AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Telling the Truth

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Telling the Truth.

It feels wrong to paraphrase what happened, so let me just read from one of Niina Pollari’s poems. She writes:

All day long, from sunrise on, I labored, keeping myself focused, reminding myself that my pain was only pain, and that I was performing a function. My husband was beside me, a consummate teammate, walking with me when I was able, feeding me frozen blueberries, putting noise-canceling headphones over my ears, and giving me water and Gatorade.

Then she writes:

We took the car ride. We got examined and checked in and praised for our efforts. Everything was exactly the way I had wanted it to be, until the second everything changed, until something was wrong and we couldn’t wish our way out of it. Then there were paramedics, and there was a transfer, and there was an operating room, and there was my daughter’s body brought to me as doctors and nurses and medical students I’d never met gathered around my bed, a funeral full of strangers. Then there was my husband crying as he whispered that he was proud of me.

Niina Pollari wrote these lines in her latest collection, Path of Totality, which she dedicated to the baby girl who was born that day: Lumi. Eighteen months later, she gave birth again, to a daughter they named Clara.

Clara is two now. She was born in April of 2020. Yes, that April of 2020, when suddenly, all of our lives changed.

Helena de Groot: How was that for you? I mean, how is even just figuring out, is the world going to be there when my kid is born? You know?

Niina Pollari: It was very anxious in many ways. I mean, I already had a lot of preexisting anxiety because of my first daughter, whom the book is about. And so I came into the experience of pregnancy with a lot of baggage, already the second time. And I was being monitored very closely by my doctor. And then suddenly the protocols changed and we had to enter through the E.R., and everybody was gloved and masked and we had to submit health checks. And each week was a little bit different and a little bit more frightening. And then my husband stopped being allowed to come to my appointments with me. So it just, like, ratcheted up the tension each visit, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And did you feel like there were people around nurses or doctors who were able to make you feel calm and like you’ve got this, or what was that like?

Niina Pollari: Yes. One of the things I’m very grateful for is the very calming personality of my doctor. She is someone who is not, like, coddling or particularly sweet in that way. She is very matter of fact and said, you know, the maternity and labor wing is the kind of sanctum of the hospital. No one’s going to be putting COVID patients there. You’re going to be about as peaceful as you can be.” And she was right, you know. It was, you know, everyone was masked, everyone was clearly overworked and stressed out. But it was, considering the circumstances, it was about as good as it could be.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: And the week before our scheduled induction was actually the week that partners were briefly not allowed to be in the hospital. And then that was overturned just a few days before we were to go in. So we were able to both be there.

Helena de Groot: That’s good. Okay. Yeah.

Niina Pollari: That was very, very scary. I was like, I can’t do this by myself.

Helena de Groot: No!

Niina Pollari: But yeah, but he was able to be there. He had to leave 2 hours after Clara was born. But, you know, and then he was just—

Helena de Groot: Because of the protocol?

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm. Then he was just losing his mind at home without us. (LAUGHS) But he was there for the birth, so that was good.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And then, like, being at home with a baby when the whole world was in lockdown, what was that like?

Niina Pollari: Yeah, it was very strange, because this is a happy event, the arrival of a baby. And you expect there to be a degree of community around you. And that was simply not allowed to happen. Community was, like, what we were all trying to avoid, right. And so, you know, we did go out on our little strolls. We did have to go to the pediatrician for her, all her well visits. But everything else was just in this little apartment. And our apartment in Brooklyn was good for just normal life, but not so great for just being in 24 hours a day with an infant. So, that was one of the reasons we opted to relocate a couple of months later to North Carolina, closer to my family. Just so we could have some space and some normalcy.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Niina Pollari: Yeah, but no, it was … I don’t know how much of this is just delirium from not sleeping at that time or what, but I can barely remember truly what it was like.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, I wanted to talk about your book, which, by the way, it has the most amazing cover. Like, I’ve never seen such black black, you know?

Niina Pollari: It’s beautiful, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: When the designer showed me the two possible options, I knew immediately this was the one. I saw it, and I was like, this has got to be the choice because it’s so striking.

Helena de Groot: It is striking. But what I was curious about is for a book that talks about something so painful and so yours alone, what was it like to deal with that normal stuff of publishing, like getting edits back and cover design? Like were you able to receive edits? Was that annoying, you know, or what was that like?

