“I thought my way through the puzzle of the poem”: A Conversation with Niki Herd

In this column, writer and Catapult instructor Jessica Wilbanks sits down with a diverse range of contemporary writers to take a close look at the craft choices they made while writing a single short story, essay, or poem.

The full text of each piece discussed in the column is available online. This month’s interview focuses on Niki Herd’s poem “Bird,” which was originally published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.

Niki Herd is the author of The Language of Shedding Skin and the coeditor (with Meg Day) of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. Winner of the 2021 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Nonfiction, Herd has crafted poetry, essays, and criticism that appear in or are forthcoming from Copper Nickel, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Literary Hub, The Rumpus, and Salon, among other journals and anthologies. She lives in Missouri, where she is a visiting writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Jessica Wilbanks: What was the first image or idea you started with when you began writing “Bird”?

Niki Herd: I think there were two images in my mind. There was the swarm of grackles I encountered that evening in Houston and then there was the image of my father lying facedown on concrete after jumping off our porch. The image of my father had been in my mind for years. It’s kind of hard to forget that, right? But the grackles, that image of them literally taking over the parking lot, was a much more difficult memory to know what to do with. When I got home that evening, I wrote something brief about this unsettling encounter. I knew it would have a place in a poem, but I didn’t know much more than that.

JW: Can you share some details about your writing process?

NH: Generally, I don’t write around images as much as ideas. Something happens in the world and it gnaws at me until I write about it. At the time I was drafting “Bird,” I was rereading Ross Gay’s “The Lion and the Gazelle”—a poem that has always fascinated me with its level of depth. The poem includes three distinct gestures: the urban, the nonurban, and the philosophical. Instead of simply writing about my father, I was attempting to pair this man with something completely different—as Gay does in his poem that pairs wildlife with the city—and imagine how the two might connect. The grackles seemed to allow the story of what happened to become bigger than itself, which was a nice surprise.

JW: One of the many pleasures of reading “Bird” is the process of discovering so many correspondences between these two scenarios. For instance, the way each event so quickly became a spectacle, something that couldn’t help but be watched.

Initially the speaker blends into these two separate crowds, viewing the events along with them, but at the end of the poem, when “each watcher retraced their steps back home / to find their families, to rejoice over food, to laugh and settle the night,” the speaker is not with them. Instead, she seems to remain watching, transfixed, as the birds remained “steadfast” in the parking lot.

I found that image so extraordinarily powerful: the child, now grown, standing before a plague of grackles that brings with them the memory of a similarly haunting event. Can you speak a bit about the way that these two separate events commingled and spoke to one another during the writing process?

NH: Initially, and fairly easily, I put together a poor draft that articulated the act of my father jumping and the neighbors watching. It was maybe seven lines long and it had no depth at all. Once I decided to take the image of the grackles and juxtapose it with that draft, I was faced with a puzzle to figure out—how might these pieces go together? What might they be saying to one another?

In real life, the grackle sighting was pretty scary and Hitchcockian, but that terror did not feel right or seem a good landing place for the poem. There are innumerable poems that speak to Black men and horror—and the draft was already embedded with addiction and the personal repercussions of war. The poem was asking me to extend the personal, to make what happened that summer bigger and perhaps mythical.

I thought about birds and Greek mythology, but that felt aesthetically false. I also thought about superheroes, but again, the idea fell flat. Eventually, it felt right to allow the father character to return to earth as the grackles themselves, which felt powerful and unique. I didn’t have to rely on a ready-made story from literature or pop culture for context.

JW: Did the process of juxtaposing these two images end up changing your thinking about either one of these experiences?

NH: That’s a good question. Had I not written about the grackles, maybe I’d still be haunted by the image of them? I’m not anymore.

JW: I love the way you describe the creative tension that resulted from putting these two images in conversation with each other, and the way doing so provided you with a puzzle that you had to figure out. It reminds of me of a podcast episode from Jessica Abel’s “Out on the Wire,” in which she interviews the graphic novelist Kazu Kibuishi.

Kibuishi believes that if he nails a draft the first time, something’s wrong. It almost always means he hasn’t gone deep enough. But when he’s deep in the forest of drafting, wrestling with a narrative that isn’t coming together and solving problems in the moment, then he knows he’s onto something.

Can you talk a little bit about what it looked like for you to experiment with different possibilities for the poem, once you decided to connect these two experiences? Did you think your way through the puzzle, or did you do your thinking on paper through various drafts? Was there a moment or a line that solidified the connection between your father and the grackles, or was it a more gradual process of discovery?

NH: I thought my way through the puzzle of the poem. Much of what is between “that summer in July” and “swallow her body whole” was in the first draft in rudimentary form. But I needed to choose between fact and truth, so details were removed, factual details that weighed the poem down and failed to move it forward. But again, the core of the poem was there. I wouldn’t call it a gift at all because I was in the forest trying to figure out the significance of the grackles—and I wasn’t comfortable in that space.

The poem took me around eight months to write, which for me, with my neurodivergent brain, is quick. But eight months is not so quick when you’re in a graduate program and you both want and should show evidence of new work. But I sat with it—you can’t force the process. And to be honest, it wasn’t an eight-month period of me working on it every day. Not at all. At some point, I sent the poem to my dear friend poet and fiction writer Naomi Benaron. She made some suggestions; then I made peace with my choices.

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