Built Around the Fire
A Conversation with Nathan Lipps
Glen Arbor Arts Center is nestled in the shadow of Mother Bear Dune in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on the west coast of Michigan. In September 2023, I spent two weeks there as a Suzanne Wilson artist in residence. Amid a cadre of visual artists that year, the only other writer was poet Nathan Lipps, an assistant professor at Central State University in Ohio. We exchanged emails, sharing our experiences of drafting and revising in a place of such astonishing natural beauty. We were drawn to the trails and to the shoreline, finding it difficult to stay behind a desk. When I learned he had published a book of poetry, I was eager to discuss the work with him.
Nathan grew up in West Michigan. His book, Built Around the Fire (Stephan F. Austin University Press, 2024) is tuned to the region, examining how change in any form – time, climate, relationships – effect rural landscapes and the people and animals who live on them. With clear eyes, Nathan looks back on his past and toward the future. There is a mournful, distilled quality to the poems that brought to my mind William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, where the farm field – golden and idyllic on its surface – conceals a very different reality.
Sara Maurer: You don’t live in Michigan anymore but many, if not most, of the poems in Built Around the Fire are set there. Was physical or temporal distance necessary for you to compose these poems?
Nathan Lipps: I'm not sure the distance helps because it's in your mind now, right, you're not just looking at it, and so I think that helps with the creativity, but I don't think it was necessary. I spent the first 25 years of my life – maybe even longer, on and off – in Michigan. The only time I ever left was for college until I got this job in Ohio. I still feel like a Michigander. And every poem that has the landscape is a Michigan landscape. I love the Great Lakes, so I don't think I needed the distance because it is almost impossible for me not to write about it. People have those things they can’t escape. A project I'm starting to work on – a longer prose piece – takes place in Michigan, of course.
So, I don't think I needed the distance in location, but maybe the distance in time. Time away, time to grow. For instance, I grew up in a community where we were all hunters. And some of us age out of it, and then you go through this period of time where you think, “That was crazy. We were just killing all these animals. That was insane.” But then you grow past that reaction, and you see it more objectively. And that's where I am now. I can write about it without that youthful pushback and I’m able to look at the characters as they are, more impartially.
SM: Speaking of hunting, I’m a Yooper [resident of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan]. Let’s talk about Dipping for Osmeridae, Upper Peninsula Michigan 1988. I didn’t know what osmeridae was until I looked it up and realized you were talking about smelt! Why did you make that word choice?
NL: One of my early concerns with this poem was the title. How many people know what smelting is or what smelt are? Are they going to think it's a factory process or a sensory thing? I didn’t want to put a word in the title that people were going to gloss over or confuse with something else, so I thought, “I'll put this other word in here that's going to really confuse them and hopefully encourage them to look at it and look it up.” Also, what a beautiful looking word.
SM: The opening lines – They make a fire / along the riverbank / to keep their hands warm / and for something to do – spoke to me because living in the Upper Peninsula is basically all about trying to stay warm and find something to do. First, what’s your smelting story? And second, how do you go about crystalizing in your poetry the essential thing about a place or experience?
NL: When I was a kid, we went on a number of trips to the Upper Peninsula for fishing, but that was always in a boat on a lake. The smelt was something my dad did when I was much younger. He would go with a couple of friends. There’d be a fire and maybe someone would bring a pack of hot dogs and a bunch of Stanley thermoses before they were cool. They were wearing Carhartts and standing around talking about whatever. Probably not politics. It was before 24-hour news. I don’t even know what people talked about back then. It was so nice and boring. They would stand over the river or the stream, dip their nets, and just dump the smelt in buckets. We'd eat on it for months and months. It's got to be the easiest fishing out there.
And then the second part about capturing the essence of a place? I think when you’re a younger writer, you try too hard, and you write in this verbose, dramatic way. You're searching for that simple truth, but it's hard to find because you're circling it. And then in time, you realize: Just say it. Within that, there's lucidity. These are just people standing around, trying to be warm, trying to fill a day with activity, and do that every day until the days are gone. And this is just one of those days.
SM: So, how would younger Nathan have approached this poem versus 40-year-old Nathan?
NL: It would have taken a lot longer to get anywhere. There would have been a lot of words that needed to be cut out, a lot of pretty language building up to a big idea. And then, Just wait! I'm gonna give it to you! And then, when it arrives, it'd be disappointing. Like a little kid who learns how to run and they're so excited, but they keep tripping because they're running faster than their legs can carry them.
