Maya C. Popa Interviewed by Mandana Chaffa

The poet on writing about and welcoming the modulations of joy, grief, transcendence, and reckoning.

Dr. Maya C. Popa is the poetry editor for Publishers Weekly, an educator, and an exceptionally generous poetic citizen on social media and elsewhere, with interests as diverse as the classics to the contemporary, across languages and cultures. She’s also an accomplished poet, whose Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton) considers the origins of human pain and how that may lead us to find wonder in our complicated lives. There’s a notable first-person narrative that reflects a thoughtful interiority equally engaged with the world, embracing love despite the certainty of loss.

Nature is as much a character in the poems as is love, and winter and spring are often our companions. In the poem “Prayer” Popa writes: “[…] I swam in perpetual / end of spring knowing no summer could come of it…” In the poem “Year,” these lines stand out:

Any day now, autumn. Winter any day.
I’ve shot my arrow and lived by its arc
and still, the hours won’t acquit.
The first time we met we said goodbye,
then we never stopped saying it.

It’s a beautiful, evocative image, exploring the dualities of endings even on the eves of beginnings. The ending of the collection offers another beginning: “When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.” Calling back to the title, this time with “wonder” but no “wound.” It also calls back to one of the epigraphs, from the late Eavan Boland: “If I defer the grief, I will diminish the gift.”

In the same way, though the word “wound” leads in the title, ultimately, wonder surpasses, urging us to look within and without for what will sustain us through the winters of our lives, until the spring. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

—Mandana Chaffa

Mandana Chaffa Since I’ve known you, you’ve lived in different time zones. Can you talk to me a bit about place? Both in these poems, and in your own life, and what that does to and with your creative impulses?

Maya C. Popa I’ve traveled between New York and the UK since 2011, when I began my studies there. Many of the poems in the collection were drafted in England—“Ghost Crabs,” for instance, which thinks about the Atlantic shores of the US, rather curiously came to mind at early dawn in the car from Heathrow into London. “Fife” and “The Scores” are about the stunning, ghostly landscapes of east-central Scotland, while “In the Museum of Childhood” refers to a museum in Edinburgh. “Margravine” is about a London cemetery. “M40” is the motorway linking London and Oxford. The English poetic tradition was invaluable to my early study of poetry. William Shakespeare, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Philip Larkin. And, of course, there are phenomenal poets writing there today, including Alice Oswald, Zaffar Kunial, Anthony Anaxagarou, Caroline Bird, and Hannah Sullivan, to name only a few.

MC There’s a friction in many of these poems I really respond to. The language you use is lyrical, beautiful, and descriptive. Yet many of the poems also express the most difficult of human emotions: grief, loss, thwarted love. How much were you thinking about that contrast? Was it deliberate or did you see it after the fact, once you had a sheaf of poems?

MCP The contrast is there—I mean, it’s the truth of the matter of our lived experience as one (love, moments of ecstatic joy) guarantees the other (grief, moments of hardship and reckoning). This isn’t at all to say that I’m pessimistic or cynical about the longevity or frequency of happiness or joy in a life, but rather that I’m aware of those modulations. I welcome them, in fact.

Yeats said that “poetry is the clear expression of mixed feeling,” which seems about right to me. I narrowed my focus on mixed feeling, on moments that were luminous while having a sense of loss at the outskirts or edges. Moments that, upon closer examination, suggested more than what was being said outright or that intimated, as Woolf would say, “the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.”

Photo of Maya C. Popa by Bill Wadman.

MC Especially when it comes to poetry collections, I’m curious about when the work was conceived, created, and edited. I have a fascination with how the pandemic has altered our brains, our ways of perceiving. Some of these poems were clearly written after the pandemic, but when considering the entire collection, how does time and history weave its way into your perspective and work?

MCP This collection will, in many ways, always feel tied to the pandemic. I have very vivid memories attached to drafting certain poems. I spent many long afternoons in the grass of Central Park editing “Pestilence,” which contains notes I took daily from the first weeks of the pandemic through the spring.

Other poems were revised on Stratton Mountain in Vermont, where the experience of the pandemic differed starkly from what I had been witness to in NYC. Stratton Mountain was, by comparison, isolated and remote, and being in nature was, as it always is, a balm.

Being at last at ease in my surroundings—being able to take a walk unmasked, for instance—afforded me the clarity I needed to return to drafts I had started before the pandemic. There are no “post-pandemic” poems in the book, really. The majority of the writing came in a compressed period of isolated life, but that had the effect of offering me a larger view.

