Interviews

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THE  SPEAKERS  IN  PAISLEY  REKDAL’S  POEMS are often observers—drawing connections between the private and the personal, the historical, mythological, and scientific. Her lyricism and her combination of loose, free verse and structured, traditional forms come together to emphasize the slippage between fact and fantasy, old myths and new. In a review of Imaginary Vessels for the Los Angeles Times, Craig Morgan Teicher writes that Paisley Rekdal is “a poet of observation and history, one who carefully weighs the consequences of time. She revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries in which ‘we hold still for the camera, believing / it will shore up time, knowing it won’t.”‘

Paisley Rekdal is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) and Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh, 2012), a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon Books, 2000), and a hybrid genre, photo-text memoir entitled Intimate (Tupelo Press, 2012). Her book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in September 2017. She’s been awarded an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Laurence Goldstein Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the 2011-2012 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship.

Newly appointed as Utah Poet Laureate, Rekdal is invested in exploring humanity in all its complexities. She shies away from nothing: racism, sex, violence, religion, death, and all the intersections therein. Her voice is clear and original, allowing her to navigate through thought and emotion with relative ease. To read her work is to engage in a conversation about compassion and self-reflection that goes beyond the page. We met with her at the AWP Conference in Washington, DC, where we talked about ethical memory, World of Warcraft, and the failure of the American Dream.

ALIA BALES

Your work straddles lyric and narrative. What do you see as the role of narrative in poetry?

PAISLEY REKDAL

A lot of people have said I’m a narrative poet, and they don’t mean that in a good way. Narrative is not hip right now, and I take that as a formal challenge to be even more narrative. My newest project is a rewriting of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, taking several of his major myths and reworking them. It’s not a one-to-one translation where the gods come down and are made more contemporary by wearing Nikes. I’ve seen a lot of those reworkings, the kind that make the formal innovation Ovid was working with glib. I want to figure out what the myth is about, then reset it in a completely different contemporary setting. For instance, in the Tiresias myth, Tiresias lived as a woman and a man. I retell this story as a mother who has breast cancer and a daughter who is going through gender reassignment surgery. Both are trying to figure out, am I entirely myself now? Another story involves Io the young woman raped by Zeus and changed into a cow. In my story, she is a woman who ends up as a quadriplegic stuck in a body she doesn’t understand anymore.

Narrative allows me to do that. Narrative gives me characters. But writing a narrative poem is not natural to me. I have moments that seem narrative. But if you’re doing a narrative poem in the way that Ovid was thinking of a narrative poem, really telling a story, suddenly you are thinking of time very differently. You’re bringing in plot and foreshadowing. You’re thinking like a fiction writer.

I learned the difference between narrative and lyric in a pedagogy class with my graduate students, a bunch of fiction writers and a bunch of poets. We were reading a James Tate poem a student brought in to show us that poets can write prose. He said, “This is like a short story.” And the short story writers went insane. “This is not a short story at all,” they said. But the poets thought it read like a short story because there’s character. Something happens to that character, something else happens to that character. The end. The fiction writers said it was not a short story because there was no reason for anything. In fiction, there’s a cause-effect relationship. In poetry, there is no necessary cause and effect. Something happens, something happens, something happens, something happens. The cause and effect, if you will, is the resonance between the images. But that is not cause and effect. When you are writing a narrative poem, you have to think about psychological cause and effect. This happens, thus they start to feel this way, thus they act that way. It changes the nature of the poem entirely. A lot of the time we call a poem narrative simply because it has a character and the character says something or does something. Oftentimes though, the poem disrupts the very idea of what a narrative actually is.

BALES

Many of your poems are interested in, to quote Ovid, “bodies changing into other bodies.” For example, the “Epithalamium” sequence in Six Girls Without Pants. How are you engaging the Metamorphoses and this concept?

REKDAL

One continuing obsession in my work is about this nature of change. This whole book is about questioning the nature of change. What’s fascinating about Ovid’s Metamorphoses is that there is no consistent answer. Many people think change is only a form of punishment in that book. People become animals because they behave badly. Change is metonymic, it becomes the emblem of your past behaviors. If you are a greedy person, all you do is eat later on. Eat yourself to death. If you’re Acteon, a hunter, you turn into a deer and are torn apart by dogs. But there are a lot of people who change for the better. Like Baucis and Philemon in Imaginary Vessels. They get change that is not a punishment. In fact, change was the reward. You did good and you want to live and die together, so you will turn into an ever-blooming myrtle. Ovid himself changes the nature of change from story to story to story. I love that.

CHRIS MACCINI

In Imaginary Vessels you inhabit various personas, including Mae West’s. What do you see as the limitations and opportunities of personification?

REKDAL

The limitation is that it’s still you, as much as you’re performing as somebody else. Those Mae West sonnets are unusual for me because I wrote all of them, except two or three, using only letters that appear in the opening line of the poem. So there’s a formal limitation that is not obvious, but it’s something that registers sonically over time as a way of enacting and pointing out the real delight of her humor to me—which is wordplay. She used to compare herself to Shakespeare, which is absurd, because she’s not a Shakespearean writer, though she was obviously committed to wit. There’s a high level of verbal play in her one-liners and humor, and that was one of the opportunities for me to figure out a formal way to reenact voice and a persona. The idea of these sonnets was also to be sort of ossifying—they’re so trapped in their wordplay that they don’t open up in ways I would more naturally like. One of the things I love about persona poems is they allow you to imagine another character, but they also push you to figure out your own limitations as a thinker and a writer.

MACCINI

Is there anything that the persona frees you up to do? Do you find you’re able to explore different ideas or themes?

REKDAL

What it frees me up to do—especially in the “Shooting the Skulls: A Wartime Devotional” sonnet sequence—is make an almost didactic move. Several of those sonnets talk back to me and sort of say, “Why are you overlaying your family’s narratives and wars onto people who had nothing to do with those wars?” I was writing those sonnets and thinking what it was to capture someone’s individuality once it’s been lost. Talking back in a persona allowed me to point out that ethical problem. You can’t just transfer your emotions onto something and have that not be another form of erasure. The fact is, those bodies that were disinterred from the Colorado State Mental Institution, they’re gone. Those photographs were fascinating because they’re trying to reclaim individuality to these people and give them a sense of humanity.

