Stella Hayes : coda

How does a poem begin?

Typically a poem begins as I hear it—in a fury, somewhere between clear thinking and the subconscious. Many take years. All take time in the editing process. Something I am working out in my life or a quarrel with myself triggers the poem(s). Like a ghost of an idea but more like an obsession. In his book on poetics, The Triggering Town (1979), Richard Hugo, makes a persuasive argument that “[y]our triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words. When you are honest to your feel¬ings, that triggering town chooses you.” So if I’m lucky, I write passed the “triggering town” to the essence of the poem which is always a surprise. The poem takes on its own life as I stand out of the way.

Stella Hayes : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

It is a subject I have given a lot of thought. If when you’re writing or conveying a private moment and if it is very painful, and if you’re jumping off the cliff headfirst, you’re not going to make music. I hope that my poems do have music which I don’t necessarily hear and that it is not as austere to the reader as it is to me. I have resisted making music in my own poetry, but I love musicality in poetry, particularly, poetry in translation, be it Brodsky or Rimbaud. A translation without music is rendered lifeless.

Stella Hayes : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I have no problem of consciously entering a state of utter delirium, but I have a problem leaving it without taking something back. My second book Nowhere with Him, came at a great cost. I wrote it in workshop with the great poet Natalie Handal in a year and a half. I completed it last summer and when I was done, I felt like I couldn’t write another line for as long as I lived. It’s a book of elegies — real and imagined — about my late father who died when we were both too young—he at 50 years old. It took me a few months to recover and I half-started Propaganda.

Stella Hayes : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

That’s such a hard thing. It’s hard to know. Sometimes a poem’s penultimate line is the last line and I won’t know it until I read it out loud or record it and play it back so I hear it like other people would hear it. But that doesn’t always work. So I put it in my desk drawer, if you will. I leave it alone until I come back to it and feel my way to the ending.
 

Stella Hayes : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

Through my mother first. World literature and poetry from the Romantic movement—specifically from the first 40 years of 19th century known as The Russian Golden Age lead by Pushkin and Lermontov—were in her veins. She has a degree in Russian literature and language. She has an extraordinary poetic reservoir which she can recall instantly from memory. That’s how they used to do it back in the day—they memorized pages of poems, short stories, novellas and novels. And secondly, through poet Gary Light, a dear childhood friend who in his pocket always had a copy of Mandelstam, Blok or Pasternak. As teenagers, we would have parties in which he would read their work. He introduced me to the poets of the early 20th century, known as The Silver Age. And at last at USC under the tutelage of dear friend poet David St. John. I feel so lucky that I had a chance of a lifetime to be his student.

Stella Hayes : part one

Russian-American poet Stella Hayes is the author of poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, forthcoming in 2020). She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Prelude, The Indianapolis Review and Spillway, among others.

Photo credit: Karin Charbit-Harnevo

What are you working on?

I am excited to have just returned to my publisher the last round of proofs of One Strange Country, my debut poetry collection forthcoming in October. I am also placing my second book Nowhere with Him.

Before the pandemic, I was working on Propaganda, my third poetry book. I had 25 poems. In it I am investigating how erotic, familial and parental love is founded on an accepted set of illusions/delusions. Night is a leitmotif and how I prefer it to day. I find myself going to bed at nearly dawn and so what I do at night continues to be a theme. At the moment, everything is up in the air and I am—be it unwillingly— find myself writing pandemic poems. I am hoping to weave them into the book, abandon the book altogether, and/or write a cycle of “Pandemic Chronicles.”