In Patrycja Humienik’s We Contain Landscapes, a new kind of worldmaking is possible. In these poems, as the speaker grapples with the tensions of border and nation, language becomes the means to solidarity, across lineage, across geography, across place and family. In their lush and abundant language, these poems examine what devotion, belonging, and place mean. Thinking through both abundance and restraint, limit and possibility, this collection generously opens the boundaries of what language can do, examining questions of inheritance and longing.
In this interview, we spoke about diasporic worldmaking, inheritance, silence, and spatial belonging.
Vika Mujumdar (VM): I loved the poem “Eros and Sorrow,” which ends with “we contain landscapes / they do not belong to us”; could you speak about your process of writing that poem, and how you decided it would be the title of the collection?
Patrycja Humienik (PH): Years ago, the ending of that poem was part of a different poem that came out pre-pandemic in a lovely journal that no longer exists, The Shallow Ends. It was a time when I was writing in a very fragmented way—all I could write in was really fragments, and that phrase, “we contain landscapes / they do not belong to us,” was resonant for me then, but I wasn’t sure what the book I was writing was called. There was a chapbook project I was working on for some time that I called “We Contain Landscapes” that I thought might be separate from this book. As I was revising that poem, it took me quite a while to find where that sentiment really belonged. And so that poem, “Eros and Sorrow,” was the product of so many years of revision. I was mulling it over in a really beautiful place in Washington, at a residency on San Juan Island, and there was this massive oak tree that I would just visit a lot for days. And the land there helped me finish the poem. So I found that that phrase just belonged in this draft I was working over, and it was one of those Frankenstein poems that came together through many sort-of-failed poems.
VM: How did you approach organizing the collection in these sections? How did you move the poems into each section, and what was that process like?
PH: I love the magic of revision, and it’s similar on the level of the individual poem and the larger level of the book’s order; it took some time to find what that was. For me, it’s a very intuitive, obsessive, and hard-to-describe process—I really look to the music of the work. If you think about a record and how one song ends and the next one begins, I was sensitive to the way that things link together, and for me, I made decisions based on either an emotional resonance or a sound resonance, or really something that’s hard for me to put into language. It was a strong feeling that certain poems would need to be stitched together, but there was also an overall arc that I eventually thought about, in terms of how the speaker was reckoning with certain questions or not. It wasn’t a linear process in terms of what the emotional journey of this speaker, trying to reckon with shame and desire and questions of belonging, was. It felt important to me to let that journey to be seen, not as linear growth, but as someone opening up more and more to other beloveds in her life. With that came the presence of more and more letters to other immigrant daughters and more direct address throughout the books as it went on, and the opening up of those longer poems toward the end, like the poem “On Belonging.”
VM: “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter” was a series that I found especially moving—the way it centers kinship and a kind of solidarity, as well as how it enacts a diasporic worldmaking. Of course, alongside this, there’s a central, larger focus throughout on nation, borders, and how we might write and build landscapes that are not confined to these boundaries. Could you speak to how you see the role of worldmaking in this collection and your poetry?
PH: That’s why I turn to poems at all, both in writing and reading them. For me, it’s relational. I cannot write a poem alone, because I’m always in conversation with the living and the dead. And for me, that process of being in conversation is already there—there are worlds in that, in our languages with each other, in the miscommunications and in what’s on the fringes of what we can build together, the questions we ask of each other. It’s the people in my life that allow me to imagine other worlds as possible. And so, when I was writing poems in this book, it felt so important to have that reaching happen, because that is what keeps me going in real life and on the page. I have some quotes jotted down from a book I often think about, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, by Hélène Cixous, and I have this line from her book that says: “to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world…” And there are so many other writers who have said this in many ways. I think of Dionne Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return, and how she articulates writing and reading as acts of desire. Just being a part of that legacy at all, as a poet, perhaps worldmaking is the charge, and in whatever ways I may even fail that charge, even just the hope to reach toward other immigrant daughters, other loves in my life to address a reader and to think beyond illusion of national belongings, that was the dream of the book itself. But how it’s done I’m still learning and unlearning.
VM: You note that this series came to be through an epistolary exchange with the poet Sarah Ghazal Ali. Could you speak a bit more to that, to how these poems came to be and your experience of writing them?
PH: Sarah and I had a beautiful epistolary exchange, which we still have, very slowly, when we can. It started because we met virtually in the thick of the pandemic in Leila Chatti’s online class, and we were drawn to each other’s work and shared questioning, and it emerged that we wrote poems in letters to each other. We were both grappling with religious inheritance, questions of who we write for and toward. And there was something beautiful in writing to each other as daughters of immigrants from different religious traditions and cultures, but sharing some obsessions and loves, including the question of devotion. That process has been life-giving to me. I just included one of those poems to her in the book, but at that time, it opened up this desire for me to address other daughters of immigrants in my life in that way. I was already having certain conversations with other immigrant daughters, poets and artists who I address directly in the collection. So, I followed that impulse. It was great for me at times where I was stuck. It allowed me to say things I maybe couldn’t have otherwise, and so putting them in the book became, too, about the overall arc. For me, again, it feels like a more intuitive process than anything, but it was tracking the journey of letting go, of attempting to let go of shame and certain inherited ideas, but then also holding on to those ideas that I’ve inherited that are still true to me and connect me to my lineage, across and beyond bloodline.