Whenever you have a representation, you have a fantasy, you have an idea of what that person is or is not supposed to be. There is no reclamation, there is only the fantasy of intimacy, the fantasy of seeing and reclaiming and getting back to an original lost body. That’s what those moments of talking back offer, an ethical nudge to say, yeah, you think you’re doing that, but you just made another erasure.

I was reading the forensic archaeologist Shannon Novak’s work when I was working on those sonnets. She has this great essay about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which happened in Utah about a century and a half ago and is still debated today. Mormon settlers slaughtered a wagon train party headed west, and covered it up as a Native American massacre. The church recovered the bones and bits of garments, buttons, pieces of shoe leather, and returned them to people they think of as the descendants. And people started to—even though they had no way of proving these buttons were from their grandmother or great-grandmother—treat them with reverence and assign them a relic status. There was a way in which they transferred all of their sense of historical trauma onto bodies that may or may not even belong to them.

What Novak talks about is a transference of emotion onto different objects. I thought that was fascinating but also disturbing. A lot of people have traumatic narratives within their family stories or their own lives and we don’t necessarily have the physical evidence of them. In fact, memorials work on that level, which is why we go to the Washington Monument, or the Lincoln Memorial. We don’t have attachment to them personally, but we transfer our emotional ideas upon these cultural icons, these eulogized sculptures. In lieu of a body, we create bodies.

BALES

In The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, you include two versions of how your grandfather acquired his laundromat. In your mother’s version, he received it for safekeeping from a Japanese neighbor interned during World War II. But according to other family members, he purchased it. You wrote, “If I have children I will tell them my mother’s story about Gung Gung’s laundromat,” instead of what actually happened. Why?

REKDAL

I’m finishing a book, The Broken Country, which collects oral histories from Southeast Asian refugees in post-1970 America. And there, the importance for me was facts, to get these people’s narratives right and to not indulge in fantasy. But one of the things I found fascinating is how to a certain extent a traumatic narrative is also a fantasy narrative.

The problem of narrative is that it is constructed event—it always has beginning, middle, and end. The perfect narrative has a sense of resolution. The essay about my grandfather was about that fantasy of narrative. What does the narrative offer us? Closure. Out of a damaging set of circumstances, my family came to the United States, and my grandmother would never speak about what happened to the family, the racist things I know she experienced. She’d be mortified that I’m telling everybody everything all the time. So that fantasy construction is in some ways an emotional connection with my grandmother, a healing, where people can all get along.

America is a place of opportunity. America is a place of cross­ cultural connection. America is a place where a bad past can be magically erased or eased over in a kumbaya way. And the reality is that that isn’t true. So there is something beautiful about telling that story. When I wrote that essay, I thought that if l had children, I would tell that story over and over to give them a sense of hope. Now I think I would tell both versions. Partly because the facts are in dispute. My grandmother has many reasons to want to lie about that story. She hated Japanese Americans, she hated Japanese people. And my grandfather hated the English. So there was no sense of historical feeling there at all.

MACCINI

Why do you think she clung to that narrative even though it went against what she was comfortable with?

REKDAL

My grandmother never clung to that narrative—my mother did, I think because that’s the assimilation story, the story of America we’ve been told over and over, and it’s an attractive one. Who doesn’t want to believe, at some level, whether it’s a salad bowl or a melting pot, that there’s a possibility of entering and assimilating—And I don’t even like that word—into American culture and being a deep part of it and not being the outsider? I think that’s what that story is about: how two different types of outsiders use the system to their advantage.

That fantasy about becoming American is powerful because it’s terrifying. You can spend your life in a country and then be told you’re not one of us and you never were and you didn’t realize it. You’ve been going along fine for a time and then someone is like, “Where are you from?” or “Go back to your country.” And you’re like, “No thank you, I’ve been here the whole time. This is my country.” That sense of being deeply franchised in America is a real longing and it’s not to be taken lightly.

MACCINI

In The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, you write about tensions you feel with your racial identity in various countries, but it seems like the place you feel the most discomfort is in the United States, when you travel to the South, and in Seattle growing up. Is there something about America that makes it more uncomfortable than a foreign country?

REKDAL

When you’re in a foreign country, you’re prepared to be an outsider, but when you’re in your own nation you’re not. That’s what makes it uncomfortable. What was funny to me living in Korea, spending time in Japan, traveling to China, and, recently, living in Southeast Asia is how familiar some of the racial and gender stereotypes are. It’s not as if Americans are the only ones who have them. It turns out you can find them everywhere you go because of our media. We’ve exported so many things. In those countries, they want people to be lighter skinned, they want women to have certain eye shapes, to be a certain physical size. They’re just more open about it, in a weird way. Whereas in America, I think there is an emphasis on being polite and hiding.

That’s why this election—for me at least, and for many people­—was deeply unsettling, because you think, after eight years, we haven’t moved the needle more significantly. When you hear these things being said—probably not representative of all Trump voters, I understand that—but they say, “Finally we can say what we’ve always wanted to say” and it’s one of those ugly, ugly moments where you’re like, “Is this really what you’ve always been thinking?” That’s what makes it uncomfortable in America. And maybe it’s also some level of hope, to say that because I’ve grown up with these people—half my family is white—why would I assume that’s how they feel about me?

In the Atlantic article that Ta-Nehisi Coates did with Obama, he makes a comment that Obama’s biracial background might have made him not as good about fighting some things, like he didn’t understand the depth of certain white anger and anxiety around African Americans.

MACCINI

Because half his family is white?

REKDAL

Right, and of course they’re going to treat him well. Of course they’re going to love him. And he might see some level of racism, but it’s going to be tempered by the fact of his presence. It was the same with me. Being biracial gives you a fascinating insight into the way people will behave, but at the same time there are ways in which you might not see fully how bad it can be.

