C O M P : Congratulations on the publication of your most recent chapbook, The Orchid in Lieu of a Horse (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024)! It’s a stunning achievement. Readers will recognize your nimble language-play and eccentric pop culture references, but may be surprised by the book’s frequent use of (for lack of a better phrase) devious directness: “I love you I loom you, / I say at the diner.” Considering your longtime engagement with Confessional poetry, how does this chapbook denote a change in your approach to the speaker–reader relationship?

Jon Riccio: Thank you for your kind words and for giving my work a home in early issues. I’m always grateful COMP published pieces that grew out of my “winding down” time in Mississippi. And, resounding thanks to Seven Kitchens Press’s Ron Mohring and Steve Bellin-Oka. Do you also categorize your writing by geographic eras? Such as: Winter-Spring 2020, what was supposed to be my last year living in Hattiesburg, saw me putting the earliest, most intense brain work into what became The Confurreal or Confessional Surrealism manifesto. The previous Fall, I moved from a one-bedroom to two-bedroom apartment and went for cable TV, strictly as a matter of living the old McDonald’s maxim, You deserve a break today. Meanwhile, Fall 2021’s energies were channeled around and in concert with a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor position at the University of Southern Mississippi. Many a Friday night I headed to my friend Natalie’s house to watch Netflix’s The Chair or, can you believe it, Psycho II? That 2020-2021 windowframe was, for the most part, all about the Confessional paint. Geographic Era-wise, here’s a breakdown of The Orchid in Lieu of a Horse’s poem origins—

Arizona Days (2013-2015): “The Patroness Offers You a Drink;” “The Mood Room;” “Follow Up;” “Kerosene;” “Eyelashes;” “Confessional;” and “Tomorrow, the Rubble.”                                                  

Mississippi Cluster (2016-2021): “Anne Sexton’s Death, 45 Years Ago Today;” “Ventriloquy Soliloquy;” “The Imp Sitting on My Shoulder Points out This Poem’s Last Word Means to Try;” “Nintendo Villanelle;” “Outside the Atrium;” “Queer-Southern, View of Beef Plant Ramp;” “The Cantos’ Meow;” and “Parenting Wil Wheaton.”   

The “devious directness,” as you so awesomely put it, stems from a Now-or-Never approach. “Eyelashes” was the first poem I wrote about queerness (in grad school, age 36), the takeaway being if you want to come out on the page, why not do it with a gay love triangle set in a glass eye factory? Haunted by parents staging an intervention about your queerness at 22 (“Outside the Atrium”)? Lineate it before you turn 40. The same goes for fears about how you’re perceived in the college town of a deeply conservative state (“Queer-Southern…”).

Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I tell my students that the narrator trusts us to a point. However, there’s a severance in this alliance when Gilman writes, “It does not do to trust people too much.” The Orchid in Lieu of a Horse is trust-driven. Tucson was where I began severing hesitancy. Readers, here are eight years of Confessional poetry addressing elements of my life that I’ve only opened up about over the last decade, including that senior from my high-school journalism class, aka the “Wendy’s worker in ketchup loafers” (“Parenting Wil Wheaton”). Talk about a memory that took 26 years to find the page.

C: You write in a variety of forms—from received forms (e.g. “Nintendo Villanelle”) to dramatic forms (e.g. “Ventriloquy Soliloquy”). How has form helped or hindered your free verse?

JR: My 2013-14 writing self could spend hours drafting a ghazal or sestina, wrestling end-word nuances before the inevitable treadmill jog followed by a microwave lasagna. Who hasn’t varied nodes with “amino, Des // Moines,” then sent a noodle amalgam on its dinnertime path? The décima and a sonnet-crown project were likewise steppingstones that year, though I postponed the villanelle until 2017. Abecedarians? I wrote a double one in 2012 about a bourbon vendor so heartbroken she became the world’s eighth continent. 

In the last month-and-a-half, I introduced students to the palindrome form through “my father explains why they left me behind when defecting” by Alina Ştefănescu, alongside Jennifer Militello’s “Endangered Ghazal with Telegram and Natural World,” torrin a. greathouse’s “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination Before a Diagnosis Can Be Determined,” Elizabeth Bishop’s end-all villanelle-all “One Art,” and a sonnet by Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (“Plácido’s Farewell to His Mother”) which was “written in the chapel of the Hospital de Santa Cristina on the night before his execution.” I can’t recall writing anything in received form and keeping it that way since 2019, though I began some sitcom-inspired poems as abecedarians that found publication in Tom Holmes’s journal Redactions. My J, Q, V, X, and Z draft lines led to heightened diction which carried over when I broke the form. Abecedarian line breaks are crucial, and I’m constantly looking for enjambment surprises in my free verse.

