January's must read: Automotive by Ceridwen Hall

Ceridwen Hall loves turning experience into poems. She likes to take things slowly, registering the details that reveal what's underneath. A slow driver. she's always looking, always noticing. 

In her debut chapbook, Automotive (Finishing Line Press), Hall turns her lingering gaze to experiences  arising from Americans' abiding passion for the automobile; for "self-movement," as she reminds us (auto - mobile). On one of my favorite pieces in this collection, "at the DMV," Hall notices how standing in line makes "you go sweet and pliant for convenience sake;" how your own name sounds strange when you spell it over and over.

The verbs in this collection surprise and delight. Green sharpens pastures. "Thoughts stretch linear. Then they scatter." "I vehicle and drift." In a surreal moment on I-80, "exits drift father apart." But my favorite happens when our driver-narrator says, "I went pedestrian," as if crossing over to another tribe.

There's a restlessness to these poems, which often close on the verge of movement.  Fisherwoman ends as the narrator drops her parents at the airport. "They go. I tilt the seat by hand, a fraction, and turn the key."  Incident slows down a collision and reveals how befuddlement changes language: "rear-ended" becomes "hit from behind." Then it closes with the driver merging "between two crawling trucks."

“Fluid identity” takes on new meaning in this collection. At 30 degrees water freezes but identity thaws, as "every few winters / this self starts to feel like a pretense" and "you fail to recognize / that gaze in the rearview" and "I want, idly, to be more / kind, more anything." This piece also points to the all-too-American failure to meet those in need as its speaker stands mute before "a stranger in pajamas."  

Hall's sonics are gorgeous and her meditative stance transports us deeper into our own lives. The list of my favorite lines goes on and on, Here’s one from the closing poem, Return: "We tell ourselves weather is scenery, not dream. / But the rain says otherwise."

Author Interview

Ceridwen completed her PhD in Feb. 2020 at the University of Utah and now lives in Ohio, where she serves guest editor and editorial consultant for Palette Poetry and Frontier Poetry. We corresponded about Automotive and met later by phone.

AB: Can you tell me the story of this collection? Did it burst from your brain wholly formed? Did it assemble slowly piece-by-piece over a period of years? How much driving do you do anyway?

CH: This chapbook came together over a period of seven years. After a few years in California (where I had no car), I moved to Urbana, Illinois and then to Salt Lake City, Utah—both places where it was easier to travel by car than on foot. As I returned to driving—both for short errands and on road trips to visit family—I found the liminal space of the car conducive to creative thinking. Traveling by car, you are between different facets of your life; you aren’t quite indoors, but you aren’t quite outdoors either—a vehicle separates you from the world and helps you move through it. And then, for a few years, I had a car with a broken CD player and on long road trips I found myself between radio stations with nothing to do but look out at the landscape and think and string words together. I realized a few years ago that I had a stack of car poems, but they didn’t really start to cohere as a manuscript until I heard an NPR piece about self-driving cars (in my car, of course!), went home to my dictionary, and realized that the word automobile already means self-moving. This became my through-line—I decided that I wanted every poem in the chapbook to say something about being a self (a human self) in motion as well as depicting a vehicle in some way.

AB: How many times have you driven across the country? What kind of car(s)?

CH: More times than I can count. My current vehicle is a Subaru Crosstrek, but I have fond memories of the Toyota Landcruiser (loaded down with rocket boxes and bike racks) that my parents used to pull their canoe trailer on family vacations.

AB: Tell me about your writing practice. 

CH: I usually sit down to write between 6 and 8 AM—incidentally this is also my favorite time to set off on a road trip. My dog [an Australian shepherd] sleeps under my desk and we listen to passing trains and bird calls. Almost all of the poems in the chapbook began as single lines or phrases that popped into my head while I was busy driving and were written down the next morning.

AB: Mountain passage reminds me so much of my drives from the Bay Area to Salt Lake. Did you have a particular pass in mind?

CH: That poem is a composite of crossing Wyoming via I-80.

AB: Did your father really eat gummy bears until he got queasy?

CH: It’s pretty easy to get queasy on mountain roads.

AB: Who is the fisherwoman?

CH: My mother.

AB: Why is the policeman be so interested in Winnie-the-Poo stickers? He’s an interesting character. “I” am not afraid of him but of his authority…” Where did he come from?

CH: I think he was puzzled that a car thief would choose a car decked out with Winnie-the-Poo characters—it’s not the most low-profile choice—and maybe hoping that stickers would be harder to remove than a license plate.

AB: I notice you migrating from first to second person and back. Can you tell me what that’s about?

CH: I often write a poem either to see where I stand or to step outside myself. The shifting pronouns also reflect the fact that the driver of car is also, on some level, a passenger, and that the passenger may be a backseat driver.

AB: I love the way you “defamiliarize” experiences and language. What does that say about your character? Your perspective? Is the world a strange place?

CH: For me, poetry is a practice of paying attention. I’m not setting out to make things seem strange so much as to see and hear them. Everything looks different up close.

AB: You won the Clarence Snow Fellowship and Levis Prize in Poetry. Can you tell me about them?

CH: The Snow Fellowship provided a stipend during my first two years in Utah’s PhD program, allowing me to focus on completing coursework. The Levis Prize is awarded to the winner of Utah’s graduate student poetry contest.

AB: I see that Alanah Hall took your author photo – is there a story here?

CH: During the summer of 2020 I asked my sister to take my author photo and cut my hair (in that order—just in case the haircut went awry). I paid her in homemade mint ice-cream.

AB: I love the cover photo from Unsplash. 

CH: Thanks! I looked at about 400 other photos on the way, but knew instantly that I wanted this one.

AB: Are/were you happy with Finishing Line Press?

CH: Yes! 2020—not so much.

AB: What’s next?

CH: [Ceridwen plans to continue to explore our relationship with machines.] I just published an essay on Submarines (the topic of her PhD Thesis) in Southern Humanities Review and I’m currently revising a full-length manuscript with lots of poems about submarine espionage. I’m still really fascinated by the question of how we entrust our bodies to machines and how we identify with the vehicles we pilot.