MACCINI

In his Willow Springs interview, Thomas Lynch said, “The reason poets aren’t read is because we don’t hang them anymore.” He goes on to describe an obligation he feels that artists, and poets in particular, should be engaged in political discourse. Do you feel that obligation?

REKDAL

What I find hard about that question is that I don’t know what we mean by political. People can look at Adrienne Rich and say that is political writing, they can look at some Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and say that is political writing. They can look at Patricia Smith, they can name a dozen writers and immediately point out what’s political writing. But the question is: Is it political writing because of the bodies that have written the poems? Or is it the subject matter? Or is it a combination of both? Because one could make the argument that all of us are political writers.

Maybe narrative is a political act because you’re writing a narrative poem that is reaching a lot of people, and it describes your own existence that has not previously been described before. That’s what Adrienne Rich’s target was, that political act. But I really don’t know what people mean by “political poem” anymore.

BALES

In your Fogged Clarity interview, you said you thought that if you were to have an honest discussion about some political things in a public sphere that maybe poetry isn’t the best way to do that because it limits the conversation. You went on to argue that narrative in poetry is a political act in itself.

REKDAL

That’s me trying to work out the definition of political. Because if the political is ultimately an argument we need to make about policy, then poetry is a terrible place to do that. First of all, the audience is limited and second of all, didactic verse still exists—it’s just not a lot of people want to read it, and for good reason. But oftentimes poems rely on an engagement with the world, of a particular person in the world, and that person’s experience in the world. In that sense, a poem is always about change, and a didactic political piece of writing can’t be about change. You’re arguing from a fixed position, and that’s propaganda, so that’s why it doesn’t work for me as a poem.

Going back to Lynch’s argument, a poem relies on complexity. It’s not that political thought doesn’t depend on it, but that political writing has to make an argument. Political thinking can be complex, and in that sense we could re-frame the question to say, “In what ways can poems enact political thinking?” We see hundreds of examples because we see people engaged with the world and engaged with ideas that are not fixed positions, and they are working toward and through difficult ideas. Patricia Smith has a wonderful poem written in the voice of a skinhead, and it’s not an easy poem. It’s not what you think. It’s not an automatic Nazi salute, Sieg Heil. There’s complexity.

KIMBERLY POVLOSKI

You do a lot of research in your work—historical and scientific. What’s the difference between truth and fact, and what’s poetry’s role in that discussion?

REKDAL

Poetry is all truth and very little fact, unfortunately. Fact is normally in the realm of journalism, but there is an ethical component to that question—when poetry relies on truth, oftentimes facts will change around time, will change around events. But it becomes problematic when you’re dealing with people who have been de-voiced. There is an ethical problem at the heart of the “Shooting the Skulls” sequence.

In his book, Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricœr talks about ethical memory, which is essentially the attempt to try to remember all of the people who normally become voiceless in traumatic conflict. He himself was interned at a concentration camp during World War II, so he was generally speaking about wartime conflicts and how we think about them and memorialize them. We think about soldiers, but we don’t think about the women who were raped. We don’t think about the children who died. We don’t think about the descendants of the people who survived the war. We don’t think about the disabled. We don’t think about the mentally ill.  We don’t think about the illiterate. We don’t think about the poor. His idea about ethical memory is that we need to reclaim as many of these voices as possible.

When a poem goes for truth, one question you need to ask is, does it reclaim or erase or continue to forget certain existences? Some people are able to speak for themselves and some people aren’t. Forgetting is a political act. We don’t memorialize or remember certain people, and we essentially continue to erase them because it benefits another narrative.

Narrative is ultimately a political statement too, if you think about who gets written into a narrative and who gets taken out. Going back to the question regarding truth and fact, I would never ignore facts in a poem if they speak to an existence that I don’t want to see because it doesn’t suit my narrative. There are facts that matter more than others, and to continue to ignore certain facts only to back up your personal story can become problematic. At the worst, it continues to erase real historical people that had very particular meanings to their lives. At the best, it will highlight that you’re only using history as a sort of recitation of your own awesomeness.

MACCINI

Do you see truth as an emotional reality and facts as objective reality?

REKDAL

Facts are objective, exactly. If handled badly, you can overload anything with facts and it becomes about showing off—I know all this stuff and you don’t. And then you lose the line, the sense of music. In some ways I’m not going to have a good answer to this question because some part of this is instinctual. You don’t know why there is a connection, but you’re researching and you start writing, and you free write, and you put things together, and you take notes, and suddenly you’re like, that’s what I’m interested in, that’s what I’m talking about.

Why did I become fascinated with the photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis? There was nothing on the surface except that they’re beautiful. But I kept going back and back and the more I read about him, the more I realized he’s just anxious about modernity. The project looks like it’s about American Indians but it’s actually about whiteness. That’s where research helps. The more questions you ask, the more likely you are to realize something about what you’re examining.

But the other thing I rely on to balance things is music. Poetry has to sound good. If you’ve got a lot of facts, they don’t tend to sound good. “Five million people died in the Johannesburg mines” is a really hard line to scan. I spend a lot of time reading drafts out loud, making sure they sound beautiful. To a certain extent, I rely on the music to tell me there’s something wrong here. Whether it’s intellectual or in terms of the image or whatever, something is wrong here, so I can circle it and go back.

BALES

Is that only with poetry, or do you do that with prose as well?

REKDAL

It’s only with poetry because—and this is terrible to say—I don’t care about prose. To me, it’s the dumping ground. If I have other things I have to get to, I’ll put that in prose because I don’t care if it sounds as pretty. It’s not like I don’t work on the sentences. I just don’t care as much.

MATTHEW MAPES

What about other forms? You put a lot of work into the blog you kept while traveling through Southeast Asia. It felt like an essay. How does working online, in Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. work into your view of literature, given the new spaces we have to write in the world?