VM: How did you decide where to place these poems in the collection? How did you think about how they were building to other themes and ideas in the collection?
PH: I’m someone who has to write a lot first, and then do the classic thing that many do, where they print out their poems and lay them all out. I did that on multiple occasions, in different spaces throughout the process, and it was important to me to see what I had put where, move things around physically on the pages, and re-order and re-experience it. I also had the great fortune of brilliant writers in my life, including my dear collaborator and best friend Gabrielle Bates, who had an eye on the book as it was coming together. It was both my own shuffling and reshuffling and other astute readers in my life, including Gabrielle and Sarah, as well as the poet Erin Marie Lynch. I took a lot of time to write and work through the whole process, and realized I had more poems to write, and then kept writing and redoing that arranging. And even when the book was sold to Tin House, I was still in the revision process with my editor and was still generating more poems. I had just returned to the region of my childhood. I started my MFA. I was revising and completing the book. New poems were emerging, but by then, I had a much clearer sense of the order, so it didn’t change much, but I wanted to see what would happen as I put those new poems in. I was open to the idea of needing to reorder it, but by then, it had a much clearer shape.
VM: I’m struck by a line in one of the “Letter to Another Immigrant Daughter” poems: “there are questions / our mothers may never answer.” How do you see the relationship between silence and matrilineal inheritance for this speaker?
PH: Omission is such a strong force in my writing life—not knowing, as well as stories lost to time or trauma or loss, as well as the literal destruction of the home my mother grew up in because of a fire. And so much was lost. So many photographs were burned, and there’s a poem in the book, too, the sonnet crown “Saint Hyacinth Basilica,” where I was thinking about my great-grandmother, who I’d never seen. And of this question, of silences and omission, even as I knew so little about her, I somehow feel so connected to her, and it’s such an inexplicable, gorgeous, bizarre thing, that we can know the tiniest detail of something in our lineage and be so captivated by it. And I think there’s a way in which I could say these things are sad—of course, the experiences my family has had have been sad. And there are also these beautiful fragments that are enough, that have to be enough. As a poet, I’m lucky to get to do something with that and to be energized by the possibility in that and of what I don’t know. There are times when it’s a heartbreaking thing for me, and I see how in many immigrant stories, there are many people who have had to deny or let go of their own dreaming. And, like many daughters of immigrants, I feel the weight of that. And at the same time, I get to dream, and that’s almost like my charge. There’s also the invitation to have more emotional strength, to then, outside of the page, have the conversations I’m maybe scared to have with family. It’s work that happens on the page and also needs to happen in real life. But sometimes there are things we can’t ever get back or ever know, and writing can be the space for exploring and unpacking that.
VM: In “On Devotion,” you write: “Easy to confuse habit with ritual / ritual with devotion, devotion with desire[.]” In addition, devotion and what it might mean comes up in various ways across the collection. In a later “Letter to Another Daughter” poem, you write: “…I inherited devotion as a / form.” I found this framing of devotion interesting—how you articulate it here as inheritance. What were some of the early poems you that focused on devotion? How did how you examine devotion change or shift across the poems as you write them?
PH: “On Devotion” was one of the earlier poems I wrote, and in its initial draft, I was mulling over the overlaps and differences between devotion that is religious and devotion within romance and with a lover, and reaching towards other kinds as well, and grappling with that. And at the time I was writing that I was also starting to take this obsession into workshops, and teaching workshops on devotion to also bring that question to others. I love that about teaching, that it’s this secret way to take all my obsessions out to all these other brilliant people too, and get to have conversations about them and read certain poems together through that lens. To continue to have really rich conversations through epistolary exchanges, in workshop, in classroom settings, and through my own reading deepened my questioning. I revised that poem and others to keep thinking about my own relationship to Catholicism and what being raised that way may have instructed me about what devotion might mean, and putting that in conversation with my own developing ideas about spirituality. Paired with thinking about my love for people in my life, both romantically and in terms of friendship and family. I still am obsessed with this idea, and don’t have a singular sense of the word. I think it will be generative for me for the rest of my life. And I’m troubled by it too, because I think it dovetails with this other idea I’m troubled by, of borders and of national identity, because various ideas around devotion have been weaponized in service of borders, in service of delineating between people and land. I’m constantly thinking about the many layers of that word, and then also on a very interior level, even devotion to one’s art and to one’s life. I find it to be really rich, and so throughout the book, that idea is a heartbeat underneath so many of the poems. By the time we end with the direct address of the poem “Beloved,” that idea is opened up, potentially inviting the reading of all the actual existing beloveds in my life right now, and also the ones to come. Devotion as more expansive than what I was told it could be.
VM: These poems are so rich with want and desire and excess; in “Holding Ground,” you write: “I’m obsessed with gerunds, their ongoingness.” There’s an attunement to abundance in both the images and the language; in On Chronic Conditions, you write” “Fond of excess, I put rosewater into rosebud tea.” Later, in the poem “Worlds,” you write: “No such thing as the world—I touch fragments.” How do you see the interplay between excess and restraint, abundance and economy?
