Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as the Lead Teaching and Learning Librarian for Colorado College. She also serves as faculty for Pacific Northwest College of Art's Low-Residency MFA program. She is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere.

A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2018 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award and in 2020 the winner of a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, was published in 2019 with Copper Canyon Press.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

In your recent poem “At Least a Dozen Bluets,” you write, “It was your personhood that made/me lose hope — that prison system of a/language.” How are personhood, hope, and language linked? And could you please elaborate on the idea that hope can be a “prison system of a language?”

My hesitation in responding to this question is that I don’t like appearing as though I am the authority over how my work is read or that I hold some “secret right answer” regarding how it should be interpreted. Elaborating on or disclosing what I meant in the writing process often functions to foreclose potential possibilities for the reader. My work and I, as the author, are more invested in messy question asking than resolute answers.

In a classroom setting or if asked at a public reading, I would turn these questions right back on the person asking: In your own experience how are personhood and language linked? Can hope function as a “prison system of a language”? If so, how? How can words exist as methods or modes of entrapment? What is hope? How does hope work? What do you need to do or have to hope? Is your relationship to language one of freedom or confinement?

You recently published a number of visual poems. What do the visual poems allow that strictly text-based poems do not?

I stumbled into creating visual poetry when I was teaching and working as a librarian at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I taught a course there called “Introduction to Writing as Art.” I was greatly challenged and pushed by students who saw acts of writing as necessarily hybrid or cross genre. This environment paired with my experience in libraries dealing with archival reference materials became married in the visual poems.

The visual poems offer a different kind of door in terms of access to the work. I think they draw more or different viewers/readers to the work. The visual poems expand and contract in certain ways that traditional poetry can’t because for me, as the creator, they push me to new possibilities in terms of form and the type of content I can juxtapose; the way I can dance between abstraction and the concrete. Visual poems offer a way to re-imagine, complicate, and subvert my own trauma and poetic voice. Visual poems offer me a different type of realm to play within. Visual poems offer the opportunity to introduce different textures, colors, shapes/forms to the work.

You are very agile with working through different forms and with different voices. For example, the cento, which asks the poet to make a poem out of lines borrowed from other authors. You also write poems after or including references to a number of artists from Fela Kuti to Sharon Olds. What, then, do you make of influence? How much power should it and does it exert over your writing? Who/what are your main influences?

I think of influences as a solar system. I am one star in a vast solar system of lived experiences, references, interactions, sources, etc. My identity is a patchwork quilt of people, places, and things connected to the past, present, and future. We don’t create or make art in a vacuum; it exists as part of an ongoing conversation, a communicative ecosystem. I’m very interested in remixing which for me is a positive relationship to engagement with multiple influences.

My influences are wide and varied; I take pride in believing that nothing is off limits for me. In the past week I have watched a 2019 documentary on contemporary taxidermists called Stuffed and another 2019 documentary on a woman engaged in ancient beekeeping traditions to cultivate honey in the mountains of North Macedonia called Honeyland. I am currently reading a novel called The Hike by Drew Magary alongside a memoir by E.J. Koh called The Magical Language of Others. I’ve been reading poetry books that offer meditations on the color blue like Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Sun Ra is currently on a steady rotation for music. I’m all over the place.

Poems of yours including “Free Radical” and “Why is We Americans” work through an accumulation of images and qualifying statements — often introduced by a repeated phrase — building up a rhythm as they go. How do you go about writing sound and music into your work?

When I’m working on individual poems or series of poems I am often governed or being led by a musical soundtrack. When working on a manuscript I will create a playlist and then have that music continually on loop. Reading aloud to myself and for others helps me work out the sonic quality I am aiming for. I consider giving a reading a form of drafting or revising in an ongoing publication process. Audience response, feedback, and context all inform how I approach the writing process.

To touch on the note about repetition or a “repeated phrase” in connection to rhythm, I think that we work through trauma and the complications of memory in the form of repetition. There is an interesting book edited by Eirini Kartsaki called On Repetition: Writing, Performance & Art that I recommend. The haunting or the return of that which is perhaps unspeakable is something I am really intrigued by in my work.

