty years ago. I was sitting on a picnic blanket under a Magnolia tree. It was hot. I was hungry and cranky and needed a nap. I was four. I don’t remember the poems that day but I do remember later poems stolen out of her bedside table, read in snatches before she came home from work. My mother taught me not only to love words, but that they were worth getting in trouble over. Her poems are not comedic, but they have humor and levity, enough to leave you exposed for the punch in the gut that comes with the wrenching truth that follows.
My mother recently came out with her first full length collection, Inconsolable Objects, and despite my familiarity with the words on the page, we had never really talked about how and why she writes. For me, I never set out to write poetry. But poetry found me despite my very best intentions. Little prose pieces bending and shifting, becoming stranger and stranger until it was undeniable that I was also writing poetry. How completely expected. Growing up, poetry was the language of our family. It was so present in our lives that I didn’t ever consider the originating impulse. I never asked my mom why she wrote? And I guess by extension, why do I? So I set out to talk to my mom about some of the mechanisms behind the magic. Things did not go to plan.
My first mistake was deciding to conduct the interview in person in my mom’s kitchen late at night after we had just baked Blondies. As we were about to begin, my younger brother Dylan and my partner Mitch, lured by the smell, sat down at the kitchen counter with us.
Me: Okay, go. This is the first take of the Nancy-Tamara poetry interview. Mitch, do you want to read my questions for me?
Mitch: [reading my written question] Nancy, your poems are largely narrative and frequently confessional, drawing often from your childhood and early adult life. As an act of memory, poetry often diverges from memoir in its commitment to truth or truth in memory. Do you think poets have an obligation to be honest?
Nancy: Yes.
[Mitch begins to read]
Me: --Wait, wait we can't just go on to the next question.
Nancy: I answered.
Me: You have to answer more.
Nancy: I think poems don't have to be factual but they have to be true. And no, they don't have to be honest. You can fudge the facts if you make a better truth.
Mitch: [going off script] What do you think makes up the core of that honesty? Is it some kind of a nugget of genuine emotion or something else?
Nancy: Well, I think that when you write a poem you don't always know what you're going to bump into and discover and I think you have to let the poem go where it wants and do what it wants and then you often discover a truth you wouldn't otherwise have.
Mitch: And how do you balance accuracy with poetic interest?
Nancy: If accuracy makes a poem boring, dispense with it. Because a poet's first obligation is to hold the reader's interest.
[At this point my oldest son Julian who is on break from college enters the kitchen]
Nancy: [to Julian] You're missing the interview. Did you come in to get a blondie?
Julian: No, I came in to do the interview instead.
Me: Julian's going to do the interview.
Julian: I'm playing a game on my phone at the same time. Okay. But where are we at?
Me: Right here.
Julian: I'm going to read it. Okay? [picking a question from the list] A lot of the people you write about in this collection are dead. Do you find it easier to populate your poems with the dead? Have you ever waited for someone to die so that you could write a poem about them?
Nancy: No, I have never waited for someone to die so I could write a poem about them. I don't ever want the people I love to die.
Me: I don't think it's about wanting them to die. It's more about waiting to share a certain truth about them.
Nancy: Well, the truth is, I don't wait for people to die to write about them, because if I have an inspiration for a poem, I typically act on it.
Me: Sometimes I withhold a poem, even if I have the idea to write it, because I wouldn't want to upset the person who is still alive.
Nancy: You would probably write it and then just not publish it. No, I'm not going to wait for somebody to die. To be honest, I don't think I write about people in a way that is hurtful or harmful. And I think I tend to write from a place of compassion and understanding and love. And I don't know that I've ever written about someone in a way that I felt like I'd have to withhold it from them. I don’t think I like this question.
Julian: But when you get a question you don’t like, you want to redirect it to what you want to talk about. It doesn't necessarily have to be anything related to what the actual question is.
Nancy: Yeah. [pause] Are you asking questions or playing a video game?
Julian: I wasn't sure if we were continuing. Who's going to be doing the interview?