Similarly, form’s repetition gave me greater permission to reuse words in a single free-verse poem. Younger-writer Jon did everything to sidestep non-form duplication. Sonic redundancy is a writing fear I’ve eased off of—word deployment (the cousin of ‘curation’) done with the question, How does this aid the arc? Writing more poems about family members’ health issues helped. Mother, Mom, Father, Dad. Sure, I could resort to paterfamilias rather than two instances of father in the same stanza, but the polysyllabism is detached from my intended resonance.

Last week, I participated in an exquisite corpse prompt during a meeting of Western Michigan University’s Poetry Society, an undergraduate organization that grew out of my Spring 2024 Introduction to Creative Writing course. We took an extra ‘step,’ incorporating drawings based on the lines. My rendition of beehive looked like a Lego flowerpot, the backwards 3, an insect’s left wing. Where doesn’t form take us?   

C: These poems belong together. The Orchid in Lieu of a Horse is a distinct, concentrated, thematically cohesive manuscript. It’s not a demo tape or sampler platter of poems. And yet chapbooks—because they’re short—can leave readers wanting more. How do you know when a chapbook is finished? Or, if you prefer, how did you know when this chapbook was finished? 

JR: This compliment is the best! Full-lengths are framework. Chapbooks are commonality culling. The Orchid’s assembly process, if memory serves, involved staring at my CV, yellow-highlighting poems, and saying “Jon, make configuration inroads.” Translation: build that chapbook. I use build with students too. It takes a dose of dread out of their final projects, as in “Now that your annotated bibliography’s complete, build a 7- to 8-page research paper. Here’s a recommended schedule: 25% or 1.5/2 pages by this date, 50% (3/4 pages) complete by this date, et cetera.” During presentation day, I bring popcorn, confer temporary PhDs, and we as a classroom charter our papers’ planes to Reno, NV (I love their airport!), for a two-hour block of conference brilliance. I did this yesterday with my Literature of Psychology students who innovated perspectives on everything from Her Body and Other Parties to The Bell Jar. Tomorrow, it’s 23 Literary Interpretation undergrads who built larger conversations around such authors as Kafka, Márquez, and Danticat.

I built my chapbook on the shorter side as—oddly or profoundly—an homage to a friend I met at Oberlin College, a violinist whose Senior recital clocked in somewhat below its required time limit (an hour). Whether we were in d minor or Town Quarter-Tone, J.M.’s time truncation was overlooked. She held court minute by rosined minute. Fifteen poems about queerness, ventriloquizing, surrealourri (I can’t bring myself to use potpourri, but damn if I haven’t portmanteau’d my next project’s working title), and 80s exercise equipment felt tethered enough, my inner-Oberlin friend nodding approval.

C: COMP aims to emphasize interdisciplinary relationships, and we suspect the musicality of your poems, not to mention their technical impressiveness, is at least partially rooted in your background as a violist. Can you discuss your experience and/or development as a musician? What musical exercises or training have you adapted for literary ends? Are there examples in The Orchid in Lieu of a Horse?

JR: The last two years I’ve shifted more to a mentoring role with undergrad and grad students alike. Writers keeping me inspired are Catherine Broadwall (her forthcoming Water Spell, especially), Carolyn Oliver (I just finished annotating her collection The Alcestis Machine), and Zach Savich, whose Momently came to my reading life at a time when I could not have been more burned out, needing a transfusion of the surrealourri.

My musicianship benefitted the most from studying four-and-a-half years (and two summers) with Roland Vamos during his Oberlin College tenure. His pedagogy could fix any technical shortcoming and instilled the value of gradual improvement, literally one finger at a time. We varied my vibrato speed around junior year (Dr. Vamos’s relationship to the metronome was like Marianne Moore face-timing with the syllable), which is when I finally committed to the idea that there was more to performance than making it off of the stage minus a heart attack. Worst nerves? July 6, 1997, Weathersfield Music Festival, playing a Hindemith sonata on two-days’ notice. Not crash and burn—that was my New York String Seminar audition in 1998—but the feeling that I was floundering before an audience, the majority of them my friends, so much so that I felt the need to apologize for the first three minutes. Once I hit the second movement, things were OK, and the third movement was a regathering of “now I honor my teacher, colleagues, and practice-room hours.”

