Discussing Meg Day’s The Last Psalm at Sea Level

This is the second part in a two-part Q&A with Meg Day. You can find the first part, a discussion of Meg’s work at the Guggenheim Museum, here.

We sat down with Meg Day to discuss their 2014 poetry collection The Last Psalm at Sea Level which won the 2013 Barrow Street Prize and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. Meg tells us about the stories behind some of the poems and how their meanings have shifted from the cultural changes in the ten years since publication.

PJI: What drove you to choose the poem “The Last Psalm at Sea Level” as the title of the collection, and when was it written chronologically in the development of the book?

Meg: Last Psalm was not originally the title of the collection and the title poem was one of the last I wrote. I had sent a different version of the manuscript out to a few prizes and received some feedback that the original title was too close to that of a memoir by a well-known writer. I felt some hesitation about using the word psalm in the title, but as the poem came into focus, it seemed all too clear that I had begun what has remained a pretty steadfast relationship with the texts of Psalms and an even deeper tie to that of musicality in its many proliferations.

PJI: The title Last Psalm at Sea Level evokes the ocean and its changing levels, and the title poem is conflicted over the role of the ocean, saying that the shoreline "made me / a tidepool instead of solid stone" (69). What role does the figure of the tide pool play as a symbol of the ‘betweenity’ of your life just as the tide pool is the likely originator of life itself on Earth?

Meg: One of the lucky things about this collection is how much it’s taught me over time: the image systems reveal new facets of meaning and relevance in my life while the politics embedded in some of the poems betray both a kind of incredible self-prophesizing and an almost subterranean fear. The image of the tidepool is one that has grown on me and also with me. When I read this poem, I can recognize easily its conception, its first sound; the poem transports me without effort to the room where I wrote it and, too, to the morning I was remembering in those opening lines. At that point in my life, I don’t think I could have better articulated the grief I felt in sensing that I had to leave behind my home and everyone in it in order to stay alive. Even the poem doesn’t really yet understand why, or what will be possible elsewhere, which is what makes it, for me, such a desperately brave poem full of difficult, near-inexplicable want. The tidepool is, of course, the keystone to both the dramatic irony of the image but also its eventual opening as a metaphor in my life. Tidepools were indeed threaded, topographically, though my own points of origin; they figured largely in my youth, but often as a site of warning: dangerous, treacherous, the place all kinds of beautiful things get trapped. Without a change in perspective, it’s difficult to see all that’s possible inside of constraint, or what opportunities emerge when we begin to see the tidepool, if uninterrupted, as a true site of poiesis. Sometimes distance is the only thing that can turn perspective on its head. This poem—and the decision it helped me make—opened the door to the future I’m living.

PJI: A Body and Potential: Perhaps grief is a contemplation on potential – what could have been, what was once capable of happening. I was struck by the “Portrait of My Selves…”poems that looked within yourself for threads of other possibilities and other potentials, versions of yourself that coexist all in the cohesive whole of your body. Can you tell me about this imagining, splitting up into selves and the putting together into portraits?

Meg: It’s hard for me to convey, even and especially to the younger generation of queer and trans kin, how different things were ten years ago. It felt as if conversations about gender and sexuality in poems—in life, in public—were still heavily surveilled and frequently censored, socially subdued through shame, interrogation, disregard, punishment. When I think about this series of poems, that is what comes to mind first: the pushback I got in workshop, the refusal I felt, the rather inane questions about how in the world one self could express more than one gender. It sounds goofy to explain it in this moment, as if I’m hyperbolizing, as if I’m perhaps too sensitive. That’s not what happened. These poems drove workshops into a kind of frenzy as they tried and failed to move beyond semantic reductions of sex and gender; I’m not sure we ever did. The poems must have begun, then, as a kind of flare, no? Surely I sensed the atmospheric pressure? At the time, it felt freeing to write those poems—maybe even fun. Satisfying, absolutely. I felt I was playing with my own fire. The poems let me ask: is gender a pastoral? Is it tonal or cinematic? Can I create a scene that suspends how my gender sometimes feels: quiet & rural, beautiful & strange? How lovely it is when I can get it to sit still. Remarkable that such curiosity can hit so delicate a nerve.

PJI: In your poem beginning with “To My Student,” you explore the strength and change resulting from “normal people standing around.” As genocidal, pandemic, climate, and political crises compound today in the last 10 years since you published the collection, what is it like to stand in 2025, in defiance and, in the word you use, ovation?

Meg: I love the youthful vigor of this poem. It feels dated to me, yes, and betrays a kind of passion—for people, for teaching, for hope, even—that many folks have promised me, some more kindly than others, would burn out over time. I am not someone who think earnestness is an offence; I remain a little old fashioned about following dreams and, if anything, increasingly convinced of the power of people. But it’s true that my fervor has matured; like many of my comrades, I’m far more strategic with my pedagogy and praxis than I used to be and more adept at finding and inviting folks to less obvious ways of having an impact. The world is, indeed, different—but when has that not been the case? We underestimate the power we have as a collective, as bodies, as mutual aid networks, and webs of information: tech or analog, action or archive. The poem is cheeky about mobility—standing around, standing up, standing against, standing in ovation—because protests, both big and small, work. In this moment, especially as we witness and live through and survive and grieve genocide and climate collapse and pandemics and political authoritarianism in high-resolution, we have more power than we’ve been led to believe is true. Remain suspicious of naysayers and instead find out for yourself the covert and overt power of your own actions.