“I Don’t Think Tragedy Informs the World”: A Conversation with Robert Wood Lynn

By Neha Mulay

Robert Wood Lynn hails from Virginia. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, and he is an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review Online, The Yale Review, Narrative Magazine, and Adroit Journal, among others. 

His work has been recognized with awards and scholarships from the Academy of American Poets, the University of Mary Washington, the Leopardi Writers Conference, and the James Merrill House, among other institutions.

His debut collection Mothman Apologia was selected as the winner of the 2021 Yale Younger Poets Award. The voice in Robert Wood Lynn’s Mothman Apologia simmers with a fleshed, reckless awareness, traipsing through the landscape of Virginia and Appalachia, simmering in its fragile osmosis of mortal peril. 

The book resurrects the legend of the Mothman into a persona that speaks to us through a chipped psyche, unveiling the tender savagery of boyhood and the meteoric constructions of monstrosity. The book is savage in its grief as it considers the chasms of alienated reticence, the bereft hues of a mitigated, mined landscape, the spatial absolutions of elegy, and the shattering reaches of the opioid crisis. 

The book contains a series of different “Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone” that scrape through the noxiousness perpetuated by submersion, addiction, and recovery. They consider obliteration and industry with the same perilous dogged instinct, germinating in an interior repertoire of infestation and loss. One of the elegies names Purdue pharmaceuticals as the company making “pills” that “put out the fires / that come with living.”

The environment and the landscape are visited and curtailed, the paddocks of tractors and broken eggs are crevassed with a continuous verse that is stunning in its unstoppered fluidity. The book carries presence and forgetfulness, containment and erasure as it renders the voice of a place and its people, an incantation that repeatedly encounters the redaction of certain narratives and their negated warnings—In “(The Mothman Pronounces Appalachia),” the linguistic latch in the term “Appalachia” transfigures into a space that holds “those of us they want to leave buried / under these hills. 

The book moves through the blazing flash of guns, misdemeanors, incarceration, etymology, bodegas, and other “Bullshit Curse[s] of Interesting Times.” There’s an endearing and destabilizing violent viscosity to the Mothman, from the “Jackknife as a form of crying,” to the voice that alleges, “I was here to spit blood in / a drive-thru cup.”

This persona is self-aware of its detritus and its splintered, vanquished peace: “An Apology. Another thing / I could give away without having any less.” The book unmasks masculinity by embodying a mode of angered, liminal disregard that flints and transmutes into a hushed mode of truth-telling. 

This is a book about a fraught genesis—a fire that is burning its own ends, peppered with brilliance and complexity, devouring and creating in one breath. In asking, “I wonder if / the interstate follows itself home,” the collection reveals its preoccupation with venturing and distance. In considering the embedded touchstones of a mythicized embodiment, the self that becomes a journey, a vehicular mode that trails its way into absence. 

The poems in this book come together and form a cobbled refuge, a journey that leads the Mothman to drop out, sneak into spaces, and then look back, an odyssey that is as prevailing as it is remarkable. This collection gestates a voice that prevails through its embroilment, navigating its sentient isolation at “a threshold at which / I felt further from any person.”

Lynn’s voice would be chaotic if it wasn’t so stunningly apt in its solace, moving through death, distance, and deliverance, reminding us that “the mind remembers joy as joy pain only as a concept.” 

By contrast, Lynn’s chapbook, How to Maintain Eye Contact, which is forthcoming from Button Poetry in January 2023, is inverted in prolusion, perhaps more microscopic in scope though no less discerning in its exploration of the base, intrinsic shame of encounter, injury, and the silence of our yearnings. The book is sectioned into various “rehearsals,” that sequentially consider “being,” “departure,” and “apocalypse.” 

The book astutely deconstructs the strange theater of living and its militant absurdities; the many ways in which we lie to children “specifically,” the abashment of a reneged, misunderstood conversation, and the silence of a new, dissuaded country filled with the “rust belt of pauses.” And yet, the book encompasses a reckoning, a juncture at which the pure horror of being intersects with an ambling, melodic solace. As the speaker states, “In spite of the evidence / I am getting good at being alone.”

In pointing to the performativity of the self, Lynn hypothesizes at the marvel of a continuously metabolizing yet fragile universe in which “billionaires go mad, cartoonishly mad” amidst the appalling entropy of existence and its numbers. It is perhaps the post-apocalyptic miasma of the third section of the book that is the most imaginatively variegated yet steadfastly interested in the blunders of intimacy and the stratospheric aftermath of destruction. 