SM: I’ve heard poetry described as an invitation into the poet’s shoes to relive an experience for just a moment. And as I read Built around the fire, I felt that invitation again and again: Here is my childhood. Here is my grief. Here are my fears, my memories, doubts. Why is it important for poets to share themselves in this way? What do poets gain from this exchange? What do readers gain?
NL: There's a poet, a Polish poet – he passed away a couple of years ago – Adam Zagajewski, who in an interview said something like, “A good poem tries to capture a moment of lucidity.” Meaning, a moment of revelation or a moment of clarity, which could happen anytime in any situation. When I heard that quote, I connected with it. That's what I feel like I'm trying to do. And hopefully, as I am trying to build that in the poem, the reader will experience that through reading the poem. Just a brief moment of lucidity.
SM: So, it's like a shared enlightenment?
NL: Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of art strives for that: paintings, music. You slow down, you're out of your own head, you have that lucid moment. And the great thing about all those forms of art is you can come back to it and maybe have that feeling again and again. That's why you go and look at the same painting multiple times.
SM: In Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, she says that being familiar with the main body of English poetry – that is, rhyme and meter – is “absolutely essential.” Do you think so? Has the “poetry of the past” as she calls it, influenced your work at all?
NL: I think there are at least at least two different camps. One would agree with Mary Oliver, and one would wave her off. The one I grew up with, as far as my teachers and professors, would say they agree. If you want to be good at your art, you have to pay attention to what came before you, the different eras and techniques, and movements. And then there are a lot of people who would just say, no, start fresh. I'm sure you're familiar with like the Beats, John Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, and how they are an iconic example of what has happened many times where the new generation sort of rebels against what preceded it – like how the Confessionals such as Plath rebelled against the modernists, the cold and distant poets like Elliot. And that's true and we’re probably still doing that today, but I also imagine that even though these generations were rebelling, they still read and knew what came before them. Before you reject the work, you have to know it. So, of course it's good and important to know what came before you, even if you hate it, and it's also just good to have the skills to work with form.
SM: Have any specific poets influenced you?
NL: These days, I don't go back very far in time when I'm reading. I did a lot of that in school. But I would say as far as classic formalists or older writers, I like the Chinese poets from many different eras, like Wang Wei and Li Bo. I'm definitely not an expert in their form and I don't know any of the original language, so I'm just reading translation, but it’s very accessible poetry and still very relevant. There's one line from Wang Wei that sticks with me forever, it's something like, the stream that I'm straddling at this mountain peak is a river in flood somewhere else. It slows you down and brings you towards revelation.
SM: You do use form, though. Some poems in Built Around the Fire are all couplets; you've got some that are in three-, four-, or five-line stanzas. What do you think structure adds to free verse? Does it create some sort of constraint that enhances what you're trying to accomplish?
NL: I think breaking a poem up like that is a tool that the writer can use as far as, How do I want this to be read? How do I want the experience to be felt? How fast do I want it to go? How slow? There are some poems that have just this one long stanza and you read it more quickly and it feels very urgent and intense. The long poem in the book – “Winter” – had many different forms and the most recent is couplets. That's how it felt the best. And I removed all the punctuation. I wanted it just to feel like this ongoing slog but not overwhelming. If it was in huge chunks, it would feel harder to read. Even in prose, sometimes I'm reading something and I'm like, “Thank God for this new paragraph! Or even this new chapter.” So, a paragraph works the same way.
SM: The average length of the poems in Built around the fire is 23 lines. Then, right at the end of section two, you’ve placed your shortest poem, “Grief” (six lines) just before your longest poem, “Winter” (180 lines). What informed your placement of “Grief” and “Winter” beside each other, and within the body of work as a whole?
NL: The shape of the book changed many times before the final version. What order do the poems go in? Do I put it into sections? And what's the point of any of that? But it ended up being the way it is because when some of these poems were written, I was going through a divorce. So, there was that grief and that loss. I wanted to put these two poems together because “Grief” is basically one sentence, and it starts: up here in April / Winter remains in the shade of the woods. You know, longer than we want it to. So, it's setting up “Winter.” Winter remains longer than we want it to; grief remains longer than we want it to.
SM: It's like bringing the reader along into your grief. And then, like all winters, it goes on for quite a while. Can you talk about like how you constructed “Winter?”
