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- [00:00]
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- [01:04]
Donna Goyer
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- [01:09]
Commercial Narrator
need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer law supplies last ends June 30 terms@ aka mscollegepc welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:32]
Holly Gattery
Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I'm your host Holly Gattery and I am thrilled to have joining me today Donna Voyer to talk about her collection Unrivered. Donna Voyer strikes gold with Unrivered, a stunning collection of poems that mediate on grief, regret, longing, self love and acceptance. Reeling from the loss of her parents, Donna speaker is forced to grapple with her own mortality and with the complicated feelings that come with aging. At times whispering softly in our ears, at times spitting venom with every word, Donna charts the ways loss impacts the body and our perceptions of grief, and how we are to keep living. With a heroic sonic crown woven through the book, like the loose stitches in her grandmother's quilt, Donna offers hope, courage and gratitude in the face of our deepest fears. The result is a masterful and gripping story of loss and acceptance, offering up rendering apocalyptic elegy, ironic detachment, or passionate, joyful celebration of life, Unrivered is bound to both take your breath away and give it a new form. Donna Voye is the author of three full length poetry collections. To Everything There Is, Every love story is an Apocalypse Story and A House of Many Windows, all published from Sundress Publications, including Unrivered, the book we are talking about today. Donna currently lives and creates in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pictures of Honey and is the co editor, co founder of the online journal Astra, a journal of arts and letters. Welcome to the show, Donna.
- [03:25]
Donna Goyer
Thank you, Holly, so much for having me.
- [03:28]
Holly Gattery
It's such a pleasure to talk to you about this really tender, gripping, kind of sternum shattering collection of poems. And I do mean that in the best possible way. My first question for you is, where did this collection start for you?
- [03:46]
Donna Goyer
Well, I think it began after my third book, which was an elegy for my parents, who I lost suddenly and quickly and within five months of one another. I was kind of reeling a little bit from that, but also had a lot of changes happen immediately after that as well. So that was 2018, so my parents were gone, was no longer really a daughter. I retired from my job of teaching 36 years. I taught middle school for 36 years in the spring of 2020, during the height of lockdown. And so I lost my identity as a teacher. I lost contact with really the world other than my husband. And so I was feeling adrift, really, like kind of like, who am I? What? Like, what am I good for? Like, feeling on, not useful, wondering, like what was next, you know, being very unsure about what was next. And so I kind of started. I had been writing a lot about the body and about how aging impacts the body. And then I was also thinking, started thinking about how aging affects your identity. Right. Because so many labels that you place on yourself and throughout your life start to fall away. Right. And when those labels are gone, how do you define yourself now? As a person who's still moving through the world, but a completely different person who is dealing with figuring out who they are all over again, just like you do when you're younger. So that's kind of where it began for me. And some of the poems that I had been writing were kind of these little sonnets to each decade of my life. And I think two of those made it into the collection. The sonnets, one of the oldest forms of poetry. It seemed appropriate for writing about age. And then from there the idea of the crown of sonnets started to evolve. And then that's really when the book started to take shape.
- [05:49]
Holly Gattery
Thank you for that. I was thinking when I was reading your work about how whenever somebody says to me, oh, I don't read poetry or kind of questions the value of poetry in today's world. I often think it's. To me, it's so baffling to even have these responses, because if you go to a wedding, people read poetry. When you go to a funeral, this poetry, poetry is there in these crucial moments of our lives, these defining moments, moments that we never forget and get etched into our souls. And yet here we are questioning its purpose. And it's something that is so vital, but also something that we seem to take for granted. And I was thinking about how there are many poems in this collection that I think would be perfect for reading. At many occasions, I was thinking about Finding Tongues in Trees, which is one of the first poems in the collection. And it really just was breathtaking. So I know this isn't Showtime at the Coca Cabana, but I was going to ask if maybe you'd read it for us and then maybe we could talk a little bit about it after.
