Wild Silence

A Conversation with Benjamin Cutler 

I once read that the most difficult thing to do in literature was to write a book without violence. The statement made me think about my own work, and I immediately began reexamining the impulsive fathers in my poems, the vengeful mothers, that speaker who found himself doing things he didn’t imagine himself doing. The emotions and scenes that included violence are not rampant throughout my collections, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how the books would have been different had I not written with a lens geared toward violence. How would my poems have interacted with each other? How would my speaker have learned about the world without that cruelty?

I’m not sure I’ll ever have those answers, but I know that with poets like Benjamin Cutler, there exists a world where violence takes a backseat to the beauty, hopefulness, and opportunities life is eager to offer. While death does occasionally rear its head, Cutler's sophomore collection, Wild Silence (2024), is a book that chooses to celebrate caring fathers, curious sons, wooded landscapes, and the everyday triumphs that make us better people. These pages alternate between prayer, elegy, and gratitude, but what remains constant is a speaker who isn’t afraid to shout about the good that happens in this world, about how content one can be by taking strides to live a more fulfilling life.  

Benjamin, thank you immensely for your time. Wild Silence is such a beautiful collection centered on self-reflection, place, and an appreciation of the natural world. But I wanted to begin our conversation with the poem  “Ars Poetica at the End of the World” and the following opening lines: 

In the end there was a word 
for everything, a single word 

for everything, but in the end 
it did not save us—

Nowhere in the poem does the speaker indicate that we as individuals (and society as a whole) can’t be saved, but that language has failed to lead us toward safety, at least the kind of safety that would help when we arrive at that inevitable end. Can you speak a bit about this poem and about the ways in which language may or may not lead to salvation? In what ways do you think writers and poets can unravel that “darkness” your speaker mentions at the end of the poem? 

Benjamin Cutler: Thank you so much, Esteban, for spending time with me and my poems—and for your kind words about Wild Silence. And this opening question! We’re reaching right into the marrow. I do believe language can be a portal to salvation—both personal and communal—or can at least provide a lens through which we can glimpse it, but the more I rely on language, especially as a poet, its limitations become more obvious and discouraging. As for this poem, the damning detail is “single word.” A single word that means everything truly means nothing at all. A word like that isn’t likely to save anyone. The more versatile or generalized we try to make a word (or idea), the less meaningful it becomes—it loses nuance and gravity. Consider a word like “love.” To express my feelings for both bruschetta and my wife with the same single-syllable word is absurd. The shades and types of “love” are numerous and vastly different in character, yet we try to convey them all with this one word—so insufficient (and often inaccurate). There are myriad, deeply meaningful ways in which love—the whole weight of it—can be communicated without language, ways that are honest and true to what the heart longs to feel and be felt.

The lines you quoted continue with this:

we who would only speak
in the language of an answer-

with-no-question.

A person or people who have abandoned questions for the arrogance of certainty are unlikely to find their way into salvation (“salvation” also being a loaded and insufficient word). There is a sacredness—a light and forward momentum—to questions. Answers that have been rendered into a “single-word” certainty and that have been cut off from the taproot of questioning and mystery will never allow curiosity, understanding, empathy, reconciliation, and healing to bloom. As for how to “unravel the darkness”? I have far more questions than answers, but the collection’s opening poem, “An Invitation to Light,” closes with the following lines: 

                                     Friend:

Let us tie each frayed photon 
into a new far-reaching braid. 

Light needs such quiet, gentle work. 

ER: I will say, I’ve definitely had some food that has crossed into the “love” territory. But all jokes aside, I agree that language can often seem inadequate to the emotions we experience or the outcome we want to achieve. Were there places in the book, however, where you feel that language does triumph?

BC: I admit—during a visit to Charleston, SC, I was moved to tears by a plate of shrimp and grits followed by crème brûlée. The crème brûlée, especially, was a triumph. It can be difficult to feel that way about my poetry, though. I’m not modest enough to say I don’t like my own poems; I revise them obsessively until I’m satisfied or pleased with them. But a triumph? There is one that comes to mind. 

