Interview by Cameron MacKenzie

There is an unrecognized state inside of Virginia that begins somewhere south of Lexington and runs west along the Blue Ridge mountains. It goes past the state line and out into North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Appalachia, here pronounced ap-puh-LATCH-uh, has a vibrant culture that is uniquely its own, and poet Annie Woodford is quickly becoming one of its most important voices. Her award-winning collections Bootleg and Where You Come From Is Gone, along with her recent chapbook When God Was a Child, show Woodford to be an uncommonly insightful defender, critic, translator, and scribe of this often misunderstood place and its people. While many writers and filmmakers have mined this culture for its trauma – and plenty of trauma is here – Woodford digs much deeper, speaking in the tongues of a native and a poet, guiding her readers back into the old forest to find its terror and its beauty, its rhododendrons and its rattlesnakes.

I wanted to speak with Woodford about this distinctive place, her conviction to record it, and the relationship between her art and the natural world, which she documents with an eye that is both loving and unforgiving at once.

Cameron MacKenzie

The title of your second collection is Where You Come From is Gone. Can you tell us where you are from? Why is it gone, and what is there now?

Annie Woodford

Hazel Motes, the street preacher in Flannery O’Connor’s novella Wise Blood, says, “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” The first two clauses in that statement really spoke to me in terms of the mythology of the South and rural America, and how America as a whole is based on falsehood and delusion. “Where you come from is gone” also references where I am from—Henry County, Virginia—and how that community was transformed by end-stage capitalism when NAFTA allowed companies to intensify their race to the bottom of the wage scale. It’s also about the fascism that is actually not a new phenomenon in the US, especially if you consider the personality of the slave-economy South, the Jim Crow South, and the South of fewer human rights. It’s also personal. I think, if we get to live long enough, we all end up in a place where everything we thought we knew is gone.

Cameron MacKenzie

In your poem “The Country,” you say “the Appalachians are a wall / making their own mist.” How has the geographical isolation of Appalachia affected its people and their culture?

Annie Woodford

That poem takes place where I now live, which is nestled into the side of the Appalachian/Blue Ridge plateau in the Stoney Fork area of Deep Gap, North Carolina. We are literally right below a gap and the continental divide, so we are in a little protected indentation running down from much higher and bigger mountains. Doc Watson grew up near there and was a source of old songs that had largely been lost or forgotten. Old Time musician Frank Proffitt and storytellers Ray and Orville Hicks were from the more remote mountains of this area and were also repositories of otherwise lost cultural information, so, yeah, I do think isolation preserved music and stories and words. A student once told me that the way an old mountain song is played can vary from community to community, even within the same region, and I love that idea.

Cameron MacKenzie

Oftentimes writers from rural areas, when they’re young, are anxious to leave – I know I was. And yet when we settle on a subject for our work, it turns out to be the very world we tried so hard to escape. When as a poet did you know what your principal subject was going to be? Was it a conscious decision, or did you find the writing naturally bending in that direction?

Annie Woodford

I always thought I’d do more leaving than I have done, that’s for sure, but discovering voices like Lee Smith and Michael Chitwood made me realize the lyrical potential that surrounded me. I was very lucky to realize Hollins University was just an hour north, in Roanoke, and then to have teachers there like R.H.W. Dillard and Cathryn Hankla who encouraged me to write in a voice deeply connected to place and family. They made me feel like I had something special in my work because it did sound of Henry County, not despite it. And they contextualized writing beyond my little place—I read Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino in their classes, so they really did make me feel I could have freedom in art, if I just read enough and were attentive enough.

Cameron MacKenzie

Occasionally there are direct references to God in the poetry, such as in “A Poem in Which I Grab My Poverty…” At other times you express sentiments, as you do in “If Bird You Be…” that “the only faith we ever had / was faith of stone and water.” Is the work in praise of something in particular, or is the poem working on itself from within the physical world?

Annie Woodford

Maybe all poems are prayers? I have always been a deeply prayerful person even as I have also been a heathen. I was raised in no religious tradition, beyond having a granny who read me stories from Jimmy Swaggert’s Old Testament for children. But I pray all the time to the great force I sense moving within all things. I have no sense that the force is in any way attentive to my small life. I’m fascinated by great artists who are believers—Wendell Berry, Flannery O’Connor, Doc Watson. I’ve been reading Berry’s poetry collection Sabbaths again this April, where he appears to be trying to align his Christianity with his beliefs about how one should behave toward the natural world. I don’t share his faith, but he consoles me when he writes:

But harmony of earth is Heaven-made,
Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer,
A little song to keep us unafraid,
An earthly music magnified in air.

Or, as Dillard puts it in his poem “Spring Letter to Paradise,”:

If I were to speculate about Paradise, I know
I’d get it completely wrong,
But I hope there’s a place to go
Or be where with any luck
You can catch Miles and Monk playing
Together in perfect harmony.

Cameron MacKenzie

Your poems often simply list the names of places, plants, songs — proper nouns. For example, in “Lovingkindness,” you write:

Boomer, Level Cross
Shacktown, Traphill
Vashti, Vilas

How do you understand this facet of your work – the presentation of the seemingly quotidian within the artifice of a poem?