REKDAL

You’re right about the blog—at some point it became exhausting because I had to keep the blog, but I was writing it like an essay I would publish in a magazine. I also edit and work with the website, Mapping Salt Lake City. One of the things I learned is that you can’t just do a one-to-one transference. Certain material works better on the internet. We read differently online. We have that great back end feature where you can see how many people clicked on a piece and how long they stayed. Longer form journalism, longer form essays, no one stays on them for long. Everyone wants pithy, two hundred, maybe five hundred words, short sentences, very direct. And it sounds obvious, but that was eye opening to me. I should have known that. I work in poetry and I work in nonfiction, and there are things that I know—that’s an essay and that’s a poem. You feel it instinctively. You know the form demands different kinds of reading experiences and different kinds of language.

MACCINI

Does that relate to how you said you don’t care about prose? Is it something you don’t engage with on an artistic level?

REKDAL

This is probably my failing, because every prose writer in America would be like, “Fuck you. This is art!” And I would have to say the same thing. The arguments I made suggest there is an art to digital writing too. I have not been taught to respect it. But there’s a formal quality to it. Twitter, say what you will, is a form of writing. A Facebook post is a form of writing. We may not take it seriously, but they’re all forms of expression.

My first training was not as a creative writer, it was as a medievalist. I sometimes think how amazing it would be to have had medieval Twitter, because when you’re doing research into the medieval period, you’re so limited by the text. There’s just not a lot of material. One of the great things about Twitter and Facebook and blogs is that they form an incredible historical record that’s constantly evolving. If you were an historian coming back and trying to figure out what 21st century America was like, you would have records that no other period of history has. The ability of people to express themselves like that is fantastic.

That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do a website for Mapping Salt Lake City and not a regular book. Once you’ve got a book, you’ve got an editing process and selection process. Certain voices come in because you want it to sound a certain way. The internet works against that—it’s community. But what I also learned is that there’s a class­ based privilege on the internet. You and I, we go on the internet and we’re there for hours, buying things and reading blogs and Twittering and Instagramming. But a lot of communities go to the internet because they’ve got to get health services, they’ve got to get job information. I’m in, I’m out, boom. They don’t play there. Their reading and writing experience on the internet is different. All of these things came up while writing the blog. And the blog finally killed me. I got midway through my time in Vietnam and thought, oh my god, just take a break. And then I didn’t go back. But it was a lot of fun too, the instantaneous reactions. People would send me emails like, “I love that piece.” That never happens. It was satisfying.

MAPES

How do you think the growing access to the internet, and the subsequent shrinking of the world has affected marginalized voices? Has it given them a chance to come out? Or has it given them more places to be hidden?

REKDAL

My suspicion would be a little of both. There are always going to be the outliers that learn how to use technology for their benefit. But one of the things that globalism has taught us is that people don’t necessarily like to be connected—maybe because it’s not that everybody is connected in their individuation; we’re connected via capitalism, too. So it’s not just that the internet allows for freedom of individual expression—it’s still within a certain type of economy of thought and self-expression based on Western values and capitalistic practices.

Have you heard about gold farmers? World of Warcraft is this endless game, but you can skip levels if you have gold that you can buy new weapons with. Rich players, mostly in the West, don’t want to go through all the levels. So they purchase gold. There were a couple communities in China where people were playing 24/7, just making gold, and selling it for real money online to players in the West so that they could skip ahead. Here’s leisure time of the West capitalizing on Chinese production and labor.

In Tung-Hui Hu’s book, A Prehistory of the Cloud, he talks about all these ways in which digital leisure time involves a lot of invisible capital and production. The reason our Facebook feeds are free of pornography and beheadings is because people in the Philippines watch animal torture and child pornography and the worst of humanity eight hours a day to scrub it—no algorithm can actually determine with 100 percent accuracy what is bad and what is good. People are getting traumatized in the second and third world so we can go through our feed and not see that stuff. When we’re talking about whether the internet opens up the world or just re-marginalizes the same voices, I think it does a bit of both. If you’re a rich Chinese person in Hong Kong, you’re not having these problems either. But if you’re poor and you have access to the internet and you figure out how to use it in certain ways, your labor might go into this.

I lived in Hanoi, where you can’t get Twitter, you can’t get Facebook, but everybody has it anyway because they get a VPN. You go into a café and see everyone on their computers with their VPNs. Are they reading The Guardian? The New York Times? No. They’re on Facebook, scrolling, looking at ads, which produces money for the West. Here’s a communist nation full of people who are entering a capitalist economy because they want to be online. This has nothing to do with digital expression, but someone will always take advantage of someone else. And it works both ways. It is both a liberating experience but also a reinforcement of the same things that are going on.

MACCINI

Can you talk about the ekphrastic impulse in your work? I’m thinking of the way the text in Intimate responds directly to the photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis.

REKDAL

For me, poetry and photography are similar media. They’re static representations of a moment. And they may represent and create multiple emotions, changeable complex emotions, but they’re highly artistic, highly crafted, highly manipulated moments in time. I use the poems as my own photographs, basically. Sometimes a documentary photograph in Intimate has a distant, if not nonexistent, relationship to the prose that accompanies it. I wanted that interesting way in which we read the photograph one way, we read the text another way, and then we see them together and think, wow, that’s a completely different way of moving these against each other.

MACCINI

You said you’re creating a third art object, which exists within the reader—

REKDAL

Only within the reader. I have ideas of what that object should be. There’s a reason why I put this photograph next to this thing, but the resonance that I hope the reader experiences may not entirely exist. Maybe there’s a possibility for it.

The reader is always the unknown. Sometimes you’ll get the reader you’ve always wanted—which is you. And they’re like, oh my god, you’re brilliant, I totally see everything you were doing, I get it. And then you get the other readers, which is most people, and they’re like, uh, what? But they end up sometimes having rich reading experiences in directions, where you’re like, okay, have fun there, I have no idea how you got there, but I’ll accept it because that’s reading. Reading triggers the imagination, it triggers memories and associations, and those are impossible to pare back. And you don’t want to.

MACCINI

Does that triangulation of poem, photograph, and reader work in a different way than, say, an essay?

