Crystal: What’s your poetry origin story or poetry lineage? 

Amanda: I never really liked reading poetry when I was younger in school. I can look back now and say that was probably a mixture of reading poems that didn’t resonate with me and being told how to read something. I came to poetry after college, which is different from a lot of my peers in the program [MFA at Ohio State]. 

The first workshop I went to was The Home School. It’s an interdisciplinary type of workshop where we had visual art in the morning followed by generative workshops, which was really up my alley in terms of thinking about the intersection of different arts. After that, I spent some time writing on my own and teaching myself as much as I could about a more formal academic setting before coming to Ohio State and just devoting three years to hopefully making this first book. 

Crystal: Oh wonderful! Are you also a visual artist? 

Amanda: I don’t know if I can claim to be a visual artist, but I do make visual art.

Crystal: Give yourself the credit! 

Amanda: [Laughs] Yeah, I mean, I grew up trying every sort of art expression and that’s really important to me — even if I’m not currently making it or practicing an art form myself, I care to spend time near it with other makers of different mediums. 

Crystal: I’m interested in that, too, because your poem “Boatsong / Viljandi Paadimees” is so visual: the poem is connected by two separate parts, in a contrapuntal form. I’m thinking of the way visual art, even spacing, can inform language. 

I absolutely love how this poem is working, literally and figuratively, with intergenerational connection and disconnection, and fragmentary spaces. The way you utilize the em dashes and columns in the poem feels relevant to this idea of reaching, or reaching toward, or reaching out. Of course, you also include Estonian language. I’m curious — how do you view the Estonian language in terms of this visual space of reaching out? 

Amanda: During the Soviet invasion, my grandfather was on the KGB list, and my grandparents needed to flee Estonia. Like a lot of other families separated by wars, I have an uncle, who has since passed, who grew up in Soviet-occupied Estonia, while my mom and her sister grew up in the States. And so there’s always been some degree of reaching toward, or I almost imagine some limb that extends across countries. I feel it here. I know my mom feels that way, and so does my aunt. The amount of Estonian I know is and was contingent upon what my mom taught me. Music is very important in my family, and a lot of what my mom taught me came through songs. It’s also fragmentary, or made up of terms of endearment, or talking about someone in front of them because most people here don’t speak Estonian. I’m also interested in that kind of yearning in other people’s art, too, so I think it’s probably why my Estonian heritage is something that I’m trying to investigate from different vantage points. 

Crystal: I love what you said about a limb that reaches across countries. How would you describe the limb? 

Amanda: I don’t know! That’s great. I guess I picture it as more of an energy. But I’m from California, so I can say things like that [laughs]. Or like a magnetic tug. I like what you said about reaching because the gerund suggests its ongoingness. It’s also a homesickness for a place I can’t claim to be my home. Even invisible, the feeling is still there. Some of my cousins live in Estonia, and because of the separation, age-wise, it’s all kind of confusing. For example, one of my cousins is the age that someone might think of as my uncle. There’s the sadness of being far apart and the sadness of growing up in very different environments. And, at the same time, so much love, even across the distance. 

Crystal: Where did this poem originate from? A memory, an image, a feeling?

Amanda: It definitely comes from this one specific moment when I was back in California. The poem starts “My mother plays a YouTube video” and at first I was like Wow, cool mom! You know, thanks for sharing this! But also, what does it mean for her to sit in California watching a group of people singing on their way to a song festival in Estonia? Luckily, we had gotten to visit right before the pandemic, but she’s an emotive, deep-feeling person and shows her emotions. In my memory, I typically see her engaging with these songs in tears. I am someone who is so uncomfortable showing that to another person, even if that’s what I actually would want. Especially if someone else is having that feeling. My go-to is to just be there with them and hold space. But for her, showing this video also transported my mother into her own memories. And so, by proxy, I got to live in the fantasy of spending time with her mother, my vanaema, who I had very little time with. You’ve probably picked up that I’m hyper-nostalgic and sensitive. I’m also just interested in how memory, but also music, can be a means of spending time with people who aren’t here anymore. 

Crystal: There’s so much going on in this poem that feels so true to this sense of nostalgia that you’re expressing, especially as a means of spending time with those who aren’t physically present. I’m thinking, too, about the direct address to your vanaema, and the way that you’re using the many voices in this poem to both call out to and amplify the Estonian language. 

Amanda: Thank you for saying that. It’s easy for me to sit here and say that was my hope while writing it, but this was one of those poems where I sat down, and it was like a download. I had to ride the wave of it while I was writing. And in that process, it just innately meant multiple voices were necessary. I think about that in connection to the three generations present in the poem, but also at the song festival. It’s this huge choir, so there’s this idea of many voices acting as one, but made up of individuals. I like dialogue in poetry because that’s often how I store memory — a word that was said to me, even if it might not be the exact word someone said. The experience becomes less important factually because the emotional narrative is what I’m more interested in. 

Crystal: I’m thinking about a song and a song festival as a polyphonic form — the title of your poem is “Boatsong / Vilandji Paadimees.” Can you tell me more about this song’s significance? Is there context that can’t be translated into English? 

Amanda: It is both a folk song and a love song. The literal translation of “Viljandi Paadimees” would be Boatman from Viljandi, but because the poem strays from the song’s narrative, the title does too. In many ways, it’s a mistranslation. The narrative is certainly of a heteronormative, gender-binary. When I think about that element as a queer woman, it does makes me sad that it’s another cultural aspect I’m not participating in. Not that the song’s story is what I want for myself — I love my partner — but it’s a cultural reference point that I’m not aligning with. So many of the songs that I did grow up listening to took on those folktale tropes of only one kind of love — I don’t know, show me a queer folktale that was written long ago. I’m sure they’re out there! The parts of the song that resonate with me come from the characters’ tender love for one another, the passage of time, and the power of remembering.

Crystal: Knowing more about your inspiration and the context for this title makes this poem’s sense of disconnection — intergenerational, geographically — so multifaceted. I’m thinking about, too, the temporal distance that comes between writing a thing and publishing a thing, and I think oftentimes it allows for so much reflection (or mortification that it’s a totally different type of piece than you’re writing now [laughs]). So I’m curious — what are you working on now? Is it interlocked with these themes, or has your work bridged somewhere else?

Amanda: Recently, I’ve been editing what I hope to publish as my first collection, and so yes, there’s been a lot of revision. Often, that means deconstructing a poem from the constraints of linear time, or amping up linguistic surprises. Some of my newer poems in progress look more directly at our current climate crisis, promises made by companies driven by profit, and consider ecocide’s relationship to exile. I’ve also been interested in phenomena in the natural world and how these events or marvels might speak to a different type of spirituality. 

I was so taken by [2022 Fugue contest judge] Kimberly Grey’s response. It’s almost unnerving to feel so seen by someone that I’ve never met. Her words are beyond generous and help me give meaning to the poem beyond my experience writing it. Making this poem was sort of an experiment. I wanted to try writing a contrapuntal, which was exciting and new to me, and maybe that’s a form I’d like to come back to eventually, knowing what bumps I hit in this process and how I might approach this form differently in the future. However, I am still very much interested in repetition and use it a lot in my writing for different reasons. One thing I love about poetry is its ability to exist visually on the page as well as performatively. It asks a reader to participate. In short, I am still writing about my mom, and her mom, and probably always will be. 

Crystal: Are you still thinking about the communal, or polyphonic, or dialogic spaces that we inhabit? 

Amanda: I appreciate you asking that, because it’s not something I’ve been entirely aware of in my work. Yes, of course, the poem’s form addresses the presence of multiple voices, but perhaps on a more subconscious level, all of my work does. I am made up of the voices of many people — my family, my ancestors, the musicians I listen to, the postal worker I see each day, my students, even voices I don’t agree with. I wonder if there’s a way of thinking about dialogue, about conversation as a type of collaboration, and if not, then certainly an influence on my poetics. I like that eavesdropping, listening, and remembering are slippery and must be caught by the ear quickly. And that mishearing or misunderstanding might also tell me something about what the poem is saying or needs to say. 

