“Hi, How Are You”: Eight Questions for Robert M. Whitehead
I’ve always been a firm believer in authenticity and establishing genuine relationships with people. However, this is something I continuously struggle with, as I feel that mostly people are solely interested and are content with casual relationships and transactional friendships. This is especially true in today’s day and age, where everything seems to be about acting in one’s own self-interest. In my generation, social media has taken over people’s thought processes, behaviours, and aspirations, which, in my opinion, has made conversations very surface-level, centered on self-validation rather than genuine curiosity in the lives of others.
I remember one instance when I was walking down the hallway to get to my class, when I saw one of my teachers coming towards me from the opposite direction. And, without slowing down or stopping, they asked, “Hi Aarna, how are you?” I stopped walking and tried to respond, “Hi, teacher X! I’m good. How are you?” but by then they had already walked past. I watched them go for a couple of seconds before continuing to my class, but the interaction, or lack of it, lingered in my mind. What’s the point in using the greeting if you aren’t going to stay to hear my response? In a hypothetical situation, if I had said, “I’m doing terribly, what about you?”, then wouldn’t they feel terrible for ignoring me?
When I came across “Hi, How Are You” by Robert M. Whitehead in Best American Poetry 2022, I was immediately hooked. Whitehead transforms that same greeting into a baseline for vulnerability. What most people would dismiss as small talk becomes a matter of self-discovery, aligning with my own frustrations regarding the disingenuousness that prohibits us from experiencing the most powerful force in the world: human connection.
The theme of a lack of human connection appears in some of Mr. Whitehead’s other pieces, like his poem “[*]”. His work has been awarded the 2022 Anne Halley Prize, and it has been published in the Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, JERRY, Denver Quarterly, and The Collagist. He lives in Philadelphia, where he works as a writer and graphic designer for a university hospital and is currently working on a queer translation of the Bible.
In your poem, you replace every “and” with an ampersand. As I was reading, I was thinking about possible reasons for this choice and wondered if this could be interpreted as a rebellion, like you were tired of following rules, or maybe even following others, and wanted to take back control through the poem. What was your intention behind using the ampersand throughout the poem?
I think in some way, every poem has to figure out its own rules—the internal logic, style, and order that makes the poem go. Every poet starts from a blank page, so before we ever start writing we are confronted with the reminder that we are inventing something out of nothing. For this poem, the first rule I made for myself was to keep the poem within the strict dimensions of a triangle. This rule was inspired by a theory I heard once while watching a History Channel program about the Pyramids of Giza—that they were built as “resurrection machines.” The theory was that the pyramids were not just tombs, but that the intricate shape of the form helped to aid the soul buried within find life after death. That theory made me think of how a poem can function in a similar way. So with that rule in mind, I had to be very choosy about the way I wrote each line, making sure they fit the structure I wanted to produce. The ampersands were a way for me to reduce the space in a line (“&” takes up less space than “AND”) so that I could fit the shape I wanted. So in a way, the ampersands are more of a functional choice than a stylistic one, but the reason I chose them was certainly to control how long each line was and to follow my own rule for the poem’s making.
I noticed that the entire poem is written in capital letters except for the title, when it’s usually the opposite. Whenever I write words in all caps, it is to convey anger in the form of shouting. Were you also trying to convey a specific tone or emotion, or is there a different reason behind this choice?
I think rage can be one of the most productive feelings for a poem. This poem was certainly informed by the particular rage of living through an era where it sometimes feels like the world is ending in a new way every day. But the initial impulse to write in all capital letters was inspired by ancient Roman stone tablets. If you look at these tablets, you see that they are always chiseled in all capital letters. That’s because the ancient Roman language didn’t have a lower case—the lower case didn’t evolve as part of the language until much later, when Romans started writing on parchment. I wanted the poem to have the feeling of an ancient proclamation, an artifact chiseled into stone.
In “Hi, How Are You,” lines that start with the word “Hi” tend to leave out the comma, like in the line, “Hi I still fear I will eat my own tail.” Especially the “eat my own tail” part brought the image of Ouroboros to mind, which symbolizes a cycle of life and death. Does the lack of punctuation and pause contribute to what could be a meaning of the poem, a feeling of endlessness, as suggested by the line “…when do you think it will end?”
Absolutely. I always think of punctuation in a poem like stage directions in a play. While it isn’t exactly read aloud, it tells you how to read something aloud. The lack of punctuation makes those moments feel a bit more breathless and harried. The feeling of endlessness, as you put it, is exactly right. The cycles of pain, violence, and fear feel endless, but somehow we get through it—”another day passed when I imagined it could not.”
I found out from your website that you also work as a designer for a university hospital. As this requires spending time in an environment centered around care, empathy, and attention to detail, do you ever find that these qualities influence your approach to writing or have inspired themes or emotions in your poems?
