Esther Hoffman
An Interview with Alicia Mountain
Alicia Mountain is a poet of remarkable fortitude. Her Iowa-Poetry-Prize-winning debut, High Ground Coward combs through questions of desire, intimacy, family, and loss as it contemplates what it means to be queer. The familial and domestic meet head-on in Mountain’s poems, the rituals of our daily lives tied explicitly to broader systems of power and injustice. In “Deadbolt Door Syndrome,” she writes:
“If the research studied scare tactics and shame
we’d know why, when the drugs don’t work,
I steal a red Sharpie from Rite Aid
and write fagz run this town on walls
in plain view, thinking no one is watching.
That way we are everywhere indelible.”
Even as the poems capture the multiplicity and contradictions of the queer experience, Mountain asserts, “All your desires are sacred.” Her writing is both elegant and bold, an urgent addition to a growing modern canon. I read High Ground Coward during the worse of Covid, and the deep humanism of Mountain’s words suggested we might emerge from the pandemic with greater clarity about our collective future.
Alicia and I corresponded over email. In one of our exchanges, she pointed out that she identifies as “a lesbian, a dyke, and gay.” We agreed that the public assertion of lesbian identities is often left out of popular narratives. She shared how she has had to seek out her own lesbian lineage throughout her literary career. “And I’m still seeking it out,” she added. As someone who has struggled with these terms, I found as much resolve in Mountain’s affirmation as in her poetry.
Alicia Mountain received the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2018. She was the 2020-2021 Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. She is based in New York City where she teaches at Columbia University and in the Writer’s Foundry program at St. Joseph’s College. At the time this interview was conducted, she was at work on two collections, one of which, Four in Hand is forthcoming with BOA Editions in spring 2023. Keep up with her at aliciamountain.com and on Twitter at @HiGroundCoward.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What new projects are you working on, and did the pandemic and the current political situation affect how you are writing now or what you are writing about?
MOUNTAIN: Thanks for starting off with a question to place us in the world and at a specific moment in time. The experience of quarantine—which is perhaps an intersection of politics and pandemic, a political and pro-social act—has had a deep impact on my writing life. I finished my dissertation in quarantine in New York City in the spring during the first big spike there. That manuscript is a book of sonnet cycles; I was writing the last section of the book while the virus was picking up steam.
In that section, I had built up a lot of formal constraints to try to wring poems out of an emotionally exhausted self. I was writing in blank verse using only found text from these newsletter emails I received from Merrill Lynch client services. I was channeling the voice of the poet James Merrill by cobbling together this automated financial language. I was trying to give myself advice and guidance through the ghost of this gay poet ancestor, who was also the beneficiary of enormous privilege, trying to reconcile all of that. That project would be quite different if I wrote it at any other moment in time.
I’m almost done with another manuscript, too. This one is less of a “project book” and more of a true collection. It will bear more resemblance to my first book, High Ground Coward, I think. It’s lyric and dykey and sometimes goofy and sometimes sharp. Looking back at High Ground Coward, I can feel that those poems were written, for the most part, before the 2016 election. This new collection is more concerned with capitalism, anxiety, health, and power, and loss . . . I just got up and walked over to the stack of manuscript pages I have printed out that are now in categorical piles to help me wrap my head around sequencing.
I was like, let me look and see what this book is really about. It’s still coming into focus but, for what it’s worth, so far my post-it note labels on the different stacks read: “industrial America,” “formal imaginary,” “snark feminism toughness,” “Queer Lish from the heart,” and “maybe?” (Lish is me. That’s what my family and close friends call me. Sometimes people aren’t sure how to pronounce my name. It’s Alicia, like uh-lish-uh, the middle syllable rhyming with fish or dish.)
This fall I have been writing about long distance love, about trauma, about meditation, and about the screen. My biggest project this year is teaching. I’m the 2020–2021 Artist in Resi dence at the University of Central Oklahoma, where I’m teaching wonderful undergrad and graduate students. I’m looking forward to teaching a course on HIV Poetries this spring. I’m also teaching my own online workshops, independent of an institution. The more I awaken to systemic injustice, the more I understand that I need to be chipping away at the tower of privilege any way I can. I am not convinced that academia is the solution I once thought it was. I also see potential for leveraging academia and trying to be a conduit for redistribution of its re sources. But I’m progressively more interested in cultivating poetry communities without gatekeeping, without gates at all. Maybe I’m working to chip away at both sides of the wall.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I loved your ending in “Upland Honest,” when you write, “We splay out on the bald hilltop,/close our eyes to the roiling sun./My belly hunger-moans when/ you lean against it—/ ferocious, even the softest part of me.” I admire the restraint here in the language but also how recognizably queer this moment is, so much is left unsaid, how do you strike the balance of not saturating your poem with queer imagery or language, and still maintaining a distinctive queer voice?
MOUNTAIN: I identify as a lesbian. I move through the world as a lesbian—I think my dyke identity is pretty legible, especially when I wear my t-shirt that says “DYKE” across the chest. My poems are informed by who I get to be in the world and how the world does or does not make space for the people I love and for me. I also think about how my lesbian lineage was something I had to seek out—and I’m still seeking it out.
For me, (and this may be specific to the generation I grew up in,) gay feelings were as much if not more about longing than they were about desire. Those two emotions are cousins—longing and desire—they are not twins. That poem and others in High Ground Coward show how much of my emotional landscape is charted in the territory of longing, of wanting and not having. There’s a fault line of shame that cuts through it. You see that in the ferocity in the passage you quoted. When a person is told, even in subtle indirect ways, that there is something wrong with the most innate parts of them, they can begin to believe they are capable of great harm. And we are all capable of great harm.
