Nicholas Gulig talks about exploring grief, grace, resistance, and poetic lineage in his new collection The Other Altar, winner of the 2024 Colorado Prize for Poetry, with associate editor Natalia Sperry.
Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Eau Claire and is the current Wisconsin Poet Laureate. The author of North of Order (YesYes Books) and Orient (CSU Poetry Center), he currently works as an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives in Fort Atkinson with his wife and two daughters.
Natalia Sperry: It’s really wonderful to meet you in this virtual space! I have so loved spending time with The Other Altar–congratulations on its publication! What a fantastic collection.
Nicholas Gulig: Thank you!
NS: So exciting. I was really interested in how, throughout the collection, “the book” becomes a complex motif, transforming from poem to poem. I’m thinking of poems like “Field of Book,” “Book of Weaponry,” “Book of Spring,” and “Book of Lake,” just to name a few, though of course it’s prevalent in other poems throughout. I was wondering if you could speak to how the idea of “the book” related to the process of writing this book. How did The Other Altar come to be?
NG: I think on some level, to answer the question most literally, “book,” as an aspect of the titles for those poems, is very clearly a borrowed conceit. In my MFA, we read Jabès’s The Book of Questions, so I’m borrowing it from there. But for Jabès, it’s also a borrowed conceit, and most directly and most obviously, he’s borrowing it–and thus I’m borrowing it–from the Bible: “The Book of Job,” “The Book of Revelations,” etc. The Bible is a composite book composed of other books, a kind of constellation. Or maybe a better metaphor is that it’s a collage of writing by different authors, almost none of whom are known. Most of the scholarship suggests that the names ascribed to the biblical books have been imposed upon them by other people living long after those books were written, after the authors had lived.
What’s interesting to me is the degree to which the actual authors of those texts remain invisible to us in the present, which is to suggest that they are ghosts. The author is a kind of ghost whose language a particular community has tended to and cared for and changed and altered over time to suit the needs of the present moment of their circumstances, for better and for worse. In a book that’s written like that–in a book of books–the text is something that’s carried and cultivated by the community. That’s really, really interesting to me because it suggests that in the end the identity of the book is unnamable. On the other hand, it suggests that the identity of the book is dependent on the other, or the otherness of community. Its power as language feels radically rooted and connected to the creative efforts of the cohort.
It’s a book that exists as a book by virtue of these connections. A book of books is a communal effort. So, in that sense, it embodies and lives out an important counterpoint to the narrative of individualism that feels to me so much at the center of the culture [of empire] that I inhabit, and that, in turn, inhabits me. Because in America, we tell ourselves a story about ourselves that centers on ourselves. And I want a language that resists that and that offers itself up upon the altar of the other as a kind of lived critique of empire. My hope is that everything I write exists in some form or another as a critique of empire. Even the poems in the book about my kids–maybe especially the poems about my kids.
By attaching the term “book,” which points to the collective, to so many of the individual poems within the larger text, [I’m trying to] suggest that these poems are not themselves–they’re larger than themselves or that trying to be more than just themselves. The individual poems within the book serve to enrich the larger narrative, which in turn enriches them. I don’t think it’s really anything more complicated than that. This collection is trying to make sense of my relationship to otherness, [which is to say] I write to come to terms with a sensibility that moves me out of myself in the direction of the other in an effort to establish a sustainable and mutually sustaining relationship between myself and everything and everyone that both is and isn’t me.
NS: I love that. I mean, thinking about poetry as an effort to reach toward a larger collective—connecting oneself through the work to a larger community when so often the concept of the “other” or “otherness” seems meant to divide us—as an act of resistance against empire…that’s beautiful!
I guess I’m curious, then: Does that idea [of the book as a communal effort] mirror the writing process for this collection? How did that process compare to your experience writing previous books?
NG: If I’m honest, I sometimes worry that all I do is write the same book over and over again, just with different words. There’s this deep-rooted, abiding fear I have that eventually people are going to pick up on this.
Most of the time, it feels like every poem is a revision of the one that came before it, because the previous one failed to do what it was trying to do. All my books feel like second takes or do-overs. In every book, on some fundamental level, all I’m really doing is looking for a way to come to think, see, and live beyond myself.
In his letters, Keats offers selflessness as a mentality toward which the artist needs to aspire, a state of mind that the artist needs to cultivate in order to make art. That feels very true to me. Maybe more importantly, [Keats’s] model of artistic selflessness feels like an instructive model for citizenship–for a way of living in relationship with other people and the world.
