Iris A. Law is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Notre Dame, a Kundiman Fellow, and the editor of the online literary magazine and blog, Lantern Review. Her first chapbook, Periodicity, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2013.
Her poem "Watching The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I think of my father." appears in Issue Thirty Eight of The Collagist.
Here, Iris A. Law talks with interviewer Amber L. Cook about passing, process, patterns, and the “ebb and flow” of the sea.
1. What made you write this poem, “Watching the Voyageof the Dawn Treader, I think of my father?” Is it a direct response to The Chronicles of Narnia, or did you take more liberty with the poem?
Yes, it’s a response to Lewis, but it’s a bit of a sideways one: the moment that provided the impetus for the poem came not from the books themselves (though they are very near to my heart), but from the experience of sitting in a darkened theater four months after my father had passed away, watching the movie version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In one of the final scenes of the film (spoiler alert!), the main characters (Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, Caspian, and Reepicheep) row to the edge of the world, where they encounter an enormous, glassy blue wall of water that rises up out of the sea, forming an impenetrable border between them and Aslan’s country on the other side. Aslan appears, and tells them that only the mouse Reepicheep may cross through to his country; the rest must wait until it is their time. So Reepicheep passes, alone in his little rowboat, to the other side. Sitting in that theater, I couldn’t help but think of my father also passing, alone, to a country on the other side of our world: how it must have felt for him to arrive in a place that was all at once new and yet familiar; what it must be like for the vestiges of one’s earthly existence to be stripped away from the soul as one crosses into God’s country. And as I watched Caspian and the children bid an emotional goodbye to their friend onscreen, I thought about my own experience of loss. About waiting while someone you love crosses into the next life. About the heartache of being left behind, of not being granted permission to cross with that person into the sun-warm beauty that you know lies on the other side of that wave—not yet.
So the poem is a response to that moment: of watching the blinding majesty of that wall of water rise up out of a twelve-foot screen (we were watching the movie in 3-D), of the sound of the sea filling the cavity of my skull, of gulls crying and of salt water streaming—both across the camera’s frame and down my face—of being transfixed there in the darkness; transported, dazzled, momentarily overwhelmed.
2. You very nicely combine long line and short line free verse throughout the poem. How do you think this variety helps progress the reader through the poem?
I’m not sure that it was a conscious decision to use such a jagged pattern of syntax, but I do know that I was thinking about the rhythm of the sea’s crashing as I was writing—hearing its ebb and flow in my head—so it makes sense that the same sort of tidal motion seems to have found its way into the trajectory of the finished piece’s arc. It’s my hope that the reader would be able to experience the same sense of being wrapped up in the sea’s movement as the speaker; that they would be pushed along by the force of language, riding the current of the action and syntax as the figure of the father crosses through the wave and the poem reaches its moment of resolution.
3. I love the sonics of lines like: “shells and rough silica scrape out the catacombs of/ my ears,/ bathe them in blue oscillations.” Do you often turn to sonics in your poems? How do you respond to sound in your personal writing and in the writing of others?
Sonics are definitely very important to me, both in writing and in reading others’ writing. I grew up playing a lot of music, and my teachers spent a lot of time training me to listen for tone, or the quality of the sound one produces on an instrument—the roundness, resonance of a note, its fatness or transparency. Maybe that’s part of why the sonic quality of words within a poem—its music—is so important to me, as well. I am drawn to—am instinctively moved—by the way that words turn in the ear, on the tongue; the way that breath and phrasing (the silences between sounds) string together to create sense and meaning.
My mother used to read a lot of poems aloud to my brother and me when we were small, and she often had us practice reading them aloud, too. She was always very insistent that we pay attention to our inflection and enunciation, in much the same way that our music teachers trained us to listen to the shapes and tonalities of the phrases we played on our instruments. Once, when she was helping me to memorize Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” for school, she pointed out that consonants in the phrase “cold currents thrid” were imitative of the soft, percussive thudding made by waves beating the body of the wrecked ship in the poem. I remember being really impressed by Hardy’s cleverness at the time. I thought it was amazing that he’d been able to choose words whose pronunciations so perfectly heightened the vividness of his already-evocative imagery; it was the first time I realized that the pleasure of a poem can lie as much in the experience of its soundscape as it can in the visual landscape that it paints for the reader.
Listening is still an integral part of my writing process. I often work out things like pacing and texture aurally, silently “orating” what I’m writing inside my head. When I’m revising, I’ll often stop and read aloud what I’ve written, in order to get a better sense of how the poem’s sonics are working as a whole. I’ve found that I can sometimes “hear” the rough spots in a poem better than I can see them.
4. What’s something you’ve read lately that you’d like to share with the world?
Henry W. Leung’s chapbook, Paradise Hunger (Swan Scythe, 2012). It’s beautiful: bravely vulnerable and rich with layers of myth and memory.
5. Is this poem part of a larger project?
Yes; or at least, I hope it will be. I have been working on a full-length project about my father for a while now. It initially began one way—I was first interested in approaching it through the lens of his passion for science (he was a chemist) and how that inflected our relationship as I grew up—but after he passed away in 2010, it started to become much more about the experience of losing, and later, grieving for him. The middle section of the original manuscript—a series of (mostly) persona poems about historical women in science and their relationships with influential male figures in their lives—has since become a separate chapbook that is being published by Finishing Line Press, and I am now focusing on reworking and reenvisioning the remainder of the project into a new manuscript. This time, I’m working with a lot of epistolary poems, many of them elegies. It’s been difficult and very slow-going, but I know that the process of working my way through the wreckage is necessary for me, both as a writer and as a daughter.