by Nicole Cooley

Brad Richard and I both grew up in New Orleans, attending the same arts high school: The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (where Brad later taught). Now, we have known each other for more than 40 years. As a teenager, I knew Brad’s poems before ever meeting him–having read them in Umbra, the student journal–and, even when I was 15, I admired his work and sought to emulate the rich, vivid language in his poems.

In the years since, Brad and I have become close friends, with a deep, shared history. We have read together, and I have continued to love his work. His engagement with ekphrasis, his investigation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and his exploration of grief and mourning all drew me to his writing.

This interview marks the release of his newest poetry collection, Turned Earth, from Louisiana State University Press, as well as a reissue of Motion Studies, with an appendix of new poems.

Nicole Cooley: In your collection, there is so much that circles back to gardens. We see the two “Gardener” poems as well as the poignant image of the daylilies the speaker has taken from his mother’s garden and replanted in his yard. The book itself also has the very evocative title: Turned Earth. While the gardens in this collection represent a complicated series of images and emotions, I also see the deep joy in tending and nurturing as a key part to how gardens function. Can you talk about gardens here?

Brad Richard: First, Nicole, thank you for writing that beautiful introduction. It means the world to me to be doing this interview with you. I thought about your first question while I was weeding in my garden this evening, which also reminded me of visits we’ve had there.

I almost hate to admit how much my garden is a reflection of myself. Earlier, I was working in a particularly neglected spot, crabgrass everywhere, things I’d planted well past their prime—or, well, dead. But there were also discoveries: a volunteer Turk’s cap mallow; new shoots at the base of a button bush I planted a few months back; peppermint runners under old leaves, protected from the heat and ready to go dormant this winter and come back in the spring. Eclectic, messy, not always logical, productive when tended to: yep, that’s me.  

My garden also embodies personal history. I owe much of my love of gardening to my mother, and you mentioned my mother’s daylilies, which an aunt had originally given her—I love those kinds of generational connections through plants we’ve nurtured. I’m also interested in other kinds of histories that gardens bear, conceal, and reveal: “Confederate Jasmine,” for instance, arose from thinking about the fact that one of the common names of a popular ornamental vine in the South is redolent of the violent past that still lives in our present. I’ve also come to hate lawn grass, which wastes so many resources, requires so many chemicals to keep it pristine, and is just a weird vestige of someone’s yearning for a country estate. So, over the past five years or so, I’ve eradicated most of our grass in order to cultivate native plants that host and feed other native species: bees, wasps, lepidoptera, dragonflies, hummingbirds. Learning some local natural history has also deepened my understanding of human history here and of our complicated relationship to this place, whoever we are, wherever our people came from and however they arrived.

My garden is also pretty queer. It’s very unlike all but one or two other yards in our neighborhood. And we are the only gay couple on our block.

As I think about all this, I wonder if my garden also allows distinctions between the personal and the social, among other things, to redefine themselves. Maybe?

I love that your mother’s daylilies were given to her by an aunt and are now in your garden! Here’s to queer gardens!

What you say about gardens, place, and identity is really interesting, as well as your observations about the personal and the social. I wonder how gardens in this collection–and in your poems more generally–are linked to grief and mourning, both of which are so central to the subject of this new book?

I think the connections between gardens and grief runs as deep as the connections between gardens and joy. You can’t garden and not be hopeful: you put a seed or bulb or plug in the ground and you imagine how it will grow as you nurture it. You want that beautiful, maybe fragrant, maybe tasty thing to manifest in your life. But in order to have those things, your hope can’t be passive or naïve: it has to be supported by learning about these plants and their needs, and it only becomes meaningful through responsibility and work. It’s also the kind of hope you develop after learning that that living things, including people, can and will be lost, that sometimes the worst is exactly what will happen. And in spite of that, you learn, over and over, that it’s important to attend to what needs you.

