Andy Young‘s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in October 2024. (You can order it here.) She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Identity Theory, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. – Alanie Lacy

Alanie Lacy: You have a book coming out in October 2024, Museum of the Soon to Depart, could you talk a little bit about what this book is and how the idea came to be?

Andy Young: The poems in the book range from intense personal experiences with grief and relationships to responses to things outside of myself but within my range of vision. That is, my mother died of glioblastoma in April 2020, after two years of surgeries and clinical trials. I also have two kids and am married to an Egyptian who has a huge, beautiful family and a wide circle of friends there. So, there’s a lot in my personal life to process. Then, living in New Orleans for most of my adult life, and spending a good deal of time in Egypt, I have been around a lot of intense public experiences. The Egyptian Revolution, Hurricane Katrina, the recent plague, which, of course, most people experienced, too. A friend of my husband’s was assassinated— another poet, on the anniversary of the revolution, bringing flowers to Tahrir Square for those who died in the uprising. All of these things shape me, and all I know to do is to write through them.

The idea of a museum to organize the book came to me after visiting the Natural History Museum in New York. The Hall of Minerals and halls of slothbones, etc., blew my mind. Plus, I love small, unusual museums such as New Orleans’ Pharmacy Museum and the City Cemetery in Lynchburg, VA, which has a Pest House Museum and a Museum of Mourning. I had all these poems about museums. I wanted that section of the book about museums to be Hall of Halls, but the editor wanted only three sections, so I ended up with: Display of Grief, Hall of Pestilence and Unhealed Wounds, and Archives of Prayer.

The structure of a museum gave me a place to put everything. I could hang my poems on its walls. Plus I write a lot about visual art, particularly photography. So it made sense to put those pieces in a museum.

Lacy: Has the process for your upcoming book been different or similar to what you have done in the past?

Young: If by process you mean the writing and organizing process, it’s been a totally different process, thank goodness. If it was the same two times in a row, I think I’d die of boredom. My first full-length collection was really gathering the best of all the viable work I had written so far. The chapbooks have been small, very focused projects. This one arose out of a more specific time period and, due to the editor’s vision, became a much leaner and more discerning collection than my first one.

Lacy: When do you know it’s time to let go of a poem and submit it to be published? Do a significant portion of them make it to this stage, or are a majority of them just for you?

Young: I know it’s time to stop fiddling with a poem when it stops moving around. I mean I print out poems as I work on them, and I hang them on the wall (I either tack them up or have this kind of clothesline situation where they are hanging in my writing space as if to dry). Whenever I walk by them, I see if anything shifts or moves. If I keep crossing out little words or changing punctuation, etc, I know it’s not done. Once it lies still for a while, I feel ok about sending it out. I do try to get most of them to that stage, though there are a few that feel too private and stay with only me.

Lacy: You have many published collections of poems, does one stand out to you as one you were most proud or excited to get published? If so, why?

Young: Other than the collection that will be coming out in the fall, I’d say The People is Singular (Antenna Press, 2012, available through my website) because it was a collaboration with an amazing Egyptian photographer, Salwa Rashad, and because it was a response to the Egyptian revolution which was very pivotal in my life.

Lacy: Is there anything that stops you or holds you back in your writing?

Young: Time stops me. Not having enough of it. That’s all I can think of.

Lacy: Do you have any favorite poets or writers that you feel helped shape the style and/or process of your poetry?

Young: My style and my process are all being shaped all the time by writers. I have admired Neruda’s “political poetry,” its big-heartedness and deep observation. Also in translation, I have admired the tragic, biting sensibilities of Nicanor Parra and Cesar Vellejo. When looking at the poems I’ve written in the last few years that are working through loss and grief, I have been guided by work by Valzhyna Mort, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Hayden, and Seamus Heaney, to name a few. My process is also deeply affected by the wonderful writers in my poetry group: Carolyn Hembree, Peter Cooley, Toi Derricotte, Brad Richard, Rodney Jones, Kay Murphy, Laura Mullen, and Allison Campbell.

Lacy: Many of your poems are about museums and artwork, and you have been known to have an interest in museums, when did this interest come about? Is there a moment that you remember museums peaking your interest or have you just always enjoyed them?

Young: I am not sure about museums, but I remember the first time I wrote about a photo. I think it was a library poetry workshop I went to. Anyway, I remember this photo of a fireman who was eight feet tall. He looked so sad. I just had to write about him. Art and museums that allow one to be comfortable enough to look at the art, and museums that are, in and of themselves, art, such as the Backstreet Museum in New Orleans or The Natural History Museum give me great solace.

