Jehanne Dubrow is the author of ten collections of poetry and three books of creative nonfiction. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.

She has earned numerous awards, such as the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Academy of American Poetry and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry from Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. She serves as a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.

The final volume in her groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians, examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dubrow's husband came to the end of his tenure as an officer. Civilians addresses what it means when someone who has been trained for war returns from the confining, restrictive space of a naval vessel.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

Civilians is the third book in a trilogy about your experience as a military spouse. The epigraph is a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed into new bodies.” What did you learn over the course of writing these three books? Did you make any discoveries or realizations about your experience through your writing?

In the early stages of working on Stateside (the first book in the trilogy), I was trying to make sense of a military deployment and what it means to be a military wife. In researching war literature, I found that there were very few interesting examples of a military spouse left waiting on the homefront. Homer’s Penelope became my primary role model; she was the literary figure with whom my poems struggled, her bravery impossible to emulate, and her marriage to Odysseus a means of critiquing my own relationship with my husband.

After the publication of Stateside in 2010, I thought I was done with the topic. But, in reading at civilian and military institutions around the country, I began to reflect on the strangeness of my situation–that I was both an academic and a military spouse. I belonged to two communities that seemed incapable of understanding one another. Yet how important it was that they attempt to communicate, that they try to speak across the military/civilian divide! That’s how Dots & Dashes came to be; it’s a collection that turns to Emily Dickinson and Sappho for inspiration. As with Stateside, I continued to examine how my poems about war might fit within a larger literary tradition.

When Dots & Dashes was published in 2017, I again believed that I had no more to say on the subject of a military marriage. But, in 2019, my husband began to prepare for retirement after 20 years of military service. Slowly, I began to realize that his transition from active-duty service member to civilian would constitute a radical transformation, not only for him but also for our marriage. Even before I started writing the poems that became Civilians, I decided to return to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I intuited that Ovid would have something to teach me about life after war, how transformation can function both as a kind of ending and as a beginning.

I wrote these three books over the space of 20 years. Looking at the trilogy, I see that my engagement with the classics and, generally speaking, with the subject matter relaxed over time. The poems in Stateside seem to me the work of a very young formalist trying to prove her agility with fixed form. There’s some anxiety there–I wanted to assert my right to be part of this ancient conversation about war and to prove my gifts as a practitioner of rhyme and meter. By the time we get to Civilians, I’m older, and the poems feel a little more comfortable in their skins, formally and intellectually. In this last book, when I write about the Greeks or the Romans, my poems are much more matter-of-fact in speaking across the centuries. As a whole, the trilogy also taught me that I should never insist I’m done with a topic. I’ve learned that the gods of creativity view these kinds of self-satisfied proclamations as an invitation to prove the poet wrong.

In “The Trojan Women,” you write about a group of women imagining their future—a future that may be darker than they foresee. You also make frequent allusions to Greek mythology. In this poem, hinting at the Fates who spun, measured, and clipped the threads of life. As a woman whose husband was at war, what was your relationship to the future? Did you find community with other women in a similar situation at the time?

Stateside, the first book in the trilogy, centers on anticipatory grieving. The whole book is terribly worried about the future, what will happen to the husband, and how the wife might handle his death in war. For instance, a poem like “Against War Movies” articulates these fears by looking at a series of famous films, each movie providing a new set of images that represent the speaker’s dread. As the final couplet of the poem observes, “Each movie is a training exercise, / a scenario for how my husband dies.” Civilians offers that same perspective, but it’s more muted because the book’s central concern is the husband’s return to civilian life.

I was an unusual military wife, thanks to my career in academia. So, I spent very little time on bases or in military housing. But there is a community of military spouses who are writing and publishing, including Siobhan Fallon, Victoria Kelly, Terri Barnes, and Abby E. Murray. I feel really fortunate to be part of this small cohort of voices. Together, we’re helping to build a literature of war that has been largely excluded from the canon up until now.

In “Tyrian Purple,” you make another reference to weaving in Greek mythology. You wrote, “Who can blame Andromache / if she sits at the loom for hours / rectangular world where nothing extends / beyond the cloth’s perimeter” (55). Could you please tell me more about your interest in weaving as an image for this book? And moreover, what is the role of art during wartime? Is it “a pastime,” or something more, like a coping mechanism?

