“Are We Not One Body?”
The North Carolina poet Han VanderHart feels power in the places where the stories of Southerners intersect—and believes that, by telling them courageously, we help each other heal.
Han VanderHart Southern poet | Larks Hollis Summers Poetry Prize | What Pecan Light poetry
Not long ago, I read my own poetry to my boy Watson’s high school English class. It felt risky, because I read and spoke to them like I would any adult audience.
Granted, these were seniors, but it wasn’t even eight a.m. as I read them poems about my mom’s death, race, grief, divorce, bitterness, beauty, and finding ways to live with what still, even at age fifty-one, makes me angry and scared and confused. Their questions were smart, serious, and kind.
A few days after my visit, their teacher e-mailed me a bunch of notes from her students. It seemed the willingness to bear witness to hard stuff got their attention and held it. I have noticed similar responses with adult audiences and my own high school students, especially when they read each other’s creative work.
Personal truth, I’ve come to believe, is the doorway to universal truths. A writer who dares to be vulnerable—to tell their personal truth on the page—is more likely to find kinship to readers who dare vulnerability, too. A kinship, a connection, is formed. And those connections can heal, but not without first confronting the truth.
Few Southern poets make themselves as vulnerable in their work as Han VanderHart. I first heard of VanderHart’s work last April when I interviewed the North Carolina poet Junious Ward. He called VanderHart’s first collection, What Pecan Light, a book that “handles nostalgia and a reckoning of the South’s history through themes that ... touch on guilt and privilege ... perhaps better than any other book I’ve read.”
I owe Junious for that recommendation. What Pecan Light confronts national and family history, racial violence, and the destructive blindness that whiteness can confer. VanderHart is a bold voice for Southerners courageous enough to look unflinchingly at the dark parts of our region’s past. Consider this snippet from her work:
I had to do the work of books
to find what I did not want to find | history
with its long oppressive arm | its roll calls
and musters | enlistment dates | pension records
Confederate Applications for Pardon | Isn’t
it enough | my fathers and uncles | my brothers
aunts | grandmother and grandfathers
sprang from the South and have done the work
of war? | It is not enough
Han grew up in northern Virginia, in tiny towns like Catlett, Opal, and Goldvein, “places that used to have maybe a post office and a gas station.” Their first formal schooling was at Lord Fairfax (now Laurel Ridge) Community College in Warrenton: “It was like 500 students when I went there. We had a renovated barn where I took my yoga class ... and it was right next to the county landfill. I got involved with the student lit mag, which was called Moonrise Over the Landfill.”
In between a B.A. at the College of William and Mary, an M.A. from Georgetown, and a Ph.D. at Duke, in 2010, VanderHart earned their MFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University, where I had earned mine in 2000, and where we shared two beloved teachers, Eric Pankey and Jennifer Atkinson.
Pankey calls Han “a force in the world [with] a keen eye and ear.” VanderHart’s latest collection, Larks, published just last month, won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize From Ohio University Press. Atkinson calls it “a book of frightening beauty [...] honest to the bone.”
Larks is one of the most troubled yet determined books I think I’ve ever read, truly heavy in its subject matter—including a brother’s abuse of his sibling—and astonishing in how the poems are crafted in ways that are both delicate and direct.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
—Andy Fogle
Han VanderHart Southern poet | Larks Hollis Summers Poetry Prize | What Pecan Light poetry
Andy Fogle: Can you give me an overview of where you’re from?
Han VanderHart: My mom and dad and both their parents are all from Louisiana. We’d go visit my grandmother in Louisiana. Both of our family trees run down deep. My parents largely kept us in Virginia, and my dad was in the military. He would deploy, and we also moved houses a few times. My parents always chose really isolated areas for their homes and always set up a small-scale farmstead, once in Mennonite country with just farms around. We had a strange couple of years when my dad was stationed at Pearl Harbor, and that was really rough because you had all these dairy farm kids—us—who were not used to military base life with other kids.