Lacy: In your poem, “Pharmacy Museum Tour Guide, New Orleans” you talk about writing the poem years after the tour of the museum and using notes you took during the tour. Is this a typical process for you?

Young: I teach high school, and I have two kids. A lot of the poems I end up writing long after an experience are simply that much later because it’s the first chance I’ve had to sit down and read my notebooks. This is why little notebooks are so important! You can take notes and come back later and see what you have. And my notes from that were so rich because Owen, who I now know was the tour guide, was so informative and engaging. His voice gradually took over my head and wrote the poem.

Lacy: As an interviewer, I am probably meant to remain as neutral as I can. However, as a reader, I want to tell you that “Phantom Ekphrastic” had me holding back tears so I didn’t cry in a coffee shop on a Friday night. This poem does a wonderful job of allowing readers to visualize the moment alongside feeling the emotions present. It, like many of your other poems, centers a photograph. What does the relationship of visual to written art mean to you? What does the relationship to other artists mean to you?

Young: Thank you for saying that! I mean, I am sorry I made you cry publicly on a weekend, but I also had to accept a long time ago that making people cry just comes with the territory of writing the poems, so what can you do? Anyway, that poem, like some other poems in the book, is centered on a photograph by Sebastião Salgado. He is a huge inspiration for me. He finds a way to bring the viewer into the vulnerability of the moment; he never objectifies. And he travels all over the world and has witnessed tremendous suffering. He somehow shows humanity and even beauty in the most miserable circumstances, but he never romanticizes or others the subjects. I often look through his book Migrations and spend time with his images, then read about them in the little booklet of information/notes that comes with it. It’s a great comfort to me. The book itself was given to me by my dearest friend the last time I visited her. She died suddenly, in her forties, soon after that. I was borrowing the book, but now I can’t give it back. So I have a special relationship with this book and with these photos, and I wrote about both the photos and the physical book in my forthcoming poetry collection.

Lacy: There is this idea that it is wrong to write poetry about some tragedies. As someone who has written poetry about moments of darkness, conflict, and death, do you feel there are topics that can’t be or shouldn’t be the objects of poems?

Young: What’s wrong are usually the tragedies themselves, the ones that must be written about, not the writing itself. I write, in part, to process things. Tragedies need processing. I think it can be easy to write about tragedies in ways that make them smaller, more palatable. In fact, it’s an understandable instinct. But I think a poem has to go into the depths of an emotion, and tragedies make for uncomfortable emotions. Some of us have been given translation abilities for articulating these feelings into language. When that’s the case, there is no choice.

Lacy: Sometimes it feels as though writers are afraid to reference current society for fear of going out of style or feeling cringy. You seem to face trends head on—referencing social media platforms by name and shortening words to match current slang. How do you balance the past, present, and future in writing? Do you ever find yourself holding back or altering your first draft to account for trends that may be shorter lived?

Young: These are great questions! I don’t understand time/the past, present, and future, so I don’t know how to balance them. As for proper naming or referencing the colloquial, I am interested in what people actually sound like now, in my ear, in the street. I try not to hold back anything on a first draft, but as far as changing the first draft to account for it, I’m sure I have done that. I also know that I like to create textures — of reference, of tone—in drafts because life is textured.

Lacy: In March, you were featured in Chapter 4 of Alien Buddha Press’ poetry series “Ceasefire NOW!” A few of your poems discuss the immediacy that social media brings to the way the world witnesses history as it happens. It’s also not always common to see poetry so instantaneously in the way this series allows. What does having a platform to share poetry about something as it is happening mean to you as a poet? What effect does it have on conversation?

Young: I loved that this platform was available for a more or less in-time response to what is happening in Gaza. There is an urgency to the situation as lives are at stake. I don’t pretend that my poems have any effect whatsoever on the situation or even on the conversation. Poetry makes nothing happen, etc, but I also feel a compulsion to use what I have, namely, words, to speak about what is unfolding.

Lacy: Is there a piece of advice (writing or general life) that you hold close and pull on when writing or working with your writing? Or any advice you would like to pass on to up-and-coming writers hoping to be published one day?

Young: When I was a young writer, I was in a writing community where the poet Galway Kinnell took questions from the audience. I was going through something very difficult at the time, and I asked him how a poet can write about something when it is too close to see; how does one get distance to write about it? His answer changed the way I write. He said, the rest of your life, every experience will get farther and farther away. Write about things when they are right there, too close to see. You have the rest of your life to write with the distance. I’m not saying this is advice for everyone, but, for me, it really shifted my approach to writing. I let distance happen in revision, and I don’t wait to intellectualize or let the feelings settle down. I write through them.

– Alanie Lacy