MIRANDE BISSELL is a teacher and poet who lives in the Patapsco River Valley, west of Baltimore. Her first book of poems, Stalin at the Opera, was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the Ghost Peach Press prize, and was published in 2021.
JENNY MAAKETO (she/her) is a neurodivergent poet, psychiatric nurse, and former professional actress. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at the University of Mississippi, as well as a poetry editor for Yalobusha Review. Jenny has been shortlisted for the 2024 Tennessee Williams Festival Poetry Contest, the 2023 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize, the 2023 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Patty Friedmann Writing Competition. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Columbia Review, Atlanta Review, the Madison Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Abbeville, Mississippi on 66 acres with her husband, son, four dogs, two cats, one chicken, and lots of love.
Poetry Editor Jenny Maaketo spoke with Yellowwood Poetry Prize winner Mirande Bissell about the winning poem, “Tilt.”
JK: “Tilt” deftly executes Emily Dickinson’s proverbial line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” To cast its oblique angle, the poem introduces an unnamed collective entity that haunts the speaker with arresting figurative detail. Reinforced by the anaphora of “they”, this mysterious group morphs line to line into a series of surreal images. Yet, because of the ambiguous and surreal, the reader intuits her intimate reality and the essential truth of her experience in extremis. Without betraying your consciously wrought slant, what more can you tell your reader about the poem’s essential truth?
MB: I set out to recount an experience of being cut off from help, not to understand it but to see it as well as I could.
The “they” began as angels, terrifying and intrusive.
As I revised the poem, I saw that it did not need any theological mooring: the “they” remained not as angels but as a feminized collective (aunts) known through their sounds, colors, and disturbing touch.
The poem expresses not only their oppressive presence (they are constant and everywhere) but also some weird residue of very attenuated humor. A terrifying experience can feel inescapable: sometimes I lose hope. Expressing the uncanny can feel like one subversive response that remains when full-blown humor is not possible.
JK: Your use of plosives in “Tilt”, particularly the “t” sound, could be interpreted as the sonic presence of this unnamed “they.” To reinforce such an interpretation, as soon as “they are gone,” the letter “t” almost completely disappears from the poem. It is clear, even just from this one example, that your poetics operate with a special attention to sound play. Could you discuss in more detail your process in poetics when it comes to using sound devices to communicate meaning?
MB: I love poems that allow the energy in sounds to lie low, a bit covert, which often astonish me as a reader when I actively look for patterns that had been there all along. (That is, I think the sound patterning works whether the reader studies the poem for it or not.)
On the other hand, I also love poems that foreground the idea of sound rather than enact it; for example, Nicole Sealey writes in “Object Permanence” that “there is “a name for the animal / love makes of us—named, I think, / like rain, for the sound it makes.” Invoking the sound of rain to name a mysterious concept brings both rain’s sound and love’s presence near each other but doesn’t over-articulate the connection between these two things.
In my writing, sometimes sound takes the reins. As I draft a poem, I try to notice the sounds to see how they are pulling me from what I set out to write, and sometimes I take directions I had not intended at first. In “Tilt,” the plosives might reinforce the totalizing effect the “they” had: even if their power had no distinct ideology/theology, it was a set of unbroken patterns & systems–a kind of monologue eventually broken sonically.