Thinking about grief and gardens also leads me into thinking about mythical and metaphysical gardens, those symbolic spaces where we grapple with mortality and consciousness. For me, as a non-believer, the crux of the Eden story is that their loss of innocence means losing their dream of immortality in a literally perfect world—a world, interestingly, that they were also supposed to tend to so it would sustain them. It’s fascinating to me that we’ve tended to the idea of that imaginary garden, in hopes of returning to some version of it, since versions of that story were first told, and that our yearning has shaped so much of how we think about the world and ourselves.   

Thinking about gardening and grief also leads to me to think about its relationships to writing and to love. Gardening is a lot like writing in that much of the time, you’re alone. Marvell somewhat cheekily presents that as the ideal in “The Garden”: “Two paradises ‘twere in one/ To live in paradise alone.” Yet even when working alone out there, I feel happy and fortunate to share a life with my husband, who must occasionally think I’ve lost my mind when he looks out the kitchen window and sees me yanking vines from a tree or trying to hand-pollinate an eggplant flower.

One last note: sometimes the strongest motivation for me to yank those vines or move rocks for the garden path or completely rebuild a compost pile is anger. Very, very satisfying, putting that anger to work.

Yes, I know what you mean about grief and anger, along with individual and collective mourning.

I am so glad you brought up Motion Studies–a book I love–which is being reissued next year with a new introduction and some new poems. Let’s talk about New Orleans and its role in Motion Studies and Turned Earth. How does New Orleans haunt and scaffold both collections? I realize, as I ask, this is a vast question.

Thank you for those kind words about Motion Studies and for this question about New Orleans and Katrina. I’ll confess: this one is harder to answer than I expected. You’re right: the subject is vast, also complex, also intensely personal. It includes the history that brought us to the brink you describe, along with all the failures and successes in managing our precarity since Katrina. And when I think about our precarity, I think about gentrification, along with escalating taxes and insurance rates, that have made New Orleans unaffordable for many people whose families have called this city home for generations. I think about how the wealth gap that was exposed so starkly immediately after Katrina has widened. I think about the horrible inequities in education that have resisted and in some cases been exacerbated by the reforms of the charter school movement—a movement, I might add, that has from the beginning been driven by the self-interest of its financial and ideological backers. I think about how much whiter the city feels.

New Orleans will very likely not exist within a few generations, or at least not in any form that I might recognize. I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m wrong, that means a lot of scientists are also wrong. Meanwhile, I try to live here as mindfully as I can, contributing to mutual aid efforts, doing volunteer work as a master gardener, voting and being attentive to local politics, listening to people whose experience here is and has been different from mine, and enjoying the rich and complicated beauty of this place and the people with whom I am lucky to share it. And my husband and I try to associate with people who are also mindful about how they live here.

Interestingly, the poem from Turned Earth that occurred to me when I first saw your question is “Lapis Lazuli,” which isn’t really about New Orleans. On a trip to Philadelphia, I visited an apothecary with a dear friend who is very witchy and was looking for specific herbs and other items. The shop had an array of stones on offer, including some small pieces of lapis. I bought a few for gifts and kept one, and when I got home, I decide to re-read Yeats’s poem, which I hadn’t looked at in decades. And I hated it! What I resisted or resented most was all the business about “their ancient glittering eyes.” What bullshit, I thought, all this crap about the eternal qualities of art—bullshit I had long cherished, of course. My poem’s last line is “remind me I’m still here.” New Orleans, because of its precarity, always reminds me I’m still here. For now.

What a fascinating story about visiting the apothecary and rereading Yeats! And yes, grappling with the reality that “New Orleans will very likely not exist within a few generations,” and learning how to live mindfully with that awareness.

I recall how you and I were part of a panel at the New Orleans Poetry Festival two years ago (where we brainstormed together!) about making a home in the Anthropocene at the end of the world. I guess my question is how one can keep writing in the face of such precarity, and also–to ask another giant question–what kind of poems does this world need? I think about this as California is burning right now. The need for poetry feels urgent to me, but I also fear poetry can do nothing to repair our world.

I also keep toggling between the images from California and our conversation, buoyed by one, gutted by the other, my attention divided between, on the one hand, a literary art form that you and I care about intensely and this massive destruction that represents, almost unimaginably, only a small part of the planetary crisis we’re living through. And which, like it or not, requires our attention and imagination as poets and citizens.

