“Night Herons”: Eight Questions with Amy Gerstler
Amy Gerstler is a poet, a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and art criticism. She is currently developing a full-length play with artist and writer Benjamin Weissman. Gerstler has taught writing, literature, and visual art at the University of California, Irvine, California Institute of the Arts, Cal Tech, and other schools in the West. She has published numerous book collections of poems. Her book, Scattered At Sea, which was published in 2015, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her most recent book is called Is This My Final Form?
Gerstler’s poem, “Night Herons,” stuck out to me specifically in the 2023 edition of Best American Poetry. The poem is made to describe the life of a person living through the COVID-19 Pandemic, who finds solace and wonder in a flock of Night Herons that are either real or imagined. The poem’s language draws readers in, using the pronoun “you” and putting readers in the narrator’s perspective. The experience of the pandemic for most people who lived through it also helps in giving context to set up the narrator’s life at the moment. Something that I enjoyed about the poem is its opening lines. It does a very good job of encapsulating the dull and dreary feeling that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to many people. However, what is truly brilliant is how Gerstler transitions from this monotony she describes at the beginning to a curious, mystical feeling that the herons bring upon the narrator and the reader. The poem makes these night herons into a beacon of hope for all of those who are locked in their houses and feeling helpless.
On your website, you mentioned that you were writing a musical play with Steve Gunderson. Has live theater ever been an inspiration for any of your poetry, or have aspects of it influenced your work?
YES! Live theatre is a huge inspiration for my writing. My mother loved theatre, had ambitions to be a musical comedy actress, and from the time we were little she took us kids to tons of plays and operas. In college I took acting classes and very briefly considered a career in some aspect of theater. Even though I’m kind of shy there’s a part of me that’s a big ham about reading texts aloud, so I loved acting. Many of my poems are dramatic monologues. It’s a form that straddles theatre and poetry and fascinates and enchants me. I love the possibilities of one or more voices exposing their inner life to an audience/reader. I’m attracted to that kind of revealing speech, where a speaker pours their heart out in relation to some particular pain or dilemma or fury or ecstasy. Playwrights I love include Edward Albee, Sarah Ruhl, Maria Irene Fornes, Thornton Wilder, Caryl Churchill. I just got my hands on an anthology of plays by poets called The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater which looks like it might have some great, crazy stuff in it.
One part of your poem, “Night Herons” that appears in Best American Poetry 2023, which I found very intriguing was your allusion quoting Psalm 17:15 from the Bible. The psalm itself is a message of hope, but I wasn’t sure of what your intention was behind the quote itself. Can you shed some more light on what inspired that reference?
“Night Herons” is a COVID poem, meaning it was written during and about the time of COVID lockdown. I think the poem may also be a lament about the encroaching loneliness and alienation that increasingly characterizes contemporary, tech-dominated life, which of course COVID isolation didn’t cause but perhaps exacerbated. The psalm quote, just as you said, was meant to let a little light and hope leak into what is otherwise a rather doomist poem, and to suggest that despite the darkness overwhelming the speaker there may be glimmers of redemption ahead. I also think I may have craved a diction change late in the poem, a shift from the speaker’s distressed, almost mourning voice to the soothing beauty of the voice of the psalm. I love collage and most of my poems contain elements drawn from other texts. For example, the last line of that poem is a tinkered-with quote from a Velvet Underground song title. The song title is “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and I bent that into the poem’s final line “all tomorrow’s garlands.”
This work carries a very particular, somewhat chronological storyline to it. A person spends all day at work, feeling like they are “going nowhere” for them to find themself out at night, seeing, or possibly picturing a flock of herons, which prompts them to think about their existence and human experience. It being something that really stuck out to me, I wonder if there is any significance in the structure or progression of the poem to you. Was there any significance in your writing process around the way that “Night Herons” is structured?
I had never heard of night herons, so when they appeared in something I was reading, their name seemed mysterious and evocative and enticing to me…I imagined them as special messengers, gliding through the night, unaffected by the pandemic, able to see and navigate in the literal and figurative dark. So, I used the image of the birds to ride into the poem. I did a little research and there are a few factoids about actual night herons (what their voices sound like, where they nest) embedded in the poem. I love the poetry of fact and lean into that often when writing poems. And the poem is infused with the despair the speaker is wrestling with, as she tries to outlast pandemic fear and confinement, day by day, night by night, adding up to years.
