{"id":35991,"date":"2018-11-09T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-09T20:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=35991"},"modified":"2025-02-21T09:11:46","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:11:46","slug":"a-conversation-with-d-nurkse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/a-conversation-with-d-nurkse\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 85: A Conversation With D. Nurkse"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0Interview in\u00a0Willow Springs\u00a0<\/em>85<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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November 9, 2018<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

JOSH ANTHONY, POLLY BUCKINGHAM, HANNAH COBB, KIMBERLY SHERIDAN<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH D. NURKSE<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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Works in\u00a0Willow Springs<\/em>\u00a059<\/a>,\u00a042<\/a>,\u00a039<\/a>, and\u00a035<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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THE POETRY OF D. NURKSE<\/strong> is hauntingly honest. It\u2019s resonant with generosity, vulnerability, and love for the world while being rooted in unflinching observations of reality and justice. He makes magic of myths, nature, family, and the gritty stoops of Brooklyn. In a review of A Night in Brooklyn<\/em>, Philip Levine writes, \u201cHe should be the laureate of the Western Hemisphere. He possesses the ability to employ the language of our American streets, shops, bars, factories, and any place else and construct truly lyrical poems, sometimes of love, sometimes of anger . . . No one is writing more potently than this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nurkse is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult, A Night in Brooklyn, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island<\/em>, and The Fall<\/em>, all from Alfred Knopf. He\u2019s the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Whiting Writers Award, and prizes from The Poetry Foundation and the Tanne Foundation. Nurkse served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001. His work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Estonian, and other languages. In 2011, a third edition of Voices Over Water<\/em> was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best book of poetry published in the UK. His poems have been anthologized in six editions of the Best American Poetry <\/em>series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nurkse has also written on human rights and was elected to the board of Amnesty International USA for a 2007-2010 term. He was a program officer for the Defense for Children International-USA from 1988 to 1992 and worked as a consultant for UNICEF. His study, At Special Risk: The Impact of Political Violence on Minors in Haiti,<\/em> was commissioned by Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently, Nurkse is a long-term member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He has taught poetry at Rikers Island Correctional Facility and in inner-city literacy programs, as well as at MFA programs at Rutgers, Brooklyn College, and Stonecoast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met with the gracious and humorous D. Nurkse in Spokane where over coffee we discussed the role of the MFA, external standards and the internet, riddles and parables, war and religion, and the joy of playing the flute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JOSH ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In A Little Book on Form<\/em>, Robert Hass says that the form of the poem is often a reflection of the gesture of its energy. In Rules of Paradise<\/em>, you start out with a lot of single-stanza poems. But as you\u2019re developing in your writing, your poems take on a more organic form in terms of stanzas and breaking. Was this in any way a conscious decision or was it unconscious\u2014did it just develop as you wrote?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it\u2019s both. These things really go through millions of drafts; any poem is like a snail that crawled out of the sea and eventually became an accountant. There are many variations. I think all poets write these things down and test them. At any stage, the raw words go through a process of interrogation, and at different stages the process is different. If you look at Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s early drafts of the poem \u201cOne Art\u201d\u2014that extraordinary poem about losing her lover\u2014the original really is, \u201cI lost my house keys, rats!\u201d But there was a process that not only made that poem a villanelle, but also made that poem a unified expression of emotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had earlier poems that were broken up. I was experimenting with a poem as a kind of rush of emotions. I think all poems are dialogic. There\u2019s a theory that every line of Shakespeare\u2019s creates a statement and an opposition. Some lines, like \u201cRough winds do shake the darling buds of May \/ And summer\u2019s lease hath all too short a date,\u201d perceive there\u2019s an opposition between an instant and the flow of time. There\u2019s a theory that there\u2019s an opposition quality in every haiku; in Japanese, there\u2019s even a word for it. Poems want to be dialogic\u2014they don\u2019t want to be monologue. Prose might want to be a monologue, but a poem might be an intuitive or inherent dialogue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been working a lot recently on prose poems. It\u2019s kind of cool because it allows you to let some air out of the poetry balloon. Prose poems may be the bar where the poetic author is less of an issue. It alludes to the anonymous parable, the anecdote, the newspaper article; it feels a little bit more insidious. And the voice has to develop; it can be more like a guerilla, random speaker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think a prose poem would be more approachable to somebody who isn\u2019t familiar with poetry, or do you think it would be more thwarting?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s possible it might be more thwarting. You know, a prose poem is in tension between being prose and poetry. It\u2019s claiming that heightened quality, and you read it wondering why it might be hard to start with a prose poem and work towards the sonnet. It might make more sense to start with the sonnet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KIMBERLY SHERIDAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shadow Wars<\/em> was published when you were thirty-nine years old. You had many different careers beforehand. Were you writing the whole time or did you put writing on pause?