Nancy Miller Gomez’s first full-length collection, Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books, 2024), is one gasp after another, filled with the most intimate of small beauties – a mother helping her small son sweep up the spilled ashes of his father, a woman tying the hair she cleans from her brush to trees while imagining the nests birds will make of it, a small girl so convinced she can resurrect a dead catfish that she performs CPR on it till the sun fades away. Underlying all these beauties are images that reveal the deep connections shared between people: isolated in a crowd as they look in each other’s eyes and discover the “exquisite sadness of shame,” between whispering incarcerated men who have sprouted an apple seed in a plastic cup and old tea leaves, “tipsy with this miracle,” and between a woman waiting in line at the DMV and the man behind the counter, as she watches “all these people / unwind like a frayed rope / into the unhappy well of [his] workdays.”
I first met Nancy during an episode of Rattlecast, when I was reading a news poem and she was the main guest, talking about her chapbook Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series). Later, I was a participant in a workshop she taught for the Poetry Salon. I was so happy to be able to spend a winter Friday afternoon chatting with her about learning to notice, inspirations she draws from the news, and the public role of poets.
Ryan McCarty (RM) – There’s so much I love about your work. I first found your writing in Punishment and – I did jail poetry writing work too – and so much of it was just so starkly what I remember about the people I wrote with there, and what it was like walking in and out of a building so many people couldn’t walk out of. I remember thinking that you balance the human – I don’t know if romance is the right word – but the beauty that people can exude wherever they are, with a really clear-eyed perspective that isn’t afraid of calling ugliness what it is. I’m thinking of the move from “Growing Apples” right to “Baby Facing the Wrong Way in the County Jail.” They both hold onto that tension in a way that is so fabulous. Can you say a little bit about how, in your writing, you manage to bring out such beauty without running the risk of ignoring the other kinds of things out there in the world?
Nancy Miller Gomez (NMG) – Thank you first for saying that because it’s a great compliment to my work. I do try to balance the happiness, the beauty, the joy – with the pain that we also encounter in life, the ugliness, the loneliness, the despair. And life is really truly about both of those things, the light and the dark, and I think my poetry does try to embrace them both because life is often hard and yet we as humans try to find our equilibrium and our joys within all that pain and difficulty, you know? And I think that what poetry does for me is it functions as a bridge to other people who are experiencing the same things, because that is what speaks to our humanity, our ability to love despite eventual loss, our ability to see beauty in something that’s truly not beautiful – that’s ugly – our ability to appreciate things that are broken and people that are broken and love them anyway. And I guess the title Inconsolable Objects actually speaks to that in many ways because I’m fascinated by and drawn to and write a lot about people and things that are broken, because I find them lovable, I guess because we’re all broken and what we have to do is love each other through and past that brokenness.
RM – Loving things that are broken, thinking that the eye of the poet is what sees the beauty in those broken things, makes me think of “How Are We Doing” – nobody being able to love Frank – and I thought that was such a great example of what you’re saying. You find and give that kindness from one human to another as a way to point out that we’re not doing well here, the lights are out.
NMG – Right. Yeah, well the news will report and the pundits will say that there is a loneliness epidemic in our culture and society and I think that’s so true because we often look to the wrong things with each other. Why can’t we just be kind? But we live in a society that doesn’t seem to hold up kindness as a value that we aspire towards anymore, and that makes me really sad.
RM – Yeah. I’m always thinking of what poetry does in the world and I think that’s one thing that poetry at the very least teaches. Sometimes when I teach students who don’t read poetry, that’s something that they take away from it – “It makes me notice things or it makes me stop and pay attention to things or to honor things that I wouldn’t have before, including people.” And that’s a hopeful thing coming out of the kind of poetry that you’re writing.
NMG – When I teach, one of the first things I start with is attention because you can’t write poetry, you can’t write about the beauty and the pain if you’re not paying attention to stuff around you. Most of us just kind of go through our days focused on other things and not really paying attention to what’s immediately around us and when I started to really study the craft and art of poetry and started to write poetry, I noticed I began to move through the world a little differently. I started to slow down and pay attention to things. But also, I think as a child I was sort of preternaturally wired to pay attention to things and maybe that’s why I was predisposed to becoming a poet, but who knows which came first?
When I teach, especially in a carceral situation, these are men and women who are really sensory deprived in that their days are very similar and regimented and yet there’s so much to pay attention to, even in that very sterile room where we’re writing, and when I give them that assignment and say “Hey let’s just stop and pay attention and write down things that you notice,” it’s always remarkable to me that there’ll be some overlap, especially if there’s something in the room that’s really obvious like an air vent that’s flapping and making noise, but for the most part people notice different things because that’s your perspective, that’s you moving through the world, and I think our poetry reflects that. Different things bring us joy, different things are beautiful to us, uniquely, and yet there’s a commonality that if I can share my experience, if I can capture that in words, the things that I’ve noticed, the things that I want to praise and lift up, then other people can read that and maybe they can connect with it too.
