“For Today:” A Conversation With Poet Carolyn Hembree
Carolyn Hembree at Napoleon House in the French Quarter
February 2024The award-winning poet talks about her new book, a vivid and evocative collection that explores the power of memory and the complex web of family ties.
– by Skye Jackson
photographs by Ellis Anderson“I think that I have a false memory of Carolyn Hembree,” I said, at the end of last year. I was speaking to a former poetry teacher from my days at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), Louisiana’s premiere conservatory for young artists. My former teacher furrowed his brow and looked at me curiously.
“How so?” he asked, taking a sip of his coffee, “tell me more.”
We were at Mojo’s Coffee shop, uptown; sitting next to a large window with the view of a gentrified boutique hotel that had once been a home for teenage unwed mothers. The building glowed with the look of new money but also beckoned to me with faint whispers of old pain.
“Sometimes I think I remember her from the NOCCA days,” I said, smiling and glancing back towards him. “I have this image of her sitting at the head of our workshop table, reading poems to my young classmates and me. I remember her hair and her voice, so distinctive and resonant, cutting through the space. This would have been before Katrina,” I told him.
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“That’s no false memory,” he said, laughing, “She did come to your class. We asked her to. She had just arrived in New Orleans then.”
Later that day, as I sat down to read Carolyn’s new book, For Today, it dawned on me that I’ve known her for about nineteen years of my life as a poet. In fact, when I moved back to New Orleans to attend graduate school, she guided me through the rigors of the program, shaping my voice, introducing me to other artists and poets whose work would become instrumental in my own journey, and helping me develop my own writing practice.
Poets Skye Jackson and Carolyn Hembree at the famous poetry case at Faulkner House Books in the French Quarter
Carolyn Hembree is as decorated a writer as she is prolific. She has won the Trio Award, and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. She has received the 2016-1017 Atlas Grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents as well as grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. She’s currently an associate professor at the University of New Orleans M.F.A. Creative Writing program.
So it comes as no surprise that her new book, For Today, is a gorgeous and sprawling collection of poetry that explores the pull of motherhood, place, memory, and a complex web of familial ties in a dazzling offering of exciting poetic forms. The book revolves around one main speaker, a woman tasked not only with caring for her ailing mother but nurturing her young daughter as well.
Readers also meet the specter of the poet’s larger-than-life father whose emotional presence continues to simultaneously haunt and inspire Hembree on her own artistic journey. Throughout, the city of New Orleans provides us with a backdrop to these charged scenes, imbuing the collection with vibrancy, pain and the indelible mark left on all those brave enough not only to live within the city but to write within it as well.
For Today transports us to another place and time and asks us to sit still and perceive it all. In this collection, the writer gives us fire preserved as though it were in amber with poems that reveal, delight, and always, teach.
I sat down with Carolyn Hembree to discuss For Today, her poetic practice, and her inspirations as she revealed why “writing the poem is salvation.”
Skye Jackson: Hands down, one of my favorite aspects of this collection is the way it unfolds as this evocative ode to the vibrant ecosystem that is Uptown, New Orleans. As I read the poems, I could see streets, buildings, homes and businesses lushly given life and breath here. The neighborhood figures so prominently, acting almost as another character in the work. Considering this, what would you say is the role of place in your work?
For Today by Carolyn Hembree, published by LSU Press, January 2024. Click to order from LSU Press
Carolyn Hembree: Place is everything. The Gulf South, New Orleans, our damaged yet magnificent ecosystem provoked me to write the book. Not surprisingly maybe, place provoked my two previous collections. We try to change as artists, but there it is. Of course, I feed on my lived experience and my fantasy life—both touched by friends, neighbors, family.
When I returned to the city the October 5 after Katrina, I remember not feeling the place-ness so much. There were practically no children, few women—and where were the birds? It felt more like a location, an emptied venue than place, my place, your place, ours.
Jackson: In the book, I noticed that the poems are consistently linked by their endings and beginnings. For me, it seems representative of the power of lineage, which strikes me as one of the most resonant themes of the collection, presented to the reader in startling and gorgeous ways. I appreciated how this is manifested in the speaker’s relationship to her mother, father and eventually her daughter. Why was it important for you to connect the poems in this way?