- [07:12]
Donna Goyer
Sure, I'd be happy to. Finding Tongues in TREES the bark of most trees yields to growth by splitting or filling from within. But not so the sycamore. Its bark flakes in uneven pieces, leaves its surface mottled green and gray. Some mistake this for disease. Mark the trunks with X's. Call the surgeons. Like we did for my father when he began to shed and shiver, his trunk covered with sores, bruises blooming on his limbs, the skin unable to stretch and accommodate what roiled beneath. We did not know how to speak to him of death, what words. Until one day, his frame, wasted and bent, adorned with damage, pulsed with light. And his heart, that most secret crocus, broke open and poured its bright into the winter air. And even when he breathed his last, my God, there was music in that sigh. It was joyful. And the trees all waved their arms and taught us how to split and heal and sing.
- [08:31]
Holly Gattery
Thank you, Donna. I mean, I think all phenomenal poetry does what. What this poem beautifully achieves. And it's holding multiple truths, it holds multiple feelings, and it is in no way, shape or form prescriptive. It's not trying to moralize, it's not trying to give us a lesson. I mean, I suppose some poetry does, but my favorite doesn't. My favorite kind of poetry. I'm sure I can find one that moralizes that I like. Generally speaking, it's not something I'm drawn to. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this idea of poetry holding many truths and many feelings, but doing it in such a way that is so beautifully distilled.
- [09:14]
Donna Goyer
I think that that's one of the things I enjoy most about writing poetry is that, I mean, I taught young people how to write, you know, essays, you know, and things like that. School writing for years. And, you know, there are, you know, certain steps and formulas and expectations that occur within academic writing, and poetry doesn't have to follow those. Right. Poetry is a daydream, right? It follows the firefly that's flying through the night sky. It follows that kind of half awake, half dream state that sometimes we're in when we're just not thinking about anything. And sometimes the connections between things come when you least expect them, you know, and here it was this I do love. I have a thing for trees. My husband and my son, when we were. When he was young, when we would travel, like when they couldn't find me, he'd be like, where's Mom? And be like, probably looking at a tree somewhere. And so when I learn new facts about trees, as I did about the sycamore, they usually stick with me. And the title is part of a line from Shakespeare, and I can't remember what play now, but it seemed to me when I was writing these poems about my parents passing, there was not just sadness. Of course there's sadness. There were a lot of moments that were. We used the word tender in our conversation before the podcast started. You know, a lot of moments that were just really tender that were beautiful as a part of that process. And when I found out about this kind of the way that this tree heals, I thought, well, that's kind of how people heal, right? We have to split to heal. And so I think that, you know, all those poems starts to be about trees, right? The trees get gave me away or helped me find a tongue to speak about something else in my life that was obviously not a tree that was completely significant. So I think poetry does that better than any other genre. It brings these disparate things together to bring us a new understanding of not only both things, but something new that the two that are put together create.
- [11:45]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, it's such a powerful antidote for this kind of capitalistic, productivity obsessed world. I feel like poetry is this form that when you are listening to poetry or you open a collection of poems, it's like just flipping the lid on your brain and letting all those fireflies you were talking about out, saying, you don't have to do anything, you don't have to go anywhere. There's no story you have to follow. You just have to exist and breathe for a little bit. And Even when I was, you know, talking about the tenderness, we were talking about earlier listeners, we were talking about there's a cemetery near where I'm staying in. In beautiful downtown Hamilton, Ontario right now, which is not where I live. And I was thinking about your poems as I was driving past. It was. I didn't notice this tree, this treness that keeps coming up. And then I was driving past the cemetery thinking, oh, I'm gonna. I'm gonna take a little walk through there after. It's quite a huge historic cemetery. And I. As I was driving by, I saw some tree roots that were protruding from the ground. I thought, wow, those are really muscular roots. And I was like, I gotta take note of that because, like, in this place of. It could be quite a sad place. There's just this, like, strength and vitality everywhere as well. And I think that's what draws me to it. It's a. It's one of those older cemeteries that's just canopied and crowned with trees. Like, there's, it's, it's. There's. They're very old. And I was thinking about that so much while I was reading your. Your book. And it's just fortuitous that I happen to be talking to you at this time where I've been thinking about this, this particular cemetery, but just the. The themes addressed in your, in your book. Because there is balance. This beautiful balance of tenderness and grief and regret, but also this just kind of laissez faire attitude. Like, I don't know what to. Like, the speaker of the poem, just not as the body gets older, just being like, well, I have to do something else now. Like, I have to move on. And again, holding all these truths up at once was really just fascinating. But before I get into another poem that I do want to discuss, I do want to ask you about the. The title of the collection. If you could tell our listeners about where that comes from. As I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Sure.