I should clarify that when I say the climate crisis requires our attention, I don’t mean that it’s every poet’s job to bear witness to it in their poems. What I mean is we can’t pretend that the hell we’ve created for ourselves and all other life on the planet is not part of everything we write about. That fact is changing us. Every day, we lose more living things we expected to last forever, because they’ve been around at least as long as we have. How will this catastrophic accumulation of losses affect our store of metaphors and symbols? How will it alter our understanding of human relationships, on intimate and social scales? How will we imagine what comes after us?

It is unthinkably sad for me to consider the living things in Turned Earth that are at imminent risk of extinction: marine life, plants, insects, birds. Some are already gone, many more are vanishing as I write this. That’s not a world I want to live in, but someone will have to. And that world is the one they’ll write about.

Some of us are writing poems now to help us process the disaster, and that’s good and important. With any luck, future readers will appreciate the attention we give to the events we’re experiencing, the past on which whatever that future is will be built. I also hope those future readers and writers will appreciate that we kept art alive, that we not only wrote poems at all, but that we did so with care, attending to both the minutiae of our craft and the full scope of our experiences, and we didn’t use some apocalypse as an excuse to slack off and become sloppy writers.

I know these are things you also think and write about, Nicole, and I would love to hear your thoughts on any of this. It’s all so huge—help me bear it!

It does seem unbearable, and yet we bear it. I worry that our easy access to images of destruction through the media makes us horrified and, at the same time, oddly numb to the realities of disaster. Moreover, I wonder how language might invoke and describe catastrophe.

I often return to Muriel Rukeyes and her amazing long poem, “The Book of the Dead,” following the 1929 Gauley Bridge mining tragedy in West Virginia. This poem contains one of the most powerful statements about the work that poetry can do in the world: “What three things can never be done?/ Forget, Keep silent. Stand alone”

Relatedly, could we talk more about speaking and silence in your work?  I am curious about the architecture or arc of Turned Earth, in particular your decision to open the collection with “How I am Whole” and to close it with “How I Came to This.”

I also love those lines from Rukeyser’s great poem, and how they frame what must be done—remember, speak up, stand together—in terms of what can never be done. I admire that urgency and vigilant personal integrity.

Your question about speaking and silence makes me realize how often the speaker in Turned Earth is alone, remembering and observing, digging up past things to scrutinize them in the present. He hears things: he talks to a mallow in his garden, and the mallow reciprocates with some good advice. (I am still a child with imaginary friends!) He speaks to his dead mother through seven sonnets, and, in a later poem, he hallucinates her speaking to him. That particularly interests me because her silence is at the heart of much of the book—that is, the silence around those poems that she buried in deep storage, in a file marked “Confidential Material Enclosed.” Did she silence herself? I think she did, which surprises me because she could certainly speak up, in Rukeyser’s sense. But part of herself, yes—whether because she didn’t want to hear that private, vulnerable voice or she didn’t want anyone else to hear it, or for reasons I’ll know. To quote one of her poems, speaking about her own mother: “She’s gone now, so I can’t ask her why.”

“How I Am Whole” is a kind of ars poetica, one very specific to this book. I couldn’t have written it when I was young: I had to be old enough to need to remember that moment when I was six or seven, standing on the porch, “feeling the glow of whole day inside me/ and thinking I want to remember this.” Remembering that memory of wanting to remember makes the speaker whole. That retrieval gives his existence in the present, in a body and mind that have experienced five decades more of life, a more resonant meaning—and he has to write it. And in a sense, writing makes him what he says he sometimes wants to be, “an idea. Form. Duration. Écriture.” He also thinks his body gets in the way of that desire to be an idea, but being an artist is what makes it possible for him to live in his body and in memory and  . . . well, and is the rest of the book, isn’t it?

