Q&A: Nance Van Winckel’s latest poetry collection picks up where it last ended
A hearse breaks away from the horses that draw it. It takes off on its own, gaining speed as it charts its own course past storefronts and out of sight. For Nance Van Winckel, this is how a poem works, swerving uncontrollably “through all sorts of historical contexts and emotional states.”
Like the mourners in “The Hearse Broke Free,” readers travel from grief to absurdity and back again, pausing in varied emotional landscapes along the way in the visually rich poems that make up “Our Foreigner,” Van Winckel’s seventh poetry collection.
A longtime Spokane resident, Van Winckel is also the author of four short story collections, a novel in the form of a scrapbook and a book of visual poetry. She’s professor emerita in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She took time recently to talk about “Our Foreigner,” working in multiple genres, and the duties a poet is asked to fulfill.
Q. “Our Foreigner” is your fifth book in four years. Your visual poetry collection “Book of No Ledge” just came out in September, “Pacific Walkers” and “Ever Yrs” both came out in 2014, following the release of “Boneland” in 2013. Does this book represent poems you’ve written since “Pacific Walkers,” or have you been crafting this collection for some time?
A. “Pacific Walkers” was something of a “concept” book, but from around 2008 I was writing many other poems that didn’t quite fit into the “Walkers” material, poems that focus on unidentified John and Jane Does found around Spokane. So the poems in “Our Foreigner” were a combination of other poems that didn’t fit into that book, as well as new poems written between 2013 and 2016. About half and half, I’d guess. “Book of No Ledge,” the visual poems, was in progress for about 10 years. I’d work on those pages off and on.
Q. Do you work in these different genres at once, or do you focus on poetry for a while, then fiction, etc.?
A. …. I like to have several projects going at once, and while I might focus on, say, a short story for a week or more to get out the initial draft, I like to put things aside to “gestate” and it helps that gestation process to have other things to work on while something new sits and brews, which is often happening mostly in the subconscious. Not that I’m comparing myself to Picasso, but I read somewhere that he liked to have five to 10 canvases going at once and he’d move between them during the course of a day. Different writers have very different processes, but for me, having a few different book projects going at once helps take the pressure off any “one.” I’ve abandoned projects, too, when I felt they were just not sizzling, and letting go of things is much easier when they’re others to go back to.
Q. Tell me about the book’s title, “Our Foreigner.” There isn’t a “title poem” per se, yet there’s definitely a sense of foreignness that pervades the book – scenes that feel fantastical, or set in another era, or in a sort of blurred space between the living and the dead.
Q. How did you come to this title?
A. Near the end of the previous book, “Pacific Walkers,” there’s a poem called “Who Died and Made You Our Foreigner?” and as I finished that book and that poem in particular, I felt like a door was opening into the next collection. I didn’t know much then but … certainly all of those – the mixed eras, the blur between the living and the dead – as well as the idea of outsiderness, of those who journey they know not where. Spokane was my 14th move! But, thankfully, the last one, I hope.
Q. When I read the poem “The Hearse Broke Free,” I thought of that poem in “No Starling” in which the speaker is driving a truck with a “dead Nance” rolling around in the truck bed. Who’s in the runaway hearse? Do you know? Is it another dead Nance?
A. I don’t think I was seeing myself as the dead person here, although that might certainly be a Jungian interpretation! But I did picture this hearse (which is maybe carrying a dead relative, and possibly from one of my earlier incarnations) just taking off on its own, which so mimics for me the way a poem works. Just like death itself, the hearse here swerves through all sorts of historical contexts and emotional states. The uncontrollable.
Q. The second poem in the book, “A Man Comes Down,” ends: “There is only me, and I / am no one. I am just the messenger.” Do you think that’s true of poets? Are you just a messenger?
A. Well, I do think of POEMS as messages, often odd jarring ones from the subconscious or some “other” version of the self that’s talking to, or back, to the “regular” one. But of course, while a poet may be initially the messenger, later she must fulfill other duties: first evaluating if the message might have any relevance to others beyond herself. Then there’s the whole shaping and orchestrating the language of the message into something that still carries the “charge” of that psychic jolt as well as perhaps some of the mystery, but also holds together with some sort of cohesion.
Q. Visual poetry is a fairly new venture for you. Do you find yourself taking a different approach to writing “regular poems” since you’ve started making poems that contain visual elements?
A. Since I’m so drawn to images as a writer, maybe it was only natural that I’d gravitate to actual images, photographic images. And yes, I’m still learning the ropes with how to compose, shoot and refine photographs. I like to capture buildings just before they’re demolished and something else takes their place. I’m drawn to decrepit murals and graffitied storefronts. In my computer, I make all manner of alterations: often lifting out a small detail, changing the colors and usually adding some bit of my own text. Entering the conversation already going on with the graffers is always my aim, and the sense of a building’s imminent demise only makes, for me, the conversation more poignant. I hope that my work is also a way of repurposing the old facades or hanging on to some aspect of them a little longer.