- [14:07]
Donna Goyer
I think titles are the bane of my existence as a writer. Titling poems is my least favorite part of the writing process. And I knew for this collection, I didn't just want to pull the title of a poem because the poems are wide ranging in terms of what they're addressing. And there's kind of an arc from this loss or, like, confusion at the beginning to a little bit more of acceptance or hope or this sense of moving forward toward the end. And I was thinking about, you know, rivers and water is also something I'm very drawn to. And rivers are really where. They're the base of civilizations. It's where people get their nourishment, their water, their food, their industry, their transportation. And so if you take a river away from a geographical place, you dry up the. The culture. It goes away. And so if I was thinking about that in the sense of, as I said earlier, about identity, you know, if the body is rivered with all of these labels that we give it, and those rivers begin, you know, begin to drain away, you know, that they're taken from you. And that's kind of, you know, shown in the COVID as well. You know, things draining. But then what are you. You're unrivered, right? You no longer have those sources that you used to draw from that make you who you are. And I was just kind of a word that came to me as, you know, a word I could coin as a title that I didn't necessarily have to force into a poem somewhere that I thought would be, you know, kind of evident by the time people, you know, finished reading the book. Oh, that's what, you know, that's kind of what that means. So I really enjoyed kind of making up a word for that. It's interesting because people have introduced the book in places and. And read it as other words because it's not a word, right? It's been introduced as unrivaled. It's been introduced as, you know, words that actually exist because people aren't quite sure what it is. And so I really love the way that the publisher also used two different colors for the word that un is in red and then the river is in blue. Kind of to put an emphasis on the fact that it is kind of a created word and that it needs to have attention paid to it.
- [16:39]
Holly Gattery
Well, that's the whole fun of poetry, is you get to do whatever you want to do. You can make a difference all the time. You can verb nouns and noun verbs and do. Do whatever you want. I mean, that's why we play in the sandbox. And it would speak like the rivered. I mean, I want to ask you about the title unrivered, because I was really fascinated with the poem bloodline, which begins with. I wanted there to be a rivering a signal. I would love you to talk about the form of this poem because I read it a few times before I realized how sophisticated it is. And I'd love for you to just tell us about what you're doing here.
- [17:19]
Donna Goyer
This was one of the earliest poems, I think, that I wrote that Ended up in the collection. I wanted a poem that would address kind of the timeline of a woman's life through the idea of, you know, menstrual period, essentially, like, because it's a crucial part of, you know, when you get it, that's when you become a woman, right? You become a part of this club. And then you realize, oh, this is not quite so fun, but, you know, someday I'm. It's going to be. There's going to be a reason for it, you know, and you. You know, it's so that you can have a child. And then when you find out you can't do that, that your body doesn't do that, then this thing is useless, right? And then when it goes away, when you go through menopause, right, you've entered this whole other stage of life, you know, this kind of crone era or whatever people go out to call it. And so really, it's a marker, right? It's a marker in a woman's life for the different stages that a traditional woman's life is supposed to go through. And so I wanted to write about it in such a way that I could write about it with some repetition in language, some structure to the form of the lines, so that the repetition looked purposeful, because it is something that comes back again and again and again, right? It's a cycle. And so I wanted the poem to be a cycle. And the one that breaks that cycle is the one that stands at the end of the poem that really is, you know, post menopausal. If you want to put a stage on each stanza where the river is gone, right, where you're unrivered. And that's the only place, I think, in the book where the word unrivered is used is in that last stanza of that poem. And so really, it was an invented form that I played with for a long time to make sure the words I was repeating in the same. That the order they were repeating in each stanza was the same. And it was like a nice puzzle for me to work on instead of just telling it in a traditional narrative sense. So thank you for asking about it because this is what I'm proud of.
