We love inviting friends and colleagues to share this space with us by contributing a post. It’s always wonderful to hear new perspectives and voices, and to see things through their eyes. When we heard about Lucas Farrell’s new collection, the blue-collar sun, we had a feeling that our friend Kristin Maffei—a perceptive reader and talented poet in her own right—would be the perfect person to interview Lucas about this book. The book, which won the 2020 Sundog Poetry Book Award, is being published by Green Writers Press on April 6. Thank you Kristin and Lucas for this wonderful conversation. And congratulations, Lucas, on the blue-collar sun!
On Thursday, April 8, Farrell will read at the Next Stage Speaks literary series to celebrate the book’s publication. The event is hosted by former Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord and begins at 7:00 pm.
I first learned about Lucas Farrell not through his poetry, but through his agricultural work: I and my family became mildly obsessed with Big Picture Farm’s goat milk caramels shortly after moving to Vermont five years ago. When I learned Farrell was also a poet, I was thrilled at the opportunity to read his work, which is every bit as delicious as those confections—and far more nourishing.
His latest book, the blue-collar sun, is out today from Green Writers Press. It was selected as winner of the 2020 Sundog Poetry Book Award by Mary Ruefle, and is at turns a meditation on art, nature, and process.
Kristin Maffei: the blue-collar sun plays out in so many different forms, including lineated and prose poems, erasure, and long works. Can you speak a little about the structure of the book and its individual poems?
Lucas Farrell: Sure! The book consists of four parts, and each part is—as you say—very different stylistically and formally from the others. This wasn't a deliberate strategy from the outset. In fact, each part was its own “project" that existed separately for a long time and was plucked from, in at least two of the four cases, a much larger body of independent work. Last October, I arrived at the realization that these four potentially stand-alone “projects" that had been heckling me from their unruly “zones" on my desk for years might work better as one. And wouldn't that be a good way of tidying things up!
It was easy to see the conceptual connections at play between them; more difficult was the task of how to order them, how to understand/present the greater syntax of the thing. Ultimately, I found the four parts satisfying in the way I find the four seasons in Vermont satisfying: each one, despite being so unique and unlike the one that comes before/after it, eventually blends in/becomes the next, in a process that feels simultaneously gradual and abrupt, impossible and yet occurring-right-now, effortlessly, before our very eyes. Okay, so maybe I don't find the structure of the book to be that satisfying or organic. But, like the seasons, I appreciate each part of the book for its uniqueness and brevity. And for how it fits into the greater cycle/circle.
KM: Whiteness pervades this book, from the opening poem's ice storm, which leaves “Everything in silver," to these lines in “the blue-collar sun:”
“The next buyer’s blindness was white as leek root. White like the sorest strep throat in America. White white white white white."
What does whiteness mean to you? What does it mean to this book, and how does it interact with blue and yellow, two other key colors that come into play frequently?
LF: Wow, what an interesting question! I am not sure I could come up with a satisfying answer, but I am deeply fascinated by the use of color in poetry. For some reason, your comment makes me think of Wallace Stevens “The Snow Man"—and the tension between the thing itself versus the idea of the thing. An ice storm—how suddenly the whole world can be covered in silver!—washes everything clean of its perceptions and preconceptions, and presents the world anew to us, and in so doing, puts each thing's ultimate connection to all other things on display (“everything in silver"). That's a major theme of the blue-collar sun, and reminds me of the final lines of the last part, about the speaker feeling connected to the boy in the Icelandic village who is just beginning to feel his connection with other people, and to all living things, etc.
Your comment also brings to mind one of my favorite haiku by Basho:
first snow
falling
on the half-finished bridge
I’ve always admired the amount of work the color white accomplishes in this poem. One is looking up at a bridge under construction—the perfect symbol of incompleteness—and then the “first snow” begins to fall, and one can imagine seeing that snow accumulate and begin to turn everything white, until suddenly the sheer whiteness of the scene “completes” the bridge in a way, allows a kind of mental crossing over to the other side (via erasure, perhaps!), which leads us to that essential quality shared by all, that greater connectedness. The ice storm in the poem you cite created a similar effect in the real world to my eyes, I think, which of course prompted the poem.
But of course the most obvious color white that is at play in the book is that of the glacier, which the second part of the book deals with directly, especially the glacier’s vanishing/melting due to climate change. That part of the book is a kind of eulogy really, wherein the erasure takes the form of Laxness’s text (Under the Glacier) receding into the background, dissolving into the blank page (another kind of whiteness, I suppose) as the speaker tries to grasp at/acknowledge that which is (or soon will be) “no longer visible.”
I’m glad that you mention the blues and the yellows at play in the book too! The cover art—a painting by the late Emily Mason, entitled “From Space”—was chosen in part for its palette. For me, the painting, at the prompting of the title, provides the perspective of looking down at earth from space, where we are witness to the intersections, almost geologic striations, of the earth. Glacier-meets-body of water-meets desert. The blues and yellows. I personally feel the sun (that “blue-collar sun”) melting an historic glacier, I feel the water rising in the middle and expanding. I feel the pressing up of one form against another, and the contradiction of forces—both the desperation of trying to maintain discrete shape and form and identity in a space that is ever-tightening and feeling the desire to bleed into, integrate with, form—of disparate parts—a greater, more inclusive, whole. Blues and yellows are complementary in my book. There is something meditative and quiet and understated yet wild and vivid about Emily’s art that I've always admired, an authentic celebration of beauty and wonder. And I think her types of blues and yellows spoke to/resonated with the blues and yellows in the blue-collar sun.