At the end of the day, I think I’m writing these poems over and over because they ask me to put myself on hold for the sake of the subject and for the sake of the language that’s pointing in the direction of–and trying to see more clearly–the object of the poem’s attention. When it works, language reminds us of the illusion of our distinction, which is a narrative that we so readily and radically subscribe to because it’s the narrative that we swim in a daily basis, the cultural ethos. So, I enjoy writing poems–I need to write poems–because they help me believe that the distance between myself and everything else is crossable.
In my first book, I was looking at landscape and asking it to do this. In Orient, I was looking at the Syrian civil war, asking the grief of other people to help me navigate my own grief, and asking if my grief could help me navigate theirs. The subject changed, but the task at the heart of those poems remained the same. I don’t know if it’s that different in The Other Altar. In this book, I’m turning to my family, my wife and kids, my friends, the community of writers in southern Wisconsin, and the community of artists I’ve accumulated through my education. I’m turning to the lineage of other artists whose work makes my work possible. I’m asking them to help me see myself as something other than myself.
In that way, The Other Altar doesn’t feel different to me from my other books. It’s trying to do the same thing. The horizon is the same. It’s just that the words are moved around. The last book failed, so here I am inside the next book, trying again and starting over.
NS: I love that idea–poetry as this continual process. If the poem inevitably fails in its reaching for connection, then the next one is still reaching. That’s beautiful.
When you mentioned being afraid of people catching on–I just wanted to say, I think that approach is a real strength too. Maybe we’re all always writing the same poem over and over. Acknowledging that feels like the ultimate poetic strength, even.
NG: Well, I hope so! I hope other people are doing this too, so I don’t feel so bad.
NS: You started to touch on this now, but I’ve been thinking about how in “Of Genesis,” you write, “the origin of every book is loss.” In this book we see loss in all its complexities —from the deeply personal to the collective, the private and the political. All those boundaries collapsed. The collection is also structured around sections that instruct the reader on how to construct and tend to an altar, and how to care for and invite the dead through these gestures. I’d love to talk more about how poetry can act as a kind of altar. How do you navigate the relationship between something as vast as grief and the forms through which we can approach it?
NG: As I was saying, in Orient I was wondering to what extent my own losses, especially the loss of my dad, might turn me outward instead of inward. Grief often orients us inward–we feel alone, our pain occupies our sense of the world’s center. In Orient, I hoped the loss of my father might turn me and make me otherwise. I was asking whether private grief can be a sustainable portal to the grief of others. To what degree can it be shared without erasing the particulars of our individual mourning? I want to live in a world where it’s possible to share the grief of people I’ve never met.
I was hoping Orient could help me share and shoulder the grief I was seeing on television, like the suffering of refugees fleeing the war in Syria. Now, it’s Gaza. How can we hold another’s grief without erasing the particulars of each experience? How do we mourn together? Because it feels important to me that we mourn together when, by virtue of the limits of my experience, it’s very, very difficult for me to imagine the suffering of others. Maybe even worse, to turn the real-time, lived experience of suffering into artifice–the product of the imagination…is that okay? So, that book emerged from that line of questions.
And in The Other Altar, I’m asking the same questions. My dad is still a part of this book, but now I’m a father, too. The grief of losing my dad has turned into an anticipatory guilt because I know that, if I do my job right as a parent, I’ll someday force my children to experience a grief that rhymes with the grief I’m still holding after losing my parent.
What might be different in The Other Altar, though, is that the lens of grief has expanded to include guilt–the recognition that my existence will create pain for the people I love most, and the people who I most want to protect from pain. Maybe I wrote this book as a way of asking for forgiveness in advance. A kind of apology that I’m making now because I know I won’t be around to make it when I’m gone.
And so the new poems still find their origin in loss, but importantly, I think the degree to which they help me navigate that loss has changed. In that sense, I think if the poems succeed–if they can turn grief and guilt to grace–then, in my mind, the language is operating the way that an altar operates. Because altars are these really wonderful, magical creations–these decorative structures that we erect as a means of navigating loss. What’s interesting to me is that this navigation moves in two directions. It feels to me like the altar is trying to accomplish the impossible, paradoxical task of holding on and letting go at once.
