A Conversation with Austin Segrest

In which TMR intern Amelia Burgess talks to former TMR poetry editor Austin Segrest about his new book of poetry, GROOM.

What inspired Groom? Did you draw inspiration from past projects in any way, or was this entirely new? Could you describe the process of composing the book?

I started Groom early in 2019 on a 7-month poetry fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Winter isolation and months of free time out on the tip of the Cape yielded poem after poem about a foundational and highly problematic relationship that I had with an older man when I was growing up in Alabama. The first poem I wrote, “Initiation,” was featured as a Poem of the Week in TMR (May 16, 2022). “Initiation” was an attempt to explain that relationship. Specifically, some guests at my cottage in Ptown were curious what my parents thought of me spending so much time with an older man when I was a teenager. The unstinted support and encouragement of a weekly poetry workshop of fellow FAWC poets Sara Martin, Gabe Kruis, Laura Neal, Philip Matthews, and Sophia Starmack was key to generating those poems. I’ve never written poems as quickly as I did the last four months of that residency, and I doubt I ever will again.

How did you approach writing a poetry book with a narrative woven through? What challenges did you face in writing a book where the poems serve that narrative while simultaneously maintaining their distinction as stand-alone poems?

I didn’t think about it one way or the other, and I think that was to my advantage. I didn’t think about the ways that the book was politically timely or theoretically positioned or part of a larger conversation. In retrospect, I can see that I was revisiting and reckoning with adolescent and teenage experiences from the vantage of middle age—from roughly the same age that older man was when he drew me into his orbit. Twenty-five years after the fact, I was able to see—or the poems were able to show me—what he was up to. In retrospect, I can see that the poems in Groom alternate between a narrative and what one reader called an “arch” lyrical mode. All I knew at the time I was writing the poems, however, was that months of honing a routine that balanced reading, drafting, walking, editing, and workshopping had come to heart-shaking fruition.

What does narrative mean? How is it different from descriptive poetry? From “accessible” poetry? Twenty-first century poetry has contracted a deep bias against storytelling (as it has against meter and rhyme). While pundits might cite political concerns (the hegemony of narrative, the fascism of form, the state surveillance of craft), I think there’s just as good a case to be made that these biases against fundamental aspects of poetry are the result of classism.

That said, I can think of two challenges with a central narrative: 1) containing the complexity of character and plot, and 2) a perceived/presumed need to know the story in order to “get” the poem. My plot is basic. It has a limited number of characters. In fact, it is largely a character, or rather, a relationship, study. What it lacks in characters and plot points it makes up for in emotional complexity. That is to say, ambivalence.

Hip poets worry about a poem being too “pedestrian,” straight-forward, or “on-the-nose.” Just as well, my mode is as clear as possible because what I’m depicting is fraught with confusion, secrecy, deception, and denial.

Do you have a favorite poem in this collection, or one that stands out to you as being the linchpin? If so, what significance does it hold for you?

I’ve had a great experience working with my press, Unbound Edition. Poetry editor Peter Campion, a poet-critic I’ve long admired, has been a dream editor. When I showed him my manuscript, he gave me many suggestions, including his hunch that there was another present-tense poem to write. At that point, I hadn’t worked on the book in about a year and felt confident that it was finished. But, if only to prove to myself that I was right, I dutifully complied. After a few false starts, “Take Back the Night” took shape—a crucial, major poem in the collection. Once again, Peter was right!

What do the different sections of the book represent to you? How did you mean for them to be interpreted by the reader?

I tend to have a micro-focus as a writer; I struggle with bigger-picture sequencing (longer poems are hard enough!). For Groom, I contracted with the legendary Jen Barber to help me order the book (as it happens, she published one of my first poems in Salamander back in 2006 or so). Jen’s order, a modification of something I had thrown together, built, in her view, toward a greater maturity of perspective. The sections themselves, that there are three—I think it’s pretty arbitrary/conventional. My favorite thing about the sections are Danny Ceballos’s brilliant bamboo-and-ink drawings.

Could you identify examples of poetry outside your own that you would call great? If so, what makes it great to you? How do you incorporate these qualities into your own writing to aspire to crafting great work?

These days, declarations of greatness get thrown around a lot. Everything is great. Except for what everyone used to say was great.

Groom engages with, in my opinion, great poetry by a number of 17^th century British poets, including Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell. This is an area of scholarly interest; I teach classes on both Donne and Milton, for example.

In the middle of my life, great poetry feels mostly like a matter of the vicissitudes of visibility and personal taste. I think I know what’s great; feeling like the top of my head has been lifted off, the spontaneous free play of the imagination—it feels universal, objective. But is it? Every famous great poet drags around a shadow school of unknown poets who can write circles around them.

I would classify very few poets as great. I can’t get through most poetry collections.

There is no key to writing a good poem. Other than reading, humility, persistence, luck… Elizabeth Bishop said she looked for accuracy, mystery, and spontaneity.

Easier said than done!