Interview with Iain Haley Pollock
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (2024), and All the Possible Bodies (2025). He has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. His poems have appeared in many literary outlets, including African American Review, American Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times Magazine, PoetrySociety.org and The Progressive. Pollock directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY and has lived in the Lower Hudson Valley since 2015.
Ann van Buren has enjoyed conducting interviews on behalf of KPS since 2017.
AvB: Your book opens with the poem, “A Black Mother’s Child Considers His Lost Dream of Immortality”. In it, the mother figure is a black woman who made her way into the halls of academia as a professor of ancient languages. As the descendant of first-generation graduates, I celebrate this mom! I also appreciate that you allude to literary predecessors such as Whitman and Hughes as well as historical references, such as the bombing of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia in 1985. This poem offers so much cultural context. I’m interested in the “lost dream” of immortality that is in the title of this poem. The concept of immortality goes back farther than the written word, and people have seen repeated defeat across millennia. Has the time we’re in sucked the life out of immortality?
IHP: Seems to me that science deflated the belief in immortality, and to the extent that we live (perhaps until recently) in a scientific age, yes, I think those repeated defeats and Modernity took the shine out of immortality. But immortality hangs on: I see the desire for immortality extant in the concern with legacy, the concern with having a recognized and recognizable place in history. Embedded in this concern is a further desire to see the power one has in the present to transcend that moment and continue. I read many of the Greek myths I allude to in “A Black Mother’s Child Considers His Lost Dream of Immortality” as contemplating power, its uses, its abuses, its maintenance, and its loss. And certainly the allusion to the MOVE bombing is also thinking about power and its potential to devastate. The speaker of the poem finds the power inherent in the immortality of Greek gods seductive—and by suggestion finds American power similarly seductive—but ultimately comes to see that power as not only destructive but as finite, as in the myth of Kronos referred to in the poem’s final image of a swallowed stone.
AvB: Speaking of “immortality,” I notice other poems that reference religious concepts in the book. ( Ex.: “Lady Soul,” “Deep Down Every Sinner,” “For I Think Upon the Price of Redemption.”) What is your relationship to religion—in your upbringing, and most importantly, in your relationship to self?
IHP: Oh, I’m an avowed non-believer. I make those references for their cultural or intellectual weight, not necessarily for their religious meaning—which of course cannot be entirely extricated from them. I attended Catholic Mass until I was an adolescent—despite, strangely, neither of my parents being Catholic—and the poetry and storytelling of that tradition certainly influenced my work. The community that can spring up around a church also influenced how I exist in other communities, especially in literary communities. But doubt won out over faith for me. Science again shoulders the blame here—it bred in me a certain rationalism.
I have to recognize that religious imagery also enters my work through the influence of the Black American musical and poetic traditions. Christian religious imagery, often hybridized with images from West African spiritual practices that survived the Middle Passage, sits at the foundation of both these traditions. But again, I’m not interested in these images and the diction of the Black American spiritual tradition for their religious dimension, per se; I’m interested in them as tools of survival and conduits for expressing joy born of resilience.
AvB: I’m interested in the idea of “myth” in your poems. The word “myth” can represent both a failure and an ideal. “Mythologies of the Suburbs” describes a gruesome scene in the suburbs—a place that was mostly invented during my lifetime and purported to be idyllic, for some. Can you talk about some of the ways in which myth and mythology has played out in your lifetime?
IHP: At the heart of this book is an examination of when myth as “ideal” becomes myth as “failure.” All the Possible Bodies came into focus in the crucible summer of 2020. The isolation of that time and, most acutely, George Floyd’s murder, made examining the myth of self and the myth of nation (of America) seem urgent. I tell stories about myself that express an idealized version of me, express a version of me that lives up to the values and ethics that I find good and right. Similarly, the stories we tell about our country often seem aspirational to me: they express the ideals we want Americans to exemplify. The trouble comes when I or we fail to live up to those ideals, but in the face of that failure, I or we continue to hold onto the idealized narratives I or we have spun. This creates a dissonance. This creates a dangerous fantasy. So, in the book, I’m trying to interrogate the stories I tell about myself related to identity, fatherhood, my moral goodness, etc.; the stories we tell about America; and the relationship between these two, the intertwining of narratives about the individual self and narratives about the nation.
AvB: The subject of Covid comes up in your book, especially in the poem that makes up the section titled “Of Marks and Lacks.” Ever since experiencing that long period of isolation I’ve been thinking about the concept of “the one and the many*.” Lockdown was such an intense time, a time when our isolation from each other magnified the singularity of our existence even as isolation was a collective experience. Many of your poems address the whole in relation to its parts, particularly in relation to racial identity. How might your experience and exploration of this topic bear upon the split notion of America that is playing itself out in the world today?
IHP: This negotiation between “the one” and “the many” seems a daily negotiation for me, and I imagine many others. COVID and the social upheaval of 2020 might have put this into sharper relief for a moment, but that negotiation existed before and has continued since that time. So, this negotiation stands at the heart of many poems across all three of my books. I am a “one”–a single unique human—but am part of “the many” and belong to any number of groups. This seems simple and straightforward enough but, given the complexity of human identity and human societies, not only can “the one” and “the many” be in conflict with each other, the different groups of “the many” to which “the one” belongs can be in conflict. In my case, being a person of African descent and being American come into conflict. Under the weight of history and the present moment, this tension is hard, if not impossible, to square or resolve, which of course, makes it fertile ground for poetry. Does poetry help bring resolution to our thinking about this tension? Of course not. But I think that not continuously thinking through the shifting relationship of the individual to the collective poses a danger, one that contributes to the split notion of America you mentioned, where we each retreat into the isolation of the self or into the insularity of groups where we feel safe.
AvB: Thank you Iain, for your poetry and for these reflections. We look forward to your reading at the Katonah Village Library, 26 Bedford Rd, Katonah, NY on March 15th, 2026. 4PM.
* The One and the Many is the title of Timothy Donnelly’s book that was released during Covid lockdown. Donnelly read for KPS at the time, and you can read the transcript of his interview with KPS here. The concept of the one and the many appears in Plato and Aristotle and throughout religions and stories across the world.