- [19:39]
Holly Gattery
I love form poems, whether it's like a sestina or pantoom or a perversion thereof. I have a tendency to say, I'm going to write a sestina and then use it to get myself started and then just kind of break from things when it stops feeling useful. But I think that forms, whether they're traditional forms or forms we make up ourselves are such fascinating ways to I know I'm going on a lot about playing, but to play, but to also give ourselves maps when we feel stuck like this is all we have to do. So when language is failing us, then the form can propel us forward. So again I'm going to ask you if you would mind reading this poems. I'd love our listeners to hear it.
- [20:19]
Donna Goyer
Not at all. Thank you for asking. This is Bloodline one. I wanted there to be a rivering a signal. I wanted the clench and bother, the stain and solder of it a desire to fit into that sisterhood. I wanted it desire the clench and solder rivering the stain and signal the wanting a fit and a bother too. Each month there was a river signaling clench, clot and bother, stain and stench a doubling pain. I did not want the pain of that belonging doubling the clench and signal river, the stench and clot, the wanting a bother of belonging. 3. I wanted to be a river gathering stones Signals to shape in my current and birth Smooth and new onto a shore. I wanted to be both river and shore gathering the stone and current shape the new and smooth the wanting a signal for sure. 4. Each month there was a river signaling failure, clot and carnage, loss and empty the breaking of biology's promise, the promise of a second heart Failure the clot and biology Carnage the heart and signal the wanting an empty promise. 5. I was tired of the rivering all its tributaries. Signals of nothing Flow and fallow, Useless current more nuisance than nurture. I wanted to be landlocked Flow the useless and nuisance, fallow the landlocked and nothing, the wanting a signal of nurture. 6. I wanted to be something else. The river dry a signal of endings Drought and flaking, sweat and shiver a new shore for this salvage I salvage a self unrivered.
- [22:54]
Holly Gattery
Thank you again for reading. This episode is brought to you by Prime. What if you had one more chance with the one that got away?
- [23:03]
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Holly Gattery
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Donna Goyer
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Holly Gattery
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Donna Goyer
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Holly Gattery
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Donna Goyer
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Holly Gattery
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Donna Goyer
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Holly Gattery
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- [24:24]
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- [24:54]
Holly Gattery
When I was, you know, everything right now is a trend. Like everything's a trend. Being in any stage of your life, whether you're in, you know, the mom stage or the child freeze stage or you're in the midlife stage or beyond that, it seems to be like trying to packaged and branded and sold to you. And I'm disgusted with all of it. But I feel like the, the, the stage for older women hasn't been packaged as tightly. Unless you're buying into the package of facelifts and like Botox and whatever it's for, for the people who don't want that, whatever is out there is not as easily identified. Which, you know, I think can be a little bit scary. But then I was, when I was reading your, your work, I'm like, yeah, that. Isn't that lovely as well that you can, you can. It's scary to not know what to do. It's scary not to have a map, but it's also a little bit of a gift, I feel like not to have a map. Does this make sense?
- [25:56]
Donna Goyer
Yes. I mean I think I've talked a little bit about, to some younger friends about it and I said that, you know, there's, there's this kind of double edged invisibility. Right. In one sense, like you said, you're not even marketed to anymore, which is kind of nice actually. But there's this way that you kind of disappear. There's a couple poems in the book that kind of reference that. But also there's a lot of freedom in that invisibility, the removal of expectation. You know, I'm not a movie actress or, you know, I don't need to worry about, you know, trying to look 20 years younger than I am. I'm as old as I am, you know, and I'm not working anymore. So I have the freedom to do things like travel and spend my time the way I want to spend my time, you know, so there is, there are a lot of, you know, bonuses to, to going through all the other stages of life and being in this one. But in another sense, like you said, like you said, there isn't really a niche or like a target for women who are past their 60s for what we are supposed to do or what we are supposed to want to do. So there's this invisibility that's sometimes a little bit disappointing, but also, like I said, a lot of freedom in it as well.
