PAIGE RIEHL: Thank you, Claire, for speaking with me about your fourth book of poetry, Meltwater, a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry. Congratulations!

I am so drawn to this collection for numerous reasons, one of which is the way you illustrate the complexities of existing as a person amid an ongoing climate crisis that feels largely out of our control as individuals. We’re living our daily lives, reusing and recycling, while all around us flora and fauna become extinct, sea temperatures increase, glaciers crumble and melt, plastics and other detritus float and tangle in the ocean. Your book explores the vastness of these problems while simultaneously feeling so personal. Was this inward and outward exploration—the movement between the self and our environment—a natural symbiosis during the poetry writing process? 

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Good question! I think some of it came from the experience of (early) parenthood itself, which is simultaneously such a narrowing of focus (time broken down into 2-hour intervals, the minutiae of an infant’s breathing) and a rapid expansion (“what does it all MEAN??” “why are we HERE??” “WHAT IS TIME??”). And the oscillation between those two scales gave those months such an alien, propulsive rhythm. And then of course there’s the issue that all parents talk about—time simultaneously dragging and racing; the days being slow and the years being fast, etc. And then throw the pandemic (which was at its height while I was finishing Meltwater) in there, and you’ve got a perfect storm of temporal disorientation. 

And in the foreground, there’s the process of trying to imagine what the world looks like from an infant’s eyes—like, what’s the deal with the sky? How would someone who just got here—who has LITERALLY NO CONTEXT—experience a Blue Jay’s call? What does the sun feel like on their body? “What is the grass?” And putting my brain through those exercises gave me permission to let go of the standard similes and structures that I usually reach for.

AND FURTHERMORE it just so happened that I signed up for Twitter in mid-2017, when my first kid was six months old, so I was able to follow #metoo, the Uprising and the intensification of the BLM movement, Brexit, the Central American migrant crisis, the pandemic, the global wildfires, every single mass shooting, while pushing my daughter on the swing. Like, watching the precinct burn and then getting my kiddo some more milk. Just the juxtapositions got so weird, and I think all of those things contributed to that sense of fluidity between the self and environment that you noticed.

PAIGE RIEHL: Yes! And the way we’re continuously bombarded with what’s happening—the “news” in all its intensity is hard to situate while we deal with daily life. It feels like American society currently exists in an ongoing state of heightened tension—a persistent sense of precariousness about our political, societal, and environmental future. Although it’s challenging to exist in a state of uncertainty, do you find that this tension offers natural openings or opportunities, starting spaces for poems? Will you speak a bit about what moves you to write?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: My gosh, I feel like this country has been at a breaking point at least since 2016, and I’m worried that we’ve just acclimated to this level of fascism and dysfunction. Every morning I hope for a general strike. Every single institution is rotten and the only way to stop the gears of a country like ours is to interrupt the flow of capital. Instead, things keep ratcheting up. I do think that this has meant that absurdism has appeared more and more frequently in my work lately. Like, things happen every day that, even four years ago, I would have said were impossible. I have been wrong in almost all of my predictions. The logic of this country and my own personal logic feel like they’re barely touching each other. It’s cartoonish, it’s monstrous. I can’t get over the footage of the student protests from this past May. Like I can watch something happen and two hours later be told by institutional media that it never happened. What!? I can go weeks at a time without hearing anyone from my real life mention the genocide in Gaza, when it’s all I engage with online. Where am I? Anyway, all of this is to say that I haven’t been able to write since October. I think, to write poetry right now, I would need to be able to use metaphor in a way that I can’t. 

PAIGE RIEHL: Right. Sometimes I find too that I need some time to percolate before being able to write about sensitive and challenging subject matter. You create tension so effectively in Meltwater, though. Is creating tension in your poems something you work toward, or does the nature of the subject matter lend itself to a natural push and pull? You masterfully use a wealth of poetic tools (line breaks, white space, alliteration, denotative/connotative word meaning, etc.) to create this sense of exploring the abundant beauty of the natural world while swirling on the edge of despair. 

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: I think in Meltwater the tension wasn’t something I intentionally tried to cultivate—it arose pretty naturally from the subject matter. That is, before I had children, my default position was one of assuming the worst, of knowing with certainty that we were heading for apocalypse, that we might as well get comfortable having a front row seat to our own destruction, etc. And there was certainly a perverse enjoyment in throwing my hands up and being like, “this is why we can’t have nice things! Suck it, humanity!” But that stance has felt harder to sustain now that my children are with me in the world. It’s true that unspeakable atrocities are happening and it’s also true that many things are very good. So sometimes the poems hold both realities inside them, but I think the tension also happens when you put two poems right next to each other that reach in very different directions—I think I played more intentionally with juxtaposition in the ordering of the MS than I did within the individual poems. 

