The Ache & the Wing by Sunni Brown Wilkinson
Sundress Publications, 2021
Sunni Brown Wilkinson was interviewed by Braden Dyk, Janey Hall, Hannah Hicks, and Hannah Swedberg.
Could you tell us a bit about your growing up and your path to becoming a writer?
The short version is that I’m terrible at math, science, athletics, visual art, and pretty much anything where you have to compete on the spot. I love reading, drama, daydreaming, the music of language, and I was always good at spelling and could write a decent sentence, so I guess things just blossomed from there.
The longer version is that I grew up in a small college town in northern Utah in a house that abuts the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. Behind us was a small alfalfa field and miles of trees. When my brothers and I were young we spent hours wandering the foothills, building tree forts, catching lizards, and just running amok.
When I was a teenager, the typical story of developers and large houses unfolded behind us, like they do in most suburban spaces. But I still spent countless hours walking the neighborhood at night or climbing the foothills (crawling under barbed wire and generally imposing on private property that no one lived on), always alone and usually with a notebook and pen. A lot has happened to me since then—college, an MFA, teaching, parenthood—but I think my real desire to write and capture the energy of the world in some form stems from those experiences. They unlocked a spirituality in me that has never left.
I still go for walks as many mornings as I can, in a neighborhood similar to the one of my childhood (though I’m now about 30 miles away), and sometimes I start composing poems about what I see: quail and all kinds of birds, aspen, willows, the rogue apricot tree I picked and made jam from, skunks, cows and horses grazing, spring in the mountains, fall in the mountains. Sometimes I just think about my life. I never get tired of it. And since I don’t paint or create music, writing is the natural art I turn to. I’ve written about all kinds of subjects over the years, but I do think this desire to observe and internalize the world came from these moments of walking the world alone.
In your interview at the Sundress blog, you mentioned that “[Ada Limon] said that when she read a poetry manuscript, she looked for a narrative arc.” How do you take your readers through a narrative arc? How do you see this narrative overarching The Ache & the Wing as a whole?
I hope that this book is a journey from deep grief into hope. I think most of us experience that pattern of grief and hope regularly. We move through it all of our lives. Realistically, we probably move through it every single day, right? I’ll admit that I move through those modes hour by hour sometimes, but then I’m a middle-aged woman who’s always been a bit emotional, so maybe that’s just me.
But beyond our personal experience, there’s also the archetypal story of trauma or loss and redemption. That’s the story of the Bible (from Adam & Eve leaving the Garden of Eden to the final lines of The Book of Revelation), of The Odyssey, of Les Miserables, and some of my favorite novels like The Razor’s Edge, Siddhartha, Gilead—you name it. Nearly any iconic narrative we anchor ourselves in—historically, culturally, religiously—is built around some kind of loss and a search for, if not redemption, then at least a hope in love or humanity, meaning, sometimes even God, the everlasting. We love that narrative because we identify with it. It’s the direction we hope the human species—maybe all species—is moving toward. We are imperfect, we experience loss, but we reach out for something to fill us, to satisfy our deepest yearnings. And those two parts are meant to work together because loss often drives us to understand more clearly what we really want.
Everyone experiences grief. Our grief in losing our son was not unique. But the journey to love the world again and live in it more completely is an experience that feels worth telling, precisely because it isn’t unique and readers can bring their own understanding, their own grief and journey to it, as a parallel or a companion.
The book opens with an admission at the end of the first poem that “sometimes you hold your own hand. / That’s all there is to take.” I felt that most in the initial stages of my grief. The weight we carry in grief we carry largely on our own. And yet, as that archetypal narrative suggests, help is there. We just have to recognize it and embrace it. I don’t think that’s a naïve glossing-over of pain, either. There are very real elements in life that can anchor us to hope and healing. The natural world is certainly one, but others are family relationships, an inner life, any kind of love, the joy of living a full life. The poems throughout the book explore those until the final poem ends with a desire for immortality, a chance to be embodied by whatever light finds us. This isn’t a denial of grief; it’s a way to come full circle and imagine that whatever we have lost is in some way regained, that we are re-born into something new and whole.
In “Don’t Feed the Coyotes” you write, “A man stands next to his Harley / and throws hot dogs / at the mangy thing prowling / the Conoco.” How do you think these lines at the beginning of the poem connect with your theme of grief, particularly male grief?
