Poems Flow One to the Other

A conversation with Leslie Ullman about her collection Little Soul and the Selves

Hello poets—Before I introduce you to today’s remarkable interviewee, I wanted to express my sincere gratitude to those of you who ordered Pine Soot Tendon Bone in June and July. My publisher ran out of copies and had to print more. Wow! Thank you!

Shameless plug: If you ordered the book on Amazon, please consider leaving a five-star rating and a short review.

Now, on to the main show …

Those of you who have taken my manuscript classes know that I encourage poets to think of presses—and the authors published by those presses—as communities. I am honored to be among insightful, accomplished poets like Leslie Ullman in the 3: A Taos Press community.  

So I was delighted that Leslie agreed to this conversation about the process behind one of her newest collections, Little Soul and the Selves, published in 2023. She shared how the poems evolved and reflected on the benefits of collaborating with other poets and trusted editors. 

We discussed:

• The collaborative, iterative process behind the poems and the book

• How new work created a dialogue with older work, offering essential perspective

• Challenges in structuring the book and ordering poems

• What it’s like to work with a trusted editor

Leslie Ullman has published six poetry collections and a hybrid book of craft essays, poems, and writing exercises titled Library of Small Happiness. A seventh collection will be published by University of New Mexico Press next year. Her awards include the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award, and two NEA Fellowships. Professor Emerita at University of Texas-El Paso, she is a faculty member in the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts and now lives in Taos, New Mexico.

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read an excerpt from the interview. To hear Leslie’s thoughts on publishing strategies, parallels between skiing and poem writing, and her approach to revision—and to hear her read poems from Little Soul and the Selves—check out the video.

Poems Flow One to the Other

[Interview lightly edited for clarity.]

Radha Marcum: From the book's description, I pulled out a couple of questions that were really intriguing as a background to the work. These questions are: How does a spirit new to the world, baffled by the family domain and its customs, but above all curious, come to discover its essence? And what does any child carry into the present from ancestors whose histories have been assimilated and long forgotten? These are incredibly powerful questions. So, I'm curious—where did this inquiry start, and how did it evolve into the book?

Leslie Ullman: First of all, I started thinking I had nothing to lose. It was during the pandemic, and I had been put on leave from two jobs. I felt sidelined and thought, "Maybe I'm going to disappear, so why not do something that pleases me?" I was doing a poem-a-day project with two of my good friends for the month of August. The first poem I wrote gave me the character of Little Soul. Little Soul begins a series of field notes, representing a side of me that I never would have known as a child. But as I've gotten older, I could create a character out of her. Is she really me? I won't go that far, but she represents an essential self, as opposed to the selves we try on throughout our lives while learning lessons, many of them the hard way. Through this process, we can begin to come to a bigger sense of who we are and why we're here.

I didn't have the answers to those questions, but Little Soul became, or it—I call it "it" because it’s not male or female, but a free, wild thing, which I think maybe we all have. So I started out with this one Little Soul on the first day of August, thinking I'd let the entire month be more field notes from Little Soul and see what it had to say.

At the same time, a good friend of mine was taking a course in ancestral memory from a wonderful rabbi near your neck of the woods, Tirzah Firestone, who I think is in Boulder. She was teaching a course on ancestral memory, which was very expensive, and I decided not to commit the money or the time. But I was fascinated by the notion that we may have memories lodged in us from generations ago. My own family had carried none of that into the present. My family was so assimilated that Jewish history and our origins were never thought about, much less discussed. We celebrated Christmas and Easter and all that.

I was reading Firestone's book Wounds into Wisdom, which was powerful about ancestral memory and how it surfaces. I thought, "I can't answer the questions she's asking in this book, but let me see if Little Soul can answer some. Let me see if my imagination will give me answers." That was how it started.

Then it branched out into other areas. It didn't want to just be personal history, but it started with that, imagining personal history as well as actual. It branched into me arguing about the nature of the soul with Louise Glück and T.S. Eliot, finding poems about the soul, sometimes in the poem-a-day project or elsewhere, that resonated with me. I thought, "I have something else to say about the soul." So, the book started to become about the soul.

I revised those poems for a year. The next August, we did it again, and I thought, "I need to have Little Soul talk about different things. I can't just have 'Little Soul does this, Little Soul does that.'" So I started having Little Soul think about other topics. I also fished out poems I had put aside years ago and realized that maybe Little Soul could influence my revisions. I expanded the scope of the book, and Little Soul started talking about things beyond personal history.

Radha: It's fascinating to hear you talk about how the new work became a lens on the old work, or a way back into territory you had been exploring before starting this project. There’s a sense in which new work can inform the revision process.

