Interview // “Recesses of Landscape”: A Conversation with Cedar Sigo

The poems in Cedar Sigo’s newest book, Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025), arrive like a ferry crossing in stormlight—rhythmic, flickering, full of veiled terrain. To leave land behind, even briefly, is a momentous act if you’re in the right mindset. Cedar’s poems show he’s always in that mindset—the one attuned to passage, to pattern, to poetic weather. This interview took place across the dining table at the residency cabin at Bloedel Reserve. The cabin is built on broad stone stilts, with a small creek threading beneath. Sword ferns and moss press close to the foundation, while cedar boughs sway against the windows. In the sunlight, spider webs reveal themselves—tensile and intricate, stitching the air into something almost visible. Like the poems, they hold what passes through as well as what can’t be said.

Simon Wolf (SW): Okay. This is Cedar Sigo and Simon Wolf. Bloedel Reserve. Hello, World. February 28th, 2025. Third cup of tea. 

We had a lovely walk on the grounds: staring eye contest with a coyote, we walked the whole grounds I think and ended with the most beautiful: reflective pool, moss garden, the bluff, posed for portraits with the mist over the Strait.

Cedar Sigo (CS): We have just now recovered enough to speak at length, I think.

SW: The first question is what has it been like being in the Pacific Northwest, relative to your time spent away? And I think within that question is, where are the other places that you have called home?

CS: Right. I lived for three years in Boulder, Colorado, when I was going to school at Naropa University, then I moved from there to San Francisco and lived there from 1999 to 2015. And then I moved back home or “up here” to Lofall with my partner Brian in 2015, maybe 16. I felt that my life was ready for change. I realized that I had an audience as a writer, like visual artists have their collectors and I was getting residencies and things that were hard to work around and still maintain a nine to five job. I was finally quitting my job and becoming an artist, which was nerve-racking and then I was also in this new romance with Brian and we had come to visit my family in Suquamish, and he became very enamored with the light and the trees. He bought a two story house on a dirt road outside of Poulsbo, and he was renting it out those last few years that we lived in San Francisco together.

I also moved back to be near my parents. They’re getting older and I had lived about 15 years in San Francisco, so I hadn’t been seeing them on a daily basis, or weekly basis. I was usually home once or twice a year. And then my sisters were having children, so I felt like I was missing out on certain crucial stages with my nieces and nephews. And just the promise of having more space, I’d always been in tight apartments in which the library is the main energizing component of the house because there were always so many books and usually in exquisitely designed editions. The whole house would feel almost like an office especially if you’re doing self-publishing and you couldn’t afford to rent out a storefront, like people used to do. The reams of paper and the paper cutter were like part of the furniture. And then you also have your desk and all of its components. So it was really the promise of more space that attracted me.

Also, I had just kind of started my relationship with Wave Books, this would have been 2014. I felt very relieved to have found them. I was just coming out of a long relationship. This was the year before I met Brian. Suddenly I had a room of my own in which to write. What ended up happening was I became very fascinated with writing essays, lectures, and writing about art, using sentences, and teaching also. Then moving up here and getting my own office with the door that I could close, a room with framed art that was emblematic of my periods in San Francisco and Boulder surrounding me. I think I felt somewhat protected for the first time. It was an opportunity to be a little reflective of what I’ve done so far and maybe write from that point of view, looking back.

SW: And how do you think and write being in different places? How does nature and the landscape of the place you are in impact what you write?

CS: Out here when it becomes dark early during the winter, that always affects my writing. When the days are shorter, I tend to get to work quicker because I know I will have to stop and start to make our dinner. It becomes dark around 4.30 in the winter. In that way, the winter light influences the amount of time that you get to spend drifting off into your practice. And when you’re a Native writer, people always come to you with questions about landscape and sometimes they expect your poetry to be a version of the poet combing through the most beautiful experiences that one could have in nature because you are predisposed to having that spiritual connection. So once I could finally dispense with other people’s expectations of what nature was, I could let it hit me like cinematography, like the feel of David Lynch and Twin Peaks and the underbelly world I imagine hidden within the Pacific Northwest.

I don’t just imagine nature. I imagine all the dark stragglers and varied characters that emerge from that landscape. I can imagine their voices. And I know about all the death and imprisonment of native families and the rape and cruelty that have permeated this landscape. When I think about landscape I think about haunted recesses of landscape and how it must be purging itself somehow, and you can interpret those things as the collapse of the environment or however you want to translate it. I mean to say that the landscape is always in flux and is always working its demonic past out in the present day. We are seeing that now with the raging wildfires.

