Michaela Carter

"What happens on the page, happens to the poet."

For Prescott writer Michaela Carter, “writing a poem is an act of creation and evolution, which reaches beyond the words themselves. ”While writing she is consciously aware of the symbiotic relationship between poet and poem: “how you translate a feeling, or an impulse into language and listen to it at the same time, and how the language leads you toward a deeper way of seeing yourself or others or the world beyond.”

Many of her poems originate from sensory responses to her environment. “My greatest influence is my somatic experience as a human animal on this breathing, animate, teeming-with-life planet. Writing a poem can be such a visceral, lush experience — the language becomes almost tactile.” Her themes frequently revolve around female growth and metamorphosis, often through reimagining folklore from a feminist perspective. “I’m deeply fascinated by the ways in which women evolve, how we can become more than we were, more even than we thought we could be. ”At times these recurring themes hit very close to home. “When I was pregnant, I lived by the Pacific Ocean and I wrote all about the ocean and growing a child and birth — it all merged together, both for me personally and in my poems.”

Michaela was always drawn to poetry. “Before I could write, my mother jotted down my rhymes. In that way she validated the act. I wrote for myself during my first years of college, and then I took classes in modern poets and poetry writing. I was assigned metrical, fixed-form poems…. The formal restrictions made the poems feel like puzzles. I was grateful for the chance to learn the craft.” From there, she continued to study writing in graduate school.

In addition to her acclaimed poetry, Michaela is a painter and novelist, recently publishing the novel Leonorain the Morning Light, an historical fiction about surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Michaela usually writes poems when she is between novels. “Novel stake me such a long time to write, and I tend to focus on them myopically.”

She has lived in Prescott for almost 20 years, choosing the small town because it felt like a good place to raise her two children. She’s taught writing at both Prescott and Yavapai colleges, although she is teaching less lately. “I spend my time buying new books for Peregrine Book Company, which I helped to found, and writing novels.”

In this poem Michaela touches on her themes of metamorphosis andre-envisioned folklore, creating “a kind of fairytale magic and a sense of defiance: a young mother enters a jungle, which transforms her into a creature with wings and a tail. She is free to become her fully wild, creaturely self.”

For Michaela, poems are “born from a place of listening. I’m a firm believer that poems come through more than from a poet.” Much like the surrealists she admires, Michaela’s poems spring from the subconscious mind. “The language itself tends to lead me toward meaning.” She trusts that the words will reveal their intention, noting, “the poem is always smarter than I am.”

Moreat MichaelaCarter.com.

The Call

There’s a pond in the mud
and the moon shines in it.
Not on it, as if the pond were no more

than a mirror, but in it, the moon
a heart inside its dark body,
illuminating the pond from within.

My husband goes there
in the heat of the day to fish, but I
goat night, through the valley of the language
of children, a little jungle of mangrove

whose roots are serpents,
whose trunks grow eyes & mouths.
Sometimes, I stay among them.

I crouch in a shadow
and listen to their pale-green
songs & the taste of salt &magic

sticks to my skin &hair for days
though no one notices.
Other times, when the moon is full,

I move quick as a river through that jungle.
My wings &tail sprig
through my nightgown &bloom,

snapping twigs & leaves,
and I flap & coast & enter
another kind of music,

the pulse of light through silt
and silence bleating &repeating.
Mudsucks at my fingers & toes

when I lower my face to the pond
and open my eyes inside it &look.
The moon has its terms.

Understand, some night soon, I will not resist.
I will drink &lose discretion.
The slender weeds curl &uncurl;

milky, burning tongues, their dance is torture.
The fish circle & spiral downwards

to where the moon must feed
the roots of the weeds. Soon I will be certain.
How long could any woman only watch?