NL: Some of it was line by line, a little bit here today, a little bit here tomorrow. Usually, when I write a poem, it might start with an idea or a note or a thought that I wrote down a couple days ago. But when I sit down to write the poem, I usually can get the first draft out right then. And then, it's the process of revising. The end product could be vastly different from that first draft, but still, that draft usually comes out pretty fast once I sit down to really do it. The “Winter” poem was not like that at all. It took a long time, and I wasn't rushing it either. I didn't know what it was going to be. I didn’t know how long it was going to be. I just never ended it. I just let it keep going and going. And then the revision also took a long time.
SM: There’s a sense of accumulation.
NL: Absolutely. And there are parts that I took out. There are probably parts I would still take out. When I read it sometimes, I forget that there's still some parts that I thought I took out because I don't really care for it anymore, but there it is.
SM: Does a poem ever feel done to you?
NL: I would say once the poem has been published, I walk away from it as far as any thought of changing it. Whereas any unpublished poem that I might put into a manuscript, it's still always open to revision, but it's not something I'm actively working on until I sit down and decide to revise the manuscript. And that's just because a year passes and you're a little bit smarter. Usually, I write a poem, draft it, revise it until I think it's pretty much good, and then I don't look at it for a long time unless I'm trying to get it published.
SM: The word “postpone” comes up in “We Are Still Building Beach Houses” and “Singing, Even Now,” poems that address climate change in Michigan’s rural western coast. Other poems suggest a willful ignorance: “…the desire / to simply forget / knowledge…” (“Cost of Living”) or “…A much too well known” (“Storm Newly Common”). How do you think the culture of West Michigan informs this desire to postpone, to ignore, especially in response to climate change?
NL: First of all, it's a nice sounding word, postpone. But, if I look back over poems I’ve written in certain moments, there's going to be a repetition of certain words because those are the words of that time in my life. And that's probably one of the reasons why that's there.
The culture of the place is something that time and distance has made more clear. It's very patriarchal, but in a gentle way, and there's this partial denial of science and facts. I grew up in a religious but in a very loving home, too. The layers are fascinating. Love can make it easier to embrace that denial of what is essentially the huge existential problems that make us want to not know anything. Our parents had the missile crisis, but nothing like what kids today are going through. And it's all there at your fingertips, right on your phone.
Once the news became 24/7, once the Internet was in every room, the older generations like my parents’ generation seemed to become somewhat radicalized. They've become much more political, but in a way that feels ill informed.
When I was a kid, no one was really talking about much. They were just going to work and they talked about money or rain because the crops will fail. It wasn't, Build a wall. In the farming community I grew up in, immigrant labor was always warmly embraced. People would fight to get them to Michigan. And now it seems like it's flipped.
SM: In “Good Poverty,” there’s a wistfulness for the past when the dairy farm was thriving, when there was laughter and youth. It ends with the image of an empty milking bucket. It left me with the sense that the narrator was wishing for the way things were. Is there an inherent goodness in rural life? In being connected to the workings of the earth and animals?
NL: [“Good Poverty”] is the one title of all the poems in this book that I was most worried about, just because to say poverty is good sounds like such a ridiculous, terrible thing to say, which is, of course, not what I'm trying to say at all. To be impoverished is not great. There is some of what you're saying here – wishing for the past – but this poem, what it became, was an ars poetica. So, I'm setting up this stark image, the locust trees, the ruins of a barn and house and where the cattle used to be. Children used to play in the hay mow. Now, it’s all ghosts and echoes. And then: I come here often / as we all do / searching among these old stones / for that loud bucket of fresh milk. And that's me attempting to say, this is where I go to write my poems. I must travel back to this space in my mind. We had beef cows , not dairy , so it's not 100% of biographical, but the sense is true that, especially in the time of writing this book, that you have to travel to that space, to the ruins, to the image of those old trees that you remember vaguely and how they used to look like monsters writhing painfully in the wind. And then going back to that loud bucket of fresh milk, back to something that you can still pull out and present to the world.
SM: Other words that come up a lot are “terror,” “darkness,” and “absence,” particularly in the first half of the book. I'm looking at one example in “Side Work” where the grandfather is divining water with a stick, and you write: …a slender tool allowing / men to forget / the heaviness of our terror. What is the underlying sense of fear, or darkness, that you are trying to address through some of these poems?