Well, the coyote is hungry and, honestly, pretty ugly. This road trip to Mexico, where this scene unfolded, happened a few months after we lost our son, so I could almost see myself in that coyote. I felt ragged, unsteady, and a mess, like grief had torn me apart, and I was unrecognizable to myself. I felt like a beggar, just like this coyote was.
It’s interesting to me that the man on the Harley Davidson seems to be enjoying this moment, flinging hot dogs despite the sign that tells him not to. He’s literally a man feeding a coyote, but he could also be seen as that strange mercy that comes in rough clothes (and maybe with a wild engine) and feeds us what we need in a particular moment, enough to get us by one more day. So he can also be a metaphor for what consoles us in our grief.
It also celebrates the sensitivity of men. This Harley guy embodies the ultimate idea of “macho,” with his loud motorcycle and his black leather. And yet, he was far more merciful than anyone else at that Conoco that day. He was tender in a way that surprised me, and I kind of loved him for it. I wondered if he also related to that coyote, if he saw something he recognized there. I see that same tenderness in a lot of men I know. When our son died, my husband grieved differently than I did. He was quieter and more matter-of-fact, but he still hurt for a long time, and I’ve seen him become gentler, more patient, more compassionate. I think too often we underestimate the gentleness of men. Certainly there are plenty of examples of misogyny in the world, but my life is filled with good men. I have three brothers and three sons. I’m very close to my father and my husband, and I can honestly say that they are some of the gentlest, kindest people I know. Some of them don’t express themselves as openly as I do. They hold things close in a different way, but their grief and their joy is as deep as mine. It just might look different from the outside.
As much of your book arises from the stillborn birth you experienced, I am curious to know how you see “The Difficult, Liquid Art” (with its “man trembling / on a high wire over the spires”) interacting with other poems in the book. From a man’s perspective, what is it like to lose a child? Or would you rather this poem be removed from those questions and stand alone?
Honestly, I never thought of that poem in connection with child loss, but it does highlight the difficulty of just being a man, so in that sense in certainly takes in loss. But I do think I’d rather just let it stand alone and be a celebration of manhood. I marvel sometimes at what men are asked to do and be, the expectation that they carry so much of the world and look strong while doing it, as if it were effortless. I don’t mean “carry the world” in a power-hungry, misogynistic way, but just the expectation that they slip into roles that generations of men before them have created. Those roles can be noble, but a lot of times they’re daunting, even terrifying. I don’t refer to this directly in the poem, but it reminds me of the way I’ve slowly realized just what my father endured in Vietnam, what he witnessed and worked hard his whole life to move past. War is an inheritance for many men, and it’s one I’ve prayed my whole life that my sons will not come into. But beyond that, the everyday business of living in a man’s body—something I will never experience but am fascinated by—of “being broken and beautiful,” as the poem says—looks like work to me.
There is another poem in the collection—“Long Time Coming”—that deals explicitly with a man’s grief, and that one fits into this discussion too. It’s about a man my husband knew who lost his son and father but, because of his role in his church, was expected to comfort everyone else while he swallowed his own grief. That’s the kind of marveling at a man’s role in the world that I’m talking about. Truthfully, I didn’t realize that this poetry collection included so many poems about men, but in hindsight I can see it certainly does. I’m surrounded by men, so I guess it stands to reason that they are often my subjects.
In “A Pocket of Air in an Irish Man’s Brain,” you portray the true events of a man whose brain appears to be missing a large section but is actually covered by an air bubble. His brain is a “mysterious cloud, house of ghosts, / holy of holies, a hollow / like a child’s hand cupped / for a caterpillar.” What was the purpose of trying to fill that supposed empty space, and what is the significance of the switch to first person when talking about filling that space with “love notes in [your] best cursive”?
This poem is about loss too, a finite but strange one: the literal loss of part of the mind. I guess I was playing with this idea of, if there existed a blank space in this man’s mind, what would I want to fill it with? I’m not sure why I changed it to first person except just to say that I would want to give him tiny gifts from my own life. Or maybe even own that part of his brain and create some wild space in it. It’s really just me messing around, which most of my writing is. But I did want to play with the idea of filling a void with beauty and meaning, which I hope comes through.
