Writing As Paying Attention: An Interview with MC Hyland

By Parmis Parsa

MC Hyland is a poet, scholar, publisher, professor, and public artist. Having published two-full-length books of poems: “THE END” (Sidebrow 2019) and Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press 2010), as well as being a founding editor at DoubleCross Press, she is already proving herself a noteworthy critic and artist. I had the opportunity to take a class called Reading as a Writer with her at New York University, which has been one of the most enjoyable college classes I have taken to date. Being or aspiring to be a writer in the 21st century is not easy, but when we see success stories like Hyland’s—poets who are capitalizing on their positions as both artist and teacher—we begin to view this endeavor as less daunting and more inspiring. I conducted this interview over email.

Could you describe what it feels like to work on a creative project that is close to your heart, or your writing in general, and finally have it shared with the public? How do you begin to form themes from small pieces you’ve worked on; when does the full picture start taking shape? And once the final product is produced, how do you respond to the critical reception received from it?

So I think there are two parts to this question: one about writing and one about publishing. As a writer, I’m a poet who works at the unit of the group of poems. I hardly ever sit down, feel inspired, and write a single poem. Honestly, I know there are writers for whom “inspiration” is a thing, but for me, writing is more like a muscle–I have to keep it in shape, and I do that by working on projects. I tend to come up with an idea of how I’ll write something long before I know what it’s about, and I also tend to write long projects that take a few years to complete. When I was younger, I didn’t understand that was my pace–it was a huge relief once I realized I didn’t have to be stressed about finding a new inspiration every week, that I could just give myself an assignment and go from there. So, for example, my book “THE END,” which came out this past summer, was a project where I wrote 100 poems, all of which were called “THE END,” and all of which were composed of sentences with similar syntax. I told myself, at the beginning, that I’d write a hundred of these poems, and as I was working on the project, I often told myself that my job was just to write short sentences (on my phone or in notebooks or sometimes on my computer), and not to think about how they went together until later. Once I had a page’s worth of sentences, I’d sit down and assemble them into a paragraph, and move them around until I liked the ways they were talking with one another. Sometimes that editing process made individual sentences mean different things than I’d first intended–I always find it really exciting when a piece of writing opens up in that way. Because that project was about hitting a target (100 poems, each at least a half-page long), I could think about form and about process, rather than about content, and that helped me write about a lot of subjects that would have been harder to come at head-on. 

“THE END” took me four years to write, and I was about a year into the process before I shared any of the poems with anyone–which is longer than I usually wait after writing to send something out for publication. While I was writing those early “THE END” poems, I had just moved to New York, and I didn’t like it here–I missed my old friends, and I felt out of place, and the poems were the place where I could put those unpleasant feelings. I can be something of a people-pleaser, but these poems were full of conflict and anhedonia and messy physical states. I was able to write it all down because I thought of what I was doing as writing that was just for me. But over time, the way I felt about things changed, as feelings often do. That made it easier to think about publishing those poems.

In general, submitting work for publication works like a muscle, too. I’ve been sending work out for almost (gasp!) twenty years now, so sharing my work is second nature to me at this point, and it doesn’t feel as fraught as it once did. You send it out, and sometimes it’s accepted and sometimes it’s rejected–rejections aren’t personal, and with practice, you learn not to take them personally. With poetry, what can be hard is the relative lack of response–very few poetry books, and basically no individual poems, are reviewed, though your friends might send you a nice email or text from time to time. In some ways this is nice–unlike my friend who’s a female journalist who often writes about gender and politics, I am very unlikely to get death threats based on the things I write. That’s the upside of poetry’s relatively smaller audience.

Many members of the literary community suffer from imposter syndrome; is that something you have dealt with? If so how have you overcome it? Did you have certain expectations, a goal or vision you aspired to fulfill? What does it mean for you to be a writer? 

You know, it’s funny: I tend to think of scholars as the people who struggle most with imposter syndrome, though I suppose it’s also a problem that writers share. I don’t know that anyone ever fully overcomes imposter syndrome–you just learn to manage it! Something that helps me feel comfortable with my place in the world as a writer is putting in the work in my community: I run a small press (DoubleCross Press, which publishes poetry chapbooks and essays by small-press publishers), review books of poetry or interview poets about their work fairly regularly, put together poetry readings, go to poetry readings, follow and cheer for and support my peers’ work. Supporting other writers takes some of the pressure off my ego, and helps me think about what I’m doing as in collaboration with other writers, rather than in competition with them.

What informs your writing? In “Neveragainland” your poems bring to light certain subtle realities that take place day to day. In other words, the language you use appears to draw attention to the small details of life, often using very sensory and honest language to capture things that may seem passing in essence, but are very relevant to the way one exists and projects themselves in the world. What inspires this? 

