Flames, with all their energy and implications, burn through Kelly Hoffer’s new poetry collection, Fire Series. In the way that fire reconfigures the landscape, the poet shares, “I am constant in my remaking, making / my memory in my own image.”

What is there to remake? Hoffer’s poems reply that anything can be vulnerable: grief, one’s mind, rooms, a body, words. The poem “Firebreak” looks for some stability that is not there and inquires, “how do you protect a body from language, / be it poison or polish or pith?” There does not seem to be a way to find immunity from the ever-present flame, tangible or metaphysical, because when “I open / my chest to the weather” the poet finds things like “sentimental white-hot pining.”

As in her previous book, Undershore, Hoffer continues to engage with form in Fire Series. In the poem “chemical lace / day series,” she offers the same poem twice, the first spanning several pages and the second repeated but with select words and letters grayed out to form a lace-like new poem from the remaining text. Several poems take a repeated Bible verse, Genesis 3:24, and give it the erasure treatment as well, though again, none of the words are fully gone, only grayed out. These poems bring a literal “remaking” while finding new meanings and outlooks.

Poems in Fire Series spark with the sensuality brought by the heat of the blaze, with titles like “Pluming” and “the faces of a diamond.” The poem “Field holiday” concludes:

look at my face

watch my mouth get dressed

up like a trick gift and tell me

the pretty things I’ve done

well and how good

it makes me

Longing is never out of reach, and recalibrating remains a constant. With fire, there is before and after, and Hoffer’s poems refuse to deem one better than the other and instead probe the differences and their effects.  

Hoffer, the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Creative Writing and a book artist, will read with Tracy Zeman and Kameryn Alexa Carter at Literati Bookstore on Wednesday, February 18, at 6:30 pm.

Hoffer and I reconnected before the publication of Fire Series. We discussed her new collection, how grief shows up in it, form, slashes as they relate to fire and punctuation, and what is next.

Q: We had an interview about your previous collection, Undershore, a little less than two years ago. How have you been? How is your visiting professor post going?
A: I am still working at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and I love it! I am fortunate that I get to talk about poetry all day, and with such talented students.

Q: At the time of our last interview, you shared that your second full-length manuscript needed a publisher. Now it has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Tell us about your new book.
A: I always find it difficult to say what a book is “about.” I think it was Allen Grossman who said, “A poem is about something the way a cat is about the house,” which I take as saying that meaning wanders in and out of poems. But I can talk about how Fire Series started. I was listening to a podcast about fire investigators, the officials who determine the origins and trajectories of forest fires, and I was fascinated by the specialized language they were using— “structured fire,” “foliage freeze,” “fire interval.” This diction felt ripe for poetic manipulation, and so I started writing poems within a limited image set in response to those terms. After I had written a number of these poems, I realized that the language was responding to concerns that I have long addressed in my writing—grief and desire. But I also realized that the poems that were angrier than they had been in the past; they felt itchy within intimacy, dissatisfied with the pressures of misogyny and capitalism, and exasperated with a U.S. government that was, and is, promoting violence domestically and abroad. None of this is said plainly in the book, but that discontent is present, and it activates the associations the book undertakes.

Q: Poems in Fire Series carry grief for your mother as they did in Undershore. “Pluming” reads, “I fear   my poems / about her death will replace her.” We had talked about your obsessions. Do you see including your mother in this book as continuing your obsession? How so?
A: Yes, my mother is the thing I can’t help but write about, and I doubt that will change, but I think she is a softer presence in this book than she was in Undershore. As we age, grief takes new shapes. I am currently pregnant with my first child, and this experience has revealed entirely new facets of a grief that I thought I already knew so intimately. My mother is present in this book because she continues to be an absent presence in my life. I do think, though, that this collection is more anxious about rendering grief in language; as the line you quoted implies, there is a real fear that in elegy, a poetic obsession will replace the lost loved one—that I am continually recreating my mother rather than remembering her. I become especially concerned when this process risks beautifying loss, or covering up contradiction with lyric polish. But I am not sure I know how to fully remember my mother without her being a part of my poems because my poems are such a part of me. So, I am left to inhabit this discomfort. Fire Series pokes that discomfort, fidgets within it.

