The Essential, Vulnerable, Art-Making Self

A native of Bassett, Virginia, Annie Woodford earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins College, and her poetry has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Asheville Poetry Review, Smartish Pace, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and many other publications. A winner of the Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets, she has been awarded scholarships from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, as well as a Barbara Deming Fund Fellowship and the Jean Ritchie Fellowship.

Woodford grew up in Bassett, Virginia, a mill town near the North Carolina border in the Piedmont region between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the coastal plain. Her mother was a nurse, and her father was a plumber. Her mother’s family moved down from the mountains to work in the furniture and textile mills which were once the foundation of the region’s economy, which has since been decimated. Her first book of poetry, 2019’s Bootleg, was published by Groundhog Poetry Press in Roanoke, Virginia, and was a runner-up for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian poetry. Poet and editor Marianne Worthington calls Bootleg “a union of spirit and flesh,” the poems “hymns of delight and damage.” She says it’s “a melodious antidote for this tough old world.” Woodford’s new book, Where You Come from Is Gone, won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry and was published by Mercer University Press. She now lives in Deep Gap, North Carolina, and teaches English at Wilkes Community College. This interview was conducted over e-mail between September 2022 and March 2023.

Andy Fogle (AF): For so many poets, the music of language is central. It’s the non-verbal element contained within the verbal, the element that takes poetry beyond its words’ denotations, maybe even beyond their connotations. I’m thinking of something like the gorgeous first section of your poem “Quiet as It’s Kept” and some of the pure sound that seems to drive the images:

Off the interstate, light
shines through the clean plate glass windows
of a McDonald’s, where a whole soccer team sits,
profiles pure flame.

The country slumbers, a majesty of plastic,
Thursday evening traffic. (The commute,
the commute and then to bed soon.)

I’d like to know about the role of sound in your process. Do you ever compose by sound, without any real subject in mind, just playing with vowels or consonants, seeing where the music leads? Or do you begin with material you want to address and then refine the music while editing?

Annie Woodford (AW): I realized once I married a musician that I always have a melody running through my head. I’m not any sort of musician, but I do hear tunes—my own and ones I’ve heard before—all the time. Writing to those melodies is something I was taught to do in a workshop with Jill McDonough that felt revelatory to me. Sometimes I try to hum the music I hear in a piece of poetry I really admire and then write my own version to that melody. I can understand melody better than the concept of meter, though marshalling that music in written form is much harder for me.

Most of the time I start with a story or subject or phrase, often drawn to them because they are infused with a sort of innate lyricism in gesture, idea, image. I love creating patterns of sounds with words—slant rhyme, alliteration—all those interlocking links you can start to play around with in language. In that way, poetry writing is very much about tapping into the lyrical potential of language and hearing it in my own voice, in the voices of others, and, in a sort of synesthesia, feeling its potential in story or subject.

AF: You’ve noted before how your friend, artist Alison Hall, told you “to write like I was from Henry County, where we are both from, and that the best part of the poems I was sharing with her had a colloquial resonance to which I should try to stay true.” You’ve also expressed gratitude for Hollins teachers making you feel that your voice and accent were “OK instead of something to be ashamed of, even fending off a workshop classmate who tried to correct my pronunciation of words such as ‘peony,’ ‘Appalachia,’ and ‘aunt.’” I’m struck that someone in southwestern Virginia, and in a writing workshop, would see language so rigidly. What’s up with that?

AW: Some folks still think it is funny to associate a country accent with stupidity. Appalachian writer Silas House points out that what they are actually showing is class hatred, since accents like mine are associated with poor people, and poor people are the ultimate pariahs in our society.

AF: Do you think we Southerners have an intrinsic love of language?

AW: I tell my students it’s a special thing to have a family member who can make a story out of something that happened at the gas station or at work—or the ability to do that yourself. I know some of my relatives make an unconscious effort to craft and then deliver killer stories—stories that are funny and mysterious all at the same time. I can’t do that. I’m too tongue tied and calculating maybe, but I sure do love to be around those folks. I’m lucky to live in a place where I hear a lyrical attention to the turn of a phrase all the time, whether it be from my students, my family, or at the Dollar General. One of my students walked into class the other day while I was playing that sad, beautiful song “Something in the Orange” by Zach Bryan (they give me song ideas to play before class starts) and said, “Lord, I didn’t know we were gonna get all broke up before class even started today.”

AF: You’ve commented before about Eliot’s statement in his 1929 essay on Dante that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it’s understood,” and how you encourage your “students to feel a poem, like music, before they worry about completely understanding it.”