I write towards things I want to know, but don’t know yet. I use writing as a way to pay attention: in particular, to pay attention to sense data that may not fit into a story I would tell about the world or about myself. Narrative does one kind of thing for people–it provides explanations (think of therapy), it builds suspense–but that’s not all language can do! It can also describe, cajole, seduce, falsify, alienate, comfort, confuse, rationalize, enrage. I’m interested in those other uses of language. I like poetry because it doesn’t have to tell a story or make an argument, but it can do both of those things. Similarly, I like that poetry can be deeply personal or totally fictive. I was interested, while writing a lot of poems in “Neveragainland,” in the question of the personal–which I’d now frame as a genre question about the lyric, though I didn’t have access to those terms at the time. We often assume that poems with a first-person speaker show something about the writer’s self and inner life–but that’s really just a genre convention. Pronouns have long seemed to me like the most powerful writer’s tools: what if I write something really personal, really about me, but attribute it to a “you” or “he” or “they”? What if I write something that’s actually about what I think someone else might be thinking or feeling, and attribute it to the “I” speaking in a poem? Playing with pronouns has helped me as a writer–and it’s also helped me as a person, to divest myself a bit of the obsession that we’re all supposed to have, in this age of social media and therapy-culture, with our own isolated stories. I want to understand other people’s experiences through my own–I don’t want my own narratives and emotions to be where my thinking and feeling end!

Usually, there’s a single big question that drives what I write for a period of a few years–and usually, that question arises from my previous project. After “Neveragainland,” I wanted to write poems that seemed lyric and personal, but weren’t about me at all, and to do that, I wrote a full-length (still unpublished) manuscript where all the poems came from notes I took on films. After working on that book for a few years, I wanted to write more clearly and directly, and I wanted to find some ways to record how my thinking changed over time–those were the concerns that led to the poems in “THE END.” After writing poems composed of “unrelated” sentences for a few years, I found myself wanting to use language to build more obviously toward ideas and insights, so now I’m working more in essay (or hybrid essay/poem) forms.  

You are in the interesting position of being both an artist and critic, how do you think these perspectives aid or challenge your writing? Do you think one role affects the other? If so, in what way?

I’ve been a poet much longer than I’ve been a critic. I’ve more or less always written poetry, and have been publishing poems in magazines since my early twenties, but I didn’t start my PhD until my mid-thirties. I’m so grateful that I got the chance to go back to school, and to study literature at this level. Being a critic has made me a better artist: I’m a more careful and a more responsible writer now than I was when I was younger. As a literature scholar you make claims about texts, and you have to figure out how to persuade people that your readings of those texts are right. This means you think a lot about scale: is this claim to big to prove? Is it too small to matter? For me, that thinking about scale has become a powerful tool. Other powerful writer-ly tools I’ve picked up or honed in my scholarly life: I’m a more attentive reader than I used to be; I have a better understanding of the long history of writing in English; I have a more diverse and international community of friends, which helps me see what parts of my experience I can generalize from and what I can’t. 

On the other hand, coming into a PhD program later in life as someone who was already a writer and a publisher made me a better scholar. Not at first–I was rusty when I started the PhD! But having already worked on a couple of long writing projects prepared me for the long slog of writing a dissertation. And having actively participated in contemporary writing made it clear how much of what gets written and what gets published is influenced by factors that don’t make it to the record. So much writing and publishing is about friendships, or about in-person conversations, or about more diffuse local scenes–all those things are really hard to track after the fact! I also think that the fact that I came in with some experience writing poetry reviews–which both is and isn’t like scholarly writing–helped me prioritize writing clearly and enjoyably. My scholarship, like my poetry, has jokes in it, because I learned how to enjoy writing prose before I began trying to use it to make academic arguments.

Since you first entered the literary scene, how do you think poetry has changed? Considering how Twitter and Instagram poetry are very popular now a days, do you think it has impacted the way you share your work? How do you view the current literary landscape and how have you found yourself reacting to it?