Library of Small Catastrophes , Copper Canyon Press, 2019 — *Library of Small Catastrophes* , Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Many of your poems operate with important historical events in mind. Here, for example, I am thinking of “The Fultz Quadruplets.” What are the poet’s responsibilities when recapitulating a historical event for a contemporary audience? Are those responsibilities different than a librarian’s?

I don’t think I have the right to decide what responsibilities are at work for a poet choosing to creatively render a historical event for a contemporary audience. I think of poetry books like Eve Ewing’s 1919, or Tyehimba Jess’ Olio, or Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke. I’m not interested in determining or establishing what their responsibilities were as poets in dealing with historical subject matters. I’m much more interested in seeing how they, as poets, re-imagined, subverted, transformed, reclaimed, expanded our current or sometimes previously limited to nonexistent understanding of the past.

When I put on my librarian professional hat I am now operating within the bounds of a particular discipline that has its own methodology accompanied by a standardized set of organizing principles as well as best practices. As a sort of archivist I do have professional responsibilities that should govern how I approach my work. In a perfect world as a librarian, I strive to be equitable in how I support an institution’s acquiring of materials and the ways in which those materials are made accessible. Like any profession or system, those dynamics are very complex and political.

Your poem “A Rock Trying to Stand” is an ekphrastic poem written after a photograph depicting the body of Big Foot, a chief of the Miniconjou Sioux. What do you make of the limits of ekphrasis — that is, what does the poem say that the photograph can’t? What does the photograph say that the poem can’t?

I’m currently working on my next collection of poetry and I realize now — post my first book — that music (sound) and art (visual) are very much intertwined in my writing process. I find them interconnected and inseparable from what eventually lands or is captured on the page as a poem. Rather than view ekphrasis as a “limit” I view it as an act of translation moving something from one form to another. Of course, in translation there are losses and gains but I think detaching the value judgment is a more empowering frame of mind for a writer.

In thinking about this question I am reminded of the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s remarks in an interview regarding her rejection of the terms “surreal” and “magical” in relationship to her photographs: “I don’t like it when they refer to my work as being magical — it makes me furious. It would interest me more, and I don’t know if I ever will get there, if my work had some poetic qualities.” I consider moving back and forth from visual art (which could include sculpture, painting, photography, etc.) to poetry as an act of translation that uses the language or currency of metaphor. We are dealing or trading in metaphors that come in different shapes and sizes or bodies if you will. Again, rather than focus on “limits” or drawbacks I strive to push each to their edge while maintaining a disposition of wonder, curiosity, and imaginative play.

A photograph arguably forecloses the imagination of the viewer whereas a poem can expand it or challenge the reader to construct (bring to life) the world in their own mind. I like the duality and exchange involved with poetry in that I present a musical score on the page with a poem but how readers put it to music is open to their individual interpretation. I don’t see myself as a writer as a role of dictatorship. I don’t particularly have an interest in controlling people’s reactions or leading them to some wrong or right reading. The sweet spot is a nuanced choose-your-own-adventure.

As a librarian I understand the value of a medium like photography for archival and documentation purposes. I understand the photograph as a potential medium for capturing truth and I realize the power of the camera’s eye to bear witness. As a poet I love that a poem can be committed to memory, that it can exist as a lyric song that is orally handed down generation to generation. I understand the body and mind as archives as well. I cherish that a poem can become a fabric of the mind and body that is free from the physical materiality of an object or tangible thing. The poem can move to the mind’s eye where it can take root and/or morph continuously.

Your poem “Portrait of a Pack Horse Librarian” closes with the observation, “She’s learned a girl is/carved from the words she does not know.” Many of your poems incorporate feminist themes, and enact a form of consciousness-raising through your exploration of social issues and historical narratives related to sexism and racism. Is it fair to say that poetry can be a form of activism?

As a black queer woman I most certainly believe that poetry can be a form of activism. I think we should all be committed to continuing to expand how we define what qualifies as “a form of activism.” In addition to more straightforward notions of activism such as social justice work and political organizing, I would argue that things like poetry, self-care, erotic pleasure, and art all have an equally important role in activism.

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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.