My first lesson with Dr. Vamos involved the sharing of M&Ms and his thoughts on Bruch’s Romanze in F Major. At the joint reception for my senior recital and Felix’s—another Vamos student—there was one of those giant cookie-cakes readily obtainable at 90s malls. My five-word encapsulation of Dr. Vamos’s impact? A Künstlerroman bookended by sugar. I shared Künstlerroman with my students (those who made the Reno, NV, conference trek), writing it on the board with low-odor marker, remembering when I first heard it (2017, a Feminist memoir class taught by Dr. Martina Sciolino at USM). I’m in the instructor lane, sometimes an all-day grading machine. The hope is that these investments take me, professionally, to the artist-mentor outcome I’ve written about in cover letters, teaching philosophies, and research statements. Is it any wonder I’m laying the groundwork for another literary movement, The Pedagogysroman?

As a musician, my goals were polish, polish, polish. With technique, plus a few studio class performances, I’d emote and phrase with less subpar-ness. That July Hindebacle? I didn’t have a dress-rehearsal opportunity among peers. To answer your question about “training … adapted for literary ends.” Gradations of stakes. It’s not always “Now or Never.” Later writes it too.

C: The Orchid in Lieu of a Horse opens with a heartfelt, if guileful, homage to Anne Sexton. What does Sexton mean to you? And how does her presence (or present absence) influence or pervade the chapbook broadly?

JR: Sexton’s poetry is one of my PhD’s areas of specialization, meaning I spent roughly a year immersed in her catalogue, save for the children’s literature she co-authored with Maxine Kumin. November 2018 through November 2019 were Sexton months—To Bedlam and Partway Back (1960) to her posthumous Words for Dr. Y. (1978)—also reading Diana Hume George’s scholarly text Oedipus Anne (1987); Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977, eds. Lois Ames and Linda Gray Sexton); and the must-read-if-Anne’s-a-poetry-influence biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook (1991). Then came annotations, which reside on my laptop, a haven for Sextonian Excel:

These are among the most resonant takeaways from her correspondences:

“Let’s be poets first – all else is unessential.”

“The future is my own. I am trying to steer. I paddle my own craft with toothpick oars.”

“Push for the stars, or at least, go back and push one poem all the way up there. And then another.”

“Because I am, I did, I do.”

On perseverance: “Don’t let prizes stop you from your original courage, the courage of an alien. Be still, that alien, who wrote ‘real’ when no one wanted it.”

I’d love to teach a Sexton seminar which covers every collection, as well as the Letters and Middlebrook. I went so far as to draft a syllabus statement—

Magic takes many guises for Anne Sexton, respite and wonder sought from human as well as fairy-tale figures, pharmaceuticals, and God, to name a few of her abracadabras. Through her entire poetry output, in addition to collected letters and the biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook, we’ll examine Sexton’s legacy. A renaissance looms. Weekly presentations, discussions, and writing prompts will engage with each Sexton opus, the end result a micro-chapbook of poems inspired by or in dialogue with Sexton’s aesthetic. The more light we shed, the more complex Sexton’s creations grow.

I used “Her Kind,” “The Double Image,” and “All My Pretty Ones” for an American Lit class this Spring and have taught Transformations as part of an introductory poetry workshop, though the opportunity to go full-Sexton scholar hasn’t happened yet. The Gold Issue of Fairy Tale Review (2021) was curated as a fiftieth anniversary celebration of Transformations, and I was fortunate to write the editor’s note. This project drew several dynamite poets to the journal, including Clayre Benzadón, Hannah Warren, and Caroline Crew.

Beyond The Gold Issue, fantasy syllabus, and trickling of her work into courses here and there, I’ve back-burnered Sexton for the time being, but that renaissance goal is on my mind. Her presence is garden-terrace where my poem “Anne Sexton’s Death, 45 Years Ago Today” is concerned. Indeed, 1960s glue flakes mapped my floor circa 2019, that apartment the opposite of “A stone room as still and clean as a razor blade” (Sexton’s “The Letting Down of the Hair” from The Book of Folly). Scanning my TOC, these titles—“The Imp Sitting on My Shoulder Points out This Poem’s Last Word Means to Try” and “The Patroness Offers You a Drink”—sound quasi-Sexton.

On the whimsiest of whims, I Googled “Kayo Sexton” (her ex-husband), hopped over to Images, and sure enough, here’s the Middlebrook biography photo that inspired my lines “his handsome/the kind that scoops seeds.” 2019 writer-me was most interested in Kayo’s smile, hair, and rolled-up sleeves. Now, I’d write about the pattern of those kitchen drawers.

Jon Riccio teaches literature and creative writing at Western Michigan University and the University of West Alabama. He serves as the poetry editor at Fairy Tale Review, and founding editor at Interpretations, a journal of undergraduate literary criticism.