We recently spoke with poet Eric Pankey about his new Slant book, Vanishments

Tell me about the book’s title, Vanishments.

The lyric poem tends to be about a moment of perception, recognition, or understanding, a moment held still for the instant of the poem that one might attend, focus, and meditate upon it. The nature of a moment is that it is momentary, it flees as we apprehend it: a vanishment.

In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance. With a bit of language, I attempt to give shape to the ineffable, that which is beyond words.

As well, the ecological reality we find ourselves in at this moment in history is a realm of vanishings. Extinctions. The ice caps melting. The climate as we once knew it irretrievable. In the triptych of books I published in the 1990s—Apocrypha, The Late Romance, and Cenotaph, I was drawn to and investigated the theological notion of eschatology. A quarter of a century later, the idea of the last days seems now not a mythical or religious construct, but the actual habitation humans have made for themselves.

In the last decade, you have published three collections of prose poetry and a book of essays. In what way do you see the poems in Vanishments as a reaction to so much time spent in the genre of prose?

As I began work on the poems in Vanishments, I was well aware, after an intense focus on prose, that I longed to return to a method of making lyric poems that is best exemplified by two of my earlier books, Apocrypha and Oracle Figures, poems that I hope are at once lush on the surface and bone-spare, poems that make their argument through the juxtaposition of images, poems that rely more on the effects of disjuncture and fragmentation than on the rhetoric of sentence-making. I wanted the poems to be beautiful on the tongue and austere in ornament. The poems in Vanishments are even more whittled-back than the poems in the two earlier books mentioned. The book employs a great deal of white space which, I hope, like gravity holds things, at once, together and apart.

Reviewers over the years have noted that one of your primary subjects has been a confrontation with faith and doubt. Is that true and if so, do you see that continuing in Vanishments?

Faith and doubt, the nature of the divine, and the sad condition of my soul, have been and continue to be a focus of my lyric meditations, but I think in this book, those subjects are approached at more of a slant than, say, in my most recent book of verse poems, Not Yet Transfigured.

I have written elsewhere about my Christian faith in an essay called “To Repair the Material of Experience.” My faith, when it has existed, is often momentary, a kind of clarity or insight, a revelation. But mostly, I stumble through the world burdened by doubt, and thus my work tends toward the lyric conventions of the elegy or the lament.

The gospels, so frequently confronted in my earlier books, come up directly in only one poem in this book, called “Evening Commotion,” a poem dedicated to the poet, philosopher, and translator H. L. Hix. I wrote the poem after reading his recent and amazing translation of the gospels, The Gospel According to H. L. Hix, in which he includes both canonical and non-canonical gospel stories into a single, continual telling of the life of Jesus. It is a book I have been waiting for my whole life—complex, moving, and surprising at every turn.

The poems in the book’s final section are all ekphrasis—poems in response to works of art. What draws you to this lyric subgenre?

One of my favorite things to do is to look at art. Much of what I read is about art and artists. This has been true all my adult life. Along the way, I chose poetry over the visual arts as my primary practice (thanks to the encouragement of many great teachers along the way), but my interest in art never diminished.

When I travel, I see all the art I can see wherever I am. When I wake up in the morning, I first read Poetry Daily online and then I turn to sites that focus on visual arts—Hyperallergic, Ocula, Contemporary Art Daily and such. When I am at residencies, I love to hear the artists talk about their practice and methods and I seem to learn more from them in conversation about the art of poetry than I do from the other writers, whose company and example I cherish as well.

With ekphrasis, I want to be in conversation with the art and the artist. My desire is not to describe the work, but to confront its evocative presence, assertions, and innovations, to react to it, which might mean interrogating its composition, or creating a narrative in which the work might exist, or to attempt to bring its visual formal elements over into a genre burdened by its limited medium—words—which unlike color or line are so tied to meaning.

Of these ekphrastic poems, do you have a favorite?

Such feelings change day to day. In reading one’s own poems, one recalls all too often what one was not able to do, what one settled for.

Today, I would say the final poem “Departures.” Emmi Whitehorse is the artist whose work is newest to me, and we have had the good fortune to buy a small painting and a larger print of hers and get to live in the radiance of her work daily, which is a treat. As well my wife, Jennifer Atkinson, also a poet, has one of Emmi Whitehorse’s paintings on the cover of her most recent book, A Gray Realm the Ocean. Jennifer and I are smitten with Whitehorse’s work. She had a large work, “Fog Bank,” recently is a show at the National Gallery of Art (which is the local museum we visit most often here in the D.C. metro area) called “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans. The gallery acquired “Fog Bank” for its permanent collection after that show.

The poem is dedicated to, and is, in my mind, spoken to the poet Charles Wright, who over the years has written some of the contemporary poems I love most, and who has shown me in our few meetings unforgettable kindness and grace.