This week our poetry team is excited to feature "Polaroids", a new poem by Arden Eli Hill. The piece of work, with its vignette form, is unlike anything we've published so far at the Umbrella, and we're happy to showcase the work alongside our growing poetry section.
A bit more about Arden Eli Hill, this week's featured poet: Despite being from Louisiana, Arden has never wrestled an alligator, only a kangaroo. He is the author of Bloodwater Parish. Arden’s work has appeared in Willow Springs, Western Humanities Review, Tupelo Quarterly Disability Folio, About Place's Strange West's issue, the award-winning anthology First Person Queer, and its sequel. He has work forthcoming from Belfast Pride 2024. In case you are still thinking about the kangaroo, Arden won.
Recently, Grant Burkhardt - one of the Umbrella's poetry and managing editors - talked with Arden about the new poem and about his work more broadly.
Grant Burkhardt: I'd like to start with a question about shared memory, which is something that comes through in the vignettes, especially when the speaker finds themselves alone. Is this, and the power of photographs more specifically, something you were thinking about during the writing of the poem?
Arden Eli Hill: I think a lot about shared memory, especially as a person with a relatively poor memory specifically around times when I’ve experienced trauma. Several years ago, I was undiagnosed with colon cancer, but beginning to suffer from it. This manifested in physical pain which led to me drinking, which led to murky thinking and forgetfulness, which contributed to a path that resulted in a former lover’s request for no contact. In regard to shared memory, I wish I had access to those early days of sickness, but I don’t and, even if I had access to the closest person to me at the time, witnesses see things through their own lenses; I’d still be grasping towards an objective truth. In the poem the speaker and the “you” do not have a shared memory of events in part because so much is hidden from the both of them.
I absolutely believe in the power of photographs. Sometimes photographs stand in for whole periods of time. I can see a single image as representative of a year, for example. I utilize this capacity of the snapshot to fill in for time in “Polaroids.” The sections in the poem are moments of a more extended period of time. Part of how I’m using them is to represent the places where memory does exist as standing out from the lingering gaps.
Grant Burkhardt: Were there other versions of "Polaroids" that were different than the version we're publishing? How did you know that the vignettes form was the right one?
Arden Eli Hill: I admire poets who keep multiple drafts of their poems. I’m not that kind of writer and I struggle to keep my work organized. At best, I can remember I’ve written a poem and access a single version of it that has been changed often multiple times. When I take something out from a poem, unless I’m looking to make it its own poem, it simply disappears into the void. From what I remember, earlier drafts of “Polaroids” were less structured into the snapshot form that I think has become a defining feature of the poem in its current incarnation. I picked the vignette form to go with the theme of fragmented memory. I have written poems in sections before, but here the poem felt like it particularly called for this form.
Grant Burkhardt: Going back a bit, I'm curious how the poem came to be, and whether there were versions of it that were shorter or longer, with fewer or more "polaroids"?
Arden Eli Hill: I’m extremely lucky to be a member of a generative writing workshop run by one of my favorite authors and editors, Tony Amato. When I receive a prompt in workshop, I find my writing muscles have reached the point where I, on a good night, begin to hear a narrative in response. Sometimes poems I had no idea were inside of me, come out. These poems and the emotions they convey can be completely surprising to me. “Polaroids” tackles a subject I’ve broached in a few other poems, but when I started writing it, I could feel it coming out in little bursts that eventually became the polaroid structure. I was really happy with the new direction to the topic that this approach sent me on. My next step for poems I want to continue to wrangle with is to revise them with my writer partner Wendy A. Gaudin. Having a regular writing partner helps me be accountable and less isolated. The spark is ignited where the piece has been waiting to emerge. Then, the emerging poem is crafted and honed. In this way “Polaroids” is a result of both individual and collective writing and revision.
Grant Burkhardt: This is such a richly layered poem, really enveloping the reader in the story, and even what's not being said. That really comes through. How did you know when to end it? It feels like a piece that could have gone on longer, with such rich detail and imagery.
Arden Eli Hill: Thank you. Ending on the image of stop felt very natural. I’d brought the poem through particular moments in time and reached the point where the speaker could command memory and thus, a response to memory to cease. The poem is on the longer end for what I normally write though oddly enough more recently I’ve been crafting shorter poems typically by pulling them out of my standard-length poem which is about a little over half a page. The last time I read “Polaroids” was for a drunk audience in a bar and I was following a burlesque act. It was quite the experience hopefully for all of us.
Grant Burkhardt: Where do you take inspiration for your work?
Arden Eli Hill: To some degree, my experiences are the seeds of poems. At times, my perspective changes as I write, which means that it’s difficult to call these poems autobiographical even though they have an “I” speaker. I once studied under Rick Trethewey, a poet whose dedication to fact was so strong that he re-wrote a verse in a formal poem when he learned that the squirrel he shot contained a different number of pieces of buckshot than he remembered. I’m more than willing to abandon an adherence to that level of detail to craft a poem into its own story. I often learn a lot from listening to the story the poem is telling me as I discover new relationships to the events I describe. How I feel about an incident can change from before the poem, the writing of the poem, to the completion of the poem. I suspect things could change even years later which might call for new work in response.
Arden Eli Hill
Despite being from Louisiana, Arden has never wrestled an alligator, only a kangaroo. He is the author of Bloodwater Parish. Arden’s work has appeared in Willow Springs, Western Humanities Review, Tupelo Quarterly Disability Folio, About Place's Strange West's issue, the award-winning anthology First Person Queer, and its sequel. He has work forthcoming from Belfast Pride 2024. In case you are still thinking about the kangaroo, Arden won.
Grant Burkhardt
Grant is a poet and writer with work featured in or forthcoming in the Martello Journal, the Great Lakes Review, Nightingale & Sparrow, Icarus, and others. His poem - 'The Thing About People Knowing You Cook' - was a Sundress Publications 'Best of the Net' nominee. He’s also one of the Umbrella's poetry editors and non-fiction editors.
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