John C. Zacharis First Book Award
Ploughshares is pleased to present Lara Egger with the thirty-second annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.
This year’s judge was John Skoyles, Ploughshares’ Poetry Editor. About the book, Skoyles writes: “A piercing intelligence, a wily wit, an impeccable sense of form, and a perfect ear are the hallmarks of Lara Egger’s How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It. She depicts a variety of landscapes, portraits, and conundrums and relates them with a linguistic energy that is nonstop. Above all, the accomplishment of this collection is Egger’s ability to handle grave matters with a light touch: a powerful and often devastating combination. Lara Egger brings a new world to life and shows the familiar in a new light.”
Egger’s poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in Verse Daily, Copper Nickel, Conduit, Bennington Review, Ninth Letter, and Salt Hill, among other places. Originally from Adelaide, Australia, Egger now lives in Boston, MA, where she co-owns Estragon Tapas Bar. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
What was the inspiration for How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It?
I’m not sure I know how to answer that question! I never consciously intended to write this book. In fact, I find “intention” to be a hindrance when I write, and I’m quite suspicious about it, forbidding myself to think about a poem before I sit down to draft it. As unromantic as it sounds, I didn’t start out with a vision for the collection. I wrote a poem. I wrote another poem. Eventually, I had a group of poems, enough for a manuscript, and then began the work of deciding which poems belonged in the book and in what order they should appear.
That said, individual lines in individual poems within the book were inspired by a variety of forces. I think most writers would admit to having certain, often subconscious, obsessions that repeatedly show up in their poems. Maybe these obsessions don’t quite qualify as inspiration, but they may offer some insight as to the occasion for a poem, and they do, of course, tell us something about the speaker’s mindset, about how the speaker engages with their world. The obsessions might take the form of particular words repeated throughout the manuscript, a color, a recurring image or setting. The word “heart” shows up quite a bit in my book, as does “regret.” Some lines of my poems are inspired by facts I learned watching Jeopardy! Other lines might come from a song I can’t get out of my head, last night’s dinner, from the junk mail sitting on my desk. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and that’s one of the things I love about poetry. Any old thing can be the stuff of poems, which, as I see it, renders poetry, and writing in general, among the most egalitarian of all the arts.
What did you discover or grapple with while writing the collection?
One of the more challenging aspects of writing How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It was determining an order for the poems (notice I say “an order” and not “the right order”!). One wants, I think, to be attentive to the last line of a poem and the title/first line of the poem that follows it when thinking about a book’s arrangement because that will be your reader’s experience of the poems. What conversation, if any, is being had in that space between last and first lines? How can we identify the “bridges,” allowing our readers to travel from one poem to another? That approach was helpful to me, at least, in terms of arranging the manuscript on a microcosmic level. There are also more macrocosmic elements to consider, some of which are purely logistical. Is there information in one poem that is essential to the reader’s understanding of another poem (in which case, one would order the poems accordingly)? Does the collection rely on a specific narrative or rhetorical structure? Sections? No sections? The possibilities and potential variations can feel overwhelming. I was fortunate enough to have a handful of folks read my manuscript as it was taking shape, all of whom gave me invaluable advice in terms of which poems might go where.
Walk us through your writing process for this project. What works for you as a writer? What do you find challenging, or even difficult, about writing?
As Dean Young said in The Art of Recklessness (one of a series of craft books I encourage everyone to read), “I don’t believe in writer’s block, writing well is very easy; it’s writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.” Young is exactly right—one must have a masochistic streak to be a writer, and, for me, writing poetry is about one part joy to five parts torture (on a good day). You ask what I find difficult about writing—what don’t I find difficult?! There’s the self-doubt, the feeling that one has nothing to say (a feeling that’s doubly destructive, since I don’t believe it’s a poem’s job to say anything), the problem of feeling stuck in a particular rhythm or syntax. Let’s face it, there are only a handful of reasons to write and several thousand excellent reasons not to.
Over the past few years, most of my better poems have been written during the Grind; in fact, many of the poems in How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It were drafted or revised during a monthly Grind. The Grind was started in 2007 by Ross White, and the first Grind group consisted of White, Dilruba Ahmed, Matthew Olzmann, and Zena Cardmon. It’s basically an accountability program in which one agrees to write a poem every day for a month. Participants are divided into groups and are required to email their poems (or prose) to everyone in their group. New Grinders are invited to join by folks who have successfully completed every day of their previous Grind, and it’s a challenge we all take really seriously. The benefits of the Grind, for me, are twofold. First, the Grind forces me to push through the discomfort of writing badly. If my usual habit would be to stop writing after three lines because “#@ck it—who cares?” the Grind compels me to press on out of necessity; I must have a completed poem to send to my group, and I’d rather write badly than suffer the shame of failing our Grind community. Second, the Grind allows me to inhabit the poetry space in my brain for a prolonged period of time. I like to imagine that my brain has an attic filled with boxes of images, words, ideas, interesting facts, etc. During the Grind I’m able to spend a whole month in that attic, to finally get around to unpacking those boxes, the contents of which will likely show up in my poems.