Poetry has changed so much since I started my MFA in 2003 (which, for lack of a better marker, I’ll call “when I entered the scene”). American writing is much more connected to writing from other places than it was then–there’s more translation and more multilingual writing. If you look back at what books were published in the early 2000s, you’d see a lot of writers who had a lot in common, in terms of class, race, the kinds of schools they went to. More people have MFAs now, which is something I have complicated feelings about, because of the scourge of MFA student loan debt (if you’re reading this, I beg you: DON’T GO INTO DEBT FOR AN MFA!) But/and this means that the authors of new books of poetry are, as a group, much more representative of the country and of the world as a whole. The American poetry scene, at the highest levels, now includes more working-class writers, more immigrant writers, more writers of color, more queer and genderqueer writers. All those groups have always produced poets, but there’s a way bigger platform for those poets in this generation. Social media has been a big part of this opening of space for new writers, but/and so has the activism and advocacy of many, many people, groups, and organizations (to name a few: undocupoets, the Mongrel Coalition, Cave Canem, Vona, She Who Has No Masters, CantoMundo, Trace Peterson’s scholarship on and support of trans writers; Kay Ulanday Barrett’s tireless advocacy for QTPOC). That said, I think that mainstream poetry may be less age-diverse–which is to say, younger, and less attuned to its elders–than it was then. I do worry a bit about that decreased attention to elders–for me, seeing models in earlier generations was and continues to be important to my sense of poetry.

How would you describe the effect teaching has had on you as a writer? Being an educator is one thing, and a writer another, supposedly. 

Teaching is another thing I’ve done consistently since I was in my early twenties–so long I kind of don’t know what kind of writer I’d be if I weren’t a teacher. I’ve taught writing, literature, and bookmaking, and sometimes other things, in all kinds of settings: in an after-school program, in parks and libraries, in adult literacy and GED-prep classrooms, in art centers, in community education programs, in colleges. The classroom is an important space for me as a writer and a thinker: it’s both a place where you work toward using language in ever-more-precise ways and a place where you can be conversational, where you can joke, where people can meet each other where they are. All those energies are important in my poems and in my scholarly writing–but the place where I learn to use language in those ways is in the classroom. I think the classroom is a really hopeful space–it’s a place you seek out because you want to know more, or to improve something about yourself (your writing ability, your ability to support your family, etc.). I think that I have a more optimistic view of people and of the world because I teach. And I also am always encountering new ideas, and new ways of thinking, in my encounters with students–a lot of that material ends up in my poems.

Being in the academic field now and having first hand experience in the teaching of literary criticism and writing, how important do you think it is to guide and help the next generation of poets/writers? Do you feel like you carry a responsibility to fulfill a debt to the literary world?

Well, “guidance” is a tricky thing: for some teachers/professors/writers, “guiding” the next generation is really about producing younger versions of themselves! I do think that every generation of writers owes something both to the writers that came before them and to the writers coming up after them. It can be hard to make good on our debts to the literary world, because a lot of our systems are set up to look like zero-sum games: if you win this book contest, that means I don’t; only one person can get each teaching job, or each paid editorial position. I think I got into publishing and reviewing other writers’ work because I didn’t want to think of my whole life as being about competition. I and my co-editors think a lot about representation: are we publishing people from a wide range of backgrounds? Are we publishing both first-chapbook authors and people who are further along in their careers? Are we publishing some people we know, and some we don’t? Are we publishing people who live outside NYC? I try to also apply these questions when I sit down to review a book, or to interview a writer. So partly these questions of debt, and of ethical relation to the field of writing, are generational, but partly, they’re also about trying to distribute my attention in a way that’s going to most enlarge me as a reader and writer.

Looking back on your years in college, was there a teacher or writing mentor that you feel had a role in guiding your growth as a writer? If so, in what way and how has that translated in your teaching today? 

Honestly, I think that in my years in college, my peers were my biggest influence! I had a friend from high school who I shared poems with, and I also traded work with a bunch of college peers, including my to-this-day best friend Deborah Stein (who later became a brilliant playwright and is now a professor at UC San Diego). I also learned a lot from my professor, Nathalie Anderson, who taught the one poetry workshop I took in college, and who taught me–both in that workshop and in a class I took with her on contemporary Irish poetry–how to pay attention to poetic form. 

In the English class I am currently taking with you, you once asked, “does poetry hold more emotion and interpretation than prose?”, a question that led to a discussion about the similarities and differences between the two genres. I am curious to see where you position yourself within this discourse. 

I’m really interested in questions of genre, and in how genres change over time. I think one of the things I said in that class is that a lot of the ideas that the average currently-living person has about poetry are historically specific: they’re ideas that Romantic poets had and wrote about. When we think about poetry as the genre of emotion, or when we think about poems with first-person speakers representing the deep and true feelings of their authors, or even when we think about poetry as requiring more interpretation than prose, we’re thinking in ways that are two hundred years old, but that would not have made sense to readers three hundred years ago. That’s because in different historical moments, people have entirely different ideas about what poetry is. There’s a field of study, called Historical Poetics (or sometimes New Lyric Studies) that is all about this question of what people in other historical moments thought poems were supposed to be and do. The eighteenth century is an especially hot spot for historical poetics, because eighteenth-century poems are SO BORING if you read them as you would contemporary poems. Think about Gray’s Elegy (which you’d likely read in LE2, if you’ve taken that class): it’s just cliche after cliche! And, amazingly, that cliche quality is why people used to think it was so good! Eighteenth-century readers weren’t looking for originality when they read poems: they were looking for eloquence, for moral truths, for a recognizable landscape (and by “recognizable,” I mean “a landscape that looked like a particular kind of painting,” not “a familiar landscape”).