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was writing the whole time. I\u2019ve been writing since I was a kid. It took me a long time in terms of the poetry industry to publish that first book. I was telling Chris Howell how many times my first book was rejected. He said, \u201cYeah, you already told me that . . . .\u201d I had the feeling that I should stop telling people how hard it was. I used to tell people I cut my own hair\u2014some people would say, \u201cObviously.\u201d I ought to be more like other poets and lead with the triumphs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t get an MFA, and it helps me as a teacher to realize that there\u2019s an inside and an outside to this thing. I\u2019m sensitive to people who are on the outside. Like when I was a judge in a contest and saw somebody write rhyming, religious poetry\u2014really good\u2014but I knew they weren\u2019t going to win the contest. I want to have an open mind. Maybe I\u2019m over-answering this question but some of the work I did helps me in terms of seeing poetry as it exists outside academia. I did work at a lot of jobs that put me in contact with a lot of people and that\u2019s an advantage. It scares me a little sometimes when I have colleagues who went to college, wondered what to do, got an MFA. They\u2019re teaching poetry, and they see poetry as something that is articulated by an MFA program. It sort of cheered me up psychologically that I taught in inner city programs and taught in prisons, and I did see people not only responding to poetry, but taking it damn seriously. There were people at Rikers Island who told me, \u201cThe purpose of my life was to be here and study poetry with you.\u201d It was more valuable to them, rather than less, because it hadn\u2019t been given to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HANNAH COBB<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think those experiences have given you a different perspective than the traditional MFA professor on what the task of poetry is\u2014what it means to be accomplished and successful?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t mean to put down the traditional MFA professor . . . . I think it\u2019s become a little bit of an industry, but also in my lifetime, I think it\u2019s become more feminist and democratic. Part of the reason I didn\u2019t want to get an MFA was I grew up in that time of poetry gurus and you would admire, typically, a well-published male poet and go to his program. And you would probably see him three times over two years while you studied with underpaid adjuncts. I think that\u2019s changed a bit. There are more diverse people who are MFA faculty members. The converse of that is there\u2019s a bit more of a correlation between being a poet and having an MFA. Yes, I do feel it\u2019s beneficial to me to see myself as outside that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POLLY BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And you had a real variety of jobs, too . . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did have a lot of jobs. I worked in human rights professionally for about six years and there were a lot of very emotionally interesting things at work. I wrote grant proposals for anti-apartheid organizations in South Africa, under apartheid, and that felt more tied into the world than someone writing a protest letter to The New York Times<\/em>. I did get to, at least in that period of my life, know people who were in the third world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That shows up in The Border Kingdom<\/em>. It seems like your Rikers Island experiences show up there, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, there\u2019s also Leaving Xaia<\/em>. It reflects a trip I took to El Salvador, as a journalist, during the height of the war. Incidentally, I used my initial [D. instead of Dennis] because when I was writing as a young writer, there were times when I was working for UNICEF or various organizations and was a consultant for refugee services. I wanted to keep the poetic response separate from the journalistic response, which was supposed to be objective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leaving Xaia<\/em> is really interesting because it feels a little closer to reality, but there\u2019s a surreal feel to some of those poems. Could you speak to the creation of imaginary places that are more real than real?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s something that\u2019s always fascinated me. I was born here, but I tend to say my parents were refugees and that might be a little bit of an exaggeration. They weren\u2019t like people leaving Syria, but they did leave Europe on one of the last boats out of Portugal and came here to escape fascism, which is to say, I grew up in America with language around me that reflected huge events. As a kid, I knew there were really important things happening in these distant countries, knew they had really influenced my parents, and my parents didn\u2019t want to talk about it because it was traumatic for them. So I had the sense of a hidden reality taking place in countries that were literally inaccessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father was Estonian. He probably didn\u2019t have US nationality when I was born. My mother had dual French and British citizenship, but Estonia was a place I couldn\u2019t go back to because it was communist at that time. So I grew up with my father having come from a place I could only imagine. There was a lot of traveling in my family. A lot of people had been displaced. Some of them were affluent. Some were dirt poor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, in my reading I was very influenced by Henri Michaux, the French poet. I think, actually, he\u2019s influenced a lot of American poets, though he doesn\u2019t get star billing. It\u2019s very interesting to me now because he was writing in the late \u201930s and early \u201940s in Europe, so he was seeing how discourse was changing in a society with totalitarian leanings. It was something he really responded to as a poet, and not in an ideological way, but in a poetic way. He\u2019s also the author of a book about an imaginary travel arc where he visits imaginary countries and looks at their strange customs. Technically, that\u2019s called defamiliarization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s something that interests me a lot in poetry\u2014you invent a completely imaginary world. The reader approaches a completely imaginary world, and they\u2019re dealing with things, like the midterms in Florida, that are not in the imaginary world, and people start to see them for their strangeness. We\u2019re an infinitely adaptable species. Warm the water a little bit and we\u2019re happy to be boiled alive. The role of