What authors or works have had the largest impact on your writing?
Certainly the late Dean Young’s poems have had a huge influence on my work. There are so many things I love about his poems: their wildness, their profound tenderness; how they contain multitudes—there’s nothing off-limits in Young’s poems. Maybe that’s what makes them feel so accessible. Young’s poems are constantly walking the line between the ecstatic and the profane, elevating the mundane while rendering the sublime in plain, unadorned diction. Take this line, for example, from Young’s poem “Dragonfly” in Fall Higher: “The guy who hoses the slaughterhouse floor / goes home and makes angels out of toothpicks.” Talk about understanding the complexities of being alive! Talk about perfection!
Other poets whose work I’ve recently felt either a kinship with or a swoony admiration of include Emily Pettit, Lesle Lewis, Virginia Konchan, Richard Siken, Eduardo Corral, Carl Phillips, Morgan Parker, Charles Wright, Anne Carson, Terrance Hayes, Ellen Voigt (and so many others it’s impossible to name them all here; Donne, of course, Rilke …).
How has your work evolved since being published in the Winter 2021-22 issue of Ploughshares?
Wow, these questions are tricky! I’m not sure I’d say “evolved,” but maybe my work is “evolving” in a couple of ways. Many of the poems in How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It, and some of my subsequent poems, rely heavily on metaphor. It’s not something I intend, necessarily, but it just happens to be how many of my poems get made. The problem, though, when operating in metaphor, is that things can get complicated. You have the metaphor’s tenor (the subject being described) and its vehicle (the figuration, image, etc.), terms first coined by I. A. Richards in the 1930s. And with such complication often comes a kind of contraction, at least in my poems. It’s not easy to explain but sometimes I feel as though metaphor acts as a straitjacket, making it difficult for my poems to breathe. One method I’ve found helpful in counteracting this tightening effect of metaphor is to lengthen the poem’s lines and to incorporate more lines that are end-stopped, lines that end at the natural break or end of the sentence. The longer lines embody a kind of expansiveness and perhaps stabilize the poem, similar to the way outstretched arms help a tightrope walker maintain equilibrium.
The other evolution I might point to is one regarding structure. Over the years, I’ve developed certain strategies that have helped me move a poem forward. They vary from repeating specific syntactical constructions to the habit of inserting an image immediately after a line that might be perceived as confessional. The idea is to establish pattern and then break it, to think of a poem as a kind of song, with verse, chorus, bridge, etc. I’m not suggesting this is the wrong approach. I have relied on some variation of this exact formula in nearly all of my poems, and I suspect many, many great poems, upon closer inspection, may, to some degree, be described as formulaic. Recently, though, I’ve become interested in seeing what happens when one removes some or all of those structural elements, when one does away with the scaffolding. I’m reminded of Chekhov’s gun—can a poem introduce a gun (i.e., a specific meter, diction, image, form, etc.) in its first few lines and never return to it? I don’t have the answer, but I do suspect that the impulse to interrogate my formal/structural crutches might be fruitful.
What writing (or reading!) are you working on now?
At the moment, I’m writing poems, (trying not to write the same poems over and over!) and thinking about how this new body of work might evolve into a manuscript. Of course, there are difficulties. There are the poems I’m writing, and there are the poems I wish I were writing, but I don’t seem to have the ability to transition from the former to the latter, at least not consciously. Maybe other writers feel this way too? I recently read Sally Keith’s River House (Milkweed Editions, 2015) and fell madly in love with it. I wish I had written that book. The poems are clearly mysterious and, vice versa, mysteriously clear. There’s a coolness to Keith’s poems that gives rise to a pureness of emotion, a flatness to the diction that acts as a red carpet rolled out for mourning. I can’t recommend it enough. Not long ago, I also read the amazing novel Drifts by Kate Zambreno (Riverhead Books, 2020). Zambreno’s novel shares a certain sensibility with Keith’s collection, a sensibility I envy and somehow hope to pay homage to in my future work.