I just think poetry is that shortcut to the sensibilities and perspectives and feelings that connect us as humans, and poets really are the ones who are striving to find language to be able to express that, so much of which is inexpressible. How do you write about loneliness, about joy, about these ephemeral abstract things? We all know what they feel like inside ourselves but how does somebody else describe a situation where they root you so deeply and immerse you so deeply into their experience that you actually can relate and empathize with what they’re going through – that is what poetry at its best does. It casts aside all of those differences and puts us all in a playing field where we can experience each other more honestly and truthfully and feel seen and heard. That, I think, cuts into that loneliness epidemic. It connects us, and all of that begins with paying attention and noticing each other and noticing what’s in the world around us. You can’t write about something if you haven’t noticed it first.
RM – Yeah, one of my favorite things I talk to my students about is riding the bus as brainstorming. On the bus, you get to pay attention to the people around you and the things you’re passing outside. It’s a great way to tune attention to one single little thing. There are so many other things that we can notice and pick up on and poetry seems to just explode out of them.
That makes me think about another thing I love about the new book. There are a lot of really great poems in Inconsolable Objects that start out with an epigraph e.g. quotes from news articles or a quote from Michelangelo or a snippet from Wikipedia. Can you say a little bit about those epigraphs? What’s the relationship between that little line or the story it comes from and the poem that eventually emerges?
NMG – I love this question and it’s not an easy answer because when somebody says “oh what triggered that idea?” it’s like “who knows?!?” But I’m a voracious reader, it is my addiction of choice. And I read books and novels and poetry of course, but I’m also an avid consumer – or at least I used to be an avid consumer – of news media. Now I don’t read the news anymore as of about two and a half months ago [when Trump was re-elected], although I still try to find ways to dip into reading human interest stories, like I’ll go straight to the cooking section because that will probably be safe.
But I guess the real answer or another way to answer that is that I get really tired of writing about myself all the time and sometimes I just feel like I’m staring at my own navel trying to come up with a poem and when I’m trying really hard to write something and don’t have any inspiration, I’ll read, and almost always I’ll come across something that’ll trigger an idea. I’m fascinated by the way people relate to each other in social media, so I’ll often pull things from social media and I’ll write about things people have posted that I just find utterly outrageously fascinating – like how could you publicly post that and they don’t even realize how much they’re revealing about themselves, so I find it interesting fodder to sort of play with the human condition based on how much social media reveals about us
So that can be one more thing that we’re paying attention to, and it’s a really interesting filter to see the world through because people often feel a sense of anonymity behind social media. I find it just interesting how not just social media but media in general have really impacted our culture in such a short time. I think you already know that I came out of media. I was a former television producer, and I was just so disappointed with what has happened to storytelling. I think storytelling would be something that would lift us up, but now I feel like it’s a race to the bottom. George Saunders has this wonderful quote – this is a bad paraphrase of something brilliant that he once said in an interview – that when something really bad is happening in a culture or society, the people living in the moment can’t see it, they don’t recognize it as bad. It’s only later cultures that can look back and recognize it and say “oh that was really awful what those people were doing. What were they thinking? How could they have accepted that?” And I feel like that’s what’s going on right now and it’s reflected in social media, the media, and all the mean-spiritedness that we see being percolated. People aren’t telling stories that are going to have any kind of personal or artistic value, they’re just telling the stories of our basest and most mean-spirited selves and people are aspiring to live like that. So I guess part of the poems that I’ve been using quotes for really call out aspects of things in our society that I want to address and sometimes it becomes about me and my place in it, a revelation as I’m writing it, a discovery that I make about myself, but oftentimes it’s not about me, it’s something else that I’m trying to get at.
RM – That makes me think about poems like “Missing History,” and making broader points with a piece you’re writing, and it’s not about poetry specifically, but I remember that the Sci-Fi writer China Mieville was giving an interview to the International Socialist Review because he’s also a radical Marxist and writes in those areas too, and they asked him something about world-building and politics and he sort of said, to paraphrase, that having a polemic you’re going for in a story is a bad idea – you’ll end up with a bad story. If you want to write a pamphlet, write a pamphlet, but if you set out to write a really true story, then your politics, your disposition, your hopes for things will shine through because that’s just who you are. I don’t know that poems can’t be directly polemical. Martín Espada does that beautifully. Of course there are lots of others. But is there something to what Mieville’s saying maybe? How do you feel about making a point directly in poetry? I mean, “The Road” is an anti-war poem and “Unsolicited” is a call for men to not . . . be terrible . . . but they’re not pamphlets or op-eds. How do poems like these get under the edge of issues and change things without losing their poemy-ness?
