Ten years ago, Callie Siskel and I were poetry students in the workshop at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Week after week, Siskel would bring in drafts of quiet precision and psychological insight, many of them elegies, poems commemorating the dead, for her father, the film critic Gene Siskel. Her poems have a dignity in their unfolding, with a perfect sense of the line, and a seductive tension between grand declaration and granular detail; they are emotive but also strange. They possess an arctic beauty.
The culmination of more than a decade of writing is Siskel’s first poetry collection, Two Minds (W. W. Norton, 2024). Of the collection, poet Sally Keith has written, “Direct but nuanced, tender but fierce, Callie Siskel’s Two Minds supposes that if we could see ourselves from just the right angle, we could understand our lives. Born of great loss, these precise lyrics do not aim at consolation alone; no, they struggle eloquently to put the pieces of a life together.”
The poems in Two Minds, inspired by autobiography and given force and freshness through form, myth, and the visual arts, are among the most precise and beautiful elegies of our time. They also ask difficult questions about what it means to write an elegy: “Vanity and grief,” Siskel writes, “are closer than we think. / Grief’s call-and-response / a mirror of our making.”
Siskel has previously published a chapbook, Arctic Revival, selected by Elizabeth Alexander for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. After completing her MFA at Johns Hopkins, Siskel studied at the University of Southern California, earning her PhD in creative writing and literature. She lives in Los Angeles.
We discussed her writing process and poetry’s insights into mourning over the phone this past winter.
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The Rumpus: Your debut poetry collection, Two Minds, is dedicated to your father.
Callie Siskel: I was torn between “for my father” and “in loving memory”; I didn’t want to relegate him to the past before the book opens, and I didn’t want him in the rearview mirror before the reader begins. I wanted the book to be an invocation of him. There’s a poem in the book that ends, “Come in, come in.”
I lost my dad when I was twelve years old, suddenly. I found out he was sick not long before he died. That informs so much of the book.
My dad himself was an incredible person. He was a film critic and one half of the television show Siskel and Ebert and the Movies. He had an ability and a desire, an appetite, to look at the world and clarify, for himself, for others, what was beautiful about it, what was interesting about it, what was compelling. It was very infectious how he did that. He used to tell me that I was observant, [or maybe] I was always really fond of that, because it felt close to what he was.
He looked at the world beautifully and purposefully. I, too, long for that gaze, for that sense of meaning in the world.
Rumpus: He was also a great and entertaining writer.
Siskel: I really thought of that as I was putting this book together. He valued concision. That was always his ultimate goal: to say something in as few words as possible. He valued brevity and minimalism. Poetry is the form of brevity. I wonder if his artistic view ultimately inspired me.
Rumpus: When did you turn to poetry? Why did you turn to poetry?
Siskel: I think I turned to poetry, in some inchoate way, the day he died.
After he died, I felt this voice in my head that was not someone talking to me but an inner drive to write. I felt I was actively grieving, physically rapt with emotion, but also, in my head, thinking. There was another voice living above my experience of grief who was already writing the poems. I feel strange saying that, but it’s true.
I remember thinking about how I’d write a eulogy, how I would pay homage to him, really early in my grieving process.
Poetry was also a communication line, a sense of making order out of disorder. A sense of having a part of him that was my own.
Rumpus: At what point does poetry take over your life?
Siskel: I was probably twenty-five. Even applying to an MFA program, I had no idea that I might still be doing it. Why wouldn’t I try writing poems? It was a dream. It’s such a special circumstance. I didn’t even think about being a poet, or [maybe I] was always a poet. But Johns Hopkins fostered and cultivated that passion. It was a place where poetry could be centered in my life.
Rumpus: How did this book come together? How do you take all of these emotions and all of these bits of writing over a ten-year period and all of these facets of yourself and craft a well-ordered object out of them?
Siskel: The last poem in the book, one I wrote during my MFA, talks about this idea of waiting—waiting for some kind of reunification with my father. I had this idea about the parentheses around our births and deaths. Are we always waiting, in some sense, for that second parenthesis?
