An Interview with Nathan Manley

When did you begin writing the poems for Ecology of the Afterlife? And what was the biggest surprise as you were writing and gathering poems for the chapbook? 

 I’m not sure when the first group of extinction poems finally coalesced into a project, but I wrote the first poem, “Deinotherium giganteum,” sometime in the fall of 2019. Later, that piece also inspired me undertake the poems’ accompanying line drawings; I’d opened the poem with the line “having plumbed the esoteric anchor of its mouth,” and it eventually struck me that this description might make little sense to a reader with no notion of what the creature looked like in life—or as a fossil specimen.  

In the course of my research for the project, I was surprised again and again by utterly lurid passages in the historical sources I encountered. The journals and anatomical studies of Georg Wilhelm Steller stand in peculiar relief as I think of them now. Steller wrote beautifully and with an enviable eye for detail about the North Pacific sea cow that now bears his name, hydrodamalis gigas. In De bestiis marinis (“On the Beasts of the Sea”), Steller describes a hunt he undertook with the crew of Vitus Bering—shipwrecked in 1741on the shoals of the Commander Islands between Kamchatka and Alaska—to capture a sea cow and haul it in for food. As coldly as you can imagine, he mentions a kind of rhythmic geyser of blood that issued from the back of one creature when his crewmen struck it with a harpoon. Steller, a consummate naturalist, supplements his horrific portrait with a comment to this effect: “the spurting gore led me to conjecture that the animal’s lungs must be located at the top of its thoracic cavity”—a fact he later confirms by dissection.

While Steller’s writing smacks of an old-world brutality sufficient to turn the stomach of a modern reader, it also speaks to the difficult truth that to know the natural world is necessarily to do violence to it. In some sense, my little project has profited from a long history of violence, the various despoilation of plant and animal life already undertaken by others. Perhaps that’s part of why I found vignettes like Steller’s hunt both so surprising and so morbidly compelling. 

What is the most difficult part about putting a chapbook collection together (or the most challenging aspect at any stage in creating a collection, making it whole, and seeing it through to publication)? 

Apart from all the usual difficulties—finding the time and discipline to devote to a writing (and submitting!) practice, reading as much as you can, and learning to stomach rejection without shunning useful feedback—it can be difficult to let a project take the lead in terms of its own shape and organization. I’m not sure there’s a less than cryptic way of getting at what I mean, but I often find that my projects suffer when I try to force my own notions onto them, instead of letting the writing itself lead me to whatever it is I’m meant to discover. 

Sometimes when you’re actually composing, for instance, a word or a phrase or an idea seems to bubble up as if from nowhere, and you’ll think, “why the hell am I thinking of the word ‘rambunctious?’” Lately, I find it’s best to pluck these unbidden little thoughts unquestioningly and find a place in the poem to plant them. The writing has a voice of its own, or seems to, one that is and is not yours; it’s difficult to hear and sometimes difficult to follow.

 Oh, a final thought: the wait between composition and publication can be challenging to bide. I’ve often got this mistaken sense that poems are going stale on my hard drive, probably because I’m inclined to be most enamored with whatever it is I’ve just written. As with most things, patience is the key, but it’s difficult in practice.

You’re not only a talented poet, but also a terrific artist. You created an illustration to accompany each poem in the chapbook. Can you tell us a bit more about your background in the arts and the process creating the illustrations for the chapbook?

Truth be told, I’ve got a sixth-grade education in the arts, but I’ve always had a bit of a knack for drawing, and I’ve played around in other mediums from time to time. My wife, however, is a wonderful and practiced artist, and it’s only thanks to her instruction in crosshatching techniques that the pictorial dimension of my project took off as it did. The illustrations proved much more difficult than I anticipated at the start, but a certain measure of hubris and bullheadedness saw me through to the end. God knows, I’ve got a notebook full of botched attempts.

