As the winner of the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Maya’s Pindyck’s Impossible Belonging is a new mainstay on my bookshelf. It is insistent on remembering, attentive to the complexities of language, and attuned to the ways in which “we move and speak and live (or refuse to live) with each other.”
Maya delves into the inspiration behind Impossible Belonging in our conversation, revealing how family, cultural belonging, othering, historical trauma, diaspora, and the Anthropocene inform her poetry collection.
Caleigh Camara: I learned that the original title of Impossible Belonging was But the Orange Tree. What an evocative title! Its forlorn tone echoes that desperate longing for what’s beyond our reach, that grief over what’s been lost. Impossible Belonging is equally as wistful, but I’m curious—what inspired the change?
Maya Pindyck: I had been debating between the two titles and eventually settled on But the Orange Tree when I submitted the manuscript. After it was accepted, my editor suggested I change the title since she was worried But the Orange Tree was too evocative and potentially confusing, while the poems in the book felt to her grounded and clear. She urged me to consider a title more rooted in the themes of the book. I mentioned that I had been considering Impossible Belonging and she loved that alternative.
When I decided to switch titles, I felt a strange surge of courage about the book, like the title was now saying something true to the poems that couldn’t be too loosely interpreted. Impossible Belonging still felt evocative, but in a way that I think is closer to the feet of the poems.
Camara: I’m enthralled by the moths you mention in the book. The way they eat away at things pairs so perfectly with the larger themes of memory, perception, and belonging throughout the collection—the metaphorical “holes” they leave in our being. What was eating at you as you wrote these poems, and have you come to grips with them?
Pindyck: Moths were literally eating at my life as I wrote those poems! I had a clothing moth infestation in my Brooklyn apartment—sweaters devoured by moths, moths fluttering around, dotting the walls. A closet that stored two wool rugs exploded with moths. They were everywhere. And they became my ultimate, unavoidable “other.” I had to face what was happening and what it was bringing up in me: fear, disgust, a desire to extinguish them from my life, sadness for my lost sweaters and socks, a manic alertness as I moved inside that apartment, wary of flying bodies, thrusting my own body to kill the ones I spotted.
Writing about the moths became an opening to explore other forms of othering and how that intersects with perception and memory, too, yes. The poems were a way to confront my feelings in that time of “infestation”—experiencing myself at war with another species while trying to find some tenderness in those moments. I can’t say I’ve come to grips with the moths, but they did open up connections I couldn’t foresee.
Camara: Can you expand on those connections that were opened up? And, if possible: How did you find tenderness in those moments of otherness?
Pindyck: The experience made me consider how acts of othering can become “common sense” in certain contexts. I was reminded of anti-Arab sentiments I’ve witnessed in Israel, white supremacy in the U.S. masked as standard, institutional practice, and notions of an “enemy” entrenched in statehood. How do these imaginaries affect the ways we move and speak and live (or refuse to live) with each other? The moths tuned me into my bodily responses in the face of fear: the clenching, the tricks of the eye, the targeted aiming of my hand.
I found tenderness, as often happens, in acts of writing and other forms of art making, which can be processes of slowing down, listening, and being curious about something, loosening my relationship to it from a preexisting idea or image and allowing a fresh sensing to emerge.
Camara: I’d like to talk bodies. Impossible Belonging has it all: bones, blood, bodies cut open, bodies stitched closed, dead bodies, bound bodies, “bodies I’ll never know.” Throughout the collection, you explore the connection between the body and historical oppression, and how it shapes our understanding of what defines home. Can you talk about language as a conduit for exploring these topics, as you do in the lines, “But isn’t language how we come to love a home / that baffles the scaffolds making us / we?”
Pindyck: Language has so much power. It creates thoughts and images that we carry in our bodies. It can numb us and put us at war with each other. It can also be a conduit for healing and connection. I see language as an ever-changing body that shifts in relation to our actions, voices, and needs. Those capacities of language connect, for me, to the reality that language always fails at “capturing” a history, a feeling, an experience. I am relieved by that failure. It keeps language striving to touch, and that striving, that longing, can be felt in poetry, which grows among people and critters and dirt and music and dreams.
Maybe I am trying to say, in response to your question, that poetry is one way I can explore painful topics that doesn’t perpetuate cycles of violence and trauma. The language needs to change to feel (y)our bodies differently, to baffle those scaffolds of tribalism and cultural belonging and identity.
Camara: How do you know when a poem has achieved that longing—that striving—for what language cannot capture? Are there certain techniques you use to help you achieve that conveyance of emotion?
Pindyck: When it says something that surprises me in the language it needs.
Does taking a shower count as a technique? Often when I’m in the shower, I’ll be revising poems I’ve written, refining the language in the back of my mind. Maybe it has to do with the water and the heat and the relaxed sense of “not thinking about the poem” that allows those pieces of the poem to rise and click more clearly.
