Nikki Wallschlaeger Visits Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Poet Nikki Wallschlaeger meets with Brian Spears and the Rumpus Poetry Book Club to discuss her investment in the sonnet form, especially in her new poetry collection, Crawlspace. The Rumpus's Poetry Book Club meets online every month; after, the website publishes an edited version of their discussion. In response to Brian Spears's initial question about her choice to use the sonnet form, Wallschlaeger writes "I chose it because it operates as a restraint I can work with." Let's pick up with Wallschlaeger's response there:

In the Publishers Weekly review they were spot on about the sonnet being a container for what was going on in each of them—and so were you Brian—to keep them contained.

Brian S: But it’s a restraint you pushed against a lot in the book. Which is the point I guess.

Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes absolutely. I wanted to express how I felt living in the city, beyond what I did with Houses. To explore more of the energy that kept Houses, and its neighborhoods, alive, struggling. The bodies of women especially who keep households alive. So there’s a lot of voices of women in the book—wives, slaves, servants, who are muttering under their breath that became poems of both their interior lives with the exteriors that they labor in.

Brian S: I was really drawn by Sonnet 28, with the references to the 1950s and King Cotton casseroles and basically segregation, I suppose, because I’m seeing that rhetoric so much more in daily life now, more than I did as a much less aware kid in the South.

Nikki Wallschlaeger: That’s one of the strongest poems of the whole book, I think. Growing up, I also remember Bugs Bunny getting knocked out—and birds flying over his head—but what’s been happening with so many cops killing black people for no reason other than being black I felt knocked out

Brian S: That line “I am usually betrayed by teachable moments in the valley” was one I really felt driven by, in part because I’m much more cognizant of my own responsibility to not ignore those moments.

Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes, I don’t want what happens to black lives to just be teachable. I want it to be a part of the same reality as white people, not as just something like a unit in class, because ultimately systemic racism is a human rights issue.

Read more at the Rumpus.