I think I do bring somewhat of a graphic designer’s eye to the poems I write. In particular, the shape and form of a poem has always been a priority for me—how it looks on the page. In my job, I work with shape, color, texture, and text to make compelling visuals that communicate essential information. I think poems can do the same thing. The length of the line, the number of stanzas, the enjambment—all these choices contribute to the visual impact of a poem on the page. And then the word choice, narrative, and voice communicate the essential information of the poem.
Care, empathy, and attention to detail are perhaps the most important resources in any writer’s arsenal and certainly influence almost all of my writing. Paying attention to the details of the world around us—as well as the world inside of us—is usually how a poem starts for me. I see or feel something that feels important and feel compelled to write about it. As I write, I rely on my sense of empathy and understanding to describe what I’m seeing or feeling. Empathy comes from the Greek em- (“in”) + pathos (“feeling”). Writing allows you to be in a feeling so deeply you can sometimes come to understand something greater than your own self. Care usually comes as a revision strategy for me—taking immense care in the nuance of wording, the placement of punctuation, carefully honing the poem into what it’s meant to be.
Are there any poets, artists, or individuals in your life whom you would consider your biggest influences?
So many poets are essential to my understanding of poetry. I always return to poets like Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, CA Conrad, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Lucie Brock-Broido, Etel Adnan, Alice Notley, Brian Teare… the list goes on. I also really love reading translations of poems, especially translations that wrestle with how a translation functions, not just as a literal word-for-word transference (which is impossible, usually). For instance, Mary Jo Bang just completed a translation of The Divine Comedy by Dante, and she understood that the revolutionary act of that piece of Italian literature was that it was written in vernacular with an eye to the politics and culture of the time. So she not only translated the words, she translated concepts and characters from their 14th century Italian origin into modern-day references. I’m very inspired by translation that is undertaken as a form of art, rather than as just a kind of scholarly dictation. Mary Jo Bang was also one of my teachers and remains one of my most important influences. I was also lucky enough to have the poet Taije Silverman as a teacher, who currently lives four blocks away from me in Philadelphia. She is one of the most empathetic poets I know, and also happens to be a great translator of Italian poetry. Philadelphia has an incredible community of artists, many of whom have influenced my writing— Libby Rosa, Todd Stong, Erin Murray, and my partner Brice Peterson, to name a few. I’m also very inspired by Jessica Scicchitano’s reading and publication series At What Cost, for which I do a lot of the graphic design.
In class, we recently read Robert Archambeau’s essay “The Discursive Situation of Poetry,” which made me wonder about the current state of poetry today. I feel that many poets tend to write about very similar topics, usually concerning nature, religion, or history. One of the reasons I was drawn to “Hi, How Are You” was that it explores something different (at least, in my interpretation): a craving for genuineness and honesty, which I think is lacking in modern poetry. Given that, do you think poetry today still feels authentic, or has it started to sound repetitive, like poets are somewhat afraid to break away from traditional themes?
I think every era of poetry has its fads and trends, certainly. And that can make things feel repetitive, or even inauthentic. But I’ve always thought the best poetry feels like it could be written at any time, addressing something so pressing and urgent that it speaks across time. And there are certain themes that are universal—love, death, pain, joy, fear, hope. We’re always writing about the same things, in a way. What makes a poem really shine, for me, is when it says something I’ve never heard before about one of those universal themes, shows me a unique way of thinking or feeling or saying it. Every poet I mentioned above has that quality, along with so many others who line my bookshelf—Rickey Laurentiis, Osip Mandelstam, David Ferry, Claudia Rankine, Mary Ruefle, Ovid, Anne Carson, etc. etc. There are so many poets out there—the more you read, the better you are at finding them. So if you haven’t found your poets yet, just keep reading!
If your poems could talk to you, what do you think they’d tell you about how you wrote them to be?
I think my poems would talk to me in a language I could only half comprehend.
The title of your poem is a very generic greeting that, to me, is overused and therefore has no real meaning anymore when someone uses it. Including it as the title and first lines of the poem made me think that you might also see this as a problem. People don’t seem to be genuinely interested in the lives of other people, except when they’re trying to pry information out of them that can be used to their own benefit, at least, in my own experience. I’m curious, did you choose this phrase as the title to highlight that lack of authenticity and perhaps connect it to some of the heavier themes in the poem, like suicidal thoughts and feelings of disconnect? Or is there an entirely different reasoning behind this decision?
Yes—you are absolutely right. Sometimes politeness is a trap. We might say “Hi, How are you” to someone casually as a greeting but have no intention of actually inquiring about how that person is. It’s just something you say to be polite. And on the other side, let’s say someone says “Hi, how are you” and you’re not doing well? Depending on the person asking, it might be considered “impolite” to say so. So we can get trapped in these surface-level ways of relating to one another sometimes, absolutely. But I hope this poem shows that when you actually open up, when you actually answer for how you are and why, you can learn so much about yourself you might never have consciously known. Much of this poem was a surprise to me when I was writing it. It was written during the first Trump presidency, which made me feel so numb and distant from myself. Then someone asked me off-hand “how are you” in that polite way we do sometimes. And I thought, what would it sound like if I actually answered them? The poem is that answer.