- [27:23]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot because I, I read a while ago Marilyn Simon's Walking with Beth, which is conversations with her, memoiring, conversations with her 100 year old friend. And then there's Plum Johnson's the Trouble With Fairy Tales and looking back on her life in her 70s, thinking about the, the trouble with all this, all the fabilizing of a young woman's life, like one more, one more buy into these fairy tales. What's the outcome? And so I've been, you know, I'm 45, so, you know, I, I, my, my kids think I'm ancient. I had my friend in her, yeah, I had a friend in my, her 60s recently called me a baby, which I love. She's like, you're a baby. I'm like, I'll take it. But it's something that I think a lot of women at midlife think about was, you know, I'm not interested in the, the path that is marketed towards women at my age. You know, like, get filler and do this, do that. Like, I'm, I mean, I thought about it. I'm not gonna lie. I definitely thought about. Then I panicked and I was like, oh God, I don't want botulism in my face. So it was really just my anxiety that kept me from buying into it. Otherwise I would have. But I think one of the poems that just made me like captured what I would consider just the abs, like absurd hilarity of it and also just like the. The sadness and depressingness sometimes. And I think they can exist in the same space as postmenopausal weight gain. King James Edition, which is on page 43 for readers following along at home. And I read that title and the fawd because I found it so delightful. And I'd love for you to talk about this poem. Sure.
- [29:08]
Donna Goyer
There's a couple poems in the book that use different lines from versions of the Bible, the Christian Bible. And I just think, because, I mean, I grew up in a church tradition that where the Bible was the, you know, the last word, you know, the be all, end all way to do things. And I thought, well, what would happen if I took some of those things out of context and applied them to things that we actually have no control over? You know, like the way the body ages and see what happens? And so this one was just fun to play with because what's really nice is, you know, these different versions of the Bible are available online and searchable now. So I looked up the word wait. I think I did a find on the word wait, and I did a find on the word diet, those four letters. And then when I got the results, I was like, oh, yeah, there's something to talk about here. And it was really, really fun to play with and to use those lines completely out of context to talk about something very normal and very typical that people experience. So it was fun to write.
- [30:22]
Holly Gattery
It was. And it's quietly rebellious, too, which I love, because as I have said repeatedly recently, I am firmly in my vigilante era. And I. I did love the little flicker of subversiveness in it. And I know I keep asking you to read poems, listeners. I said to Donna, oh, you can just read whatever you want instead of,
- [30:47]
Donna Goyer
no, no, this is wonderful. I like it because you're asking about poems that I haven't read a lot. So this is great.
- [30:52]
Holly Gattery
I would just love for you to read this one. Sure.
- [30:54]
Donna Goyer
This is so just as a note to people listening there, you know, the lines that are from the King James version of the Bible are in the book italicized, but obviously there's no way to indicate that reading. But I think you'll note the shift in language, and it won't be a problem. Postmenopausal weight gain. King James Version. Most uses of the word weight in this version refer to gold or precious metals, payment or offering or proof of power. This should make me value myself more, but it's the opposite. I notice that only once do the letters D, I, E, T Appear referring to food, otherwise they are only a part of dieth. I don't want to die, so I track my calories, aspire to let not the greediness of the belly nor lust of the flesh take hold of me. I cook new foods that are healthy and nutritious, but always return to the ones that are not. The chocolate in my mouth, sweet as honey. A false balance is abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight. I wonder who decides upon a just weight. The doctor always says I could stand to lose a few, but warns it will be difficult at this age. My fitness watch says the energy I burn should make me smaller, but it never seems to happen. If the belly of the wicked shall want, then, Lord, I will remain wicked. Running hard against the odds, always hungry.
