NER intern Cole Chaudhari talks with poet Grady Chambers about writing under the auspices of global warming, the recentering magic of gardening, and the power of the unsaid in his poems “Second Summer” and “[There were, that summer, so few people]” from issue 45.1.
Cole Chaudhari: Several images in your poem “Second Summer” have the resonance of furnaces: “The June moon blackened by the heat; / children tramping through the city’s fountains / like giants in a stream—; “The heat and dust had gathered all day.” To me these lines resonated as acute depictions of climate anxiety, of a planet overheating and nearing apocalypse. How do concerns about our climate present themselves in your work? How do you think about the mission of poetry in the face of ever-hotter summers?
Grady Chambers: I think concerns about climate tend to enter my work incidentally rather than intentionally. I wasn’t thinking directly about global warming when working on “Second Summer,” but I do remember wanting to imbue the poem with the mood and atmosphere (at least as I experience it) of summer in Philadelphia. Oppressive heat, of course, has increasingly been a defining feature of summer here and everywhere else, and so it made its way into the poem naturally. I’m realizing how distressing that is: the effects of human-induced global warming are becoming so constant that they make their way into my writing regardless of whether I intend for them to. Which is scary.
I’m not really sure what the mission or role of poetry is in the face of climate change. For me, writing about the (many) global, social, and societal things that worry me doesn’t help combat the feeling of helplessness that the constant flood of dark news can often bring. Instead, I find it much more helpful to do things in my community that bring some tangible benefit to others. I work for a social services organization, so that helps, but also volunteering, delivering food boxes, etc. I’m not saying that I’m Mr. Volunteer or something, I’m definitely not. But I’ve found that when I spend time in my community that way, it does more than almost anything else to combat that feeling of helplessness I just described. It gets me into the world, interacting with other people, and reminds me that there are millions of practical ways to make a beneficial difference in someone else’s life. That alone seems like a good thing.
CC: I’m curious about the spaces in “Second Summer” beyond the interior/exterior/outside/inside conversation in the poem. The “I” and the “he” of the poem only ever interact at the window or in the bedroom, and never in the “I”’s retreat to the kitchen. The “I” and the “he” stand together in the bedroom, described as the “second, hotter summer.” Why was it important for you to communicate togetherness in terms of positionality and temperature?
GC: My hope was that the poem’s power comes more or equally from what is withheld or inferred rather than from what is directly said. The poem is about a time in my life when I was sleeping with men for the very first time. I think at that point in time there was only one person who I was open with about that fact. My life was incredibly compartmentalized; I was keeping a lot hidden, and I wanted this poem—in the way it withholds, and the way it admits through inference and symbol rather than directness—to embody that time of hiddenness. Attention to temperature, space, and spatial relations became useful stand-ins or symbols for what the speaker wasn’t yet willing to admit.
CC: In “[There were, that summer, so few people]” you place seeds and photographs into a common vocabulary of hope and remembering. In my mind, both of those objects negotiate distances, although differently; seeds develop a relationship to time, and the photographs of bracelets and Ferris wheels suggest a physical removal, or a physical gap. How did you formulate that poetic pairing?
GC: That’s a really nicely articulated insight into those aspects of the poem. I would say less that I formulated that pairing and more that it simply emerged, while working on the poem, from giving close attention to memory. As with the way that an attention to heat in “Second Summer” comes to have the effect that it does, the photographs and seeds emerged as metaphors not from intention or design but from asking myself questions to help build the world of the poem: What was my life like in the period I am writing about? How was I spending my time? And only then did I come to see how those practical daily things I was doing had a relation to or resonance with the emotional world I was in during that period, the things I was thinking or fretting about, etc.
Your question is making me realize that I almost never set out with a metaphorical intention when it comes to the images I’m using in a poem. I want the images to be what they are. I want the experience I’m writing about to feel honest and true in how it’s rendered. If I’m lucky, the images will take on additional metaphorical or thematic resonance on their own accord.
CC: “[There were, that summer, so few people]” devotes a stanza to the love of gardening and the tangibility of that task. In my experience, poetry can feel woefully intangible at times. Does the physical work of gardening and its hapticity provide you with a foil to writing poetry? Do you find that grounding (no pun intended) yourself in such an activity helps with thinking about poetry?
GC: Writing poetry can feel woefully intangible to me too! I sometimes joke that my very favorite night of graduate school was when I spent all evening putting together a chair I’d bought from Ikea. It was so satisfying to spend time with something that came with instructions and gratifying to experience the built object. Unlike writing, of course, which has many of its own gratifications but certainly no instruction manual.
I’m not sure that grounding myself in gardening or something similar specifically helps me write or think about poetry, but I do feel strongly that writing feels much more possible and desirable and available to me when it exists in my life as one thing among a number of things that I give myself to, not the very central thing. I moved to Philadelphia in 2017, and it was the first time in five years that I was not part of a weekly writing workshop. That fall, I went from writing on a near daily basis to only mandating that I write once a week, typically on Sundays. That really reset my relationship to writing in a beneficial way. It helped decenter it for me and helped me do a better job of not aligning my happiness with how things were going with writing. That once-a-week routine has been a really useful one for me, and one I’ve stuck with, on the whole, since then.
When I’m feeling stuck on something I’m working, I find it very helpful to take a shower, do dishes, go for a walk. Letting part of my mind focus on something tangible seems to free up the other parts to work out whatever I was trying and failing to work out with intention. Taking a walk almost always helps the language arrive.
CC: What media have you consumed recently that you enjoyed? If you could recommend one book, one film, and one album right now, what would they be?
GC: So much! Music and films are such constant presences in my days and life. Can I pick two albums? One would be Chet by the trumpeter Chet Baker.
My mom loved jazz. She died in October, and I was asked to put a playlist together for her memorial service. I came across that Chet Baker album and have been listening to it constantly. It’s felt a like way of connecting with my mom, but also his playing is just so pleasing to listen to, so smooth and elegant. It’s a good album for Sunday mornings. It’s so pleasing that it almost guarantees anyone who hears it will say, “Who is this?” So, if you want to impress your friends, play Chet by Chet Baker! Also Valerie June’s album The Order of Time. When I first heard her voice I thought it was someone singing from 100 years ago. Her songs are beautiful.
I’m a bewilderingly slow reader, but I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s 2022 novel Stella Maris. It’s an unusual novel and very unlike what people probably think of when they think of Cormac McCarthy. The whole book is a series of conversations between a therapist and a young and very smart mathematician who’s checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Wisconsin in the 1970s. It’s the companion to his other novel from around that time, The Passenger. A heavy book, but I absolutely loved it.
The two characters discuss lots of things—the atomic bomb, mathematicians, Bach, the nature and origins of sorrow, mental illness, and what we call reality. There are things the protagonist says that have great resonance to me, and there are passages of real beauty, like this one:
“It’s just another mystery to add to the roster. Leonardo can’t be explained. Or Newton, or Shakespeare. Or endless others. Well. Probably not endless. But at least we know their names. But unless you’re willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little ice age of fifteenth century Italy and sawed and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for seven years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then—knowing this perfect thing—took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin.”
As for films, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy remains a favorite. I’d also recommend Chloé Zhao’s The Rider. She got super famous for Nomadland, but I think The Rider is a better film.
Cole Chaudhari is a rising junior at Middlebury College, where he studies history and English. He was a spring 2024 intern at the New England Review.
Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), chosen by Henri Cole as the winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, the Sun, Image, and elsewhere. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and lives in Philadelphia.
Photo of Grady Chambers courtesy of Jessica Scicchitano