This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Devon Walker-Figueroa, whose poetry collection Lazarus Species is out today from Milkweed Editions. One of the book’s final poems, “My Invention,” offers an apt metaphor for the Promethean daring of this second collection: In darkness, the poet sees herself carrying “my tune like a torch,” one held aloft even after the moths have lost interest. Walker-Figueroa suggests that such “shifty mechanisms” of light have enraptured poets and scientists in a shared project of collapsing time and distance. “My Invention” ranges from Li Bai holding a “dynasty of moonlight” to Nikola Tesla’s dream of a mechanical eye that will see all the world at once, the Earth being the “first poem it will commit / to memory.” Here and throughout Lazarus Species, Walker-Figueroa invites her readers to “See filament give way / To lament,” illuminating the proximity of invention and extinguishment, scientific discovery and poetic enchantment, an unstable past and a future eclipsed by climate change. Airea D. Matthews described the collection as “a suite of linguistic resurrections, equal parts elegy, incantation, and cosmological flirtation. Publishers Weekly wrote, “No two entries are alike, cycling from classical forms to modern text-speak, from Mars to a restaurant in Brooklyn.” Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of the poetry collection Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021) winner of the National Poetry Series and the Levis Reading Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Previously a Jill Davis Fellow at New York University and an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar, Walker-Figueroa currently teaches literature at Bennington College.
Devon Walker-Figueroa, author of Lazarus Species. (Credit: David Evan McDowell)
1. How long did it take you to write and assemble the poems in Lazarus Species?
I wrote what would become “Vacancy” in 2013 when I was bartending in Salem, Oregon, at a place called Venti’s. I wrote the lines on a guest check and slid them under the till until my shift ended. Since that is the oldest poem in the book, and “The Peasant’s Orgasm” is the newest (finalized in a hotel lobby in Barcelona, February of this year), I guess, start to finish, Lazarus took twelve years, though I would say that I did not begin working on it as a book-shaped project until about 2016, when I was living in Iowa.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the poems in the collection?
Certainly the rate at which the world has changed, and the upheavals and violence which many populations and ecologies have endured, over the course of writing this book…that has posed a tremendous challenge. Remaining engaged with such profound and largely negative transformations while not being totally overwhelmed and overrun by them is a tall order. History’s panoply of disasters and hysterias have at least provided a much-needed sense of scale.
I would also say that, in this collection, I write more directly about the abuse I experienced as a child, even though I bury it under a mound of footnotes on T. E. Lawrence. All to say, this explicitness was one of the collection’s more personalized difficulties. I almost didn’t publish the poem “Citadel” at all due to the upset I knew its subject could cause my family. In the end, I chose not to publish it in any magazines, only in the book. So I would say negotiating my own sense of privacy or lack thereof has also been a challenge with this project. I’m quite shy actually, though you might not know it from the book. On a related note, I’ve long guarded certain secrets about my life, to the point that this guarding has become a central tenet of my person, one I am only now beginning to slowly challenge, and this book, intra- and transpersonal though it is, has been a major part of that.
(As addendum to that, I’ve always struggled with privacy, being raised as I was in a religious household wherein we believed a divine being, God, was constantly eavesdropping on and judging our thoughts as though before they even formed. Now that I have the modest audience/readership that I do with poetry, I alternate between a profound need for privacy when I’m writing and a numb disavowal of “ownership” of my experiences, which are, yes, personal, and yet their ilk belong to many other people. One both is and is not alone at any given moment in one’s particular sensations and scenarios.)
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can’t tell if I’m erratic or dogged in my writing practice because I’m rarely sure if the immediate what of my work constitutes “writing.” It can take days, months, years for me to know when notes pass into the arena of poem or story. I write every day but often in a shorthand that only I would be able to decipher. Is that writing? It’s not poetry in the sense of shareable poetry. Maybe it’s a closed-circuit language between sense and idea that borders on sub-linguistic.
4. What are you reading right now?
Herzog by Saul Bellow. My fiction mentor, Jeffrey Eugenides, recommended it to me after I was complaining about novels and their too-common inability to retain lexical tension and line-level intrigue over their entire duration. So far, Herzog has been a delight—observant, beautifully phrased and paced, and possessed of an erotic hilarity.
5. Which poet, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Nick Twemlow. The title poem of his last collection, “Attributed to the Harrow Painter,” is a lodestar for me, a whole life distilled into a single seventeen-page stanza. It’s a miracle of a poem, and you can find it in The Paris Review’s online archive, if you’re a subscriber. Otherwise, just order the book. You’ll be glad you did.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear and an over-abundance of anxiety. It can paralyze me, put me in an all-out stupor. This also serves the work in the end though, somehow. So it’s a cocktail of curse and blessing garnished with the usual sprigs of doubt and longing. I also struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder, which can lead me down the path of ritualized distraction. But I’m learning to tamp this down and move more freely, I feel.
7. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the poems in the collection?
Lighting candles in the basement bar where I worked in 2012. The place was lit mostly by candlelight, and so I was constantly running around relighting lanterns that burned through their tea candles. And while shaking a Corpse Reviver II for a patron, I saw a candle snuff out and smoke rose from the red glass lamp. Something about that image gave way to the line “robed in the music of our own replies.” That was the first line of the book to find me.
8. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
I organized it every which way to Sunday. And every time I wrote a new poem, it seemed I had to reorder the entire book. Finally I ordered it with a rage to modulate the formal choices and tones while also grouping the large movements into vaguely feminine and masculine voices, troubled as those categories are both to me (as an agender mind) and to the world.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Lazarus Species?
Oh gosh. Archeology, trees, real and also speculative architecture and engineering (see the desert or “end of the world” theater, as well as the architectural movement of new pastoralism and the euthanasia coaster design by Julijonas Urbonas), film (esp. Sunset Boulevard, Lawrence of Arabia, and early film clips of Loïe Fuller), Nikola Tesla’s rotating magnetic fields and dynamos as delineated in his patents, the neuroscience of long-term potentiation, nematode death fluorescences, Sumerian religious beliefs, species and words and maybe even feelings that are departing this world (though we hope they return, however paradoxical that might seem).
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t say what the best is, as I’ve been gifted with so much good advice over the years, but one piece I come back to is from the poet Michael Dumanis: “Sometimes your best revision is your next draft.” Another is from my late mentor Michael Koch: “The single hardest thing to do is create an absorbing voice, but once you do, the reader will go anywhere with you.”
