Claire Wahmanholm received her BA from UW-Madison, her MFA from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD from the University of Utah. Her chapbook, Night Vision, won the 2017 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest. Her debut full-length collection, Wilder, won the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her second collection, Redmouth, was published by Tinderbox Editions in 2019. Of Redmouth, Victoria Chang writes, "I don't know many poets today who can write such beauty into such devastation." Claire lives and teaches in the Twin Cities, and you can follow her on Twitter at @cwahmanholm.

Tom Simpson: As it pens elegy and navigates landscapes of grief and sorrow, Redmouth immerses itself in classical myth and tragedy. How did the pastoral poems of the ancient world become touchstones for you?

Claire Wahmanholm: It was certainly unexpected—I had never drawn significant inspiration from Classical texts before. My introduction to them came through the lens of elegy, which is my main jam, and was one of the focuses of my doctoral reading year. Someone on my committee must have suggested I put them on my reading list, and I totally fell in love with them. I was (am!) especially interested in the way that grief is articulated as literal transformation: either as a shedding of a previous body or state of being or as an upheaval of landscape. The way trauma barrels past metaphor and punches holes in reality. I’m into that surrealism, things becoming unglued from their proper places and popping up where they don’t belong. My favorite passage of Idyll 1 is “Bear violets now, you bramble-bushes, and thorntrees,/ Let the world turn cross-natured, since Daphnis dies./ Let the prickly juniper bloom with soft narcissus,/ The pine be weighed with pears. Let the stag hunt the hounds,/ Let the nightingale attend to the screech-owl’s cries.” (I like it so much that I use it as an epigraph for another poem). Redmouth features a lot of these moments of metamorphosis.

TS: In Redmouth you intermittently employ erasure—of the poems of Virgil and Theocritus—so powerfully. Tell us a bit about how that vision and strategy emerged in your poetic process, and tell us a bit about your experimentation with a variety of forms in the collection.

CW: It’s funny: I got into erasure as a result of being post-partum with my first kiddo and not being able to use both hands to write. But I found that I could do erasures with one hand while holding a kid with the other. I also wonder whether childbirth made erasure especially compelling—the notion of carving a smaller text out of a larger body, which then stands on its own but is always somehow tethered to the original even as it goes on its own adventures in the world. This maybe helps explain my own relationship to erasure, which is deliberately non-antagonistic. Erasure is often used to condemn or undermine a source text, and it’s well-suited for this, but doing erasures means immersing myself pretty deeply in the source, and I want to reserve that energy for texts I love and admire. Obviously, I hope my erasures still have interesting conversations with their sources, even if the relationship isn’t so confrontational.

I think the metaphors of parent/child are pretty intuitive when it comes to erasures, but I’ve also found myself thinking about my own life as a parent in these terms. That is, becoming a parent hasn’t fundamentally changed who I am—it has only allowed certain aspects of myself to recede or become more visible. The visible things had always been there, they’re just more legible, and the grayed-out things are still part of my text even though they aren’t as urgent right now.

Overall, I'm a deep lover of forms and often grapple amicably with restriction. Rhyme schemes are my favorite formal element, and several poems in Redmouth are written in a scheme that I haven’t (yet?) seen elsewhere—where the final two words of a line will rhyme (sometimes exactly, but usually slantwise). Part of the fun of a rhyme scheme is that you’re supposed to be able to develop a sense of when the next rhyme will fall. I found that doubling up the end rhymes subverts that predictability in a fun way. Add to that the fact that the line lengths in those poems are highly variable, and you get a pretty tottery product. But any pleasure lost is recouped by getting twice as many rhymes as you normally would! At least that’s my elevator pitch.

TS: How do teaching and writing interweave in your life? Do they nourish each other? Do they war?

CW: It really depends on what I’m teaching—if I’m teaching a literature class, I find I can’t write at the same time. Those modes are separate enough in my brain that crossing between them takes pretty significant time and effort (neither of which I have space for during the school year). So in those circumstances, I generally have to wait until the summer to get any real writing done.

But if I’m teaching creative writing, it’s much easier for me to work alongside that. I never teach the same syllabus twice, which means I’m always scouting for new things to bring into the classroom. Teaching keeps me on my toes in that way. I want my students to have as broad a picture of poetry as possible, so I always bring in modes or genres that I haven’t historically responded to. Just because I don’t personally like a poem doesn’t mean it’s not good or worth teaching. Once I tried to make a syllabus out of my favorite poems because I was like, wouldn’t it be great to just teach poems I love all semester?? And after reading the syllabus through I was like, these are just fifty versions of the same poem lol NEVER MIND. Maybe other folks have broader tastes than I do and could pull this off, but I know my limitations. But I obviously still teach poems that I know and love, and even this takes on a new dimension when I share them with my students. Their attention is often drawn by other elements than mine is, which expands my appreciation. Occasionally I’ll also do the assignments alongside my students (it only seems fair).

Anyway, all the work that goes into putting a creative writing class together is deeply enriching to my own writing. I’d love to create a situation where I’m teaching all creative writing all the time (wouldn’t we all?), but I haven’t been able to work that out yet.

TS: What are you devoting yourself to this year? Whose art, whose voices, whose music sustains you?

CW: Especially as I head back into the classroom after my maternity leave, I’m really planning on being sustained by the writers I teach. This semester I’m teaching poems by Natalie Shapero, Chen Chen, Traci Brimhall, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ada Limón, Meg Day, Su Hwang, Nikki Wallschlaeger (and others others others!). I’m so grateful to these writers for their words and for giving my students such a rich introduction to poetry—it makes going to work a total delight. And of course, the other half of the equation is the students themselves, and for real, I have been so charmed by the work my poetry students have been doing this semester. These high schoolers are writing poems about mental health, the environment, police brutality; they are so deeply aware that the world they've been given is bullshit, and they are not having it. At the same time, they're approaching each other's work with such grace and rigor and good faith. I've been away from that energy for the last nine months, and I'm so grateful to be reconnecting with it right now. It really is a sustaining force.