These constructions of post-apocalypse are both desolate and mildly absurd: In “The Museum of Maintenance, “Retainers” are “the first thing abandoned” followed by “vitamins” and “Exfoliating creams.” And yet, Lynn is solemnly interested in language and the enigmatic speech of communication, destruction, renewal, and the resultant modes of being, all through submersion and containment. In “Again We Interrupt the Dishes,” Lynn writes, “Their ring around the sink. And even that a language written for us. / Even that, a way of holding.

Lynn’s work is astonishing in its scope and its resurrections of a bruised past, flinging us through panoramas and leading us through doors that open and close. There’s a modish vulnerability to his work that teems with the bare bones of a sparse knowledge delivered as emblems for unsettlement. As Lynn writes in that telltale, audacious mode of dismal wisdom, “Careful to leave / the past leaking, hungry with possibility.”

Indeed, while Mothman Apologia  is driven by landscape, power, luminous, aching spaces of silence propelled by elegy and memory, How To Maintain Eye Contact is more of a survival-based envisaging, a consideration of terrible freedom and the search for intimacy in a distinctly urban setting, moving between the “coffeeshop on Rogers” and “public service announcement[s]” with an actualized sight that senses our fractured becoming.  

These days, Robert splits his time between Brooklyn and Rockbridge County, Virginia. This October, as Fall swept through New York, I sat down with Rob to speak to him about his poems, his work, and his impetus. 

We sat outdoors in a cafe, and the sun slanted cogently through the flowers that were twisted into the awnings. The speaker right behind me throttled with music as we settled into tawny metal chairs. I asked him the first question, and he made eye contact, briefly, then looked towards the movement on the street and began to speak. 

Neha Mulay: In the introduction to Mothman Apologia, Rae Armantrout notes that the book is comprised of prose block segments that combine to create an overall non-linear fabric. How did you arrive upon this structure?

Robert Wood Lynn: This is a fun question because it was a really long drawn-out process of writing very poorly for long periods of time. This book took me 15 years to write, although 60 percent of it was probably written in one year. 

Everything started coming together right at the end of the first semester of the MFA program, when Catherine Barnett gave me a copy of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Headwaters. 

It’s an incredible collection, and it's written with no punctuation. So much of it, especially the title poem, feels like it is shot out of a canon, and I was immediately obsessed with trying to write that way.

I was also really interested in Eileen Myles and the really short lines they have in so much of their work: “Peanut Butter” is one of my favorite poems of all time. 

So I was writing short-line poems with no punctuation, and they were very bad. In the three-month period before I really started on the elegies in earnest, I may have written about 20 of these poems, and I don’t think any of them have seen the light of day. 

After getting feedback, I was finding out that every reader has a point at which they’ll disengage from writing that doesn’t have punctuation since it gets too confusing, so I was trying to figure out how raw I can make the poem without destroying the reader. It forced me to structure my thoughts in a way that did not use periods and commas, and was instead reliant on line breaks and conjunctions to create breath and space. 

I love the work shorter line breaks do, but I needed longer lines. I wanted the weight of prose blocks. That’s where the caesuras came in—they helped me find a way to create frequent line breaks and pauses while still keeping inside a constrained block. 

In the meantime, I’d been working on what would become the elegies as part of a longish prose project, and that too, just wasn’t clicking at all. And then I changed forms, and suddenly the elegies came together pretty quickly—there were only two or three drafts of each poem, whereas I had labored over the predecessor poems and the prose project for a few months to seriously zero success. It was a process of merging these formal choices with content that was more engaged and unlocked by the form. 

NM: How did disrupting punctuation allow you to actualize a specific mode of writing? 

RWL: I didn't set out to do this, but I felt like breaking out of punctuation allowed me to unleash a voice that I was trying to channel. Mothman is so different from How To Maintain Eye Contact—I feel like they’re written by different people. In Mothman, I was trying to channel the voice I had when I was 19 or 21, and I was a very different human being back then. 

I think Eileen Myles is amazing at crafting a voice, specifically with short-line staccato approach that speeds up the poem. That form unleashed a space in which I could be very informal and edit around the voice of the speaker that I wanted. The caesuras are a good way to reinforce the silence and isolation, which form a huge thematic chunk of the book.

NM: I can absolutely see the difference between the two books. Mothman Apologia feels wild and varied—it’s sharp and somewhat chaotic. I’m interested in the ways in which you intertwine boyhood with monstrosity in Mothman Apologia. What led you to modernize or draw upon the legend of the Mothman? 

RWL: I guess these elements tie back to what makes Mothman such an interesting myth to draw upon. It's a relatively new piece of folklore. It tracks back to the 1960s. It’s a part of contemporary history, and it functions as an urban legend, which gives you space to play with.