NL: That poem is about men drilling for water. It could go two ways. Busy hands quiet the mind, right? So, you're not focused on your terrors. The more you work, the less you think, which is, I believe, very true. But the larger point I'm trying to make is that there are so many man-made, terrible issues with the planet, and yet we still drill, we still decimate ecosystems because people need to make a living and all these other reasons. But we have to find ways to either not think about it while we're doing it or, you know, give in to the terror that we're essentially instilling upon the planet through our work, which have been made necessary for various reasons.
SM: When you wrote to me, you called these sad poems. And there is a sense of sadness, but to me it seems a necessary sadness. Where many characters in the poems are denying reality, you are embracing it and engaging with it rather than pretending it's not there.
NL: I’m always amazed – I know a lot of people that just seem so happy and they're not talking about or thinking about all the sad things. They’re like these little bubbles of joy. And I love joy, and I love being happy. But I don't know – It's bewildering how not everybody is constantly overwhelmed with the larger ontological questions.
SM: Do you think that being attuned to the larger issues that you're talking about feeds your work, or takes away from it?
NL: I think it definitely feeds the work. I think it certainly helps me write a poem. I'm just not sure if it's always helping me write a good poem. You know, like, who is the poem for, right? If it's just for me, then it doesn’t really matter. But if I want other people to read them, sometimes you’ve got to tell a story. Sometimes you’ve got to find other ways to connect with people. You can't constantly dwell upon large philosophical questions, like, what is existence? It definitely gives me a lot to write about, but not always a good thing to in fact write about.
SM: What poet, or what book of poetry, should everyone read (besides Built Around the Fire!)?
NL: Can I give you a couple?
SM: Yeah!
NL: There are so many books. I can never keep up. There are so many books of poems that I haven't even read yet on my bookshelf. I’ll just say, Mary Ruefle. Madness, Rack, and Honey, which is a book of lyrical essays that could almost be read as poems, but I think it's just a great middle ground for people who are looking for either poetry or prose, because it's very poetic.
I'm also currently reading George Oppen. I'm reading his collected. He writes very sparse, objective poems that at first might feel difficult to access, but he was writing poems in the 1940s or 50s. He was associated with the Communist Party when it was a really bad time to do that, and so he fled to Mexico for a few decades and came back and then really started writing again. Very interesting person.
Also, Adam J. Gellings. I know this poet personally. He’s got some great ekphrastic poems, and haunting poems about love and family and the worn streets of Paris. He wrote a book called Little Palace.
Solmaz Sharif if you're looking for a poet that knows how to engage in politics. Very intelligent poet. There’s so much. Her first book was called Look where she uses words from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms in her poems.
I guess one last one that I'm just looking forward to is Tiana Clark. I think her new book’s coming out really soon. But her last book was great. I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. It's about love and race and being a woman in America. She’s a very exciting, very engaging poet, and her new book is coming out soon. My students often have great reactions to her work.
SM: I want to end by talking about how the perspectives of the poems change as the book unfolds. In the beginning, the poems point outward into nature, particularly the farm fields and the woods. In section two, they point inward and are set inside buildings and homes and within personal relationships. In section three, they point upward to the mind and knowledge, to religion and belief. Can you talk about how the point of view of the poems changes as the collection moves from beginning to end?
NL: In Part 1, I'm just trying to introduce certain themes: the environment, the rural landscape, and the idea of love and loss. Like I said earlier, this had many forms, and this is where I landed. If I did it again today, it might be different. Here, the first part was focused more on landscape and then the second part was focused on the course of relationship, beginning – even before the beginning – to the end. Those poems were initially spread out and I just wanted to put them together. It made more sense to make that a siloed kind of experience. Then the question was, how do I move on from that? And so, I did try to get more cerebral or philosophical and open up at the end.
The last poem, which is maybe the oldest poem in the book, is almost 100% a lived experience, even if there's nothing really to say about it. It's just a guy or person in their kitchen. But I was living in this little apartment above a restaurant in Ludington, Mich. And thinking about the idea that before death, the implication would be that before death is life. And so that's really what it's about. It's acknowledging that death is the end, but you know, life is before that. And so, it was trying to be a poem that is gratitude and praise of essentially being alive in this simple act of here in the kitchen, there's fruit, there's a bird somewhere, and it's just nice. It's just really nice. Isn't it nice to be alive in such a simple moment?
SM: Thank you, Nathan.
Nathan Lipps: Nathan Lipps is the author of Built Around the Fire and the body as passage. His work has been published in the Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Cleaver, EcoTheo Review, North American Review, TYPO, and elsewhere. He currently teaches at Central State University. More about Nathan and his writing can be found at nathanlipps.com.