On Grief and Ghosts: A Conversation with Annalisa Hansford
Blog Director // Leanna Florez
Emerson Creative Writing major Annalisa Hansford is the author of Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts, a poetry collection that reflects on personal trauma, love, and loss. Together, we sat down to discuss the book, what it is to be a writer reflecting on a past you feel disconnected from, and how poetry continues to be an outlet for processing (or romanticizing) grief.
FLOREZ: Why did you write this book?
HANSFORD: Well, the earliest poems are from the summer before my sophomore year. A lot of them I had written during sophomore year because I had just gotten out of a relationship that summer, so it was kind of processing and dealing with a breakup. There’s some breakup poems, but then there are a lot of poems about unrequited crushes, unrequited love, and dealing with that after a breakup. So a lot of these are just kind of dealing with these feelings, processing them and putting them on paper. I feel like it’s a time capsule for who I was at that point in my life. I was telling the other guy who interviewed me that sometimes I look at these poems and cringe, because seeing what I was writing and feeling… I just feel so differently now, so it’s weird to have it out now.
FLOREZ: What feels different now?
HANSFORD: I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a person and a poet. I feel very distant from that part of my life.
FLOREZ: That must feel interesting to be talking about this version of yourself that really isn’t you anymore, editing these poems and everything with a different mindset while still trying to remain authentic to your voice.
HANSFORD: Yeah, and now I’m a senior, so I’m working on my senior poetry thesis, new stuff coming out. So it feels weird because I’m so grateful to have this out, but it’s just not how I feel as a person or a writer, so it’s very bittersweet.
FLOREZ: Because you have to stand behind it, even if it isn’t you.
HANSFORD: Exactly. I was talking about this with someone else, and they feel like that’s the story of every artist. You release something, but by the time it’s actually published, you’re two years into your next project.
FLOREZ: Does that feel like a bad thing?
HANSFORD: Yes and no. My other friend told me that it’s good to cringe on old writing because it means that you’ve grown and you’ve evolved since then. So I want to look at it as a good thing, like, okay I’m getting better and growing.
FLOREZ: That’s beautiful. So what compelled you to put these different parts of you together?
HANSFORD: I think after my breakup I was really lonely and sad. I was, like the title says, trying to romanticize it.
FLOREZ: You have this sadness, so why not make it pretty?
HANSFORD: Literally. I leaned into it too, which could be a little unhealthy at the time for my own emotional wellbeing. But I think a lot of it wasn’t just the break up, because then I would get these intense feelings for crushes that were unrequited. I felt it so intensely that I needed to just put it down. That’s what compelled me to write all of it. It was my outlet and my way to get it out of you somehow.
FLOREZ: So describe further what the title means to you. How did you decide on it? It’s romanticizing that feeling of sadness, right?
HANSFORD: Even though I kind of don’t love that sentiment anymore, that was how I was coping. So I was like, okay, let me lean into it and make it sound pretty and lyrical and whatnot. And when I was composing this chapbook, I was kind of crazy. Like, I made a Google Doc and listed every poem I had, and I would find different images in each poem.
FLOREZ: That’s so cool!
HANSFORD: Yeah! I found a lot of imagery of ghosts and the word grief was mentioned a lot, so I highlighted them. When I was choosing which poems would make it in, some of them got cut because they didn’t touch on grief or ghosts, they had to stick with the title and those overlapping images.
FLOREZ: I really love that as a process, that’s really fun. Now you know readers love a theme, what did you feel like is the theme of this book?
HANSFORD: Hm, probably loss and desire.
FLOREZ: Those are such contrasting things.
HANSFORD: They are, but I think I’m talking about the loss that comes with desire. They’re very intertwined.
FLOREZ: Yeah, you can’t feel loss without having first felt desire.
HANSFORD: Exactly, because you feel the desire, but you can lose that, and that can be grieved too. With loving someone, there will always come grief. Even being in love with the idea of someone and losing it as you get to know them, you need to grieve that loss. So for themes, I would say loss, desire and grief.
FLOREZ: That does it, huh?
HANSFORD: Yep, loss, desire… what was the other one? I lost it.
FLOREZ: Grief.
HANSFORD: Yeah, that’s… yeah.
FLOREZ: Those are your big three. Which poem took the longest to write? Or edit?
HANSFORD: Okay, I have an answer for which one took the longest to write. It’s “Portrait of My Ex-Girlfriend’s Mouth,” because I actually wrote a draft of this for my freshman poetry class after my professor showed us a Donika Kelly poem. I can’t remember what the prompt was, but we tried to answer this poem and I think I wrote two or three lines, but nothing ever came of it, so it was just sitting in a Google Doc, collecting virtual dust. A year later, I just wanted to revive old stuff, so I found it and revised it. So even though I wasn’t actively writing it for a year, it was building and I was writing it in my mind.
FLOREZ: That took the longest to write, which took the longest to edit?
HANSFORD: It’s a kind of intense title, but, “My Lover Told Me Today is the One Year Anniversary of Their Suicide Attempt.”
FLOREZ: One of my favorites, for sure. So raw.
HANSFORD: I think all of these poems as fictionalized in a way, it kind of exaggerates the speaker’s feelings. But this one was a real moment that happened in my life, and I felt it so deeply, and I wanted to get it right. When I first wrote it, it kept flooding out really easily, but then editing it, I kept changing the format. I ended up keeping it as it is, like a prose block, but when I was playing around with it, I used slashes to break up the text, break up the moments. I just kept changing and rearranging lines and whatnot. It took the longest, and I’m very proud of it.
