Hannah Brooks-Motl on Utopia, the Pastoral, and Process in Her Book Earth

Poet Emily Hunt spoke with Hannah Brooks-Motl—author of Earth, from The Song Cave—on Zoom before the pandemic, before "video conferencing became a primary, if not compulsory, means of communication," as Hunt observes at The Believer Logger. Discussing the manuscript's process, Brooks-Motl says, "I went back and thought about the poems not as isolated individual units, but as things that were in conversation with one another through something that might be like a content, but was also much more tonal—certain colors or moods or rhythms. I remade the book according to these principles." More:

BLVR: I definitely see this in your work. Your description makes me think of Earth’s epigraph: “Then must be realized no harmony but a system of discrepancies beautiful as the rotted peach.”

HBM: That quote is from Marguerite Young’s first prose book, Angel in the Forest. She started as a poet and then she wrote this historiography of two utopian communities that had been founded in the same town in Indiana, called New Harmony.

BLVR: Oh wow, New Harmony! I love that name.

HBM: It’s an amazing book. All of Young’s work is obsessed with utopia and our failures to achieve utopia. That quote includes the idea of harmony, but also of discrepancy, which is really fundamental, I think, to a lot of the poems in Earth. Things can hang together, but also not be the same, or be jarring. The idea is that you’re constantly oscillating between these attitudes and positions. In rethinking the book, I was working towards a place where things made sense, but were also dissonant, and that dissonance was part of the sense they were making.

BLVR: Right. You mentioned oscillation. I feel that flexibility in your poems. They don’t necessarily land as discrete individuals and stay put or static—they’re all moving in this kind of … not necessarily storm, but system, together.

HBM: I like the feeling that you can wander around in poems and that poems are capable of wandering around in you...

Continue wandering at The Believer Logger.