There are some people who take it seriously, but I encountered the idea of the Mothman more playfully when I was growing up. Aunts and uncles used to joke about it. A boogieman kids might be afraid of. And then I became more academically interested in the Mothman when I was in college, which fits the speaker in these poems. 

And what really hooked me, aside from the local color element, was that the Mothman doesn’t eat your dog. The Mothman doesn't burn your house down. The Mothman doesn't lure you into the woods and kill you. The Mothman functions as a harbinger who warns you of something and then disappears.

And there's something really powerful in that concept of warning, of conveying that something has to change. In the canonical story, the Mothman just showed up, and the witnesses were very scared. The Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, collapsed shortly thereafter. And it’s this conveying of knowledge—the unheard warning—that is the most galvanizing aspect of the myth. It’s a harbinger, but we only find out what it is warning us against in retrospect. 

NM: Yes, I think the poem “The Mothman Pronounces Appalachia,” in particular, wrestles with the idea of leaving monsters buried under the hills and the mothpeople who just wanted a warning. Why the focus on the pronunciation of Appalachia? Am I pronouncing it right? 

RWL: Well, there’s actually not one way of pronouncing Appalachia, though people will get really worked up about it.In West Virginia, the joke goes that if you pronounce it in any other way than “App-uh-latch-uh” Appalachia, then I will throw an “apple at ya.” But my grandmother lived in Charleston, West Virginia, for 70 years, and she said, “App-uh-lay-shuh.”

There are people in New York State who live in the Appalachians—I mean, it’s a very long mountain range. There are people who are native to Appalachia who say it quite differently.I like to imagine the Mothman, at least for the purposes of the poem, as being someone who's very intent and defensive about it. But I actually don't think there is a right or wrong way to pronounce it—but there is a sense of ownership in it, which is what feels so raw about it. 

NM: The book is preoccupied with roads, freeways, and cars—how do these and the American landscape (specifically Virginia) affect the book?

RWL: That's a really good question because I hadn’t noticed how many roads and highways are in the book. And yet, you’re definitely right. I grew up in Virginia and most of my family is from various parts of West Virginia. And so driving for seven, eight hours over the mountains again and again is an important part of my youth. 

I didn’t get on an airplane till I was maybe 21 years old. So in that universe, the idea of running away from anything was always gonna be tied to a car. I think cars are just the backdrop of the area, but I think they underscored the isolation of the subject matter as well as the desire for freedom. 

I think there’s something about the myth of America and being tied to the car and driving. I love the energy of collecting a group of people into a car and saying, “We’re gonna go someplace.” It’s also the triumph of being 16 and realizing, “I have the ability to move my body and my friends to another place and explore the universe.” And I think that filters into American media and its representations of cars and driving. 

I think that, kind of like the prom, the road trip has become an international teen symbol of America. So I feel bad about subjecting other people to it, but it’s certainly a chunk of my personality. 

NM: I definitely don’t think the book reinforces the cliché of an altering trip that ends with an epiphany. There’s also a lot of meaning attached to the idea–both politically and metaphysically. 

At one point in Mothman Apologia, the speaker is at the gas station filling up the car, and there’s something so poignant about that moment. Perhaps it’s the juncture, the impasse, or the steady consumption of resources that is intrinsically needed to fuel movement. 

RWL: Yeah, there’s a duality to it—the freedom of having a car while also tying it into the fact that the car is one of the top killers of people, especially in rural areas. They’re a leading cause of death, which, for better or worse, parallels the themes of the book, especially in terms of the destruction of the planet. Places like West Virginia end up being harbingers of the global climate apocalypse as they're subjected to the impacts of those industries. 

NM: Yes, because the book simultaneously considers the natural environment as well as its decrepitude. 

RWL: I visited some towns in Eastern Kentucky where floods were exacerbated (if not caused) by mountaintop removal mining. There’s a scene in the book where the speaker sneaks into a mountaintop removal mine, which is something I did once when I worked in Charleston. It really is a jarring sight—a fundamental change in the world that is caused by the fossil fuel industry, sort of where the rubber meets the road of it. This kind of destruction forms part of the backdrop of these places. 

NM: What led you to a consideration of pharmaceutical and medical industries/addiction/the opioid crisis in the book? In the introduction, Rae Armantrout writes that the book places Purdue pharmaceuticals “in a place that, is not exactly hell, is close enough.” What are your thoughts on contemporary hell and poetic hell in the book?