Niina Pollari: Well, one of the things I did was set a couple of boundaries, because by the time that this book was coming to be, I was expecting Clara already. And I, I knew that at the time that she arrived, I could no longer engage with writing new material for this book. So I knew that the generative portion had to be over by that time. Not just because of the new baby, but because, you know, I just, it wouldn’t be fair. I wouldn’t be being present, you know?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Niina Pollari: And the editing process, I was very fortunate to work with a dear friend, Sarah Jean Grimm. And so that helped a lot because any time that I had anxieties, I was able to just reach out to her as a friend. And she was able to help me navigate those moments. So, that was good. But, you know, writing, writing to people and asking them for blurbs, very odd around the subject matter. You know, a lot of the people I spoke with about this are parents themselves. And it’s a tough subject to ask someone to engage on. And then it feels weird if you think about it too long, it feels weird to think about drumming up publicity for your pain. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Niina Pollari: But all of that, like, okay, you know, I took each piece of the puzzle and I laid it where it was supposed to go in order. And that’s what, that’s how I got through it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. And the poems to me felt very immediate, as if you’re talking to someone. And I wonder if that was what you experienced writing them. Were you writing to someone?

Niina Pollari: Not a single one person. I did want—I do strive for immediacy, I think, in general, in my practice. And so that is to some degree always going to be true. But what I wanted to achieve was something that I felt was true. And that’s a lot of how the mechanics of this book came to be. Just, any time I felt like something was … embellishment or a device in a disingenuous way, I cut it out. I just wanted to stick to truth, and I think that comes with a degree of immediacy.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: So I would be writing—well, I didn’t write for a long time. I was just collecting sentences or fragments in just like, the most depressing phone note in the world, just listing one after the other. But when I did start writing, I was like, this is, this feels like an exercise. This doesn’t feel real. And so I just started using the prose blocks. And I had never done any work with like prose blocks or prose poems really before this book. But everything that I was used to using didn’t feel right, didn’t work.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And you said that you weren’t really writing for the longest time, even though you were taking notes on your phone. What were some of the things that you felt you had to take down in the moment, that you didn’t want to wait until you were feeling better or you were feeling more up to it?

Niina Pollari: I didn’t even take notes, per se. I just wrote down, like, I don’t know if I was—I did a lot of reading. I tried to find something that described the way that I felt. So I just read everything on child loss, and I read everything on, you know, a lot of, like, grief memoirs in the larger category. And, you know, sometimes things were phrased some particular way that was accurate, that felt right, or I would read a newspaper article and I would find something that was a good encapsulation of my feelings. And so it started with those kinds of things, but then eventually, descriptions of my own states of mind or my own thoughts in the shower or something, my own thoughts about my weird, amorphous, changing body, you know, those started creeping in. And that’s how I was able to start kind of creating something.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And what’s one of the books that you remember really speaking to you?

Niina Pollari: Yeah, I found myself resenting a lot of grief memoirs actually, because they are expected to have this arc of like, oh, I’m mourning something. Oh, I’m feeling better. Oh, now, I can reflect on it.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Niina Pollari: And I just didn’t want to feel better. Like, I didn’t want to feel better. I just wanted to find something that was reflective of this state of mind. And so I read a lot. And found parts of things speaking to me. This particular book is one that people who’ve lost babies cite often. Elizabeth McCracken’s book, what is it called? Oh my god. Let me look it up. An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. This book is a memoir of her own particular loss, and it is striking in the way that it’s immediate, but also it has moments of humor. It has moments of humanity. It like, you would think it would feel inappropriate, but you have to be able to include that stuff because,

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: —otherwise you just, you lose your yourself. And I don’t know, it was like that book was an experience where I was like, okay, someone has made it through this.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Niina Pollari: Like, not the resolution part, but you have had this experience and it has fundamentally changed you, but you are also you still, too. That was a good, good one. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was wondering, because you were talking about, you know, most of those memoirs really getting on your nerves because they insist on this this sort of hopeful arc. So I was wondering if we can get to a poem. It’s the one called “No Redemption Arc” on page 87.

Niina Pollari: Okay I found it, I have it here.

(READS POEM)

No Redemption Arc

No more stories can be good. No more stories have a re-

redemption arc.

The forest where we used to picnic is ash.