You end the poem “So Long” by writing, “The body / and the spirit are a bicycle / you ride carefully / and uphill / and for how long?” How does the body and spirit becoming a bicycle suggest the journey of life? Does the word “uphill” symbolize suffering or do you see a different way of interpreting that?
Oh, it’s suffering all right. Not always hard-core suffering but effort, labor, the grinding repetition of daily life, of juggling the physical and the spiritual on a constant basis. That’s exhausting. And I’m never sure I’m very good at it. It’s so much work living in a body! A man’s body, a woman’s body. It takes endless attention and movement and skill. I’ve always been a clumsy person, so moving with any kind of grace has felt like work.
About the body and the spirit becoming a bicycle, I guess I just pictured each being one of those wheels, and then the effort to balance the two feels endless. Maybe I see this most as a mother, as the poem suggests, because I have these very physical duties of bringing children into the world, feeding them, caring for them, etc., often at the cost of my own body and my inner life. Something has to give, and mothers often put a part of themselves on hold for a while. The trick is not losing that sense of self. My artist friend who did the cover of the book has talked to me about this too. We both feel a deep reverence for the ability to have children, but neither of us wants to let go of our desire to create other things too. Balancing the demands of a family with what your own spirit and body need is also tricky. So, really, I guess this poem is my personal honoring of what women experience. Maybe it’s a counterpart to the poems about men.
In the visit our class had with you, you spoke about how “When it Comes” was a list of actions—such as watering the daisies and loving bees—that can help ground people to the little things in life while dealing with grief. That being said, the last stanza has a bit of a darker tone, with language such as “bloodhound sharp / and howl.” What led to these closing words?
Those are actually some of my favorite lines in the whole book. I’ve been thinking for years about what constitutes real “greatness.” I’ve studied it, examined the people around me, mulled it over for a long time, and I guess if I’ve come to any real conclusions, it’s that greatness lives in everything that lies in total opposition to what the world at large celebrates. So, bees and daisies and toddlers and all of the quiet and seemingly unimportant things. Often domestic things. That’s where the real gold is. The rest is fool’s gold. “What matters is nearly invisible,” that poem says. And I really believe that. Not that it’s really invisible, but that we look past it so much. It’s so ordinary we can’t believe that’s it. We have to have the right eyes to see it. And when we do find it, we should howl like hell and not shut up. Because other people are looking hard for that truth, that greatness, and it’s our responsibility, once we’ve found it, to help others find it too.
I’ve kind of created this mantra for myself that says: be true to what you know is true. Like a bloodhound, I try to search for that truth with every part of my attention and then give my life to it. I think that’s the other part of “howling.” We don’t just talk about it, we raise an alarm about it, we bend our whole lives toward it.
In “Monk Parakeet,” the speaker revels in the small details they observe in the city, most importantly the small emerald bird that’s louder and brighter than the best the city has to offer—“greener than green beads, louder than Charlie Parker.” This bird arrived because of a hurricane. Is the significance of this beauty derived from a storm that good things, no matter how minute, can come from bad?
I do think that’s the suggestion. I’m not positive that was a conscious consideration when I first wrote the end of that poem, but it certainly played a part in my decision to include it in the book. It goes along with that idea of “real gold,” or authenticity and wholeness being in natural, seemingly ordinary things. It’s true that the real star of New Orleans for me was that budgie that sang out from the treetops, far above the filth and noise and splendor of the city. Humans can’t create that kind of perfection. And it was so tiny up there that I barely saw it. But it announced itself, as Mary Oliver would say, “in the family of things.”
And I discovered, with a little research, that it’s a foreigner. But this bird, one of many, has adapted to its new home. I guess that’s also part of the narrative of the book: loss comes in all forms, but we can adapt, we can find a new balance of spirit and body and make a new home where we are. We have to in order to survive, right?
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Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s most recent work can be found in Western Humanities Review, Sugar House Review, Ruminate, and South Dakota Review. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of Sundress Publications’ Chapbook Prize). Her work has been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, and the Sherwin W. Howard Award.
Braden Dyk, Janey Hall, Hannah Hicks, and Hannah Swedberg are alumni of Lee University.