{"id":13984,"date":"2011-05-28T02:28:07","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T02:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13984"},"modified":"2011-05-31T02:06:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T02:06:17","slug":"cave-canem-prize-winner-iain-haley-pollock-an-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13984","title":{"rendered":"Cave Canem Prize Winner Iain Haley Pollock: An Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cave Canem Prize Winner Iain Haley Pollock: An Interview<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Michigan Quarterly Review<\/a>
\nFebruary 2011<\/a><\/p>\n

Dilruba Ahmed<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Meet Iain Haley Pollock<\/a>:\u00a0Philadelphia-based poet, English teacher at Chestnut Hill Academy, and co-host with his partner Naomi of an occasional culinary smackdown based on \u201cIron Chef.\u201d\u00a0 Iain\u2019s first book of poems, Spit Back a Boy<\/a><\/em>, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize<\/a> and will be published in June 2011 by the University of Georgia Press.\u00a0 I conducted the following interview with Iain via e-mail, but you might imagine the ambient noise of Hobbes Coffeshop in Swarthmore, PA, where Iain and I have met from time to time to talk about poems:\u00a0 a whirring espresso machine and clattering mugs.\u00a0 Fork tines clinking into bowls of an elusive truffled macaroni that suddenly disappeared from the local menu.\u00a0 The tap-tap of Iain adding more ketchup* to his macaroni.\u00a0 And amid the clamor of the everyday, the sound of Iain reading aloud a remarkable poem called \u201cChorus of X, the Rescuers\u2019 Mark,\u201d a poem that I am thrilled to share here in an audio clip as part of this interview, along with Iain\u2019s comments on the major preoccupations of his manuscript, poetic inspiration and form, and the recent controversy over Tony Hoagland\u2019s poem, \u201cThe Change.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nTell us a bit about the book\u2019s evolution.\u00a0 When did you begin these poems? Did you envision them as part of a manuscript when you began, or did some themes and threads emerge as your work unfolded?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I\u2019m a grandiose sum\u2019bitch, so I think of poems (and evolution) in terms of space and time.\u00a0 While the places I\u2019d lived before\u2013Southern California, D.C., Utica, Boston\u2013factored into the content of poems, they were all written in Syracuse, Greensburg, Pa. and Philadelphia.\u00a0 And the poems are located in time between the first Portuguese incursions into Africa and waiting, about two years ago, for my partner Naomi to come home from work.\u00a0 In writing about moments along this continuum, I was drawn to the presence of history in the daily and of the daily in history.
\n\u00a0
\nI never thought of the poems as a cohesive manuscript\u2013I aimed for \u201cbest words, best order\u201d\u2013but was surprised to see themes emerge from my preoccupations of the past several years: race mixing, death, and marriage…<\/p>\n

…In \u201cPort of Origin: Lancaster,\u201d you write of a speaker who knows of his \u201cblack mother\u2019s blood\u201d as well as his \u201cwhite father\u2019s city.\u201d Is this speaker twice exiled, so to speak? How does your speaker grapple with his hybrid identity (if that\u2019s an accurate description)? In the \u201cThe Recessive Gene,\u201d for example, we see him attempt to \u201cscrape\u201d his way to a new complexion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Someone once called me a \u201chybrid\u201d at a party. Made me proud to have such an obviously small carbon footprint, but the intent was likely to package me into the de rigueur <\/em>post-colonial theory of the moment. I\u2019ll leave to the critics any thoughts about the Calibanic<\/a> nature of my speakers. I\u2019m hoping that in the poems about mixed-race identity that mixed-race folks see some of their own experience in the poems, and that other folks find a reflection of any doubleness in their own identity…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cave Canem Prize Winner Iain Haley Pollock: An Interview Michigan Quarterly Review February 2011 Dilruba Ahmed Meet Iain Haley Pollock:\u00a0Philadelphia-based poet, English teacher at Chestnut Hill Academy, and co-host with his partner Naomi of an occasional culinary smackdown based on \u201cIron Chef.\u201d\u00a0 Iain\u2019s first book of poems, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,20],"tags":[6448,6445,6444,6446,6447],"class_list":["post-13984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-usa","tag-dilruba-ahmed","tag-iain-h-pollock","tag-iain-haley-pollock","tag-iain-pollock","tag-michigan-quarterly-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}