Q&A with Molly Sturdevant

Two Chicago poets walk into a bar, what do you get? A riveting conversation! Join Molly Sturdevant of The Wild Umbrella's three most recent poems and our Editor-in-Chief Julian Kanagy on a meditation on Sturdevant's inspiration, and thoughts on the ultimate American Poet: Emily Dickinson.

"A Poem, in which a Poet who Hasn’t Been on a Date Since 2010, Attempts to Use a Dating App" flows very naturally, as thoughts do; I wonder if you agree that this is a poem that benefits from being heard aloud.

I do agree, certainly. I used to shy away from reading my poetry out loud, although, having written in Chicago for 20 years, I've always loved hearing other people read out loud, which is a huge tradition here. I've opened up to it more in the last several years, taking sound and performance more seriously as a writer. I've grown a lot since doing so, too. Thinking about owning my poems a bit more publicly, speaking words to people in real time / real space, made me feel more connected to poetry as a form of community with other humans. That brought a new sense of urgency to the practice of writing, for me. And yes, this poem in particular is, as you noted, a kind of glimpse into my wandering thoughts- in such a way that hearing it out loud gives the reader more of an "in" than they'd otherwise get on paper alone. It also kinda feels like a real triumph, too, to perform it out loud, since it is in large part a poem about how difficult (impossible?) it is to find your authentic voice while making small-talk across the table from a person you've never met.

Could you tell us more about "Tigers, Could Have Been" and the woman featured within? This piece features delightful images and a satisfying conclusion in her present, and I wonder how this poem developed for you.

I often find myself trying to disassociate from a difficult memory by convincing myself that what I want to remember is some arcane detail, like "hmmm, what animal was that episode about, when it was on in the background while a milestone-moment in the traditional experience of human intimacy was sadly passing me by, oh, maybe it was tigers." A poem can make space for those minor details to coexist with something heavier, like the foregrounding of loss. There's a way in which a person can be taking her hair down after a long night and everything is fine... until 10 years later... you realize you knew all you needed to know in that moment, and what you knew was pretty sad. In writing poetry, I can process that distance between deep knowledge and surface observations (and the reference to eastern Colorado, a beloved landscape for me, is a kind of perfect staging for that feeling).

How did you connect Dickinson's feathered hope to Spinoza's monism in "Presence versus Hope?" I am curious about what source of inspiration or state of mind led you to write this piece--in addition to the aforementioned poet and philosopher. I found its conclusion reminiscent of some of Mary Oliver's addresses to the reader.

I taught early modern philosophy for a long while, and appreciate Spinoza's 'Ethics' (1677) for many reasons, not least of which is his critique of hope. Hope is a sad affect, meaning, it clings to something unreal and jacks up the imagination, in such a way that real, actionable, presence with the communities in which we find ourselves begin to appeal to us less than this fictional idea that hope gins up if left unchecked. The response to this critique is not the opposite however, namely, resignation or "hopelessness", so, being brief and more personal here, I'd say this: nothing fires me up more than taking stock of the actual world I am in (and all its serious problems), and building solidarity with those near me, with whatever we have, and however we are able. Hope alone, by comparison, just fritters around, waiting, without any commitment to present action. So, my poem tries to gently agitate that poetic tradition (which adores birds, hope, and Emily Dickinson's poem about those things), and supplant it with a somewhat darker but (to me) more exciting and urgent tonal shift. In other words: we need boots on the ground. Things in the US have reached such a state that I want to make more poems that expand our capacity for anger and doing something with it, without trying to redeem that anger with hope, because hope lets us off the hook. Importantly, I realize my poem also totally stands in debt to Dickinson, with the uses of the long em dash and the hard stops on specific observations, and like you said, to Oliver as well, in that last bit. There's something anticapitalist about assuring the reader directly, that we're enough, we don't have to earn or merit or prove our humanity. I doubt the poem really accomplishes all that I've just said here, but hopefully it's a kind of gateway for me, to working on more similar projects.

Our audience loves to hear more about the process of creating the great works that the Wild Umbrella features. Would you like to share anything with them about how your poetry comes to be?

I always have an idea of the feeling first, of the whole thing I want to get across. But my process is kind of collage-oriented; I like to set things next to each other and see what happens, and I like to subvert expectations in terms of diction, tone, or rhythm. So... my process is to collect (by jotting down on whatever is nearest) phrases and vocabulary particular to non-poetic practices (historic words, technical, mechanical, philosophical, scientific words), then collect sensations, memories, distracted or piecemeal thoughts, and then when I have time, I start laying them out in front of me (by typing into a word document) in ways where I'm thinking: what would happen if use these in a prose poem, or as a list, as a traditional lineated poem. What if I stuck terminology from a medical dictionary into the middle of this, etc. The hardest part is getting from that first feeling, through this kind of experimentation, to a whole and realized poem.

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Molly Sturdevant

Molly Sturdevant's writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Dark Mountain Project, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Northwest, About Place Journal, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net and a Pushcart, she is recognized as a Western Federation of Miners Union Scholar. Her labor-history novel is forthcoming in 2026.

Julian Kanagy

Julian Kanagy is a poet and editor whose work sets out to explore questions he can't find other means of asking. He reads, writes, and lives alongside his kitten, Pippi, in Chicago. Both as an editor and in writing his own poetry, Julian appreciates intention, concision, and structural variety. Per the advice of a mentor, he lives in search of poems that nobody else could have written.