Turning “towards the possibility of love”: Megan Pinto on closure, openings and experimentation
By Alishya Almeida
Turning “towards the possibility of love”: Megan Pinto on closure, openings and experimentation
By Alishya Almeida
Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books) and the chaplet Lovesick (Belladonna* Collaborative). Megan’s poems have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.org, Ploughshares, the Slowdown Podcast and elsewhere. She won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers.
In Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s poems tenderly hold and recount instances of family histories, faith, girlhood, adulthood, heartbreak and multiple transformations of the self over the years and across several geographies. When I first read Megan’s collection, so many lines stayed with me. I mean, I now carry them with me. Like Only the body holds/what the mind cannot from the poem “In Heaven, There Will Be No Bodies” or I practice picking up a thought/then throwing it away from “New Year”.
My interview with Megan leads into a discussion about how she navigates poem endings, spacing and sequencing poems, and some decisions she made while working on the manuscript.
Alishya Almeida: How has the reception for Saints of Little Faith been so far? Were there moments or experiences that surprised you once the book came out in terms of navigating the publishing world or a wider audience now engaging with your collection as a whole?
Megan Pinto: The book has been beautifully received. I remember being so nervous this time last year! But perhaps I just feared what we all fear, being misunderstood. That has not been my experience, though. People have responded to the book with recognition and empathy. I think the most surprising part has been speaking with readers that I do not personally know—people who just picked up the book and took a chance on it.
AA: One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Across an Open Field” and I think it’s because it weaves and holds intimately several themes that you have engaged with across the book. The speaker considers Maybe like everything, healing has a season, dormant, but rooting and later in the poem, Desire was an arrow but now, desire is the field. For me, it’s about taking risks and being open (also in the poem’s title) to change and healing, and explores how acceptance of the difficult parts of living can be included as part of a spatial mapping of one’s inner life. It feels purposeful that this poem sits as one of the final poems in the book. Could you tell us a little more about writing this poem?
MP: Thank you so much! This is honestly one of my favorite poems in the book as well. I wrote this poem in the spring of 2023. I was emerging from my Saturn’s Return, which had brought lots of upheaval and change in my life. As part of that period, I had taken a break from dating, because I found that when I reflected on all of my romantic failures, the common denominator was me. I spent the last year or so of my Saturn’s return living alone (for the first time ever) and not dating. It was profound. In that quiet, I was able to slow down and listen to what I liked and didn’t like, starting with my preferences for breakfast and extending to what I wanted from intimate relationships, romantic and otherwise.
Around this time, I had also taken a workshop with Myoung Mi Kim, who taught about writing and revising as a physical experience; she encouraged us to take our drafts on walks. So that’s what I did while writing this poem—I walked around Prospect Park, thinking through language and returning to my desk to revise. Oh—and perhaps the most important part of this poem—as I was emerging out of my period of solitude, in early Spring of 2023, I had developed a huge crush on my now boyfriend. I nurtured this crush in secret for months, trying to integrate my newfound sense of self with the possibility of romantic love, the thing I so longed for. This poem is not quite a love poem, but rather a poem that turns toward the possibility of love. In that way, I think it is hopeful.
AA: I absolutely admire how your poems end. They resist closure and welcome surprising images or reflections in so many ways. Has this always been a feature in your writing or is it a result of the constellation of themes you explore in Saints of Little Faith?
MP: I’m so honored and so glad. To be honest—I used to suck at endings. My endings were the exact opposite of what you’re describing now. Because my endings were so bad, I spent my essay semester at Warren Wilson writing about poetic closure. I looked at Jack Gilbert’s “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”, Larry Levis’ “The Oldest Living Thing in LA”, and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”. I studied how each of the poems moved associatively towards their closure, both within and outside of fixed forms. What I discovered is that poems do not really “end,” but rather there is a turn toward the ending that signals a change in the established pattern (sonically, associatively), and this change opens a kind of door into a deeper mystery. I stopped thinking of a poem’s ending and started to think of closure as an opening, so I think that is what you’re reading in my work today (thank goodness).