Last winter someone murdered a bear in its den and it was

perfectly legal.

I sit near a small fire telling my selfish tale to everyone who

gathers. I clutch myself and yell like I’m from an ancient

culture that values mourning. But I’m a curiosity, and the

badness of my story is unexceptional.

The cut bodies of flowers travel across the world in boxes,

in trucks that emit fossil fuels. The flowers end up at a wed-

ding or on top of a casket.

What have you been taught to do? Put it away, end it, turn

it into a beautiful point. But there are no more good stories.

There isn’t even an ending.

Outside your body, the night knits into a sweatshirt of open

space around the earth. The sweatshirt enlarges every sec-

ond, getting emptier and darker. Everything in the universe

is wearing it, which should be useful in your new storytelling.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, there are a lot of poems where you describe in one way or the other, that expanding emptiness.

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And yeah, I really like how sort of close to home you bring this one. You know, like it’s almost cute, you know, like this giant sweatshirt, “the night knits into a sweatshirt of open space around the earth.” Yeah, I can’t help but see a sort of cartoon image of that.

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And you know, what I was also curious about is … when you’re so confronted with … with a loss that is so random, and because of that randomness, so meaningless … but then, at the same time, you also have Clara. So how do you let your firsthand knowledge of the meaninglessness of everything not get in, get in the way of creating meaning for her or with her?

Niina Pollari: By loving. Yeah, that’s really the answer. I can feel … a desperate darkness about things that have happened, and I can love somebody and see the joy that they find in small things. And both can be true.

Helena de Groot: And do you feel like the … yeah, I don’t want to push you in a redemption arc narrative. Not at all.

Niina Pollari: (LAUGHS) Appreciate it. Because, I mean, with time, these things happen. Your relationship to events changes, but they will always be there with you. You will have been changed by them. There’s no going back to the person you were. Not that anyone is insisting that there is, you know, but I—it’s like magazines say, “Get your body back” after pregnancy. There’s no—you’re not getting that body back. Whatever it is, whatever it was.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Niina Pollari: You can just get a new version of it or, you know, the changes are chemical, man. Like, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. But I also feel like, you know, even if people acknowledge the change, there’s this, this narrative that at least the change should eventually be positive, right.

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Like, isn’t there that thing about “All things end well, and if they’re not well, then it’s not the end.” And I’m wondering how the meaning of what happened evolved for you.

Niina Pollari: We’ve talked a lot, my husband and I and, you know, with other people as well, we’ve talked a lot about this idea of, like, there was a path and you diverged off of it. And the further you are in time, the further you are from that branching. And so it’s like impossible to say who I would have been, you know, now, had it not happened. At first, you clearly see the trajectory. You stare with longing at the other side that you can no longer be a part of. And you wish that you were there, but you move further away from it, and you have new experiences in front of you and you are changed by those experiences as well. So it’s like, it just becomes—you would drive yourself mad, like, thinking about that moment in time in the same way. I don’t know. You couldn’t. You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t do it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: You know, and I’ve had a lot of happiness and joy come to me since then, but I’ve received those things as the person to whom this also happened.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

So, you know, I’ve I’ve changed and will continue to change. And I will continue to regard this event as an emotionally significant transformative event in my life. But with time, it will probably be among other monumental, monumental events, you know? Yeah, I don’t know.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can get back to your book and to a poem that you’ve written.

Niina Pollari: Sure.

Helena de Groot: It’s a little bit longer, this one. It’s on page 45. “Hungry Ghost.”

Niina Pollari: Yeah. Yeah, this was a tough one. Would you like me to read it?

Helena de Groot: Yes, please. And if you want to say something about it before you read, that’s good.

Niina Pollari: Yeah, no, the poem and its title kind of become apparent pretty soon. I love to spell things out, you know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) The reader is grateful.

Niina Pollari: (LAUGHS) Here we go.