NMG – I agree that writing with an intent to make a specific point in a poem is probably not going to result in a very successful poem. But that doesn’t mean that a poem can’t have a point of view or ultimately move a reader towards a particular way of seeing or feeling about something, especially when dealing with injustice or cruelty or bad human behavior that decent people can agree isn’t tolerable. Some of my favorite poems do that very successfully. Poems of witness, or as it is now called – documentary poetry, such as “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forche, or “Jasper Texas 1998” by Lucille Clifton. Brigette Pegeen Kelly’s poem, “Song,“ is a fable that calls out the senseless cruelty of boys (and men), by crossing into the surreal with beautiful, haunting images and language. Other poems that come to mind are Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily during the War,” and Jane Hirschfield’s “Let Them Not Say.” Both are poems with a point of view, but they are written in such a way that the message is embedded in the emotions and images evoked by the language, not the other way around.
RM – That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately because I write sort of frequently for Rattle’s Poets Respond and one of the things that really interests me is trying to figure out when poems are inspired by a particular news story, how they develop their own life beyond that story. Like, sometimes you might need the news story to make sense of the poem, but other times it has fully stepped out on its own. So again, for example, a poem like “Missing History” does what I’m talking about, where I can feel the connection to the line from the news story, which is this piece about how, in general, women’s stories are so catastrophically under-reported across time, but then from there it’s you telling the story of those particular stories vanishing, not being shared, staying hidden away. Can you say a little bit about how you build on these stories so that your poems can sometimes live on their own – inspired by them but not the same as them or dependent on them?
NMG – I think it’s a really great question but oftentimes, I think of the news article, the epigraph, the quote as my leaping off point. It’s something that has struck in me some kind of a need to respond and I don’t want to just repeat what’s in the article or tell that story, because then you could just read the news article, so I try to give my imagination permission to ingest whatever it is about that story that intrigued me and see if I can take it somewhere unexpected where I might bump into some kind of discovery, either about myself or about us as humans or get at something that’s a little bit different. There’s that old adage – and I never can remember who actually said it – “no discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader.” That’s kind of where I go with it, and tinker with it to see if I can find some new discovery, and it’s interesting because sometimes that’ll come back to my life. Like, for instance, there’s the one about the self-decapitating sea slug [“Self Portrait as Sea Slug”] that really became all about me and my life. I just found it so interesting that this animal can self-decapitate in order to heal itself, and then the body goes off and dies while the head goes off and grows a new body. It really became all about me going through a very difficult time in my life where I had to reinvent myself in order to be able to move forward and get through my days, and I didn’t expect that. When I read the article it was simply an interesting fact, an interesting piece of science, so that was unexpected but it really kind of made sense with the news, the science, and the discovery of these self-decapitating sea slugs.
But the other one that you mentioned, the “Missing History” begins with the epigraph from a news article in the New York Times that said that only 0.5% of women’s stories are reported historically. That’s crazy to me and it just shows you how far behind we are with lifting women up as newsworthy and story worthy and visible. But I think it’s not true. I don’t agree with the quote in many ways because you have to look for women’s stories in unexpected places, which is where that poem tries to go. They’re not recorded but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. At the same time, after I finished the poem, it was in my portfolio and my editor KMA said I don’t think this poem really got anywhere other than what the news quote was about. That was before I brought in all the personal stuff about my grandmother and myself and my granddaughter and I agreed with her and I was either going to take the poem out because it wasn’t fully realized yet or completely rework it and I spent about another 6 weeks or so really working on that poem, trying to figure out how to make it about something that wasn’t just paraphrasing the news article and that’s where it became personal, where the discovery was made. My grandmother, who was a poet, never published a single poem her entire life, but she was a bohemian, gave birth to my mother and left her with relatives, then went off to live a bohemian lifestyle. She wasn’t married, which in those days was extremely unusual and certainly was not acceptable, but she went off to live her artist’s lifestyle and wrote and lived a very interesting life and practically on her deathbed, had this massive manuscript filled with poems. And after she died, it disappeared, and I searched but I still don’t know what happened to them. And this was before I was seriously considering myself a poet. I was still quite young and that loss really rings in my soul, like how many other women artists, writers, storytellers, have had their work just disappear because no one valued it.
RM – I think that’s exactly why this poem resonated with me because I think about all the ways that happens and I looked at that article and it almost seemed to suggest that women’s stories didn’t get recorded and because they didn’t get recorded, they aren’t part of our historical record. But women share stories with each other and with their families and their lovers, but because they aren’t officially written down, they disappear anyway, and I love the way that you took it in that direction, because if that’s the case, then they’re dependent on other humans to remember and carry on and keep speaking those stories, but when those other humans are gone, the stories evaporate too.