- [32:44]
Holly Gattery
Oh, that's just amazing. I, you know, for anybody out there who has struggled with this kind of nonsense, like, I, I struggled with eating disorders most of my life. And I, As I get older, I just, I move further and further away from it. And that poem just tickled me in all the right places because it's, it's like all of this for what? All of this hunger for what? All of this want for what? Yeah, I, I love that. I want to, I wanted to give that to my doctor, but she recently told me that when I said, I know I need to lose weight, she said, no, no, no, like, at your age, it's good to have, like, just don't be too thin, because if you're too thin, you can get osteoporosis. And, you know, there's all these issues with excessive. Yeah, with excessive thinness and even heart disease for women. She, you know, there's. You have a 20 pound set weight, and in that 20 pounds, like, you're completely healthy on either end of that 20 pounds. And so just stay where you are, you're great. And I got on the way home, like, I'm buying an ice cream sandwich. I felt. So, yeah, I'm fine. It doesn't matter anymore. And this, this permission, as you said, just to. Okay, well, if, if nobody's paying attention to me like they used to anyways, if I'm not under that scrutiny, like, how wonderful is that? And I may feel lost and scared sometimes, but, I mean, I'm not alone. There's other women out here feeling this way. And yeah, I, I can remember poet Mary Ellen Zammer saying to me when I was in my twenties that becoming invisible as she got older was the nicest thing that ever happened. It was such A gift. And it stuck with me even in my 20s. I'm like, we're gonna file that away for, like, and see how I feel about it then. And it really, truly is delightful. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. I did want to ask you. My second last question is about your style and your tone, which I find incredibly sophisticated, but, like, the equivalent of also, like, smooth, easy listening to the ears. There is no point. While I would say that your poems necessitate slowness and a deliberate reading, if I was rereading something, it wasn't because I needed to unpack it further, which some poems do ask of you. Which to me is fun. Like, it's a. Why wouldn't. Like, it's. I'm totally cool with having to reread something to unpack it, but I didn't have to do that if I was rereading it. It was like rewatching my favorite episode of the Golden Girls. Like, I just wanted to like to. To, like, experience it again. And quite often I was doing a little bit more unpacking. But I really love how Clairon. These poems are, like, trying to think. They're like a crystal glasses drying in the sun, you know, like. But you can move and get another edge on them. You can see another edge of it, but it's. They're clear from the beginning. And I would love to hear you talk about that style. And if you'd like a little bit about your process. Sure.
- [35:44]
Donna Goyer
Thank you for those. I take those as compliments. I know that some poets don't like the word accessible, but I always wonder why, because that's kind of the point, right? It's communication. And although I love communicating with other poets, and very often that's who ends up reading your book, I would like to think that anybody could pick up the book and it will communicate with anyone, even if they don't normally read poetry. So I don't think I have a tendency to not want to be obtuse or to make the poem a puzzle. I think that there's work for the reader to do here in terms of figuring out why things are juxtaposed or how a particular metaphor is working in a poem, but I think my goal is always clarity of. I usually write to clarify what I am thinking about something. And so if I get to the point where I have figured out what I want to say, then I feel like my job as a poet is, well, now that I've figured out what I want to say, how do I write it in such A way that not only other people will understand it, but that there's craft, right? So I think my biggest revision sticking points are always flow and sound are the two things that I go back to over and over and over again. There's a lot of sonnets in this book. Even though I don't write only sonnets, that container, to me is a comfort. It's like kind of a favorite. Like you said, a favorite television show or a favorite blanket. Like, you know, one you go back to over and over again because it's. It's soothing, right? There's a pattern to it. There's a. There's a place where it's supposed to turn and change so that you know that it's okay to do that. And I think that working so much in the sonnet form allowed me in the other poems to branch out a little bit. Like in that poem, Bloodline say, well, what would happen if I create my own form and kind of do a lot of repetition and kind of explode these two or three images over and over again in stanzas? And so I think that sticking within those, the comforting or the accessible language in most of the poems and is just the way I think, right? I don't have an mfa. I didn't study poetry. Right. I came to poetry through just loving language and reading and taking workshops and trying new things. So I think my favorite poets are poets that I don't have to over puzzle, right? That I don't have to work too hard to understand, but ones that show me something I thought I knew in a different light. And that's kind of my goal when I'm working toward finishing a poem or believing that it's done or done enough to send somewhere, is that I've used language in a way maybe that's different than someone would have thought of. Not that I'm creating something completely new and different, but that I'm providing a lens that maybe is new or different than people have had when they've thought about the same topic before. So I still write longhand. I draft everything longhand, which probably is why most of my poems end up being shorter. So when I move something to the computer, that's when I'm in my own head saying, okay, I think I have something here. I think I know what I want to say. And then that's when the kind of the fun work of the puzzling through different wording and line breaks and. And rereading it over and over and over again to be sure that it sings, I guess, is the word that I would use. Right. I like. I like my poems to sing. Someone once asked me to describe, like, my. My style or whatever in. In three words. And the only thing I could think of was low rent. Mary Oliver, you know, I use nature a lot in my poems, but I want, you know, I want there to be like, a joy there behind the tenderness or the sorrow or whatever else is there. So, yeah, I guess that that's all I can think of to say about that.
