Name: Maia Elgin
Hometown: I was born in Blue Hill, ME, raised mostly in La Crosse, WI, and identify with New Orleans, LA.
Current city: Cleveland, MS
Occupation: Assistant Professor of English at Delta State University
Age: 31
What does poetry mean to you?
There are two river teeth (thanks, David James Duncan) that stick out from my developing poetic consciousness. The first happened when I was 10 and I wrote a poem after my grandmother died: “What I feel is emptiness / I can’t cry so I laugh / something is missing something strong / I know that something is gone.” I couldn’t name my “lost innocence” or “grief” in that moment; Grandma Smith was gone, but something else was gone, too, a part of myself, like “the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad feeling I sometimes get” (props to Judith Viorst for providing a name for my anxiety), so I wrote a poem and read it at her funeral. To name something is to understand it, and I still can’t do either for that loss. I find that the moment we think we understand anything, the meaning shifts. To name something is to (mis)understand it, but poeming something can help ease the unknowing.
The second tooth came much later, after I already had an MFA and a chapbook and was trying to convince myself that I could be called a poet. I saw a duck in City Park in New Orleans with a broken leg and I thought about its innocent suffering. I thought about the “immense suffering of all things” and “the problem with evil” and “the face of an immensely cold and cruel universe.” And every poem I’ve written since then has been about that duck.
Audre Lorde said, “it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.”
Who is your favorite poet?
Why do you like this poet?
First of all, Stein was a revolutionary in her own right who has been barred by the great canonizers that be from the kind of recognition she deserves because she had a vagina. Yes, I’ve heard rumors that her womanizing also rivaled that of the men who attended her salons, but it’s her meaning making, in this case, that matters here. Her particular brand of modernism moved poetry closest to pure abstraction, and I see what she was doing in the terms of Wassily Kandinsky: we cannot express a spiritual truth with material imagery. Her work with connotation made language strange à la Shklovsky and brought new meaning and feeling when all the old words had become cliché. She taught me that there is (more) sense in unsense.
“to the road kill cat” is in some ways an imitation poem built off of the line “The difference is spreading” from “A Carafe, that is a blind glass.” Stein’s poems in Tender Buttons take the familiar and “rend” it unfamiliar, divorcing the referent from the word and creating (revealing) a simulacra of language, but I’m interested in the ways meaning can be restored, to language, to suffering...In this poem, which is also a process poem, I guess trying to (and writing, to some extent, about trying to) access the "nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt."
to the road kill cat
after Gertrude Stein
by Maia Elgin
the distance is rending
a light breeze—terrible
density creates
an unlikely orange mountain
a triumphant trunk
the tar the tar
of a teen-aged labyrinth
the nighttime shit-shadow
in the shape of a dog
and the homemade collage
becoming unfamiliar
a great parisian
liquidates the final soldier
a something is just
beginning to become
and not knowing a boulder
the looming
the looming and a sharp prick
to be human is to uncouple the stars
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Maia Elgin has recent poems in Tarpaulin Sky, InDigest, Ghost Town, and Glitter Pony. Her chapbook The Jennifer was published in 2012 by Birds of Lace Press. An assistant professor at Delta State University, she earned her MFA at LSU. She lives in the Mississippi Delta with her partner, two cats, and a dog.