“December”: Five Questions for Cecily Parks
Cecily Parks was born in 1976 and she currently lives in Austin, Texas. There, she works at the University of Texas where she is an associate professor in the MFA program for creative writing. She has written three collections of poetry, including Field Folly Snow (2008), O’Nights (2015), and The Seeds, which is coming out in 2025. Her poetry has received awards which include the Chapbook Fellowship award (2005) and The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award (2019). Her poems are featured in many places, including The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and Best American Poetry.
When reading Best American Poetry 2021, Parks’ “December” stood out to me because of its strong themes and symbolism. It tells the story of many winter scenarios that Parks experiences over time. I thought this was interesting because the poem brings to light the significance of events that, at one’s first glance at the poem, may seem small and meaningless. Through the lens of these small happenings, Parks discusses the meaning of nostalgia, growing up, and nature, which I found to be quite profound. All in all, by reading the poem, I could see the way Parks views the world and how she finds meaning in certain things, and each time I read the poem I could discover even more significance in the symbols mentioned.
Throughout many of your poems, I’ve noticed a theme of Texan nature. In what way is this meaningful to you as a poet?
I moved to Texas in 2014 for a new job. I was a new wife and a new mother, and, for the first time, I owned a home with a tiny backyard in Texas, a state that was new to me. As I spent time in that tiny backyard and, eventually, my Austin neighborhood, I was struck by how little I knew or understood about Texas flora and fauna. Prickly pear cactuses, night-blooming datura, crape myrtles, Texas Mountain laurels, ball moss, armadillos, grackles: I know their names now, but I didn’t know their names then. I didn’t know that even spineless cactuses can prick the skin, or that datura is poisonous, or that ball moss is an epiphyte that lives in live oak trees but feeds on air. I didn’t know why the presence of cockroaches surged in our home in August. And so on.
My poems have always engaged with place, but I’ve found that I’m most inspired to write poetry when I am a novice, new to an environment and still learning about it. Poems permit writers (and readers!) to be curious; they privilege questions over answers. Writing poems about nature in my new home was not only instinctive to me as an artist but also imperative to me as someone raising her family in a new ecosystem.
In “December,” you mention visiting a local museum to see the work of Anne Sexton. I notice that you and she have similar poetry in that you both discuss deep emotions and personal experiences. How has reading her poetry shaped your poetic style and guided you to where you find inspiration for poetry?
The “museum” I mention in the poem is the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which holds Anne Sexton’s papers. The day I visited, I saw a framed typed draft of the first page of her poem “Flee on Your Donkey”: it has a few strikethroughs but was most eye-catching for the huge “AT LAST I FOUND YOU…” that Sexton scrawled over it in pen. I treasure Sexton’s work, especially her feminist retelling of Grimm’s fairy tales in Transformations, but these days I am particularly grateful to Sexton for helping me think of poem-writing as an act of discovery.
You often mention your daughters in your poetry. How does watching them grow up inspire your poetry?
When my family moved to Texas, my twin daughters were 19 months old, walking, acquiring language, and often playing outside. Together, we began to learn about the lives of the plants, animals, and people in our new community. Motherhood gave me the uncanny experience of trying to convey a mother’s wisdom even as I most identified with my daughters’ curiosity and unknowingness. The poems I’ve written since moving here, including “December,” document my attempts to get to know my environment and share that knowledge with my daughters, so that they can learn to care for the earth, even in the sometimes awkward and flawed ways that I do.
Your poem, “December,” includes various specific scenarios, such as a birthday or a manicure, however you chose to end with the line “I arranged our winter coats so that mine was holding everyone else’s.” How does this tie together all of the ideas of the other instances mentioned and home in on the poem’s main message?
When I wrote this poem, I wanted it to record one month of living in the thick of family. Because December is the last month of the year and often a time of summing up, the poem also, I hope, will strike readers as an attempt to gather a specific period and hold it, however precariously, in place. The image of the coats serves as what T.S. Eliot calls “the objective correlative”: the coats are “the set of objects” that convey the emotional impulse that runs throughout this poem, an impulse to hold close the messiness and magic of a month’s worth of living. I’m letting the reader decide if “my coat” at the end of the poem is a proxy for the speaker, motherhood, the poem, or all three.
Many firsts are mentioned in the poem, such as a first time ice skating or first time keeping a secret. How do memories and nostalgia shape your poetry?
The first time we do anything can be momentous, I think, but of course I can’t remember many of my own first times. I suspect that having children is allowing me to revisit (or confront my inability to revisit) my own childhood “firsts” and overlay those memories (or voids) on my daughters’ experiences. I’m less interested in comparing my experiences to my daughters’ and more interested in how motherhood can dilate and/or collapse time. Robert Frost calls poetry “a momentary stay against confusion” because lyric poetry is often focused on a singular moment or emotion. Impossibly, beautifully, writing poetry offers me a way to stop time and study it.