Early in, I found a certain meditative quality in drawing—in the way you’re forced to consider the dimension of an object and the manner that light spills over it, attempting to translate these sometimes dynamic physical qualities into a two-dimensional, static abstraction. It exercised some area of my brain that must often lie dormant, which is to say that I found it unexpectedly stimulating. Because the year happened to be 2020, I drew mostly by reference to photographs of museum specimens, passing evenings of the initial lockdowns in this way.

In my research for the project, I was reading through all manner of early modern and Enlightenment taxonomical works and loving the line art (woodcuts, mostly) that adorns so much natural philosophy of the period. Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium, from which the chapbook’s epigraph is taken, was a particular inspiration. And while I wasn’t skilled enough to ape the style of Gesner’s woodcuts (made by a number of different artists), I hope that I arrived at a style that is consistent and crisp enough to evoke these early forays into modern zoological and botanical illustration.

As Ecology of the Afterlife goes out into the world, into the hands of readers, what do you aspire for this book?What do you hope readers will take away from it? 

I hope, above all, that the book is read and enjoyed, that the music of its language resonates. For me, the poems often took on a kind of penitent, prayerful mood, and I hope this aspect of the project also strikes a chord with readers, particularly those carrying grief for the ecological losses of our own time. In producing a literary and artistic impression of these extinct organisms, I’ve tried to usher them into a little afterlife, however brief, on the page. I hope, as a gesture, that this means something. 

Who or what are your literary influences? What poets do you continually go back to? And, why? 

At any particular time, I’m influenced most by what I’m reading, and I try to read quite a mix of things. I also tend to indulge little manias when a particular subject really arrests me. Right now, I’m loving certain kinds of scientific and ecological writing; nature writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries tend to be more interested in description than the systematic collection of information, which makes ultimately for a more engaging read than the work of contemporary scientists. I’m also awful fond of a good ghost story, and Roman literature of late antiquity has been the focus of my translation work for a number of months now. 

In terms of contemporary poets, I’m absolutely enchanted by the work of Charles Wright. Louise Glück is another favorite. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a few of Tracy K. Smith’s books this year. Thinking back to the mid- and early century, I love the way Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s poems contemplate geologic time. I love Elizabeth Bishop for the same reasons everyone else does. Further back, C.P. Cavafy (an Alexandrian) treats classical subjects with a stunning facility. Rilke’s mysticism appeals in a way that mysticism usually doesn’t. In the nineteenth century, Arnold, Manley-Hopkins, and Tennyson each speak to my religious impulse in deep and varyingly hopeful ways. In terms of the ancients, Vergil’s tends to be the voice continually calling me back.     

How is your writing informed by place and the natural environment?

 I’m not sure to what extent this interest is evident in Ecology of the Afterlife, but I’m deeply engaged with the idea of landscape in much of my writing. That being the case, I tend to draw language and images from the landscapes I live in, being that they comprise such a significant, if ambient aspect of my daily lived experience. 

In the chapbook, you’ll find two creatures that once hailed from New England, where I now live: the heath hen (Tympanuchus cupido cupido) and the silver trout (Salvelinus agassizii), a species which inhabited only two lakes in the state of New Hampshire until its extinction in the 1930s. You’ll also find stegosaurus, by far the most ancient of the extinctions included in the collection. It’s the Colorado state dinosaur; being from Colorado originally, it seemed important (for reasons I couldn’t exactly articulate) to nod back toward home. Including a dinosaur among the more contemporary extinctions in the book also spoke to a counterintuitively childish element of the project—by which I mean to say that the first animals I loved as a child were dinosaurs, and their having been dead for more than a geologic age presented no barrier whatever to my loving them. 

How has your writing changed overtime? And/or, how has the COVID-19 pandemic changed or affected your relationship to writing, either in the creation of it or the consumption of it?