Part IV’s closing poem—“The River at World’s End”—is one that possessed me. This doesn’t happen with all of my poetry, but occasionally (rarely), the writing feels as though I’ve accessed something numinous outside myself but also entirely within. That poem is deeply personal for me in that it expresses my understanding of what my own spiritual journey is or can be, and the language—in its lushness, music, structures, images, and metaphors—conveys that personal truth so fluidly, much like a river (that was my objective, anyway). Even now, when I return to that poem, I just think, “Yeah, that’s it; that’s everything.” Readers may find moments of triumph elsewhere in the book (hopefully), but this poem felt like a personal triumph in that I had arrived somewhere sacred existentially and then managed to share it beautifully, despite the limitations of language.

ER: Throughout Wild Silence, there is a constant reflection on loss and grief (family members, landscapes, innocence). I wanted to know how you approached these subjects, and was there a time in the course of your writing that you had to step back to process it all? 

BC: It wasn’t until I was organizing the collection that I realized how fixated I had been on loss and grief. When writing poems, I don’t really set out to organize a book (other than the vague awareness that a book could be in the future). Each poem is its own work, and it isn’t until I’ve spent years writing them independently of each other that I start to consider how they might converse as a collection. Once these poems began to meet in that space, in Wild Silence, it seemed they wanted to speak of nothing but loss—loss of loved ones, loss of identity, loss of innocence, loss of faith, loss of place, and more. There were so many elegiac poems a dedicated section was warranted, and so many other poems in the book could have been included in that section as well. None of my poems are intended to advise on how one should process or cope with loss, but they are my attempts to understand my own grief.

Yes, I did need to step back—not during the writing (which can be cathartic) but during revision. After the book had been accepted for publication, I was able to return to the poems to revise—with the amazing and thoughtful feedback of Tina Schumann, one of Wandering Aengus Press’s incredible poetry editors. It had been a while since I’d spent time with the poems, and I was surprised to discover how triggering it could be to cross that distance back into those mental and emotional states—places and memories of loss, grief, despair. Collectively, I do think this book is about coming up into the light—about healing, breathing deeply, and acceptance—but descending into memory can be harrowing, and it was at times. 

ER: I wanted to talk a bit about the organization process because your approach is wholly different from mine. I definitely set out to write a collection around a theme or subject, but for you, the poems are their own entities first before they contribute to the collection as a whole. I absolutely love this concept, so when you realized that you had enough poems for a collection, how did you go about arranging them into a book? Did you have to direct that conversation the poems were having with each other? 

BC: Thank you, Esteban. I’m not sure that my approach is the most efficient—but I’ve never quite been able to focus myself on a pre-planned, book-length series of poems that are designed to work in communion with one another to create some kind of thematic or narrative arc. I really admire poets who do this. Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic comes to mind.

For this newest collection, once I knew I had more than enough poems for a book, I needed to figure out how to see them as a whole—literally all together in my view. I know some poets will print the poems out individually and organize them on the floor or do something similar with notecards. I know myself well enough to know that I would have a big mess and not much to show for it. Perhaps there are better tools for this, but I used Google Slides. For simplicity’s sake, I created one slide for each poem with only the title of the poem. I then subtitled each slide with what I thought were the dominant subjects, themes, or even images. In the grid view, I could then click and drag the slides to organize them into units. Once I was able to see which poems and how many shared commonalities, I was able to start color-coding the slides. This was the very early stages of figuring out if I wanted my collection organized into parts, how many parts, and what the thematic focus of those parts would be. This process also allowed me to see which poems were outliers and ultimately wouldn’t fit into the collection and which poems shared too much in common; this helped me know where to make those difficult decisions to cut.

