We Call Upon the Author to Explain: Raye Hendrix

In the latest edition of the We Call Upon the Author series, the lovely Raye Hendrix discusses her debut collection What Good Is Heaven. Rife with critters, queerness, and Christianity, Hendrix’s raw yet tender poetry is transcendent.

Mia Grace Davis: Throughout What Good Is Heaven—especially, I noticed, in sections I and III—one can find Alabama’s foxes, squirrels, dogs, raccoons. What significance do animals have for you in these poems? Do they represent something, whether as the collective or the individual?

Raye Hendrix: I love the instinctive intelligence of animals. I see a lot of queerness in them, in that way—they just do what they want, what they need, and don’t care what anyone thinks. Their instinct is to survive, but they also play—it’s very human, to me. Growing up around so many animals, and especially the ones we think of as “critters”—I felt, and feel, such a natural kinship with them. A little sneaky, a little misunderstood, a little nocturnal. Freaky little weirdos just doing their own thing—I resonate with that.  I’m personally also really interested in resisting the narrative of the Anthropocene—that humans and animals and nature are all separate things and that humans are meant to dominate. Animals are a prophetic and convicting mirror—what we do to them we ultimately do to ourselves. Their habitat is our habitat; our homes are their homes. And I think we see our animal in their animal, too—instinct, nature—the things we suppress in ourselves that they feel no need to. I’m really inspired by that.

MGD: I particularly enjoyed “Letter Never Sent to a Once-Lover on the Coast.” With an intriguing narrative thread, the voice within this piece is particularly evocative. I’d love to talk about developing the speaker: who are they? What are they looking for in these poems?

RH: I was trying to write this breakup poem that isn’t really a breakup poem since the lovers in it were never really together, and trying to navigate the complicated pain of losing something you never actually had. The ambiguous largeness of that sadness—you have to carry it and move through it, but you can’t talk about it either because you feel a little silly for it. It’s like, yeah, you know you’re not supposed to count your chickens before they hatch but you did it anyway and hurt your own feelings when they didn’t hatch and you don’t want anyone to say “I told you so” because you’re already saying it to yourself. It’s a bitter kind of misery. I think the speaker of this poem is looking for a way out of that bitterness and misery, and it’s hard because there’s so much love there, still. And because the lover didn’t really do anything wrong—it was all undefined and tenuous. Bitterness too just isn’t an emotion I see a lot in poetry and I was really interested in exploring it with this speaker—and I wanted to sit with that, let it be recursive and a little bit seething and see where it took me. I think the speaker is figuring out that bitterness is just a different kind of grief, and it’s a grief she has to grapple with alone. 

MGD: It appears as though most of your poems are free-verse, though they all approach the page in different ways—for example, “Squash Garden” is the only piece to take the form of a prose poem, while couplets are more prevalent throughout. What was, and continues to be, your process for discovering a poem’s form?

RH: I like the way you phrased that, “discovering” the form. For a lot of the poems in this book, I knew what their form wanted to be before I wrote them. As you say, couplets are probably the most common, and I think a lot of it was subconscious, at least at first. So many of these poems were dealing with binaries—man vs. woman, straight vs. gay, life vs. death, etc., and it felt right to have that hinge reflected in the body of the poem as a couplet. But most of the time I don’t begin writing with any form in mind at all, so it really is an act of discovery. An example that comes to mind is the poem, “Husk Hymn,” which resisted any form I tried to give it for a long time—I really wanted to force it into couplets, for it to be mirroring these binaries again. It sounds cliché, but that poem found its form when I started listening to what the poem wanted, and it wasn’t a binary. I was trying to force this speaker into that space—man or woman—and my own words reminded me that wasn’t what the speaker was doing—they’re actively resisting a gendered binary. So why shouldn’t the form resist it too? Why shouldn’t it be in the shape of cicada wings, trying to outrun tercets—the triune God? The one you mentioned, “Squash Garden,” sort of happened like that too. More than any other poem in the book it felt like it needed to be controlled, domesticated—a small box in which something must try to grow.

