A Poet’s Path to Finding Their Voice in Verse:  A conversation with poet and translator Christian Gullette

In this conversation with talented poet and translator Christian Gullette, we delve into Coachella Elegy, his debut poetry collection, a journey of love, loss, and self-discovery. We also explore his creative evolution and the pivotal role of revision in shaping his vision.

Our conversation doesn’t stop there. Gullette offers a glimpse into the intricate world of translation, showing how words can bridge cultures and languages.

This summer, Gullette is stepping into the role of a translation instructor at The Kenyon Review Online Translation Writing Workshop, inviting aspiring translators from all backgrounds to join in. With a focus on creativity and inclusivity, his workshop promises a vibrant mix of voices and perspectives, making it an exciting opportunity for anyone passionate about language and literature.

Paula Williamson: Christian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. First, congratulations on releasing your debut poetry collection, Coachella Elegy. Before getting into your book, I want to talk a little about your writing journey. Since Lunch Ticket is a journal within a low-residency MFA program, our readers are eager to hear from writers who have followed a similar path. So, when did your writing journey begin, and have you always gravitated toward poetry?

Christian Gullette:  I’ve always gravitated to poetry. I remember writing in high school for the literary journal. Then, in college, I started taking creative writing courses, specifically poetry ones and even changed my major to English from Anthropology—primarily because I had taken an Intro to Poetry writing course and loved it.

I realized I had to do this for better or worse. My publishing job right after college in New York felt like the next step for me in the writing world, despite it being a different angle on being a writer.

PW: You received your MFA from Warren Wilson College. Did Coachella Elegy start during your time there?

CG:  I did not graduate with a manuscript ready to send out into the world. It was a fantastic experience that I was proud of—I learned a lot but still had a lot to discover. I also ended up being in a PhD program in Swedish Literature and Film at UC Berkeley, unrelated to creative writing, so while that took me down a path where I wasn’t writing as much, it gave me time to experiment and find out what worked and what didn’t.

PW: For many folks pursuing MFAs, there is a big rush to get these pages together because this will be the start of their book, so it’s intriguing to hear a different perspective. That’s not how everyone’s path goes. Did any of your thesis work appear in Coachella Elegy?

CG: It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation because I added two sequences from my thesis to Coachella Elegy in the final editing stages. One of which is the sequence of poems titled “Sonoma,” which appears almost exactly as it did in the thesis, and I was shocked to find that I still liked it and that it sort of fit right into what Coachella was doing. So, now that you mention it, it has come full circle.

PW: The “Sonoma” poems are some of my favorites. Coachella Elegy is filled with beautiful snippets about love and loss. Each section of “Sonoma” offers a glimpse into a cherished memory.

Your poems often feature nature as a backdrop, capturing pivotal moments from your life in California. These images are so vivid and familiar, from a chilly San Francisco day to the dry heat of the desert. They ground me in the poems. What inspired you to use the imagery of California in this way?

When I originally wrote “Sonoma,” it was the beginning of my turning to nature. I didn’t come into Warren Wilson thinking of going in that direction, but I responded to that. I was experimenting with a kind of lyricism where details of the natural world reflected my interior feelings, and I discovered during that time it spoke to me.

CG: When I originally wrote “Sonoma,” it was the beginning of my turning to nature. I didn’t come into Warren Wilson thinking of going in that direction, but I responded to that. I was experimenting with a kind of lyricism where details of the natural world reflected my interior feelings, and I discovered during that time it spoke to me. Then, fast forward to the writing of Coachella… I realized the role of California, and it seemed like a natural fit to allow the details of the different places to reflect different moods. The “Sonoma” poem is maybe the first time I began experimenting with‌ that melding of the erotic and the melancholy and the natural world and how all those things can play together.

PW: The length of the poems in Coachella Elegy immediately stands out. They’re all compact, but they pack a punch. You get the point across concisely. Was that always your technique, or was it something learned along the way?

CG: That has always felt natural to me. I have always been interested in how a compacted space can make the diction vibrate or make an image do a lot of work. I have learned to lean into ambiguity and ambivalence in how my poems end. That sort of shortened length can amplify that in a good way.

PW: How do you feel your LGBTQ+ identity inspires or intersects with your poetry?

