Poetry: Interview with Nancy Miller Gomez, Guest Judge for 2024 Debut Chapbook Contest
Poet Nancy Miller Gomez chose the winner of our 2024 Debut Chapbook Contest, Examining a Dress, by Jessie Leary, which will be out in the fall. She also did us the honor of answering a few questions about poetry, her own poetic leanings, and poetry’s interaction with memory. This is an experimental interview where we started with Nancy’s statement from the contest guidelines and moved from there. Her inventive and exciting answers can be found below, and they are full of insight for all emerging poets (and honestly, poets from any stage of development, Nancy rocks). Thanks, Nancy, for everything you’ve given us at Frontier!
I love chapbooks that take me on a narrative, thematic, or emotional journey, but I also love a mixtape of poems that pulse and push off from one another in ways that create a rich experience for the reader.
Frontier Poetry: What memory appears when you think of these words? What poem (or book, or chapbook) emerges when you think of them and why? (memory and explanation should be limited to one sentence, give poem/book title and author)
Nancy Miller Gomez:
Narrative –
Memory: My father sharing stories after dinner.
Book: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Why: My father recited it from memory (and then taught my seven-year-old daughter to recite it with him).
Thematic –
Memory: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Tour – an ambitious musical spectacle staged by Genesis when Peter Gabriel was the lead singer. It made a life-long impression on me when I was very young.
Book: Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson
Why: Bleak but beautiful, these thematically connected stories narrated by a lost soul named Fuckhead (FH for short) plumb the underbelly of addiction and despair in America with compassion and a small helping of humor.
Emotional –
Memory: Three-year-old Maya telling me over the phone that she misses me so much she has a bug in her heart – which pretty much guts me.
Book – So, so, so many books! But there is one I read with my family every Christmas Eve because it embodies coziness and happiness and security and magic and warmth and all the emotional fuzzies you could ever want in a story/poem: A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.
I love when poems, polished into little gems, bump against poems that are mouthy and wild.
FP: Inhabit wildness: (5 sentences or lines, less than 500 words):
NMG: I am currently at a writing residency in the remote wilds of Wyoming at a place called Jentel. We have been told that when we walk about the land, we must wear these terribly garish neon orange vests. I assume that is because there are hunters about who might mistake us for deer or elk or other wildlife and dispatch us with a bullet, but I often forget to wear the vest, so when I’m out in the far reaches of nowhere, I take a moment to wonder how I would look to a hunter from a distance – there I am scrambling up and down rocky hills, pausing to turn over stones and dirt clods and occasionally digging things up with a stick. Do I look like something that someone might want to shoot? I reassure myself that the good hunters of Wyoming are only interested in killing things they can eat, or things they think might eat their cattle, and I probably don’t look like either, and also, it’s too far to go back for the vest – so I carry on, walking past outcroppings of yellow bentonite loosely following a path made by the animals who walk this way to the river. I’m out here surrounded by deer and cows, and an occasional porcupine or magpie, and I give myself over to the utter ease of being in this world without all the head clutter and deadlines and worries – until I hear a click, and I freeze. Am I about to encounter a gun toting crazy person? I realize then, that I am not afraid of the earth and the animals. It’s people I fear, because they are the ones who will hurt you without reason or cause. I stand still and wait, and there is another click and another, and I slowly walk to the top of the hill, where I am greeted by the friendly, curious face of a fellow wanderer, a piebald horse shaggy with winter and looking like she is as startled by my presence as I am by hers. There is a remarkable connection that happens when two wild things greet one another with the shared relief that the other you are encountering is benevolent and does not mean you any harm. We stand there and take each other in, and then the horse, in the ultimate signal of trust, drops her head to graze on the scrap of green poking out from under the snow.
I love poems that sound good when read out loud; poems that are rhythmic and gut-punchy yet still stylistically elegant; poems that use language in unexpected and fresh ways; poems that pivot and turn and buck and circle, that misbehave and don’t care what anyone thinks.