MGD: I commend your bravery for talking so openly about challenging topics, such as sexual assault and animal slaughter, throughout the collection. If you’re comfortable discussing it, were there any pieces that were particularly challenging to write? How did you find the courage to write with such intense vulnerability?

RH: Thank you for that—I haven’t thought about it as bravery, because I’ve honestly been afraid of people reading this book, so it’s really nice to have that acknowledgement. I still don’t know if it’s bravery or just necessity. Writing this book felt a lot like coming out again, and in some ways it was literally, if subtly, that. I’ve been out as bisexual for a long time now, but I’ve been very slow to publicly talk about being nonbinary, even though I’ve known it about myself, in some way, since I was a kid. But to the point, anyone who’s come out knows that being in the closet is a crushing safety—you’re alive, but not all the way. It’s disingenuous. And so coming out is scary, but not nearly as terrifying as the thought of living half-known. That’s how writing these poems felt, and how having them in the world feels now—honestly frightening, but it’s fear tempered by the clarity that comes with telling the truth. Two of the hardest poems to write, maybe predictably, were “There Were Daisies” and “Let Not a Woman,” both dealing with sexual assault. I don’t know if I found the courage so much as it was wrenched from me. It’s that line from Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” I want the world split open more than I want to hide.

MGD: Are there any poems, then, that you love the most (just as the speaker’s father “once told me (made me swear to keep it secret / to never tell my sister) / that he loved me the most”)? Which did you enjoy writing, which do you enjoy reading, and which have you enjoyed sharing?

RH: I love the way you’ve posed this question—like I have to whisper my answers to you so I don’t hurt the feelings of the other poems in the book. There are two I remember loving writing, but for very different reasons. “The Heron” is dark, but I had so much fun writing it because I had to work backwards. I think all poems are puzzles, but with “The Heron” all I had was the final image—the drowned heron—stuck in my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I started inventing narratives and worlds around it until one clicked into place. The other poem, “When There is Nothing Else to Do We Drive,” was fun for a very different reason: I was in college, tipsy from cheap pitchers of beer on a bar patio watching the sunset with my poet friends, and summer break had just started. We were broke and sunburnt and deliriously happy, writing poems and reading our drafts aloud to each other. I drafted this poem there. It’s one of those memories that feels golden when you look back on it, so the poem feels golden to me too.  The other two are simpler: I’ve really enjoyed sharing “Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You” because I get to tell people about that weird sign, which is peak Alabama lore. I really enjoy reading “Against Salvation” because it feels like wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses and throwing middle fingers in a church.

MGD: Think back to when you first developed the idea for this book. What advice would you give to that poet, on the brink of such a special undertaking?

RH: I would tell a younger me and anyone else embarking on something like this to slow down and savor it. Don’t look at what everyone else is doing. Write down why you want to do this and repeat it to yourself like a prayer. And to reverse an adage, don’t lose sight of the trees for the forest. The trees make the forest, not the other way around. The trees—the poems—come first. Collect them as you write, but don’t try to force an oak into a pine just because you’ve got a lot of pines. Trust yourself and enjoy it—if you’re not having fun, what’s the point? There are plenty of ways to be miserable in this world. Poetry shouldn’t be one of them. Focus on the trees, put on a leather jacket, and go flip off a priest. 

What Good is Heaven is available through Texas Review Press

Dr. Raye Hendrix is a writer from Alabama. Her debut poetry collection, What Good is Heaven, was selected for the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series to represent Alabama by Texas Review Press (2024), and is the winner of the 2024 Weatherford Award for Best Appalachian Poetry. Also the author of two poetry chapbooks, their poems appear in American Poetry Review, River Styx, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. Raye lives in Knoxville, where she teaches in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. Find out more at rayehendrix.com. 

Mia Grace Davis is an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Her work appears in Gone Lawn, The Tusculum Review, and Ice Lolly Review, among others. She is a 2023 National YoungArts Finalist in Writing and a U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts Semifinalist. Visit her at miagracedavis.com.