Andrew Szilvasy teaches Literature outside of Boston, and has poems appearing or forthcoming in CutBank, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, and RHINO, among others. He lives in Boston with his wife.

Andrew’s poem “Haircut Before Funeral” appears in the Spring 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.

One thing I love about poetry is its ability to be introspective and provide focus to small details or moments in time—very much like your piece does. What characteristics about poetry do you love that call you to write?

Poetry is always elevated language—once we call something a poem, even the most mundane diction is charged with meanings. I think of William’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” for instance. In many ways it’s easy to meet the great moments with that language: there is a nice congruence. But I find it hard to read and to write those types of poems. Instead, poets recognizing the holiness of simple moments—finding eternity in a grain of sand, as Blake says—tends to move me most, and challenge me to do the same by writing.

I love the rhythm of the line "she gabs and trims." What is your writing process like? How do you find your rhythm in writing?

My basic rhythms are typically iambic. That flow is almost primal in English, and it is what comes naturally. But, for better or worse, my writing process is disorganized and scattered, so a line like “she gabs and trims” might come to me without context. Lots of times, the connections come at random times, and I need to stop what I’m doing to get the whole thought out or it’s gone. It is almost like a muse, to be corny. And what completes the line shapes the initial. The consonants and vowel sounds in that above need to reorder themselves to fit their new context, and it’s in the process of reading my work aloud once the poetic vessel, if you will, has been filled, that I might need the “a” of “gabs” to catch with the “a” of “imagine”: it is both a sonic and a structural pressure that I’m not entirely aware of until long after.

Poetry can be extremely personal, and it is often that vulnerability that helps make a poem. What advice do you have for writers struggling to integrate material from their life into their writing?

There are many strategies. Here is one: displacement. A danger all writers face is solipsism: we are all the centers of our emotional and intellectual lives no matter what we do. Our brain is just there, interpreting, mulling, meddling. In a weird way, we need to create a hollow space. Putting something else into that hollow space, focusing hard on it—an image, perhaps, a person or moment that is not us— and then describing it or experiencing it for a least a few beats means that when our mind does rush in, it’s not like water into a cup, but into a valley: it’s guided by what you’ve put in, but it can now subtly reshapes that landscape.

What poem are you holding onto right now, and what keeps you going back to it?

I come back to Elizabeth Bishop more than any other 20th and 21st century poet. I find her combination of craft and emotional nuance a model for what I’d like to be in a writer: at home in the elevated and the mundane, the surreal and the real, and in a variety of registers, too, somehow. All that. Of her works, perhaps I love best “A Cold Spring.” It engages with the tradition—hearkening back in some of its language to Keats and Stevens—while standing entirely on its own. The sonics plays with the reader, skirting rhyme in that pleasurable way the best free verse poets do. The metaphorical language is perfect. And then, ends the hopeful address, in that way Horace (another of my favorites) can achieve when he’s at his best, that doesn’t tip into the maudlin. And how can you ever see fireflies at night again and not think of champagne bubbles?