For poet, translator, librettist, and editor Rebecca Gayle Howell, art is a fundamentally collaborative practice of place. Her work, which often probes the intersections between the ecological and spiritual, is invested in the earth as a site of divine intelligence, and in the stories we exchange to understand our place in it. Her books have received critical acclaim from the Los Angeles Times, Kenyon Review, and Publisher’s Weekly, and her awards include a Pushcart Prize, Great Britan’s Sexton Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Carson McCullers Center, the Kentucky Arts Council, and United States Artists. In addition to three libretti produced in collaboration with composer Reena Esmail, Howell is the author of the poetry collections Render: An Apocalypse and American Purgatory, both climate-change novels-in-verse that invite us to imagine the future of our planet and how we will shape and survive it. Her newest book, Erase Genesis, is forthcoming from Project Poëtica/Bridwell Press. She makes her home between rural Kentucky and northwest Arkansas, where she is an associate professor of poetry and translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program. She also serves on faculty for the University of the South’s Sewanee School of Letters low-residency MFA program. She talked with Molly McCully Brown about sacred texts, creation through erasure, and the gift and responsibility of interconnectedness.
Image: Can I start by asking you to talk a bit about your newest book, Erase Genesis? I’d love to know about the structure and the conception of the project.
Rebecca Gayle Howell: Erase Genesis is a book-length poem, a new creation myth, or a recreation myth, for our climate-change age. It was made by repeated erasures from the first three chapters of the book of Genesis. I worked by merging my practice of poetry with techniques I use as a literary translator. Most writers tend to think of drafting hierarchically, with first, second, and final versions, but translators tend to work laterally. So, when I’m translating, I might do a version that foregrounds a particular technique, such as sound work, and then in a second version foreground something different, such as image systems. I’ll end up with several versions that are all valuable but very different. Then I’ll step back and learn from them about what might be possible for the version I publish.
So here, I started with the first chapter of Genesis and erased it one way, then a new way, then another. Each time I came to the source text with fresh eyes, I found new poems, or new sections of what became a book-length poem. As I worked, I realized that a myth was compiling itself, that the sections were not just speaking to each other but telling a story.
Image: Can you tell me about what led you to this project?
RGH: I started Erase Genesis because I received a commission from Southern Indiana Review to publish a poem in honor of Marcus Wicker’s tenure there as poetry editor. Marcus and I became poetry family during our time at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which is near the tip of Cape Cod, an extraordinarily specific and extreme landscape, especially in winter. When we were there together, in the winter of 2010–11, I was writing Render and thinking a lot about how I was writing in a place that might not exist in the near future because of rising ocean levels. I felt I was walking around in a very precious, disappearing place. So those memories—of loving a place that is fragile—started rushing back.
You know, climate change erases. It erases what we have held most dear—the reliability of our seasons, our places, our weather. But what assertions brought us to this moment? And what if they were erased instead? What abundance might be lying fallow, waiting to be found? I believe a primary assertion that brought us to this moment is the idea that we have been endowed with dominion over the earth, the right to dominate her—which is found in the King James Version of Genesis. So I thought that would be the place to start, and when I came to Genesis to see if there was a poem to be made, it turned out that there was a book to be made.
Image: That’s a powerful distillation of the project. Out of all of the landscapes where you could have begun hunting this story, why Genesis in particular?
RGH: I just get a feeling, or a little bit of language, and then I follow it like bread-crumbs back to the house. That’s how I write all of my books. It’s a process of discovery, of seeking. I now realize Erase Genesis is the first of a trilogy, a triptych of books made by erasing biblical texts, and together they will tell a story about our exile from nature—and nature’s call for us to come home. With this work, I am foregrounding what has always been in the Bible, an original deep ecology that points to the divine intelligence of the earth. It seems obvious to me now, though I couldn’t have known it then, that Genesis is the only way for such a trilogy to start.
Image: What was your relationship with the Bible prior to this project?
RGH: When I was eleven or twelve years old, my mind turned on, and reading flipped the switch. I wasn’t reading novels; I was reading poetry and the Bible. And it’s not like I was raised in a household where people were reading or going to church. I grew up working class in Kentucky, with my parents working split sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week, 363 days a year, at our diner. We didn’t have time for leisure. But I was a kid, and I did have time to read, and reading flipped that switch for me at the same time a few fissures happened in my family: a divorce, and my father’s diagnosis with stage-four lymphoma.