A few years ago, I was fortunate to win a poetry contest that included a weeklong writer’s retreat at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC. I spent much of my time there doing all of this organizational work. It wasn’t the most inspiring work, but it was so helpful to have that time to focus (and obsess) on this tedious part of the process. Since then, the book continued to go through a number of changes—reorganization, additions, cuts, etc.—but those first solitary days in Southern Pines were when I began to see and understand what this book could and would be.

ER: Rereading your collection for the interview, there were multiple moments where I had to stop to really admire the language as it concerns the natural world. “While Wandering the Blue Ridge, We Followed the River Acheron” stayed with me for quite some time, and if you don’t mind, I want to highlight the entirety of the second section: 

Caught between the river’s blunt teeth—
as skinless and broken as an answerless question—

the dead doe did not rest; there is no rest 
where water floods ribs and pushes like a cry 

through a jawless mouth. We looked and knew then 
what we had tasted; every flavor is touched by loss. 

Water, too, will take and remember what it has taken. 
When you drink, know this: every mouth is a window 

open to the rain. Is not each body a house haunted 
by memory? Is not each memory a ghost of water? 

Can you talk about your relationship with nature and how it inspires your work? 

BC: Thank you so much, Esteban, for highlighting that poem. That image of the dead deer in the creek is one I’ve carried with me since my early teens. I shouldn’t find this a difficult question, but I do. I think much of my poetry—and this collection—is my attempt to understand my answer to this.

I’m no Mary Oliver or Jim Harrison; I don’t take myself into nature daily to write or even just be, but I did grow up with a river right outside my bedroom window and another river about a hundred yards down the road—the confluence of the two a short walk away. I’ve lived my life in a rural, small-town county in western NC that shares most of its land with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I’m a high school English teacher but have spent around 15 years guiding whitewater rafts down the Nantahala River during the summer months. Fly fishing is a favorite pastime of mine—spending hours of a spring, summer, or fall day carefully tip-toe navigating the upper flows of a cool, freestone creek, catching and releasing small wild trout. 

Being a poet is an act of dedicated, focused, quiet attention. My home is so lush with nature—and it’s hard not to be enchanted by its beauty, to reflect on its spiritual implications, to grapple with its indifference, to puzzle through how I’m connected to it, separate from it, a part of it, an intruder. The wildness of this place has so much to offer—rich with imagery and metaphor. It would be a challenge, actually, to write a series or collection of poems that did not feature nature to some extent. To delve into my own memories—whether they be rooted in grief, joy, anger, or love—is to also recall the season, the landscape, whether it was raining and how hard, the cast of a mountain shadow, a sunrise, the gloaming, a sunset. A life inundated with the natural world is the only life I know.

ER: In the absence of nature, what do you turn to for comfort, reassurance, or inspiration? 

BC: Family, poetry, pottery, and meditation. Aside from nature, these are my joys and my medicines.

I’ve been married for over 21 years now; Jennifer, my wife, is one of my greatest supporters and comforts—and she knows better than anyone how to see me through my dark seasons. I also have four children: a son who is 20, another son and a daughter who are 16 (twins), and another daughter who is 7. There is a great deal of comfort, reassurance, and inspiration in those relationships.

I also turn to other poets—and I’ll refrain from making an exhaustive list here. I mentioned Mary Oliver and Jim Harrison earlier. There are many poets I read, and I admire their craft—their voices and skill—but there are some who, for me, have become something akin to scripture. Mary Oliver and Jim Harrison often convince me to love the world and my place in it.

I find deep satisfaction in pottery. I’m a ceramicist, and I spend far too much time in my pottery studio. There’s nothing that can get me into a totally present flow state like centering and shaping clay on the wheel—not even a poem.

I also have a regular meditation practice—which involves a combination of breathing exercise, contemplation, prayer, and reading poetry/mystics/sacred texts. Meditation has been one of the healthiest and most impactful habits on my mental health and my relationships—especially my relationship with myself.

ER: After I finished writing my first poetry collection, I realized that I had a good dozen or so poems that were lingering in this uncollected netherworld. They didn’t make the cut, but I felt that they needed a home, and because of that, I worked on creating a new collection from them. What did the journey look like from your first collection, The Geese Who Might Be Gods, to your sophomore book? Is there a third collection already in the works?

