Interview with Bess Cooley, Author of Florence

Ahead of the release of her debut poetry collection, Florence, Bess Cooley spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Ines Pinto about how grief, time, and identity are the driving forces behind this work, while reflecting on her poetic choices and the vulnerability of writing.

Ines Pinto: The title of your collection, Florence, is a callout to the poem of the same name. What made you pick it as the title for the collection? Would you say that “Florence” is its central poem?

Bess Cooley: A lot of the collection is about my grandfather forgetting names in dementia. In the poem “Florence” (and in real life), my grandfather gave that name to a plant that was meaningful to him at that time, towards the beginning of his illness. At the the beginning of the book, with “Florence” as the first poem, there is an emphasis on the loss that comes with the forgetting of names, when someone with whom you were once incredibly close no longer remembers who you are at all. By the end of the book, I was trying to think about that loss in a different way, as an imaginative opportunity or a way to make some kind of peace with it. So Florence as the name for my grandfather’s favorite goldenrod and Florence as the name for the collection felt like a way to honor the name he did choose. While it’s not literally the central poem of the collection, as the first poem it brings up several themes, images, and patterns that I want you to keep in mind as you read the book.

IP: Stylistically, you make use of blackout poetry, at times mixing more than one poem within, creating a whole new narrative that allows the reader to look at these poems in a different light. What made you follow this creative path? 

BC: It took me a long time to figure out that this was a path the book could take! It actually started from a point of frustration. I had been working with the collection for a long time and the poems themselves felt good but their organization, the collection as a whole, wasn’t clicking for me. I started the erasures as an exercise to try to unlock something new in the poems and try to see them in a different way. (I was also having a difficult time writing at this point, and it was a way for me to get started without having to face a blank page.) I was surprised by how much the erasures opened up the book for me, since at first I didn’t even intend them to be read by anyone or included at all. Of course, they represent the very real erasure that dementia creates, but I think they also work because they are a way of re-seeing the poems. The originals are still in the book, and the space they occupied still exist exactly in the erasures—the white space does remember—but they are also new poems, and offered me a new way of looking at loss. They ended up being the main way I allowed, throughout the collection, loss to be construed as something that can create new, that also has a kind of creative energy—just like with the naming of Florence. 

IP: The presence of a grandfather who was at once a companion and became a stranger is ever-present throughout the collection. Would you say that the grandfather is a driving force behind this poetic narrative?

BC: My grandfather was the main driving force behind the book from the very beginning, always. As I was beginning my MFA in poetry at Purdue University, he was in the beginning stages of dementia and ended up moving into my parents’ house, where I spent a good amount of time helping them care for him. Because that was the main backdrop of my life at the time, and because I was in a program where I was asked to write two poems a week for three years, I was writing a lot of poems about it. Even in my MFA thesis (a very long-ago beginning for this book) he was the driving force. I knew he would remain that even through the many, many different revisions and iterations the book went through. All the other threads center and twine around the grandfather images. 

IP: Childhood memories and yearning to return to a simpler time are recurrent themes throughout Florence. All the while, the poems transmit a certain anxiety regarding time passing by and the changes it brings. How do these link up with the looming presence of the grandfather, and what is their significance?

BC: The childhood memories very intentionally link up with the grandfather themes in the poem: the memories, and in some ways childhood itself, are what is lost when someone who was a big part of that childhood no longer shares those memories. That is part of the anxiety of loss, as well, and how quickly it happens with a disease like Lewy Body Dementia, which is what my grandfather had. That anxiety of time passing also “links up” with the theme of identity throughout the collection: the anxiety of losing identity because identity is connected with memory and with the people who have been in our lives a long time. 

IP: I noticed that observations of nature and animals are sometimes used to express a yearning for freedom. What made you choose this imagery in your poems?

BC: I think nature and animals are always subconsciously a way for human beings to express—or experience—a kind of freedom. I have always felt this way when outside—gardening, hiking, camping. They are easy images to convey through poetry because there is a long tradition of the natural world as giving a sense of freedom. For me, it is a space where I pay closer attention than I do when indoors, which is important for a poet! I think that’s why natural images make their way into my poems: they are easy for me to observe and find something new in every time. Observing is in itself a kind of freedom. 