In terms of pace, COVID has ultimately had almost no influence on my writing practice. I do think, however, that the daily reality of spending vast tracts of time alone in my home has forced some exercise of the imagination in terms of finding suitable subjects for my poems—for fear I’d otherwise be attempting fruitlessly to describe the boredom and emotional exhaustion of quarantine. As time goes on, I find myself turning increasingly outward—to history and to science, to the natural world and the lives of others—for inspiration. I’m lucky to have led a mostly dull and unremarkable life; for all its simple pleasures and common tragedies, it probably wouldn’t suffice to move a reader in the ways I hope to. Moreover, there’s a kind of poetics of the inner life (and of psychic pain in particular) that has flourished in American letters for the better part of a hundred years. While some great writers undoubtedly inhabit this category, it’s one I find myself looking to move away from as I get older—toward something that acknowledges, but does not utterly orbit the ego.

What is the best piece of writerly advice that you’ve been given?

As to the publication process, it’s been helpful to me, and I can’t recall who told me this, to think of submitting as standing in a line you can’t see the length of. Any rejection signifies that you’ve moved forward and that you’ve just got to wait (perhaps not so long!) while other deserving voices take their turns.

As to the practice of writing, all my teachers—the good ones, and yours too I’m sure—had it right when they said that you’ve just got to sit down to it regularly. Sometimes the writing comes easy; sometimes you’ll feel like you’re down in the mines turning up hunks of worthless material by the bucketload. Good poems can come out of either mood.

What’s next for you? What are you working on now, and what can we anticipate in the future? 

 Like many poets, I’ve got a handful of manuscripts (one book-length) circulating with the small presses and in contests and whatnot. While I wait for the form rejections to come rolling inevitably in, I’ve been busy with another ecology-centered project that I hope will shape itself into a book at some point. I’m trying to compile a poetic ecology—whatever the hell that turns out to mean—of the Great Plains. I grew up in Colorado, and my family has farmed there for five generations, so I’m most personally familiar with the plants and animals of the Plains region; that familiarity struck me as indispensable to the mingling of science, history, poetry and spiritual practice that I hope to explore in this project. So far, each poem considers a separate organism or assemblage of organisms—I’m increasingly interested in the mutualisms of the assemblage. For whatever reason, I’ve also taken an unexpected interest in invasive species and vermin. I had no suspicion at the outset that I’d spend so much time reading and writing about slugs and fungi, rodents and Russian Olives, but here I am, deep in the paint with all these ostensibly loathsome things. I hope the project will help me to cultivate a sense of awe and beauty and hope for what remains to us of the natural world—something I might eventually to pass on to readers.

If you were venturing into the wilderness (alone) for a month, what three books would you pack and take with you? 

Reading’s probably not going to be a priority if I’m out in the wilderness, but for sake of answering in good faith, I’ll pick Vergil’s Georgics, a good translation of Dante’s Paradiso (it’s next up on my reading list), and something that’s languishing at the bottom of my bedside bookstack—Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, let’s say.

Is there anything you would like to share with our readers that we haven’t discussed already?  

I’m an occasional instrumentalist with a great deal of music precious few people have ever heard. If I’ve piqued your interest with that irresistible pitch, you can take a listen at my website: nathanmmanley.com. You’ll find a link to SoundCloud there for anything you’d care to download instead of stream. It’s all instrumental, no vocals. Thanks in any case for reading, if you’ve made it this far!

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Ecology of the Afterlife by Nathan Manley is published by Split Rock Press and available for purchase online at SRR’s store, Amazon, and your independent bookseller. 

Nathan Manley is a writer and erstwhile English teacher from Loveland, Colorado. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Northern Colorado. For now, he resides with his wife and two cats among the great deciduous forests of New England, where he is pursuing a JD at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of one chapbook, NUMINA LOCI (Mighty Rogue Press, 2018). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Portland Review, THINK, Natural Bridge, Crab Creek Review, Split Rock Review, and others. His work has also been nominated for Best of the Net. You can find his writing and instrumental music at nathanmmanley.com.