Didi Jackson is a poet and professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. The recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and a finalist for the Meringoff Prize in Poetry, her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, the New Yorker, Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. My Infinity (Red Hen Press) is her second book of poems.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

In “Witness,” you allude to the martyr St. Priscilla. Other poems take up women mystics like Hilma af Klint and the other members of De Fem, who practiced mysticism. The tree of knowledge—Yggdrasil in Norse mythology—is also frequently regarded as a feminine figure. For you, how are mysticism or spirituality, gender, and witness connected?

What a wonderful question. In much of this collection, I am thinking about the historical role of women in the church, art, spirituality, and the world at large. In “Witness,” I refer to Santa Priscilla’s catacombs and compare the shape of the orants (the praying figures) in the frescos to the shimmying of the leaves on birch trees. What isn’t exactly mentioned in the poem, but you perhaps intuitively honed in on, is those particular catacombs are filled with images of women participating in various religious activities that are normally performed by men.

One example is a fresco of a group of women, one of whom is breaking bread for the Eucharist, a role reserved only for men in early Christianity. I love how these frescos speak to women’s roles as spiritual leaders almost two millennia ago. Also, martyred women like Saint Priscilla, who were tortured in multiple ways only to be violently executed at the hands of men, are horribly tragic figures.

In my poem “Burning Bush,” I undertake the subject of the murder/suicide of a student of mine, Brianne Ort, who was killed by her partner, a man who wanted to control her, to own her, to have her for himself. This story is all too familiar and happens far too often. Such was the fate of thousands of women throughout the ages: the martyrs whose names we know and the countless others who have been lost to history.

The word martyr itself comes from a Greek word that means witness. Personally, as a poet, it is my utmost calling to act as a witness, to observe the world and write about it. In her poem “I Go Back to May 1937,” Sharon Olds writes, “I say / Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.” Olds understood her charge as a poet of witness from a very young age. I act as a witness for Brianne. I am a witness for Hilma af Klint, overlooked in the canon of art history. I become a witness for my younger self, a girl alone and vulnerable. I am a witness to these and other struggles of women.

As a woman who has sought my own counsel from a female medium in order to learn more about the possible afterlife of my husband, who died by suicide, I identify with the quest for knowledge both Hilma af Klint and the group De Fem reckoned with. The theosophy movement allowed women to claim power in a world where they were considered second-class citizens. Theosophists attempted to bridge the spirit with the natural and scientific worlds. Women usher in life, and the miracle of birth can be mirrored in its converse: death. Women are closer to life and death by the sheer limitations and capability of their bodies.

I read once that in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, women were given their last rights as they entered into labor during childbirth because the odds of infant and maternal mortality were so high. It is no wonder that if women come close to these worlds naturally, they would be suited for interconnecting to that which comes from beyond this life. They perhaps more easily serve as conduits to the mysteries unknown.

In “Awe,” you quote an excerpt from Barry Lopez, “We are the pattern makers.” In a similar sense, Hilma af Klint used shapes, symbols, and patterns as a sort of visual language. Do you see pattern-making as part of your poetics? What role do patterns, meter, and form play for you?

Hilma af Klint’s use of symbols is mind blowing. She kept such intensely complicated diagrams and catalogues of her work in her notebooks, creating an entire language translated from her communications with the High Masters.

Pattern-making is a natural part of writing poetry. I don’t write in rhyme or meter, but that doesn’t mean I don’t apply patterns in other ways. Images can be linked through an extended conceit to create a pattern. Also, diction can create a pattern of both sound and tone. (Assonance, consonance, and alliteration all create a pattern of sound within a poem.)

I often think of how a visual artist uses color in a painting. For example, by placing the color white in various areas around a canvas, the artist creates a sense of unity or cohesion, guiding the viewer's gaze around the painting. An artist could do the same with line or shape. Lines that are sharp or angular generate tension or anxiety, and curved fluid lines produce a sense of calm or serenity. Such repeating patterns of lines have a tonal effect on the work. Words have the same power, and poets are aware of how such patterns in the language of a poem can manipulate the reader emotionally. Finally, patterns can also originate not only from meter, but from how the line is spoken and where the breath falls naturally. All of these add to the design of the poem. I read my lines as I compose them out loud to hear the natural pauses for breath, how sounds repeat and please the ear, and how images fall like puzzle pieces within the lines.

The rest of the Lopez quotation (which is not included in the poem) reads, “and if our patterns are beautiful and full of grace, they will be able to bring a person for whom the world has become broken and disorganized up off his knees and back to life.” How, if at all, do you think art helps us process grief? Does it resurrect? Maintain? Expand?

I love that quote so much. And I constantly think about bringing someone “broken…. up off his knees and back to life.” My poem “Mercy” is about holding a ghost of someone who has died from self-harm and reminding him of what is beautiful about the world and what he loved while alive. Writing certainly helped me process my grief. I was already writing before I lost my husband to suicide, but the poems that came from that event helped me immensely.