I’ve also learned to trust the intelligence of sound. How sometimes following sound (and opening myself to sound) can be a way of achieving that.
Camara: Throughout the collection, there is a back and forth between “forgetting” and “remembering”—of breaking free from restraint and raging against the idea of forgetting. In recalling your family’s past, did you unearth memories that you or your family preferred to remain forgotten? How do we grapple with stories and places that are necessary to our understanding of where we belong, yet are impossible to reconcile?
Pindyck: The preservation of memory has always been a core part of my family and Jewish culture. I grew up with an insistence on memory, on never forgetting the Holocaust and where I come from, and with a mother who records our family’s histories with deep devotion. The challenging question for me wasn’t what/if to remember but what to do with those memories. How do I hold my family’s memories of the Holocaust and Zionist dreams with a critique of statehood and a resistance to oppressive policies upheld and protected by “my people”? Where do I locate knots of past oppressions and present privileges in my body, and how can I mobilize those knots to address current injustices?
I think we grapple with those stories we cannot reconcile by writing them again and again, maybe each time with different “others” in mind, and for a future people we hope to touch.
Camara: The two latter sections are very family-centric, and with them comes a gradual shift in the collection’s tone, from lamentation and anger to happiness and acceptance. I was touched by the final poem, “Present Tense”—which was featured on the poet Ada Limón’s podcast, The Slowdown—and the speaker’s “return” to family. When you set out to write this book, did you anticipate this hopeful ending? How much has your original vision changed, and what were you pleasantly surprised by during the process of writing?
Pindyck: Even though I knew, on some level, that all the things I was writing about are interconnected, I was surprised by the ways the themes spoke to each other and the kinds of relationships the poems created when together.
I came to the order of the poems by continually reshuffling them to find bright, energetic relations. I couldn’t anticipate that ending, but when I put all the poems on the floor and eventually placed “Present Tense” at the end, it was like breathing a sigh of relief: the poem and finding its place among the others. There, at the end, that poem became a way of honoring where I come from and also of pointing to a kind of hope, a possibility in family sprouting in a new direction, one that is already a part of me—
Camara: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your daughters contributed to and/or influenced several poems in Impossible Belonging. What perspectives did they add to the collection, and what can we learn from their interpretation of the world, of history, of ourselves?
Pindyck: Motherhood is, in many ways, the lens through which I write about cultural belonging, othering, historical trauma, diaspora, and the Anthropocene. My experiences as a mother frame this collection—I wrote most of the poems when my daughter, Noa, was 3 to 5 years old, and her sister, Alma, was a baby/toddler. There are poems in this book specific to motherhood, and also ones shaped from the wilderness of my children’s language. Several of the poems sprung from stories Noa told me, some of which were old stories she retold with fresh and wild root.
I see that sense of wilderness—of blooming, undisciplined voices observing and re-imagining—interrupting the world as we “know it.” Kids have a way of reminding us that imagination is part of the real, shapes the real.
In 2022 I heard the artist Hank Willis Thomas talk about how our society is an outcome of creative blocks. That really resonated. I see creative practices that flow naturally from children (and that artists work to sustain) inviting us to reassemble relationships between events and histories and species on the same page, to flip things on their head, to stand on our own heads to re-see something, to question the foundations of our language, to resist rigid and monotonous interpretations of the world, of history, of ourselves.
Camara: Here’s a blank space. What question are you dying to be asked, and how would you answer?
Pindyck: I want to be asked a question inspired by my daughter Alma:
When you are dying to be asked, what happens to your skeleton?
I would dance my answer.
Camara: What are you working on next? Are there any poems that didn’t quite click with the themes of Impossible Belonging that you plan on exploring?
Pindyck: I am working on one poem each morning before my kids wake. I’ve also been dancing a lot in my office at Moore and filming that for a video project. I’m beginning a collaboration with another poet on essays about whiteness and Jewishness. And I’m writing lots of “quizzes” back and forth with Noa, and that is opening something up, but I don’t know yet what.
Maya Pindyck is the author of the poetry collections Emoticoncert (Four Way Books, 2016) and Friend Among Stones, winner of the Many Voices Project Award (New Rivers Press, 2009), and co-author of A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers (Bloomsbury, 2022). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and grants from the Historic House Trust of New York City and Abortion Conversation Projects. Her visual, collaborative, and community-based work has been exhibited at the Milton Art Bank (Milton, PA) and in New York City at the Art in Odd Places Public Festival, the Governors Island Art Fair, the Lewis H. Latimer House Museum, The Clemente, and elsewhere. Currently, Pindyck lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design. She grew up in Boston and Tel Aviv.
Caleigh Camara is a Master of Fine Arts candidate in fiction at California State University, Fresno. She serves as an assistant editor for The Normal School. Her stories often explore themes of grief, loss, and insecurity, incorporating magical realism or the slightly abnormal, like makeup kits that can alter faces or grieving granddaughters who steal tomatoes.
Author photo: Beowulf Sheehan