literature in general is to restore the strangeness of being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COBB<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a lot of poems dealing with wars it\u2019s not clear what war it is, and it\u2019s really far away. The closeness we do get is when the speaker is in the draft office, but they\u2019re not usually on the battlefield. I\u2019m curious about your use of distance to evaluate war and what you\u2019re doing through that distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of that has to do with my own experience in the war I actually did see, the war in El Salvador. It was, frankly, for about ten days that I was in the war zone and saw people shooting at each other\u2014but it wasn\u2019t for very long. The rest of my life has been, and very much in America has been, that issue of distance. I think as a poet you may be trying to critique or supplement the media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Certainly, a lot in my youth was determined by the Vietnam War. It was interesting that in the Vietnam War there were far more images of war than there are now. An efficient job has been done of suppressing those images, though some are becoming available over the internet. But TV news used to show massacres. And you would wonder if they were desensitizing people or whether they were informing people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve had the same wonder about the videos you see of people of color being shot by the police. To see somebody being shot seems like a radical infringement on their privacy. At the same time, it feels very necessary that people should know. That seems like a deep ambiguity. Not to be glib, but those are the kind of ambiguities that poetry exists for, because poetry isn\u2019t claiming to tell you the truth. It\u2019s claiming to give you both the reaction and the critique of that reaction, or a reaction that you could critique as a reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have a poem where a guy is digging his own grave, \u201cBen Adan.\u201d Kimberly and I were just talking about this and trying to figure out where the origin of this might have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s probably one of the few questions I can answer that has a very specific origin. It\u2019s Bagram air base around 2003, the beginning of US involvement in wars in Muslim countries and how those wars were carried out. It was a very specific example of an interrogation technique where people were being interrogated by a mock execution. It\u2019s a complex thing because the mock execution is a little bit of an appropriation of the person\u2019s death, as well as their life, saying, I have the power to kill you but not kill you. You survive the mock execution entirely because of somebody else\u2019s choice, so it trivializes your stoicism and your willingness to die. It\u2019s based on an actual case of a guy who was, I think, a taxi driver, and I think he was interrogated for taking somebody who our military was after to their destination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That poem is trying to get into ambiguities of power relationships, and even ambiguities of what you might call colonial relationships. There\u2019s a kind of hope for a resolution, too. It\u2019s trying to look at the power relationship and then give it the possibility of changing in any amount of ways\u2014that the person who\u2019s being interrogated is able to see the humanity of the person who\u2019s interrogating\u2014it\u2019s possible that it\u2019ll work both ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHERIDAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things that was closer to home for us was 9\/11. I think you and I were both in New York when it happened. It shifted the atmosphere for a long while. It seems like distance helps in writing about an event. I\u2019m wondering if you were able to write about it immediately or if it took time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of those things took time. For Leaving Xaia<\/em>, I was a poet who\u2019d gone down and seen this war zone and thought I\u2019d write about it\u2014forget about the revisions, it was about a year before I started writing about it. And certainly it took a lot of time to just write about 9\/11\u2014 also, a lot of drafts, a lot of false starts. I probably have a thousand pages of notes and files, and there\u2019s no book I wrote about 9\/11\u2014it might be a total of ten poems\u2014and I fictionalized it or dreamt about it in lots of different ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You write a lot about famine. I\u2019m curious about your experience of it, your witness of it, or the interplay between what you write about and the reality of it for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I idolized my father, but people did tell me that growing up in Estonia, he didn\u2019t have enough to eat. Somebody in my family told me they would send him to the store to buy food on credit, and he would be hungry, so he would buy extra food and eat it without telling his parents. Then the bill came due at the end of the month, and there were all these other charges, and they beat the shit out of him. That really got to me as a little kid. So that might be where it\u2019s from because otherwise I\u2019ve been in one war zone but haven\u2019t been in famine zones, so I don\u2019t have any direct experience with it. Then again, my father was also very interested in poverty. He was an economist, but he was not a Wall Street economist. He was interested in poor countries and third world countries. When he was still alive, I remember him going to India and seeing poverty in India, and my mother was worried: would he be able to handle what he saw?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are a few poems where there\u2019s a couple and there\u2019s a war in the backdrop. In an interview about Love in the Last Days<\/em> you said that maybe love isn\u2019t about obedience, but it\u2019s the opposite of obedience. And then, in some ways Love in the Last Days<\/em> is apocalyptic. I wondered what role you see love playing as an opposition or as a part of our healing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a huge issue in my work, the couple. I think, Well, maybe that\u2019s my parents<\/em>. Because they were both uprooted by war, left their lives, came to this country, and had memories of war they didn\u2019t talk about. Maybe as a writer I\u2019m trying to just enter that silence and imagine what\u2019s in there. But it\u2019s also a huge issue in my own life. I\u2019ve written a lot of poems about marriage and war, weaving together contrary moments. Obviously, there\u2019s a way marriage gets infiltrated by war, can replicate some of the things of war, and then there\u2019s another way where maybe I\u2019m seeing the couple as an emblem of humanity\u2014they don\u2019t offer a solution to war, but it\u2019s a humane situation in contrast to war. In Judaism, from the very late 18th century, there\u2019s Rabbi Nachman\u2019s proverb: every relationship is infiltrated by the struggles of nations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHERIDAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did you get involved with teaching at Rikers Island?