Green-Wood

Sometimes scary, always subtle and deepening, Green-Wood is one kind of necessary writing for this moment, a guide to losses that might help us understand what to do now.

New Writing Through the Anthropocene

Lisa Olstein:  “Form sets the thought free,” says Anne Carson. How did form and thought co-evolve in the unfolding of this work?

Allison Cobb: I initially wrote a manuscript of poems about Green-Wood, but I was unsatisfied with that. It was fragmented, emotional—reflective of the shattered feeling I had post 9/11. I wanted to keep that, and I also wanted to do more, to document my trail through this history of landscape and culture. So I began writing in prose, and citing my sources—and the manuscript took a hybrid prose-poetry form, what some call documentary or investigative poetry. The hybrid part was important to me. I wanted to use the strategies of historical research, nature writing, and journalism, and I also wanted to undercut them, to show how each has its genre conventions, and none should be thought of as transparent mirrors of some “truth.” The hybrid nature of the work—and my technique of juxtaposing poetry with poetic prose with journalistic recording and historical context—let me show the seams, the constructed nature of all those endeavors, and my own co-construction with them.