Fun With Doom

“More than anything, I want / the ability to respond perfectly / to tragedy—,” Paige Lewis writes in Space Struck (Sarabande, 2019), their wise and witty debut collection. In some sense, the book does exactly that. It’s a personal but outward-looking—and deeply felt, albeit never sentimental—response to the catastrophes of the early 21st century, from the isolation and loneliness induced by technology and secularization, to the impotence and sorrow created by climate catastrophe. As they write in “No One Cares Until You’re the Last of Something”:

Someone squealed about the ivory-billed woodpecker
nesting on my back porch, and now there’s a line
of binoculared men holding buckets of mealworms
and pushing their way into my home. I let them in
because I’d rather be host than hostage.

The recipient of the 2016 Editor’s Award in poetry from The Florida Review and a Gregory Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal, Lewis earned their MFA at Florida State University. This summer, we corresponded over email about their new poetry video series Ours Poetica, why they’ll miss whales the most after everything has gone extinct, what it’s like to be married to a fellow poet, and “moments where the divine and the everyday meet.” The following exchange was condensed and edited.

The “Notes” section of any book draws me in even before I’ve read the poems, and your notes are fabulous, acknowledging such influences as Giordano Bruno, St. Bernadette Soubirous, and Rabbi Simcha Bunim Bonhart of Przysucha. Who and what do you most like to read, and what subject matter most commonly finds its way into your poems?

I love that you look at a book’s notes section first, and I’m glad you weren’t disappointed by mine. I read a lot of history and science books, which ultimately inform my poems. But my favorite thing to do in my downtime is read the subreddit Today I Learned. I can get lost for hours following links to articles about the hydraulics of spider legs, or Katy Perry’s legal battle with nuns. Sometimes when I learn something new about the world, I won’t tell anyone because I know I’ll have more fun telling them in a poem.

Religion and spirituality—miracles, Noah’s ark—crop up as significant motifs in your work, as in “God Stops By,” which starts “to show me how healthy He’s been. He’s / sleeping more. He built his own gym,” or “St. Francis Disrobes,” which begins “When Saint Francis materialized / in the corner of my studio apartment, / I figured I was in for a quick // message from the Almighty—Thou / shalt lose weight, or Thou shalt not lie with thine physics professor.” At times, your approach to these metaphysical matters seems earnest and sincere, and at other times irreverent. How important is religion to you personally?

Catholicism was a large part of my childhood, but there was always a certain cartoonishness attached to it. The first stories I heard were about different family members being visited by divine apparitions. It always interested me how these stories my family told seemed so anachronistic compared to the circumstances of the stories I’d read in the Bible. Like, how could an angel visit my aunt while she was loading a dishwasher? The ordinariness of the setting seemed so absurd. My very favorite story about the divine is the one my grandfather told. He said that one night he woke up to see the Virgin Mary at the foot of his bed. She told him to get his family out of the apartment because the building was on fire. The detail that always sticks out to me about this story is that my grandfather was in such a rush to get out that he didn’t put on clothes. Imagine a stained-glass window depicting my grandfather experiencing this divine moment, this miracle, while in his underwear. I’m very interested in writing about moments like this, moments where the divine and the everyday meet.

Space Struck is your debut, although your poems have appeared all over the place. How did the collection end up with Sarabande, and what have been the biggest challenges, rewards, and surprises about putting a full-length book together and getting it out into the world?

I remember getting the acceptance call from Sarah Gorham while on my way home from my wedding. An airport probably isn’t the best place to jump up and down screaming, but that’s exactly what my husband Kaveh and I did after I got off the phone. I originally sent the manuscript to Sarabande because I loved the books they published, and I had heard very good things about their relationships with their authors. And even with that knowledge, I’m still surprised by how hard everyone at Sarabande works. I mean, when I told Sarah I wasn’t happy with my manuscript’s original title, she re-read it and sent me a bunch of other possible titles, one of which was “Space Struck.” She also spent weeks tracking down a painter I love [Joachim Bandau] to get permission to use his art for my cover. I feel like Sarabande eliminated most of the challenges that I expected to face introducing my book to the world.

You live in Indiana and teach at Purdue University. What brought you there? How does your teaching impact your writing and vice versa?

We moved to Indiana after Kaveh was offered a tenure-track position at Purdue and, as someone who spent the first 27 years of their life in Florida, moving to a place where snow actually happens was a bit challenging at first. But then I bought a very big coat. I try my best to keep my teaching and my writing separate, but they do tend to bleed into one another. The inspiration I feel after talking with my students about writing is of course going to impact my work. And the rush I feel after having written is going to influence my teaching practices that day. I think my favorite part about teaching creative writing is that when I ask my students to try a new writing experiment, they’re actually interested in trying it. And then they come out the other side with incredible works of art.