At a first glance, the Herons in this poem seem to be symbolic. However, your description of the Night Herons’ appearance and actions is very vivid, making them feel real. Although in another part of the poem, the narrator states that “it’s the same either way”, making it seem like it does not matter if real or fake. Therefore, my final question about “Night Herons” is, are the Herons meant to be a physical inspiration for the narrator, a symbol of the emotions they are going through, or does it not matter?
If someone asks, “does such and such a thing mean either this or that–which is it?” I am always tempted to answer “Can’t it be both? Can’t it even be three or four things at once?” I think art is one of the sacred places where multiple meanings can arise, co-exist, entwine, contradict and/or foment each other. In other words, components of a work of art and works of art as a whole can evoke and release multiple meanings. I think that might be an important part of art’s job. Those myriad meanings might pull together or against each other, (or, again, do both.) So, I want the night herons in the poem to have several functions: to be themselves, real living birds, as well as symbols for the narrator to use in her thinking about her predicament. Maybe also the birds are agents of her imagined escape from all that’s oppressing her. If the poem works, my hope is that the night herons can embody multiple ideas/meanings, depending on the individual reader. I tend to think about poetry not as a definition of something singular but as a multifarious exploration/ experience.
Which poets or possibly artists that you have reviewed have been the most inspirational to you, whether personally or in your work throughout your life?
Poets and writers whose work dazzles me:
James Tate, Philip Larkin, Diane Seuss, Mary Ruefle, Lydia Davis, Wislawa Szymborska, Franz Kafka, Pablo Neruda, Donald Barthelme, Tracy K. Smith, Alice Notley, Ada Limon, Sei Shonagon, Leonora Carrington, Claire-Louise Bennett, Charles Simic, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Dean Young, Bob Hicok, Elizabeth Bishop, MFK Fisher, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ross Gay, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Frank O’Hara, Virginia Woolf, Tom Clark, Bert Meyers, Natalie Diaz, Edward Lear, Lucile Clifton, Elaine Equi, Ted Berrigan, David Foster Wallace, Terrance Hayes, Mirasaki Shikibu, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman. I could go on like this all day, all year, as this list doesn’t even scratch the surface, but I don’t want to drive you crazy.
In our class, we are scheduled to read some articles written by Joseph Epstein and Dana Gioia from the book, The Monkey and The Wrench about the current state of American poetry. What is your take on the state of American poetry today, and are there other articles you would suggest we read?
I’m probably not the best person to field this question, partly because I’m not sure I believe there is one unified, identifiable state of American poetry. It’s a rich, vital field and the US is a big sprawling, messy, fraught country, with tons of range in what its poets choose to write about and how they approach their work. I embrace what I see as the American all-over-the-place-ness and the wide array of voices and techniques which characterize American poetry now. In terms of books about poetry…. I like Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity, Charles Simic’s writing about poetry, Michael Ryan’s book A Difficult Grace. I treasure Alice Notley’s two books about poetry Coming After and Telling the Truth as It Comes Up. But I gravitate much more toward reading interviews with writers I admire as my main ways of getting information about writing craft and practice. Paris Review magazine, for example, which can be accessed online (hopefully there’s not some pesky paywall blocking access) has an amazing archive of long form interviews with all kinds of writers, from the current moment going way back to 1953. Books like The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers can be useful if you find it helpful to read interviews with writers you like. And of course the internet is packed with interviews with writers and all kinds of other artists.
A lot of your poetry is grouped into books. If each book had a personality, which one would you go out for coffee with, and what would the book be like if personified?
This is an amusing question, to which I have a rather dull answer…I tend to be most interested in the most recent book, so that would be the one called Is This My Final Form, in which “Night Herons” was published, which came out in April of this year. If personified, that book might be an inquisitive teenager, with long, unruly reddish hair, who is a great skateboarder, wears baggy unisex clothes, has a sweet if slightly raspy singing voice, vapes a lot, eats mostly desserts and is constantly barraging everyone they encounter with manic questions, almost to the point of being annoying.
On your website, you mentioned you were an art critic and were also writing a play. What is one piece of art and/or work of theater that you enjoy?
I am going to cheat and name several things. “Seascape” is a play by Edward Albee that is close to my heart. Two of its four characters are sea monsters! Two visual artists whose work I like a great deal are Pippilotti Rist and Annette Messenger. I love graphic novels…those by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez are longstanding faves.