(READS POEM)

Hungry Ghost

When we met to sign the paperwork

It was in a coffee shop called Hungry Ghost

The paperwork consisted of two certificates

And when the funeral director handed them to us to sign

Her face was grim with practiced empathy

Hungry Ghost is a term from Buddhism

For beings who are driven by need

And unlike regular ghosts

Hungry ghosts died in unusual circumstances

Or in their lifetime did an evil deed

Why this is a name for a coffee shop

I don’t understand

As much as I don’t understand

Why we chose to meet the funeral director there

She had offered to bring the certificates to our apartment

But my immediate reaction was to say no

That I didn’t want her inside my home

Though I would later allow her in

But not yet

*

Hungry Ghost was full of people on laptops

Doing the ordinary work of their lives

Scrubbing through film clips

Or editing an endless document

Like this one

All the tables were taken

So we sat in a row of three on a bench

A large painting of a bull behind us on the wall

The funeral director, my husband, and me

I ordered a small caffeine-free tea

I needed to order something

To pretend we were there

For a normal reason

On this day in October

Just days after my daughter

Came out of me not breathing

I sat behind the barrier of my husband

So that I could hide my face if I needed to

And he covered me with his huge emotional wingspan

Even though he was also feeling devastation

And as I signed the paper

I screamed in the silent forest of my heart

And the queen’s corpse

Which was my corpse

Rattled with the force of my voice

I gave the paper back

And held my undrunk tea

In my freezing hands and felt its heat

Radiate into the little calcium of my bones

*

I had been to Hungry Ghost the day before the birth

I had been feeling good

The contractions were occasional

But already strengthening

I sat with my longtime friend

Who used to tell me

When we were kids

That I was too secretive

That I should feel okay about letting people in

When I’m having a hard time

That I should let people care about me

The way that I care about them

She had the barista take a picture of us

While she pointed at my belly

I saw the photo only once

​​But I remember exactly

The way it looked

The way I looked in it

Dear friend I am having

A hard time today

Helena de Groot: Thank you. What was it like to read that now?

Niina Pollari: Yeah, it’s, you know, I haven’t had a lot of practice reading these poems to an audience. I’ve read them to myself quite a lot of times, just to get at the truth, you know, of them. Change them as I needed when I was still in that part of the process. But they have not received many audience readings. I’ve not read them live to an audience ever. Yeah. Yeah. It is weird. I, I hope they sound truthful to, to you, because I do find myself caught in their emotion. And that’s partly because it happened to me and I was there. But I hope that the turns of the poem convey that as well. They do to me.

Helena de Groot: They do for me too.

Niina Pollari: Okay.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Especially, yeah, the turns of the poem is a good way of putting it. Like that leap in time to the day before the birth. Yeah. That sentence that’s so dry and so matter of fact, “I had been feeling good.”

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm. The last beautiful day.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah. And then, you know, “had the barista take a picture of us while she pointed at my belly.”

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Um.

Niina Pollari: It’s just what you do.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: When you’re expecting something and, you know.

Helena de Groot: But that’s why I thought it was so arresting, because I think often when we’ve experienced something, we start to rewrite the past as if we had a premonition, as if we, you know, whatever. We saw it coming, you know.

Niina Pollari: I wanted to resist that, too. Even though, I mean, there are moments I could point to. I didn’t really write about them, but there are moments I could point to where I’m like, if I really wanted to think that on some level I knew this was going to happen, I would point to this, but that’s not where I wanted to go with writing these poems. I wanted to convey my love and joy as well, even though, you know, even though the outcome was what it was.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And speaking of love, one of the huge … sort of miracles that I wasn’t expecting from this book is the love for your husband and the lovely human that he seems to be from these poems.

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm. He truly is. And I think a lot of times, I mean, there’s a couple of ways you can turn from a cataclysm. You can—and a lot of times people do tend to process very differently, and so they—one closes off and the other, you know, I’ve heard of this happening. You know, people fail to stay connected after something like this. And I’m really, really happy that that didn’t happen for us. He is the only other person who knows, you know, the extent of it. He was, he was there with me every single day. For, I don’t even remember when we were first apart after that. (LAUGHS) But it was a long time. It was a long time.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah, he, he was just everything.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah, I, he definitely was very protective of me. He called and yelled at companies when they sent us mail about our new baby or whatever, you know, because you get added to all these mailing lists. And he was like, “No, I’m not going to let her see this.” I found out later that, you know, he had, like, called some baby list and told them to—I don’t even know what he said to them, but just so, so grateful.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Niina Pollari: That I didn’t have to open the mailbox and see that.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah, just. Yeah. I don’t know, I mean, I hope that I was able to be there for him in a similar capacity, but our experiences were certainly very different. Even though we were both there that day. Just, the aftermath, the recovery, all that stuff is different, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. But, I mean, it’s beautiful the way that you describe, yeah, there’s something also about the experience that is sort of inherently lonely making.

