NER intern Tasha Deen talks with poet Maja Lukic about nonlinear storytelling, the psychic heft of natural imagery, and preserving enigma in her three poems from issue 46.1.
Tasha Deen: In your poem “Death,” you quote Knausgaard who questions, “why death exists, / why we die at all, why we don’t rebel.” You seem to approach a point of acceptance with death’s presence when you write, “ . . . know only / so much of their sliding / back into matter.” Has experiencing grief—missing your dead—brought any relief in the absence of our understanding of death? How have “the characters [who] can’t die” helped you draw conclusions in the real-world? Do you feel your own work reflects a kind of impenetrability to death that Knausgaard’s characters also present?
Maja Lukic: I’m skeptical of easy conclusions but, in a way, experiencing loss concretized death and gave it shape. What once seemed like a distant dread (my mother will die someday) became local, immediate, and ruthlessly factual (my mother died in front of me, took her final breath, and began to transform out of life). It is deeply horrifying but there is also a withering away of abstraction. Once death entered my inner circle and once the worst imaginable thing happened, anything seemed possible. Loss made me more open to uncertainty and the unknown, though I don’t know that I would call that relief. I suppose I also felt shielded against any other harm—after my parents died, nothing could be so painful again.
In Knausgaard’s The Morningstar (and other books in that series, they’re all so good), the impossible becomes possible: eternal life. Death, which we take for granted, disappears. I was struck by the idea that the absence of death is as upsetting to the psyche as the fact of death. It disrupts the natural order of things, the way we organize our lives and understand the world.
TD: Your three poems in NER 46.1 are concerned with temporal moments. In “Death,” the speaker is on the train or the “getting late” hours of a party, while in “The Afterlife,” a psychic reconnects the speaker with their father, and you write: “I wait for the thin sheet of ice / covering my balcony to melt. I’m seized,” before concluding, “It’s not only the dead who cross over / take new shapes.” These poems tie in loss, death, and mourning between a dichotomy of past, present, and future time. In this way, they remind me of Julia Kristeva’s essay on “Women’s Time” in the sense that time is not linear, but cyclical/monumental. How does temporality show up in your writing? In what ways does “Death” and “The Afterlife” allow you the freedom for metamorphosis?
ML: Right, I don’t have a linear understanding of loss or loss of self through grief. It is much more cyclical and recursive and true to Kristeva’s conception of cyclical and monumental time, repetition and eternity. So yes, strict linearity is limiting as a framework for understanding the ongoing process of renewal and birth of a new self through loss. The poems are constantly cycling through loss to reach some perpetual after, but they are also about the eventual return to life, changed but returning, nonetheless.
In “The Afterlife,” the father’s afterlife has become the speaker’s now as she is forced to transform. In “Death,” the speaker finds herself in the autumnal season, the season of cyclical decay, but also the season that points to eventual renewal. In the poem, autumn is also a portal to the realm of the dead so that the afterlife is almost overlayed like a membrane over the speaker’s present life.
I have another poem about the film Wings of Desire, which ends with the speaker’s expressed desire for an “eternity of now,” including the actual lived now of the poem but also the past when the parents were alive. That sense of time collapsing and grief felt and expressed across temporal contexts feels very apt and acute for these poems.
TD: I’m also curious about the ending in “The Afterlife,” in which you write, “forced to molt, I molt.” It’s an aggressive force of change. This subtly violent imagery appears in “Needles,” too, where you write, “. . . my gentle / father teaching me to pluck / a pine needle and slip its sharp tip / into the frail sleeve at its base—/ and form a loop and then loop / several coiled needles / together into a chain . . .” In both poems, you rely on natural imagery to present an emotional shift. Could you talk about your affinity for and relationship to environmental language?
ML: Images from the natural world frequently enter my poems—sometimes to hilarious effect. Last summer, I was at Bread Loaf and another poet looking at a set of my poems observed that each one ended on a flower image. I made some rapid edits.
Because I’ve been thinking about transformation and the cycles of death and renewal, natural imagery feels like an intuitive correlative for spiritual and emotional shifts. In the natural world, nothing is fixed or static, which is such a comfort. My affinity for environmental imagery also comes from my obsession, as a young writer and probably still today, with Tomas Tranströmer and the way he used the Swedish landscape to articulate and reflect psychic terrain. Tranströmer taught me to value image over connective tissue and to trust all the associations and meanings that a single image drags into a poem.
I think it also has something to do with preserving enigma in the space of the poem. I don’t want to seal off the speaker in some solipsistic state where everything is easily pinned down and analyzed and defined. The speaker’s attention moves outward to something larger and more boundless than herself where the shifts can be felt and understood through correlatives in nature. Allowing natural imagery to enter the poems introduces a sense of unpredictability and chaos that feels true to lived experience.
TD: “Needles” is a particularly striking piece. The imagery of needles transforms itself over and over; first in the present as “thin needles into my stomach,” then in the “self-injected adrenaline” the speaker’s father used on himself, and finally in the pine needles the father teaches the speaker how to weave. It left me with a powerful sense of personal history, that of the speaker and their father joined together by the blood that emerges as the speaker undergoes IVF treatment. Could you talk about how you situated the “two versions” of the father character’s life? And, more broadly, how does your poetry confront uncertainty, in relationships and beyond?
ML: Thank you for that beautiful reading. So much of my father’s life has been indeterminate, including the exact date and time of his death. Because his death has been unfixed to me, there is a real danger, I think, in chasing after the unknowns. Part of the grieving process involved accepting that the time for questions was over and that some things will never be known. Here, uncertainty is the point.
In the poem, I wanted to be as honest to this core emotional truth as possible. What was striking to me was that both narratives about the father seemed plausible and implausible, potentially truthful and potentially fabricated. And both seemed incomplete because the father, ultimately, is unavailable and cannot fill in the lacunae in either story. But together, they pointed to a more complete kind of truth and a kind of insight: I think you can never really know another person. While the speaker can’t resolve the binary between the two versions of the event, she can find some peace in a third reconciling, resolving fact—that of a loving memory, of having loved and been loved. But even at the end, we are left with a kind of splintering—a choice of linking the pine needles or not, having a child or not, continuing the loving lineage or not.
Part of my responsibility as a writer is to preserve for as long as possible a space in which emotional truth can be explored and known but perhaps not definitively resolved. I am deeply interested in uncertainty as a craft question and how to manifest it. One of the beautiful things about poetry is that it holds the potential for multiplicity of meaning. Think of all the craft tools we can use to encompass multiple meanings at once—whether it’s a radical enjambment or a caesura in a line that holds two thoughts or an image that carries a complex and various resonance. Poetry creates a space where truth is multifaceted, different truths can coexist and contradict each other, and the essential mystery of being alive, of having been here at all, however briefly, can be felt but not entirely known.
Maja Lukic is a Brooklyn-based poet. She received an MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, Image, Sixth Finch, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Poets, The Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere.
Tasha Deen was born and raised in Brooklyn. She is currently finishing her undergraduate degree in English literature at Middlebury College. She loves her college’s radio and often walks the local trails with her headphones on and her orange notebook, a gift from her father, by her side. Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird Literary & Arts Journal, Middlebury Geographic Magazine, and Cornell’s Rainy Day Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in The Southeast Review.