SW: Are these dark recesses and the straggler characters unique to the Pacific Northwest? Has it created a certain style of poetry that comes out of this area?

CS: I like the Pacific Northwest when I look at it, there is an appreciation of Asian poetry, that sort of lush presentation of nature to evoke a mood. I really like that possibility. I feel like Basho would have written well here. I get less interested when there’s an “I” in this poetic natural landscape and they’re just overwhelmed and cataloging the elements. Which is also something that I find a lot not just in this region, but in regional writing in general. It tends to get precious. Taking the ferry in and out of Seattle. I always wanted to write that scene. And there were images belonging to the  Pacific Northwest that I wanted to write for a long time, but I just knew I wasn’t good enough, yet . . . And now, sometimes I feel like I can do it if I write fast enough and I don’t think about it too much while it’s happening. That will always be the ideal, to be able to recreate the ferry pulling into the city at night with all its ominous sounds. I think that’s part of my new attraction to prose, the possibility of describing that in the pace of several concurrent paragraphs.

SW: I’d love to talk more about prose because you have such a power in both. How do prose and poems interact for you?

CS: Well, with poetry a lot of times it seems to happen as this element of transmission, that you’re given these lines. With prose you might hear a sentence spoken on the street or you take half a quote from a book and it becomes a refractive line. It’s almost like the curtain coming up on a theater. There’s all this pulsating activity behind that line and if you have the time and you’re in the right physical space, you could definitely unload this material and spin it. With poetry it’s more of a received situation, you wake up with eight pieces of a collage and you put them together and there’s the poem whereas the story is sort of beckoning to you. You’re going to have to kind of shake the tree a little more.

SW: Another part of your practice is teaching: Naropa, Bard, University of Washington Bothell, Common Area Maintenance. Why is teaching such an important part of your practice, and why do you keep doing it?

CS: Well, I do it as often as I need the money and that’s one of the reasons that it’s helpful as you realize that that’s one of the things that poets can do to support themselves. But it’s also been done to death. It’s become one of our great colonizers. One could say that the entire adventure of poetry is almost completely academic. One has to “pay to play” in a certain way. Why does anyone need to have a degree to be a poet? It seems rather ridiculous and costly. To some people It’s like purchasing this crown. Or maybe it’s just a way of passing time.

SW: The way you teach, though, when you’re actually in the room, I don’t think anyone’s going to think, oh, he’s just doing this for the money.

CS: You’re right, I say all that to say that I teach when I want to. I don’t teach on a turnstile or on a semester schedule. I’m not affiliated with just one university. I will come for guest teaching, meaning one semester or less usually, or with Bard and Naropa, I come during the summertime. I prefer a hit and run atmosphere to keep these discussions of composition special for myself and the students. Poetry is a revealing art and teaching too is very revealing. You’re not just saying “these are great writers, and these are the facts of that writer’s life and here’s what they wrote in their letters and essays.” I often teach writers that I’ve actually encountered, that I’ve heard live, that I had/have friendships with. I also try to offer intimate backgrounds on their lives, even pathetic things, glimmering bits of gossip, things that bring you eye to eye with your students. I try to assert authority by being entertaining and self-deprecating and doing the poetry exercises in class right along with them and reading the results. Sometimes when they’re great and always when they’re embarrassingly bad.

SW: Being a traveling teacher has allowed you to be aware and a part of multiple scenes as they’ve been developing now for decades? New York, Boulder, San Francisco—it seems like your teaching enables you to keep those certain connections, certain parts of your writing practice going.

CS: Definitely, because I’m not a poet riding the waves or strictures of a mainstream poetry career. I’ve had some “crossover success,” but I belong to a subgroup that is often dismissed as being overly experimental, so mine is even more of a hidden path than just the poets you might see recommended on Instagram or at Barnes and Noble or however people buy poetry anymore.

I think the whole trick of it is to not be too invested in any one scene. They kind of pass like a landscape painting in front of your eyes and you find out who’s going out with who and who’s also coincidentally reading in this series and who has a book coming out. All this highly sensitive information is surrounding you. And you just allow yourself to hear it and you can’t get too invested. And you’re also bringing your own drama to the scene. Hopefully they’re talking more about your presence and writing, rather than you chasing down a certain feel of a scene. In New York, when I stayed out there recently, I realized that people recognize that it’s a central scene because it’s happening in New York City, but it’s also like any city to some extent. It’s even similar to the scene in Seattle. They have more people passing through and there’s more money to be spent on it. But it’s still just another fragile ecosystem.

