A Sunday in God-Years
Michelle Boisseau

Q. Where does the title come from?
I'm not sure I remember how I came up with it. But it came out of a notion that if you step back, way back in time and look down on earth from a god's-eye view, all human history, really every event on earth, might look like it happened on a Sunday afternoon when God was taking a nap. Strange as it might sound, I find comfort in taking a long view. Holding in your hand a fossil imbedded with the shell of creature that existed 450 million years ago you connect yourself to lost ages and to what literally endures, connect to the time before the tongue or the eye had evolved, when even the master of our world, the sun, was a youngster.

Q. Which is the first poem you wrote for the book?
Funny thing, in a sense, the first poem for this book is a poem in my last book, Trembling Air (Arkansas 2003), the poem "Haloes Stippled with Crosses, Roses ... ." This poem and the long poem "A Reckoning" in A Sunday in God-Years were originally part of another very long poem which I decided at one point wasn't working. Most of it got composted and from that soil grew these other poems. All along I felt discomfort handling this slippery material. Where do I get off writing about this stuff? A middle-class white woman whose family were slave-holders, who benefitted from the system which caused, and continues to cause, devastation? I spent a lot of time reading and staring out the window and throwing out false starts and being frustrated.
In his The Slave Trade Thomas describes how gold in the art of middle-ages came from Africa, from secret trade routes that were also associated with slavery. This fascinated and horrified me. I have a great love for the Italian art implicated —Giotto, Martini, Fra Angelico. I might read their sacred images ironically, but I find their work moving. I started to think about how beauty is mixed up with suffering. I don't mean beauty as the very pretty, but beauty as a force, the kind of mysterious force you feel emanating from a Fra Angelico or a Mozart concerto. What does it mean when something beautiful is entangled with evil? Does it mean anything? What's my responsibility in writing about it? How can a poem consider how the White House and Capitol were built with slave labor without just belaboring the obvious. The nasty Medicis made possible amazing art. Thousands (millions?) of kids across this country owe to a Carnegie Library some of the best moments of their childhoods (I know I do), for the quiet and dignity they found in going to a lovely library that was built by a horrible man. Slavery and genocide built the empires on which the modern world lives.
As did the ancient world.

Q. So how did the long poem "A Reckoning" come about?
Through a lot of fits and starts. About the time I was reading Thomas's book I was looking through some papers my father had when he died. On a sheet from a yellow legal pad from the 1960s, I found a Boisseau family tree sketched and a letter to my dad from an acquaintance who was trying to help my father trace his line back to the Huguenots. Apparently my dad had wanted evidence to make him eligible for the DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution} or some such. My father's knowledge about his Boisseau side of the family had big gaps; his father died when my dad was fourteen; my dad's father never met his own father since he died (from wounds received fighting for the Confederacy)less than two months from his birth in 1868. My grandfather was in his mid-50s when my dad was born.
When you have a name that looks like a fruit salad, you're curious about its origins ("boisseau" is an antiquated unit of measure, related to "bushel"). My father knew the name of his Huguenot ancestor but little about the Virginia side of his family. When he was effusive, he'd say we were somehow related to Pocohantas and had owned slaves before the Civil War. In 1998, I took the information my dad had from the 1960s and entered it on a genealogy site that had recently sprung up. After a while I heard back from an Andy Boisseau. He turned out to be a cousin, and he generously sent me his trove of research.
When I started reading through what he sent, I was startled and troubled. The story about Pocahontas was bogus, but unfortunately the one about the slaves was not. Andy had a clipping about a runaway slave from 1834. And wills of family members leaving slaves to their relatives.
The names. Little Suey! I kept seeing families torn apart, again and again and again.
My dad's flippant remarks about our family owning slaves haunted me. And so I spent a few years reading and doing research and spinning my wheels. I showed an early draft of the work to the poet Al Young, and he pointed to the runaway slave notice that's now part of "A Reckoning" and told me that's where I had to start. I kept reading, stared at old maps with my family name on them (and lots of last names people I know have). I stared at the ceiling, made stabs at starts, made drafts.
A few days after I came home from a research trip to Virginia, (a month after the agony of Katrina), my oldest brother, a schizophrenic for thirty years, was hospitalized and died from pulmonary failure in a matter of days. There had been a hope that he would grow out of the disease, and we'd get him back; now he was gone without ever having had much of a life. I thought of those generations of slaves who lost brothers, sisters, children, mothers, fathers, how someone in my family might have heard the crying from a cabin over a sold child, and shrugged it out of mind, the way you might cross the street to avoid some unpleasant scene.
As I grieved I sifted the material that I had, stuff going in every direction, I realized the poems would have to be about the enormity of the task, the task of confronting how one has benefitted from slavery, the likelihood of failing at the task and the struggle against self-deception. The loops and tangles.

Q. Tell me about the cover.
My friend and colleague Kati Toivanen created the collage for the cover image. She took material I had—copies of deeds, obituaries, photographs, geology prints, maps, wills, the inside of an old book (Longfellow's poems) which my great-grandmother had given my grandfather (and which my father gave me when I earned my PhD)—and using part of the Appomattox River my family lived alongside, Kati made a kind of psychic landscape. A NASA image of the sun is burning through.

Q. The image, or motif, of the sun runs through much of this collection. How deliberate was the development of the sun (and alternate darkness) as a unifying element in the book?
It was more of a discovery than a plan. In my last book I made the sun into a kind of a stooge ["The Sun Surveys Other Cynosures"]; it acts as a mouthpiece for a type of whiner. But in this book as I followed the metaphors from geology, the sun became a kind of (semi) stable image to measure human activity against. Over the eons the continents have been sliding around on the globe, but the same sun more or less brought morning and left behind night, and from the earliest organism to the guy riding by on his bike, that gargantuan drives our rhythms.

Q. A reader of this book often gets tickling allusions to past poems, such as the title “When I Consider,” echoing the John Milton sonnet, or “Before the Age of Aerial Bombardment,” an echo a Richard Eberhart poem; yet no direct reference ever comes up to those other poets. Is this part of the fun for you, of playing with the history of poetry, or is there some other impulse going on?
I guess it's just part of the process of writing poems. The poems are in conversation, at least I hope it's a conversation, with the world out there, and for me the world includes a lot of poems. Among other things, Milton's poem is about the value of writing poems. What does it serve in the vast scope of the universe? The only answer for that, I think, is the poem itself.

Q. Why the footnotes?
I almost couldn't resist footnoting the footnotes. I hope they help give a sense of the slipperiness of some of his material. Even those things based in fact which I think must be laid out—like what happened in 1808 or 1834—are chips in a kaleidoscope. When you pass through one doorway, you find ten more, and each of those lead to more, branching ever backwards and sideways. Limestone riddled with trapdoors and elliptical passageways.

Q. And yet a lot of the poems aren't about slavery at all; some have funny moments: "a goat enjoying the taste of a mantle" or the "armada of arithmetic set out against me." Or the title, "The Sad Book of Fun." Or the way you bring sex into geology, the image of Hawaii's nipples steaming in the ocean.
I hope the book hits many kinds of notes—dark irony, joy, silliness, grief. That the poem "A Reckoning" can plant a center around which other questions radiate. This is why using the lens of geology felt so valuable. When you shift the geologic scale, you shift what you take for granted is important. If you think of geologic time as a year and the universe began on January 1, then the earth was formed in September, the dinosaurs appeared and disappeared during a few days at the end of December, and humans don't enter the scene until the last few minutes before the clock strikes twelve on New Year's Eve. Given that, don't we need to recognize how close we are? How we're all in this together?