AF: How old were you there?
HV: I was fifteen to seventeen then. And that was over 9/11 too.
AF: Wow. Extra layer. My Lord.
HV: Yeah, it was a lot. Then we came back to another farmstead in Virginia, where I finished my last year of high school before college.
AF: Were you homeschooled?
HV: It’s kind of built into the fabric of the fundamentalist Christian movement, as well as the Quiverfull movement. My parents were involved in those movements.
AF: Tell me about your closed church community.
HV: It wasn’t open to outsiders; it wasn’t like an evangelical megachurch where everyone’s welcome. That was not the church we went to. It was much more concerned with maintaining itself. Our church would excommunicate members fairly regularly. And so it was a terrible church. My mother was involved in a women’s Bible study, and the senior pastor would sit in so that the women wouldn’t interpret scripture by themselves.
“Emotions like shame or guilt, you can deny having them—but oh, oh, you have them. Poetry keeps digging into these depths inside us, keeps articulating what we don’t have language for.”
AF: Got to be supervised doing your thinking.
HV: I ended up studying a lot of historical theology during my Ph.D., and in early American history there’s this purity model, this movement toward, like, “We’re just going to worship with the holy families, and we’ll segregate ourselves more and more…” There’s this one Baptist minister who, eventually, it got smaller and smaller, then became a home church, and at one point he just informed his wife “Sorry, it’s just me now.” And I always think of that. It’s just like when you cut off community over and over again and you realize, “It’s just me.” At what point…
AF: Is it even a church then?
HV: No, I know. You just need one, you just need one. History’s amazing. There’s nothing we’re doing now that has not been done before.
AF: This morning I was rereading your new book’s title poem, “Larks,” and ..and I was awestruck by how much more I saw in a second reading, how much deeper and layered my experience became. I know the words on the page will always be the same words on the page, but the poem seemed to open up, or maybe I opened up. I know the arts are supposed to have that effect, but I want you to know that your art does.
HV: Aw, thank you. Thank you so much.
AF: You know what Junious Ward said to us at Salvation South about your first book, What Pecan Light? The bit about touching on guilt and privilege without centering it—was that conscious?
HV: I was so angry when I was writing What Pecan Light—and it was, importantly, before I had begun trauma therapy to process much of the material that would make up Larks. Now I know how strongly anger is tied to grief. I wanted white people to acknowledge their positionality, and I questioned what the performance of guilt in poetry was for, what it accomplished. I wanted to tear down statues and burn down barns. I wanted to yell at my mother (and I did). It is wild, but emotions like shame or guilt, you can deny having them—but oh, oh, you have them. Poetry keeps digging into these depths inside us, keeps articulating what we don’t have language for.
AF: There’s a line in your poem “Artist’s Statement in a Mountain Cabin” about realizing that anger is not the truest emotion. Why isn’t it?
HV: There was so much rage in my house growing up—from my mother, from my brother—and to explode back was also to protect myself. And we see this in the Iliad, from those famous opening lines onward—we see how rage is a raw, lashing, yet protective impulse, powerful and godlike. But love—that’s the truest emotion. That’s the actual center, the ballast, the balance—what turns objects back into people.
AF: Can you say more about working with hard emotional material? Larks has its share.
HV: In some ways, Larks was easier than What Pecan Light because there was more distance in the material. I think it was pretty protected and pretty closed, even though it has a fight with my mom and it has got some things that are really hard that are really triggering in the moment. The first version of “Confederate Statues Are Falling This Morning” was terrible. I wrote it in my head driving home from that visit with my mom with my little kids in the car and it was really bad. And so I rewrote it a few times, over and over again, trying to figure it out. Then I got to work with [the poet and Princeton professor] Monica Youn, who is brilliant, and she read some of the early poems in Larks and was like, “You need to go deeper. You need to go into the stuff you’re scared of,” and I was like, “Oh, my God.” It absolutely terrified me. Really scary. But I felt encouraged.