Crystal: I’m so interested in this idea because, for me, growing up as one of five children, my spaces were always communal. I think that’s where my curiosity comes from. I felt so very seen in this poem in those ways. But it’s hard, too, to write about people who are not yourself, who are your family, or just those you share breathing and speaking space with. 

Amanda: I’m so glad you brought up this quandary of ethics. It’s something I really struggle with, too. I wonder about the impact of me telling a story that isn’t directly mine, but was inherited or passed down, and is part of me but is not my lived experience. I didn’t live through war and its violences, its silences, and yet it sits somewhere in me still. I try to write from experience, but I know that not all of my poems are doing that. There are the poems that I worry about who they might hurt, despite that not being their intention but being their consequence. I certainly don’t like being spoken for. Sometimes, it’s different looking at one poem versus a collection. For example, I write about Vanaema a lot, and it’s romanticized the way that I know her. She passed away when I was four. But she really stays with me, and I’m sure that my representation is not going to be the same as my mom’s or my aunt’s full narrative of her. There’s not an end to this sentence… 

Crystal: You say that so eloquently, and you write into that silence so beautifully, I’m thinking of what Ilya Kaminsky calls “a silence that moves us to speak.” 

Amanda: Kaminsky is one of my favorite poets and I could listen to him talk about poetics forever. Part of that is because of the way he considers an “emotional truth,” and you can feel that in his readings. The silence that you’re referring to makes me think of The Singing Revolution in Estonia, which was a nonviolent protest against the Soviet occupation of the Baltics. It was an act of resilience which ultimately led to Estonian independence. There is a mixture of awe and urgency in the song “Mu isamaa on Minu arm,” which was sung in resistance, and I was lucky to experience its different effects on myself as an audience member, its effects on my Estonian-American family, strangers, performers, and even the young children playing tag behind the benches at Laulupidu, the Song Festival, in 2019. I think this is an example of the necessity of art: a spirit that can’t be quantified or monetized, or even articulated entirely, but a force that refuses to be ignored or erased.  

Crystal: This is somewhat of a shift, but I’m also curious about you as an editor, and as a person who submits to contests and journals. What’s your relationship to submitting? What do you look for as an editor? As a submitter? Is there overlap? 

Amanda: I’m relatively new to sending my work out. I think the first year, I was trying to learn as much as I could about different journals. I have friends that talk about the tone, or voice, of a journal, but I’m really interested in journals like Fugue that have a large range of voices. I think Fugue is pretty amazing in that, well, you’ve been in contact with me. There’s a genuine human connection, and that energy of collaboration has always been attractive to me. And in terms of a judge, I do think connecting with a judge’s work is the first and foremost point of interest. And then also, there’s this fascinating element of chance. I don’t know what anyone is going to like. In terms of editing, I don’t think I’ve really paused to think about that. I really appreciate that question because it puts agency back in the writer’s chair. I admire editors for the many hats that they wear. Precision is not a gift that I have, so I hope the editors that I work with are okay with that and open to living in some abstraction. While I’ve served as The Journal’s Poetry Editor, I’ve tried to meet each poem with openness and intrigue. I love to be surprised and to learn, and we are fortunate at The Journal because that happens often. Submitting can feel so vulnerable, and I’m grateful to the poets who share their art with us.

Crystal: Is there anything that you want to communicate to the reader that you feel like you haven’t already about this piece that feels pertinent? Or is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you wanted to talk about as a writer? 

Amanda: I’m really struck by how my mind went blank when you offered that question to me. It’s very thoughtful, thank you. I guess I’d be interested in offering that this poem is a place to spend time in the in-between. There isn’t a place to land, and the rotations and foldings of time and other people’s voices can be a place to rest or pause, unsolved. It falls out of language, or time, or music. I’m also saying this to remind myself that not every poem has to slam the door shut at the end or come to a huge resolution — it can end in the same dizzy nature that it began.