It’s funny how seasons of personal stress can be very loud, but they can also create unexpected space for quiet. What found me in that quiet were the voices of poets and sacred-text writers. That’s when I figured out poetry made me feel less alone. One of the miracles of poetry is how it travels through time and space to say, “I’ve got you.” My life was saved by that voice.
We didn’t have medical insurance, but my father was a veteran, so he would drive to the closest VA for treatment, in Lexington. And Lexington had bookstores, while our town did not. My father would always stop by a bookstore on his way back home and get something off the clearance rack for me. Inevitably, it was poetry on that rack. And that’s how I started reading. I saw no distance between the music of the Scriptures and the music of US poetry. I was reading Gwendolyn Brooks and T.S. Eliot alongside the Scriptures and seeing them as equals.
Image: Were you getting the Bible or other sacred texts in the same way you got poetry, from your dad?
RGH: As many people do when they get close to death, my father began to reactivate his spiritual imagination in a way that he hadn’t since he was a boy. In those years, we would go to jazz concerts, art museums, the theater. He had one of those great record players where we could stack the records and let them fall and play for hours. And he began to read the Bible, and so did I.
Since then, I’ve always wondered what it is about sacred literature, of any faith, that causes it to transcend. Why do these texts hover over time and place, language systems, personal crises? Why do they last? I’ve been extremely lucky to have Alicia Ostriker as a lifelong mentor, and that question has been a cornerstone of our conversation. I’ve learned so much from her about the literary techniques that underpin these texts.
One thing I’ve understood in this process is that myth, when it’s connected to song, is a juggernaut force. We humans need help moving past our partially evolved self-reflective consciousness—our egos; we need help imagining interconnectedness. Story helps us do this. And I am interested in how myth distills, while song propels. I find that when these two techniques are combined, they can give the spiritual imagination a sensory experience, a felt knowledge of the idea that we belong to each other.
Good stories make use of what’s called transportation theory, the idea that when we have an imagined experience, if it’s specific enough, our nervous systems will react as if we’ve experienced it physically. When we’re reading a novel, if it’s well-written, we transport into it. Myth does that too, or can. When I connect myth to poetics, I am making use of patterns and the breaking of patterns, music and the music that points toward silence, in order to wash over the nervous system in the way that a symphony does, combining music’s power with transportation.
Image: I love that notion of music being powerful partly because it points toward silence. In Erase Genesis, those erasures, those silences are present visually on the page as blank space. What went into that choice?
RGH: As I say in the book’s postscript, it’s important to me to make a distinction here. As you well know, many contemporary erasure-poetics projects are acts against texts that need to be challenged.
Image: Right, like Solmaz Sharif’s Look, which is an erasure of documents of bureau-cracy and war and government violence.
RGH: Yes. And certainly the King James Bible’s creation myths have hurt entirely too many people and places, but these stories are also sacred texts to me. Because of my experience as a child, and my ongoing devotion to these questions, the music of the scriptures just lives inside me.
And so when I’m erasing these books that I love, I am holding that love in my heart. I feel I’m participating in the Bible’s life, its translation, rather than writing against it. Redaction is really just a translation technique called loss. And translation loss is not an obstacle, but a part of the art. Either you become afraid of it or you make use of it. Loss has always been a part of biblical translation, be it by scribes who were behaving editorially or by insects or dust. I see all of them as collaborators. If these are living texts, as I think they are, they are alive because they move through us.
Allowing silence into a text, accepting a silence that a text asks for—this is work I know from my translation practice. For me, welcoming more silence into the stories is like carving a bowl out of wood. It creates a space for the reader to fill, to co-create meaning, to be welcome. I feel that’s what I’m doing here. And, at the same time, at the front of Erase Genesis, the source text is printed without redaction. I wanted it to also stand on its own, as an invitation to the reader—an invitation for them, too, to participate in the text’s life.
Image: I love the notion that the more hollows there are in something, the more opportunity for someone to walk through and into something. I’ve only seen portions
of the book, but it’s interesting how those silences appear. They’re not heavy black boxes. They don’t look like government redactions. Would you talk about your method?
RGH: I wanted a natural element to be the agent of erasure. I tried a few different techniques and ended up working with watercolor. They’re not done digitally; each page in the book is its own primitive painting. I ended up making and remaking the poems by hand, over and over, as I sought the right version of each painting. As I said earlier, the poems compiled into a recreation myth that tells us man’s suffering comes from his choice to try to practice dominion over the earth, which exiles him. As I worked, I thought about what I now think about pretty much all the time: What are the practices that bring us back?