AF: Cool.
HV: Now, I’ve had students say to me, “I just realized that when I write, I need to just open a vein and let it...,” and my reaction to that is no, no, no! I don’t like that metaphor. You’re not going to just bleed onto the paper and let it dry. You’re going to write things down and then you’re going to work with them. You’re going to think them over. You’re going to let them bother you.
AF: How do you feel about being a Southern poet or a Southerner, especially having grown up in Northern Virginia? I grew up in southeast Virginia, and when I moved to Northern Virginia, a family friend said, “That’s not even really Virginia anymore. You might as well be living in New York City.”
HV: That’s so funny, because there were plantations in Maryland, right? I think there’s nothing more Southern than denialism, particularly denialism of Southern identity. Downplaying is such a Southern thing: “It’s not that big a deal. Why are you making that big a deal about that?” That’s my mom. Meanwhile, they will make such big comments about the North, so you actually hear there’s a real discomfort with acknowledging positionality. There’s a real discomfort with talking about whiteness. There’s a real discomfort with looking at family cemeteries. I think it really goes back to narratives of white innocence, or that you’re airing dirty laundry, which is something my mother said to me when What Pecan Light came out. It’s so interesting. We will literally be an hour away from a family cemetery where ancestors who owned a plantation are buried, and someone in my family will be downplaying that fact, downplaying whiteness.
“[The late Arkansas poet C.D. Wright] was a poet who I didn’t even read until my thirties, but when I did read her, I was like, ‘Okay. I know who I am now. I’m a Southern poet.’”
AF: When you mentioned your mom, I thought of moments in Larks that make me consider our relationship to our own stories and our relationship to others’ stories. One is simply the phrase “my pacifying mother” in the poem “Larks.” Right before that is the poem “My Mother Says ‘But This Is Your Sister’s Story.’” As if to say you don’t have a right to write about what happened to your sister?
HV: I mean, it makes me think of some of C.D. Wright’s titles. [Wright, who died in 2016, was an acclaimed poet from the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.] I think of One With Others. I think of One Big Self. Her work about the South, her documentary poetics, her historical lens, her style with both verse and long lines of prose, what she does with dialect, what she does with the Southern sentence, the interjection, the disjunction—she’s phenomenal. She was a poet who I didn’t even read until my thirties, but when I did, I was like, “Okay. I know who I am now. I’m a Southern poet.” And I didn’t even know it, I just did not get it. I had just been reading British poets for years. I wasn’t reading people like her, so she transformed how I saw myself. And again, I think it goes back to that denialism in Southern families—and positionality.
AF: Positionality—what do you mean?
HV: It’s like you’re swimming in this water of identity and you do not realize you’re in it. That water is whiteness, the super-Southern family. “Oh, we’re not special, we’re nobody.” What they’re really saying is, “We’re universal. We’re everybody.” Something I work on with students all the time in these writing situations, especially when they’re working on college application essays, is we all have a story. We are all significant and rooted in history and place and time and family. You tell me your story, and I’m going to tell you what’s really significant about it and help you write it. Because they do not understand what’s so incredible about whatever their positionality is, because they haven’t had to acknowledge it or work with it. They’re just a little fish in the sea, just swimming in it. It’s really been powerful to work with, say, a white boy from the East Carolina woods and be like, “Hey, you’ve got an incredible story. Let’s talk about it.” Or whoever it is.
AF: It’s just about the relationship between the story and the person whose story it is to tell.
HV: It’s like the parable of the body. Are we not one body? Doesn’t something that happens to one part of the body affect all the other parts? I grew up in the church. I learned all these rich metaphors for the body of Christ, the body of the church, and then something awful and traumatic and terrible happens that I’m directly involved with that’s so awful my brain literally wipes it. It’s gone. And my mom’s like, “That didn’t happen to you.” And she doesn’t say, “It’s not your story to tell.” She said, “That didn’t happen to you.” I’m like, “Only because my brain wiped it.” It was so traumatic because it happened to these sisters that I raised. I was the child who raised my younger siblings. And my mom has a history of trauma as well. It’s very much unprocessed, unhealed, but trauma touches everyone in a community. We can’t box it, we can’t contain it.