Annie Woodford

I’m in thrall to language, especially when it seems so unselfconsciously rooted in place. A.R. Ammon’s “Said Songs,” the work of Kentucky poet Maurice Manning, Mississippi’s A.H. Jerriod Avant—these are some of the most beautiful and aspirational embodiments of how to find the high, strange art in colloquial language. Ammons’s larger body of work, which is quite avant-garde and experimental, is informed by his linguistic origin story in rural North Carolina.

Cameron MacKenzie

I think a poem like “All of This is Magic Against Death,” is emblematic of your approach. This poem begins with a mother is trying to pull together dinner, while there’s a rabbit out back,

in a chicken-wire cage
once it got away
the little kids chased it
some skint their knees
they practiced kissing
in the trampoline
sweat all salt no spunk yet
the orchard next door
was closed by dementia
we used to eat the cherries
after the old man
swept down the nets

And the poem goes on and on in an aria of careful detail. What, would you say, is the this of the title?

Annie Woodford

Yes! The “this” is all those details—the rabbits, the skint knees, the cherries, the brokenness and the grubby persistence of our little lives. As Frost writes in “Birches,” “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

Cameron MacKenzie

You often intertwine different kinds of language in your work. In “I Must Be Born Again,” the first stanza reads:

I want to walk into your land by taking the creek
slogging, stream-wise, into your acreage,
since I can’t get there no other way

Cameron MacKenzie

Here you have the plain speech of the first line, the more conventionally poetic of the second, and the wonderful resolution of the colloquial expression in the third. How do you think about the deployment of these different registers? How do you determine when and where to sound a certain way?

Annie Woodford

It’s always a fight against purple prose for me. I cut my teeth on the Romantics and the Victorians. I fall in love with the idea of how something sounds or a slant rhyme that I discover and then everything else is about either curbing my most excessive instincts or letting that excess be an engine in the poem. The intentional elevation of the plain and colloquial language into the poetic is something I am constantly trying to do. I’m always trying to get to the tactile delight or resonance of words, of things, of experiences and I guess these different registers are the ways I try to get there.

Cameron MacKenzie

So many of your characters are working through generational difficulties, problems that have been passed down. In “Sometimes There Are No Good Choices,” the speaker wants to soften the hard world she has inherited, but the title and tone of the poem bring the possibility of this into doubt. How do you think about the lineage of Appalachia? What should be carried on, and what needs to be left behind?

Annie Woodford

Outside economic forces ensure anyone who is poor in America has vastly limited choices in their lives. Appalachia has always been, as a New Yorker profile of my hometown put it, a “canary in the coal mine” for the economic fortunes of everyone else. Poor people produce a lot of wealth in this country, but that wealth doesn’t stay in their communities. I am most interested in an art that bubbles up from the bottom—that’s my artistic lineage and I try to place that survival within the larger, more educated and privileged tradition of poetry. Like I said, my poetry teachers made sure I read Calvino and felt empowered to write and speak in a Henry County voice.

Cameron MacKenzie

In the poem, “Conjuring Spring in Wilkes County,” the speaker sees the hard facts of the world in front of her – the parking lots and polluted creeks and storage units – and then raises her eyes to see “the sky…thin like a cervix / radiance pushing up against / from behind.” What does the ‘conjuring’ of the title mean here? What is being conjured, by who, and why?

Annie Woodford

I guess this goes back to your question about prayer—maybe all poems are also little spells. Maybe they’re all trying to conjure up some magic, some resilient beauty in the face of the overall harshness of our lives.

Cameron MacKenzie

Is the natural world inherently beautiful and we only have to realize it, or do we have to make it beautiful?

Annie Woodford

The natural world is beyond human ideas of beauty—look closely enough at anything in nature we would consider beautiful and there is always some horrific biological realism also visible (to see it as “horrific” is a very human perspective, I guess). At the center of nature is death, or, at the very least death’s cousin, change. This is one of my favorite Lucille Clifton poems and I think it’s about what I would term “horrific,” but what she seems to be able to encompass in her large-minded vision of the world (and her place in it):

[the lesson of the falling leaves]

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves

Cameron MacKenzie

I think you approach the complicated racial history of Appalachia most directly in your poems that emphasize its music, particularly “Lord How It Would Ring,” and “In Order to Deny the Fact of Death…” What draws you to the local music as the best way to explore these dynamics?

Annie Woodford

We’ve Jim Crow-ed everything in this country in a lot of ways, so that Black art and culture has been seen as separate from the mainstream, when in fact it is central to it. It is the creator, co-creator, and all too often unacknowledged creator of what is most interesting and profound about American art. White supremacy is responsible for this false segregation. I would argue Beyonce is playing around with this in her Cowboy Carter album—racial categories in music were imposed during the Jim Crow era and they stuck. Both of those poems are about American music and you can’t write about American music without acknowledging race. American music and art has always been about racial cross-pollination, though historically white supremacy ensured only the white contribution was recognized by the mainstream.

Cameron MacKenzie

When is a poem finished? How do you know when you’ve written the final line?

Annie Woodford

Sometimes it really does feel like you have reached the end of a song, the end of a piece of music and there it is: the final few notes. I can hear a poem building up to an end as much as anything. I often think of the end of a poem as a melody and then try to find words that fit that melody. Sometimes the ending is found by lopping off what I thought was the ending, where the energy dissipates. Or, as Dillard advised, via The Duke: “It don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got that swing).”