FLOREZ: It’s really, really good.
HANSFORD: Thank you, and I showed the person that it’s about and they loved it.
FLOREZ: Wow, how was that experience?
HANSFORD: It was good. This poem is about my ex, obviously, and we’re not speaking anymore. I still have love for her and appreciation for her, but we just can’t be in each other’s lives right now. But when we were speaking, I showed it to her on the rooftop of this parking garage.
FLOREZ: Very picturesque.
HANSFORD: It really was. I wrote this a year after we’d broken up too. I literally wrote it after… have you seen Heartstopper?
FLOREZ: Yeah!
HANSFORD: I wrote it after that one scene with Nick and Charlie, I forget what scene it was, but it was one of the finales, very sad. I was just thinking about loving someone when they’ve tried to take their own life.
FLOREZ: It’s heartbreaking, truly.
HANSFORD: And so I wrote it and showed it to her, and she loved it. It was a really nice moment. But yeah, I would say this one took the longest to edit because there’s a lot of feelings in there. So much soul-bearing. I wanted to get it right because it’s such an intimate thing.
FLOREZ: Were any of these poems easy to write?
HANSFORD: That’s a good question. I feel like my best poems were the ones written in a single sitting where I’m not thinking much about it. The ones where I take a bunch of time to edit them as I’m writing, I’m never as proud of them.
FLOREZ: Writing it in one sitting doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to write. Because emotionally, getting yourself to the place where you can write a poem in one sitting is really hard I feel like.
HANSFORD: Fair. The one I feel like was the easiest was probably “Abecedarian for my Future Lover” because I just had such intense feeling for the person I had a crush on. It was easy to put it all down. And the format, the Abecedarian, with the structure of having to make sure each line follows the alphabet, it helps me to structure it. I don’t know, usually I write free form, but having that restriction kind of helps me, in a way, to keep the poem flowing. I usually write short poems, so this really challenged me to keep going and make sure that each line was interesting.
FLOREZ: Definitely, structure can be fun! Another question I have is, why poetry? Why is that the outlet you gravitate towards?
HANSFORD: That is such a good question. I don’t know. I remember reading Rupi Kaur when I was fourteen and I was like, woah, you can put all your feelings on paper. It just became something I did. Then I took it more seriously in senior year of school. I feel like this is a common fear for people who write, but the fear of forgetting is so real. And with journaling and writing, I’m able to remember things.
FLOREZ: That’s interesting, especially for this generation where everything is so fast-paced. I didn’t realize how common this was.
HANSFORD: It is, I’ve met so many writers that talk about it. Not just writers, like all artists too. I was talking to a film person, and they were telling me how their biggest fear is forgetting. Like, living a great life and not remembering it, that’s scary.
FLOREZ: Or even growing older and getting dementia, being able to read something you wrote and realize, “that’s my life, even if I don’t remember it.”
HANSFORD: Yeah, I don’t know, like I think that’s part of my need for poetry and like I said before, it’s kind of a time capsule. So I can immortalize people or memories of my life that are important to me. And of course there’s the aspect of poetry that it’s just a way for me to process feelings or give structure of intense feelings and sensations. These feelings in my head are now out in front of me and I can conceptualize them in these short little lines.
FLOREZ: Is that what feels so good about poetry specifically as a medium? The structure of it?
HANSFORD: Right, because they’re so short, and my attention span is getting so short, which is really scary by the way. But I feel like a poem usually contains a specific moment. A lot of good poems just take place in a very specific point in time, and you can really immerse yourself in one moment, whereas in non-fiction or fiction, it takes place over a really long period of time.
FLOREZ: I love that about poetry too, that it’s just one single moment or one single feeling and the reader gets to feel that as well. You can convey it through just a few words, it’s powerful.
HANSFORD: And then it’s there and it’s done.
FLOREZ: It’s there and it’s done and you get to play around with it, like format and word choice, so becomes fun.
HANSFORD: It feels like a puzzle, you’re just trying to make all the right pieces fit.
FLOREZ: Who are some of the poets that you love? Or your favorite poetry books?
HANSFORD: I love this book called frank : sonnets by Diane Seuss. That book is the reason I’m doing my poetry thesis on sonnets.
FLOREZ: Oh cool, is that what you’re doing?
HANSFORD: Yeah, it’s mostly sonnets. I also love Frank O’Hara. I love him, but he’s dead now. I intern at Grolier Poetry Bookshop, and he used to go to Harvard so he would always go to the Grolier because it’s nearby Harvard. It’s very cool being in the space because a lot of poets used to read there and just hang out there, and it’s corny, but it feels like their energy is there.
FLOREZ: I’m sure that’s very creatively stimulating.
HANSFORD: Exactly, yeah. There’s a really good community there. Anyway, my biggest influences are Diane Suess and Frank O’Hara. I also recently read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. She does non-fiction and poetry.
FLOREZ: I’ve read her non-fiction, but I haven’t read her poetry yet. Is it good?
HANSFORD: I loved Bluets. It was so good. I also love Ocean Vuong. I just read “Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read” for a class.
FLOREZ: Oh, I just read that in my art of non-fiction class.
HANSFORD: With Alden Jones?
FLOREZ: Yeah! Alden! I love her.
HANSFORD: Oh, me too. I love her. Shoutout Alden Jones.
Read Annalisa’s chapbook, out now online and in stores!