MAYA C. POPA

You wear so many hats as a literary citizen—hosting book clubs, teaching at NYU, posting on Substack, founding Conscious Writers Collective, editing for Publishers Weekly. It’s so inspiring! Is there a uniting mission? How do these various roles feed back into your life as a poet? 

Well, I want to start by acknowledging the work that you are doing, Natalie. Thank you for reviving this series and for your wonderful curation. 

My sense of what literary citizenship means, or what it can look like at its best, is an effort that’s collaborative and holistic. Collaboration is what makes literary culture possible. Magazines require not only submitters, but subscribers who will financially support the publication’s efforts. Books need booksellers, and booksellers need literature enthusiasts. We each have a role to play in championing poetry in the ways we can. 

I’ve worked at Publishers Weekly since 2018, where I help libraries and booksellers determine which collections they might wish to stock. I dearly want my peers to be read and to reach new audiences. And—the reality is that we only cover six poetry titles a month, when there are dozens of titles I wish I could draw attention to each season. In Poetic Commons, we gather online to discuss a collection each month. There’s something wonderfully gratifying about introducing readers to writers they may not have come across online, but whose work is, in all ways, exceptional. I’m thinking most recently of poets Steve Scafidi and Donna Stonecipher who rarely promote their own work. We read Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith earlier this year, which I think profoundly expanded our sense of how poems can operate across a collection. This month, we’re reading Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop. It’s an idiosyncratic curation. 

With Conscious Writers Collective (CWC), my aim was to create a space that made the serious and ongoing study of craft possible beyond traditional academia. I saw how much writers were eager for continuous programming, a space to log on each day to study with the same cohort. I also had plenty of writer friends who were gifted instructors eager for additional teaching opportunities, so this seemed like a perfect chance to connect them with students. We recently began collaborating with MFAs and arts institutions, and my long-term goal is to improve the lives of writers directly while continuing to support the presses and initiatives that make publishing possible. We’ve been awarding scholarships yearly, and our CWC Bookshop supports Indy Reads bookstore.

One of the lessons I’ve learned is that to make anything happen, you must show unusual and sometimes extraordinary willingness to be cringe. You may start an initiative and have no one sign up, and you will almost certainly have anxious thoughts of judgement by your peers. None of that will matter when, two months or two years into an initiative, someone is thanking you for improving their life. If you genuinely hope to effectuate change, to build infrastructure that helps the groups you care about, then you should never be embarrassed to be seen trying. I remind myself all the time that my ego’s tantrum about being visible or promoting something that I’m building is no excuse not to do the work. 

Yeah, I subscribe to embracing the cringe.

Right? I mean, what’s the alternative? We all do nothing and remain cool?

I imagine it can be all-consuming at times. How do you detach from the poetry world? Is there some non-academic, non-poetry activity that helps you reset?

The logistical admin reality of running CWC, a Substack, Poetic Commons, etc. is complex. It requires thinking 6-12 months ahead alongside the daily and weekly planning. But, oddly enough, it’s that variety that’s helped me not want to detach from the poetry world. 

Right. Like you can shift into a slightly different mode when necessary. 

Yes, and that prevents me from feeling defeated or exhausted by one kind of engagement. You must find a way to feed the lake, as Jean Rhys said, that doesn’t put you at the center of everything. 

I found it much harder to be a poet in my mid-20s for that reason—it felt like that title was entirely attached to whether I was writing and publishing poems. It’s an enormous relief to be behind the scenes working rather than the focus being exclusively on my production. I get to learn continuously and refine my practice while being driven by a greater sense of purpose around poetry’s role in my life and the lives of others.

Let’s turn to your third collection, If You Love That Lady, which draws inspiration from nineteenth-century courtship letters. The title itself stems from the letters of Sally McDowell and John Miller, but it also echoes Robert Graves’ (rude!) advice to Siegfried Sassoon: “If you love that lady, don’t marry her.” To complicate this correspondence triangle, you also invoke the platonic/professional letters between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. What first drew you to the McDowell-Miller archive? Was there something about their society that informed the book’s landscape?

To start with McDowell and Miller, they’re writing in the years leading up to the Civil War,  and the tome of letters opens with her rejection of his proposal. 

Oh, wow. 

That’s a high-stakes place to begin a correspondence, essentially with “How dare you?”

I don’t often gravitate to memoirs or autobiographies, but I’ve always been interested in reading correspondences. But from a formal standpoint, I didn’t want to write epistolary poems. I wanted to investigate the impulse to apostrophize the beloved in poetry and the letter’s inherent tensions, particularly around delay. 

You write, “Like asking is my verse alive / and waiting leaden days for the reply.” I love how “leaden days” captures the heaviness of waiting for such a response—how it echoes Dickinson’s “formal feeling.”

 It’s a really neat examination of the “paradox of correspondence—” the silences, hesitations, intimacies—of the epistolary form, and how a third-party reader of these letters could be eavesdropping on the lovers’ private conversation. It also made me think how text messages or DMs can speed up the courtship process or sow doubt (e.g., being left on “read”). 

Imagine being Dickinson asking for that reassurance and having to wait days or weeks for the answer. There’s so much rumination involved in interpreting silence. In previous centuries, silence was expected, built into the fabric of our interactions. In some ways, it continues to be an essential (if not diminishing) part of courtship. In the quiet, each beloved is inventing the other person. Each is anticipating what the person might reply, and how they themselves might be read. It’s solipsistic, even as it’s directed outward. It’s a strange thing to want to capture on the page. I knew I wasn’t writing love poems in a traditional sense. 

