“The Travelers”: Nine Questions for Abigail Dembo
One thing that’s been interesting to me for a while is about how we think about and remember the past, such as old memories, family stories, or just short moments that stick in your head for whatever reason. For this reason, Abigail Dembo’s poem “The Travelers” gained my attention in Best American Poetry 2025. The poem is written about exploring memory and wanting to live through a moment in the past. It is framed in a dreamlike way where the experiences feel surreal, almost like they exist as a part of the imagination. In addition, it illustrates how people hold onto things like memories which are impossible to revisit. Reading the poem made me think about the feelings like curiosity and disappointment that you get when remembering moments in the past that you would like to revisit.
Dembo works at the University of Iowa and won the Nomadic Press Literary Award in 2022. Her writing often combines the imagination and memories. She usually lets her poems, including “The Travelers,” form naturally while she writes rather than planning them out ahead of time like some other poets prefer to do. When my class and I free-write in English, we come up with ideas as we are writing and this allows us to think of many different details in the moment that we wouldn’t think of if we were planning out our writings, just like Dembo. Connecting back to “The Travelers,” there are many details that just seem like they originated from feelings being felt in the moment of when the poem was being written. To conclude, Dembo is currently working on a new collection of poems, but has not been accepted for publication yet and has not shared them.
In “The Travelers”, the woman wants to revisit her father’s childhood home. How does your experience with memories or imagining the past influence or shape this poem?
I think a lot of my longings relate to wanting to return to the past, my own or others’. As long as I can remember the fantasies I’ve had have been of this kind, rather than wanting to imagine some future world. At the same time, I’m aware that these are quite romanticized versions of the past. If I consider the idea of visiting my father’s childhood, it is also this breed of longing, although also a more personal version. And it is quite true, that I felt when I wrote this. What a way of knowing someone this might be. But regarding the past more generally, I think I feel at the same time not just the pain of the impossibility of this, but also the fear or the awareness that the longing would be undone if I ever were able to experience the reality. I am sure, somehow, the longing would be ruined if I were to be able to. And then, I think, I want to keep it (the longing or the fantasy, I’m not sure), rather than have it ruined. It’s a kind of impossible problem, but of course it is impossible to go backwards. It’s only a knotty problem in my mind or my emotional world, wherever it lives.
The poem “The Travelers” describes very specific and unusual details, for example, “I ate green horehound in my bed at night.” Can you explain the process for choosing these types of images?
Many of these images were either from my childhood, and I include my childhood books here, because I know horehound from Laura Ingalls Wilder, but also from stories from my mother’s grandmother’s, father’s, great-grandfather’s histories, or stories I’ve heard of them. All of these things, when I was writing, were very quickly spinning and combining together. I couldn’t call it a choice, as though it were some kind of intellectual process. They assembled themselves.
The voices in the waiting room in “The Travelers” all speak in a very split up way. How did you decide to structure the poem this way, and what effect did you think it would have on the readers?
Oh, I don’t know if I thought they were speaking in a very split up way. I think the most I was considering was pulling in images of the different kinds of longings people might have, from the small, to the simple, to the strange longing. I think I hoped the reader could identify with this kind of small urge, the kind that is a very quiet whisper. And, again, this is all happening in a very subconscious kind of way. It is often more like I am following what is happening, and if I realize what is going on, trying to help it move forward. Or maybe not get in its way.
One of the last lines of the poem compares the old woman to “a snowdrift” and “the drum of an inner ear.” How did you come to decide to use these comparisons and what were you trying to show about the woman’s state?
Ah! This one I can say, because “the drum of an inner ear” line was harder to come by, so I remember the moment it came to me. But let me say first, with the snowdrift, there it was pulled in from the image of the television, that snowy screen they can get, and so kind of reflected onto the old woman’s restlessness. So it was that kind of merging between the two images, I think. I can’t say how I chose the drum or small bones of the inner ear, but they did come to me walking, as so many good images do, and when it came, I knew it was right. I think I saw in this image of the inner ear, (perhaps from high school biology) a kind of small, easily moved machine almost, and in it a delicate tremor. With both images, I think I was trying to convey a kind of anxiety, even urgency, humming underneath everything in the waiting room.
Which poet, writer, or other artist influences how you make your poetry and how you go about your thought process?
Early on, I think I was influenced by Charles Simic, both his own work and translations. But I think since then, I have been most influenced by Yannis Ritsos. I am always searching for new stuff, but I return to him again and again. I read a lot of poetry in translation. A lot of it from the first half of the twentieth century. I also am drawn to Ted Hughes’s work, and Alice Oswald’s.
I don’t know if they influence how I make my poetry though, if you mean how I write, or my thought process, but I bet they do. They have certainly influenced my style. A book that did influence how I make my poetry is “The Triggering Town” by Richard Hugo. I have a place in my mind that I have invented, that I often go to when writing. This is something I learned from Hugo.
Where do you see the state of American poetry going in terms of the styles of the poems? Do you see the future of poetry including more dreamlike poems similar to how “The Travelers” was made?
I am not sure I can predict where American poetry is going. I know people who are working in so many different modes. I certainly hope there is always a contingent in poetry that works in the “dreamlike” way you describe “The Travelers” working. I certainly enjoy reading this kind of work and I find working in this way fruitful. I find that if I can escape from my day-to-day preoccupations and thoughts (which is sometimes quite hard to do), my imagination, my writing reveals things to me. I find this discovery quite exciting. I often think my imagination is more interesting and more honest than anything going on at the top of my mind.
If “The Travelers” was made into a short movie, which sensory element such as sound, movement, or smell would you insist has to be preserved, and which would you allow to be changed?
I think I would want that waiting room to be preserved, with all of its people and things, and the rumbling of trains. I am not sure what could be changed without the character of the place and experience being altered. Perhaps it is not important that the main character be a woman. Perhaps she might just as well be a man, I think.
When you write poems such as “The Travelers,” do you already have the poems planned out and know how they are going to end, or do you let them unfold as you go along?
No, I never plan out a poem or know where a poem is going when I begin to write it. Often, if I know too soon when writing where a poem is going or what it is doing, it is not a good sign.
Are you currently working on a new collection of poems that will be published soon, if you want to promote them at the end of the interview?
No, but thank you for asking. If I did have one, that would be lovely to do. I am working on a new collection of poems right now, and I have a manuscript that I have finished, but neither has been accepted for publication at this time.