Image: Back into accordance with the earth, with other creatures?
RGH: Yes. Back into balanced interconnection. Man’s fantasy that he can be separate from the earth has made us sick. Only when we imagine we are separate can we then take that next dangerous step toward dominion. We’ve fallen into an amnesia about how dependent we actually are, how interdependent. Wherever I am, I am a member of an ecosystem, and it has consequences upon me and I have consequences upon it. Being in denial about that just makes the consequences more grave.
Image: As you articulate it, this practice of coming back into attunement and interdependence is about coming into a more conscious relationship to your own body. Would you talk a little more about the fact of the body in relation to these ideas?
RGH: One reason poetry is sacred is that it connects our thoughts to our heart. Our thoughts—the possibilities of things—begin to be organized by the heartbeat, the fundamental force that keeps us tethered to the earth and alive. This is what protects poetry from being abstract: the urgency of music’s aliveness, as made by the pursuit of truth.
I am from a region that has been severely extracted by mining. Within my home region and outside it, I’ve lived in places where the water table was bad, the soil was bad. And I now deal with chronic illness related to a cancer diagnosis I survived in 2016. It is not a metaphor when I say that separation from the earth makes us sick. We cannot deplete our habitat without repercussions. The body, human health, is a barometer for that. It’s not the only barometer, but it’s one we tend to pay attention to.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I understand now what it feels like to no longer have the same freedom in my health that I once enjoyed. I know what it feels like to be out of balance and to have to start paying attention to acts of mending. And that helps me imagine how climate change may feel to the earth, if the earth had a voice. I think it feels like grief.
Image: The relationship between mythic place and actual ecological, biological
concrete place feels like something that has animated your whole body of work. What keeps you returning to that?
RGH: Myth connects sky to ground. When I was writing my first two books of poems, Render: An Apocalypse and American Purgatory, I was mythologizing actually lived and grounded places—East Kentucky and West Texas. In Render, I was imagining a story that takes place on a subsistence farm not unlike my grandmother’s own. It’s a landscape I knew well, but the book is fiction, so the place is raised up into the mythos just a bit. The same is true of American Purgatory, which is a dystopia set in the near future around the West Texas industrial cotton farms that I studied while I was completing my PhD in Lubbock. For that book, those farms and the town of Lubbock itself are raised up just a bit into the mythic, the same technique I used in Render. It’s a way of lifting a place just enough for us to see it differently, and I hope with more clarity.
In Erase Genesis and in the trilogy it initiates, the setting is more sky than ground. In this work, the sense of place shifts, the markers of identity merge and blend, with specifics blurring into surrealism. In the story, the Lord Woman character is hidden among the trees, and she is also the trees themselves. Both things are true, and this simultaneity creates a world of interconnection at the sentence level.
Image: Let’s talk about your work as a librettist. How did you get started, and what has it brought to your understanding of story and myth?
RGH: When you receive a United States Artist Fellowship, you get to go to Chicago and meet the other fellows. While I was there, I met Reena Esmail, who also received the prize that year. She and I have a lot in common—namely, we are both wallflowers at cocktail parties, so we were hiding out in the corner and got to talking. Shortly after that weekend, she read my work and contacted me, asking if I would like to write a cantata with her. That’s how we got started, and now we are nearly seven years into our collaboration.
Image: Could you describe some of the work you have done together?
RGH: The first piece of ours to premier was Interglow, a meditation on breath for string quartet, flute, piano, and community voices. It premiered online during the pandemic. In 2022, two pieces came out around the same time: First, A Winter Breviary, which is a set of eco-carols published by Oxford University Press, written for four-part chorus. The original commission was for Christmas carols, and they are that, but from an interfaith perspective focused on the earth. And then Say Your Name, the cantata that originally brought us together, which took several years to premiere because of the pandemic. It was written in honor of the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage, for choir, orchestra, and a soprano soloist, who sings the role of Democracy, a character who is surviving gaslighting and abuse. The cantata’s story is about how she finally remembers herself.