PH: Desire and want, as you name, like for so many poets, are just such a driving force for me. I mentioned earlier Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, and I think often of a line from her in which she says: “Writing is an act of desire, as is reading. … And desire is also an act of reading, of translation.” And I say that to say that there is no way for me to write without contemplating or enacting desire. And for me, maybe because of my inherited religious tradition that is so ornate—the cathedrals, the Polish churches I grew up going to are quite literally full of excess— questions of excess, of pleasure, of beauty are compelling for me. It comes up in the book too, but I love beauty and the sensuous material of our lives. And so, it is very much about questions of want and the hunger for living many lives, a voracious appetite to experience the sensual world. And as someone who loves music and dance, this all impacts my poems, to have this sense of lushness and music and excess feels true to me as a person. And at the same time, I think a lot about my relationship to restraint, and I sometimes can only think in fragments, as I mentioned earlier. It’s a funny tension, and then I have inherited certain ideas about restraint and a moral sense of what that means, and I’m always grappling with questions of excess and pleasure. Also, as a white American, thinking about how having grown up here, even though I come from elsewhere, my parents having immigrated, I still live here, and over indulging excess is a very seductive thing in our culture. And so, the relationship between excess and restraint is a tension in the book. It’s a tension in my life. And so, for the speaker, there’s this grappling between disciplining oneself as an immigrant daughter and being told to restrain as a force that I want to push against, but then also contending with the white American narrative of comfort over everything. The speaker grapples with Americanness and inheritance, trying to figure out how to be with the beautiful sensuality of living, but also refuses a kind of American appetite that centers itself above everything else.
VM: There is such a strong sense of place and landscape in this collection—what landscapes and geographies influenced these poems? What geographies did you write these poems in, and how did these poems shift or grow as a result of those influences of place and space?
PH: I grew up in the Midwest, but I wrote the majority of this book in Seattle, where I came into myself as a poet. I had moved to Seattle after spending a decade in Colorado. When I was writing the poems in Seattle, I was thinking about my childhood near Lake Michigan, and I’m fascinated by the Great Lakes, their graveyards, the complexity of those ecosystems of water. While I lived in Colorado, I was haunted by that longing, of missing bodies of water, though I was also falling in love with mountain rivers. When I came to Washington and living near more water again, I was being influenced by the landscapes there and the lushness, and remembering the more arid landscape I lived in in Colorado, while also thinking about my childhood in the Midwest, as well as the mythical Poland in my mind, even though by then I had been to Poland a few times—but as I was writing this book I hadn’t been in many, many years. And so, at once I felt the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, the Midwest, and Poland swirling in my mind as I was writing the collection. I also had the opportunity to study abroad in Chile during the student movement for free education, and the landscapes of Chile, along with its political landscape were influential to me. I got to study some Chilean poetry there and I’m still thinking about its influence on my work. All of those varied landscapes and ecologies moved me so much.
VM: Who are your influences as a poet? Could you speak to how they influenced the poems in this collection?
PH: My influences reach back to when I was really young, in Saturday Polish school having to memorize Polish poetry, which I’m so grateful for now. At the time, I was struggling with the work of Wisława Szymborska—as a young person so drawn to music and lush language, her work can be so sparse. There’s a poem in the book that engages with my relationship to her; she’s now come to be a strong influence for me and is an epigraph for the book. Among others, there’s Czesław Miłosz and Adam Zagajewski, as well as Alejandra Pizarnik, Etel Adnan, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Lucie Brock-Broido, June Jordan, and Jack Gilbert who are also strong influences as far as writers who have passed. For living poets, there are so many to name, but if I were to think about the poets whose engagement with image and the line and sound, and whose work and ideas particularly move me, it would have to be Aracelis Girmay, Natalie Diaz, Aria Aber, Sandra Lim, Anne Carson, Carl Phillips, and Layli Long Soldier. When I think about this constellation of poets, who are all quite different, there is a depth to the work that is inexhaustible for me. At the same time, I’m also so influenced by landscapes, by land, by plant life, as well as visual art and dance and music. All of those things together were essential for writing the book.
VM: Which visual artists, musicians, or dancers influenced this book?
PH: In the book, there’s overt engagement with the visual art of Francesca Woodman and Diana Al-Hadid. More subtly influencing the book is the work of Ana Mendieta, whose engagement with body and landscape is so rich for me. There’s also an artist referenced in the book, Hélène Delmaire, who did the art for the movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is one of my favorite films. There’s such a range of music across all genres that I’m constantly inspired by, but as I wrote the book, I was listening to a substantial amount of FKA Twigs, as well as Chopin.
__
Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor & teaching artist from Evanston, IL. She is the author of We Contain Landscapes, forthcoming with Tin House in March 2025. Patrycja is an MFA candidate at UW-Madison and serves as Events Director for The Seventh Wave, where she is also an editor for TSW’s Community Anthologies project. She has developed writing + movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, Puksta Civic Engagement Foundation, in prisons, and elsewhere.
__
Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, Public Books, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
Liminal Transit Review 