SW: What are the book titles you remember that you really love?

CS: I’ve always loved Nerves by John Wieners. That was one of my favorites. I also really liked Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. The title can be its own free standing poem. I think people still say, you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I say you can judge a book by its title, definitely. The title can be a hook or a key, a way in. I always stole Orson Welles titles. I thought those were fantastic, like Chimes at Midnight. That’s my favorite title. And I stole that for a single sonnet in Language Arts, and with Siren of Atlantis. I always loved the title sequences coming up in an old movie, the letters being too big for the screen.

SW: How did you come up with the title Siren of Atlantis?

CS: It was a movie starring Maria Montez, this B movie actress that was a favorite of the avant-garde filmmaker’s Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger. I once saw Anger introduce a screening of his favorite Maria Montez movie, Cobra Woman, in which she does this dance and she dramatically points out victims during her dance and whoever she points to during the dance gets executed on the spot, it’s the campiest thing. Now you could re-stage it in a drag bar so easily. So I just used that as a title, that’s the source of it, but the reason it applies to me is because it felt like I was this wounded Siren after the stroke, trying to hear again, trying to hear that song that lures men to their deaths and, I hope that I did it, or, at least replicated strains of it. It’s all about getting back to that elusive music.

SW: The other day you told me that there’s never going to be another book like this and that it has been a process of recalibration. Can you talk about that, what you really mean by that?

CS: I will never write another book like this, because it is a book coming back from a stroke, meaning a reorientation of one’s senses of language and art and music and trying not to compare yourself to a person that no longer exists. I’m a new draft of that person. I’m not Cedar that wrote Guard the Mysteries and Royals and All This Time exactly. I’m an altered version. And in some way, I have scrubbed off all the barnacles and I’m like a child now in new ways. So that part is good. On the other hand, there are poems in Siren of Atlantis that are just trying to find their footing. I don’t know if some of them, for instance, “Chatter in the Waiting Room” seems like a kind of embellishment of the line that I might never revisit again. But I wrote it in St. Louis when I had that residency just to keep myself busy. I did that exercise that Joanne Kyger always made me do, to write for five days straight, just some kind of entry, at least three lines a day, and then you’re only allowed to cut five lines at the end. Each time I would make an entry I was so relaxed I would forget that I was writing. 

SW: This is also a different book for you because this is the first time in a lot of years that you only put out one book at a time rather than putting out two books. Did that just happen by chance?

CS: I had two books come out simultaneously in 2007 and then also in 2021. It seemed  to show people that I could do more than just give beautiful readings of fragmented poetry. I think it was a grand design, and that Wave believed in me. They believed that I could do an essay book and that I could edit the book of Joanne interviews when I didn’t necessarily know that I could do either. I didn’t want to disappoint them. And there is never this quality of Wave wanting me to do something the way anyone else did it. They treat each poet individually, which I like very much.

SW: So the Siren, is this you getting to hear again? The breath of poems in this book is incredible between, “Rayograph,” which reminds me a little bit more of your past poems,  and there is “Chatter,” “Star Jasmine,” “Saint,” it seems that you’re giving more away.

CS: Yeah, I think that there’s a quality of dailiness. A poem doesn’t just have to be a tour around a beautiful building. It can be something that emerges over a day or over a week and you’re not just polishing it up and putting it under lights like you would with a single poem with a perfect title. After Guard the Mysteries, after I had that book of lectures I had gotten better at answering questions about process and identity. There are thoughts in the new longer poems that you might find in an essay. But this time they’re in the arena of a poem and they’re numbered and and they’re discreet and they’re fine right where they are and I’m not trying to work them into an essay.

With “House Sitting,” it is sentimental. I may have written a similar poem in the past but never published it. Or even shown it to anybody. There might be a few other house sitting like things in my journals.

SW: So why do you decide to share it this time?

CS: Because there’s a paragraph that begins that sequence that is all about the stroke and about the fact that these poems were made consciously after the stroke, my first attempts at poetry after the stroke. And the one that precedes “House-Sitting” titled “Mettle” was a poem that I took from a book about how to teach poetry to children by Kenneth Koch. It just goes through the elements: When I am earth . . . , When I am fire . . .