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And even with your husband, I mean, I wonder if there’s a loneliness that comes between the two of you, because only one of you was with her for nine months. In this, in this way, you know?

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Did you, do you feel like he ever felt excluded from knowing her in the way that you did?

Niina Pollari: Maybe. Maybe. I can’t, definitely can’t answer that on his behalf. But I do know that my relationship with Lumi was different by nature. By nature of our proximity.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah, yeah. But one of the things I am really appreciative of him for is not forcing the recovery and not wanting to ignore it or, he never wanted to, like, put it away or put it behind us or, you know, he’s—he and I still talk about how affected we are, you know, in different ways. It comes up a lot still. He’s never done that, like, stereotypical male partner thing of closing off about it, you know. He’s always been willing to engage. And even when we didn’t have the words, he was, you know, I was like, okay, let’s go to this grief group. He was game to go with me. And some of the, you know, I could I could see that not being true for everyone.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: So, I mean. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Can I ask you about Lumi? Is that is that okay?

Niina Pollari: Yeah, that’s okay. I don’t want to go deep into the events of that day. The book gives you a lot of what I want to say about that, but I’m happy to talk about her, yes.

Helena de Groot: Were you able to hold her?

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm. Yes, it, it took some time. Yeah. And my husband got to hold her first before, before I did. But I did. I got some time. Not enough time. But there’s never enough time. You know, even when your children stay with you on this earth, I feel like you must eventually think that you didn’t hold enough.

Helena de Groot: And do the nurses come in and take her, or is that a decision that you feel like you’re supposed to make, or how does that go?

Niina Pollari: I don’t remember exactly the order of events, but she was there with us in the room for some time. And then, then they, they came to take her. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Do you remember what she, what it was like? How she felt in your arms. What she smelled like.

Niina Pollari: I will always remember that. I will always remember that.

Helena de Groot: How do you hold on to that?

Niina Pollari: I’m sorry, I’m going to cry a little.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, of course.

Niina Pollari: Yeah. Yeah. You hold onto it in your memory, because you can’t hold onto it in person. I don’t know—I wrote, I haven’t revisited this journal, but I wrote a journal very extensively trying to write down all the details of the room and the day and everything I could remember. I have not, like I said, I haven’t looked at it since. Maybe I don’t need to. Maybe it’s fine to know it exists.

Helena de Groot: A friend of mine who has two kids, she said that when her second was born, she was so deeply aware of, “Oh, what a different person this, the second baby is,” you know?

Niina Pollari: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Not like what he looked like or whatever. But just his, I don’t know, spirit, you know, you just felt like he was a different consciousness.

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm. I felt that way before Clara was born. I was like, oh, this child is not cooperative. She’s a little gymnast, just turning and turning way more than Lumi ever did. Like, yes, you could—I never for one second was able to have this delusion that it was the same child or, you know. That’s a worry. You know, that’s a worry, where you’re like, Oh, am I—because if you think it’s, if you think it’s the same experience, then you know how that experience ends, right? And so I was very glad that from an early point in that pregnancy, I was able to know that it was a different person in there.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Niina Pollari: That helped me remember that I didn’t know the outcome, that I didn’t know that it was going to—you know, that I could be hopeful, even if it was frightening me.

Helena de Groot: What’s your favorite memory of her being inside you? I mean, do you remember anything or?

Niina Pollari: Yeah, she always woke up when I started talking, even if she was asleep. I’d feel like a little (GESTURE).

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Niina Pollari: So that was the sweet. Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Well, you have a very sonorous voice. I mean, I can imagine that.

Niina Pollari: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: You know, it’s sort of low, and—

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: It feels very embodied, you know, like, I feel like you’re making it vibrate in your body, not in your head.

Niina Pollari: Thank you.

Helena de Groot: And I bet that that feels nice if you’re a baby.

Niina Pollari: I like to hear that, because sometimes people are like, “You talk in a very interesting way,” and I’m not sure how they mean that. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Do you want to read one last poem?

Niina Pollari: Sure.

Helena de Groot: How did you feel about “Sunflower”?