RWL: My first non-manual labor job was working in a doctor's office in a small town, and that was the first place I ran into the excesses of the pharmaceutical industry, which were wild—these companies market directly to physicians and would pour an insane amount of money into getting ten minutes with an individual doctor. 

It also gave me a closer view of the opioid epidemic than I probably wanted.Glimpses of that experience make it into the book. I later had a corporate day job, and during that time, I ended up occasionally doing work that was tangentially connected to the pharmaceutical industry. I decided to steer my way out of ever working in a pharmaceutical adjacent space. 

I’m grateful for Patrick Radden Keefe, and the other whistleblowers about Purdue Pharmaceutical who have created and helped reveal how much one company was driving this mass death event in the United States.

I don’t think of the book as a tirade against the pharmaceutical industry by any means—some aspects of the industry are actually trying very earnestly to improve the world. 

But, like with so many other American problems, the structure of capitalism effectively decentralizes the crisis, so there is no one single thread to it, which makes it more difficult to solve. 

I don't think it's entirely created by the pharmaceutical industry, but the industry was certainly happy to catalyze it or happy to exacerbate it as long as they were making money, as long as they didn’t have to clean up the negative externalities themselves. 

There are many different kinds of addiction and many different substances. Addiction is one of the many avenues of coping with grief. For the most part, I hope the book exists outside of the modern, corporate concept of hell. 

NM: Why do the “Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone” have eleven elegies? 

RWL: That’s a fun question. It felt like an impish choice. 

The eleventh elegy is the only one that takes place outside of the state of Virginia—it takes place in New York. So for me, the eleventh elegy felt very much like a postscript. I liked the gesture of it; being able to set it aside from the other 10 while also making it a loop. 

NM: The poem “The Mothman Reads from The Book of the Dead” refers to the “muffled warnings” of the dead. What is the role of elegy and loss in this book?

 RWL: I think so much of the book is about the act of looking back and trying to make sense of tragedy, if not the idea of a literal space for the afterlife. 

I don't think tragedy informs the world. As you mentioned, the road movie wants us to have some kind of epiphany, but there isn’t one, right? We just slowly and surely work our way out of it. It doesn’t go away. It just sort of gets better. And for me, so much of this book is about processing anger, and that shows up in various figures in the book. 

The Mothman’s words are coming from a place of anger. It’s impossible to see the world that the Mothman is living in and not feel some fury. And the lessening of anger and the half-life of grief is a huge chunk of what I wanted to explore. 

NM: Yeah, I can sense that. I think the book explores masculinity and anger in a very profound way. 

RWL: There are a handful of poems in the book that explore masculinity head-on. So much of Mothman Apologia is about the men who experience anger but aren’t given the tools to express it. It’s the way that we condition everyone, but especially young men to sort of hold it all inside and then explode.

Most of the young men I have lost in my life, in one way or another, have been due to anger—because the world didn’t give them ways to self-soothe. I think the opioid crisis and the spikes in violence are the result of that. And I wanted to explore that in the poems without making it a central theme of the book. 

NM: The book is also preoccupied with knowledge. I’m also interested in the way you phrase the myth of Prometheus in the book—chipped, bitten, and in a kind of nightmarish modern scape of patents and confinement. 

I’ve always wondered why knowledge has been the central component of so many different myths—Prometheus/Pandora/Adam/Eve). Maybe it’s because knowledge is both power and condemnation. 

RWL: That’s a really interesting way to frame knowledge. The Mothman myth has been percolating for about 50 years or so. I think if most people back then had to guess what would happen to the world in 50 years, they would have thought of space exploration and flying cars. But instead the real revolution has been around information. Knowledge gives us the ability to make changes. But decision-making and power are important aspects of knowledge. 

Knowledge in the Prometheus myth is absolutely about power. The Prometheus myth and the Mothman legend ask similar questions, such as, “What should we do with knowledge? What is the cost of knowledge? 

Opioids specifically are about wanting to drop out of the world, as opposed to certain other substances, which may give us more knowledge or feel more in the world. So much of Mothman Apologia is about asking, “How do we deal with the things that hurt us everyday?”

NM: In Mothman Apologia, you write, “No one knows / what they will do with power till they have it. / None of us believes they got it when they do.” How do power and currency function in the book?

RWL: As long as there is another person or another actor in the system that has more power than you, it’s almost impossible to believe that you have power too. And so it becomes really difficult to see yourself as a negative actor. I wanted to explore the fact that we all have power. 

The most extreme version of American culture entails decentralizing everything that we have. The opioid epidemic is fueled by almost every single force inside of it believing that they're a morally neutral or a morally positive actor while moving the train further and further down the tracks. 