I believe in the idea of catharsis. I feel it is important to move towards the pain rather than run from it. I needed to recover from the trauma and shock of losing him, and poetry provided a space for me to work through all my emotions. But I want to be very careful here. I don’t want to imply that poetry was able to rid me of my grief or that it “cured” me in any way. I believe grief expands and contracts depending on the day. And I know for sure it will never go away. But my art, my poetry, helps me to carry its weight. It takes part of the burden and bears it for me for my lifetime.

Did you have any trepidations about writing fictional accounts using Hilma af Klint’s voice, for example, in “The Automatic Writing of Hilma af Klint?” Why or why not? What was your research process like for the book, and at what point did you decide to write in her voice?

I like to think of the poems in Hilma af Klint’s voice as a type of historical fiction based on a great deal of research. I poured over and read her notebooks, bought and read the exhibition catalogue from the show at the Guggenheim in 2018, and ordered the seven-volume Catalogue Raisonneé of her entire life’s work. I read Hilma af Klint: A Biography, released in 2022 by Julia Voss and translated by Anne Posten. I watched the fabulous documentary Beyond the Visible, directed by Halina Dyrschka. And ultimately I visited Sweden to experience the city of Stockholm and its surrounding areas. My husband and I drove to the island of Munsö and visited the churches she sketched early in her life (which I found in the Catalogue Raisonneé). We visited the cathedral in Stockholm with the giant sculpture of St. George fighting the dragon, an influential image for af Klint.

When I started writing the poems, they sounded overly didactic. It was as if I was giving an art lesson in each poem. I don’t personally care for overly teachy poems. So, I decided to put those facts in the voice of Hilma af Klint. The information was the same, all from the references listed above, but now she can be the one conveying the information. It is as if she is speaking from beyond the grave, telling us about her life. I don’t think of myself as a medium, but I wanted to give her a voice to our contemporary world.

Do you practice automatic writing? What techniques do you use to generate ideas or to expand on them? Where does intuition come into your writing and revision process?

My writing process has changed over the years. Having just read an interview with John Ashbery, I realize I am not alone with that. His process, too, changed as he got older. I used to need prompts, a specific setting, a glass of wine! (ha ha!). But now, I can enter the world of the poem much more easily. I usually begin with an image that I turn into a metaphor or simile. That sets the climate of the poem. I am able to shut off my editor brain much more easily these days. Maybe I trust myself more? Or maybe it is a muscle I’ve developed after years of writing? I keep a list in my notes app on my phone of poem or essay ideas. It is a LONG list. With teaching, I feel as if I don’t have enough time to write. I am always adding more ideas to the list than I am able to write about. Also, I am lucky to be part of a generative group that meets on Mondays. In it, we give each other several words and then write and share a poem right then and there. At the very least, I get the beginning of a poem that I can return to it throughout the week.

As for revision, I have a few people who are my first readers. My husband, Major Jackson, is one. My friend Michele is another. But at some point, I realized I had to start to trust my own intuition. So, I read and re-read my poems alone. One thing that helps me out is recording myself on my phone’s voice memo app. Then, when I take a walk, I play my poem back and listen for bumps or awkward spots. I hardly recognize my own voice! So because of that, it is easy for me to think about what is or isn’t working in the poem.

Many of the poems in this book ask questions that cannot be answered. You acknowledge this in poems like “The Tree of Knowledge,” for example when the speaker observes, “But I’ll never know why / I was left a widow” (40). Many feel that questions asked in prayer and meditation are similarly unanswerable. Do you see your work as prayerful or meditative? What role do questioning and ambiguity play in your work, and why are they important?

When I was a child, heaven was a place where I’d know everything. In my child-brain, it would go something like this: I would die, go to “heaven,” and there I would somehow be given the answers to questions I didn’t even know I had! I have wanted answers to the unanswerable for a long, long time.

When my husband took his life, he left me with so many questions. He had not fought depression and did not ever speak of suicide. So, my greatest irony is that I will live the rest of my life with one of the worst kinds of unanswerable questions. I take comfort with Keats’ concept of negative capability. To keep from driving myself mad, I work daily on how to sit with the mysteries of life. Mediation helps. Funny, my child-self still feels certain that all will come clear when I die. So all I can do now is write the questions. Put them out there for others to read and relate to.

My cousin, who is like my sister, was just diagnosed with State IV ovarian cancer. She is in her early fifties. Here come the questions: why her? Why such suffering? Why does this happen to such a kind person? I am overwhelmed knowing that I really know so little. I think Aristotle said something like the more we know, the more we don’t know. So, I reach towards the unknown in my poetry. Allowing myself to ask the difficult, unresolvable questions is a way of self-care. But I know these questions are bigger than me and my own needs. They are part of how the world operates and the mysteries we all must live with.

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

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