The Shore Interview #56: Lizzy Ke Polishan

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Thank you for being willing to take part in this interview, Lizzy! My first question has to do with a craft element I found myself admiring more and more as I reread your poems (including your previous one in our Issue 21). Really it’s more of a combination of elements, such as your enjambment, line length, syntax and spacing, which produces this pacing effect that I can only call something like, “breathwork,” in your lines. An excellent example of this effect is in these lines in “catafalque”: “...are you / haloed? are you rolling / loneliness / away from the mouth / of that cave?” which doesn’t even do it full justice without the spacing on the page. Can you speak to any places or sources that may influence or inspire this type of effect, including any outside of strictly “creative writing?” 

LKP: My family owned a sign company when I was a kid. I hung out there a lot, with the rolls of vinyl and the industrial plotter, watching enormous words come into being in all these colors and fonts. With signs, the words are the words, but they’re also objects, deeply embodied. The word conveys the meaning; but the word itself—the signifier itself—conveys meaning and feeling through all these non-verbal cues. The layout, the placement, the way the words are grouped all change how the words feel.

This “breathwork”—I love that description, the idea of enclosing breath with sound—uses some of those elements, pressing on the graphic without tipping fully into the graphic, to shape how the poem feels and lives on the page.

It started as a way to multiply meaning—to set off specific groups of words or words that emphasized or, especially, contradicted or negated, the main syntactical current. I tried to do this a bunch of ways—that earlier poem in The Shore was maybe one prototype—but space feels right. Space creates these groupings, but also opens a multiplicity of other possibilities. I love how caesura opens a poem, holds a space for space—for the silent presence beyond the poem, the breath between the sounds. A way to visually hear the silence. I also love how space can let you run syntax in two different directions—you open a space and, if you can slot words in above or below, you’re creating another syntactical chunk. You’re not necessarily verbalizing this, but your brain subconsciously registers it as another unit of meaning.

This is all sounding very theoretical, maybe, but it’s one of my favorite parts of making the poem—a lot of it is very intuitive, embodied, playful.

EF: With your two poems, “here is the end of everything” and “catafalque,” together in our current issue, I can’t help but notice the overlapping currents of loss in an interestingly embodied manner. “here is the end of everything” seemingly hinges the occasion of the poem on the mouth of the “you” and its line breaks on “beating” imply internal turmoil within the “you.” While the “i” in “catafalque” slides across a spectrum of possibility, whether personifying or metaphorizing the catafalque, what is being carried, decorated and honored, is both a physical body and an intangible loss. With all this in mind, I’m curious about what imagistic directions you find most fruitful when handling writing about loss in the lyric, perhaps ones you don’t think are always obvious to a reader?

LKP: I normally don’t try to look at loss directly, but sometimes it emerges—and I love this question because I never really thought about the mechanism for why this happens, but I’m noticing now that both of these poems came from the same impulse. With both these poems, I started with and leaned into not so much images but specific words or phrases that felt viscerally negative in my body, then used syntax to transform them.

So words and phrases like “alone,” “you wanted to leave,” or “the end of the everything” give me a pretty strong visceral feeling of tension. These feel fundamentally different in my body from something like “here is the end of everything you wanted to leave you alone”—which contains all those same words and phrases, but feels viscerally like exhale, like relief. The same with “catafalque.” I think the gateway phrases into that poem were “falling apart” and “suffering”—things that, alone, feel very different from “suffering…falling apart.”

So the negation of the negative—that was the thing I kept leaning into, the driving force. Not an erasure or a cancellation or an avoidance, but a transformation. A doubling of the negative into something positive—something else.

EF: In your recent Letter from Our Editor for River & South Review, you mention that you’ve been drawn towards prose writing after primarily writing poetry for many years. How, if at all, has this recent exploration of prose writing changed your writing or editorial process and how do you think it will potentially influence (or perhaps already has) how you conceive of a full manuscript for yourself?

