Rivendell Institute Associate Fellow in conversation with LETTERS editor Remi Recchia, Fall 2025

REMI RECCHIA

There’s a certain muscle flexed and ready to uncoil lurking beneath the meat of your poems. When I read “Eviction” and “Rapture at Point Lobos, California,” for example, I’m called to imagine, simultaneously, a camouflaged serpent and a slow, glorious sloth: the potential for a quick danger mediated by the possibility of comfort, survival. How would you describe your process of crafting these poems? Who or what was guiding you as you wrote them?

BEN EGERTON

I must say that I’m honored by your reading of “Eviction” and “Rapture.” I’m fascinated with and by the natural world, and I spend a lot of time outside. Perhaps that’s why both poems are concerned with living things, their stillness and their instinct for quick movement. It’s probably not too much of a stretch to make that claim of poetry itself. I’ll answer your two questions by partly combining them, but also to speak to the “flexing” and “uncoiling.”

I like the physicality of poetry, and I’d hope that sense of physicality comes through in my work. Of course, the act of its writing is a physical one, but poetry invites ideas of growing, of loosening, of expanding, not to mention that task of “setting to work.” And I don’t think it’s uncoincidental that so many poets have likened poem-making to productive physical labor (Heaney’s “Digging,” for example). Poetry is a physical experience—in its reading and its writing, certainly, but also in its existence: it lives, often, in the pages of a book; it’s carried with us internally; it’s chiseled into stone in public places; it’s a marker, in some sense, during public and private ceremony; it’s spoken and heard. And these poems explore, including “Hallowed Turf,” as you note, movement.

Because poems themselves aren’t still. And my own attempts to write aren’t still. Often a poem, or a line or a phrase, appears to me as I’m running. I run a lot, particularly in the bush where I live in Wellington in New Zealand. There’s a lot of native bush, and the bush, certainly in the evenings when I tend to run, is loud with birdsong and the wind. And I swim, and there’s little to do when swimming apart from to count lengths. Now I have a watch that counts lengths for me, I often use swim time to allow these lines and ideas for poems to steep. Running often jolts an idea into existence; swimming lets it percolate.

I try and keep a poem/a line alive in my head for as long as possible before I write it down. I feel that (my) memory is a good filter of poetry. If it ‘stays’ then it’s probably worth persevering with. If it disappears, then that’s a sign too. That said, it’s not a foolproof method. Sometimes I’ll record my thoughts straight away after a run so I don’t forget them. The late Scottish poet John Burnside talked about writing a line down as “a clearing of the register” to make way for new ones. It works like that for me, too. I guess all of this is to say that, for me, the acts of writing and moving are indistinguishable in many ways. That said, to go back to your images, as I get older my running has become more sloth-like!

In terms of the crafting of these two poems, they have two contrasting origins. “Eviction,” weirdly, knew it wanted to be an eight-line, rhyming, two-stanza poem before it existed. I’ve been sitting with the image behind the poem for over twenty years, but only recently did it re-arrive as a poem. And it kind of came out in one go as I was running one evening in New Haven in late September 2025. I was marveling at the squirrels. For me, sadness about not having children is never far below the surface, and seeing squirrels busying themselves with their gathering and attending was somehow a release for the nest memory to become something. That the form has almost chosen itself ahead of time seemed to me, in turn, to be a kind of filling of a nest, an occupation of a different sort—but a predetermined form isn’t something I’ve ever experienced before. I recorded the poem into my phone the moment I finished running.

“Rapture” has been nearly ten years in its making. My wife and I were on holiday in California with friends in 2016 and we visited Point Lobos, completely unaware of its association with monarch butterfly migration. I read all the interpretation boards about migration…and became fascinated with the idea of resting and waiting and then this sudden and deliberate action. It sounded, and still does, like answering a call, like faith. But it took years—and many swims—to make sense of this and for the poem itself to realize how and what it wanted to be.

REMI RECCHIA

I’m interested in your comment on the physicality of poetry. I agree that poetry is a physical experience (and in terms of labor, Philip Levine comes to mind), and, for me, perhaps an experience that encourages an act of hoarding, or, to put it more generously, an act of collecting. I worked at a truck stop during my MFA, and I would go through this horrible combination of dread and boredom—which are, I suspect for a lot of writers, the same thing—while stuck behind the counter. I was either getting yelled at for not counting out change fast enough, for the porters not cleaning out the shower stalls well enough, and so on (hence the dread), or I was standing still for an hour at seven in the morning, waiting for enough sunlight to creep through the windows so I would feel at least thirty percent alive (hence the boredom). Between customer interactions and in moments when my manager wasn’t breathing down my neck, I would begin to draft poems on receipt paper; I kept those scraps for years, even if they didn’t become anything more. Aside from lines and/or poems in your head, what do you keep with you? What are your poetic “obsessions,” so to speak? What can’t you put down?

BEN EGERTON

I like your truck-stop image of poetry as all dread and boredom. I wonder if that applies to the reading of poetry or its writing? And certainly when I was at high school, “dread and boredom” was a perfect way to describe any lessons involving poetry!