Leslie: Yes, I've had that happen before. There's a new vibration to the old work when you put it next to newer work, creating a dialogue between them, and it feels new on its own. That definitely happened here. I incorporated Little Soul into some of those titles and revised them a lot. For some older poems, especially from my days of being totally baffled by love and making a lot of mistakes, I let Little Soul talk about those mistakes. This resulted in a series called "Little Soul's Six Lessons on Love" in the middle of the book. By integrating those mistakes and poems into the broader theme of the soul-making nature of love, they stopped feeling trivial.

Radha: The poems ground the reader in literal experience, in the body, while also feeling mythic, symbolic, expressive, and emotive. Could you talk a little about that effect in this work? It feels like there's a dialogue between the literal lived experience and the sense of creating a personal mythos.

Leslie: I didn't quite realize that until I was living with the poems and trying to order them, which took forever. That was the hardest part; the poems came pretty easily, but finding the order was difficult. In that process, I began to understand that I had larger themes. I also tapped into something that has always been in my mind and many of my poems: an awareness of how momentary my lived experience is in relation to the history of life, the planet, rocks, and things much older than we are.

I'm not saying, "Oh, we're so minuscule, and we're so trivial." It's nothing like that. It's just that I feel like I'm living on two planes at once, especially when I'm writing. In rearranging these poems over and over, I realized that I had a huge canvas to play with. I wasn't using the whole canvas, but it was there. I don't know if that answers your question. I hadn't thought about that before.

Radha: It is a sort of widening of the lens, right? Earlier, you said you didn't want to be stuck in personal storytelling. You wanted the poems to be much more than that, and I think the poems have succeeded amazingly in bringing us into that kind of experience.

Leslie: Our anxieties push us beyond our limited views. As a writer, you probably feel this too—that you have to reach beyond what feels limited. When you're afraid you haven't done that, something happens, and you see a way to get beyond it. You try, and it may or may not work.

As I was writing this morning, I had that feeling. Maybe I hadn't named it as a desire to go beyond, but I do feel a sense of claustrophobia in a work if it hasn't happened yet. Sometimes I will abandon a poem or a project because it feels too myopic. But I hope you come back to some of those later because they may jump out at you. Don't throw them away.

Radha: Before we jumped on the video, we talked a little bit about the role of community and supports in your process. For this book, what or who supported you most?

Leslie: I was doing the poem-a-day project with two poets, Susan Eisenberg and Betsy Sholl, whom I know from Vermont College. When you have to write a poem a day for two trusted readers, or even eight, you have to make something happen, whether or not you're in the mood. We've found that this is not always successful, but it often opens things up in astonishing ways.

Over the winter, we send poems to each other for critique once a week. That's been one mainstay. I also exchange manuscripts with other friends, helping each other with feedback. Initially, it was about identifying the strongest and weakest poems, but I had to be careful with that because I also had a trajectory in mind. I'm not used to dealing with a plot, but I ran the manuscript by different people.

When the manuscript was complete, I didn't shop the book around. I chose Andrea Watson, the editor of 3: A Taos Press, because I knew she was a very hands-on editor who liked the poems. I thought she could help me hammer out an order, as I felt lost and needed a catalyst. We worked together for a good year.

Sometimes Andrea wanted me to take out poems I didn't want to remove. I tried to find different places for them, hoping she'd like them better. Her feedback was invaluable, even though there were long periods between her feedback and my revisions. Over time, I figured out how to keep most of the poems I wanted while finding a better order. She challenged me in helpful ways and supported some decisions that made a big difference, like placing the six poems on love, which became a fulcrum in the book.

I usually order my own books and do it professionally for others, but I was really stymied with this one. Getting help sped things up significantly. When you have a good collaborator whose editorial vision matches your own, it's easy to say yes to working together through the process.

—

Purchase Little Soul and the Selves here. Learn more about Leslie and her work at leslieullman.com.

---

Upcoming Events & Classes

It’s not too late to join me for …

How to Publish Poetry — Lunch & Learn (Virtual)

Are you working on a full-length poetry manuscript or chapbook, or building a portfolio of journal publications? Learn how to work smarter and overcome common obstacles to getting published during these monthly sessions in 2024. Jump in any time. Our next session is August 13th. Get a free guest pass.

---

Pine Soot Tendon Bone

"Radha Marcum writes unflinchingly and with a rare synthesis of lyric and scientific intelligence, investigating just what it is to exist with consciousness now.” —Carol Moldaw, author of Beauty Refracted