- [40:11]
Holly Gattery
I don't think there's anything low rent about. It's funny to hear you say it, but I don't. I don't. I don't know if I echo that. It's to me, like, accessibility in poems is a neutral quality. Like, it's. It's okay. Like, accessibility is not good or bad. I just is just like complexity. It just. Just is. It's just people have different styles, and that's fine. I. I tend to just want to be surprised. Sometimes I'm surprised because I've had to puzzle my way through to something, and that surprises me. And sometimes I'm surprised because, like I said, like, with yours, it's like this crystal glass drawing on a rack in the summon. It's just bam, you know, like, right away. And neither one is better or worse. It's just different. And I think. What? Yeah, and. And it's. Just because something is accessible does also does not mean it is simple. Like, I made sure to preface by saying, like, I really believe that your work is sophisticated. And often a lot of poems that are labeled accessible are actually incredibly sophisticated. They may not be. They may not be complicated to understand, but there are complex mechanisms that are making them so accessible to read. And that's a lot of practice on the poet's part. That's a lot of editing, a lot of removing words, replacing words, scaling back. Like, it's. The best poems are that are super accessible, are usually ones that have been worked on a lot to get them to that point. Because it's, you know, poets have to say in a few lines what a novelist or short story writer could take paragraphs or pages to say. So it's an illusion. And you work the illusion very well. Yeah. It was such a pleasure. My final question for you is about what are you working on now?
- [41:59]
Donna Goyer
It's been kind of nice. I've been since October when the book came out. I've been doing a lot of readings, which I've really enjoyed because my last book came out during lockdown, so I couldn't really do anything to promote it. And so with this book, it's been really fun to kind of be out in the world with it and share it with people. And. And so I haven't really put any pressure on myself to, you know, start, you know, a project or something new in that respect. So I've just kind of been writing what I've been writing when I've had the time and the inclination to do so. And I'm finding that the things that I'm writing that I think are successful are exploring kind of memory a little bit like, kind of this memory as a. As this. As a landscape or this vast landscape that you can't possibly know every corner of. And so what happens when you go exploring there? It can be dangerous, right? Or you might be changed when you come back from exploring there. So a lot of poems kind of rooted in memory. I've been playing with form in terms of kind of creating my own approaches to these instead of sticking with traditional form, like I did a lot in this book. Um, I've been writing what my mentor, Diana Goetz, would have called things at some point. So I'm not sure what they are. I don't know if they're poems. I don't know if they're prose poems. I don't know if they're flash. I don't know if they're flash essays. And just kind of letting them be for now what they. How they exist on the page and not trying to force them into any kind of box. And I've been kind of fascinated with thinking about memory, so then also thinking about other vast landscapes, so good facts about space and the ocean kind of creeping into my notes and into some of my poems, and so trying to really kind of explode outward in the things that I'm writing and just experiment, which I haven't done in a long time. I've been highly focused on, you know, kind of making sure this collection was. Was cohesive and tight and then being able to promote it. And so we use the word play a lot in this conversation. I'm kind of just playing and seeing where the language takes me and where. Where. Where the writing wants to go on any given day. And it's a really fun place to be.
- [44:28]
Holly Gattery
Thank you so much for joining me and for giving me that update. I mean, I. I too, understand whenever some. I've just put a book out and be like, what are you working on now? I'm like, leave me alone. I don't want to answer that. I'm just existing. But Again, I think no matter what, people who write poetry, even if they're, they're always writing poetry, even if they're, as you insinuated, gathering wool. Like, not, not like creating entire poems, there's little snippets, like me noticing muscular roots on a tree or like, there's just little snippets that are dropping in here and there. And if you put them together eventually or you don't. But the whole point is there's some problems process that's going on at all.