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s something I always wanted to do. I wanted to teach in prison. When I was a kid, I would read Etheridge [Knight\u2019s] poem, \u201cThe Idea of Ancestry,\u201d and it\u2019s a poem I still teach. It\u2019s very much a poem by a prisoner about being in prison, a combination of strong emotion, repression, fear, time on your hands. I thought poetry would be a useful tool for prisoners or would be something I could do that would be useful, rather than just try to help some middle-class kid get into college, or some middle-class kid get into grad school, or help a middle-class kid get a job in the local community college. And it was. It was like anything else. I had five prisoners there, and maybe one was a real poet, three \u201cgot\u201d poetry, and one wanted none of it. But that was fine. I mean, that\u2019s also true of one in five poets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But yours is a logistics question. For a while I had a really good hook-up. I became friends with people who were in a nonprofit that had a subcontract with the Board of Ed to provide GED instruction to minors on Rikers Island. I was the enrichment section teaching poetry so there was no subterfuge in what I was doing. I could just call up the librarian at Rikers anytime and say, \u201cI\u2019d like to do a three-day residency this week,\u201d and he would say, \u201cFine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem was the guards. Not all of them\u2014even among the prison guards, there\u2019d be one guard who really got poetry and would come to workshops and be like, I want to be a poet, not a prison guard. But mostly, the guards were very obviously opposed to the kids being able to articulate what happened to them. It was very instructive to the political climate because you saw how totalitarian situations need to create chaos. You know, one day I would go to Rikers Island and they would say, \u201cDennis, you said those Giants were gonna win and they won. Just walk right on in.\u201d And I would walk right on in. And the next day they would say, \u201cYou don\u2019t have form 342, we\u2019re gonna have to strip search you.\u201d And it would be the same people. Whether they were doing it deliberately or out of an unconscious playbook, it was to keep everybody permanently destabilized: The truth is what I say it is. Which means I have to say something radically different today from what I said yesterday because otherwise truth is just precedent. And I\u2019m no more powerful than a judge or a lawyer or a parent whose being consistent, so if yesterday I had to say, \u201cYou need Form 342,\u201d today my demonstration of power will be, \u201cWalk in and help yourself to coffee.\u201d But it always has to be what I\u2019m saying in this moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It helped me to understand the situation we\u2019re in now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COBB<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an environment that\u2019s consistently destabilizing, can poetry be a force that offers stabilization?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it can. It can at least be a force where people can understand their own humanity and have a little space outside the endless conflict. I was moved by some of the prisoners at Rikers Island. I remember a conversation with four kids\u2014and I wonder if I\u2019m slightly romanticizing it as I say it\u2014but I remember these four prisoners. One said, \u201cLast night I woke up in the middle of the night, at 3 a.m., and had a poem in my mind. I really wanted to write it down. But the guard would have jumped on me, so I just had to stay there and try to memorize it until now.\u201d And another prisoner says, \u201cOh you did? I did, too!\u201d And the third person says, \u201cWow, you guys, you woke up . . . ? Me too!\u201d The fourth guy says, \u201cTwo of you, the three of you . . . I woke up with a poem at 3 a.m.!\u201d James Baldwin said, and I\u2019m paraphrasing, \u201cThrough books I learned that the things that most tormented me were actually the things that most connected me to all the people in the world who were alive or had ever been alive.\u201d Which is just beautiful. Each of these kids thought his little subjective, imaginary thing was a thing that cut him off from all the other macho kids. They maybe weren\u2019t writing the same poem, but each was writing a poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was there a poet or writer you taught to folks in prison who was a catalyst point or was it different for every student?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be honest, this tended to not be a course in literature. The nonprofit was able to publish the best work by students. They created anthologies of work by young poets who were remarkable. I would, of course, teach people like Langston Hughes, but I would also largely give them examples of these kids who write excellent poems. It\u2019s not about grammar and syntax. It\u2019s about imagination, and that tended to be what we worked with. As part of going to the Crusades in the Middle Ages, Richard the Lionhearted was briefly imprisoned in what now would probably be Germany. He wrote a poem about the experience which begins, \u201cNever trust a poem written by a prisoner.\u201d I thought these kids would be like Yes! because it was really a poem about having to speak in code in situations of power. And they were taken by the name Richard the Lionhearted, and the idea that he was a King and also in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fran\u00e7ois Villon, in my opinion, may be one of the greatest poets ever. This guy was a petty thief sentenced to death. He wrote about his pending execution and about being raped by a prison guard. He talks about \u201cbeing penetrated by the dark love\u201d but it\u2019s in a very, very bitter poem. He wrote about being hanged: \u201cMy neck is about to find out how much my ass weighs.\u201d Whoa, pretty powerful. You know, it could be hip-hop, too. The kids could relate to some of that. It\u2019s probably less useful to read these kids poems about the coming of spring in a small New England village. We had this nice liberal social worker who gave these kids an uplifting talk about Nelson Mandela. One of the kids said, \u201cWhy is she talking about all that? Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner, but we\u2019re just petty thieves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kids told me, \u201cDennis, promise us you won\u2019t go to prison. You couldn\u2019t handle it.\u201d That\u2019s pretty sweet, isn\u2019t it? Also, the racism of it is just inconceivable. They would say to me, \u201cDennis, do you also teach in any of the white prisons?\u201d And I would have to tell them, \u201cThere aren\u2019t any white prisons in New York. There\u2019s just this. There are white schools, white hospitals, white social clubs, but they don\u2019t have white prisons in New York.\u201d In New York it\u2019s going to be all people of color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, believe me, I saw my privileged kids at Sarah Lawrence who felt it was their constitutional right to smoke a joint while there were kids in Rikers Island who had been busted for that. There was a kid there who had been busted off parole for riding a bicycle without a headlight at night. There was a kid, who was a child, who shot a gun into the air on a roof on New Year\u2019s Eve. Nobody said he was shooting at anybody, and he did maybe a year and a half in Rikers Island. Then there were all the kids who were facing trial. Some of them hadn\u2019t committed a crime. They get brought in and they get put in jail for years, and then the DA says, \u201cWell, if you plead guilty, you can go home. If you want a juried trial, you\u2019re gonna be in here for another X months.\u201d And they deal with it, but some, like 93 percent of the cases, do not actually go to trial. They get plea bargained\u2014which is true throughout the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You write about ambiguity and imaginary places. I\u2019m thinking about the spaces you talked about in Voices Over Water<\/em> and Love in the Last Days<\/em>. There\u2019s a magical space where love happens and it\u2019s in the forest. It\u2019s like history allows you into a more magical space, and I wonder about what that relationship is: how do you enter that space and why is it the forest?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My book is very different from the original myth, Tristan & Iseult, but I\u2019m still trusting the wisdom of the original myth. In the original myth, there are these forests that stand for psychological states\u2014that part I didn\u2019t make up. In the original myth, there\u2019s a forest of love and a forest of enchantment. I love those ideas. As a poet, I don\u2019t want to be just a pure materialist; I want some room for things that are transformative or profoundly unexpected. Love in the Last Days <\/em>is kind of an anti-heroic treatment of the myth, and the hero is delusional. He wants to be\u2014and I think there\u2019s a certain psychological truth to this\u2014he wants to be close to his lover, so he must impress her. And by continually trying to impress her, rather than being himself, he drives her nuts. He\u2019s just constantly overcoming trials that are more and more imaginary. She\u2019s like, \u201cWhy can\u2019t he just catch a rabbit? I\u2019d like him just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Love in the Last Days<\/em>, and other books as well, I\u2019m sure there\u2019s an amount of research that goes into drafts. Some writers like to saturate themselves with the research and others are like Richard Hugo, who said in an interview he intentionally halts himself at a certain point in research so he has more space to play with it. Where do you fall on that research spectrum and how you go about researching?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a very important question because I think there are a lot of real world issues that poets could really benefit from researching. I was once sitting next to Mark Strand at a bar, and he said to me, \u201cDennis\u2014I should be writing more about the real world!\u201d and um, no one believes that. I think there are a lot of poets who do research, but poetry could up its claim by doing scientific and naturalistic research. Obviously, we\u2019ve moved into a world that\u2019s really unknown to all of us, and some of the language that will make it decodable is scientific, and some of it is psychological; I really think the culture could enter those worlds more. But, then, I did a lot of research for Burnt Island<\/em>, which ends in the voice of sea creatures, marine creatures. At the time, I was writing in response to 9\/11, and it seemed like the options were really creepy fundamentalism and consumerism, which was really joyless also. Then, I started to read about nature and realized there are spiders that live miles above the earth on winged currents. They just blow on the wind and mate in the wind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lynn Margulis wrote a book called Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth<\/em> about life on earth, maybe four or five hundred pages long: mammals take up about a paragraph, humans take up about a pause. The largest creatures on earth are fungal networks. You have bacteria that have survived from the origins of the planet, when the sky was sulfur, and they still can only breathe sulfur. They\u2019ll die in oxygen, and they\u2019re living creatures that live in sulfur springs because they\u2019re so ancient. All of those things are really fascinating, and they\u2019re more interesting than a bunch of terrorists or a bunch of advertising executives. All of that is very spiritual to me. I don\u2019t see any contradiction between the astonishing ways life imagines itself and the idea of a spiritual existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me say a little bit more about that question of research: poems do wander from a dreamlike part of the mind. I have felt that contradiction, and I did feel that very much in writing Love in the Last Days<\/em>. You intuit that there\u2019s an obstacle between the research and the poetry. There were poems drafted at 3 a.m. that woke me up. And then I worked and worked. And there were other places in the narrative where I needed a poem, but I wasn\u2019t feeling it. And yet, the research structure meant I had to write that poem. It took me forever to write the poem the narrative called for. It would just feel so lame. It took me forever to get the volitional poem to feel as if it was a spontaneous poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t help but think about M\u00e1rquez\u2019s Nobel Peace Prize speech where he goes into this litany of all the real things in the world that are so bizarre that they seem not real\u2014because he\u2019s a journalist and a magical realist at the same time\u2014and I was thinking about how hyperreal your work is in terms of its context, and yet, how deep image and mythical it is, that you go further in both directions. Maybe you\u2019ve already spoken to this, but is there anything else you might add?