REKDAL

I can only point to the work of other writers to answer that question. Because I don’t necessarily know if it does in my work. I was influenced by W.G. Sebald and then Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The ways they use photographs are exactly the ways I wanted to use photographs, where there is that triangulation effect. I cheat, though. In my two books, I have beautiful photos. But if you read Sebald’s work, those photos are incredibly dull. If you were just flipping through them, you would pass them up. They don’t register. And oftentimes they’re badly reproduced, deliberately so. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, same thing. Badly reproduced photos, oftentimes of moments that look like they could be meaningful, but stripped of context. And her text refuses to give you context. Sebald does that too. If you took these photos outside of the context of the text he produces, you’d say, “These are the world’s worst vacation photos.” But when you put them next to text, suddenly we’re talking about the decay of Victorian values as World War I and World War II are looming on the horizon. An innocent beach scene becomes the Holocaust. It’s amazing. He infuses history into photos that are absolutely devoid of any sense of time. Cha does the same thing with her photographs of traumas in Korean history. You’ll see people looking into the distance screaming. But you can’t see what they’re seeing. You have no idea if they’re at a game and they’re shouting excitedly or they’re watching a horrific massacre. That sense of the information being off-screen is terrifying and creates a sense of unease. It disrupts this sense of history. Both Cha’s book and Sebald’s work are trying to reclaim moments of history. Sebald is pointing out what we normally forget, what we normally write over, and trying to bring those to the forefront, to make us see what we have suppressed. In Cha’s case, she’s like, you may think you know, but I’m going to suppress what you want to see, all the time, until it’s actually the opposite. I love their work.

MAPES

That triangulation effect relies on the reader to internalize whatever they are taking in. What is the relationship between the poem and the reader?

REKDAL

That goes back to what I said about ethical memory. At the heart of that idea is an impossibility. The desire to represent the world in language is an attempt to get closer to the reader. To have an empathetic experience, the reader imagines that they’ve walked a mile in your shoes. It is an attempt to force the reader to have a certain emotional response. So in one way, it is this intimate and emotional bid that the artist is making. But there is selfishness and egotism that can never be denied. The persona poem is still the writer. The representation has a failure built into it. There’s always a limitation to what we can express and what we can hear and what we can imagine. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make an attempt. If you make no attempt whatsoever, there’s no communication at all, no possibility of intimacy.

That’s what fascinates me about the nature of intimacy. You’re backing away as much as you’re coming close. What I love about photography is that it purports to document the real world. This thing happened to me, and I saw it. But every photograph is posed. Every photograph is framed. In every photograph, there is more that you don’t see than you do see. As soon as you aim the camera, you’ve said I’m not looking at that. A poem is the same. As soon as you say this fits, something else does not. And so it is not documentary, not an accurate representation of the world. We are more likely to say that is true about a poem. We recognize that it’s highly manipulated. But a lot of people still want to see the photograph as the actual thing. Narrative and lyric poems make an interesting bid, because they are the more realistic forms of poetry. There is a suggestion that the reader is going to say that this happened to the writer. I now know who this person is. That is a mistake. The form suggests transparency, but it is just as opaque as anything else.

BALES

In your poem, “The History of Paisley,” you turn the lens onto yourself in a way that’s accommodating to your readers. I’m wondering how you look at yourself with such clarity.

REKDAL

That’s assuming that I’m right, that I’m looking at myself clearly. Because I could totally be making shit up. I’m writing about myself, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. It’s a performance of myself that appeals to readers because it hits certain notes of humility and charm. I’ve read lots of poems from horrendous people I’ve known personally. We all know horrific people who are writing wonderful poems. I don’t think just because you like the persona that you like me.

BALES

So when you write about yourself, it is a persona as well? How aware are you of that?

REKDAL

This is important with memoir. Oftentimes when you are writing about things that happened, other people look bad. So it’s your turn. You have to turn the gaze around and let yourself look bad. That’s a formal device. But it’s absolutely necessary as a bid to the reader to say, “You can trust what’s coming out of my mouth.” And it works in poetry too. When the self behaves badly, it can do one of two things. If the self behaves too consistently badly, people may be horrified and walk away. But if the self behaves just badly enough, there is a moment of “authenticity,” which is funny because it’s a performance. It is always a performance.

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IN A REVIEW OF SPACE, IN CHAINS for the Kenyon Review, Jeremy Bass writes that Laura Kasischke “[posits] her readers in the space of active consideration, a space in which the reader might feel, as her poems do, actively alive in a world that is both fanuliar and strange, at once common and surreal.” Although Kasischke’s writing comes from familiar places—grief, illness, mortality—those places become transformed by her use of rhythm, space, and juxtaposition.

Laura Kasischke is a novelist and a poet, earning such honors as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has published ten collections of poet­ry, including Gardening in the Dark (Ausable, 2004), Lilies Without (Copper Canyon, 2007), Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon, 2011), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Infin­itesimals (Copper Canyon, 2014). Her novels, some of which have been adapted into films, include The Life Before her Eyes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), In a Perfect World (HarperCollins, 2009), and Mind of Winter (HarperCollins, 2014). The board of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award called Space, in Chains, “a formally inventive work that speaks to the hor­rors and delights of ordinary life in an utterly original way.”

Much of Kasischke’s work explores the line between the mundane and the catastrophic. Apocalypse and mortality sit next to small, everyday moments, such as in “My son practicing the violin,” when the speaker observes that “Even the paper cup in my hand has learned to breathe.” Reading her poetry evokes the surprise and sudden recogni­tion of something that has been on the tip of your tongue, something you haven’t been able to name until that moment—until Kasischke reveals an image or turn of phrase that feels exactly right.

We met with Laura Kasischke at the AWP Conference in Los Angeles, where we talked about existential terror, the Book of Reve­lation, and David Lynch.

DANIELLE WEEKS

Is there anything you’ve been obsessed with recently?

LAURA KASISCHKE

I have revolving fixations, and while this isn’t really poetry related, I’m obsessed lately with true crime. Because of the internet you can watch crimes committed and solved all the time. I think my obses­sion started getting bad with the Serial podcast. I’ve been working on a novel that’s crime related—a horrible murder that happened close to home. So now, with the novel, I’m not just watching crime on TV—I’m, you know, doing research.

CODY SMITH

Is there anything we can learn about storytelling from Serial?