In my free time, I’m a weaver (in fact, in another life, I would have been a textile artist). But weaving–both as a physical action and as a symbol–also appeals to me because the words “text” and “textile” are so closely linked; they share the same PIE root. And it makes sense. As with writing, weaving is a way of marking time; it mimics the construction of narrative, one row–one line–of thread placed on top of another. The loom is a frame much like the frame of the page. Andromache’s loom, Penelope’s loom. These are places where death is forestalled, where the woman-as-maker has some control over the movement of hours. We take writing seriously. But weaving? Frequently, textile production has been overlooked as women’s work, more craft than art. In “Tyrian Purple,” I use the word “pastime” ironically. The poem ends:

It’s late in our history to condemn

the ways people spin out a war,

if they twist the days like fibers on a spindle.

Imperial purple. Purple of bruised

loyalties. Unfadable purple

that stains the maker’s skin.

This is the ars poetica of the collection. Andromache’s work at the loom is profound, artful, and necessary. And the poet, when she writes about war, finds that her own hands are stained by their sustained contact with such painful, wounding subject matter. But that doesn’t mean she should stop weaving.

I’m very interested in your explorations of distance and anticipation throughout Civilians. In particular, I enjoyed the way you used the sonnet form in “The Acme No. 470 Clicker” to build sonic anticipation that mirrored the anticipation the imagined soldier might feel waiting for the clicker to sound. Would you please speak more on your approach to using form? For example, when do you find the use of an established form generative, and when might a poem be better suited to free verse?

For me, the sonnet often functions as a small essay in miniature. It makes a very clear argument in its opening lines, and then the rest of the poem offers textual evidence in support of that thesis. Both Dots & Dashes and Civilians include what I think of as my “artifact sonnets.” These are poems that present the reader with tiny portraits of objects associated with war (i.e. the clicker, the trench whistle, a copy of one of the Armed Services Editions). In the space of the fourteen lines, it’s possible to discuss how the artifact is a thing I can now hold in my hands as well as a relic from a distant war. Sonnets can easily move across time and geography; the volta allows us to engage in that kind of travel, swiftly and effortlessly.

I started out as a formalist. And the first of the books in the trilogy, Stateside, is largely written in blank verse or in fixed forms such as sonnets and triolets. I made extensive use of rhyme and refrain in that collection. But I’ve become increasingly comfortable working between modes. Civilians reflects the fact that I now take a more organic approach to my handling of form. Yes, sometimes I still love to give myself a writing prompt. Let’s write a villanelle today, I might say. But, frequently, I let the draft guide me toward its eventual shape. If I’m writing a narrative poem, for example, I’m likely to use a longer, more conversational line (perhaps one that’s around five feet). Maybe I’ll forgo stanza breaks, preferring that the story remain uninterrupted by blank space. And if I’m writing a poem that leans toward the lyrical, it’s very possible I’ll end up working in rhyme and meter. But sometimes the scope of the topic demands a fixed form as well. This brings me back to my artifact sonnets. The Acme No. 470 Clicker is a small thing; it fits easily in my palm. It wants to be contained the box of a sonnet and sits so well inside that structure.

“As You Were” begins, “To be a knot untied, a bowline cut, / a sheepshank slithered from its shape” (49). In part xiii of the long poem “Metamorphosis,” you write “After the fighting stops, / grief is like a god / changing us into something else” (37). These are two different types of transformation: one defined by what it used to be, and one identified by what it is now. How do you think grief changes us? Do our old identities ever leave us, or are they transformed into new ones?

What a good point. You’ve just made me realize that Civilians somehow anticipates my most recent project. I’ve spent the last two years thinking about grief as I’ve worked on my forthcoming book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma. Poetry that reflects the experience of trauma or that embodies the thinking of someone who is in a state of grief often uses techniques such as fragmentation, nonlinear narrative, or even hybrid forms to enact woundedness, that dislocation, that loss of equilibrium. In many cases, grief and trauma are experiences of extreme stasis. A terrible change occurs, and the metamorphosis (usually instigated by a loss or a crisis) immobilizes us. We become frozen in our new forms. Grief can divide a person into before and after. In extreme situations, our old identities may be left in shards, and it’s then the poem’s task to mimic such an experience and to put the reader inside the shattered realm of the traumatized mind.

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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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