Jaimee Hills is the author of How to Avoid Speaking (Waywiser Press) which won the prestigious Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She has been a featured reader in the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, Blackbird, and elsewhere. Find out more at her website: www.jaimeehills.com.
Recently we talked with her about relationships among words, among people, and between words and people.
ALL: How did you get drawn into this work? Do you have an origin story?
JH: In first grade, we played a game of matching word pairs. The teacher would say “peanut butter” and the student would say “jelly.” And I remember getting the word “saucer” and having no idea what was supposed to pair with that, so I said “alien” and was told that was wrong. The teacher tried to guide me to the correct answer, “teacup,” with the example, “The cat drinks from a saucer of milk.” And I still had no idea. The fact that I remember this incident might be the “origin story” for my love of words and their possibility—how years later I decided the game itself was wrong. I still think “alien” is the far better answer.
ALL: What's the most exciting part of contemporary poetry for you? Or the best thing about the poetry/literary community in the Midwest?
JH: Definitely the diversity of contemporary poetry is exciting—both in terms of form and the diverse voices being published. Yes, we can study Keats but we can also study Natalie Diaz or Ocean Vuong. It’s also exciting that we can see poetic responses to contemporary events. Even though I think some poems can take years, there’s that possibility of immediacy. Access to information is changing how we consume poems and create them. Any fact I want is available at my fingertips and I can write about it—that’s exciting. As for the literary community in the Midwest—I grew up and lived on the East Coast for most of my life, and now have been in Milwaukee for several years, so I feel like I’m still discovering it. But one of the best things here is that we have one of the only all-poetry bookstores in the country, the Woodland Pattern Book Center.
ALL: What are you working on currently? Where can we find more of your work?
JH: My current project centers around a time of great uncertainty in my life when my husband and I were deciding whether or not to have kids. He has lived most of his life at risk for a genetic brain disease and he’s a science fiction scholar, so end-of-the-world scenarios are kind of a staple of our lives and the idea of bringing children into the world was knotted with fear and uncertainty. (We have two kids now and are fine and happy.) But I have several poems that explore the ideas of fear and hope, the future, utopias, and climate change, woven together in a collection that might be titled The Utopologist’s Wife—not sure if that’s the title yet. Some poems from this new work appear in Mezzo Cammin and I have to two poems forthcoming from Star 82 Review. I also try to keep a catalog of my online work at my own website.
ALL: I find the title of your book How to Avoid Speaking fascinating, especially in a day and age so focused on speaking out. Could you tell me more about that title?
JH: Poetry is a kind of speaking and also not—because it is written and on the page. Poems have speakers you can speak through, and so often the white space, the pause, or the line break carries meaning too. The title poem of the collection deals with shyness and forms of expression beyond speaking (which are also kinds of speaking). We are definitely in a society that favors the extrovert, but we’re also in a moment in our society when speaking out doesn’t necessarily mean you’re behind a megaphone. Derrida has an essay by this name that begins with an explanation of the French translation of the words. I can paraphrase: it means “how to avoid speaking,” but also “how to avoid speaking a certain a way,” which can also be thought of as, “how to say something a certain way”—which is what poetry is. So I liked the idea that the way to avoid saying something is also how to say something.
ALL: I love your poem "Lo Lee Tah." What drew you to exploring that character?
JH: I was working with a word pattern for each letter of the alphabet. “Lo Lee Tah” is based on L. When you can subtract or add the letter to a word, then you get a kind of “rhyming” pair. So, for example, singled and singed or lover and over. One section of How to Avoid Speaking has a series of these forms which are all personas. It’s kind of like writing a poem backwards—to begin with a list of words and then figure out what they are saying or who would say them, like a word association game. L is for Lolita, and the poem takes some images from the provocative villain-narrator of Nabokov’s novel and offers a rebuttal to Lolita’s characterization. I think it’s the wordplay of her name that happens within the novel that really drew me to the subject, since my series of poems is an exercise in playing with sounds.
Hear Jaimee Hills read at the Watershed Reading Series “Dangerous Women” event on March 17, 2018 at 7 PM at the Arts + Literature Laboratory.