When I am Earth / I stand perfectly still / at a slight angle // When I am water / I vanish quickly into crevices // When I am fire / I brandish heat among / clusters of frozen starlight // When I am Wind / I string loose figures / onto a clothesline / and lean back / hands up in surrender

I think there is a quality of relief, that I’m able to write poetry again. Re-realizing I can make a joke in poetry. Those are happy poems to me.

SW: How did it really feel coming back to writing from your stroke? Was there a time when there were just no words?

CS: It was all happening in my head but getting it through my hand onto the screen. . . Learning to type again was a lot easier than holding the pen. But even to email a couple lines to say, “I’ve had a stroke, and I can’t take part in this now.” That would take 15 exhausting minutes. It was a huge recalibration, again that comes back in, when the body won’t move a certain way without pain or without rethinking.

But the words were always there. I think one thing I still have trouble with is deciding, particularly with prose, deciding what I’m going to write about. That’s why people have been asking me to do blurbs and I’ve been saying yes, because that’s been an easy way for me to concentrate. I get to write one glittering paragraph about something I read. They make the decision for me. It’s been harder to make a decision about subject matter in terms of essays but not so much with short stories. That still seems new and interesting, but with essays, I have a hard time finally settling on a subject.

SW: That makes sense with these poems, these different slices of perspective and of how your mind works. The shapes of the poems vary greatly in this book and are so much different than your other books. For example with Royals there’s a lot of space on the page. It’s pretty consistent though whereas this one, you just have so much more pushed together.

CS: The line is a little longer. It’s less broken, I think the same principles are at play with collage, now I give a little more of the picture before I pull the listener/reader away. It’s still fragmented but I give longer glances through the peephole.

SW: And also just how they appear on the page is so different than I think I’m used to reading a lot of your poetry.

CS: It’s so you can read them with some sense of continuity. It’s meant to do that instead of making you feel that you’re being spun through an object.

I was so surprised when I heard Eileen [Myles] for the first time reading so fast and edgy because I was like, oh, it just pours down. That’s meant to be a pour.

SW: There’s a common theme throughout your books of other people coming into your work through titles, quotes, fragments. Where did that tradition come from for you?

CS:  I think partly, a fear of no one using poetry the way that I think it should be used. And so I leave it in there as sort of a teaching moment sometimes, ways to use poetry, ways to be excited by it. And just out of a fear that it will be abandoned and not used or that these writers might not get their due once they are no longer on earth, and also because I like to play with the notion that you can become someone else. You can take on their tone of voice. You can be influenced by their life. But how close can you really get? So I like to kind of play with that. It’s so widely accepted by painters to copy the greats, but then when it comes to poets, they say, “Oh, no, I don’t copy, I don’t do that.” That is also ignoring the fact that there’s nothing new under the sun. The tradition is so old in fact, I like to be a derivative poet, it is a very freeing thing to say and to know, because then you’re not looking over your shoulder anymore. You have accepted it.

SW: And can you speak on your references to people through this book?

CS: Yeah, the one that mentions Donald [Guravich—artist, poet, and Joanne Kyger’s husband], that’s from when I was doing a lot of imitations, when I was coming back from the stroke. “Hotel Francois” is me copying Gertrude Stein. And then there is, “Psychic TV” which was a straight up William Burroughs cutup via Genesis P-Orridge. And I love “Dreaming of Li-Po” too. Which was a translation of Tu Fu, a translation cut up. I was reintroducing myself to different ways of doing it.

SW How did you do the translations?

CS: I read three English translations and there were two bad ones and then in mine I tried to update it. Some of the lines, like the second one, “gone to the corner store,” is obviously not from the original poem. That’s just a trope from an old blues song that did something good to the rest of the poem.

SW: There’s some lines recurring in your writing.  The line “I have dreamed of your face . . .” You keep coming back to it and using it in different ways.

CS: Right, because the sentiment was something like that. I love how Robert Desnos phrased that, so I put in his French line.

SW: What’s the original line . . .

CS: “I have dreamed of you so much that your shadow has worn thin” or something like that, something so erotic, casual but desperate.

SW: How do these certain phrases work for you?

CS: It’s like sampling. I just want to put that in there and it’s like subliminal messaging in rap. It’s not quite a sample. It’s just like little subliminals of the past lurking in the mortars. And you are able to get through that little door in translation, keeping the poem a real poem in English by bringing everything you have to it, which means you’re old turns of phrase, whatever is going to make it a poem in English to you, a Cedar Sigo poem in English, live ghosts have to be trapped under the lacquer.

