Maybe you wonder sometimes why we interview the writers we do, or choose the books we want to highlight and it’s kind of a magic process, that same magic you feel when you’re browsing the shelves of one of those really great indie bookstores that seems to carry only books that you haven’t heard of before and that you are irresistibly drawn to. That magic.

Just so, sometimes we’re browsing the internet or book catalog and a book jumps out at us. Such is the case with Field Music, the debut book by Alexandria Hall. Its evocative title, geometrically lovely cover, and Vermont pedigree made this book irresistible to us, and we’re so glad we didn’t resist! We thoroughly enjoyed the poems in Field Music.

For this interview, we asked our dear friend Rena J. Mosteirin (also an exceptional poet) if she’d like to ask the interview questions. Rena immediately had an ear for Alexandria’s work and appreciated it as much as we did. Below is the conversation between Rena and Alexandria. Thank you both. And congratulations, Alexandria, on the publication of Field Music!

Alexandria is launching her book at a virtual reading on October 9, at 7:00 pm, via White Whale Bookstore. She will be joined by poets Jihyun Yun and S. Brook Corfman.

Rena Mosteirin: Many poems in Field Music are set in Vermont and have a certain resonance. When you choose to set a poem in Vermont, what are the stakes of that choice? Is it any different process-wise, then when you set a poem somewhere else?

Alexandria Hall: I feel like, at least in Field Music, I never really considered choosing a setting as part of the process. Rather than deciding to set a poem in Vermont, I might write from a memory or a constellation of memories and each of those is tied to its original setting. I grew up in Vermont and I was living there when I began writing the book. Place plays an important role in the book, but the setting of each poem was a result of the memory or images belonging to a given place.

For example, one poem, “Travel Narrative," mentions Middlebury, Hamburg, and Galicia, because that’s where the poem led me when I was writing it, through memories of those places, but I hadn't planned on writing a poem about those three places. I think in these poems, there's always a setting, and it poses this kind of inescapable challenge: how do I come to know myself and my experiences here?

RM: I love the rhythmic quality of Field Music. The lines borrowed from pop music work really well because the music of the poetry is distinctly not pop. I mean, the syncopations are unpredictable. For me, this is a distinct pleasure of the book. How does your background as a musician show up in these poems?

AH: My first relationship to poetry was to its sounds. My teacher, David St. John, says, “poems persuade by their music, not their argument.” And I think when I first fell in love with poetry when I was young, it was the music that moved me and that prompted me to linger in the language. The music of language is really powerful, not just in poetry, but also in conversation, thought, and play. It carries its own logic, one that’s probably always present, though not always at the forefront of our consciousness, forming conceptual and affective connections through sonic relationships.

I'm not really a technically skilled musician. I didn’t study music in college and I never really mastered any of the instruments I play. But I've been a songwriter for about as long as I’ve written poetry, and I think more than anything, that background shows up in the attention to sound, to establishing patterns and then breaking them.

RM: How did you begin writing poetry? When you started out, who were you reading?

AH: I fell in love with poetry when I was pretty young. I was kind of a sad, lonely kid, and I had this third and fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Brown, who taught us poetry. She would have students memorize poems of our choosing and then recite them to the class. I loved it. I started writing poems then, and she would give me my own extra little poem-writing assignments.

And my mom had a couple W.H. Auden poems around that she loved, and she used to write down the lyrics to the songs she loved on scraps of paper. I remember looking through those and loving the words and her handwriting. So those were my earliest introductions. But I'd say in middle and early high school, I really started to concentrate more on writing poetry. Then, I was reading e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Sexton. In high school I started to discover more contemporary poets in magazines like the New Yorker. I loved Carl Phillips and Louise Glück. When I found a poem I really loved, I'd write it on my bedroom wall with a permanent marker.

RM: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten in workshop?

AH: This is a tough one because I've gotten a lot of really good advice from friends and mentors in and outside of workshop over the years, but some of the greatest lessons I’ve learned have actually been from the social and communal elements of the workshop, from reading others’ work and hearing how others have read and received my work. Also, Catherine Barnett, who was my thesis advisor at NYU, constantly created opportunities for us to surprise ourselves in workshop, to continue to be more open to new possibilities. She even brought our workshop to do an improv comedy class.

RM: What inspires you?

AH: I’m always inspired by my friends and loved ones—their work or bits of our conversations. I’m also inspired by other mediums: movies, music, dance, visual art. I feel like the things that really move and inspire me tend to hang together and mingle in the background for a while, not leading to direct or immediate creation, waiting for some spark that lights up a path between them. What inspires me to write may be an image, a memory, a sound, or a problem that needs to be solved. I do a lot of thinking through writing. Also, I feel like I’m not the best at expressing myself in conversation, so sometimes a poem is inspired by a need to express what I wasn't able to express in the moment.

RM: Which new poets are you really excited about right now? I’m particularly interested in little-known poets that you think we should be paying attention to.

AH: I don't know how known or unknown anyone is, but two people whose work I'm most excited about are Ama Codjoe, whose chapbook Blood of the Air came out earlier this year with Northwestern University Press, and Erin Marie Lynch.

RM: Field Music is a gorgeous collection. What’s next for you? Is there a new collection in the works, are you focusing on your music or your dissertation? Perhaps all of these inform one another?

AH: Thank you! Lately, I've been focusing on two main projects: a collection of short stories and a second book of poems. In both, I've been exploring themes of mortality and immortality, fleetingness and lastingness, anxiety and dread. I haven't been writing music at all lately, but I've gotten back into playing the piano. I'm still finishing coursework for the PhD, so my writing, research, and creative projects have felt mostly exploratory. I'm just kind of letting it take me wherever it takes me.

Alexandria Hall is a poet and musician from Vermont. She received her MFA from New York University and is now a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She is founder and editor-in-chief of tele- magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, BOAAT, The Bennington Review, Foundry, Memorious, and elsewhere.