Niina Pollari: That one is a favorite.

Helena de Groot: Of yours or of other people?

Niina Pollari: Of mine.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah. Yeah, I’ll read that one. Okay.

(READS POEM)

Sunflower

Once there was a sunflower on a fire escape across from my own. It grew slowly, as plants do, from a small pot. I did not notice it until it was huge, its big head on its small stalk, wobbling hilariously in the wind. The surprise of seeing the sunflower made me laugh. It’s so big, I kept saying. How did I not notice.

I have a blind spot. I now know this.

In the maternity ward, there was an emblem on our door of a calla lily, the flower of funerals. The emblem was there to warn anyone entering about the atmosphere of the room. All the other rooms in the ward received sunflower emblems.

Behind my funeral door, so much of my blood was gone that I felt completely dried of everything. But urine still leaked from my catheter, a muted yellow, my body ejecting more than I thought it was capable of ejecting.

In the lily room, they gave me the blood of a stranger, and I took it and let it rehydrate my body like a plant being watered.

Sunflowers are like a total eclipse. They are dark in the middle, with a corona that extends.

During an eclipse, animals and plants go to sleep. They start to wind down, tucking their legs under their bodies, closing their leaves. Bats begin hunting. Mosquitoes start biting. When the eclipse is over, they experience stress because what happened is not what they expected.

I realize now that you came from the eclipse. You were sucked back into it when it was over, when our time together came to an end. You were beautiful and world-ending. You shocked me with your beauty, and I became so scared.

A blind spot burned into my retina. A permanent hole, like film chewed up by heat.

Sunflowers are sunny. Why wouldn’t that be.

Later at the grief group, each participant brought in a flower to create a big bouquet. We were sad people in a room, and the bouquet was for all our babies. I brought in the biggest flower, a sunflower. It had the tallest stalk. It had the biggest head as it glowed there, dark in the middle.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Why is it your favorite?

Niina Pollari: Because I insist that the sunflower’s still for her, too.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: I don’t want to the lily.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Well, once I realized that thing about the eclipse and the look of it and the sunflower and I was like, oh, now it all comes together. Last year, I got a giant sunflower tattoo. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Niina Pollari: But actually, it has two heads, for both my babies.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. There are a lot of references to the solar eclipse throughout this book. And I think when I, when I first heard the title and knew what it was about, because yeah, your collection is titled Path of Totality—

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: The only thing that I thought about was the darkness that comes with the solar eclipse.

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: But in this poem, you know, the way you talk about, “Sunflowers are like a total eclipse. They are dark in the middle, with a corona that extends.”

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I never thought about that ring of light around the eclipse.

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: When did you first see that?

Niina Pollari: It’s so beautiful. If you have the chance to see a total eclipse, it’s so much different from a partial eclipse. It’s, it’s shocking to see. Even though you know what you’re about to watch, you’re still startled by it. It’s just unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We saw it in 2017, drove down to North Carolina, where I now live. Actually found the house that we now live in that trip.

Helena de Groot: (GASPS)

Niina Pollari: It just somehow felt momentous. Well, we weren’t, we were just starting to think about maybe leaving the city or relocating at some point or starting to split time somewhere else. And that house just came up and we decided to go look at it. And then we talked ourselves into it, which was, seemed at the moment a totally insane decision, but it turned out to be … very helpful now, when we needed someplace to go, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah. So it just felt like that experience was somehow really one of possibility, if that makes sense.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah. But if you ever have the chance to see one, I highly recommend it. It’s like a hole is punched into the sky and you’re like, “What? How is this physically possible?” I could imagine, you know, ancient peoples being like, “Everything I know is a lie.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: You know, like, if you don’t know what it is and you see it happening, like.

Helena de Groot:I know. And also those creatures that you talk about, you know, “animals and plants go to sleep. They start to wind down … Bats begin hunting. Mosquitoes start biting.” When the eclipse is over, they experience stress because what happened is not what they expected.

Niina Pollari: Yeah, that is somewhat a good summary of what happens in grief.

Helena de Groot: Do you feel like this metaphor helps you grasp what happened? Is that what a metaphor can do? Or is that giving it too much weight?