Hembree: I appreciate this reading of book arrangement and theme. Though I started the project in 2014, I didn't consider poem order, sections, epigraphs, or any of the architecture until Summer 2022 when I attended a Twisted Run Retreat writers residency in Vancleave, Mississippi. Aside from daily walks, I locked myself in a tiny cabin named Bishop and covered the counters, stairs, bed, floor, every surface with pieces I was auditioning for the manuscript. (I didn't bring any devices so as not to be distracted by the internet.)
By the third day of my residency, I felt that the sonnet crown, an elegy for the speaker's father who died when she was six months pregnant, should open the manuscript and that the long poem should end it.
Of course, I rearranged the pages a zillion ways to try to get that static electricity between the end of a poem and the beginning of the next one. I thought most about the sections—how much asymmetry I could manage without wrecking the thing. Oh, there was a lot of tinkering—I'm a tinkerer—to build the motifs, create consistency. Many of the poems I brought to Mississippi didn't make their way into the final manuscript.
Jackson: You write, “Now I am your gun poem. I won’t be put down.” We see the speaker referring to the gun poem as “composed decades / before to keep from offing yourself – .” It has helped the father to survive. In this way, we see the speaker acknowledging the power of poetry to keep those we love alive, sustain ourselves and to impart some sense of agency within our own lives. What is your opinion of that idea? And the role that poetry plays (or should play) within our everyday lives and existence?
Hembree: Your description of how poetry can save us is perfectly expressed. The speaker's father composes and recites his poem as a stay against his own suicide, which is an extreme and literal interpretation of the idea that poetry saves lives – an idea I subscribe to. After I started writing poems, I wanted to die more slowly so that I could have more time to write.
As for the larger world, I think the state ELA curriculum should expose young children to the likes of Agha Shahid Ali, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Toi Derricotte, Joy Harjo, and Naomi Shihab Nye. There are plenty of works by these writers that are age-appropriate, thrilling, and teachable. It is fine to have dead poets in the curriculum but not dead poems.
Jackson: I find myself returning to the lines, “Did he know I would, one day, need poetry & doubt? / Or did he teach me to need them? / Or is poetry a / scintilla of doubt?” Here, you present three deliciously unanswerable questions; ones that undoubtedly haunt our speaker. Why do you think, as the speaker wonders, that we need doubt? Both as poets and also as human beings who exist on this planet?
Hembree: Thank you for telling me what calls to you. The wonderful poet Henk Rossouw pointed to the same lines. For me, doubt, skepticism, reluctance, and ambivalence are part of being awake in private and public space. To engage deeply with others through writing, reading, or speech, we have to doubt ourselves—at least I do.
When I was young, I would try to punch through doubt in part because I felt menaced by that horrible truism that the writer must silence her inner critic. Why? Isn't the inner critic part of how we engage with the world, language, the reader, creation, and revision?
Not too sexy nowadays, but I'm more of Elizabeth Bishop's ilk—slow, methodical—when it comes to writing. I love revision—the palimpsest that emerges, how it must carry the poet's doubt and hubris. Revision allows me to feel that I am inside the poem breathing through its skin.
Carolyn Hembree at Napoleon House in the French Quarter, February 2024
Jackson: Another aspect that stood out for me was the way that the cyclical nature of motherhood is addressed in the collection, particularly in the poem, “La Dictée.” Here, our speaker exists at a unique vantage point: she watches her aging mother deteriorate as she helps her own child to develop, play and grow. Did you find it challenging to negotiate between these different reflections and standpoints of motherhood? Was it painful? Or did you find it thrilling?
Hembree: Writing my two previous books felt like lugging a wet sack of lead fishing weights up a seventy-degree slope. A "gift poem," as I've heard writers call them, "La Dictée," came out whole after supper one evening. I just sat down and wrote it. Later, my friends and the editors of Beloit Poetry Journal where the poem first appeared helped me edit the poem.
To answer your question more directly, the lived experience has been a bitch. Writing the poem is salvation.
