Photo credit: Studio Lovely Jubley | Interview by Beth Mcaulay
“During these visits, I am immersed in familiar company, and it isn’t until I have short moments away from family, in solitude, when I take stock of my surroundings and focus on the unfamiliarity of everything”
Billboard
my relatives in Oregon have these neighbours
who would make Jesus blush,
and at the end of their drive,
they’ve put up this billboard,
and one sunny afternoon it said:
YOU – WHO DON’T BELIEVE IN
HELL
HAVE A BIG SURPRISE COMING.
and even the crickets seemed hushed
by the heft of those letters,
until my cousin came saying something like:
Josh, shall we go and swim in the river?
There appears to be a duality in how one can engage with place in your poem. Namely, through intimate familial association, and alternatively by the more impersonal signs, symbols, and physical characteristics of a place. How did you think about this distinction – which can sometimes be antithetical or contrary, whilst writing your poem?
That duality was definitely something I was trying to capture as I wrote and reflected on my own experiences of visiting relatives in rural Oregon. During these visits, I am immersed in familiar company, and it isn’t until I have short moments away from family, in solitude, when I take stock of my surroundings and focus on the unfamiliarity of everything. On one such visit, I remember being taken aback by the evangelist neighbours’ billboard – its message is more or less unchanged in my poem. I loved the way it was both impersonal – for the eyes of any passing unbeliever – and also strikingly direct and ominous. Still thinking about the billboard years later, I started to experiment with ways I could incorporate it into a poem based on my visits to rural Oregon.
While writing the poem, I felt it was important to create some sort of counterpoint – of tone, register, and sentiment – to the billboard’s message, which is how I landed on the poem’s volta in the final line. I was also keen to maintain and play with the religious themes of the evangelical billboard. For me, the suggestion of river-swimming alludes to this.
Tonally, your poem reads like a short extract from an informal conversation or reminiscence, which too is enhanced by the fluidity of much of its form. How, if at all, was this style influenced by ideas pertaining to memory?
The conversational tone emerged as I experimented with incorporating the billboard’s message into a poem. I liked the effect of framing the very stark warning with casual and occasionally vague reminiscence, and I decided to indent the all-caps billboard stanza to separate the two. Ideas pertaining to memory definitely influenced these decisions.
Writing the poem, I found it interesting that I had remembered word for word a billboard I had seen two years earlier, and I wondered why. Was it the Americana novelty of it? The way it promises hell with a kind of sassiness? Because of this, the idea of memorability felt important to the poem, and a tone of informal reminiscence helped bring this to the foreground.
‘by the heft of those letters’ is an intriguing line. How, if at all, was a variety of typographical styles important to conveying different registers and voices in your poem?
Very important, especially for the billboard’s message. I was keen to replicate the appearance of billboard lettering on the page. For this stanza, I imagined a rectangular parameter, within which I made the appropriate indentations and line-breaks. I also experimented with putting this stanza in bold; however, this felt over the top. I decided to italicise the dialogue in the final line rather than use inverted commas. I was drawn to italics for a variety of reasons. Often denoting internal thoughts, italics seemed better suited to the ambiguous recollection of this dialogue line, as established by the previous: ‘until my cousin came saying something like’. Also, I liked the way the slant of the italicised line visually contrasted with the rest of the poem and helped emphasise the different register.