KM: “i approached a little farewell” is a series of erasures of Under the Glacier by Halldor Laxness and it was originally paired with photographs by your wife, artist Louisa Conrad. How does collaboration work for you? What was it like to collaborate artistically with your spouse? What was it like to collaborate artistically with a dead Nobel laureate?
LF: Louisa and I have been collaborating since we first met each other back in college, and continue to do so in nearly every aspect of our lives. We co-taught a course at Middlebury College after graduate school on the subject, called “Invoking the Third Mind: Collaborations Between Artists and Writers.” There's just such a rich and interesting tradition and history of artistic influence/collaboration that has always inspired us both and continues to do so. In short (because I could go on forever on this subject), I like that collaboration frees me up from my own habits of thought, requires that I suspend my own expectations/preconceptions, and encourages me to get lost, so to speak, when it comes to art-making—to allow that third mind to guide the process. There's a lot of Keats’s “negative capability” that is required in the act of collaboration, which I think is so important in a world that can be Google-splained in any moment.
I loved collaborating with a dead Icelandic writer! I highly recommend it! I carried around 3 or 4 used copies of Under the Glacier for a couple of years after our trip to Iceland, oftentimes working on the same page but in four different books at once. Laxness is such a fun writer with such incredible range and versatility—his language can be deeply philosophical and metaphorical in one instant, but then witty and wonderfully superficial and mundane and lighthearted in the very next. So I always felt free to act similarly (tonally) when it came to my erasures.
KM: In addition to being an artist, you're a farmer, an entrepreneur, and a father. How do you balance these roles and leave space for your poetry?
LF: With great difficulty and/or with no difficulty at all, depending on the day! One thing I can say is that the longer I’m on this planet, the less of a distinction I truly see and/or feel between the various roles you mention. Is it a farm or an art project? Am I tending to the animals, or are the animals tending to me? Is this my daughter or is it the most lovely poem ever written by any god in the history of the universe? I guess what I’m saying is that I’m partial/open to the both/and mentality vs the either/or. Like Whitman, “I contain multitudes," etc. Until, of course, I don't, and then I quickly succumb to the feeling of being overwhelmed! But then a goat reminds me that I better get back up and not to take myself so seriously, and furthermore, to fetch me more hay at once!
KM: “a description of the hook i am capable of” was written while you were at an artist residency in Iceland with your wife. Tell us about your writing process in residency, and your writing process at home.
LF: It’s been so long since I’ve been in residency that I’m not sure I remember what it’s like to have no obligations other than to create art. What a great privilege! Of course I was very privileged in that I had the opportunity to attend graduate school for creative writing in my early 20s. And while I had a TA-ship, which required teaching writing to undergraduate students in exchange for my tuition, it was still a period in my life when the actual priority of existence was to write and read—what an unbelievable luxury! But of course it didn’t last; one has to make a living eventually. And honestly I wouldn’t trade the busyness of my current life for anything in the world! But farming by its very nature is an around-the-clock, remain-in-one-place kind of an enterprise. As is parenting. As is running a small business. And so my writing “practice” certainly has evolved/diminished over the years, and is now really relegated to the winter months when the farm slows down a bit, unless something very poignant/upsetting happens that necessitates some processing-via-writing / writing as therapy / writing as ceremony/commemoration for something/person/animal in particular. Notes continue to happen in journals on my bedside table, though, gather in piles on my desk, end up in word docs on my computer—SLOWLY they do accumulate. Louisa and I refer to these things as “art chores." And when I find more extended time—usually in the winter months—I might mine those writings/experiences and further reflect on them, and, with any luck, formalize some of them into poems or essays. Some days I feel I have so much formalizing left to do! On other days, to formalize at all feels less important than just absorbing my daily experience in this world.
KM: What is the best thing you've read recently?
LF: Mary Ruefle’s Dunce. Paul Celan's poems are currently on my bedside table. Dorothea Lasky’s Animal, which is a very fun and very weird and ultimately very wonderful collection of free-wheeling meditations/lectures about poetry and poetry-making and life.
KM: What's next for you?
LF: Kidding season! We have about 40 pregnant does ready to freshen in April/May. Which—no matter how many seasons we’ve done it, now—requires every last ounce of our attention and being. It’s a lovely and joyful and emotional and difficult (and ultimately the most poetic) time of year on the farm. We live in the barnyard for six straight weeks.
In terms of the writing, I’ve been working on a collection of writings about our goats. They are actually eulogies/tributes to individual goats after they have passed away, strangely enough. Some essays, some poems. It’s been a way for me to both celebrate and eulogize/process each goat’s departure. It’s quite heartbreaking and painful to lose these animals we’ve lived with for so long—as anyone who has ever lost a pet can surely understand. So many of our goats—who were born on our farm ten and eleven years ago—are entering retirement/old age, and a few have already passed on, and so there’s an urgency I feel to somehow speak to or otherwise acknowledge what wonderful creatures they are/were, and to thank them properly/sufficiently.
Lucas Farrell lives in Townshend, Vermont, where he and his wife own and operate Big Picture Farm, a small hillside goat dairy and award-winning farmstead confectionery. His first book of poems, The Many Woods of Grief (University of Massachusetts Press), was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He has two daughters.