PAIGE RIEHL: That juxtaposition is something I’m really interested in exploring! Spread through the sections of your book, there are eight erasure poems, all called “Meltwater.” All are erasures of “How to Mourn a Glacier” by Lacy M. Johnson (originally published in the New Yorker in 2019), an essay that explores the scale of the climate crisis in part through the death of an Icelandic glacier named Okjökull. 

I’m fascinated by your use of erasure: how each poem uses different words from the original material, how the poems morph, shift, and shorten as the book progresses. Is erasure a form you’re drawn to? Tell us a bit about the process of creating this series of “Meltwater” poems for the book. What unique opportunities does erasure as a form offer, particularly for your subject matter? And what drove your decision to disperse these poems throughout the manuscript?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Thank you! I will admit that I don’t generally like doing found poetry, which erasure technically is. But I do have erasure sequences in all of my books! I find erasure to be a very finnicky, demanding form. It can be hard to make erasures stand on their own in a satisfying way; it can be hard for the “so what?” to come through. As with any form, erasure really needs to make sense on a conceptual level, and I usually get impatient if I hang out on that level for too long. 

It’s funny that you mention the dispersal of those poems across the book because at first, they were all back-to-back, in a section of their own, sort of in the middle. But that really seemed like a missed opportunity—both because the rest of the book is so dense that it’s just begging for pockets of airier poems, and also because if you can break up the pieces of one long narrative arc (which the “Meltwaters” are) and scatter them, they end up creating several smaller arcs wherever they land, which really diversifies the rhythm of the book. 

PAIGE RIEHL: You certainly achieve the sense of diminishment and loss, which I also see in the “Glacier” poems. Like the series of “Meltwater” poems, there are four poems titled “Glacier” in the book. In the first “Glacier,” the speaker is part of a crowd that has paid to see a glacier in a room where “For an additional five hundred dollars you could mount a ladder and point a hairdryer at the glacier for two minutes [. . . ] could shape the surface into pits—a gentle divot for an eye, a more forceful one for a mouth” (10). This poem struck me with such force! Although you create a futuristic dystopia, there’s such truth in the destruction here—the way we’re all taking a hairdryer to the environment in one way or another. Will you share more about the poems titled “Glacier”? Did you know early on there would be more than one?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: The glaciers were maybe my favorite poems to write! I can’t quite remember where the idea came from, but I think it was from reading about Olafur Eliasson’s work Ice Watch (which he had first done in Paris in 2015, but I was reading about the London installation from 2018: https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/ice-watch-2014/. He went to Greenland and fished out these huge chunks of ice that had already calved from the Greenland ice sheet and brought them to the Tate and let them sit outside until they melted—I think it took 10 days maybe? And there are all these photos of people out on the street, kissing or hugging or pressing their faces up to these enormous chunks of ice. The photos are bonkers, and seeing them made me be like, what if this were the only way to see glaciers in the future? And one of the uncanny thing about the sequence is that it doesn’t take place too far in the future. In Wilder I have a set of post-apocalyptic poems that are very clearly just that—post-apocalyptic. But the Glacier series is set in a world that may be only five years away. In fact, several details from the poems have actually happened in real life since I wrote them (in one of the “Glaciers,” the speakers are drinking glasses of water cooled with ice cubes that are carved directly from these rare glaciers, and just last fall there were stories about both Martha Stewart and Antonin Scalia going on (separate) yachts and making martinis out of glacial ice that they chiseled off of a passing glacier). It’s wild! I don’t like it!

The first one was so fun to write that I decided to make a mini-narrative, where the speaker goes on this quest to see all the world’s remaining glaciers (only four, I decided!). That way, I could explore different settings (museums, vaults, open-air exhibits, etc.) and also create an emotional arc and show the glacial loss in real time (the fourth one melts before they can get to it). 