Me: It's my interview.
Julian: So you're going to be interviewing her?
Nancy: She is right now.
Julian: Okay. Continue.
Me: If I were to broadly categorize the poems in your book, I would say that there are biographical poems, which tell your own stories, the poems which start with a fact about someone else's life or a fact about the world, and a more mythical, nebulous type of poem which uses symbolic gestures. Do these different poem types come from different writing periods or different approaches to poem generation?
Nancy: They don't come from different periods. They do come from different generative impulses. When I want to get out of my own head and not write about myself, I often look for inspiration in newspaper articles or social media. Or I’ll write from an epigraph. And those poems, while I think stylistically they're similar to my other poems, they are not about me personally. Although sometimes they are. Sometimes they blend. Sometimes I use a leaping off from something and it ends up being a poem about me.
[pause] We're putting Dylan to sleep over here. He's falling asleep.
Me: And the third kind?
Nancy: Oh, what's the third kind?
Me: The mythical poem.
Nancy: Mythical poems. I think I would love to write more of those. I admire poets that can write mythical poems.
Dylan: [head down on the counter, whispering] You do write mythical poems.
Mitch: When you write mythical poems, where does the inspiration come from?
Nancy: I don't know.
Me: So a specific example would be "Why I tie my hair to trees", where the speaker imagines her hair becoming a nest for birds.
Nancy: Oh, that came from me actually gathering the hair from my comb and putting it on trees because I love the idea of birds making a nest out of it.
Me: Somebody reading that poem wouldn't think it's literally true. But, you're saying it is.
Nancy: It's literally true.
Julian: It's interesting that the most mythical nebulous poems come from like your own spontaneous--
Nancy: --oddness
Julian: --mythical living that you express in your actual life.
Nancy: Don't you put your hair outside so the birds can nest with it?
Me: No.
Dylan: Well you know what they say, the weirdest shit in life is real.
Me: The bird’s nesting brings us to the next question. Many poems in this collection involve animals and the interaction between the human and the animal world. Especially birds. But also slugs, leopards, bears, a dead catfish, an eviscerated snake. Do you find yourself particularly interested in animals as a metaphor for humanity or symbolic of human characteristics? How do these animal poems reflect your broader themes of alienation and connection?
Nancy: That's a hard question. Like, I don't know that I could answer that.
Dylan: That's like five questions.
Julian: Do you feel particularly interested in animals as a metaphor for humanity?
Nancy: I think that the way humans interact with animals is reflective of our humanity. So for example and I guess yeah there's some metaphor there because there's the bear poem [“Lost”] where the lost little boy is adopted by a bear and then he becomes bear-like. It was actually based on a newspaper article that I read. The little boy got lost in the woods. He was three years old. He was gone for like three days, and when they finally found him, they were so surprised that he was in pretty good condition. And he said, well, a bear took care of me. A bear kept me company. And there was no way for them to prove whether that actually happened or not. That's a pretty cool story. And obviously, that's a poem just waiting to be written. And then the other one about the monk getting eaten by the leopard while he was meditating [“Leopard Eats Meditating Monk”] seemed like a poem that was just waiting to happen as well. Because there's got to be some kind of a lesson in that, right?
Julian: Would you say that that's where you draw most of your poems from? From poems waiting to happen? How do you find those?
Nancy: I find them in many places. I find them at the DMV. I find them in the newspaper. I find them in my grandchildren and my children. I find them in nature. And I find them in things that happen to me in my life, things I observe and witness, things that I remember from my past, my childhood.
Julian: How do you distinguish between these poems that are waiting to happen and the rest of mundane life?
Nancy: Well, a lot happens in our lives every day. We experience so many things and most of what we experience—most of what we see and feel and smell and touch and taste—we forget. Because there's just too much information to take in. But the things that lodge in our minds and that come back to us as memories or that we hold on to, I think there's a reason. And that's because it's a poem waiting to happen.