So, for me, genre is one of the great tools we have for thinking about our place in history. As a writer, I’ve been more and more interested, in the last few years, in working across genres. I write poems that are also letters to specific people. I write micro-essays, or research-based scholarly essays in verse. I personally find that narrative (usually combined with close attention) is one of the ways I experience emotion in language–it’s not necessarily about the genres of poetry or prose. By “narrative,” I don’t necessarily mean stories with beginnings, middles, and ends–I mean characters, relationships, and change.

It became apparent to me that you take a special interest in experimental and hybrid works of prose and poetry. How do you think photography, visual art, and other art forms interact with each other and how have they impacted the current poetry scene?

Well, I think hybrid works are the most fun to teach, because they have the most potential to expand one’s sense of what writing can be and can do. I think that expanded sense of possibility is important to develop, because there are all kinds of mechanisms to slot people into rigid genre pools, and it’s easy to get frustrated by the limits of your genre if you’re an intellectually curious person.

My own writing and scholarship are informed by my work as a publisher–and, specifically, by my training as a letterpress printer. Which is to say that my work is always thinking across media, even if what that thinking produces still pretty much looks like a poem. The ways I understand form are shaped–both in ways I can articulate and in ways I can’t–by the experience of setting metal type, which gives me a physical sense of words as having a weight. I’m also personally interested in a lot of other art forms, because what it means to create can be so different, depending on what discipline or genre you work in. Several of the friends with whom I’ve had the most sustained conversations about writing aren’t writers, at all: they’re printmakers, or social practice artists, or dancers, or theater artists. What I like about talking to people who make other kinds of art is that they might think very differently about the work’s relationship to its audience. For example, the audience for a performance is dependent on where, when, and how that performance happens. Is the space large or small? Is the audience seated or standing? Is the work site-specific? Do people have to buy tickets? How much do tickets cost? All these questions are going to affect what the piece ultimately means. 

We’re currently in a moment, at least in New York City, where there’s a bit more overlap between the worlds of poetry and of visual and performance art than there was when I first moved to the city. The economic worlds of different art forms can be pretty siloed from each other–visual art has all this money that siphons through it, as, in a different way, does fiction (though, really, the fiction money is Hollywood money at one remove). Poetry and modern dance are both historically under-resourced, though we’re currently in a moment that does have celebrity poets, and in which modern dance choreographers can get hired to make pop song videos–these are both somewhat astounding changes, as far as I’m concerned! Here in New York, there have been a few institutions, in particular, that have brought writers and artists into deeper contact. Wendy’s Subway, a space in Bushwick that has a lot of readings and workshops and a publishing program, is run by a collective of writers and artists. The Sunview Luncheonette also hosts a lot of poetry, music, and art events, with some overlapping audience. And a few historically poetry-specific institutions (the Poetry Project, the Segue reading series) have been bringing in non-poet curators and/or hosting combined readings and artist talks. These are exciting openings into cross-disciplinary conversation. 

Finally, if there were one week left on earth, what is the last thing you would choose to write about?

Okay, I’ve been thinking about this question for a couple weeks now! My first thought was that I wouldn’t write anything at all: so much of writing is about making a way to remember the present moment, and if there’s no future, remembering the present probably isn’t anyone’s most pressing need! But I think that I might write letters to the people I care about, to tell them why and how they matter to me. I’d like to think that that might make the final week a little easier, for me and for them.

MC Hyland is the author of two full-length books of poems: “THE END” (Sidebrow 2019) and “Neveragainland” (Lowbrow Press 2010). She has also published a dozen poetry chapbooks/artist books, most recently Plane Fly At Night from above/ground press and the self-published “Five Essays on the Lyric/The Laundry Poem” with Anna Gurton-Wachter. She is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress, and recently finished a PhD in English at NYU. From her research, she produces scholarly and poetic texts, artists’ books, essays, and public art projects. She lives in Brooklyn.

Parmis Parsa is a junior at NYU studying English on the creative writing track. When she’s not grooming her ravishing eyebrows or flaunting her british accent, she writes poetry and is currently working on her first collection. Outside of the realm of poetry, she enjoys watching and making films, strolling in parks and petting strangers dogs.