A first book, too, is an act of waiting. For a sense of closure, a sense of pause. I didn’t feel it until this book was accepted. I had wanted it to be finished for many years. I wanted to be done, to have a book, to have had a book. I wanted to exorcize the grief book from my body so I could stop writing it.
Through rejection, in part, but also having the opportunity to work on it during the Stegner Fellowship, to have other teachers and writers looking at it, it kept extending the process. I eventually felt I was ready to end the book.
I’m happy the book reflects a long journey to where I am now. Grief is not monolithic. You experience it in stages. With time, I’m able to take a more intellectual approach to grief. It’s been twenty-five years since my dad died—that distance textures the poems differently than if they had all been written at an earlier phase. I like the dynamic of that range through time.
Rumpus: In your book, there are poems that enact grief and poems that interrogate grief, that question even what grief is. Your speaker also makes claims about the relationship between grief and vanity, which I found surprising. The figure of Narcissus is everywhere, and the book is full of mirrors. What’s the relationship?
Siskel: The connection between grief and vanity appeared in the act of writing a poem, which is when all the best thoughts happen. I was writing about a very vivid memory of my dad shaving his face. I wanted to be proximate to him. I always wanted to be near him. But I thought there was something so otherworldly, as a young girl, about a man shaving his face. How did it work mechanically? Did it hurt him when the razor went across his face? I often sat on his sink while he did that. The vanity plays off of “a vanity,” the noun, but of course, I also thought about vanity as in “being vain.”
There’s a tradition in Judaism that looking at oneself in grief is forbidden, and certain observant Jews might cover the mirrors in their home on the day of the Shiva. We didn’t do that. But I knew of it as a commandment or practice or teaching. For me, the act of writing an elegy is looking at oneself in grief. To write about yourself, to foreground the lyric “I” in a poem that mourns—is that a vanity?
Then I had a teacher who, when I was talking about this theme, said, “Yes, and it’s also in vain.”
Rumpus: This seems to me, even more complicated in your poetry, because throughout Two Minds is this notion that you resemble your father.
Siskel: Yes, that’s in more than one of the poems. I realize I was told that often. And I don’t have memories of being told that before my dad died.
One time, my mom showed me a baby picture of herself, and she compared it to one of mine, and they were almost indecipherable. We had the same face.
Obviously, my poetic brain has made an argument for why my face transformed into my father’s. But it did. It really changed. I’ve been told that by people my whole life, and it’s disconcerting. I love it, deep down. But it can also be alienating and strange and sad. To carry the face of someone you wish were still on Earth.
Rumpus: So many of your poems seem to take details from your autobiographical life and turn them into art. What does it mean for you to fasten memories to the page for other people to read?
Siskel: That’s the ultimate question: to what extent you transform your daily life—how to reveal it? From the spectrum of raw honesty—is that even possible? I think of a poet like Frank O’Hara, who creates this sense that his work documents a moment exactly in the moment he was writing it. But, of course, we know poems are so orchestrated, totally, temporally. I wonder to what extent it’s possible to be honest. No, that’s not the right word: I mean, literal, plain, forthcoming. Immediate.
For a time, I was interested in memory studies and rhetoric. I was looking at mnemonic devices and how classical performers remembered those epic speeches. They would picture a room in a house, and they would assign different topics to objects in a room so that they could traverse the metaphorical house to finish the speech by collecting all of the totems that had been linked to their idea.
That is what I do when I’m writing a poem, except the house is metaphorical and real. It’s the apartment where I grew up. I start in the bedrooms and move toward the kitchen. I see what happened in my mind. I pick up what’s still on a table that hasn’t been touched: my mom’s letter opener. I wrote a poem about that. Our piano. I have to start from somewhere tangible in order to feel and to remember what my childhood was.
Rumpus: I’m thinking about your poem, “The Plans,” about your family home that doesn’t get built. How much are you planning when you write? How accommodating do you have to be of the vagaries of time and life, for those projects that remain unbuilt, rooms that won’t be inhabited? And what do you have to abandon?