MC You have more than one poem named “Wound is the Origin of Wonder.” It’s a great title of course, because the reader starts conjecturing and inhabiting the statement before even reading the first line. I know I did. Where did that come from?

You italicize the word Wound, which suggests an emphasis on pain or at least the memory of pain, a scar, and there’s a poem with that title in each of the three sections. Would you talk a bit about that? Also, it goes without saying that I love each iteration, but I keep coming back to this:

A cross-breeze between this life
and the imagined one.
I am stuck in an almost life,
in an almost time.

This feels both grounded in this present moment, yet looking outward, beyond what the eye can see—what the heart may feel—and who is to say which is the imagined life, of course! Each time I read it, I focused on a different aspect. I consider the idea of parallel lives a lot, but this last time, I got stuck on “stuck.” Life on this plane is stuckness, isn’t it? We may have a few moments of transcendence, but we’re affected by gravity, we’re directed by time that only seems to go in one direction, we’ve very little control over anything.

MCP Those lines were drafted in a car within a few weeks of the pandemic shutting down the city. I had been reading in Connecticut (my last in-person reading for over a year), and coming back into Manhattan, I drove against a blinding sunset that made the surrounding highway palette—steel, bridges, bare trees—particularly stark. There were no intimations of spring in sight, and despite the movement of the vehicle, I felt that psychic stuckness that was amplified by the details the poem includes: the litigation signs, the abandoned playground. But, like many, those moments just preceding March 2020 still hold a strange weight, as though in their unsettling detailing, they were prescient. The figurative stuckness became a physical stuckness. I knew spring was around the corner, though of course, not the grief the spring would bring.

MC “Pestilence” is the longest poem in the collection, and because of that there’s a difference sense of time: the time we spend with the words, with the images, with the experience. It also provides the kind of specificity that I think you excel at: pestilence ostensibly is a synonym for plague, but it isn’t the same thing, is it? The way it rolls in the mouth, the sibilance, it feels longer than three syllables, I hear the word silence in it, the word sentence and it feels more disquieting than plague.

MCP You read that title so beautifully, Mandana. Thank you. It was a challenging poem to write; parts of it felt entirely immediate, the lines appearing unbidden throughout the course of the very strange days and weeks that I did not leave my apartment. But it was a difficult poem to wrangle into a sort of shape that exceeded the sum of its parts. It’s an arrangement of glimpses and reflections on the oddities and discomforting psychic landscape of those early weeks of March and April 2020.

Albert Camus’s The Plague is called La Peste in French. The archaic nature of the word pestilence appealed to me, as did the qualities you note above, though I hadn’t consciously noted the affinity with silence, which is apt. Sentence too—quite. I fully believe and defer to the unconscious mind that hears what the poem needs or calls in (that sibilance). If we hold too tightly to the reigns of logic or control, we diminish the possibilities for mystery that, after all, are the truth of the matter, being at the heart of the human experience.

MC Tell us about your new, terrific Substack, Poetry Today. Both the broader aspects of what you’re hoping to be able to expand upon that other venues don’t allow, as well as your doctoral research into wonder and poetry? That combination is endlessly delightful.

MCP Thank you so much for reading my newsletter. I wanted to serialize my research on wonder, partially to debunk the notion that academic research or writing has to be inaccessible or riddled with jargon. That is not the kind of research I wish to write, and I didn’t undertake a PhD to simply move bones from one graveyard to another, as the expression goes. My aim was to find ways to make the writing feel as immediate as the subject of wonder itself, and my approach is often conversational. So, my Wonder Wednesday posts are designed to give readers a short lesson on what philosophers, critics, and writers have said on the subject of wonder over the ages. The posts take only a few minutes to read but will hopefully linger with the reader as the week unfolds.

The rest of the newsletter is devoted to curations of poems and discussions on more practical aspects of writing. It’s a passion of mine, speaking about the setbacks and so-called failures underlying achievements. I’ve been teaching high school and college students for nearly a decade, and I think those conversations are what makes the single greatest difference in how students show up in academic spaces.

We know that our physiologies work in particular ways that either assist or detract from learning, from how we take in information. It is hard to learn when we are anxious or frightened. If getting students, readers, strangers to set aside their shame at not fully understanding and their self-doubt will help them process more, leading to better results, then it is worth establishing that culture up front—one in which our fallible humanness leads, and where pretentions and affects are dismissed for a kind of basic connection and support.

BOMB