And I’ll wrestle with that forever. Because it’s impossible to not abuse power. Because just the act of living involves making a series of concessions to the limitations of your world. 

NM: And yet, the book does assert the power of the self–the Mothman does get clean. 

RWL: Yeah. And that’s one of the things that has always struck me as being so interesting about the narratives that I was surrounded by growing up. Many depictions portray these places as some kind of wasteland. And yet, the world is mostly not on fire.

Ultimately, humans are really resilient, and they find ways to struggle and fight through, even after very difficult things happen to them. I think resilience is something that gets dropped from the external narrative. 

At no point did I set out to write an opioid story or a Virginia story or a West Virginia story or an Appalachian story. I was just writing about events and experiences that I had a close lens on. And then it was Yusef Komunyakaa at NYU, who said, “This feels like the backbone of a collection.” So I kept going and brought them to Deborah Landau who kept encouraging me in that direction.

NM: The book is quite obsessed with language—pronouncing “Appalachia,” the idea of language as a “place trapped in time.” What frustrates and intrigues you about language? What are the traps of language?

RWL: I’m interested in language because as soon as someone says, “This is an incorrect construction,” they’re usually trying to take power away from someone who speaks differently. 

So much of the book is about voice and the way that we use language differently in different circumstances and with different people. I spoke very differently when I was 19 as compared to today. 

Writing language as you hear or speak it leads to writing dialect, and dialect can be a dangerous thing to write in because most of the time it is used to indicate something about the speaker. I wanted the poems to be about the way in which voice creates conceptual meaning rather than signifying something else. 

NM: Your chapbook, How to Maintain Eye Contact considers the shame of being alive, as expressed by Mary Ruefle. The discomfort with intimacy or envisaging the idea of eye contact as being the “proximate cause” for everything—what led you to ruminate on the awkwardness of your speakers?

RWL: The reason that I focused on the awkwardness of the speaker is that I'm awkward. So, the speakers are interested in exploring something that feels intensely personal to me. Eye contact is one of those things that I've just been hilariously bad at my entire life.

I think there is a lot to be explored in the bumbling of failed human connection because so much of poetry is about exploring that human connection. When human beings fail to communicate, whether it’s verbally or nonverbally, it leads to isolation, which is such a fascinating topic. I was using poetry as a way to circle that failure. 

I like writing with a sense of fear and anxiety because that’s just where my brain fits all the time. There's something liberating about writing from the perspective of an anxious speaker, which I don't think I had allowed myself to do until this chapbook. 

NM: The book is sectioned into various “rehearsals” that allude to a performative scaffolding self. How did you arrive at this idea of “rehearsals”?

RWL: Rehearsals are about practicing something until you get it right. In my experience, so much of trying to exist in the world is about just doing something over and over again until it's not hard anymore.

I began to ask myself, “What are the things we are rehearsing for that we don't know that we're rehearsing for?

And then the last part of the book is a bunch of apocalyptic scenes, which is interesting to me because we, as a society, and I, are perpetually obsessed with the apocalypse. Many of us want to know what the world would look like when it’s destroyed or after it has been annihilated. 

The Covid Pandemic has made me a lot less interested in the apocalypse because we globally lived through a mini apocalypse, so it'll probably be a long time before I'm so interested in writing about apocalyptic themes again.

NM: What was the process of editing this book? 

RWL: The production timelines for Mothman Apologia and How to Maintain Eye Contact were almost simultaneous. I think the books have such different tones that it was great to be able to go through the poems I was excited about and move them back and forth and find the right home for them. It was sort of exhilarating to have that opportunity to do so.  

NM: What are you working on right now? 

RWL: I have two projects I’m currently working on that I'm excited about. I just finished a manuscript for a second full-length collection that stems from my thesis. Terrance Hayes was incredible at helping me find my themes from my literary obsessions.

In law school, I took a class on lying, which was eye-opening in a way I’m not sure any other class has been, and whole swaths of my manuscript are about the concept of lying. I also have the beginning of a novel which is about bureaucracy and regret—forgive me if that’s not an enticing elevator pitch yet.

NM: What have you been reading recently? 

RWL: I have been reading a lot of work by Natalie Shapero and Diane Seuss. They’re both simultaneously funny and insightful, funny as a trapdoor to insightful. Seuss’ work is especially exciting and generative for me as a writer. I could use her poems as a prompt every day and never get close to writing like her.

You can purchase Robert Wood Lynn’s Mothman Apologia here. 

How to Maintain Eye Contact is forthcoming from Button Press in January 2023.