At any rate, I knew early on that that would have to be the first poem. “How I Came to This” was much harder to place. There’s a third poem in that group, “How One Goes On,” the darkest of the three, because the speaker is in a deep despair. I wrote it about six months after Mom’s death, and right after I learned about James Tate’s death. Tate was one of my first literary heroes, and I took his passing hard. I couldn’t place that one too close to “How I Came to This,” a lazily jaunty (if that’s a thing), cheeky kind of poem. Of course, it also deals with death, but cheekily, and we know the speaker is happy enough to enjoy arriving at a lazy point in life. I thought it was good to leave him that way. And you know what else I like about the placement of that poem? He’s looking forward to greeting his husband on the porch, which echoes the porch where he sort of meets himself in “How I Am Whole.” I may be running too far with this, but I think in the end he’s accepted that his art is not just personal, it is also social, starting with the domestic sphere. 

All of this is so interesting! I want to continue discussing the book structure as well as the speech and silence by turning to the wonderful second section of Turned Earth, the crown of sonnets “Matrilineation: Homage to Nell Parker, 1944-2015”. These poems are so beautiful and heartbreaking. I am fascinated by the inclusion of your mother’s work along with your discovery of her poems in the “Confidential Materials Enclosed” folder. Could you talk about your decision to place this cycle as the second section of the book and why you chose to include her works beside/inside your own?

Finding that folder astounded me, taking me back to the last and only time I had seen any of these poems, when I was ten. My grandmother died that spring, and when I visited Mom that summer, she wanted to read me some poems she’d written during those difficult months. She sat with me in a window seat, read one or two poems, then burst into tears and took the folder with her into her study. When she came out a few minutes later, she apologized and quickly said something like, “How about some lunch?” I never forgot that moment and I never asked her about it.

Over the years, I sent Mom almost everything I published, and she always found something specific to praise or ask about, always found ways to be supportive of my work. (My father does, too, of course: he’s a painter, as is my stepmother, whose art I’m grateful to have on the cover of Turned Earth.) Mom should have been a writer: I always knew she had the skills and instincts for it. And then I found those poems and realized that there was at least one point in her life where she needed to write poetry.

I tried writing an essay about all this; it was very bad. But in 2020, during lockdown, I re-read that draft and Mom’s poems and over three or four days, I wrote this sequence almost exactly as it appears in the book. The key problem with the essay was that it felt more like it was about me than about Mom. Including substantial excerpts from her poems, and a whole one in the middle, made me feel like I had given her back her voice, to the extent that I could. In fact, a friend suggested I drop the last two lines of the sequence so it would end on her words, not mine. I hope, though, that my ending completes the homage and links us.

Its placement in the book was the most important decision I made, because that allowed everything to fall into place. The first section of the book in grounded with poems I wrote while she was alive, and it ends with “Zuihitsu on the Letter M,” in which it’s clear that she has died. “Matrilineation” follows in its own section, a place set off for the two of us with our words—which is, really, how I remember much of the time we spent together, talking or reading.

I want to add that I couldn’t have written this sequence until I had gone through a full five years of grief and could better understand what I had lost. Processing that through writing “Matrilineation” also allowed me to more fully understand myself as a writer.  

I love the idea of you giving her back her voice in these poems. So beautiful.

We’ve been talking about sonnets, and you mentioned zuihitsu.  I wanted to ask about form in this collection. It strikes me that you play with and refract form throughout the book, from the sonnets and zuihitsu to a villanelle to an ode to a ghazal.  Can you talk about how you think about form in Turned Earth and your decision to include these forms in the book?

I love the word “refract” here! I’m very happy with the formal variety in this book, which just came about organically. My default drafting modes are usually couplets, tercets, or big blocky strophes, and often enough, those drafts grow up to resemble their young selves. The embryonic versions of most of the poems in Turned Earth started off in one of those defaults, until they morphed into whatever their DNA demanded. “Field Trip, Barataria Preserve,” for instance, was all long monostichs at its birth, then evolved into tercets in its adolescence, and imagine my surprise when it grew up to be a modified haibun.

