In the following email interview with poet Courtney LeBlanc, she talks about how, “Poetry is a way to process everything I’m feeling,” and then adds that, when it came to the poems in her new collection, Her Dark Everything (paperback), “…there were a lot of feelings.”
To start, is there a theme that connects the poems in Her Dark Everything?
There are two main themes in Her Dark Everything: it’s part elegy to my friend Paula, who died by suicide in summer 2023, and part love poem to my best friend Virginia, who suffers from severe, chronic, drug-resistant depression, and in spring 2023, took a chance on a new treatment and it saved her life.
When you started to assemble Her Dark Everything, did you start with this theme in mind or did you realize a theme was forming as you started to put this collection together?
As my best friend began receiving ketamine infusions for her depression, I started writing poems about it. Along with her husband, we tag-teamed taking her to the twice-weekly appointments. While I was so grateful she was trying a new treatment, I was terrified it wouldn’t work and that she would decide to die. I wrote poems to capture that fear and sorrow and then, as the treatments started working, and she told me that after every session she felt less and less suicidal, I started writing love poems to her, the treatment, and our 25+ year friendship.
Shortly after Virginia’s initial set of sessions completed, my friend Paula died by suicide. She was a brilliant poet, and so I channeled my grief over her death into more poems. I soon realized these two sets of poems, which I spent much of 2023 writing, would come together in a singular collection.
What made you realize a theme was emerging, and what made you decide to run with it as opposed to away from it?
Richard Hugo writes in Triggering Town, poets essentially write the same poem over and over, and for me, I write poems about the same topic over and over. I will write exhaustively about one or two topics until I’ve written my way out of them. Until I can’t write about them anymore. Poetry is a way to process everything I’m feeling and with the two themes in the collection, the loss of one friend and the survival of another, there were a lot of feelings. I’ve never run away from writing into a specific theme or topic because if I’m writing about it, it’s because I’m feeling it deeply and I must write about it. Not all those poems may get shared or become part of a manuscript, but I’ll always write them. I simply have to.
Her Dark Everything is your fourth poetry collection after Beautiful & Full of Monsters; Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart; and Her Whole Bright Life. What writers, poetic or otherwise, do you feel are the biggest influences on both what you write poems about and how you write them?
I have so many poets I love who constantly inspire me — Megan Falley, Laura Passin, Kelly Grace Thomas, Melissa Fite Johnson, Tiana Clark, Jeanann Verlee — I gobble up anything these poets write.
And what about your dogs, Piper and Cricket? How, if at all, did they influence the poems in Her Dark Everything?
Piper is a boxer-hound, and Cricket is a pit-mix, and they definitely influence my poems. They show up in seven poems in my new collection. I hike them nearly every day, and in this they keep me grounded. The day after I learned Paula died, I took them hiking and just cried as I walked the trails. The wineberries were ripe — they grow wild in northern Virginia, where I live — and so I plucked them to eat while my pups pulled me forward on the trails. They remind me that even when things are hard or sad or scary or unknown, there is the beauty of nature and two 50-pound dogs who want to cuddle on the couch after.
Cricket, Piper
Back in the early 1800s, when I wrote poems, I would often workshop them by going to open mics and poetry readings. Do you do this as well?
I don’t use open mics or readings to workshop my poems, I prefer to do that on my own, after giving myself a little time away from the poem to breathe. Because of my schedule — I have a demanding full-time job in addition to running a poetry press [Riot In Your Throat] and my own poetry — I usually only perform when I’m on book tour for a new book. Occasionally, I’ll read a new poem as part of my set, but it’s never the first draft of a poem. Those baby poems are often too tender to be shared with a wider audience.
Having read your earlier collections, you seem to be someone who is not inclined to hold back, even if it makes you look bad or damaged or something else some people would suggest you keep to yourself. In assembling Her Dark Everything, how often did you debate whether or not to include a poem because of what it says?
I didn’t debate much to be honest. I’m a pretty direct person, and we’re all flawed. If someone reads a poem that talks about my disordered eating and they too have dealt with it, maybe they’ll realize they’re not alone in this struggle. If someone is dealing with grief or sorrow and they see themselves in one of my poems and they feel seen, then that’s a good thing.
At a recent poetry reading that my best friend attended with me, someone said to her, “Thank you for letting her write these poems.” And she said, “Well she didn’t ask me.” And that’s true. But for most of them, I’m writing about my experience with her treatment. I’m writing about how it made me feel when she said it felt like someone took an ice cream scoop and scooped the sadness out of her brain. I’m writing about how scared I was that I would lose her. So they’re about her depression and our friendship, but at their core, they’re about what I was feeling as she embarked on this journey.
I’ve also noticed that most of your poems are free verse. What is it about this form — or lack of form, as the case may be — that you think works best for what you’re trying to express?
I mostly write in free verse. For me, it’s the form that suits my poems the best. I do love a good form poem, especially abecedarians, but most often I want the freedom to play with words, with sounds, with line breaks and free verse allows that freedom where other forms do not. Form poetry can be really helpful if I’m stuck and feel like I’m unable to write. Then the rules of a form can help push me into a poem.
So, is there anything else a potential reader might want to know about Her Dark Everything?
Know that even though it has heavy topics, it also has light and joy and hope.
Finally, if someone enjoys Her Dark Everything, which of your other poetry collections would you suggest they check out next?
I would suggest my third collection, Her Whole Bright Life, as it also has two main themes: in this instance, my father’s death and my disordered eating. This collection is the most similar to Her Dark Everything in form and structure, and that while it’s about heavy topics, there is also hope and joy in there as well.