“I think of trauma like some other liquid falling into water—that’s how trauma spreads and touches us. It would be great if it just happened to one person, but it doesn’t.”
And that’s why reparations are so important in communities, because when we take care of each other, it helps everyone. It’s not like we’re scooping up something from one set of people and giving it to another. It’s like, look, like we can enrich our communities. We can help our communities. We can heal our communities. That’s amazing. That’s what we should be doing, because right now we have traumatized communities. Right now we have ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents] on the streets in Durham, North Carolina. And that’s creating trauma in our schoolchildren’s lives this past week. I think of trauma like some other liquid falling into water—that’s how trauma spreads and touches us. It would be great if it just happened to one person, but it doesn’t.
AF: That title—“My Mother Says, ‘But This Is Your Sister’s Story”—seems to imply that your sister’s story is not yours. Can you tell us something of how you think of the ownership of stories—of bearing witness to/through/with others in poetry?
HV: I think questioning the language of ownership here—the capitalism of our narratives; are they private property, or do we hold them in common with each other?—is such an important move to make. We make up these artificial borders between our stories and our bodies and our countries and each other, when in fact we are entirely porous. For example, what happens to a person carrying a fetus in their uterus happens also to the fetus through stress hormones and gene markers. I’m reading the incredible book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by [the psychotherapist and trauma specialist] Resmaa Menakem right now, and the author addresses historical and generational trauma, and that really is the lens and the scope we need when talking about our stories—they are nested with each other’s stories, they are overlapping and touched by each other. No man is an island, as John Donne said. Maybe the real question is why we are trying to fence trauma and contain it—who or what are we trying to protect by doing so? What are we really avoiding acknowledgement of?
AF: In Larks, you have dialogue-like poems that are in conversation with other texts and writers. Those poems remind me of the idea that all of us are “in conversation with” all that we read. Our shared teachers, Eric Pankey and Jennifer Atkinson, were the first people I heard use that phrase, and it made me aware of how creative writing has this social aspect that begins in reading. Were you conscious of that when you were writing Larks?
HV: Literature is a great game of call and response—the greatest, in my opinion. It’s liturgical. Playful. Transcendent of time and geography. I often think of the poem as quilting or piecing. I am a gatherer, rather than a hunter. You live your life, and notice the ordinary—how strange it is—and that is where your writing comes from. What you find beautiful and interesting—isn’t that what we’re always trying to get our students to simply notice? [The journalist and author] Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote, “Writers notice what they notice.” No one can tell you what you love, I tell my students.
AF: Let’s talk some about the poems we’re publishing along with this interview. First, the ars poetica. Essentially, when you get down to the root of that term, it’s writing poems about poetry. This may well be my own bias, but that feels like it becomes too “meta” or something, a poem about a poem. But yours were so fresh. I was just captivated by them. How did you find yourself writing those?
HV: I just started writing them and thought, “I just like this, I’m really having fun.” And I mean, some of them weren’t good, but when your brain decides it is into something, that’s where the dopamine is, so you just keep going. Every time I see a quote about how writing is pain, writing is torture and all that, I’m like, “No! Writing should be fun.” Again it’s that “open the vein in your arm and bleed” thing. I mean, I got done with Larks and I said to my therapist, “I did something. I took this awful stuff, and I did something with it.” And that felt awesome to have made something from something really difficult.
AF: Absolutely.
HV: But writing can also be just pleasure: “I’m going to make something where there wasn’t something today.” And that feels really good. It’s that whole thing where you ask a painter, “Why do you paint?”
AF: Because you love paint.
HV: Because I love paint. That’s a good reason.