Niina Pollari: It gives me weight and a sense of gravity. It gives me that, because I felt so moved by the eclipse that I felt so shocked by it. Obviously, it didn’t change my life the way that the death of my, my baby did. But as far as like something that’s descriptive of shock, yeah. I don’t know if it helps me grasp or process anything, but it helps me convey the enormity, maybe.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Niina Pollari: It’s more helping me talk to other people. I didn’t write it as a tool to help me talk to people I know, but it has helped in that way.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Your daughter Clara is two now.

Niina Pollari: She’s two, yeah.

Helena de Groot: So she’s a bit young, probably, to understand what happened, but how do you imagine telling her about her sister?

Niina Pollari: I mean, she’s big enough now to know that we’re going to bake a cake on October 18th, same as we have been. You know, and my husband has mentioned Lumi to her. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about it with her yet, but, you know, I think that we won’t avoid the topic. We won’t make it a big thing. We won’t make it like a big announcement or anything, but we’ll bring it up in hopefully appropriate ways.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Niina Pollari: You know, I’ll answer the questions that she has.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. How did you come up with the name Lumi?

Niina Pollari: Lumi. Lumi is Finnish for “snow.” It wasn’t snow season yet, but the name was on our list and we hadn’t landed on a name before she was born. And we chose Lumi. For … for a few reasons, but one of the reasons is, you know, it’s beautiful and maybe fleeting. It’s also got a kind of, like, reference to luminosity or luminescence.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Same with Clara. The connection between those names as Clara has, like, brightness and clarity implicit in it, you know? And so, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah, I don’t know, names. Names are so hard. (LAUGHS) But yeah, I do feel like we landed on the right names. Both of those times.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Do you feel like your relationship to language and expression in language has deepened in some way or changed?

Niina Pollari: Yeah. Yeah. So I think there’s a lot of like, for lack of a better word, like, cuteness in my first book that I wouldn’t turn to now. Part of that is like, I’m older. (LAUGHS) But yeah, I don’t know, maybe it’s true whether you go through an event like this or not, but I don’t think I could rewrite my first book now. I don’t know. I think it’s honed my philosophy of, like, clarity and saying things as simply as possible, even when they are metaphor. I haven’t quite distilled this into a craft talk, because I’m not an educator—

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Niina Pollari: But I know it when I see it, you know. It’s helped me. It’s helped me to get there.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Is there something that you wish I had asked? That is something that you want me to ask.

Niina Pollari: That’s a good question. I didn’t really know how this would go. Truly, I’ve never actually done a podcast before, so, no, this has been lovely. And I appreciate that you don’t—you probably have questions, but you don’t appear to be referencing a list of questions that you are sticking to. Like, this has been a pretty naturally flowing conversation. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) That’s good.

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I feel like my philosophy is, I prepare to a ridiculous degree, and that’s the only way I can let go, you know what I mean? So.

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I also asked help from a friend who lost her baby. And yeah, it didn’t just help me ask you questions, but it also helped me ask her.

Niina Pollari: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: You know, like, those questions that I asked about, you know, like, what was it like to hold her and smell her? I would have never in a million years asked that,

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: if she hadn’t said that. And I don’t know if you wanted to talk about it, but now at least I know that she did, you know?

Niina Pollari: Yes. Yes. I think people, when something like this happens, people are very afraid to ask anything about it. And so they just don’t ask anything. And then you’re like, wait, I just had, you know, I just had this baby. And now no one wants to talk to me about, about what happened.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: No, I think it’s very important. And I think that’s really good that you did that. I think for everybody it’s different, what they want to talk about, what they want to share about it. But I think it’s really important to ask. And they can always say, “No, I don’t want to discuss that.” But it’s really important that someone engages with you about it. Because it’s very lonely, otherwise. I lost friends that, like, just stopped talking to me. You know, I don’t think they meant to be malicious, but they are out of my life now, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: For that reason. And then, similarly to when people say, “I can’t imagine,” you know, you can imagine, you can, you just don’t want to. And I think that phrasing is something I will now forever consciously avoid when talking to someone who lost someone. I will try my best to imagine, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Niina Pollari: Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Niina Pollari is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Dead Horse, which was published in 2015, and Path of Totality, which came out earlier this year, in 2022, and she co-authored the split chapbook, Total Mood Killer. She is also a translator of Tytti Heikkinen’s poems from the original Finnish. That collection is titled, The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and their daughter Clara.

To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.