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is just an aside, but when I was a kid, I was in Colombia, and traveling makes you realize how genuine these things are, because Colombia was a magical realism country. It was full of things that boggle the mind. A Japanese tourist who was a dentist got the idea of leading a guerilla band and organized a guerilla band and fled into the mountains. It just seemed so unpredictable; they seemed like they came out of a novel. It\u2019s interesting\u2014and this has to do with something entirely different\u2014the concepts of experiments and classicism: in a way Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez is a classicist. He was writing at a time when people thought the future of the novel was in French experimentalists. You read these really dense novels that are frankly really hard to read and M\u00e1rquez is saying, \u201cLet me write a fascinating love story that\u2019s going to be experimental,\u201d and it worked. The experimental label is so often given to more cerebral work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COBB<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m interested in your use of religious language, and particularly I\u2019m thinking of The Fall<\/em> as a book title, and then within The Fall <\/em>there\u2019s the poem \u201cBorn Again.\u201d You\u2019re taking these terms that are defined in one particular way by religious institutions and you\u2019re re-imagining them into something else and defining them in a different way. Can you talk more about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that\u2019s absolutely true of my work, and it doesn\u2019t stop being true. Some of it is personal. I grew up reading the Bible, and it influenced me. My dad was definitely an agnostic, but these things were important to me. I remember being a little kid and reading about the sacrifice of Abraham. I marched into my dad\u2019s study\u2014he was in the middle of important work\u2014and I said, \u201cDad\u2014explain this! Are you gonna fucking kill me?\u201d He really wanted to say, \u201cIt\u2019s all okay,\u201d but at the same time he wanted me find out for myself, so his explanation seemed really unconvincing to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, there is something that fascinates me in Christianity, in Judaism, and in Buddhism. I\u2019m not Jewish, but I studied these texts with a Rabbi for maybe eight years, an Orthodox Rabbi in a small group of Rabbis. They fascinated me and it fascinated me as textual analysis\u2014they had such a wide range of analysis they were allowed in that culture. Adam named the animals\u2014does that mean he had sexual relationship with the animals? They consider everything in ways that were really very free but that get to some questions about the sacred and narrative that are at the root of being human. I think my dog must live way more than I do, but my dog is probably not as obsessed with putting it into story. To humans, stories and metaphor are really ways of knowing things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COBB<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So then, is poetry for you, at least sometimes, a participation in that Jewish tradition of Midrash and imagining stories in different ways?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, at times, and I\u2019m also influenced by the Christian tradition. When I was a kid I did read the gospels, and I was told \u201cthis is literature that has importance to your life.\u201d It\u2019s not necessarily that I agreed with all of it, but it was an example of literature that was supposed to change my life in some way. Not that I was going to go to church. My dad died when I was eight, but I was super close to my dad, and he definitely was kind of an anti-Christian. Maybe this is an overshare, but when he was a kid, his family would go to church, get very riled up by the idea of sin, and they\u2019d come home and put the poker in the fire and beat him with the poker because he was a sinner. He was like, \u201cThis is a crock.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My mom was a Hindu for a while. This was before the New Age thing was fashionable. She was interested in Hinduism, in the idea of the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, of the action that expects no reward. In the Mahabharata<\/em>, the hero has fought the evil enemy all his life, and he\u2019s fighting for good. The evil enemy has been fighting for evil and everyone is being decimated\u2014both sides are being decimated. The worst of it is the hero had to do horrible things fighting evil. He\u2019s had to kill innocent people and burn their houses. Everything is over, and he\u2019s finally won at a terrible cost. He\u2019s going to Paradise, and all he has left is his little dog. And he goes to the gates of Paradise, and he hears all this feasting and carousing, and he\u2019s really turned off. Why are all these people just feasting and carousing in paradise? You know, they\u2019re supposed to be playing harps\u2014and they\u2019re singing dirty songs. The guard at Paradise says, \u201cWell, those are all your enemies. They\u2019re in paradise, too.\u201d The hero says, \u201cBut they were evil, they were terrible!\u201d And the guardian of Paradise says, \u201cYeah, but God made them. It was their nature to be evil\u2014they were just acting in accordance with their evil. So they\u2019re in Paradise.\u201d And the hero says, \u201cOh my God\u2014sigh\u2014I guess I better go in. There\u2019s nothing left, but I have to go into Paradise.\u201d The guard of Paradise says, \u201cWait a minute. No dogs in paradise. That little mangy dog can\u2019t come with you.\u201d And that\u2019s the last straw. The hero says, \u201cOK, I give up, I\u2019m not going to Paradise\u2014I\u2019m just going to wander off into the desert.\u201d He wanders off into the desert, and the little dog says, \u201cThat was a good call because I am Krishna, Lord of the Universe. And this story is to tell you that there is no Paradise!\u201d That was why my mom was interested in Hinduism. You do the good deed, but you expect no reward. Once you expect\u2014I\u2019m going to go to Paradise, the other person\u2019s going to go to Hell\u2014that just gets you into objectification. You can\u2019t help but start to objectify the people around you . . . who, say, voted Republican.