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Reese Menefee’s work first appeared in The Sun in March 2023. That poem, “Ode to My Brother’s Face Tattoos,” is a description of painful family bonds that manages to be beautiful, visceral, and surprising all at once. When I read her latest poem, “Hymn”—equally powerful, but very different in style and subject—I began to wonder what makes this writer tick. I had the chance to ask Reese about the origins of her poems when we talked over Zoom just before the December holidays. During our chat she also told me about finding her way home through her writing and the unlikely way she ended up in an MFA program.
REESE MENEFEE
Nancy Holochwost: What our staff liked about “Hymn” is how open the writing is to various readings. What did you want people to find in the poem?
Reese Menefee: I wanted readers to take away the synonymous nature of God, love, and home. To me they are all interwoven, and they’re all dwellings, in a sense: They’re places the self resides. All three are tied to notions of belonging and permanence or impermanence. With that comes a longing for safety and acceptance, which we may not receive. I think that uncertainty can create fear, which I chose to write about in this poem. I wanted a reclamation of what God is and what it would mean if God, love, and home were the same thing.
Nancy: The poem uses religious imagery alongside expressions of romantic love, which is an unexpected combination.
Reese: For me, religion and love are connected to each other. They’re both also connected to the idea of wanting to be accepted—as the last line of the poem says, to be taken as you are.
Nancy: There’s a surprising moment at the end of “Hymn” when the speaker says, “God isn’t real,” then describes praying.
Reese: I tend to pray a lot, but I don’t necessarily believe in God. I wanted to reflect on the idea of expressing gratitude and asking for things to work out, but not knowing for sure whom you’re speaking to. Maybe you’re speaking to your home.
Nancy: Can you say more about how the concept of home plays into the poem?
Reese: I wrote “Hymn” after living in Louisiana for three years and coming back to Kentucky, where I grew up. It’s a complicated place for me. When I was a kid here, I was focused on leaving. I was in Catholic school, and I didn’t really fit in. I never felt that Kentucky was my home or that I belonged. But when I moved to Louisiana, I missed Kentucky a lot. I have family here, and the landscape in the South is so different. Louisiana is so flat! I started writing all these poems about Kentucky, and people would read them and tell me, “You really love Kentucky.” I had this moment when I thought, “Maybe I do love Kentucky. This is strange.” Being away from it gave me a new sense of connection to it, which was unexpected.
Nancy: There seems to be a tension in “Hymn” between how the speaker wishes things might be and how they actually are.
Reese: My poems tend to have a sense of urgency and desperation, which I have a hard time getting away from. In “Hymn” there’s a yearning for someone to be listening. There’s also a sense that love and home are fleeting. They come and go, even though you want them to be stable.
Nancy: What’s your starting point when you write a poem?
Reese: It’s really important to me that my poems have an accessible emotional core. I tried to write neatly for a long time, and that didn’t work for me. I had to start letting myself write from a place of desperation. In the beginning I didn’t always feel comfortable doing it, but the emotional core I want depends on vulnerability, and vulnerability is messy sometimes. A lot of the emotions I write about aren’t neat emotions.
Nancy: How did that shift in your writing come about?
Reese: Part of the change came from showing my poems to other people, which I’d never done before. It’s funny, because you’d expect the opposite—that the poems I kept to myself would be more honest and the ones I shared would be more constrained. I was in an MFA program, which I’d applied to on a whim. I had no idea what I was getting into, but having a community of people to share poetry with was definitely helpful.
Nancy: I’d like to hear more about this whim.
Reese: I was in my first year of teaching high school, and instead of using my planning periods to plan lessons, I was using them to write poems. I realized that writing poetry was what I wanted to do, so I looked into how I could do it, and an MFA came up. I’d never heard of an MFA before that point.
Nancy: It sounds like you were writing for some time before you pursued it professionally.
Reese: I can’t imagine a time when I wasn’t writing. It’s something that I’ve always done, usually in journals. Eventually that writing started taking the shape of poems. I also began reading poems. I think reading poetry got me into writing poetry.
Nancy: I saw online that the title of your MFA thesis was Heart Teeth. Is that right?
Reese: Yes. It’s such a bad title! Oh, my goodness.
Nancy: It seems to fit the poems of yours that we’ve published in The Sun: the idea that what you feel most deeply has teeth. I don’t know if that’s anywhere near the right reading.
Reese: That’s how I wanted the title to be read, but no one else took it that way, so I’ve grown to kind of hate it. I’m working on a full-length collection right now that includes some of the poems from my thesis, and I’ve changed the title to Waterbody. Water is a connecting force in all of my poems. When I think about home, I think about the Ohio River and the other surrounding rivers, where I go swimming with friends. I write a lot about the river, and also about bodies. That sounds really straightforward, but it’s the first title that’s felt right to me.
Nancy: Do you have favorite poets or poems that influenced you?
Reese: Kim Addonizio has been a major influence. What Is This Thing Called Love is one of those books that feels like a favorite album. I’ve cried on my couch to it; I’ve returned to it so many times and for so many different reasons, and every time I find something new in it. I love that book.
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