Q: Fire Series refers directly to poetry and your poetry. There is an “Ars poetica (clouded).” Another poem is called “Constraints I give the page as it builds my virtual life.” Why write about poetry within poems?
A: My poems are always interested in language—both its openings and its opacities. It feels natural to me, then, that a poem will occasionally comment on its own mechanisms/territories/limits. I’m obsessed with poems! I also write about and talk about poems outside of poems, but when I enter a poem-writing space, I am more open to discovery and less committed to what I think the answer is, or less loyal to an argument that I have predetermined. My ego takes a back seat, so I am more likely to be surprised. This is maybe a way of saying I want to know what poems have to say about poems more than I want to express what I think I know about poems.

Q: Fire Series plays with form as well. The poetic form of erasure appears in several poems. The poem “vers” centers the titular word as its letters appear in other words, such as the line “anni-   vers    -ary, once more together in an egg-shaped loop around the sun.” How did this poem, “vers,” come about?
A: “vers” plays on the etymology of the word “verse,” which comes from the Latin for “turning.” Poems in verse can be thought of as plowed fields, where the poetic line turns at the end of each row. Inspired by the movement of a poetic line as both return and reversal, I began this poem hoping to turn over the “vers” as many times as possible—seeing what language emerged with each new plowing. Not surprisingly, what resulted was recursive, obsessive, but I was also delighted by how wildly various the poem became, despite—because of?—this constraint: a duchess, a Martian landscape, and chandeliers all make appearances. I doubt these terms would have surfaced if I hadn’t forced myself to return to “vers” at the head of every line.

Q: Pages with varying quantities of slashes appear between poems. The book’s blurb from Jennifer Nelson says, “Hoffer plays simultaneously on sound and vision, offers irruptions of slashes (in multiple senses) that tease decoding, and yokes erotics uncomfortably yet deliciously with morality.” How do you see these slashes interspersing poems working?
A: The book plays with the technical definition of “slash” as the “felled trees and other debris left in a forest after logging of a tract, or resulting from high wind or fire.” This definition is probably most familiar to us in the context of slashing and burning, a technique used to manage territory by cutting down trees and then burning what is felled. I liked the doubling of care and destruction that this definition of slash carried, and I let it interact with my own thoughts about the slash as a punctuation mark. Slashes both separate terms and imply a connection or mutuality between terms. In the manuscript, the slashes become visual features that carve up the language of the book, but I hope that they also keep alive (and make graphically present) the contradictions of mind that populate the collection.

Q: Wrapping up, I would like to ask the two questions that I often end with, as we did last time, if you are willing to answer them for this point in time. What is on your stack to read?
A: There are a number of books of poetry out from Fonograf Editions that I am excited to spend more time with: Nora Claire Miller’s Groceries and Sara Gilmore’s The Green Lives. Other recent reads that are haunting me include Sawako Nakayasu’s Pink Waves (Omnidawn) and Farnoosh Fathi’s Granny Cloud (NYRB).

Q: What is on the horizon next for you?
A: I’m continuing to expand my experiments with three-dimensional poem objects. I’m knitting poems—perhaps foolishly. If that’s of interest, you can see an example at Ghost Proposal or read more about it in this essay by Lloyd Wallace, who was generous enough to feature my work on Poetry Daily. I’m also playing with writing poems that fold up like the one I published in the latest issue (49.1) of Cream City Review. Other than that, I am getting ready to welcome a baby at the end of March—radical changes on the horizon!

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.  

Kelly Hoffer, Tracy Zeman, and Kameryn Alexa Carter read at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, on Wednesday, February 18, at 6:30 pm.

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