IP: In “To The Person Who Signed My Name on the Backs of Checks Written Out to Me,” the image of a double that the speaker absorbs and believes is themselves is particularly interesting. Can you explore the idea of this thief of identity further?

BC: A lot of the book is about identity and how it is created: through memory, through brain and blood, family, and particular experiences we have. This poem is definitely about the nebulous or changing nature of identity, an exploration of the fact that identity can (legally, at least) be stolen. When writing this poem, I asked myself, “What would happen if it was more than just a legally-stolen identity and that person actually became me?” Poetry is always a space for me to make those metaphorical or symbolic questions literal because it allows for transformation to happen physically. The same thing happens in “Hemoglobin” and “I’ve Had This Rhythm in My Head for Decades” with transfusions, blood taken from someone else’s body (in this case, three other bodies since I received three pints of blood). If I am living with others’ blood inside me, part of me becomes them. And maybe vice versa. This gives me a way to ask how identity is formed. This is also connected with my grandfather: a relationship that once formed part of my identity, which in many ways has disappeared, or at least has significantly, unalterably changed.

IP: Another prominent theme in your collection is the hospital as a setting, MRIs, and a disease that spreads without the speaker being able to control or fully understand it. There is a sense of irreparable loss when the speaker declares, “my brain / No longer my brain.” (“On the Chicago River”) How would you say this “theft” relates to the speaker’s relationship with the fading grandfather and life, in general?

BC: In some ways, throughout the book, the speaker and the grandfather have parallel experiences that collide at times (under the MRI machine). A lot of this collection is about the brain—dementia and the brain can both be seen in the brain, even if it takes a machine to do them. These threads are closely related to your question above about identity: we often believe that our brains are what shape who we are and what makes us unique, but they can also betray us in some pretty significant ways. Are we still the same person when our brains change, especially in ways they are not always “supposed to”?

IP: In “On The Chicago River,” you use the image of a spider to describe the arachnid cyst the speaker lives with and connect it to the buildings in the city. What inspired you to tie the two together?

BC: In some ways, this is a poem about having an experience when you are thinking about something else—or have just gotten some bad news you can’t not think about. What inspired me was really that, as the poem says, I had just that morning gotten a call from my doctor about the cyst and was going on the river tour. I love that in poetry we can move so quickly from one image to another that it feels like they’re happening at the same time. That everything you see is colored with whatever thoughts you’re obsessing over at the moment.  

IP: In “Layering,” you express that to write is to undress oneself and continuously peel off layers. Would you say this collection has achieved that?

BC: I do think that is what all (or at least) most writing does, Florence included. This is why we write and tell stories and share images with each other, I think: to peel off the layers of who we are and how we got here. “Layering” is about the vulnerability and sometimes wildness of that: you don’t often know what you’re going to get when you delve underneath! In Florence, those layers surfaced in ways that were often unexpected for me—the erasures, for example, and the ending of the book, which I didn’t expect to be as hopeful or accepting as it is.

IP: Finally, Florence skirts around death—real and hypothetical. What is the significance of death in the collection and how does it relate to the other present themes?

BC: Well, death is always a significance, always looming. Especially when you are living with someone who is aging rapidly, not in a way that you know they would hope to age. For the speaker of Florence, it is also a fear with the health concerns: brain cyst, seizures, and blood transfusions (but I am okay and healthy now!). It explores how we think we might want to die, but really have no control over how that happens. In the end, maybe that lack of control over what happens to us and who we are has to be okay, too. 

Order your copy of Florence today!

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Bess Cooley is a winner of The Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, The Journal, and Verse Daily, among other journals. She is co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal and teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Ines Pinto (she/her) is from a small beach town near Lisbon, Portugal. She decided to leave those shores behind as she moved around Europe, eventually completing her master’s degree in International Politics. She dreams of a fairer world, so she worked in the non-profit sector to call for the end of corruption and dirty money flows before moving to New York to start a brand new adventure. She is also the proud mother of a spoiled cat named Louis, a certified multilingual Eurovision fan, and a reader with an appreciation for all genres.