CG: The first poem in the book, “Palm Springs,” situates the queer characters. The book’s opening highlights the search for my identity and sense of belonging as a queer person. I wanted to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that much of the grief in the book is not just from physical loss. But also a search for what it means to feel meaning, self-love, and acceptance. There is a lot of wandering in the journey. I am also interested in the way places like San

Francisco or Palm Springs have represented a sort of mythological queer promised land, and how those myths fail or end up bringing you to a new place of understanding is an essential part of the book’s energy.

PW: I love “traveling west to seek the new frontier” and that connection with queerness. Even if it doesn’t always live up to it, places like Palm Springs and San Francisco were the “promised land” for many folks who didn’t fit in “back home.”

CG: Yes, it is part of a destructive and displacing mythology and has a history of violence. I think the book tries to situate that movement west in that context.

PW: Revision is a significant part of writing poetry. Can you discuss your feelings and approach to revising this collection and your overall writing?

CG: Well, since this was the first time a book of mine has ever gotten to this moment, it is like, “This is it, it’s going to the printer.” It feels really good because you have to just let it go, as is. It was freeing for me to read from my book at AWP and know there was no going back. You get a new relationship with the poems.

Revisions are a really important part of my process, but my favorite poems are the ones that came out 60% as they look now. I’ve grown to understand how to recognize the difference between revision and torturing it into something. My favorite ones in the book are usually the ones where I go, “Oh, I had no idea you were going here, but okay.” Sometimes, even though I have fought it for a long time, one or two of them are serious revisions from earlier publications.

PW: You attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2022. How did that experience impact your work?

CG: I had a very interesting experience at Bread Loaf in terms of the manuscript, because I had a manuscript called Beehive State named after one poem that’s currently in Coachella Elegy. Over time, that manuscript had split itself in half. I had written poems about Palm Springs but had it in my head: “No one’s going to want to read those.” You can’t write a book that’s all Palm Springs, so I gave two different readings at Bread Loaf. One was my primary reading, and I read three of the Utah-based poems from Beehive State. At the second reading, I read three of the Palm Springs poems. I left, realizing I needed to revise Beehive State to be more Palm Springs. It should have been a major red flag that my book was becoming something else. It was a grieving process for me. It ended up being good because later that summer, I started asking myself serious questions about where I wanted this manuscript to go. The support I got from just being there around all these amazing writers at Bread Loaf was critical for the becoming of Coachella Elegy.

PW: Confusion can be a good emotion. It’s uncomfortable to sit in, but it can send you where you need to go. This was recent, so you made a lot of changes quickly.

CG: It was the end of September 2022 when I stayed up all night and decided, okay, what would happen if I essentially made a new draft where I deleted the Utah half? That was the first time I saw how the California/Palm Springs poems looked. I was like, “Oh, this feels like me.” By the following May, the book was picked up.

PW: Do you have a plan for the Utah poems in the future?

CG: A few of them are in the book, which was also why my book’s editing process was so critical. I had excised all of them except for Coachella Elegy and Beehive State, and my editors thought maybe we could bring back some of these. I called them all elegies. In the end, some of my favorite poems ended up being there. This was the book I was meant to write.

The major lesson I learned is one I have heard many times: write the book you need, not what you think other people might want to read. I don’t know whether I wasn’t paying attention before, but that night in September, it seemed so obvious. I wrote what I wanted to write.

PW: What is the most important lesson you learned while bringing this book to life, and what messages do you hope readers will take away from it?

CG: The major lesson I learned is one I have heard many times: write the book you need, not what you think other people might want to read. I don’t know whether I wasn’t paying attention before, but that night in September, it seemed so obvious. I wrote what I wanted to write. It’s hard sometimes to hear your inner voice and trust it. I don’t regret that I wrote Beehive State. It led to this, but maybe if I had listened to my gut a year earlier…well, we will never know.

The main thing I would love to know is that someone feels something. If somebody can sense this is the world through my lens when they read it, that would be amazing.

PW: Antioch’s MFA program has a translation department, and Lunch Ticket accepts translation submissions. MFA candidates must take part in an 8-week translation seminar.  You were a lecturer at UC Berkeley, teaching Swedish language instruction and translation theory courses.What led you to translation work? Was it just your interest in the Scandinavian language?