BC: I will confess I sometimes feel as though my second book should have been my first. Once I had enough poems for a collection—and felt as though I had enough publication credits—I was eager to publish my first book. The Geese Who Might be Gods, though I’m proud of that work, is essentially every poem I’d written up to that point; in my inexperience, I wasn’t very selective about which poems should and should not be included. And after the book had been accepted for publication and then eventually published, I was still writing furiously; in fact, that was one of my most prolific periods. When I should have been focusing more on book promotion and events, I was far more obsessed with writing and thinking about the next book.

Regardless, choices were made (I should put that on a t-shirt). I don’t necessarily regret that first book, and I learned a great deal from it—how to approach book structure/organization, what the business/promotion side of this is like (which doesn’t come very naturally to me—or many poets, I think), what to look for in a publisher (and what to be wary of); also, Geese brought me to a level of craft and experience to be able to write Wild Silence. 

As for a third book, though? I want to believe that’s in the future—but it seems quite distant. When my first book was forthcoming, I remember other poets and writers I know, who also had forthcoming books, commiserating about how they weren’t doing any writing—a combination of weariness and having to focus on promotion. I also remember seeing a very successful poet commenting on Twitter about how she hadn’t written a poem in nearly a year after her last book was published. I was thinking that maybe something was wrong with me—that maybe I hadn’t put my all into that first book the way these other writers seemed to have. I couldn’t empathize; as I said, I was writing more than ever at the time. But I understand now. That voice that needed to speak in verse has been pretty quiet for most of a year. There was a time when that would have horrified me, but I’m mostly at peace with it—and, for now, content to make pots on the wheel and to help direct my high school’s musical. I’m also excited to give my attention to Wild Silence and some creative events to continue to infuse life into the book over the next year. 

ER: In “The Fire,” one of the last poems in the collection, your speaker says the following at the end: 

Come closer, friend, 

to these flames; feel the warmth you have made. 
Do not let it die. When you leave, keep 
a glowing coal to carry with you wherever you go. 

This sounds like some of the best advice I’ve heard in a while.  What’s your glowing coal in the midst of so much darkness? How do you hope this book becomes a beacon for others? 

BC: I have a friend who lives states away. We rarely see each other or speak, but when we do we can easily fall back into the open and comfortable ease of friendship. I once apologized to her for not reaching out more often (a common and cliche apology in long-distance friendships). Her response has stayed with me for years, and I think it always will. She said, “It’s just a momentary silence in a lifelong conversation.” I believe there’s something of the Divine in everyone—including myself. Another’s goodness—their kindness, generosity, honesty, and love—can become my own if I’m willing to see it, receive it, and quietly sit next to the carefully built fire of our mutual connection and humanity. 

But there are those “momentary silences”—times of loneliness, despair—that we must all pass through, when we can’t be next to the fire.  It can be difficult to see that shared divinity when humanity shows us its darkest side (which it often does) or when I’m overwhelmed by my own darkness. To feel and learn from another’s grace and love (“the fire”), and to then be able to extend that same grace and love to others and—often the most difficult—to myself through the dark sojourns: that’s the glowing coal I carry with me wherever I go, even when the source of the flame feels distant. 

A live coal can become a new fire. I hope that’s what readers take away from Wild Silence—the sustaining power of healthy relationships with one another, with the environment, and with our own messy selves.

Benjamin Cutler is an award-winning poet and author of the full-length books of poetry, The Geese Who Might be Gods (Main Street Rag, 2019) and Wild Silence (Trail to Table, 2024). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times and has appeared in Zone 3, Verse Daily, Tar River Poetry, and EcoTheo Review, among many others. He is also a recipient of the North Carolina Poetry Society's Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship. In addition, Benjamin is a high-school English and creative writing teacher in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina where he lives with his family and frequents the local rivers and trails.

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