- [45:09]
Donna Goyer
You're collecting. It's necessary work. It's. I think that, you know, I've never been a. Well, I couldn't when I was teaching. Right. But I've never been a person that's been like a. You must write every day or you're not a writer person. Like, no, you know, you, A lot of. There's a lot of time where you're just thinking and collecting. And then when, when you have time, you look at the kind of like a bird sticking things in an asteroid, you look at what you've collected and see, oh, is there anything here that's worthwhile for me to, to work with further.
- [45:40]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, I never write every day. I've had. Oh, my gosh, like, I'm having six books come out in seven years or something, and I've like, two coming out next year. And I do not write every day at all. I, I, at all. Like, so there are days where nothing gets recorded and there are days that lots get recorded. And I'm a. But absolutely not. It's also, you know, that, that, like, illusion of productivity where some of the stuff that's coming out was written 10 years ago.
- [46:07]
Donna Goyer
I was going to say part of that's the publishing process.
- [46:10]
Holly Gattery
Yeah. Like, it's. I'm really not that prolific. I keep telling people, especially when you're working with collections of poems or collections of essays, some of the essays, like, are not, I don't say super old, but they're, they're not. It's not like I've written the last few years. They're much older than that. So it's. I always tell people, no, no, don't. I'm not actually that productive. There are days where I'm just not doing anything. I read every day. I can say that. Like, I. Every single day I'm reading something else, but definitely not writing every day. That sounds exhausting and boring.
- [46:43]
Donna Goyer
Yes, agree.
- [46:44]
Holly Gattery
And I refuse to be bored. I've reached a stage in my life where I'm going to be bored. Doing some stuff I have to do. I'm not going to take the things I love, like writing and reading and make.
- [46:54]
Donna Goyer
Make them boring.
- [46:55]
Holly Gattery
Yep. I refuse to. Donna, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you. Oh, I should have asked. Did you want to say anything but A Hundred Pictures of Honey.
- [47:04]
Donna Goyer
A Hundred Pictures of Honey is a reading series, a virtual reading series that I started in 2021. Again, sort of during. I had just retired and I knew I wanted to do something literary, but we were in the midst of, you know, lockdown. What can I do? And my friend Dustin Brookshire had started a virtual reading series during lockdown that he was running weekly at that point, just as a way for poets to gather. And I'm like, well, I could do that, right? I could get in the zoom and run a reading series. And I really love it. We're in our fifth year. We like there's more than just me running it. It's in its fifth year now. All the former readings are on YouTube. I just usually have three, so sometimes five readers, depending on the month. I used to run it monthly and now I do it six times a year. Just a way for me to kind of give back to the community that's given me so much and provide a platform mostly for small press writers who have difficulty getting the big interviews or college readings or things that agented poets can sometimes get. And just trying to build a little community where everyone is welcome. And it really feeds me a lot. Like, I find a lot of new poets through the series. I always get nervous before it happens, you know, just the logistics of it. And then once I'm hosting it, I just. It just feels so lovely to sit and listen to other people read their work. Right. Instead of everything always being about me trying to book things to read my own work. So I really love it. And like I said, We're. We're on YouTube. All the old readings are on YouTube, so feel free to look them up anytime. It's been really rewarding to do. I really like it.
- [49:02]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, thank you so much. And I love the name, 100 pictures of honey. Like, that's just delicious.
- [49:07]
Donna Goyer
Jeffrey R. A line from Jack Gilbert's the Forgotten Dialect of the Heart, which is one of my favorite poems.
- [49:14]
Holly Gattery
Oh, everybody go look that up and check out Unrivered by Donna Goyer, which you can buy wherever books are bought or borrowed. Published by Sundress 2025. Donna, again, immense gratitude for coming and joining me today on nbn. I hope to have you back again. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [50:12]
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Donna Goyer
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