Reena and I are working on a couple of new commissions now. In practice, our collaboration looks like sending a lot of voice texts back and forth between LA, where Reena lives, and wherever I am, usually Arkansas or Kentucky. She’ll play a riff on her piano and send it, and I’ll come up with language that locks into that metrical pattern, then send it back. Or I’ll give her some language, and she’ll set it, but maybe a phrase needs to be recast with a dactyl or a trochee to better match what she’s hearing, and so we go to work. We always say we’re both tuning into an invisible radio frequency somewhere between where she lives and where I live. We are listening, together, to ourselves and each other and beyond each other and ourselves.
For example, Reena is an expert in merging Hindustani and Western classical styles. For A Winter Breviary, we created a story that moved according to the Christian canonical prayer hours, housed in the corresponding raags for those same hours. (In Hindustani music, raags are ancient melodic frameworks that have different moods or colors associated with them, though that’s really an oversimplification. They are aligned with the turns of the day.) Anyway, that kind of dovetailing of traditions and techniques happens when we’re on the phone together and one of us says, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we…?” When we let go of control and listen, when we just follow it into our joy, that’s when innovation happens. And we know we can trust ourselves and each other in that process, so we have a lot of fun making something that is larger than either of us.
Image: That strikes me as beautifully tied to the way that you talked about your own spirituality being fundamentally about attunement to something larger than your single self.
RGH: Yes. I am alive, and so I get to just be another humming thing while listening to all the hums all around. That sense of release, into the song that is around me, into the truth of my being, which is that I’m just another part of the song—I think I gained that sense once I got sick. Maybe because I almost lost it, in the way that gratitudes sharpen, but also because I suddenly knew how quickly I could one day disappear and all this would go on humming, whether or not I ever noticed, and that feels like a miracle of largeness to me. God, we’re so lucky.
When I’m collaborating, either with Reena or with the poets I translate, the process brings into focus how connected we all are to each other and how much of life we lose when we stop listening. And listening requires silence, which I hold as a sacred practice, as prayer. In Kentucky, I have a few wild acres. Living in this quiet place has been so good for me, because that radio frequency I mentioned earlier, the one Reena and I try to tune to—it’s in everything, everywhere, all the time, and all I have to do is not do, to be still and listen.
Image: So, the act of composition begins with the act of listening. Earlier you mentioned the contemplative Christian practice you bring to your work. I wonder if you might say more about what that looks like and how it’s evolved.
RGH: When my father was bringing me books, one writer who became important to me was Thomas Merton. Merton taught me that the life of the artist is a mystical practice of pursuing truth and beauty by releasing into mystery. His book Contem-plative Prayer was transformational for me, because it was the first time I encountered anyone who described prayer as listening, not talking. Prayer in the contemplative tradition is not a pleading state and not a controlling state; it’s a receptive state. And Merton taught me that a person could practice art that way, as actionable prayer.
So that’s the way I practice, and that’s the way I write. Now I can look back at what I’ve made and see that I’ve been writing myths, but I didn’t plan it that way. When I was writing Render, the words just kept coming, and I kept following them. I didn’t know I was writing a story until I was about three-quarters of the way into it. And then my job was to look back and learn from the poems themselves—what they were saying and what they were making. That’s how I’ve written all my books, by trusting one word, then the next, while holding a question in my heart. I trust that the work will tell me what it wants to be, that it’s bigger than I am, smarter than I am.
So, my practice of contemplation is actionable. I don’t see a distance between it and my practice as an artist. Writing is my prayer life, just as much as my stumbling efforts to love people beyond my own capacity.
Image: That’s a moving articulation of a relationship between faith and art.
RGH: Merton died seven years before I was born, and he spent the majority of his life in a monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, thirty minutes down the road from Elizabethtown, where I grew up. Because I started reading him at such a young age, he was always real to my imagination, like a neighbor. But as much as his writings have meant to me, what may mean more is his own stumbling-around humanity. He loved jazz and bourbon and swimming in the pond, and he would sneak out of the monastery and go to town. He loved to have his artist friends up to the monastery, and they’d spend the day making pictures or enjoying music together. He once wrote that Kentucky is the center of the world. I feel like I know what he meant by that.
Image: Merton makes so clear that a reveling in the things of the world—sublime natural things but also the detritus of humanity, the high and the low—is part of what makes the contemplative life possible.
RGH: If you get to be just another humming thing, you’d better start humming. If you’re going to be born to interconnection, choose it, become interconnected. But that means you will be messy; you will make mistakes; you will have to get down in the dirt.
