A Conversation on Poetry, Landscape, and Wilderness with Michael Garrigan and Jory Mickelson

Jory Mickelson: So Michael, we met through an online workshop with the FreeFlow Institute in Missoula, Montana. You live in Pennsylvania and I live in Washington. Can you tell me about how your new book Robbing the Pillars was influenced by your life on the East Coast?

Michael Garrigan: Robbing the Pillars was greatly influenced by my life on the East Coast. Though it ventures into western landscapes, the template for these poems, and really all my writing, is the landscape I am in, which is currently Pennsylvania. The title (which is also the last poem in the collection) is an old mining term that describes the process of extracting the last pieces of anthracite from the mine. These were the pillars that were literally holding up the mine shaft. My great grandfather was one of the kids that would rob the pillars—lighting the fuse, running from the blast, waiting to see if the mine would collapse. This became a metaphor for this collection—me trying to get at every last piece of “valuable” rock before the mine collapsed on me. That landscape, the one of northeastern Pennsylvania that has been ransacked for resources, influences my writing, my stanzas and line breaks, and my understanding of the physical and genealogical landscapes we inhabit, that shape who we are. There is a beauty and a wildness even in these post-industrial landscapes that is greatly shaping my current writing. 

MG: Jory, can you tell me how your book, Wilderness/Kingdom, was influenced by your life on the West Coast? You are originally from Montana, correct? Do you find your poetry is tied to those landscapes? I think it’s easy for us as “nature writers” to simply try to transcribe and mold the landscapes we experience—do you ever find that instead it's the landscapes we are “of” and “in” that are shaping our experiences and writing? 

JM: I was born and raised in the Treasure State, and moved to Northwest Washington about 15 years ago. It was a vastly different landscape to Western Montana. It has been, and continues to be an unfolding acclimation.

When I lived in Montana, I was very curious about the landscape. I grew up with a wildlife refuge and hiking that bordered on wilderness right outside my door. I was almost entirely immersed in the natural world from a young age. It is natural for these experiences to work their way into my poems. That said, I am often reminded of the painter, Georgia O’Keeffe’s ascorbic quote, “One uses the facts of nature to express an idea or emotion. Mere accuracy has no art-value whatever.”

I can have a ponderosa pine or a steller's jay in my poem, but the real work is figuring out what it is doing in the poem. I don’t mean that these objects are symbols or a code to be cracked by the reader. They aren’t. They have their own inherent dignity or agency, in and of themselves. The real question for me becomes, why is this particular bird appearing every time I write about x? Is the bird mirroring the something in the poem? How might, let’s say it’s a great blue heron, how might it surprise the speaker or the characters in the poem? I wish my process were this analytical. Mostly, it’s a lot of intuitive fumbling on my part.

JM: Michael, going back to what you said, is really fascinating, about the building and taking down of mines. My own grandfather and great-grandfather worked in one of the copper mines in Butte, Montana. I am now wondering how you think of your poems as being built? Would you say you have an architectural approach? And if so, how might that stand in contrast to your understanding of wilderness or wild-ness in the world?

MG: Birds! Ah! I noticed that birds show up throughout a lot of your poems. I love it. In your poem “My Father Drawing My Portrait” an osprey climbs “the air above / Metcalf Reservoir, my father’s hand clutching the breeze,” and later there are your “crow’s feet.” Even in a poem about your father, birds are very present. 

I’ve been slowly trying to identify birds this summer. An odd thing happened last week—a White Pelican showed up on the Susquehanna River just downstream from my house. It flew up and down the river, perching on the rocks, for a few days, then left. So incredibly far from any of its normal migration. I wonder what brought it up this way. I wonder where it went. I wonder what it thought of this place, so different from what it’s used to. I think it’s natural for us to each have certain landscape pieces that seem to resonate with us, that show up over and over in our writing. These are probably the ones we interact with the most—are you a bird watcher? Is noticing them something you just naturally do? I can’t help but look over every bridge I drive across trying to take note of the water. 

I’m in and around streams so much that I think they are the architectural basis of a lot of my poems. I think Jake Skeets (his collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is really incredible) mentioned in an interview once (it may have been a Tweet? I am paraphrasing from memory here . . .) that even a field that may look completely wild still has structure. Though most of my poems would be considered “free verse,” structure is still incredibly important. I let the poem dictate that structure. I rarely go into a poem with the form in mind. No, the structure is built around the images that come and the line breaks that happen and the story I want to tell. It’s a very intuitive process, not something I really think about until I am in the revision process. At that point, a form has already been established and I piddle around until everything fits. I think that mimics my approach to and understanding of wilder/wildness. When I explore a new ravine, I want to experience it for what it is, not what I think it should be. I want to follow it and let it take me somewhere unexpected; with that comes, hopefully, a deeper understanding of all its beautiful complexities and contradictions. I try to experience wild places on their terms so when I write a poem, I want to experience that poem on its terms. I want it to show me its wildness. 

MG: I noticed we both write of our fathers in our collections and we seem to have images and pieces of wilderness and landscape associated with them. Do you notice certain objects or animals or pieces of landscape that show up with certain people or topics in your poems? With my father and his family it is abandoned rusted industrial pieces that seem to keep fitting into those poems. I also wonder how wilder/wildness shapes your work. As I read through your collection I kept coming back to this notion that there is more than just the wilderness of the natural world - there is wilderness in our spirituality and identity. Do you find that your approach to wilder/wildness shapes even those experiences and characters that may seem “removed” or distant from the natural world? 