AA: I’m moved by the ways your poems juxtapose memories and the past non linearly as opposed to say, a coming of age story or novel, so a poem that grapples with memories of your child self is beside a poem of teenager years or adulthood, and sometimes all within a poem itself. What were some aspects you considered in sequencing this collection?
MP: I considered so many aspects—and then I let them all go. For the consideration: while revising the manuscript, I spent a great deal of time applying to chapbook competitions. I never won one, but that didn’t matter—assembling the chapbook manuscripts was an exercise in seeing how my poems spoke to each other in batches. This helped me understand the poems on a deeper level, how they were connected, and to also see where the gaps were. I would write toward those gaps.
Once I had more than enough for a book length manuscript, I printed the poems out on notecard sized paper, and then I would take them with me on the subway, shuffling different arrangements, or lay them out on a blanket at the park or back in my apartment on the floor, moving the poems around like playing cards. I color coded my poems too (ex; purple for dad poem, red for love poem, etc.) and noticed when the poems had multiple colors on them. I even did a few arrangements where I organized the manuscript by reading the last line of the poem and then seeing if it connected with the first line of the next. All of this helped me revise the manuscript in the way I would revise an individual poem: with play and experimentation. At some point, I knew I wanted 3 sections (after I wrote the lyric essay), so I spent a lot of time with Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, and Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus, to see how the authors moved so deftly between wildly different tonal sections. That’s how I got to the collection that exists today. The alchemy of all that experimentation led me to the juxtapositions of different ages/ memories/ selves.
AA: Another craft question for you! While themes like faith, family, love, shame, girlhood, illness, and others show up consistently as central themes across the collection, no two poems are the same in terms of form/structure—there’s an element of play with space/spacing on the page that adds layers and dimensions, and sometimes even within a single poem such as “It was the Winter of my Life” or “Summer of Nectar and Green” I would love to hear more about this!
MP: When I graduated from grad school, I noticed most of my poems looked like bars of soap—left margin aligned and 3/4 or so of a page. Robert Hass says form is “the way a poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making” and I found it difficult to believe all my energy was left margin aligned! I had a period of reading lots of postmodern work, and also visual poetry, to try and understand the poem as an art object, one that we encounter first as a visual shape on the page. And then I started to think about the emotions of my poems, how, for example, in “Faith,” I might make the spacing enact the experience of breathing, of steadying one’s breath. I’ve come to love white space, how it disrupts our expectation of syntax “proceeding as usual” and also moving between different margins—when reading language in the right margin, I always feel the absence of, or departure from, the left. At times, this departure can be moving, if the departure relates to the poem’s content.
AA: Could you tell us a few writers/books/art/music you return to often that have had or continue to have a significant impact in your writing and life, and why?
MP: It’s so difficult to choose! Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband is what I first read freshman year that made me want to write poems. Larry Levis is someone I return to all the time in thinking about narrative in poetry. Susan Mitchell’s Rapture blows my mind each time I read it, and I want to write poems that make people feel the way I feel when I read her work—totally in awe with what language can do. My inner artist/child is still obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (currently rewatching). And I love free writing to folk music in the mornings—so gentle and soothing.
AA: What advice do you have for new and emerging writers?
MP: Whenever I was struggling with something in my 20s (which was everything), I would tell myself that (insert the blank) happens every day. For example, when I was longing for romantic love, I would just tell myself, “Megan, people fall in love every day. One day it will be your turn.” It’s the thing with publishing books. People publish books every day! People write poems every day! People change their lives every day. If a particular day wasn’t “my day”, then I would try to take a positive step towards that future, longed for that day, and trust that if I did the work, one day it would be my turn. As Rilke says: “just keep going/ no feeling is final.”
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