SW:  What do you think the ghosts are in this book?

CS: Yes, “Dreaming of Li-Po” is definitely bleeding stylistic ghosts.Then there are ghosts propped up in memoriam like Diane Di Prima, and there’s a poem called “Nightfall,” and the ghosts in that are the different installations at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa.

SW: I feel like your dating in this book is an ode to Joanne Kyger.

CS: Definitely, and especially with these poems that took more than a week, then I feel like I need to put the date down.

SW: Do you have a favorite poem in this book?

CS:  I love “Saint of the Abyss,” the longer poem.

SW: Do you want to read that one? I also want to talk to you about having a big book publisher, but also you’ve had two chapbooks: Saint of the Abyss and Occasional Objects out since your last book. And to talk to you more about Saint of the Abyss, the poem as well as the chapbook that felt a lot more raw and like you were really clawing your way back from the stroke, do you feel that way?

CS: Yes, the centerpiece of this book is this poem in which I talk about coming back from the hospital after the stroke and my cat avoiding me thinking that I had died and spooking my cat.

SW: How does the poem come to you? How do you choose which ones stay with you and are relevant and get brought into the next collection?

CS: Well, pretty much all the poems that I write over five days, it’s kind of foolproof, over five days, write at least three lines and then you can cut five or whatever your arbitrary number is at the end. That’s never really failed me. At this point, I’m not going to spend five days on a poem and then not type it up, probably. I might ruthlessly edit it before it gets typed up and then give myself one more day to add more data or something. Some kind of backstage drama.

SW: Can you talk about your approach to editing?

CS: Yeah, I just have extreme self-hate, and that’s helpful. Before I get rid of something, I rearrange it before it gets thrown in the garbage can, it usually gets rearranged. I try to use it, any living organism. But if it becomes dead, I’m forced to kind of dispense with it. But I will try. And I let dice and chance determine the order.

SW: Will you read excerpts from “Saint of the Abyss”?

(Audio of Cedar reading excerpts.)

Poetic gestures of interment or straight up tagging onto the walls,
under non reflective glass and frames, in font,
words carved in reverse through the screen
with hauntingly long trains of gowns
and the blood tapered through the underbrush
our installation to hint at its continuous river stepping in-and-out
is an event a storyboarded comic we want
recreated as ephemeral but still printed (names) more internment
language tossed onto the page as a weapon asleep
that was simply one afternoon spent bent down
scribbling entirely focused and entwined with space
I am allowed to run a little ahead of myself or not?
The idiots’ secret, what is it like to write well?

*

The war has gone fully internal at the moment–green snot–night sweats–I set a lock out on my creaking door.

2

Yesterday, I was being paid to fight off the assertion that Native thought and philosophy could lie down next to the bride of white theology. It didn’t work the first time around and now we have so-called allies crowding the entrance, an almost separate crusade.

3.

“Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun”– from René Char’s war journal Leaves of Hypnos. I think of Beckett and the last line in his translation of Apollinaire’s “Zone,” “Sun corseless head,” or Roger Shattuck’s take on the same line: “The sun a severed neck.”

4.

Money is a war of the unknown future, forcing yourself to say “yes” out of fear that no other work will come. I now know that the poem, in all of its parts, will come forward to embrace the future.

*

Back home from the hospital
The cat avoids me
I am a ghost
of my former self.

*

The carousing red middle of the kerosene lamp, the cat inches off the record player. I can hear a few nightbirds through the screen, upstairs. I walk the hall and whisper John Wiener’s lines from 707 Scott Street, those that failed me this morning, “For I have looked down into the pit and turned away trembling.”

*

You die and fall through space
        to lie as an outline
memory is a few shattered pieces lost
no lilies on earth were ever mine,
plucked from a spring, in secret
A rush of figures
spring out from middle hell,
the darkened
faces that linger in back
     wandering

SW: Beautiful. One last question: is there anyone you want to shout out, any artists that you’ve been thinking about, enjoying the work of?

CS: Yes, I love the visual artist and musician Seth Bogart. He lives in L.A. He’s amazing. He does funny ceramics that seem kind of 80s and almost as if they’re painted with makeup. Pulp paperbacks fresh from the kiln. I remember he once made a giant bottle of Exclamation perfume from paper mâché. That may have been for a video shoot. He is always referencing the most hilarious things.