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Q&A with Ann van Wijgerden, writer of 'Between the Tides' and 'The Dying Art of Letting Go'

Our poetry team this week is featuring two new pieces by writer Ann van Wijgerden, titled 'Between the Tides' and 'The Dying Art of Letting Go'. Our team loved these works for their melody, their immense lyricism, and for their great range. Both poems are doing something very different from the other.


Born in London, the U.K., Ann van Wijgerden has spent most of her life in the Netherlands and the Philippines. She’s had her writing published in a number of magazines, and works with a charity providing education for children living in Manila’s slum area of ‘Smokey Mountain’.


Recently Grant Burkhardt, one of our poetry editors and managing editors, talked with the writer about her new poems and about her work more broadly. This is a condensed transcript of their conversation:


Grant Burkhardt: I'd like to start with a question our poetry editor Claire Beaver likes to ask, which is: When did you start to feel like you could start calling yourself a poet?


Ann van Wijgerden: Oh, that's a nice cruel question. Maybe tomorrow. Some of my writing group friends, I was telling them I feel full imposter syndrome and even an imposter inside of my imposter syndrome. I don't hesitate to call my poetry "poetry", but isn't it funny that I hesitate to call myself a poet?


Grant Burkhardt: Are there times when you do and times when you don't?

Ann van Wijgerden: Even last night, sharing with some friends who were talking about art forms, I deliberately stop from calling myself one. What is it? I'm not a young chick anymore, so I'm just wondering when I'm going to get around to calling myself a poet.


Grant Burkhardt: Maybe just try it on one day, see how it feels.


Ann van Wijgerden: Good idea, maybe I'll try it on one day.


Grant Burkhardt: Well, you're obviously a poet, and these poems are so beautiful, and so very different. I'm curious about the restraint in "Between the Tides", because if you take that poem into a writer's group or a workshop, there might be an ask for more. I love that it stops, but I'm wondering when you were writing it, how did you know where to stop it?


Ann van Wijgerden: I felt like there would be a push to say more, but I had said what I wanted to say, and I didn't want to lose the simple thing I wanted to say. I didn't want to dilute it.


Grant Burkhardt: It's interesting to hear you say that the fish in "Between the Tides" is actually a fish, because as I was reading it again this morning it struck me that it might actually be a tiny person. Like, maybe we would call a small child "little fish", and with the way those last eight lines are written, I wondered if you were referencing a person. That brings me to this, though, which is I wonder how you feel about "joy seeking", as often we see the joy of the world reflected in the eyes of those younger than us. I'm curious how you view "joy seeking" as nourishment?


Ann van Wijgerden: My friends are tired of hearing me say this, but the natural world keeps me sane. Despite what you're observing in nature, the joy that is given, or that is to share, just observing the natural world doing its thing. It's only come to me recently that we're part of that. I used to think we humans were off in the distance observing, or looking down on it, or trying to control it, but now I'm starting to enjoy it much more because I realize we're part of it. And that's a journey that has come through writing poetry and reading other people's poetry.


Grant Burkhardt: Do you feel the joy is inherent in nature, and it's the poet's job to see it?


Ann van Wijgerden: Not to glamorize it, because not everything that happens in nature is joyful. Of course not. Even if it's lingering by a rock pool and letting it speak to you. And actually on a bigger scale, in ["The Dying Art of Letting Go"], that was the natural world speaking to me and telling me something I didn't want to hear at first. Not necessarily even joy, sometimes it's admonishment. Sometimes I feel told off, like "get over yourself, man, stop taking yourself so seriously."


Grant Burkhardt: It strikes me that joy is something that happens maybe when we don't think too hard, and nature doesn't think, it just does.


Ann van Wijgerden: Right, it just does its thing.


Grant Burkhardt: There is so much feeling in "The Dying Art of Letting Go", and I'm curious first about where the poem came from?


Ann van Wijgerden: It's my story. It's my mom's story. It's 99 percent autobiographical. My mom suddenly died at the age of 89, and we had to come home and empty the house for selling, that whole grim time. It was so busy and so intense, I could not grieve. I was utterly stuck. My mom and I had an amazing friendship, so when I anticipated one day having to do without her, I thought I'd be totally broken, but when it actually happened, I could not feel.


And when we arrived at the house, there'd been an horrific storm weeks earlier that destroyed her garden, and that garden had been an oasis for me for 35 years. And I could not look at it. I could not look out the windows at the garden. And we were busy, busy, busy, but there was one moment where I paused at the back door, and the sun was shining, and I took a photo. Two months later I had a writing course and I thought I had to write about it, and I revisited it. As I wrote the last line, I realized what it was saying to me. So I made that journey to the last line, to "Oh, my goodness, that is what is being said to me, it is over, let go."


So that poem is part of my grieving experience, and it made me endlessly grateful for poetry. I couldn't have managed without it.


Grant Burkhardt: In the writing, how did you square the emotions of being stuck and needing to move forward?


Ann van Wijgerden: The writing of the poem was the moving forward. How do people manage without poetry? I joke about free therapy, maybe I shouldn't do that, but it is so profoundly helpful in moments like this. And also I'm in awe of the human subconscious. I feel like my subconscious knew well enough what the message was, my conscious self wasn't ready to face it.


Grant Burkhardt: Do you always reserve the emotion for the reflecting and writing process, or are there certain times when you can see the thing right away as it's happening?


Ann van Wijgerden: I have a hint of it? There's something that you're noting, that your subconscious is noting, and we have to come back to it, and in that thing there is a hint of emotion. Quite honestly I'm a bit of a coward about big emotions. I put things off, I shut things down, I don't want things to get too emotional. But of course the emotion is there. And I was thinking about it today: There are even things I haven't had the courage to revisit, because of the repressed emotions of the thing. There's a lot I have revisited through poetry, but not everything. So, we're all on a journey.




 

Poet Ann van Wijgerden
Ann van Wijgerden

Born in London, the U.K., Ann van Wijgerden has spent most of her life in the Netherlands and the Philippines. She’s had her writing published in a number of magazines, and works with a charity providing education for children living in Manila’s slum area of ‘Smokey Mountain’.



writer Grant Burkhardt
Grant Burkhardt

Grant is a poet and writer with work featured in or forthcoming in the Martello Journal, the Great Lakes Review, Nightingale & Sparrow, Icarus, and others. His poem - 'The Thing About People Knowing You Cook' - was a Sundress Publications 'Best of the Net' nominee. He’s also one of the Umbrella's poetry editors and non-fiction editors.

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