An interview with Orchid Tierney

Orchid Tierney is from Aotearoa-New Zealand, currently residing in Philadelphia. Her chapbooks include Brachiation (Dunedin: GumTree Press, 2012), The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF, 2017), blue doors (Belladonna* Press, 2018), and ocean plastic (BlazeVOX, 2019). She is the author of a full-length sound translation of the Book of Margery Kempe, Earsay (TrollThread, 2016). Her collection a year of misreading the wildcats is forthcoming from The Operating System in 2019. She will be joining the faculty of Kenyon College as an assistant professor of English in the fall.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I’m not sure when I began to write poetry, but I recall reading a lot when I was younger. I assume that I simply fell into the practice as an extension of my reading behaviours. What keeps me going is also unclear. For me, poetry is simply a form of critical thinking: it’s a mode of scholarship. So I’m predominately motivated by the way that poetry can build communities and exchange knowledge (through group readings, anthologies, engaged-learning practices, and so forth) outside of the immediate environment of the poem.

Have you noticed a difference in how you approach poems between publishing chapbooks to full-length collections?

Not really. My practice is archival-based, and the difference between chapbooks and full-length collections is primarily a question of scale. I recently interviewed Michael Martin Shea on his translation of Liliana Ponce’s Diary, and he proposed that Ponce approaches the chapbook form as a compact meditative practice. In other words, chapbooks are small spaces for dense thinking. I’d certainly like to incorporate that approach in the future as chapbooks offer constraints to poetry that full-length collections don’t necessarily allow. 

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

I’m very influenced by Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s and Jennifer Scappettone’s collages for reasons that I will explain in the next question.

You work with both text and image. How do the two genres interact, if at all?

We’re not really talking about genres here but different modes of thinking with materials. That said, text is visual, and I’m conscious in my assemblages how text and image ought to interact, look, and communicate with each other on the page. 

I’m in the process of wrapping up my doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, and both Jennifer Scappettone and Rachel Blau DuPlessis have significantly informed my approaches to thinking about collage as a mode of waste management. In particular, I would argue that Scappettone applies collage as a critical lens with which to engage environmental calamity. Collage enables readers to analyze landfill leakages more effectively since it is already a porous form. When source texts, which comprise a work, are decontextualized and undifferentiated, they allow for potent connections between different textual geographies. And when you think about it, the collage poem is a useful form for examining the human impacts on the natural world since collage, too, is a built environment. Both the landfill and collage are constructed from materials that have migrated from different spaces, different households, different timescales. To this end, I like to think of collage as a textual landfill, one that compacts the discarded materials of our commodity cultures.

What are you currently working on?

The Operating System will release my first full-length collection of Polaroids, poetry, and prose, a year of misreading the wildcats, in October 2019. This collection engages with petroleum cultures, climate change, and the precarity of the island. I have plans to continue writing on the impacts of climate change on island ecologies, but for now I am currently working on my next manuscript, entitled blue doors: a failed novel. This work-in-progress builds on my interest in environmental violence to examine the relationships between vegan food cultures, whiteness, and the meatpacking industry. I guess it is a hybrid long poem/novel of sorts. At any rate, blue doors attends to the persistence of the sentimental genre in the contemporary animal rights movement, which often co-opts anti-racist language (as PETA notoriously does). I’m hoping that my research into the historical meatpacking industry and its contemporary manifestations works in tandem with the ideology of the sentimental genre and the use of prosopopoeia to speak for animal life.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

I don’t think I can gesture to one poet when the Pacific region is so lively with poetry. And poets of the Pacific Islands are undertaking an astonishing range of formal and linguistic innovations in ways that, I believe, are quite unlike anything else. Of these poets, Lehua M. Taitano, Robert Sullivan, Roma Potiki, Craig Santos Perez, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Vaughan Rapatahana, and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner are exemplary.

I also don’t think we can really discuss the Poet without acknowledging the communities that enable poetry to find an audience, to flourish, and to migrate across networks. And for this reason, I’d like to acknowledge the labor of indigenous poets, scholars, and editors, who are at the forefront of bringing contemporary Pasifika poetry into greater visibility. In 2014, Robert Sullivan and Reina Whaitiri edited the anthology Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English, for example. More recently, Vaughan Rapatahana produced a small anthology of Māori poets, which is currently online at Jacket2 (available here and here). And I would be negligent not to mention the new Effigies III (Earthworks) anthology, edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brandy Nālani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez.