Interview with Anne Barngrover, Author of Everwhen
Anne Barngrover is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Everwhen, forthcoming with University of Akron Press in 2023.
Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in places such as Verse Daily, Arts & Letters, Guernica, Ecotone, and The Slowdown podcast. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she directs the MA in Creative Writing program, and lives in Tampa, FL. Find her work on annebarngrover.com.
Anne Barngrover’s poetry collection, Everwhen, is out now from the University of Akron Press. She sat down to answer questions on time, hope and grief, and poetry style.
Jacquelyn Scott: Congratulations on your release, Everwhen! What is the significance of the title?
Anne Barngrover: Thank you! I first came across the similar word “everywhen” while reading David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” from New York Magazine in 2017. He explains that the term is synonymous with “dreamtime,” an idea coined by Aboriginal Australians, to depict a mythical realm of gods and mortals, the past and present happening all at once. He likens “everywhen” to the Anthropocene, this era when history catches up to our current moment and we feel the consequences of long-ago decisions suddenly upon us. This collapse of linear chronology terrified and thrilled me. What’s more, I initially misread the term “everywhen” as “everwhen,” the inverse of “whenever.” After years passed and I realized my mistake, I wondered if my brain had misread this word on purpose, working all the while to invent my own sense of time-out-of-time.
Scott: What is it about time that fascinates you?
Barngrover: It scares me! It’s too complicated for our weeny human brains to comprehend, and when I really start to think about either infinity or time running out, I feel disconnected from reality. Many of the poems in Everwhen deal with this uncanny sense of disassociation. Sometimes I wonder if my fascination with time is just something concrete for me to hang my anxiety on. Regardless, if something scares me for whatever reason, I want to write about it to figure out why.
Scott: Why did you choose the Roman goddess Ceres to narrate these poems?
Barngrover: The nine Ceres persona poems are written in the voice of the Roman goddess of agriculture, women and girls, and cereal grains, as imagined in the twentieth-century Anthropocene. Ceres is the Roman counterpart of the Greek goddess Demeter, the mother of Persephone. The Demeter/Persephone myth has been written about a lot, but I wanted to consider it from a new angle, almost as a pissed-off Mother Earth character. I considered just how disappointed and betrayed Ceres would feel if she could see what humans had done to her planet today. I wanted to use her voice to slip in and out of time—not only as a tired and angry mortal woman’s voice but also as an expansive, out-of-time voice that can make big proclamations and has seen a lot.
Scott: These poems explore love and grief, hope and joy. What was navigating those spaces through your work like?
Barngrover: I like to begin each poem with an image or sensory detail, a quote I read somewhere, or just a disembodied phrase that’s stuck in my head, and then I unravel my train of thought by free association. These overarching themes–—love and grief, hope and joy—aren’t the starting point for me but rather the inevitable byproducts as I try to observe and describe the world around me.
Scott: Were any poems particularly difficult to write? Were there any particularly easy?
Barngrover: Many of these poems arose during weeks-long spurts of time; being in academia, I tend to binge-write during the summers. I feel a sense of urgency then since I know that my time is limited, which does make the writing easy, in a way.
One poem that I struggled with was “The Sea Urchin Spines.” The original ending just did not sit right with me. It’s an image-heavy poem, and it ended on yet another image. It felt a little too easy to rely on this device. I also felt like I wasn’t being entirely honest with the reader. After a while, I came back and changed the ending to “Empathy isn’t what I thought it would be.” This was a realization I’d already been saying about something in my life, and to me, it fit as an ending here—there was nothing more to say.
Scott: If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
Barngrover: That’s a tough question—I have so many favorites—but if I had to choose, I’d go with Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Since high school, it’s been my all-time favorite novel. The sentences are so lush and lyrical, and the story is beautiful and sad. (Great soundtrack, too!)
Scott: What's your favorite trope to read or write?
Barngrover: I love to read a good coming-of-age novel, a bildungsroman or künstlerroman, which is the artist’s version. One of the poems in Everwhen is actually called “Künstlerroman” where I kind of play with the conventions of this trope. I also just finished teaching a Literature course on Girlhood, where we read four coming-of-age novels. It was a lot of fun.
Scott: Do you have a favorite form or style you like to write in?
Barngrover: I like to give myself visual limitations—this poem must be in couplets with short lines, this one must be stichtic (one stanza) and fewer than thirty lines, this one will be scattered across the page to mimic another writer’s poem I liked, etc. If I find myself struggling with a poem, the first thing I’ll try is switching up its visual appearance, like changing it from stichtic to indented tercets. Doing that makes me see the poem in a new way, both literally and figuratively.
Scott: What are you currently reading or working on?
Barngrover: I’ve made it a mission this year to read nearly everything that Rachel Carson ever wrote. Even though Silent Spring is her most famous work, I was much more drawn to her writing about the ocean, especially The Edge of the Sea and Under the Sea-Wind. Her prose is sparkling, and her mind on the page is so clear and imaginative.
I’ve been working on a nonfiction book, sort of a mix of personal narrative and cultural critique, for a few years now, and I hope to be able to devote a lot more time to it in 2023. Some new poems are starting to emerge again, too, like little mushrooms popping up overnight.
Scott: What is the best piece of writing advice you've received?
Barngrover: Read more than you write.
From University of Akron Press:
Everwhen by Anne Barngrover
Everwhen is an anxious, verdant poetry collection that is preoccupied with a chthonic era—when the secrets of long ago catch up to now, and when the past, present, and future collapse into what’s long been identified by indigenous cultures and early naturalists as Uncreation or Deep Time. Driven by the voice of the betrayed Roman goddess Ceres, these poems consider what it is like to live out of time, to suffer unnamed illnesses of the female body, to love and grieve at the end of the world, and to even find hope and joy in “the way an apocalypse can mean/ to reveal.”
Get your copy from University of Akron Press.
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