But what a thing. The things that are left unsaid, that stay kept inside, that go neglected and denied? They can become a roar. Even those softest parts of us. In my poems, I don’t ever worry about being too gay or not gay enough. I’m just writing what’s true. I’m also not working hard toward restraint. I’m working hard toward poems that are as complicated as human life is. And as simple as it can be, too. To me, that final image in “Upland Honest” is an image of tension and resignation at the same time, intimacy and distance.
Those things have been a big part of my life as a lesbian. I imagine they are common in the lives of other people who identify as queer and also in the lives of many who don’t. Rather than trying to strike a balance that involves not saturating my poem with the imagery of my experience, I actually think all of my work is saturated with who I am and how I know the world. This imagery is just how I say it. I think that specificity and honesty might make the voice of a poet distinct.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In your book, High Ground Coward, there is a repeated “I” in your poems, for me the book reads intimately, I find myself connected to the voice of this “I.” Can you tell us more about the “I,” or the perspective you’re writing from?
MOUNTAIN: I went back to re-read the answer I’d given when I was asked a similar question in Foglifter a few years ago. Then I said, “The speakers in High Ground Coward are me, but they are many me’s. These are many possible versions of myself, many are imagined selves. There are some speakers that are less landlocked, some that are believers, some that are so moody, some that just want to play around with sound, some that don’t have to go to work, etc. I think readers will recognize a shared sensibility, even when the vocabulary or subject shift.
These speakers all drink the same water and wear the same shirt. To put it simply: it we.” I think this still rings true to me, though it may not always. In the poems I’ve been writing lately, I think my speaker(s) are a quarantined self, a numb and thawing self. I’ll be curious about what I notice when I look back on these “I” voices in the years to come. In an interview for Lambda Literary, Shereen Lee said, “while I was reading High Ground Coward I thought of the personas from poem to poem as ‘neighbors in thought.’” That description sounds right to me, too. It sounds nice to remain a neighbor of my past and future and other selves.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In an interview with The Southhampton Review, you say, “I’m ready for all of us to retire elitist ideas about poetry. Poetry is for people who go to Wendy’s. Poetry is for people who work at Wendy’s. Poetry is for people who sleep in the corner of the parking lot outside of Wendy’s.” I love everything about this. My question is, how do you ground your work in the details of the everyday in a way that is accessible to people, but still adheres to what we expect from poetry? Or are there no poetic expectations to uphold (which I would like to believe)?
MOUNTAIN: We might be on the same page in that I’d like to believe that even if some readers or critics have expectations of poetry, it is not the poet’s job to uphold them. Perhaps that is a point of entry into talking about the quotidian in my work. I have this hunch that the details of the everyday have lowkey magic in them, lowkey revolution in them. Sometimes the poem is an altar where I place my offerings. I want to fill the poem with what is precious to me—sometimes this means the vista from the top of a mountain, but sometimes it is French fries and a Frosty, sometimes it’s Costco, sometimes it’s filling the tank with gas. Anything that acts as a companion can be precious to us.
Even our pain. Even our boredom. Even the things that others look down on or we look down on. What happens if you put it all on the altar? What happens if you say, exaltation can look like anything and anyone can do it? It turns out there is nothing in that act of exaltation to gatekeep. It seems more conspicuous to leave these things out of a poem than to put them in. They’re already in there anyway, even if we don’t name them. So, I name them and in doing so they become part of the altar. It might be that classism and racism and homophobia and misogyny and all our other manifestations of shame are the only forces telling us that our daily lives are not one big alter already.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I love how you describe the poem as an “altar” and the poem’s content as “offerings.” I never thought of it that way. And you are so right about poets utilizing what they are “offered,” the daily ritual of their lives, as content for their poems even though, “we don’t [always] name them.” I like how that automatically makes most poetry anti-elitist. I am curious, because I think about this a lot, but do you ever find a conflict in the usage of imagery and abstractions that are not easily accessible when trying to convey the ordinary? (Maybe I am asking if you think the form should match the content?)
MOUNTAIN: Hm. What first comes to mind for me is strangeness. I think of strangeness as a really important tool in poetry because it gets me both outside and inside myself. Anything looked at in very close detail becomes strange (like the exercise of looking through a microscope and finding that a familiar material suddenly appears completely alien, or reading a word over an over until it loses all meaning). In description (both imagery and abstraction), the ordinary is sometimes best rendered through a strangeness that shakes us into seeing it anew.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In the first poem of your book, “The Book is a Hungry Darkness,” you write, “My mother sends my wife her love./In all of this, forgiveness/assumes sin and I’m not sorry.” Here you show the contradictions of the queer experience so well, how does queer representation function in your work?
MOUNTAIN: As I sat to think about this question, my first impulse was to respond: I can’t possibly represent queer experience, or even cis white thirty two-year-old size medium vegetarian lesbian experience. But when I think more deeply about High Ground Coward some of the moments of queer representation that are most important to me are about histories, inheritances, and kinship networks that extend far beyond me. In the book I write about the legacy of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, the debt I owe to activists who were gone before I was born, and the work still left to be done to ensure that people living with HIV today have their needs met with dignity and equity.
I write about non-queer people struggling to understand identity and still trying rather than letting the fear of doing it wrong keep them from connection. I write about non-monogamy. I write about being part of a family and how I recognize that my own pain is in conversation with the many different pains of the people I know, the people I don’t know. I suppose this is all to say that, in my mind, representation is about a zoomed-out view. I’m in there, I’m in that panorama. But it’s also about the whole bigger landscape. It’s about what it feels like to be one person, this dyke person, this Alicia Mountain person, inside and in relation to the rest of the big picture. To allow myself up on that big altar, too.