The Shore Interview #54: Anastasios Mihalopoulos

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: Hi Anastasios, it’s a pleasure getting to conduct this interview with you. I’d like to start off by looking at your poem in our latest issue, “Thoughts on the Invention of the Alphabet from a Cottage in Prince Edward Island.” I keep coming back to the moment in the poem where the form alerts the reader to a disruption in stanza eleven where a tercet is introduced after consistent couplets. Moreover, this disruption creates a visible cause and effect as it leaves the final stanza as a monostich. It’s a beautiful turn in the poem. How do you gauge when a turn feels right for your piece? Do you find it’s a different type of gauging across genres, or do they feel similar?

AM: Hi Ella, the honor is mine! Thank you so much for this generous close read of my work.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the poetic turn both formally and contextually. To refer to the poem specifically, I was thinking a lot about language at the time and I was reading Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram when I wrote it. I’ve been fixated on this idea he suggests that "The written word locks language into fixed forms, stripping it of the fluid, dynamic qualities of speech.” He suggests that "Once the written text began to speak, the voices of the forest and rivers began to fade" (Abram 138). The ideas Abram offers is that by turning to written words for our source of sensuous stimulation we have driven a barrier between ourselves and nature. In this poem, I wanted to echo that idea but also challenge it a bit. I wanted to see if I could use language and line breaks to return to those fluid qualities of nature. So, in my mind, the poem takes both a structural and a contextual turn when it breaks its form with the lone tercet. In that tercet, the focus turns to the negative outcomes of the Anthropocene (loggers and clear cuts, etc.) before returning to couplets and finally the monostich. My hope is that the turn in both form and content urges the reader to feel a sense of gravity in regard to nature and music, to the idea of compressing all this life and meaning into the note, A.

All of this said, my non-answer to how I gauge when a turn feels right is It depends. There are so many forms a turn can take and so many directions that turn can take us. In some poems, the lack of a turn or climactic reveal becomes a kind of turn itself. In most cases, I often think of an old scientific adage from biology and chemistry, form determines function. In the case of my poetry, I actually believe that the function of the poem determines the form of verse and the nature of the turn. When I feel those details are aligned that would be when I’d say a turn feels right.

Across genres, I would actually say that the metrics remain the same. While poetry of course can turn via formal aspects of meter, stanza and line breaks, prose requires and relies more on contextual turns, though many prose pieces use forms and shifts in POV to accomplish this.

EF: From the writing workshops you attended in Greece, to your current PhD program in New Brunswick, how do you see the contrast of geographical locations playing out in your work? Do you think it plays a role in your manuscript, Still, Sometimes, Shipwreck?

AM: Absolutely.

I have been fortunate to spend several months in Greece over the years. I attended the Writing Workshops in Greece (WWIG) on the island of Thasos alongside many writers and close friends. This time was especially meaningful to me as a member of the Greek-American Diaspora. I grew up without learning Greek or Italian which led to a sense of cultural disconnection and generated feelings of a lost heritage. These trips continue to function as a kind of reclamation for me.

I’ve always cared deeply about a sense of place and the way natural landscapes influence identity. Still, Sometimes, Shipwreck is very much about this form of home-seeking regarding my Greek and Italian heritage. The poems of this collection often turn to nature and landscape as a means of mending a fractured self with recurring images of broken lighthouses, the sea, my late grandfather and The Odyssey. However, the poems of that collection were written before I moved to Canada. My second manuscript-in-progress, Dancing in the Land of Sound, includes many poems situated in Atlantic Canada as well as in Greece and Italy.

When I first moved to New Brunswick, Canada, I immediately felt a sense of connection. I found a vibrant literary community and a rich tapestry of culture and history that I am continuously striving to learn more about. Soon after moving here, I met my fiancé. Together, we’ve traveled all around Atlantic Canada, often seeking out new, authentic and respectful ways of connecting with the landscape. In this poem and others, it’s evident that these places quickly found their way into my writing.

EF: On top of your creative writing degrees, I found it interesting that you also hold a BS in chemistry. How has studying in the sciences, and chemistry in particular, impacted your creative writing? Could you speak to any occasions in your creative writing career that you found the skills for your chemistry degree came in handy in any surprising way?

AM: I’ve always loved books and science; both for the exploration and sense of discovery that comes with them. When I began my undergraduate degree at Allegheny College I enrolled as a chemistry major and a creative writing minor. It wasn’t until my junior year that I chose to double major in English and Chemistry. It was a moment of recognition that writing would take equal priority in my life. So much of my writing begins with a scientific phenomenon. I think that studying the sciences has certainly impacted my gaze as a poet. I don’t think it’s influenced my writing style as much as it alters where and how I look at things. I actually have a bit of a resistance to using scientific terminology in poems but I love the perspectives one can gain by looking at things through a different lens, from a molecular or an atomic level. That is probably the largest impact the sciences have on me, this altered way of looking at certain phenomena in the world. At the same time, I think that poetry leads me to encounter the sciences differently, to not be so obsessed with “learning” something into oblivion but rather reveling in the unknowability of certain questions. It’s very much a reciprocal relationship.

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

AM: I’m always excited for new issues of the Fairy Tale Review. But I’ve read recent work from The Fiddlehead, 32 Poems, Ergon and Ninth Letter to name a few that come to mind.

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

AM: I was particularly struck by Michelle Ivy Alwedo’s poem, “By 2050 There Will Be More Plastic in the Sea than Fish,” and Melody Wilson’s “Singularity” and how both works lend a kind of animacy to nonhuman elements. In Alwedo’s poem, “The Atlantic licks the cliffs… with a hunger that startles the old fishermen” and “Even the crows have changed their language” to one of mourning. Here, I see much more than just personification, but a kind of reckoning of what the landscape is telling the reader and the fishermen. Similarly, in Wilson’s poem it is not the black hole but the image of it that takes on the role of nonhuman protagonist. Wilson writes of the photo:

The photo looks a little like everything else,
the ocular lens of a microscope, 

the nostril of a horse galloping at night.
They say it’s very still, that it gurgles, 

a baby practicing its vowels.

Here, again we understand a form of language, a quiet communication from one being to another like the crows changing their language, the black hole is now practicing its vowels trying to take on another mode of speech to tell us something. What strikes me about both of these poems is how both poets, through careful language and meter, establish a sense of urgency for environmental change by giving voice to the nonhuman world.

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Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his MFA in poetry from the Northeast Ohio MFA program and his BS in both Chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Scientific American, Driftwood Press, Fairy Tale Review, Pithead Chapel and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.