KASISCHKE

There had to be a lot of manipulation there, excellent timing, and presentation with the backstory, but I think the strength of Serial is based on the strong material she kept chipping away at. There was probably a lot of jettisoning—boring interviews and other stuff she took out to streamline it. That’s key—getting lots and lots on the page so you have too much and can get rid of things. I used to say to students, “Just get it on the page. Worry later about the clutter, because it’s far better to have material to get rid of than pulling your teeth to find material.” Documentary filmmakers will say, “We shot 500 hours of footage to make this one hour film about starfish.” And you might think, what a waste of all those other hours. But it couldn’t have happened if they hadn’t had those things to take away. You could compare it to a stream of consciousness poem or novel. Sarah, the narrator in Serial, was not like the surrealists who said you could not revise anything. She revised and shaped and streamlined.

WEEKS

The critic Stephen Burt describes your poetry as suburban surreal­ism.

KASISCHKE

I like the surrealist impulse—which doesn’t necessarily have to be a dream landscape. I like association and the subconscious or uncon­scious mind being the source of inspiration. I grew up in a suburb and often go back there in my brain when I’m writing. I’m not trying to always return to the suburbs, but as a writer you only have so much material.

WEEKS

Your novel In a Perfect World is centered on a pandemic that leads to an apocalyptic world, and you have poems with apocalyptic themes. Is the apocalypse one of your obsessions?

KASISCHKE

In the novel, I was interested in asking, what if the Black Death happened now—if a third of the people died, or two-thirds? As for the poems, I don’t know why the apocalypse comes up. My parents weren’t super religious, but I took to religious stuff like a fish to water. I became much more religious when I was younger than either of them were, and I think it startled them, and they quit going to church just when I got most into it. I still have the Bible that was given to me for my Confirmation, and I completely annotated the Book of Revelation. I’ve always been interested in that book—the dream­-like, surreal kind of crazy content. I used to know whole passages by heart. And I’ve always been interested in the Plague and the Middle Ages—the dance of death.

SMITH

Do you take any of your pacing or rhythm from the Psalms?

KASISCHKE

I think I was influenced by the Bible, yes—I really only encoun­tered language like that in church. We didn’t have much poetry around, and I didn’t know there was a lot of free verse to be read. I had one poetry anthology and thought it was the only contemporary anthology in the world. Maybe I read the Bible because I wanted that experience of language. Until I got to college, I hadn’t encountered anything like Ezra Pound that I might have read instead of the Book of Revelation.

SMITH

I noticed your use of repetition in some of the poems in The In­finitesimals, such as the “Beast” and “Trumpet” poems. How does repetition come into play in the work as a whole?

KASISCHKE

I was looking at plates from this book at The Cloisters in New York, an illuminated Book of Revelation. I was looking at those images for inspiration, but the plates became less interesting than the descriptions of them: “Oh, there is a small bestial form.”I had different poems that came out of the same inspiration, so I gave them the same titles. A few of these poems were many-part po­ems. I pulled them apart, and they worked better separately, so I moved them around. I started to like the idea of many poems under the same umbrella of this title or description. After a while, if I did that long enough,I realized that every book could have the same title. Where do you stop? And honestly, that could be kind of cool, but I don’t know if it would’ve gotten published. Then people would really be asking, “Why do you have 50 poems with the same title? What happened?”

WEEKS

Do you see a difference in purpose between poetry and fiction?

KASISCHKE

I read poetry to see what other people are, how they can change my mind on something or excite me or startle me or inspire some sort of feeling in me or sense of mystery. I’m not the first person to say that poetry needs to be something done in language about something you can’t really do in language. You have that creepy, uncanny feeling—this isn’t a musical telling us something we could otherwise hear about. This is terra incognita. You can’t really go there in language, so the poet’s done the best he or she can to take us somewhere else.

For me, writing poetry is just about me. Not all poets feel this way, and that’s probably a good thing, but I’m writing poems to see what I can come up with. I think poetry is about expressing an experience or a memory or a possibility or something about the human condition you really can’t sit down and talk to anyone about.

Fiction can serve the same function. Mrs. Dalloway is my favor­ite novel, and I wouldn’t call that high entertainment or anything­—it’s about the mind and about this weird place we inhabit. We find ourselves on Earth for a little while trying to figure out what we’re doing and what’s going on, but we spend most of our time trying to pretend that this isn’t all that weird—the fact that we’re going to die and that we have no idea when, and no idea if anything will happen after that. Even if we convince ourselves that we do think we know, we don’t have any proof. There are people who say we do, but we don’t. So, my God, we have to go around acting like it matters if we get to the dentist on time.

ROX

How do you bring freshness and surprise to your work?

KASISCHKE

With a few of my novels it’s been fun—but also frustrating—to start without a plan, just a landscape or character. As I’m writing, I’m figuring out what’s going to happen next, just the way you would as you’re reading a novel. It’s fun until you realize, three-fourths of the way through, oh, this has to be from a different point of view. I should have made a plan but I didn’t know what was going to happen, so how could I?

There’s that Robert Frost quote, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I’m less interested in the reader’s surprise, though, and I think readers can be forced to be surprised by just in­serting something surprising. The exciting part for me is the sub­ conscious—when I suddenly realize, oh, I wasn’t going to say that or maybe I shouldn’t have written that or I didn’t know where I was going but I’m going in the right direction anyway.

It’s easier to play out surprise in a poem because you work on it for a couple of days, then if it doesn’t go anywhere and you’ve surprised yourself by not writing a very good poem, you can throw it away. But if after five years you’ve surprised yourself by not writing a very good novel or one that makes absolutely no sense. . . . Well.

Even with the most formulaic writing, it’s all about the things you discover beyond your rational mind. In writing even the driest of essays, it’s the writing process itself that holds the surprise. Part of what’s fun is not putting on the page what you already thought and wanted to express but using writing as a way to figure out what you have to say. Once you start doing that, it’s all about surprising yourself.
And that happens every night in our dreams. You think, whoa, where’d that come from? Maybe it was something weird or startling or it seemed like someone else’s life, but it came from you. Last night, for example, I dreamed I had a cat litter box I was getting ready to clean. I saw the litter was moving and that something was coming up from underneath. I called my husband—I was freaking out, I don’t know why—and I made him watch. We saw this slimy head come out-like something being born out of there. I went running from the room, upset to see this mucousy baby coming out of the cat litter. After a while n1y husband said,”Oh, Laura, you need to look at this, it’s really cute!”I did not want to look, but I came in and there was a cute little kitten sitting on top of the litter. I was so excited! Where did that come from? The writing process can be like that—just sort of, whoa, where’d that come from? It comes from a part of our brains we don’t have access to when we’re not sleeping, dreaming, or writing.

WEEKS

A lot of your work has humorous moments even if it deals with death or medical recovery. How does humor work in your writing?

KASISCHKE

For a long time I was not interested in humor in poetry—I only wanted the darkest of material and tones. But then I realized I didn’t always want to read the darkest material. I think David Lynch helped me realize how much more morbid things can be when they’re leveled with humor, how they become even more startling and horrify­ing. When I watched Blue Velvet, I was like, oh, that’s it-that’s the tone you want. There are so many funny moments, like at the end with that robin chomping and chomping on a worm, in this really campy, disgusting way that’s hilarious. We laugh at that, but it’s still just horrifying.

WEEKS

In your poem “Twentieth-Century Poetry” you write, “Twenti­eth-century poetry-an eagle/in a cave, bleeding: such/a lot of noble suffering/in a dark and lovely place, full/of widows pleading.” Do you see a kind of violence in twentieth-century poetry or the twentieth century in general that must come out in poetry?

KASISCHKE

I’m sure if you looked at any century’s poetry you would see how it’s influenced by horror, but the twentieth century was really a house of horrors. I was reading an introduction to twentieth-century poetry and thinking about how laughable it was: Well, this poet influenced that poet and this poet influenced that poet, and just kind of tossed in there was the information that he died at Auschwitz and he killed himself after getting out of Auschwitz, and it’s like, oh . . . this says so much more than what the rest of the introduction to this anthology could really say.

ROX

You’ve referred to the “dead white men” in some of your poems—

KASISCHKE

Right. Wordsworth. I’m ashamed now, looking back. I knew nothing about Wordsworth. I didn’t like his name. I didn’t like the idea of there being a British poet named Wordsworth who wrote about daffodils. But did I know anything or had I read anything of his? No, I just assumed. Then I read William Blake and read about him and realized he’d lived a hard, horrible life and wrote some of the strangest poetry. I wanted poetry to be mysterious and weird, and he’s a British man who’s dead so I thought his poetry couldn’t be weird. But it is weird. This isn’t news to anybody except me for a little while.

WEEKS

Were there any dead white women who were influences?

KASISCHKE

I read women. But it’s a smaller group because they mostly lived and died without being educated, so they couldn’t write. This might be controversial to say, but when you’re a sixteen-year-old female who wants to write poetry, everyone hands you Emily Dickinson, and I didn’t really like her. I was like, she should have gotten out more. I don’t know. But now I’ve come around to seeing, at least, what every­ one says. But I don’t return to Emily Dickinson a lot. Sorry.

ROX

Were there other female poets who influenced you?

KASISCHKE

There were a ton of women just a little older than I was or who were still alive and writing—Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In my own state there’s Diane Wakoski, and it was just flabbergasting to one in high school to think, here’s this woman who’s writing poetry in my state and she’s alive and she publishes it. It was her and Alice Notley who were introduced to me in college. But there were a lot of others, too, like Carolyn Forche. I was at the University of Michigan, so there were a lot of women poets coming through. I was in the resi­dential college, which was kind of offbeat, and my poetry teacher was Ken Michalowski. He knew Allen Ginsberg and he ran a press and he knew all these beatnik or sort of political ’60s and ’70s poets. And he was an expert on the New York school of poets, so I was reading Denise Levertov. Anne Waldman came to the residential college and read her poetry. So, yes, there were a lot of women who influenced my poetry.

WEEKS

Women who write about domestic issues often get labeled as writers of”chick lit.” Have you ever felt you were treated differently as a female writer, based on the things you wrote about?

KASISCHKE

Not really—because of the readers I always wanted to have. I have nothing against men reading my poetry, but I’ve always felt that women might prefer it. I wish one of my novels would get called chick lit, because those sell. But, really, no. I probably lucked out in that way, being in the generation I was. Some of the women I’ve named who are ten to twenty years older than I am, they would be in a college or in a city where it was really all about the men poets and their sensibilities, and they fought that battle so that I could just write for them. In our MFA program today there are quite a few more women than men in every class, and I think sometimes it’s the guys who get, “Why are you writing about this?”

WEEKS

Are there writing rules or etiquette that writers force themselves to follow?

KASISCHKE

One of the rules I’ve always understood is that melodrama ought to be avoided. But I don’t want to write a poem unless it’s over-the­ top melodramatic. Really, I’m not sure anybody can follow any rules except the internal ones. I’m sure I had a teacher say, “Don’t be so melodramatic,” or “It’s too clever to have a little rhyme at the end like this,” but I don’t want to not have that.

I’ve been around long enough to see trends come and go. For a while, a ton of metaphor or imagery was just not where it was at—ev­erything was more cool and abstract. Poetry fashions change. Some­ one does something that works, and we all start to imitate it. But then you move onto something that becomes a reaction against that first style. All you can really do is develop your own voice and write about the things you’re obsessed with.

Everybody says to write the kind of poem you want to read. I think about that a lot, and sometimes it’s upsetting, because I think I’ve just written exactly the kind of poem I don’t want to read. I mean really, right now, what I want to read are these mysterious short po­ems, and I don’t write them well. So I end up with another long, sprawling narrative poem, and I think, that’s not what I wanted to do. You make your own rules and just keep changing them.

What if you don’t allow yourself to write a certain way because you’ve heard it’s not the thing—it’s corny or sentimental or whatever, so you don’t write poems you otherwise would have written. Instead you’re busy trying to write a poem that’s not natural to you. And then you’ve lost those poems that might have been yours.