Image: To your sense of yourself as a humming and interconnected thing: I’d love to hear about how your work as an editor has shaped your life and your thinking. You were for ten years the poetry editor of the Oxford American, and you’ve also edited a remarkable anthology of poems about labor, What Things Cost.
RGH: The work at the Oxford American was such a powerful teacher in my life. When I started in 2014, I knew I wanted to create a living anthology that would record the complexity of that region. Regional literary traditions got a bad rap in the twentieth century as being reductive, as if complexity existed only in very small, powerful urban areas when, in terms of ecology, the opposite is true. I know place-based arts traditions to be incredibly complex, because every maker brings with them their own experiences, joys, traumas, thoughts, conditionings, family inheritances—all while they’re also engaging a place with land memory that runs as deep as the earth itself. And that creates a very interesting potency for innovation. At the Oxford American, I wanted to showcase how Southern poetry made itself differently, across experience and identity and idioms, across the many ways to sing that song. I now teach at the University of Arkansas MFA, where C.D. Wright is an alum, and I often teach her work and legacy, which is astonishingly complex and innovative. I think she can help students who are afraid to start writing their places, for fear of being pigeonholed and dismissed—I mean, I too have been warned against writing the way I write for that same reason. But C.D. Wright’s legacy is such a powerful example of why that’s not a warning anyone should take seriously.
The anthology What Things Cost came together at a time when a lot of people were publishing essays asking, Where did all the working-class poets go? And I’m thinking to myself, Pick up a pebble and throw it—you’ll hit one. Ashley M. Jones and I wanted to build a community that showed writing about economic struggle is one of the great idioms of the US tradition, that most of us, actually, are writing through financial crisis, trying to not fall through the cracks. In those pages, we wanted to bring writers into conversation with each other who otherwise may never meet. We wanted everyone—struggling writers and readers, both—to feel less alone.
Image: I’m struck by how much of your work comes back to this question of interconnectedness and interdependence.
RGH: One reason I’m grateful to have origins in the agrarian arts economy is because arts behave differently there than in capitalist arts economies. No culture is a
monolith, or perfect, or quaint, but generally speaking, agrarian arts traditions are connected to their place and its land memory and to the people who came there before. Whatever is being sung, told, shared, built, and painted in any given moment has a live wire running through it, straight to the ancestors. That wire, that connection is intended for the next generation, for them to benefit from, improve upon, share. Agrarian arts traditions are a community teaching apparatus. It’s not about the individual. This is the way I was raised.
Image: In closing, I want to ask you about the title, Erase Genesis. There are all kinds of ways to parse that phrase—as a command, as a description of how the thing was made, and more. I’d love to hear you talk about the title a bit, to bring us back to where we began.
RGH: That title operates on multiple levels. On one hand, it’s simply in alignment with the titles of my other collections. I tend to give books titles that say what they are: American Purgatory is a purgatory myth; Render: An Apocalypse is an apocalypse myth; and Erase Genesis is an erasure of the book of Genesis. But it also operates, as you say, as a command, or what I imagine to be an invitation. I hope the reader can feel newly welcome in the text, on their own terms, whoever they are, however they come, and to know that if this is a living text, that’s only true if it lives inside us without pretense. That they too can pick up a brush and start erasing and maybe find the underlying truth they need most.
But also, as I said earlier, my inciting questions had to do with what assertions brought us to this climate-changing moment, and what might want to be said instead, if they were erased. In Erase Genesis I am working with a particular translation, the King James Version, which uses the words have dominion over to describe humanity’s relationship to nature. Duke theologian Ellen F. Davis, in her book Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, argues that this is a mistranslation, or at least a very specific and consequential choice by those translators. Davis suggests that the source language actually points to something more like practice knowledge among. What if it had been translated that way instead? The King James Version was made at the very dawn of the seventeenth century, right as globalization was taking hold. Everything might have been different.
Have dominion over. That choice holds a very subtle violence. It is not an artful use of translation loss; it is a propagandizing one, because it erases the source intention. Practice knowledge among speaks to our being a responsible part of the natural world, not above it or outside it. In the source text’s myth, we are called to listen. Erase Genesis opens with an epigraph from Meister Eckhart: “Only the hand that erases can write the truest thing.” Here, Eckhart is articulating the better loss, a letting go of what distracts us from truth. And that is what I’m trying to do.
Photo by Intricate Explorer on Unsplash