CG: During my time at Warren Wilson, the faculty encouraged me to include a lot of translated work on my reading lists, even though I wasn’t proficient in another foreign language. I had recently been to Sweden and read Tomas Tranströmer for the first time in English in one of my semesters at Warren Wilson. I was struck by his long work Baltics, and I thought, wouldn’t that be amazing to read that in the original language? So I went to Berkeley and took an Introduction to Swedish Language class on a lark, thinking, at the very least, maybe I could read this in the original. Wouldn’t that be cool?

As you know, it clicked for me. After a couple of years of taking language courses, I realized that not only was it amazing to read a work in the original and to translate it, but it led me to devoting a portion of my life to the academic study of Scandinavian languages and literature. This paved the way for me to pursue translation.

Studying translated works, even those translated into English, elevated my understanding of how diction operates in poetry. With translation, you have to consider that someone made a very specific choice between glimmer versus shimmer, which are very different words. That idea helped make some of the lessons I was learning as a poet click for me. I realized, “Oh, that is a diction choice.” All these elemental concepts of writing poetry became clearer through works translated into English.

PW: Much of your translation work has been poetry from the LGBTQ+ community. What is your approach to maintaining authenticity in the poems? Do you often collaborate with the poet

Because I translate contemporary poetry and literature, I have the good fortune of being able to consult with the author and, in many cases with poetry, work closely with them, so that is a real advantage.

CG: Yes. Because I translate contemporary poetry and literature, I have the good fortune of being able to consult with the author and, in many cases with poetry, work closely with them, so that is a real advantage. Translating a language like Swedish has a lot of similarities to English, so it can come down to shimmer versus glimmer, and the Swedish poets I work with understand these differences. It is really fun that we can work on it together.

I’ve also been very fortunate to work with poets and writers who understand we’re making something new and that I may not, for example, be able to bring over some of the tonal music of Swedish in a line, but I might use some sibilance to get an “s” sound in there, to alert the reader at least that this is a musical poem.

PW: It is fascinating how sound plays a role. I hadn’t considered that. Maintaining the same musicality can be challenging when you switch languages, especially with languages that have no similarities. Do you have any advice for writers who are interested in working in language translation?

CG: Anyone who wants to try translation should jump in and give it a shot. Many great works need to be translated, especially in non-European languages. The rise of online journals in the past decade has increased opportunities for many. Getting translated works accepted is hard, as it is often not the priority at journals or publishing houses. When submitting translated work to The Cortland Review, we encourage people to tell us about the poet and the work. Be persistent and keep sending that work out there and not just for submission; read and go to readings of translated work. It’s essential not just to be bound up in the publishing machine. Champion translated books and people talking about translated work. You can go to translator conferences; AWP has so much translation stuff. There are journals seeking people to write reviews of translations. That is another excellent way to participate in translated literature. Eventually, agents and publishing houses will know that you work in a specific language and that some authors should be translated. You start being asked to do project samples and build your translation. American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has emerging translator fellowships you can apply to, and you don’t even have to have published works. They will pair you with a mentor in your language. Governments of countries also have fellowships. I have gone to Sweden several times as part of emerging translator fellowships, and I did not have an extensive resume of books published. There are many avenues for making those connections, but it takes persistence.

PW: What poets have influenced your style and approach to writing?

CG: Carl Phillips, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Louise Glück, Amy Clampitt, C. P. Cavafy, Diane Seuss, Federico García Lorca, Henri Cole, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Elizabeth Bishop, Sandra Lim, W.S. Merwin, and Thom Gunn were big influences for me.

PW: What are you reading right now? It doesn’t have to be poetry.

CG: I just finished Diane Seuss’s book Modern Poetry. The Palace of Forty Pillars by Armen Davoudian is also excellent. Ward Toward by Cindy Juyoung Ok, a translator who will be on the faculty with me at The Kenyon Review. Silver by Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Couplets by Maggie Millner. There is so much good stuff right now. It’s awesome.

PW: Thank you again, Christian, for taking the time to talk to me today. It was inspiring to hear about your journey, and I am so excited about your book’s official release. Enjoy it!