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your father died when you were eight, and those poems run from the first book to the last book. Can you address the way loss shapes your poems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, there\u2019s future work that goes back and revisits that, too. I think it\u2019s just what makes poetry important rather than something you would do for recognition or validation. Maybe you\u2019ve been talking to somebody all your life, and then from one moment to the next they\u2019re absent, and you have to recreate that. Maybe all of poetry is just imagining another voice that answers you when nobody answers you. I had wanted to be a poet before his death, but I think it was a rupture in my life. I don\u2019t want to overdo it, but my father waved goodbye to me and I was this little too-cool-for-school eight-year-old, and I didn\u2019t wave back. I thought, Tonight I\u2019ll hug him. I didn\u2019t wave back because my little eight-year-old friends were there, and one of them was the star of the soccer team, and I didn\u2019t want to seem lame waving at my shabbily dressed old father. And there was no tonight. And I didn\u2019t see him again. He\u2019d never been sick, but he died. That gave me a sense of the cost of not saying something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think everybody has an experience like that in their lives. That\u2019s just the nature of love. I think a lot of poetry is<\/em>, by definition, the things you would say if you weren\u2019t really a real person living a real life. They\u2019re the things you would say to your partner, which romantically is \u201cI love you\u201d but might feel a lot more complicated than \u201cI love you.\u201d And the things you would say instead of \u201cHoney, have you seen my toothbrush?\u201d The things we just postpone saying to each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUCKINGHAM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The little dog . . . your work has so many inanimate objects speaking and characters that we don\u2019t expect to speak speaking. Can you talk about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m interested in poetry as the creation of a decoy self. Even if you\u2019re writing a poem about your first marriage and how strange your first wife seemed\u2014if you have to write that kind of poem, you\u2019re still creating a decoy self who is not a real self. For me, it\u2019s the self that people see from a distance. I get into this research that allows more subjects in poems, allows different speakers, and allows more freedom to the poet. This is something I think I\u2019ve benefited from by being a teacher. I would find students who were very inhibited. They didn\u2019t want to hurt a family member. There were students who were able to write about things that were taboo by writing, This is a poem in the voice of a pencil sharpener.<\/em> I gave the assignment to the students to help them, and then I learned from what they were doing with the assignments. But I\u2019ve also been interested in poems that use inanimate objects. One example is the riddle. It\u2019s an old, human form. An old Anglo-Saxon riddle is: twenty white horses on a red hill\u2014who am I? And the answer will be the teeth in the mouth. While they seem like puzzles, and they are, they\u2019re also projections of the self into some really unlikely area and having that unlikely area speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That reminds me of an activity we did with Laura Kasischke. She said, \u201cWrite about a white room. You\u2019re in a white room and it\u2019s silent.\u201d Then, later on in the activity she says, \u201cWhat you wrote about is your death.\u201d So you could apply that afterwards because you were able to say all these things about the white room and then\u2014I\u2019m sure you can apply anything\u2014but that\u2019s your death. That\u2019s what\u2019s going on with the inanimate objects, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It definitely is. Since a coffee cup by definition has no unconscious, when you\u2019re writing from the point of view of a coffee cup, you\u2019re probably liberating your own unconscious. I\u2019m interested in animals, too\u2014maybe personally I just had a closer relationship with animals than I expected to. I\u2019m not Buddhist, I don\u2019t question killing a fly. But if there\u2019s a little fly on me, I\u2019m thinking, \u201cHmm, could be my Grandma.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve been talking about ambiguity within poems, or in narratives, and intuition within the writing and reading. I noticed when you use a lot of narrative within your work, it often seems to push beyond and into the realm of parable. Was that conscious? Or what do you think are some elements of parable? I\u2019m thinking allegory more as X equals Y, so this story has this lesson, and it can\u2019t be looked at differently, whereas parable has a larger ambiguity to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The whole question of parable is interesting because there\u2019s a meaning but also withholding. Within the Christian tradition, there\u2019s a very simple story, but half the people are not supposed to get it, so there is a question of meaning becoming volatile. Meaning is not something that\u2019s static. In this sentence I\u2019m going to withhold it; in this sentence I\u2019m going to give you some of it. So it\u2019s almost like meaning becomes a fire, like a volatile, spiritual quality rather than something definable. In the Jewish tradition, a story will be a paragraph long, and there will be volumes written about what it contains. That\u2019s because the meaning is correlated with time, and the meaning is correlated with the person who reads it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kafka has this quote about parables where he says, \u201cIf you really studied the parables, then you would become a parable, and you wouldn\u2019t have any more problems.\u201d Kafka\u2019s approach to it was really very simple and very complicated at the same time. I think that\u2019s a very hip differentiation\u2014that allegories do seem kind of like, this is just me dressing up as a pirate when I am dressing up as pirate. You know it\u2019s meant to be solved, whereas a parable has that kind of volatility where at different times in your life, it\u2019s going to have very different meanings to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COBB<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you see a connection between parable and riddle and the inhabiting of inanimate objects?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Definitely. Not to be cheesy, but a lot of this has to do with the subject-object relationship. It fascinates me that our basic syntax in our language\u2014and not necessarily in other languages\u2014is either I or Me. In Vietnamese, I can be neither I nor Me. I would be \u201caging poet\u201d or \u201cGrandfather.