Siskel: That poem is an older poem. It was helpful for me to think about the house that wasn’t built as an elegy—reinhabiting it and leaving it different from when you started. That is the testament to poetry’s power: it changes memory, and it changes the way you look back on your life. What you started with is not what you ended with, and you can never go back. Writing my poems has shaped the narrative of my life. Writing a poem is changing your life in reverse. A poem is the potential to build something never built but on the ground of something that already exists.
Rumpus: Were there any historical elegies you turned to when writing this book that showed you a way forward when writing your own elegies?
Siskel: One of the most formative poems for me is Seamus Heaney’s “Personal Helicon.” It’s an ars poetica, not an elegy per se, but it’s about self-location. About hearing an echo and learning who you are in response. That poem grieves Heaney’s lineage. It also grieves a kind of poetry he didn’t write. Looking down into a well, he must accept his own attention, his own interests in the world. He inherits the tradition he wants to inherit.
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Rumpus: You write, in your poem about the mythic figure of Echo, “to echo is not to repeat, but to diminish.” Is that one of the anxieties of inheriting either from literary tradition or from your father’s greatness?
Siskel: I’ve learned late, in the myth, it’s not that Echo repeats everything Narcissus says but only the end of what he says. That’s the curse. She must be the end of someone else’s thoughts. That’s an anxiety about being someone who writes about others. Being the writer in a family, the one who writes poems about our family—I feel some sense of guilt and unfairness. Why do I get to tell this story?
Poetically, there’s a beauty, too, that poems are ceaseless echoes of poems that come before them. The elegy has become the most common, the most pervasive genre of poetry. So, we are all echoes and diminishments.
There’s a throughline in the book, too, about becoming self-possessed enough to speak.
Rumpus: I’m thinking about “Bildungsroman,” one of my favorite poems in the book, which is a collage of speech acts from the family. The last line is the grandmother’s command: “Declare yourself!” Does the book do that?
Siskel: I try to write with abandon, but I’m so worried about hurting other people in my life. Considering others while I’m writing is just, unfortunately, a part of my process. In that poem, I wanted to foreground that—to explore that. I was searching for an “I.” It was an imperative I needed to remember—“Declare yourself”—and this book allowed me to embrace it.
Rumpus: Many of your poems are ekphrastic, inspired by and commenting on works of art by others. Why do you look to visual arts, in particular, for meaning?
Siskel: Art, for a writer, for a poet, is the anti-mirror. Immediately I’m not looking at myself. It neutralizes, subverts, chastises the impulse to look at the self. However, it also becomes the ultimate portal back to the self. You trick yourself into not writing about yourself and then find yourself in doing it. That’s what ekphrasis is to me. You need to look away to look back.
Rumpus: Why, given the subject of your elegies, your father, and his life dedicated to film, do you not turn to movies in these poems?
Siskel: My dad loved art. What excited me was that I never heard him talk about art, but I just saw the effects of how it changed him. To see him in front of paintings he loved was a kind of speechless sense of perfection, very alluring to me. Visual art has such a fast transmission from work to feeling. It’s instant.
Rumpus: Rereading this book, the seasons are invoked everywhere. The untitled poem to the book ends with the line: “The seasons remove their traces, in spite of us all.” You’re a poet deeply connected to the seasons and they seem so important to this book.
Siskel: My dad was born in January and died in February. I wanted to make meaning out of that. The entrance and exit in winter. The human urge to craft conditions around something random as a gesture of love, as a gesture of burial. Humans do it when they make a grave site, to dignify and beautify the exit from the Earth. Every season has a beauty to it. Winter’s the most mysterious—and being from Chicago, the most palpable. I can still remember turning the corner and feeling the wind from the lake on my skin. I wanted to bring the beauty of winter to how he died.
Rumpus: The book comes out in spring.
Siskel: I was writing so many poems of bleakness, of hibernation, of being alive and dead at the same time. I was down there, under the earth, willfully and unwillfully. Emerging is hard. But, even in elegy, you must think about coming up and out of that, into spring, into life.
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Author photograph by Lauren K. Allen