NMG – One of the things that I’m absolutely fascinated by is the ephemera that you find in antique junk stores. Like the photographs – who’s getting rid of their ancestors? Who’s putting these photographs in shoe boxes and taking them to the Goodwill? And I worry so much – I mean, I guess it’ll happen to all of us eventually – but I can’t even imagine taking the photographs of my ancestors and disposing of them. But so many people aren’t valuing the history and the stories, and I just find it so interesting. Or I like finding old books with interesting marginalia in it. Postcards where people are revealing interesting things, but postcards have their own language because it’s so truncated – you can’t write very much. It was like early Twitter!
RM – I have a similar thing. One of my special super powers is, when buying used books, I’ll find copies with old inscriptions from the author, like someone was at a reading and then I’ll end up with the book and it might just say “Thanks” and a name, but I’ve got some that are really weird and personal, like one that says “Thanks for the couch” and we can wonder about what that means, what that story is, or I’ve got another that just says “Hold on.” There’s something there. When I first met Martín Espada he just wrote “Do justice!” and when my kids pick up that book, that’s what they see. That actual book is a story too, one that only it can tell.
NMG – I love that you have that superpower. My superpower is finding stuff that nobody else wants but that speaks to me so I bring it home, much to the dismay of everyone in my family. And then I build my own little museums of my stuff. I often travel with this little art installation that consists of all these inconsolable objects and things that I’ve sourced from junk stores around the country and it’s fun because I give them away. I let people take them home and it’s so interesting to me to see what people are drawn to.
RM – So thinking about that and community and bringing people together and seeing what they’re drawn to, I wanted to ask about a new thing – now you’re going to be poet laureate of Santa Cruz – and I’ve been thinking a ton about what poetry does and it ties into the news thing too. I love the idea of a poet laureate because it’s a bit more of a public thing, people who are somehow associating poetry with a city or a state or the country, then they kind of have a project and imagine ways to have poetry at the ready. So are you super excited about that? Do you have fun ideas about being the poet of such a poety town?
NMG – I have an overwhelmingly long list of things I want to do and I’m going to try to channel my inner Ellen Bass who is really good at asking people to help her do things and see if I can get a whole bunch of people to help me get a bunch of things done to lift poetry up in the community and make it more visible than it is. I also want to reach out to members of the community who really aren’t exposed to poetry as much as I think they could be and where I think it might have a significant benefit for them. So we’re going to do a lot of outreach to the farmworker community and to kids in under-served communities. I did teach in the juvenile hall and I would love to do some programming there again. Yeah, I have a whole list. Everything from poetry scavenger hunts to poetry drinking games. You name it, I want to do it. But I want to create a whole village of people to help me because I can’t do it myself. That’s not any fun.
RM – Yeah, I mean scavenger hunts and drinking games are community events.
NMG – Why not add poetry into the mix?
RM – That’s why public poetry is so important. There’s some repair work we need to do with people and poetry, right? How do we do that? It might be an “it takes all kinds” sort of thing, but does a news-story-based poem have the potential maybe to do that thing particularly well, to bring folks into poetry and not be afraid, to show them the benefits of noticing things that are already in front of them?
NMG – Yeah, one thing I try to do when I teach students who haven’t already embraced poetry is I just try to knock it off its pedestal because people are intimidated by this kind of writing that feels unintelligible and makes them feel alienated and unintelligent, and that’s the last thing poetry should do. It should make people feel seen and heard and connected. I tend to start with poems that are accessible and that someone who hasn’t been studying poetry can step in and appreciate as just a story or language that’s going to make you experience something that is unique. Poetry is just a way to get at the indescribable stuff we all experience and once people see it that way, they won’t be afraid of it.
So I use news stories as inspiration for poems, the story or a headline or a quote from the news is a place to leap off from. But I also use what I see and experience every day as inspiration along with memories that surface and seem to want to be written about. I think a poet’s first job is to pay attention to the world around them, to notice things. So many people walk through their lives not paying attention, and in truth there is so much going on around us at all times that it’s impossible to take it all in. And that’s why I think the things that we do notice have more significance. Out of the multitude of sensory stimuli, I believe what stays with us matters in some way and is worthy of exploring in a poem. So, while I don’t think a news-story-based poem has any more or less ability to show people the benefits of paying attention, I think the news is just one more thing that happens in our lives that we can pay attention to – or not, and it’s all the stuff we can mine for poetry – as mundane as wild flowers growing next to tire tracks on a dirt road or as significant as a news article about a disembodied heart on a snowy battlefield in Ukraine – it’s all the stuff of poetry. I might also add that lately, I haven’t been reading the news. In the face of an onslaught of bad human behavior on a daily basis, I’m taking a break. Lately I’ve been writing more about birds and the conversational insights of a particular three-year-old I’m enamored with. She recently said that she missed me so much – she had a bug in her heart. It doesn’t get more poetic than that!