AW: I love that idea of intuiting a poem first. I tell my students to read with the heart first and the head will follow. My beloved teacher R.H.W. Dillard encouraged us to read ambitiously and not worry about getting everything because you won’t, of course, but what you do get will matter. This was his advice for reading Ulysses, and it has served me well through the years. I tell my students the story of how I first encountered Eliot—I picked up a copy of his collected poems and bought it purely on impulse because the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” blew me away. I read that poem obsessively and didn’t understand its narrative much at all until I was in Mrs. Garrett’s English class at Patrick Henry Community College. Learning later how much music informed his poetry made me realize that while I was mostly missing the narrative, I did have an incredibly meaningful experience with the music of the language and the resonance of the images. Students get so worried about not having the “answer key” to a work of literature and I feel that it is really important as their teacher to assure them they have the ability to have transcendent, “soul-making” (to cite Keats) experiences with reading.

AF: How does being a poet influence your teaching, especially your teaching of composition? 

AW: Trying to write poetry (or anything for that matter) is so humbling. It is good for me to be reminded of how hard it is to write, how much of a tangible physical process it is, how honest it is. It reminds me to put in my hour or two a day for my own writing, if I am going to preach to my students that the key to writing better essays is often a matter of time dedicated to the task. I am constantly trying to design writing assignments in which my students feel invested, interested, inspired. I would like to think more deeply about how the structure and purpose of the types of essays we write in college classes could be more meaningful and more natural—a way to connect the genuine human impulse most of my students have to make something good, something beautiful. To think of writing as an act of learning and discovery, which is the essence of what I love about poetry. 

AF: You say in a 2016 interview that “revision is a skill that did not come naturally” to you, that when you were in college you had a hard time with it. Why was that, and is there anything you can pinpoint about when or why that changed for you?

AW: I am blown away when students can really dig into the revision process. It’s hard! Probably teaching revision [helped me get better at it.] I also think that as I aged, I started to relate to creation/time differently, and any time spent in the contemplative act of writing was the goal, not necessarily thinking I had created anything I could actually share with the world. I would also attribute it to my continued growth as a reader and add that I am still learning how to revise.

AF: You’ve said you don’t think you articulated to yourself that you were a poet until your 30s. How do people react now when you call yourself a poet?

AW: What did Bishop say? “There’s nothing more embarrassing than to be a poet.” It’s a wonderfully weird and anachronistic thing to be. I love to find out about all people who like to write/read poetry out there—I’m always moved by that confession. As Robert Graves has said, “there’s no money in poetry, but then than again there’s no poetry in money,” right? Did I mention my teenager requested all the Rupi Kaur books? Did I mention I got them for her?

AF: Do you have any thoughts about the debates over accessibility, so-called literary quality, craft, audience, what have you, that go on about Kaur’s work or someone like Amanda Gorman? I’m thinking about poetry that is popular beyond typical poetry audiences. Billy Collins is an earlier figure that comes to mind.

I don’t think we have to start out as sophisticated readers (Lord, who does?)—I think we have to start out as whole-hearted readers . . .

AW: I was so happy my daughter was being drawn to poetry, to those pretty, little books as a symbol of some sort of alliance with the poetic impulse. Some of the first poetry I loved was by Robert Service and Whittier and Longfellow—all popular poets beloved by casual readers. Amanda Gorman reading in the yellow dress at the inauguration? What a beautiful moment! It got people who might not think of poetry excited about its possibilities, about what it means as a form of popular expression. I love how these popular works open up young people’s receptivity to art in general. I’ve seen that with my students—they get excited about something we are reading and want to share with me an Instagram poet they like. I don’t think we have to start out as sophisticated readers (Lord, who does?)—I think we have to start out as whole-hearted readers, and then that initial sincerity will do much to support insightful readings of all sorts of imaginative texts. 

AF: Can you say something about audience? You know that “others”—anyone beyond you—will be reading you, so how does that knowledge affect how you write or revise?

AW: I hold a contradiction in my mind: my dream would be for readers to respond to my work the way they do song or melody. Again, I tell my students to read first with their hearts and their heads will follow. You can always become a better educated reader/listener, but you can also be moved, for example, by Mozart, with very little contextual knowledge.

Today in class we were reading N. Scott Momaday, who examines the importance of place and language. He has said that “Place names are music” and our “sacred places” allow us “to know our place in time” and to “reach to eternity.” He says, “Language and the sacred are indivisible.” Which are all reasons I leave the hyper-specific regional and linguistic in my work: ultimately my poems are my personal evocations of the sacred. I don’t know how to think about them any other way.

I tell my students to read first with their hearts and their heads will follow. 

AF: The poem “In Order to Deny the Fact of Death, Which Is the Only Fact We Have” takes place in a bar where people are playing music, dancing, and watching college basketball, but it covers so much ground. There’s a mix of belonging and misunderstanding, of joy and dis-ease (“I both identify & deny identity here”), there’s the irony of the term “redneck” (how many so-called or self-identifying “rednecks” are pro-union?), and a closing soundtrack of Blind Willie McTell: “Wake up, Mama. Turn that lamp down low.” It’s one of the longest poems in the collection, encompassing so much in a single, common setting. Could you describe how that poem arrived and shaped up? I know this was one of the last poems that made it into the book, so I’m curious if you saw it differently as you worked on it, if you worked it with the book specifically in mind, whereas sometimes we just write poems without a book necessarily in mind.

