An Interview with Lesya Bazylewicz

On The Watering Place

IB: Your cover image is striking, and I think mimics a lot of the thematic elements of your poetry. What was the process of its design?

LB: From idea to execution, the design of my cover actually underwent quite a few changes. I began with the desire to incorporate water—more specifically, the reflective surface of water—and a few other natural elements like an animal and trees (i.e. things to be reflected in the water). As you might tell from the chapbook’s title (and title poem), I was very inspired by Theodore Robinson’s “The Watering Place,” an impressionist painting that depicts a man on a horse, and the horse is standing in and drinking from a river. You can see the sky, the horse’s silhouette, and some greenery in the water, as well. With this, I became fascinated by the idea of reflection—that we can see something in the water that we may not even see in the painting’s frame (or in “the real world,” as it were); and that the water is defined by the very objects and colors that it reflects, even if it only reflects them hazily. I don’t think that these thoughts are unrelated to the human process of reflection.

There were a few different drafts of this idea—multiple ponds (some quite rudimentary in their execution…), various kinds of animals (a horse, a buffalo), and both blurry and clear reflections of pine trees. I’d really only painted water before, and it turns out that drawing water with a single-color pen is much more difficult than painting it with numerous oils. Given this challenge, I decided to keep the design simple: a grove of mostly pine trees reflected on the bottom half of a horizontal axis, to indicate the water. I thought that a clear horizontal divide would force people to notice what’s in both halves and what isn’t. And I decided on the falcon in part given its appearance in the manuscript, and in part because I liked the idea of capturing an animal in motion, in flight. As for colors, I went with a white cover because of its minimalist appearance. I knew that a white backdrop would make the title and drawings—which I wanted in a darker color, like the rich blue-green in which you see it now—appear all the more stark.

IB: Similarly, “The Dream Happens” sets up what I see as a deeply contemplative tone that characterizes a lot of your poems. How do you situate the speaker in this poem? How do you balance surreal imagery with emotional realism?

LB: I would say that the speaker is situated not in one physical space, but rather in a kind of dreamlike state of mind. I think the same could be said of many of my poems. “The Dream Happens” was inspired by dreams that I’d had at the time of writing it (the roaches, for example) and the idea was to contemplate the relation between the dreams that we have in our sleep, and the dreams—the hopes, fears, anxieties—that we have when we’re awake. So while the poem is driven by a lot of figurative language (a habit burrowing, for example), I wouldn’t say that the speaker (or the poem) is situated in an alternate reality—even if some of the imagery verges on the bizarre. That’s what’s so fascinating about dreams: we wouldn’t say that they’re “actually” happening in our lives. Yet at the same time, we can typically tell that they represent hopes and anxieties very real to us. I would say that the speaker is situated somewhere between a dream and life, using dreams to interrogate some of the realities of life—bad memories, the desire for more out of life, the fear that this desire can’t be fulfilled.

Whether I achieve a “balance” between surreal imagery and emotional realism is not for me to say. However, I don’t think that the surreal (or perhaps simply, that which we must imagine) is necessarily at odds with “realistic” emotion. As I mentioned above, I think that the surreal, or whatever we “see” in our dreams, can be used as a means or lens to address very real emotions and desires. It’s an impulse that seems very natural to me, given that we imagine things all day long. Provided that the imagination doesn’t run too far away—as long as it doesn’t leave the human realm (though again, it’s difficult to say what that would really look like)—then I think the emotion naturally follows.

IB: How do your format your poems visually? In particular, what role does your use of indents function? And where in the writing process do these visual cues appear?

LB: Generally speaking, the format depends on the individual poem. I don’t really have one method or rule with which I begin all of my poems, which is why they appear fairly differently across the chapbook. For example, in “Like a Snow Hill in the Air”—the only prose poem in the manuscript—I wanted the form to feel relentless, or off the rails in a sense, to emulate the very absurd encounter that happens in the poem. The line breaks in a prose poem are entirely arbitrary—it’s just a matter of where the margins confine the lines. I thought that this sense of rule-breaking (or even lack of conventional rules) suited my intentions in the poem. In terms of the process, I began writing this poem with the relative certainty that I would maintain the prose form.