I also love the idea of refraction in relation to thinking about form as a mode of thought, and especially in relation to zuihitsu, which I now more firmly understand to be a genre or mode rather than a form. For readers not familiar with zuihitsu, the easiest place to begin describing it is the name, which means “follow the brush.” As a Japanese literary genre, it is essayistic, subjective, and often associative. It can be as simple as a short list of things related to a topic or theme, or it can be more complex and draw on disparate genres. Readers who know Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book may know that she originated the genre over 1000 years ago. Haibun is another form that zuihitsu can take. In American practice, zuihitsu has leant itself to workwe usually call hybrid, with elements and strategies we recognize from poetry but also from non-traditional essays and other kinds of texts.

What I love about zuihitsu is the essential not-knowing that the writer brings to the page: follow the brush. I know what my topic or theme will be, and I write until enough material has collected, which I can then shape. Am I doing it “right?” I’m still not sure, and I’m OK with that. I recently tuned in to a fascinating webcast of Kimiko Hahn in conversation with the marvelous Japanese writer Hiromi Ito, whose work I didn’t know at all before that night, and they had some interesting back and forth about what zuihitsu is and isn’t. I revise toward a stronger sense of closure than Kimiko Hahn now sees as a quality of true zuihitsu, but when I’m in the midst of writing zuihitsu, closure is the furthest thing from my mind—which is so different from writing something like a villanelle, in which closure is the goal.  

Going back to the idea of refraction, which I really do love: yes, zuihitsu encourages me to refract memory, imagination, and observation through the lens of a particular theme, which tends to reveal a specific spectrum of thought and feeling. I think that’s also true of a form like the ghazal, which is also associative, and the sonnet crown, which can be kaleidoscopic as it turns its material again and again, shifting the patterns in transformative ways. My practice with odes tends toward the same kind of thinking and re-thinking, turning a thing over to see what I missed.

That sense of shifting patterns to discover new ones also runs throughout the book, formally and otherwise. Two poems come to mind. One is “Imagine a World in Which All Monumental Lions Are Replaced, Every One, with Monumental Chickens,” by the far the poem that gave me the most pleasure to write in this book. It emerged from the lockdown era of long, aimless walks, staring at things that I kept seeing every day and that kept getting weirder every time I saw them. Like, why do people buy miniature monumental lions to decorate their front steps? It’s adorable and ridiculous, all at once. And as much as I love Patience and Fortitude, the lions of the New York Public Library . . . well, at least they’re at the Library and not Trump Tower. (Forgive me for putting that idea into the world!) Anyway, on one of those walks I burst out laughing when I had this vision of every lion statue becoming a chicken. A dumber idea may never have been a poet’s inspiration, and it was so freeing and joyful to follow it all the way through. And where did it lead me? Right back to my mother’s cast iron chickens, who live in my garden.

The other poem I wanted to mention is “Zinnias.” It came out of a writing activity I’d given a group of students, which was basically to write a poem that surprises you in every line. Well, I thought I’d done a bang-up job (and it was a very fun first draft to write), but later, my workshop group kept finding possibilities for it to—yes, to refract! It was such a pleasure to work with their ideas and let the poem become what it had wanted to be all along, but which wasn’t what I thought it was when I started it.

I love all of these origin stories about the poems in the book! And your discussion of how your use of form has evolved.

What a delight it has been to have this conversation, Brad. Thank you!!!!

Thank you, Nicole! It’s been a joy!

Brad Richard is the author of Habitations (Portals Press, 2000), Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), Parasite Kingdom (The Word Works, 2019), and  Turned Earth (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). His 2022 chapbook, In Place, was chosen for the Robin Becker Series from Seven Kitchens Press. A second edition of Motion Studies, with additional poems and a foreword by Skye Jackson, will also be published by The Word Works in March, 2025. He has taught creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, The Willow School (whose creative writing program he founded and directed), Louisiana State University, and Tulane University, and for New Orleans Writers Workshop. Series editor of the Hilary Tham Capital Collection from The Word Works, he lives, writes, and gardens in New Orleans. More at bradrichard.org.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Her most recent book is Mother Water Ash (Louisiana University Press, Fall 2024). She has published six other poetry collections.  She teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and literary translation at Queens College, City University of New York and lives outside of NYC with her family.