AW: One day I hope to get to the point where I can see my way in a book clearly enough to write poems for it. That poem was part of additions I made to the manuscript when it started becoming more intentionally about interrogating the toxicity of white supremacy. Also, it is set in what was once an iconic roadhouse in Roanoke that became fully right-wing during the Obama years and now flies a Gadsden flag. I was mad about that, mad at myself for being in that space, mad at the band for being that good and playing in that space. I guess I wrote a poem instead of getting my ass kicked at the Coffee Pot.  

AF: “Racial reckoning” is a phrase I hear a lot in relation to America since March 2020. How do you think we’re doing wrestling with our demons? 

AW: White people are doing a terrible job with it. We are the ones who need to do the work. We want to be innocent, but whiteness never exists in a historical or moral vacuum. We need to be listening and reading people who aren’t white and talking amongst ourselves about the toxicity of whiteness as a social construct, a false god we lift up to justify atrocity. I don’t think people of color are ever surprised about our racist families, communities, colleges, etc., but we sure as hell seem to be, so I guess the racial reckoning needs to happen within white spaces, white spaces that need to turn their gaze inward to their own toxicity. I know I have much to do in this regard. Because racism in white culture runs so deep, at least in the white culture I know. For me to truly do the work, I am going to be dislocated from so many things/people/spaces I thought I knew or that once seemed innocent to me. And then we have to think about how it warps our souls to be a part of these racist systems, whether those be families or ways of reading and thinking and experiencing art or communal spaces.

AF: What do you think people should know about poverty?

AW: That the greediest motherfuckers you will ever meet are often the richest, and it’s poor people who don’t ask for help. My community college students always say, when thinking about writing for a scholarship essay I have them do, someone needs it worse than I do. That poor people are more likely to help you. As my mother would say, her father would “give you the shirt off his back.” That no one should be ashamed of being poor. That someone who seems poor to an outsider might not consider themselves poor at all. That they might not be poor within the context of their community. America worships money and despises the poor, seeing poverty as a moral failing. That nevertheless I live in fear of poverty because I know what it means in this country. It means being crushed. I’ve known many a brilliant student falter for want of a few thousand bucks.

AF: Balancing teaching, family, and writing is plain hard, and it’s easy to let writing be the distant-third priority of those three. How do you manage to give fair time to your writing? Do you carve out consistent time for writing or is it done in bunches whenever the rest of life allows? 

AW: I was pretty consistently working two hours a day—usually a bit in the morning and then a bit in the evening—until last year; however, the fall we went back to school post-Covid broke something in that work ethic that I am still trying to fix. I still try to do something with my writing every day, but other parts of my life have definitely grown to consume my attention. However, I remember something the poet Thorpe Moeckel said in an interview, that he used to worry poetry would leave him but that he doesn’t worry about that anymore, that it will always be a part of him, something he does. I find that very reassuring and believe it to be true. 

One magical thing that has happened to me since I have started being less shy about trying to make friends with fellow artists is that when I am feeling most divorced from my creative, happy self, someone will pull me back into thinking about my writing, into writing—it might be a text from a friend with a poem in it or a reading that I attend or my bi-monthly poetry group meeting. Or hearing from someone like you, who read and appreciated my work. Other artists are each other’s guardian angels, in that sense—we keep the conversation going with one another and it can be a lifesaver.

AF: I read about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, by way of James Baldwin, telling each of you at Appalachian Writers Workshop, “Here you are to be loved.” May I ask exactly how she set that up? Was it the first day or something, during introductions?

AW: She was doing something vital to the art-making process. It kind of makes me think about an activity that R.H.W. Dillard did in our creative writing workshop one time—he asked us each to draw a self-portrait. We had maybe 10 minutes to do it and it was terrifying for me. I’ve been thinking about that for years and one thing I take from it is it is a reminder of the child-self inside our adult-selves. Most of us still draw like we are in fourth grade, you know? And that child is one of the many layers of personality that make me who I am, maybe the truest approximation of myself. That’s really what I guess my connection to reading was—a consolation in the midst of my human loneliness, a bridging of time and space to delight in the imaginings of another human being’s creations. I see now, after reading your question, that my earliest readings of work I recognized as having both a tactile beauty to its language and philosophical power to its ideas helped me tap into some sense of the universal current of love that I hope, at its core, floods the universe. Maybe it’s just all interstellar cold and decaying back into star matter, but the tenderness between human beings—whether that happens in human interactions or by immersion in art—is the closest thing I have to faith.

Featured photo by Hillary Robinson Photography.