As for your second question, I tend to think that indents create the appearance of a back-and-forth exchange—thoughts going back and forth, perhaps contradicting one another. In this way, indents function mimetically for me. They capture a mind moving in and out of ideas, which (I hope) provokes further interrogation of the ideas themselves. Where this cue in particular appears in the writing process varies. I’ll often begin a poem with the desire to shift lines on the page. But sometimes this only occurs to me after having written, in which case a reevaluation of the form of the poem is necessary. In “The Watering Place,” for example, I chose to indent lines after having already written. This was because I wanted to provoke some sense of irregularity between the three (fairly neat) five-line stanzas. The poem is very much about revising ideas, going back and forth in thoughts, and my understanding of this occurred to me only after having written a draft of it.

IB: Two of your poems, “Gloucester on the Heath” and “Life in a Box,” both make reference to other writers [Joanna Newsom and Tom Stoppard, respectively]. What inspired the choice to incorporate these other writers? Is there a difference in incorporating a line from music versus a line from a play?

LB: I made the choices on fairly different bases, actually. When I wrote “Gloucester on the Heath,” I only knew that I was writing a poem after having read and been fascinated by Gloucester from King Lear. So technically in this case, the poem incorporates two writers. In the play, Gloucester makes a comment about his “loathed part of nature” burning out before he attempts to commit suicide, so I knew I wanted to incorporate something of this—a fire—in the end of my poem. The idea to bring in Joanna Newsom struck me as I was writing this end, and it only came to me by association. The line—“I call and call for the doctor, but the snow swallows me whole”—is from her song “Sapokanikan;” and I think it popped into my head both because of its sense of extreme desire for help (and the apparent futility of this desire), and because of the mention of snow, an opposite to fire. I think the line represents Gloucester really well—someone who clearly has so much hope, and yet, paradoxically, recognizes the possible futility of his hope (and thus tries to commit suicide).

As for “Life in a Box,” however, I believe I already had the epigraph in my head before writing the poem. So in this case, the choice wasn’t quite as spontaneous. But again, I was really moved by Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—apparently there’s a lot of Shakespeare behind my writing—so the poem was very much motivated by my fascination with the play. More specifically, I love that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are very minor characters taken from another play (Hamlet). But once they’re removed and written into a play of their own, we’re reminded of how little agency they seem to have, even as the new leads. Their duties have been determined entirely by the will of their makers (Shakespeare and Stoppard, in this case), and outside of this, they really have nothing to do. With my poem, I wanted to capture this simultaneous panic and aimlessness from the perspective of a regular person—not an explicit character from a play. In this case, the speaker has come to the realization that life isn’t what it once seemed.

I’m not sure if these two inclusions are different because they’re taken from a song and a play. I think that both media can be intellectually compelling and thematically relevant, so the two don’t differ in this respect. Perhaps the Joanna Newsom song line is more obviously rhythmic in terms of its sound and syntax, and thus was easier to incorporate into the body of a poem. Maybe it’s more associative and surreal in terms of its imagery. But I’m sure that we could say the same about a line from a Shakespeare play, or a perhaps a surrealist drama. So, I think the real difference here depends on the individual quotes, because they’re saying very different things.

IB: What do you see as the role of geography in this collection? How do you envision the relationship between domestic and natural places? I found “Tending the Succulents” to capture this dynamic in a particularly interesting way.