Me: Overall, your perspective is one of deep curiosity about the self, others, and the stories which connect people and objects. There is something both alien and childlike in that intense scrutiny of things, uncovering truths and sharing insights about everyday situations and objects. Throughout your life, have you felt like this type of awareness has been a gift or a curse?
Nancy: Both. It's been both. I think being hyper aware and hypersensitive is something that is a gift because it feeds an artistic nature. And it means that I am constantly sponging up material for writing. And it's also a curse because you notice things that are often painful and hurtful and alienating and difficult and you're troubled by them and bothered by them and upset by them and it's the processing of those feelings that comes out in the poetry but I imagine there are people who walk through life oblivious to all that and they're perfectly happy cracking open a beer and a bag of chips and watching tv and that's probably an easier life.
Dylan: [whispering] Sooo much easier.
Julian: As a poet then, would you say that it's your job to make people's lives more difficult by forcing them to pay attention to these things?
Nancy: Absolutely not. No. That is not my job. My job as a poet is to write about the things that I notice and do so in a way that illuminates them first for myself and then for my reader. [pause] Anybody else want to weigh in? You have a question, Dylan? Here's your chance.
Julian: I think you should include the questions I added.
Dylan: I actually think Julian’s questions were good.
Nancy: Mitch, you have a question?
Mitch: No.
Me: I want to get back to what motivates your writing. Like… you're writing it because something is a poem?
Julian: So she finds things in the world and some of the things she sees in her life stick with her. And then she takes those things and to further understand them she writes a poem--
Me: --and that helps her figure it out for herself and then she shares it--
Dylan: --Right. As a form of processing.
Julian: And so is the hope that other people will find connection and illumination in recognizing the truth of the poems?
Nancy: I think that poems are connective. And I think that the reason most poets write is first to be able to understand themselves and process things, but also secondarily to connect with other people. And I think a successful poem does that.
Dylan: But where in that is there just like the artful process of putting words together and making them sound nice?
Nancy: Well, that's the craft aspect of it.
Dylan: So why don't you talk more about that part too? Not just the feelings and perspective, right?
Julian: Or is that not something you want to include?
Nancy: No, the craft is very important. And I think that craft is something that I study, and I read a lot of other poets that I admire, and I look at the moves that they're making and what they're doing, and I think, you know, a poet can always get better and hone their craft and learn.
Julian: Did you record that?
Me: It's still recording. Everything is being recorded.
Julian: Wow.
Me: Maybe this should be the interview. With everyone’s… interpretations.
Mitch: I have a question for you, Nancy. Do you feel that teaching poetry has made you a better poet?
Nancy: Absolutely. Yeah, because that's my weakness. I didn't have confidence in myself as a poet. So being able to teach other people poetry felt very… I felt very insecure about doing it and I didn't feel like I would be any good at it. And I spend so much time coming up with lesson plans that I think will be successful, that I learn a lot in the process, and it also ultimately over time has given me more confidence in my own writing. If I'm going to teach a two-hour workshop at the jail, I will often spend 12 hours putting together a lesson plan for that, which means I'm reading a lot of poems and thinking a lot.
Me: I want to get back to the question of how poems are read and received and the point of poetry, which you say is connection, processing and then… connection for the reader?
Nancy: It's also an art form, you know. There's beauty in poetry and there's joy and there's also, you know, sadness and pain. And I think that when people can put things down in words and then someone else reads that and feels seen and heard and understood, then it's connective. And let's face it we all walk through our lives and we're all lonely little islands unto ourselves and the only way we have of connecting really is through words.
Dylan: Not the only way--
Nancy: --And poetry is a very heightened form of language. It gets to the heart and the truth of things. --Oh, my phone has died -- No, still going. Going once. Going twice--
Dylan: --Sold.
Nancy Miller Gomez’s is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books) and the chapbook, Punishment (Rattle chapbook series), a collection of poems and essays about her experience teaching in prisons and jails. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, River Styx,
Waxwing, Plume, The Rumpus, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She co-founded with Ellen Bass an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, and Juvenile Hall. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California. More at: nancymillergomez.com.