JM: Sadly, I am not a birder. I just pick up a little here and there as I see what is flying around. Right now, I am in the middle of a somewhat noisy relationship with 3-5 stellar jays. These are the blue jays that look like they have mohawks. It began with some peanuts in the shell and has turned into a somewhat regular affair. This kind of jay appears in a few of my poems in Wilderness//Kingdom, “Evening” and “Blue, Consuming Blue.” They were totally new to me moving to Western Washington. 

There are so many moments I love in Robbing the Pillars where the speaker in the poems is doing their best to navigate their internal and external landscapes. The 20th century American mystic, monk, and poet Thomas Merton says, “The artist, like the monk, has an interior wilderness to discover.”

I really had to do my own digging there, in both fields, though I was never a monk. As an LGBTQ+ person, growing up in rural, conservative America, it didn’t feel like I had many options. I could leave. I could stay and keep my sexuality secret. Or I could come out and face violence and shunning. My junior year, an out gay student transferred into my rural school. He was beaten and harassed nearly every day. The administration told him he was “inviting it” because he wasn’t ashamed to be gay. The student didn’t last a semester before he found another school.

The wild places, the outdoors, were one of the few safe places in my life. There, no one was policing me. In the woods, no one was intentionally seeking to do me harm. This neutrality served as a way for me to imagine a life of my own, outside of what my small town told me it would be. A good deal of my “spirituality” was shaped by the landscape that offered me refuge. Today, my relationship with wilderness is more complex and more reciprocal. But it is still a vital place for me and my writing.

In your book, I see that some of the speakers are wrestling with their received spirituality, a Christian upbringing, specifically in the poems “Defrocked” and “Where Is This God You Speak Of?”  But I also see the speakers trying to navigate or enter into the land as a kind of religion or at least for a theology of landscape . . . I love the opening of “How to Make a Mountain”: Prayer hands push up and break the crust / and dirt and rock tumble across the back / of your hands . . . .”

JM: Along this thread, what do you find yourself faithful to these days? What currently has you believing that something better may be on its way?  

MG: Faith. That’s a word full of wilderness for me. Some days I discover something about it that I can understand, but most days it’s still full of mystery. Those poems that you mentioned were the beginning of an untangling and redefining that I’m still working through. One of the main threads of my next collection is just that—the untangling and redefining of my Catholicism and spirituality. I think my initial plunge into wilderness was a direct rejection of my Catholic upbringing. I wanted to literally and figuratively shed the altar boy robe. I couldn’t stand the stiffness of church, the hardness of those pews, anymore. I wanted to find holy water not in an ornate stoup, but somewhere deep in the woods, a spring bubbling up from moss. As you mentioned above, wilderness gives us the chance to imagine and be who we want to be, to develop an authentic belief in something, anything, to connect to something mysterious. 

What have I been faithful to these days? That White Pelican, for one. I’m faithful to its stubbornness to keep exploring, to be where it shouldn’t. My bicycle. Yes. I’ve been teaching from home since mid-March which has afforded me the time to ride my bike every day up and down the river. There’s a simple joy in riding a bike that I’ve grown faithful to. Get on, pedal, go. Swerve and laugh. Swerve and laugh. I’ve noticed that the eel grass is finally growing again in the river—we’ve had three years of spring and summer floods which has scoured the river of all its zostera leaving few places for crayfish and bass to linger. This has given me hope that something better for that river is on its way.

MG: What about you, Jory. What are you faithful to these days? What have you been finding faith in? 

JM: It depends if I have been reading the news or am on social media too much. I have always been a pessimist. Faith is one of those difficult and triggering words for people. Many of us have suffered from the expectations and assumptions of others about what our own faith or personal belief should look like. I have a knee-jerk reaction; my immediate response is to my old, negative experiences with that word.

But after that, I remember all the things I have learned to have faith in. The affection of my cat. The ruckus-joy of magpies. The certainty that my spouse will always exasperate me in numerous small ways. That the best of poems not only momentarily transport me, but can sometimes even transform me—across centuries, and cultures, and languages. That somehow characters on a blank page have the power to devastate me and delight me. And to the best of my ability, I want to spend my life entering and reentering those waters—to swim as close as I can through my own study and writing, adding a few drops to that oceanic force. That sounds dramatic, but I also believe it, even on the worst days, maybe especially then.

Michael Garrigan writes and teaches along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He enjoys exploring the river’s tributaries with a fly rod and hiking the riverlands, and feels strongly that every watershed should have a poet laureate. Garrigan is the author of the chapbook What I Know [How to Do] (Finishing Line Press) and a full-length poetry collection, Robbing the Pillars (Homebound Publications). His writing has appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Wayfarer, The Drake Magazine, Permafrost, Sky Island Journal, and Split Rock Review.

Jory Mickelson is a writer, educator, and retreat facillitator whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sixth Finch, The Puritan, Jubilat, Mid-American Review, Diode Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Vinyl Poetry, The Collagist, and other journals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Mickelson is the author of the full-length poetry collection Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press). They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. They have received fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They live in Bellingham, WA.