What do I keep with me? That’s an interesting question. I often play the “desert island” game in my head. What books, music, luxury item would I take with me if I were packed off to a desert island. My desert island poetry choice—if I only could take one book—would be the collected poems of Edward Thomas (I’d cheat, because the volume I’ve got also has his diaries from the First World War in them, and they’re a real treat). So in a sense I carry Thomas’s poetry with me. I’ve never written on Thomas’s poetry, in a scholarly sense, but it’s dear to me because of its “on-the-cuspness,” caught as it is between all manner of things, not least a short, bright burn of poetry before he died in action. Thomas only wrote poetry for three or so years, although he was a full-time critic and author (a “professional hack,” as he called himself). It was his close friend Robert Frost who coaxed the poetry out of him.

But this is a long-winded way of answering your question. There’s a line in one of Thomas’s diary entries, almost the last thing he wrote before he was killed in battle in April 1917, where he admits, “I never understood quite what was meant by God.” I keep that with me. (I don’t think I’m the only one: Christian Wiman takes this line as the starting point of his “Poem for Edward Thomas.”)

I don’t (always) know what is meant by God, although I have (a) faith. Mark Oakley, Anglican priest and poet, has a lovely phrase: “God shouldn’t be the object of our knowledge, but the source of our wonder.” I detect an overlap with Thomas here. Thomas certainly wasn’t religious in the sense that we might understand it, but his work is full of wonder—not least an extraordinary attention to the natural world—but it’s also tempered by, and acutely aware of, disconnection and loss. To misappropriate a phrase from Jürgen Habermas, Thomas’s poetry has an “awareness of what is missing.” Does that include God? Possibly. Probably.

I’m not really a collector of things, but I like poetry that is a connector of things. Maybe this is what poetry is. I recently reread Czesław Miłosz’s poem “Ars Poetica?” in which he writes, “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.” I can’t put down poetry which occupies an ambiguous space, poetry in which two competing things can both be true at once, poetry which is both “now” and “not yet,” but poetry which asks us to consider how—like some kind of word orrery—how these competing ideas are held in relationship with one another and with us and with the created world. I can’t put down work that’s fragmentary and suggestive (David Harsent’s Salt is a fine example, or work by Atsuro Riley); I can’t put down work which does this with (irreverent) humor (see Ella Frears); I can’t put down work—and maybe this is what I aim for myself in my own poetry—that connects things that are “barely evoked yet fully present” (as my friend Christianna puts it). And I also love work (we’re back to Thomas here—in fact two Thomasas: Edward and R.S.) which accretes such things—layer by layer, bit by bit, return by return.

REMI RECCHIA

I see that my TBR pile grows higher and higher the more we correspond! I suppose I can’t resist adding to the stack, though, because I must ask one more question: You released in 2023 a full-length collection of poetry, The Seed Drill (Kelsay Books, 2023), and then, in 2025, the chapbook, Antiphony/Anti-Phoney (Buttonhook Press), right? What’s next? What are you working on now?

BEN EGERTON

Well, I have a collection coming out with Kelsay mid-way through 2026, called a is to b as c is to d. The collection employs a unifying mathematical and acrostic constraint across its eighty-one short, almost meditative, poems. a is to b as c is to d was a few years in the making—I started the poems back in 2014—and I’m really happy that they’re about to come into the world.

I’m currently working on another collection. It’s still very much at the manuscript stage, but I’m pretty excited about how these poems are shaping up. Although I didn’t set out with a particular concept in mind, the poems are beginning to coalesce around the familial and ornithological, as well as explorations of faith and the natural world. And it’s interesting to me, as I write these poems, how specific images and themes keep returning. I love birds, but I’m neither a knowledgeable nor avid twitcher, yet so many birds appear in these poems—especially pigeons!

Over the last year or so, I’ve been enjoying a rich collaborative partnership with Christianna Soumakis—an artist and writer from New York. (I believe her poetry features in this issue, too!) It’s been such a gift to be working with someone alive and alert to ways visual art and words converse. Christianna has been responding in ceramics to some of my poems, and we’re currently working on a project with the Antiphony | Anti-Phoney poems. Oh, and Christianna’s artwork forms the cover of a is to b as c is to d. So, lots on the go!

Thank you again for this conversation and for taking on my poems in this issue.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ben Egerton is the author of two collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Antiphony | Anti-Phoney (Buttonhook Press, 2025). He holds a PhD in Creative Writing (Poetry and Theology) from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he teaches in the School of Education. Ben is an Associate Fellow at the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts at Yale University.

Remi Recchia is a Lambda Award-winning poet, essayist, and editor from Kalamazoo, Michigan. A nine-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, and Best of the Net 2025, among others. Remi is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Addiction Apocalypse (Texas Review Press, 2026), and four poetry chapbooks, and he is the editor of two anthologies of contemporary poetry and prose. He holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in English. Remi is currently pursuing an M.Div. at Yale Divinity School.

back to Issue 18