LB: I’m glad you asked this, because I’m not sure if I’ve ever thought very explicitly about geography in my poems. I suppose a wide range of places pop up in the chapbook—Stratford, Texas, inside a car, and of course, outside in nature. It’s difficult for me to say if there’s one particular role that geography fulfills, because I think it likely depends on an individual poem. But if I had to generalize, I’d say that places can serve as important backdrops against which we have thoughts and realizations. In “Father” and “Time Capsule,” place is very much tied to memory. Observing a given location can take us back in time, so to speak. In poems like “The Forgotten Spring,” geography is more indicative of current circumstances being contemplated—the dwindling reservoir, the thorny plants (somewhat apocalyptic, in this case). Geography serves as both an evocative and symbolic force, and it can send the mind on a particular train of thought.

“Tending the Succulents” is a really good example to answer your second question, because it clearly indicates a tension between the natural and domestic (the speaker, in this case, has brought living plants into her apartment). In general, we seem to have little control over the course of nature, and domesticity suggests our attempt to control natural things (as in a domesticated animal). In the poem, the attempt to influence nature doesn’t succeed—the plants initially harm the speaker, and the plants ultimately die. I wouldn’t say that this relationship is necessarily constant—“Still Life in March,” toward the end of the chapbook, shows a very different picture of nature. But in this particular poem, there certainly exists a tension between the natural and domestic.

IB: “Doctor Death” and “Like a Snow Hill in the Air” really stick out because their speakers seem to radically depart from the other poems in the collection. How did you craft these personae?

LB: In the case of “Dr. Death,” I had read a longform piece on a doctor in Texas who was on trial for hurting—and in some cases, killing—his patients. He was actually nicknamed Dr. Death in the media. He lied about his qualifications and education throughout his career, reportedly took drugs on nights before operations, and in a span of two years paralyzed and killed multiple people. In some cases, he was operating on the wrong body parts. But through all of this, he staunchly maintained his innocence, and in fact blamed others for his fatal errors. I wondered if and how a person could really rationalize all of this. I decided to write a poem from this perspective, as a sort of attempt to answer this question. As I mentioned before, I think that poems can occupy a particular state of mind—even one disturbing—and in doing so, allow readers to interrogate that state of mind. This was the goal for “Dr. Death.”

The story behind “Like a Snow Hill” is quite different. I only wrote it a few months ago, and at the time I’d been reading James Tate’s Lost River. I really love his use of surrealism and comedy; the personae in this chapbook are often doing absurd things (like yelling at fish) and totally unaware of their absurdity. At the same time, these poems are also filled with really sincere emotion. So I wanted to try something like this, in part as a challenge to myself. As I’ve said, I like poems to be a performance of a mind thinking. But in this case, I had to challenge myself to be a little whimsical, to approach something like comedy with this strange persona. And it was a really good exercise for me, because I often err on the side of taking things really seriously. So I let go here, and it was truly one of the most fun writing experiences that I can remember.

IB: What was the process of compiling your poetry into a single body like? Any surprises?

LB: The process initially was a bit daunting. I don’t see myself as writing through one particular mode—such as an autobiographical one, for example (though biography does have its place in my poems)—so I wondered whether my chapbook might feel disjunctive or perhaps too broad in range. But of course, once you see your work compiled, you begin to notice all the subtle and not-so-subtle connections between poems—the preoccupations, phrases, and images that recur. Voice and tone persist as well. Versions of the phrase “I have no time” appear in several of my poems, and I had no idea that this was the case until I read all of my work together. Similarly, the words “perfect” and “enough” seem to be all over my poems. In a way, I was pleasantly surprised to find these consistencies—to recognize that I’m consciously (and perhaps unconsciously) trying to address specific ideas and problems, though often in different ways. So when it came to actually ordering the poems, it wasn’t as much of a challenge as I thought.

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Lesya Bazylewicz received her B.A. in English and Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. In 2016 she was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review Allison Joseph Poetry Award, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Salamander, New South, and elsewhere. She serves as a Poetry Reader for The Adroit Journal. Originally from Chicago, she currently lives in Dallas.

Isabella Bowker is from Cranston, Rhode Island, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.A. in the Writing Seminars and is pursuing her Masters in Teaching at Johns Hopkins University. In Transit is her first chapbook.