Michael Quinn is a writer born in Philadelphia. His poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, the Chiron Review, and the New York Quarterly anthology Without a Doubt. Follow him on Twitter at @saintcignatius.

Michael’s poem “Home” appears in the Spring 2021 issue of Carve. Order print here or download here to read.

I’m curious about the fragmentation of language and lines that is occurring throughout this piece, particularly with lines breaking on prepositions or other seemingly minor words and new words forming (“nevernew,” “betweenfloors”) from familiar ones. Was this meant to mirror a deeper disruption or evolution in the poem? Were these decisions you made when writing the initial draft or during your revision process?

I should say first that the poem is heavily inspired by Lady Gregory’s translation of “Donal Og,” which features prominently in John Huston’s The Dead. Speaking towards line breaks occurring at seemingly minor words—I’m concerned, often, with creating a sense of momentum that can push the reader through the poem. The constant disruption creates a sense of unease but also forces the reader to ask what comes next. Of course, the poem deals with the death of a parent, an intense disruption to our sense of being. But my mother told me, after the death of her mother, that she felt a sense of calm about dying—that watching the process happen calmed her fears about it. So I think those are the two twines unraveling, one of discomfort and one of momentum, the reality that life is moving forward despite us.

Speaking towards the compound words—“betweenfloors” is a good example, and one of the only revisions I made. It was originally “between the floors,” but I wanted to summon a specific feeling. I had one of those paneled ceilings in our basement where mice would scurry. Soft panels, so you could really hear the feet. And sometimes, looking, I would lift up a panel and see the truth of a house, that it’s something made by people, and there was a large, dark space between the floors. Precision of language is one of the simpler joys of poetry, for me.

There is a delicate collocation between the animal/natural world and its living and dying and the more interior world and eventual death of the speaker’s mother in this poem. These domains often blur—for a moment it is unclear whether the small body described is that of the mother or the mouse. Was this ambiguity intentional? 

I have to admit that this ambiguity was not intentional but it’s a wonderful reading. I try not to analyze as I write and simply follow my typing fingers beat to beat, and I think in most good poems, the words are doing more work than the poet could. And there’s always a moment when you sit back and see that your subconscious was forcing something out. For years I was constantly writing about spit. Spit would just show up everywhere in my poems, all the time.

Speaking towards collocation—the house I’m writing about is my childhood home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, very woody and critter-infested. I think the animals that populate the poem, the deer and mice, are just as much a part of the architecture as the house itself. There’s a constancy to looking out into the lawn and seeing a family of deer, or a doe, or hearing stinkbugs fluttering against the wall, or hearing mice crawling around. And similarly, I’m writing about my mother here as the you of the poem, she’s spent two decades maintaining this home for us. It’s like the bacteria inside an animal—a community of things. And the presence of these animals prefigures the death of a loved one that, above all, I am trying to describe as very natural.

“Home” begins with a portended death and ends with “the first blood of the new spring,” seeming both cyclical and perhaps even hopeful. Was there a feeling you wanted the reader to leave with? 

I struggled a lot with the last line, even after it was accepted. It seemed, to use the colloquial term, cringe. But as I was fiddling with the poem—this happens sometimes—I realized that it simply did not want to budge, that everything had found its place and there was little I could do to fight it.

I wrote this for my mom for her birthday two years ago. She had lost her mother the year before. So it’s definitely an attempt at making sense of the big troubles of life—loss of a parent, the way time scurries faster than we expect, and of course what a home is, when it’s the site of our most formative experiences and often our most traumatic. I always want a poem to have a sense of ambivalence—some central tension pulling us in two directions. So there’s life versus death, the natural world versus the human world, the house versus the landscape, nurturing versus violence. I don’t think any of these tensions are resolved, but I think the poem ends with a truism—life definitely goes on, despite us.

This poem tackles grief in a beautiful and measured way. The description of the “long scrape” of the mice’s lives and the question that follows, “What noise have you / made?” were especially poignant. Are there particular poets, poems, or lines you return to in difficult times? Are there new writers you've discovered this year?

Thank you so much! That’s my favorite line.

Eavan Boland’s “Quarantine” is probably my favorite poem ever.

The last stanza of Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” returns to me often, I think, as I’ve grown up and out of a lot of the depressive episodes I used to experience. Frost captures a balanced sentiment; the speaker in the poem is only able to look away from this stark, frosted field where he contemplates his loneliness because he concludes, there’s something much darker within himself.

My favorite poem of last year was Ashanti Anderson’s “Self-Portrait as Kendrick Lamar, Laughing to the Bank,” which I read over and over when it came out. Wonderful sense of momentum, and the first time I read it, realizing she had postured the poem between a split line from “GOD.”, I was in a bit of awe. The speaker in the poem there, too, is lost in contemplation and must find a way to move on. The double connotation of a-ha as laughter and revelation—genius!

Allison Adair’s The Clearing has been the book staying by my side. The poem “Honey” ends “To those / I have kissed, on granite stairs and / idling trains, under a roof cut out / to frame the sky: What passed / between us? How did it harden? / Whom does it nourish now?”

And Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,”! Favorite line: “But the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight.”