Not only are you engaging with letter-writing as an art form, but the poems serve as a method to assess the “damage” (or the ways people imprint upon each other) after a romantic relationship. Poetry also serves as a vehicle for rebuilding or transformation. The “If You Love That Lady” series holds some of my favorite lines: “Historians will have to invent / a new word for this love, you’d said. / We’d been talking about the war”....“I’d thought I’d trapped my suffering in amber”.... “He said the arc of things was always / toward their ends; all bows bend / goodbye.” Can you share your thought process in writing this series and why it occurs in an alternating frequency in the first section, but then nearly disappears? 

All three of my books have had a sequence with a repeated title that appears at intervals throughout the collection. I’ve always likened it to how a ballerina will spot one object in the room as she pirouettes. I like the sense of a refrain or repeated interrogation. 

That poem is written in the voice of a speaker trying to take stock of what it means to love a difficult person, to love someone who one knows from the beginning will not be there at the finish line. “[T]he arc of things was always / toward their ends.” What does it mean to love someone who is an elegist, someone who thinks only about ends? My focus wasn’t the actual details of the dynamic, but on the speaker’s reckoning and attempt to understand their complicity and their reasoning for being drawn towards an outlook different than their own. 

 I read “One Way or Another” a million times at this point, marveling over how the form reads like peering into a “gallery of mirrors.” The mirror is a recurring image. 

Yes, yes, yes.

This poem has these slight syntactical adjustments that underscore the complexities of thwarted love (“I love you; then what?...So we begin / in earnest; what then?”). 

Amazing that you noticed this—thank you. 

Yes! I also noticed the new enjambments add weight the second time around—placing more pressure on a word like “fracture.” Your poems have such a calm precision. Can you speak to how the form came to be? 

 It was a happy accident. It would be disingenuous of me to give a craft lesson on this because it’s the kind of thing that happens when you labor without success for hours, building a sort of muscle for listening for opportunities in the poem. Then, once in a long while, the poetry gods seem to offer you something with ease. 

But I did want the poem to have many forms of doubleness. The form revealed the poem’s underlying subject, enacting that Heraclitus adage “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” The idea of mirroring is present, as you said in the collection, primarily because, I think, the people we love reveal different aspects of ourselves to us. Both our deepest woundings and the angels of our nature. 

Writers often collect strange histories. “Trial of the Mayfly” juxtaposes the bizarre structures of human history against the fleeting reality of nature. What first drew you to the medieval practice of subjecting animals to formal legal trials? 

My PhD was on wonder in poetry, and I did a great deal of reading on the medieval period. One of the aspects of animal trials that most fascinated me is that they’re such a detour in legal history—it’s not as though the legal system hadn’t been formalized yet and humans and animals were both fair game for trial. It’s a bizarre practice that emerged and then phased out. The value of the trial was deeply symbolic, as the poem suggests. It’s an example of the strangeness of the medieval imagination, which is adapting to the rise of formal religion and the decline of magic. 

There’s definitely an absurdity built into it. 

Absolutely. And mayflies live very short lives. I wanted to choose something that you couldn’t bring to court in time. What would a judge say? 

Right. I mean the mayfly’s brief lifespan kind of challenges our obsessions with bureaucracy; it renders any human “malediction” or execution meaningless. The poem’s structure is around contrasting vignettes. It pivots to fly-fishing at Gunpowder Falls, weaving in memories of a father and the imagery of “knots you thought were permanent.” How do you balance between public history and private memory within a single piece?

It is a question of balance. I don’t usually figure it out on the first go. I have to write into both parts at length and then do a kind of triage and figure out what’s in conversation, what’s worth deepening further. In some ways, it’s also negotiating that sense that the public amplifies the private, and the private amplifies the public, each one offering a kind of evidence for the other. 

I’d like to turn to this fascinating The New Yorker: Poetry podcast episode, where you provided a close reading of Brenda Shaughnessy’s “Artless.” There are so many insightful nuggets about how Shaughnessy’s formal design encourages negation, inversions, and reversals. Her voice is praised for its intimate, personal quality that avoids being super autobiographical or sentimental. I think this is true of your poems, too. You’ve said that when writing on desire, one may aim to “capture something at once consuming and impermanent, delicate and muscular, something layered and complex as we are.” Is there a poem you think achieves this? 

First, I have to mention Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson, which is a seminal work of criticism on the subject. I think poems of desire, like elegies, are completely foundational to our orientations as poets. Our capacities to mourn and long can be endlessly mined because they are self-generating and self-renewing emotions that are fundamental to our humanness. Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” and Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love” both do this really well. Melissa Crowe’s “When We’re in Bed and You Take Out Your Mouth Guard, I Know It’s On” is another favorite. It’s a happy poem, which puts it in an unusual category for poems about longing and desire. 

As an expert on wonder, you’ve argued, “A poem that too neatly and tidily squares away the confusions of wonder forfeits the power of the feeling. Wonder is an end in itself.” How has this philosophy shaped your own poetics? 

 I think I’m forever a student of wonder. Just as the sublime is a mix of the terrible and the beautiful, the idea behind wonder is not entirely as upbeat and uncomplicated as it’s sometimes made out to be. The wondrous breaches and surpasses us—and then, most importantly, it makes us ask questions. We have the verb “wonder” and then the noun “wonder”? “To wonder” is often the entry into a question. This questing, this questioning, is at the heart of our interactions with the world. I see it as profoundly psychically useful. Rachel Carson says that it helps diminish our appetite for destruction. I’m very interested in how we leverage it, and what poetry can do to help sustain all the other parts of the Anthropocene.

Interview Posted: September 1, 2026