American Anthem is a scathing, retributive broadside – a savage critique of America today. In her searing, visceral book, poet Kelly Michels calls out the policy-makers and pharmaceutical corporations for their cynical neglect of the American populus. The book also spirals out of her own traumatic childhood and the shock of her mother’s death. These poems never stop shifting, from childhood abandonment to violence, gun-crime and, finally, death. Like records of PTSD, these brave poems reel from the things they can barely fathom, somewhere between the silence of death and a desperate fleeing, between the sound of a gun and the garrulous spewing of words. Time and again she refers to ‘the point-blankness of space’: that crushing claustrophobia or pressure point; the trigger itself.
Your book corresponds so closely with what’s happening right now in terms of political tumult and uncertainty. What’s your take on the last month or so?
While it has definitely been a tumultuous month, I do think it is looking more hopeful. I am feeling incredibly positive at the moment with the entry of Kamala Harris in the presidential race. And I am simply hoping for a national leader who can inspire people to be the best version of themselves by approaching others with respect and empathy. There is a lot of cultural mending and healing that needs to take place. We need a leader who can facilitate this.
American Anthem touches on both the political and the personal – your poems range from societal collapse to violence, gun-crime, your relationship with your mother, her drug addiction, and her death. Which of these were most significant for you?
Well, the personal is political and vice versa. But in the current US political sphere, the political can feel very separated from reality for me. And it only seems to get worse, especially as people have begun to spend more time online and less time interacting in person. Social media posts and news headlines cannot convey the layers of consequence and human suffering within addiction or violence or the countless other things afflicting people’s everyday lives. In the era of the soundbite, there is a desire (or demand) for answers without asking questions first, which is a scary predicament. But I believe art (and its resistance toward closure) creates the conditions to ask those questions.
One of my favourite anthologies is Against Forgetting edited by Carolyn Forché. She writes that ‘poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political’. I interpret this to mean that poetry can meaningfully complicate the oversimplification and categorization of political ideology. It reclaims human experience, grief, and the dialectical complexity of living, wrestling it away from abstraction. This, in turn, can lead us to the questions we need to be asking. And the real answers are usually the questions.
I also think the quote refers to the tendency within the political arena to distort and misrepresent the reality of social problems as a means of political advantage. Art is a way of reclaiming the complex lived reality of these social issues. It gives space for the personal, not simply in its singularity but in its collective accumulation. Therefore, I might say, the personal in a collective sense, seems especially needed right now. This includes an emphasis on our testimonies and experiences, our personal relationships, and our ability to listen and empathise with others—the social fabric of our society. It is a way of reclaiming ourselves by returning us to each other. Separation, whether physical, mental, or social, has always been the most effective form of disempowerment. Art provides an essential cultural function by fostering human connection so that the ‘social’ and ‘personal’ can be better reflected in the political.
Trauma lingers at every turn – many of your poems hover between saying and not saying. How important is it for poetry to say what happened?
Not-saying is part of the reality of saying. It is incredibly important to ‘say what happened’, but it is impossible to say everything. This is part of what fuels the poetic desire and necessity of saying ‘what happened’. Additionally, ‘not-saying’ is a part of ‘what happened’. And this operates on many levels. For example, as a child of an addict, there were innumerable things that could not be said. There were extreme consequences if ‘what happened’ was known, consequences that would have been out of my control completely. Silence was a necessary form of survival. It was both protective and destructive. On the other hand, even the physical act of ‘saying’ can be difficult.
After I was attacked at 22 years old, something I write about in ‘Çat and Mouse Act for the New Millenium’, I tried to speak to paramedics and officers, but no one understood what I was saying. I physically could not speak in a way that was understandable to the outside world. Obviously, I regained the ability to speak. But later on, I realized I could not fully articulate the reality of flashbacks or the complex reality of surviving the violence. The experiences defied the constructs of language. Even now, while I might want to ‘say what happened’, I will consistently fail to articulate the actual experience. Conceptual categories get scrambled, whether concepts of time or the senses. This can make it difficult to convey experiences in a way that would make sense to others. As a result, the interaction between ‘not saying’ and ‘saying’ becomes fundamental in any attempt to ‘say what happened’.
At the end of the book you leave America for good – though you also note that you’ll never escape from what happened. To what extent were you able to reclaim yourself? Was writing the book at all cathartic?
There is no reclaiming a part of myself from my past. I think sometimes in US culture there can be a focus on reinventing oneself or rising above it and reclaiming your ‘true self’. But I don’t believe any of it. The past is embodied within every cell in me. There is no separation. And I think it is vitally important, not just personally but culturally, to acknowledge the past, grieve it, absorb it, and understand that we carry it with us.
That said, my move to Ireland has been personally restorative and has allowed me to realise more intimately how I carry the past with me. For example, I had no idea all the small behaviours I had developed to avoid danger in the US. It was eye opening. The behaviours are so ingrained, you have to step out of the geography to really see it. In this sense, separation from the United States brought me closer to ‘what happened’.
Words: Christian Wethered
American Anthem is on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Poet Kelly Michels relocated to Ireland from the United States in 2019 and completed her PhD at UCD. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Tampa Review, Best New Poets and New Ohio Review. She has published two pamphlets, Mother and Child with Flowers (2012) and Disquiet (2015), and has received the Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize from 92nd Street ‘Y’, the Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She currently lives in Dublin.
Priced €12.95 – €19.50, it is available at gallerypress.com