AF: Yeah, I love words. A poet loves language. A musician doesn’t just like songs. A musician likes sound. That’s what we’re in love with: the medium. I remember my first night with Eric [Pankey], the first meeting of my first class in grad school, and he said he hoped we would all “approach poetry with the same seriousness with which a child approaches play.” I thought, I already love you. That’s absolutely one of my touchstones.
“I think that paying attention and love are anti-fascist. Love is about truth, about seeing another person as real, and that should be something we’re cultivating in our lives with each other.”
HV: That’s amazing.
AF: Speaking of love, how about the love poems? Any particular impulse that got you going along those lines?
HV: After What Pecan Light and Larks, I just wanted to take a break and write something that was just really what I wanted to write. I’ve been getting into trouble on Blue Sky lately for posting that writing love poems is anti-fascist. People are getting mad at me and saying things like “Ezra Pound begs to differ.” [VanderHart laughs.] Oh, okay. So now I need to go write a rigorous essay defending my viewpoint—which is not the point of posting a tiny little thing, anyway.
AF: Oh, man.
HV: It’s called micro-blogging, people. But I do think that paying attention and love are anti-fascist. Love is about truth, about seeing another person as real, and that should be something we’re cultivating in our lives with each other. I just wrote a lot of love poems and that’s this project. I don’t have a whole lot to say other than the fact that it’s been a lot of fun.
AF: That’s reason enough.
HV: Iris Murdoch is a favorite philosopher of mine and she says that love is to acknowledge another person as real and to acknowledge a reality outside of yourself because we’re good at acknowledging the reality of ourselves, but not that of other people. So, when you love someone, that’s when you acknowledge another person is real. And I think that love and truth are connected.
AF: One of my favorites in the new book is “I Go Into the Wyeth Painting Above the Psychologist’s Left Shoulder.” Those last lines “this place is safe enough / for sleep” are so lovely, even as the poem grapples with trauma. I know I hear my high school students talking about mental health a bit more freely and openly, but what do you see?
HV: There are still many barriers against access to care. I think Tik Tok has actually played a huge role in destigmatizing care in terms of people being able to use language around therapy to talk about PTSD and all kinds of different diagnoses. I hear people normalize talking about the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), this doorstopper-thick book that used to be something that would only be in a clinical researcher’s office, but now people own copies in their house. I have a copy. There has been access to text, access to conversations, that have really opened up. You can get on Reddit and read up on hypervigilance or you can find what we call a community of text. Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know. Tara Westover’s Educated. Gretchen Schmelzer’s Journey Through Trauma. Considering that we didn’t even have the term PTSD until the ’80s, there has been a proliferation of text. I post booklists through River River Books on bookshop.org. I try to normalize it just by talking about it. By seeing a therapist, doing trauma therapy, your brain can heal. Surround yourself with a community of books and other people. Know that cycle-breaking is one of the best things you can do for your kids. If my mother had had that kind of care, that would have been an amazing gift, a deep gift.
“By seeing a therapist, doing trauma therapy, your brain can heal. If my mother had had that kind of care, that would have been an amazing gift, a deep gift.”
AF: So much of what you’ve said makes me think of a passage from “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.” Do you see acknowledgement of what people have been in denial about as central to healing?
HV: Oh, absolutely. The go-to minimizing and avoidance, the idea that we can repress generations of trauma and be just fine is such a white, Southern farce—you can’t treat other humans as property and be okay in your bodies. The anxiety and depression in your family tree have a source. Resmaa Menakem writes about the somatic (bodily) healing that needs to take place for Americans, and the acknowledgement of white-body privilege in My Grandmother’s Hands: “If we are to survive as a country, it is inside our bodies where this conflict will need to be resolved.”
Andy Fogle is the poetry editor of Salvation South. He is the author of Mother Countries, Across From Now, and seven chapbooks of poetry, including Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. He’s from Virginia Beach, spent years in the D.C. area, and now lives with his family in upstate New York, teaching high school.