Jackson: There are different forms, so beautifully rendered, in this body of work. There are sonnets and haikus (to name a few) that guide us through the collection. How did you decide which forms you wanted to focus on and highlight here?
Hembree: The villanelle is my favorite form, but only lonesome "La Dictée" survived my cuts. The sonnet is a go-to revision form for me with the exception of the sonnet crown, which started in blank verse and as a crown.
As for the haiku, I wrote those as a kind of mental break from the long poem. As a long-form poet, the haiku humbles me, so only a fraction of those I initially wrote made it into the book. I also cut a ghazal, some free verse, a few prose poems.
Jackson: The beginnings of the sprawling and evocative title poem, “For Today,” are absolutely astounding and forced me to think not only about the intricacies of the work itself but also the process and practice of writing poetry.
You write, “[mental note: haiku-a-day / garden wall lizards / rubescent throats throbbing / turf? love? both? / rubescent? cerise? carmine?]”
I love this internal line of questioning…this endless search for the perfect word. It is fascinating, in that moment, to witness the speaker thinking her way through the possibilities of what the poem could be. What is your process for mentally walking yourself through the composition of a poem? Does it mirror that of your speaker in For Today?
Hembree: In her memoir Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong includes an excerpt from a letter Theresa Hak Kyung Cha wrote after completing Dictee: "It is hard to say what I feel, how I feel, except that I feel freed, and I also feel naked; the manuscript never left my body physically ..." (153). It made me feel less weird to read that one of my favorite writers, one of the greats, did that too.
At a certain point, I know I have to carry the work on me like a baby. Though highly constructed, the meta thread of the book mimicked my creative process in that I took notes as I walked the neighborhood and so on. When I received feedback from my readers that I couldn't figure out how to fix, I jotted the notes in the poem's margins.
For example, a friend said that my allusion, "Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?" (the first line of Rilke's Duino Elegies), is overused. Of course, but I was too deep in the writing to see anything! Anyhow, I jotted down the note next to the line in my poem.
At some point, I started incorporating my marginalia into the motif of "mental notes" that runs through the long title poem. Thus, next to the Rilke line is the note, "line played out." I did something like this in a number of places. Maybe it was cheating.
For Today can be found in the French Quarter at Faulkner House Books
Jackson: As a former (and most would argue forever) student of yours, I’m always curious about your influences. Which poets were you reading as you wrote this book?
Hembree: Duino Elegies and Alphabet obsessed me. Here are the books I reread the most: C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining and One with Others, James Schuyler's Morning of the Poem, Charles Wright's Zone Journals, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, and George Oppen's Of Being Numerous. I also listened to recordings of The Odyssey for a year or so. But you're my teacher too now.
Jackson: When and where can readers pick up a copy of For Today? And do you have any readings coming up that folks can plan to attend to celebrate you and the work?
Hembree: Thank you for asking. Signed copies of For Today are available at Blue Cypress Books; they can mail them out too. LSU Press's website also has the book as a paperback and an e-book. On March 3, I'll read at Octavia Books with Peter Cooley for the launch of his new book. On March 8, I'll read at Bar Redux at 8 pm with Dylan Krieger to celebrate her new book. Thanks to Adrian Van Young, I'll be part of a panel with him, Anya Groner and Alex Jennings at the Tennessee Williams Festival on March 23.
Carolyn Hembree’s upcoming appearances in New Orleans
Tuesday, Feb 20, 6pm -7:30pm: Reading and Conversation with Karisma Price, Ian Gallagher Zelazny Creative Writers Series, Tulane University Diboll Gallery
Sunday, March 3, 2pm -3:30pm: Reading with Peter Cooley, Octavia Books
Friday, March 8, 8pm - 10pm: Reading with Dylan Krieger, Bar Redux
Saturday, March 23, 1pm - 2:15pm: Tennessee Williams Festival, "Writing Southern Gothic in Modern New Orleans" literary discussion with Anya Groner, Alex Jennings, Adrian Van Young, and Brad Richard (moderator), Hotel Monteleone
For Today can be found locally at Blue Cypress Books, Octavia Books, Crescent City Books, and Faulkner House Books. You may also order through LSU Press.
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