FP: What is more important to you in the poems that you love—surprise, or intent? Explain. (3 sentences/lines, no more than 300 words)
NMG: I’m a total sucker for surprise in a poem – a discovery that jumps out of nowhere and changes everything – the poem, the poet and the reader. But I also care very much about intent because If I don’t care about the underlying themes and intention of the poem I’m probably not going to care terribly much about the poem in the first place. While I can admire a poem that is well crafted and beautifully written, if it doesn’t move me then I’m not going to fall in love with it.
FP: Follow up: what poems do you think would be a good roommate, or a good best friend? A good boyfriend? What are the poems you don’t think you could get along with? (150 words)
NMG: Good roommate: “Yes” by Carrie Fountain because you want a roommate that has a past and is done with it and yet is honest and kind and writes with a ferocity that can outrun anything life throws at her.
Good Best Friend: “How to Triumph Like a Girl” by Ada Limon because you need that kind of strength and character in a best friend, and “Hip-Hop Ghazal” by Patricia Smith, because everyone loves a best friend with swagger and sass and self-confidence and who knows how to sing and also Leila Chatti’s, “Tea,” because the poem would bring you tea and sit with you when you’re sad.
Good Boyfriend: “The Poet at Seventeen” by Larry Levis, because you could look back at who he was and fall in love with who he became all over again.
Poems I can’t get along with: The ones written by people who don’t care about other people.
I love poems that refuse to get tied into bows, or that give me the finger on their way out the door.
FP: What was the first poem you read that didn’t care about you?
NMG: Hmm, that’s a hard one. Probably one of the poems we had to read in 8th grade English class. We undoubtedly didn’t care about each other because I don’t remember it and it doesn’t remember me.
FP: What was the first poem you read that cared too much? Tell us more. (300 words for each)
NMG: Again, another hard one. Maybe Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” because the poem cared about conveying the truth as an essential purpose behind the poem. I read it when I was still a child and spent years trying to understand the negotiated balance between the facts and the truth. When is a truth too blinding to be expressed directly? In her poem “There is a certain slant of light,” the profound expression of existential melancholy and despair still hurts every time I read it. Maybe because that was my first introduction to a poem describing something indescribable. Also, Jane Kenyon’s “Happiness,” is a poem that cares boundlessly as it captures the fleeting, impossible to hold onto feeling of happiness, especially for the meek who have yet to inherit anything, much less the earth. And oh, that poor wine glass so “weary of holding wine.” It breaks my heart every time.
I love a poem that opens a window, a poem that changes how I see the world so after I’ve read it everything is different.
FP: You’ve lost your keys and your neighbor, who has your spare key, is out, and isn’t answering their phone or responding to your texts. What poem will climb onto the fire escape and open the window? What poem will remember if you locked the window before you left the house, or if you left it cracked because you wanted to circulate the air after you burned the toast? (no word limit)
NMG: “Throwing Children” by Ross Gay will climb onto the fire escape and open the window for you. Read it and you’ll see why. It’s a happy, kind-hearted poem that is compassionate and good-natured through and through. “The Hug,” by Tess Gallagher would climb up there with it.
“Washing the Elephant” by Barbara Ras is the poem that will remember if you locked the window so the poems “Throwing Children” and “The Hug” can let themselves in. “Frying Trout While Drunk” by Lynn Emanuel would also probably remember as would “A Color of the Sky” by Tony Hoagland which features “the only metaphysical vandal in America.” “Dust” by Dorianne Laux will remember but will be too tired to get out of bed and tell you.
Nancy Miller Gomez
Nancy Miller Gomez's first full-length collection Inconsolable Objects is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2024. She is the author of the chapbook, Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series), a collection of poems and essays about her experience teaching in prisons and jails. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, River Styx, Waxwing, Plume, The Rumpus, Rattle, The Massachusetts Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She co-founded, with Ellen Bass, an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, and the Juvenile Hall. She has a BA from the University of California, San Diego, received her JD from the University of San Diego, and obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Pacific University. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California.