For example, after my dad died, mom made an altar, and she’s been tending to it for almost a decade now. She’s making and remaking this altar, over and over. And the act of making it, decorating the surface, placing pictures of my father on the altar, gathering objects that were meaningful to him—the things that he loved when he was alive—keeping a candle burning on that altar, placing food on that altar every day, putting flowers in a vase… those things and actions are for him. The light of that candle is for him, and those flowers are for him, as though he were there. The act of making it and rearranging the photographs brings him back. It brings him into the room. It allows us to communicate with him. These offerings bring him back and keep him here with us in the present. And it grants us access to what is missing, and it keeps us from forgetting. It allows us to hold what has been lost, and yet, kind of strangely, the making of the altar—or any of the funeral rituals that we participate in across cultures—is something that we do in order to move on. They help us heal. And so these funeral rites are, at their core, aesthetic acts. They’re decor. They’re decorative. We decorate death, and that act of decoration, the turning of the abstraction of grief into the material structure of the altar itself, helps us to let go and carry ourselves forward in the direction of a future that no longer contains the dead, in which the dead are gone.
I guess what I’m saying, I think, is that much like writing, and much like poems—or at the very least, the poems that mean the most to me—the altar acts as the embodiment of this fertile contradiction that holds otherwise disconnected worlds together: the living and the dead. The altar is a bridge between those spaces that respects and serves them both, and the language that matters most to me, and that feels the most successful, strives to do that.
NS: I think that’s such a profound expression of love, too, constructing a made thing, whether it’s language or an altar, as a way of processing grief and connecting with it. It speaks to the fact that this is a book of love, hope, and grace, just as much as it is one of loss.
This also reminds me of something you mentioned earlier, about the lineage of other artists whose work makes your writing possible. In the acknowledgments, you mention leaning on and drawing from several poetic influences—John Keats, George Oppen, Emily Dickinson, just to name a few. When writing, how do you consider your poetic lineage and that intertextual relationship between the work you’re doing and the work that’s come before?
NG: Yeah! Another way I think that poems, when they’re working, act as altars is that they move in two directions in relationship to the tradition of which they’re a part and to which they are contributing—and changing by virtue of that contribution. If an altar is telling us to hold on and let go of the dead at the same time, an acknowledgment of the influence of another person’s life on your life, then my hope is that the poems—like the poems in the book that include Keats’s language, or Oppen’s language, or Dickinson’s language, or maybe just all poems—might live in acknowledgment of the importance of my literary ancestors. The men and women and people whose work makes my work possible.
In poetry, I want to hold on to, acknowledge, pay tribute to, and make good on that debt I feel I owe these people that came before me. I want to celebrate and give voice to that gratitude I have and the connection I feel to my literary ancestors, past as well as present. And that’s how I think of them—Keats, Oppen, and Dickinson—as my ancestors. And, of course, there are so many others, [and so many still alive!] but in this book, many of the poems, but especially those three, intentionally attempt to incorporate their language and weave it into and among my own language in a way that feels akin to, or rhymes with, what my mom is doing when she’s using my father’s objects and rearranging them and thereby adding to it, like the candle and the flowers and these offerings of food. She’s weaving herself into and together with my father’s objects as a way to pay tribute to him and, again, to help her live without him, to move beyond his passing.
In this book, I’m trying to use the language of my ancestors in that same way. I’m trying to construct an altar in which they are present in a very literal sense. Their words are there as part of the poem. But at the same time, the poem is trying to move past them in search of something original and new and different. I guess what I’m saying is, in the present moment of the poem, I’m always trying to strike a balance between the future and the past, between the old and the original, that feels akin to the balance I’m also trying to strike between the self and other, and the balance that an altar is trying to strike between the living and the dead. So, for the moment at least, a language that attempts to live and breathe as altars live and breathe is the tool I have at my disposal. It’s my only implement, until I discover a new one.
NS: We’re almost at the end of our time, but on the topic of endings, I have to ask—every poem in this collection concludes without end-punctuation. It creates this openness within the book, as though none of the poems end, or at least no ending is final. There’s fluidity to the various forms of these poems, but also a sharp intentionality. How do you consider formal choices and subtle details like punctuation in your poems?
NG: I suppose on some level, I don’t know how to end a poem…but maybe the better way to answer your questions is that I don’t trust periods. I think they’re lying to us. They’re insisting that one thing doesn’t belong to the thing on either side of it. They build a wall around the sentence. And in so far as the sentence is inseparable from the self, the period builds a wall around the self and elevates the self at the expense of the possibility of connection between selves and between sentences. Periods feel antithetical to otherness because they insist that we’re mortal. They tell us we’re alone. Everything I want a poem to do says otherwise. I want a poetry that reminds me that everyone and everything is here.
Read more about The Other Altar or purchase your own copy here: https://upcolorado.com/center-for-literary-publishing/item/6650-the-other-altar
Natalia Sperry is an MFA candidate in poetry at Colorado State University, where she works as an associate editor for Colorado Review. Their writing has appeared in Interim and Five South’s The Weekly. She lives with her partner and two cats, Apollo and Artemis.