LKP: With poetry, I feel like I’m looking at the words. With prose, it’s feels like looking through them—at the world behind and beyond or inside. In some ways, that’s a simplification—words are on a spectrum and there’s always a little of both.

In terms of process, I think toggling between the two has given me a fuller awareness of this spectrum. A better understanding of this: Am I writing from the side of the signifier or from the side of the signified? Mostly this awareness has opened up a really gorgeous range of possibilities in both genres. A few poems that were giving me trouble feel into place, because the issues weren’t really linguistic but substantive. And with fiction, sometimes I found it easier to feel into a piece linguistically, rather than trying to first determine the meaning.

As for a manuscript…So over the summer, while I was starting the novel, I was concurrently arranging an overwhelmingly gigantic stack of poems into something manuscript-adjacent, something that has since become two manuscripts. (Yay!) I found that process way harder than writing the poems themselves. It was work. Writing poetry normally feels fun and joyful and exuberant. But that process really alleviated some of the stress I felt about fiction. I realized the thing I’d previously struggled with most in fiction had less to do with the writing itself and more to do with the fact that I was trying to organize the whole and create the parts simultaneously—when they’re really separate (but related) processes. So with fiction, now I have a general sense of the whole, but I understand that my job is just to do the best I can with the parts until the real whole emerges. I put everything in its own Word Doc, instead of one seamless behemoth. I jump around, go out of order—the whole thing feels way more fun.

EF: Are there any journals or magazines you're currently enjoying?

LKP: POETRY. Paris Review. New Ohio Review. Blackbird. Gulf Coast. Passages North. American Poetry Review. Bennington Review. Ploughshares. Sugar House Review. Salt Hill. Southern Review. Black Warrior Review. Orange Blossom Review. The New Yorker. Copper Nickel. Epiphany. Up the Staircase Quarterly. Rust + Moth. The Shore—obviously.

I do have a little bit of an obsession with lit mags—I’m definitely missing some.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

LKP: Giljoon Lee’s “Arrival” and Hayden Park’s “Last Photograph of God”—are they speaking to each other or speaking slightly past each other, speaking at a slant? I love that both these poems hinge on encounters with small mundane things that are—or could be—something else, something much bigger.

In Lee’s poem, the speaker encounters a “you” who he knows is “not you.” It’s the kind of stomach-dropping encounter that can—and does—send the speaker into a tailspin. It doesn’t matter that the “you” is not you—the presence of your absence and the visceral reminder of that absence conjures you, plus a fuzzy encounter with you, somehow both past and future, present and not, liminal and hazy and real.

In Hayden Park’s “The Last Photograph of God,” we get the speaker’s brother—who “[finds] god in the bottom of a tub / of vanilla bean Haagen-Dasz”—and the speaker—who “[throws] out the half-eaten pint / of rocky road in my own freezer. / just in case.” Park gives us this Schrodinger’s ice cream situation. Here is the possibility for an encounter with something that could be something else, in a mundane moment, much like the moment that catalyzes “Arrival.” But unlike the speaker in “Arrival,” this speaker has a choice—and chooses to avoid the encounter altogether. The ice cream stays God and not-God.

Though these poems felt very different and had very different experiences with the encounter, they both felt, to me, to end on moments of grace. In “Arrival” we’re left with a feeling, painful but fully embodied. In “The Last Photograph of God,” we slide past the ice cream back into the world—to the door that’s just a door, rattling. Both speakers move past the encounter and into the afterimage—be it a fully internal feeling or a fully external world. I love that in the divergence of the possibilities a strange similarity echoes.

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Lizzy Ke Polishan’s recent poems appear in or are forthcoming from: Waxwing, Gulf Coast, Epoch, Passages North, Dialogist, Poet Lore, Rhino, petrichor and Black Warrior Review, among many others. She is the Managing Editor of River & South Review. She reads for Psaltery & Lyre, is a Guest Editor at Palette Poetry and is the author of the collection A Little Book of Blooms (2020). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband.