Another Creature
Poems by Pamela Gemin

Why did you title this book Another Creature?
Well, I can see the “I” of most of these poems as someone who’s lived two or three distinct lives and has become, by lucky accident or intervention or desperation, capable of evolving into another creature despite a willingness to self-destruct. I have known many such people, who took a longer than average time to grow up and settle down. They still have some wild sparks, but when you give up bad habits all that stolen energy rushes toward you, and you really need to make produce things quickly—a family, poetry, art, music—good and lasting things. And then there’s the desire of some characters to want to blend into the landscape as wild creatures do, to be absorbed, protected, camouflaged, to be just another animal. I imagine Walt Whitman “loafing and inviting his soul” and embracing as a brother or sister the one he finds passed out on his lawn. Somebody might lie down in the grass for awhile thinking he’ll not be missed, but eventually he’ll get up and consider his imprint, the mark he’s made, and get moving.

How would you describe your writing practice?
I’m not someone who carries a notebook, so I forget most brilliant insights immediately. I carried a voice recorder for awhile, but what I played back was embarrassing, nonsensical within 24 hours. I’m pretty much a fits-and-starts writer who takes a long time to revise. I have a full, writing-intensive teaching schedule, but I have been able to do some traveling thanks to grants, and have been lucky enough to go to Ragdale (an artists’ residence in Lake Forest, IL) several times. I always get a lot of good preliminary work done away from home, a lot of good starts. But I always love coming home and doing the edits, the real work in the real world, where my family and career are.

Many of your poems deal with altered states. There are many references to alcohol, for instance.
That’s true, but it was not something I was fully aware of until someone else pointed it out, the sheer number of poems in which drinking is…there, like muzak. I can’t imagine my home places, Michigan and Wisconsin, without seeing blinking beer signs. But to say that we’re “a drinking culture” up here is a simplification. To balance out the drinking, there’s also a lot of swimming in this book. Swimming brings one to an altered state, too. Many of these poems came about in swimming pools and in lakes, which are also abundant in my home places, thank God.

The cover image of Another Creature is a girl coming out of a lake—where did you find it?
A few years back I met Erin Tapley, then an art colleague at my university, and we knew right away that we wanted to collaborate. She had used my poems “Junction” and “Raspberries” in two commissioned installation shows of her own, and then we did a joint show in which I responded in poetry to her prints and paintings, and she responded in visual art to my poems. The deal was that neither of us could ask what the other’s intent had been when she composed. Erin did a whole wall of prints on “Lawns,” and a full mural on “Ravenous,” as well as many other amazing smaller works from the poems, but when I saw “Girls and Lakes,” I saw a visual representation of the last ten years of my work, and I hoped that if Another Creature was published this oil pastel of Erin’s would be the cover image and, happily, it is.