TtD supplement #301 : seven questions for Hannah Brooks-Motl

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Her sequence “A chooser” appears in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “A chooser.”

A: An extended lyric that meditates on the choosingness that is involved in any making. This not that. Those things here. The poem tries to take the non-neutral activity of selection—the condition of being “a chooser”—seriously but also lightly. Which words are large? How large? Those words, really? Quotidian events witnessed on walks through degraded natural vital northeastern US New England locations: why this now here? Aesthetic, actual, political, metaphysical stuff like that. I wrote it during a period when most of my poems were “about” the earthy transcendence and transaction that is poetry and making poems from, in, and across sites of the everyday and the more-special-than.

Q: What prompted this particular shift?

A: You know, I think actually “A chooser” is a poem just before a shift? It’s got some similar architecture to my book Ultraviolet of the Genuine and was in fact written after I’d finished that manuscript. So it is kind of a tail-end poem. Bottom of full exhale. Natural pause of a particular thought or style of thinking that had sustained a particular moment, an ars poetica moment, in which constellating the fallen modes, disgraced objects, sullen affects became my primary objective as it seemed to me this was what poetry was good for, a kind of recuperation. In this way the big words might be read as jokey and desperate—a joke about how desperate are the poem’s efforts?  

Q: Where are you currently, then? Mid-shift, or further along? What is that process looking like?

A: I am currently more interested in the left margin than I’ve been in a while. Doing word by word writing as opposed to phrasal movements that want space, choreography. I get up very early to write, that’s still the same, but now the work seems (to me) harder, it wants to move faster, get clipped at strange angles, it feels more obdurate—almost punishing. One way to describe this might be “a fury.”

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: Amelia Rosselli, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Anna Mendelssohn; I’ve been reading around in outsider psychology from the 1960s—R.D. Laing mostly. He might be there too.

Q: Why outsider psychology? And how do you see it, if at all, affecting the poems?

A: The psychology is for another project (prose) but of course it jumps the prose/poetry barrier. Laing is often mislabeled an “anti-psychologist,” accused, for example, of saying schizophrenia was caused by family of origin. While he was deeply suspicious of medical diagnoses that concerned only behavior and then-emerging-now-prevailing pharmacopsychiatry, he bitterly proclaimed until the end that he had not endorsed that view. However, the social, cultural, phenomenological models of minds, particularly those in extremity, that he did propose are deeply affecting, in part because he wrote so wildly and so well. I recommend “Bird of Paradise” from The Politics of Experience. For me, poetry tracks mind’s movements and for the last few months existential psychology has offered new rhythms, vocabularies to do that.

Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks over the past decade-plus, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: I hope it’s getting stranger and, within that strangeness, more accurate.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Reading is always energizing for me, so I’d say the writers I’ve already listed as important to what’s going on now. I return to Lorine Niedecker, Iris Murdoch, Wong May, Emerson, Montaigne, Marguerite Young, Ernst Bloch, and the work and example of my friends—Dan Bevacqua, Emily Hunt, Sara Nicholson, Scout Turkel, Kai Ihns, Peter Gizzi, Hai-Dang Phan, Ben Estes, Alan Felsenthal, Stacy Jo Scott, Jae Choi, Joanie Cappetta, Patrick Morrissey, Mark Leidner, Anya Klepikov among many others!