You’ve been curating a video series for the Poetry Foundation called Ours Poetica that will feature 150 videos rolling out 3 times per week beginning September 13th, and that aims “to reach people who don’t yet know they like poetry but who do love online video.” Can you say a little bit more about this series, how it came about, and what you hope it will achieve? Who will some of the guests be and what will they discuss?

One of the best parts of living in Indiana is living so close to our friends/Ours Poetica producers, John Green and Sarah Urist Green. Through Complexly Media, John and Sarah have a lot of amazing YouTube channels, and they wanted to make a series that focused on poetry. That’s where I came into the picture. Early on in our discussions about Ours Poetica, we decided we wanted the videos to be personal and intimate. And what’s more intimate than watching a reader open a poetry book and read one of their favorite poems to you? The videos also focus on the text of the poem as it’s being read so that the viewer can follow along closely and experience the text’s placement as the poet originally intended.

A few Ours Poetica guests include Carl Phillips, Shailene Woodley, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tay Zonday. But oh, I’m excited about every single reader! I really mean that. They’re such intimate moments, these encounters with people and the poems they love. With Ours Poetica, we hope to provide a gateway into the world of poetry. We hope to show our viewers that there are many different types of poetry out in the world and each one is relevant and important and very much alive.

You’re a delight on Twitter, where you share other people’s work and good news as often, if not more than, you share your own thoughts. Recently, you tweeted: “Poets! If you could share your poetry with one famous person, who would you choose?” Who would you share yours with and why?

I’d have to say Thom Yorke. I was obsessed with Radiohead growing up, and I’ve written many poems while listening to their albums. I’d hope he’d view the poems as gifts and not obligations.

You also tweeted, back in June, “If you could create your own universe, what’s one thing you’d absolutely want it to have?” What’s your answer?

Sunday comic strips.

In Space Struck’s acknowledgements, you offer “Love and love and love to my husband, favorite poet, and bright particular, Kaveh Akbar.” Besides him, which living poets do you consider to be your biggest influences? Which dead ones?

My three biggest living influences—Heather Christle, Tiana Clark, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil—were all kind enough to blurb my book. How unbelievably cool is that? If I made a “dead poetic influences” list, Marianne Moore would be at the very top.

How did you and Kaveh meet? And what is it like being married to a fellow poet in terms of how the dynamic plays into your work?

The short version of how we met is: I made a painting of Lisa Simpson reading The Bell Jar. Kaveh saw this painting on a mutual friend’s Facebook page and sent me a message to tell me how much he loved The Simpsons. We ended up talking until the sun came up the next day. And I guess we never really stopped.

My poetry has changed dramatically since knowing Kaveh. When we first started dating we were in two different states. So, we’d write these long letters to each other and include daily poems in the letters. I really wanted to impress Kaveh, so I worked all day on those early poems. I worked harder than I had ever worked on my poetry before. And I believe it made me a much better writer. Even now, Kaveh is still the first person I show my poems to. And it brings me so much joy to share my work with the person I love most.

In “On the Train, a Man Snatches My Book,” you write, in relation to climate catastrophe and mass extinction, “I don’t think I’ve ever written / the word doom, but nothing else fits.” Space Struck is arguably a doom-haunted book. But it’s also very funny, albeit grimly, as when in “The Foxes Are Back” you write “That thing about boiling frogs isn’t true— / they know what rising heat means / and they will jump out. All my pots / are empty.” How did you set about assembling what your jacket copy calls “a menagerie of near-extinction,” and how did you settle on the best tone for such subject matter?

The only way I can face something as terrifying as the certainty of total ecological collapse is through my periphery. If I’m being perfectly honest, I am terrible at holding onto all the dread that I feel. Sometimes my poems attempt to share the weight of that dread with the reader. Humor is my way of trying to pay the reader back for all their heavy lifting.

Follow up: what animal will you miss the most after almost everything has gone extinct?

I think I’ll miss whales the most. They’ll leave so much empty space.

Now that Space Struck is wrapped up, what are you working on next?

I’ve been working on this epic about a minor biblical character, Yael, who is only very briefly mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. I wanted to give Yael a whole backstory, part of which includes their being nonbinary, and a heroic journey to embark upon. I’ve been having a lot of fun with the epic. I mean, so far there are many alternate universes, a whale named “HOWBIG!,” and a deeply fallible god. I’m having so much fun.