PAIGE RIEHL: At a reading at the Loft Literary Center, you mentioned that there’s a fifth “Glacier” poem that didn’t make it into the book. Will you share more about that poem and why it isn’t in the book?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Oh yeah! Very simply, it didn’t make it into the book because I didn’t write it in time! For some reason, I had always pictured there being five “Glaciers” in Meltwater (the first “Glacier” in the series has the line “We had heard that some people had vials from all five glaciers lined up on their mantels like Hummels.”) I wrote the first four pretty easily and then tried and tried to write another one but it just wouldn’t happen, and I didn’t want to force it. But I always felt the absence of the additional poem. And then for AWP last year, when Meltwater came out, Milkweed was doing an off-site that involved some author-sponsored raffle items. And I couldn’t think of anything to contribute and then I was like WAIT! MAYBE I CAN WRITE THE MISSING GLACIER POEM AND RAFFLE IT OFF! And so I did, 18 months after the book had been written. (My brother-in-law won it, lol, so it’s in a frame at their house! I haven’t published it anywhere!)

PAIGE RIEHL: It seems so apropos that the poem stayed in the family! Speaking of family, one aspect I admire in your poetry is the way you braid the emotional intensity of being a mother to young children with the fear of existing in a world that can be inhospitable, particularly toward the innocent and fragile. I’m thinking of poems like the frontispiece “O,” which begins “Once there was an opening,” as well as “M,” “P,” and “XYZ.” These poems have a storybook quality, as if we’re about to hear a mother reading to her child: “P is for picture book,” for example, is how “P” begins. 

However, the poem quickly turns toward the terrifying: “I sing ‘Baby Beluga’ and see pods of pilot whales with pool floaties pretzeled inside their cavities. I turn the page but it’s a palindrome of panic” (77). The speaker carries an emotional burden, or maybe “burden” isn’t the right word? How does the emotional intensity of being a parent—the exhaustion, the hope, the love—inform your poems? Did you find that your poetry and/or your writing process shifted once you became a mother? Do you think of your children as part of your audience?

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Oh my gosh, my poems got so much better once I became a parent, 100%. I think I had the technical chops before 2016, but no real material. Like it doesn’t matter how good your cookware is if you’re using it to heat up Campbell’s soup, lol. Once children entered the picture, the technical stuff finally had something to grab onto, and I think—I noticed, at least—the poems got pretty good pretty quickly. Of course I won’t be able to find it now, but I saw someone on Twitter this week ask something like, “did anyone else experience a crazy period of artistic fertility right after having kids?” and I was like “oh! oh! me! me!” (I didn’t actually respond to the post, but I looked through the replies and it sounds like this is a real thing that happens! (if you’re lucky enough to have time + space to make art post-partum, which! is not the average experience!)). I think some of it is what I talked about earlier, just the surrealism of babies. But your brain also is more plastic in early parenthood—like the structure and function of your brain actually changes, and I think that might have contributed (now that I’m in a terrible writing drought, I look back at how quickly I wrote Meltwater(in about 18 months) and I can’t believe it). 

I don’t generally think of my children as the audience of my poems—although! I had this spooky moment a couple of weeks ago! So “O” was featured in an art exhibit in NYC back in 2020, and they blew the poem up super big and sent me the exhibit copy, so I’ve got this largescale poster of the poem up on my wall. And the other week I heard my 7-year-old reciting the opening lines of the poem and I was like WHAT IS THAT, WHAT IS HAPPENING, and I came out and she was standing in front of the poster, reading it, and it was actually one of the spookiest things, to hear those lines in her voice. I guess they are starting to become the audience in some ways, even if an unintentional one! 

Also it’s interesting, even the poems that are directly addressed to children (“You Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill You,” “In a Land Where Everything is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an Autotomist,” “Primer,” “Glossary of What I’ll Miss,” and “:” ) were written when the kids were so young that they aren’t really those people anymore. And they change so quickly that even a year ago they were totally different people. So I couldn’t really say that the poems are even addressed to them as people now. They were written to their former selves (selves that they probably won’t ever be able to access, memory-wise! It’s wild). 

PAIGE RIEHL: It’s interesting to think of the poems being written to the children’s former selves that they probably can’t access in memory! As I read, I felt like your poems often exist in liminal spaces—a dystopian future without bees, the dreamworld where much is extinct. The speaker makes a list of what she’ll miss, such as magnolias, lambs, sweat peas. Will you speak about the function of liminal spaces in your poetry? 

CLAIRE WAHMANHOLM: Interesting! I don’t actually think of those poems being set in liminal spaces—at least not intentionally. I think I’m very committed to acting as if, writing as if, the situations in the poems were absolutely real—not hypotheticals, not something imaginary. I think I try to collapse that boundary as much as possible. Maybe the poems throw the readers into a liminal space because readers need to keep one foot in the present while having to imagine whatever future the poems describe? Whereas when I write them, I lift both feet up and let myself be carried completely into the next world.