\u201d I\u2019d speak of myself in the third person. We can kind of never be both. Once you consider yourself, you\u2019re either the subject or the object of consciousness. If you\u2019re the object of consciousness, you can\u2019t be the subject of consciousness. And if it\u2019s your own consciousness, if you\u2019re the subject, you can\u2019t be the object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do think parables are the riddles. It\u2019s not that I think somebody who doesn\u2019t understand writing would say, \u201cThey\u2019re being unnecessarily obscure or deliberately obscure.\u201d I think it\u2019s more that they\u2019re inhabiting the tension between \u201cI\u2019m being seen or I\u2019m seeing.\u201d The parable is somewhere in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a way, the riddle really takes place between the riddle and the answer. There\u2019s a change in the frame, a change in the psychological frame, and the point isn\u2019t really the answer. The point is that the frame has changed. You had a chance to see yourself from a distance. This is something that I\u2019ve quoted a lot in my life, but Ralph Waldo Emerson says in an essay on poetry, \u201cWhen we\u2019re in one thought, we\u2019re stuck in that thought, we\u2019re infinitely far from the next thought; therefore, we love the poet.\u201d That\u2019s kind of a simplification. I don\u2019t know exactly what he means, but I\u2019m extrapolating: poetry is our way of escaping the monologue of consciousness since we\u2019re trapped in associations of ideas. And that is the importance of revision, too, because you\u2019re writing poems not written by you on Friday morning. They\u2019re written by all the different yous over the three months or years and become something different, even if it\u2019s just a very simple sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHERIDAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview, you answered the question, \u201cWhat do you like least about being a writer?\u201d Part of what you said was, \u201cI can\u2019t free myself of the temptation to measure myself by external standards especially in the parkade of the internet.\u201d Can you speak to those external standards?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s almost as if part of being a writer now is having a Facebook page, and I don\u2019t do that. The internet throws back at you a lot of reflections of yourself. I\u2019m human like everybody else. I\u2019ll google my reviews and they will come back to me. If it\u2019s a good review, I\u2019ll feel great, and if it\u2019s a bad review, I\u2019ll feel horrible. That is more of a constant pressure than twenty years ago. My publisher might say to me, \u201cWell, Dennis, here\u2019s a new review.\u201d Now it\u2019s like I\u2019m expected to google it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do think technology is changing people\u2019s brains. Even to me, I find it\u2019s slowly mulling holes in my brain; just after this interview, I\u2019ll go up to my room and I\u2019ll turn on my cell phone. It\u2019s not just a world with no privacy from the government, but it\u2019s a world where we have no privacy from ourselves, where if you\u2019re walking in the magic forest of love, it\u2019s like the trees aren\u2019t saying anything, but if you turn on your cell phone, it\u2019s speaking to you directly. This is nothing new that I\u2019m saying, but it\u2019s like a chemical hit you get every time that happens, and it\u2019s like being addicted to your own saliva; you\u2019re addicted to that little adrenaline charge. I find the whole thing totally scary. It\u2019s something that I\u2019ve tried to write about a little bit more in forthcoming prose work, but, yeah, I do find it terrifying and it\u2019s scary to my life. It\u2019s like creating a world without absence in it. You realize how important it is to have things like absence and death and distance because this world that we\u2019ve created is kind of hell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe there\u2019s a story of Saint Theresa of Lisieux, and she prays all her life for the conversion of Satan because she can\u2019t stand the idea that Satan doesn\u2019t know the love of God. You aren\u2019t supposed to do that. You\u2019re not supposed to spend your whole life empathetic with Satan; in fact, in Dante it says that the saints have no pity for the damned. Well here\u2019s this little girl\u2014because she died when she was about eighteen\u2014who feels terrible pity for Satan, and they ask her about hell and she says, we know hell exists because human beings created it and for all we know, it [hell] is empty, which seems like a radical answer. And all they can do is kick her upstairs and make her a saint. She visits with the poor and the people with tuberculosis, and she exposes herself and dies at a young age and is obviously all her life enraptured with love, so they\u2019ve got to make her a saint. But you know I do think they, and we, are doing this good job of creating a hell for ourselves, a hell where we more and more see ourselves being punished and tormented, just like how all the worst parts of ourselves are externalized forever on the internet. I\u2019m just assuming the human race will rebel against that, but I\u2019m not going to live to see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SHERIDAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point you were a street musician and I was wondering what instrument you played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NURKSE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I played the flute. And I still play the flute. I played the flute last night trying not to be too loud in my hotel room. I try not to play too loud. Along with studying with a Rabbi, I played gospel with a bunch of black inner-city musicians in Brooklyn. We did a little CD. A couple of the tracks are still pretty nice. I\u2019m trying not to exploit that and write my self-deprecating but warm memoir about the experience, you know? Just let it be. But it is important to me. Poetry is amazing, music is pretty amazing, too: meaning that people from a thousand different cultures hear. Dah duh dah duh, dah duh dah duh, I think it means something to all of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE POETRY OF D. NURKSE is hauntingly honest. It\u2019s resonant with generosity, vulnerability, and love for the world while being rooted in unflinching observations of reality and justice. He makes magic of myths, nature, family, and the gritty stoops of Brooklyn. In a review of A Night in Brooklyn, Philip Levine writes, \u201cHe should be the laureate … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":1674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35991"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35991"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36803,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35991\/revisions\/36803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}