I’ve gone through periods where I was writing poems because I thought, oh, it seems like that might get published, and i would like to get published now, but they were such a waste, and I dragged them to the trash after long enough.

Maybe you have to go through a sentimental period or a melodramatic period where everybody will roll their eyes and you won’t get published because the work’s too heavy-handed, but maybe that clears the way for poems that won’t do that.

ROX

In an interview with The Smoking Poet, you described Dan Cha­on’s process of “letting things mate.” Your poetry often makes amaz­ing associative leaps that result in a cohesive poem. Is that a result of “letting things mate?”

KASISCHKE

I don’t really know. I have a journal, and I’ll write down some­thing, but then I’ll start a poem that’s not really related to that. Later, I’ll find I can cannibalize that earlier material for the poem. Art is a process-oriented discipline. When things are going well and I’m in the process of writing a poem,getting to the end seems subconscious. There’s work I can do gradually. I know if I’m in the right place and I’ve got material and a journal or something that I can, you know, mate my other stuff with, then I’m sort of using the poem to think, and sometimes there’s a miraculously appearing ending, where differ­ent pieces come together. I find writing poetry very stressful for this reason. Maybe some people do it to relieve stress, but I find it stressful because I have to get into the place where the work’s not going to be necessarily rational. I have to be able to construct an ending that seems organic even though I worked hard to force the ending onto it. There’s nothing organic about it.

ROX

In your Willow Springs profile, you said you started writing the poem “Near-misses” with just the ending image of the spoon sliding into the soup. How did that poem develop from that image?

KASISCHKE

I think that was a case of ideas mating. I’d written that image down, and I wrote a little bit more of something, and then I wrote a little bit more, and I put them together and slammed down that end­ing. So that kind of “mating” does happen sometimes. That’s probably when it’s easiest to write a poem. Even if it’s a typo or you have this first line or you know this title or this last line is something you feel strongly about, and you just get the rest of it to mate. When Chaon talks about forcing things to mate, it’s like you’re writing and not writing a poem now. Hopefully, the things that come out of it have connections you can heighten. It’s sort of tricking yourself into being able to write. I think it’s good to study craft, but I don’t know if that word fits for me. I can manipulate line breaks and revise, basically, but that’s not really craft.

The whole idea of craft seems like being false. For me, poetry is more about improvisation. I think there are things you know, and maybe some attention to traditions and studying how other poets make something happen—but during the process of writing, there’s either a logical culminating moment or it’s a throwaway.

WEEKS

Has there been a time when you’re reading or writing and some­ thing feels false to you for that reason?

KASISCHKE

I’ve been trying to put together new and selected poems, and I’m looking at old books. Maybe other people, when reading a particular poem, haven’t really thought to themselves, ugh, this is no good. But I can’t even look at some of these poems, because I know I faked it a little—that the whole impulse was wrong. It’s like relationships you look back on and think, oh, that was just . . . I was in that for all the wrong reasons. You don’t want a lot of evidence of that past lying around, but with poems you can’t burn the photographs—they’re always there.

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“IT’S DIFFICULT IN TIMES LIKE THESE,” Anne Frank wrote. “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Frank’s words, delivered in the face of what she called “grim reality,” reflect the same innate sense of hope woven throughout Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven. The book begins in the hours before a deadly pandemic sweeps across the globe, with the opening scenes set onstage during a production of King Lear. The story jumps ahead to twenty years later, as a troupe of actors and symphony musicians— survivors of what they call The Collapse—travel around Lake Michigan performing music and Shakespeare for other survivors. Weaving together multiple points of view, Mandel moves back and forth across time to slowly reveal connecting threads between the characters’ lives, while examining what was lost and what might be gained as her characters look toward rebuilding civilization. Station Eleven, Joshua Rothman wrote in The New Yorker, “asks how culture gets put together again. It imagines a future in which art, shorn of the distractions of celebrity, pedigree, and class, might find a new equilibrium.”

Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the novel won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the Morning News Tournament of Books. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages. One of Mandel’s three previous novels, The Singer’s Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystère de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013 and Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. She is a staff writer for The Millions, and lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

In the spring 2016 issue of Humanities magazine, Mandel reflected on her time on the road with Station Eleven, a tour initially planned for five cities that grew into well over one hundred events in seven countries, during which time Mandel and her husband learned they were expecting their first child. She recalled photographing each hotel room door so as not to forget the room number, and joked about flight attendants looking nervous that she’d go into labor midair. “The tour had begun to mirror the book; we traveled endlessly, my fictional characters and I, afraid of violence and sustained by our art, exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure, and the costs were not insignificant but we’d chosen this life.”

We spoke with Mandel during her visit for Spokane is Reading, a citywide common read program. Our conversation took place at the Davenport Hotel in a boardroom adorned with white marble, a gild- ed mirror over a fireplace, and an impressive chandelier. We discussed endangered elements of culture, the limiting nature of genre labels, and finding pleasure in privacy.

MELISSA HUGGINS

Author Dani Shapiro, in her craft book Still Writing, encourages writers to approach writing in the way that dancers approach their craft: “Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. . .she knows there is no difference between the practice and the art. The practice is the art.” As an artist who has pursued both dance and writing, does that resonate with you?

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

Absolutely. Dance was something I was set on doing from a very young age—I was one of those obsessive six-year-olds who only wanted to do ballet. I trained pretty intensively through my teens and went to school for contemporary dance in Toronto when I was eighteen. It was a great program, a great experience, but by the time I graduated, I felt done. That was all I’d wanted to do since six years old and I was twenty-one. It wasn’t fun anymore. I was living in Montreal and the auditions weren’t going well; they were in French, which was difficult, plus I had a hard time finding classes to take. I found myself drifting away from it. When I was very young it was part of my parents’ homeschooling curriculum that I had to write something every day, so I was in the habit of writing short stories and poems, which grew into a hobby. What’s funny in retrospect is that even during my late teens and early twenties, when I thought of dancing as my sole pursuit, I still found I had to take pen and paper with me when I went for a walk. I was a bit obsessive about writing. The transition between mediums was slow. I began gradually thinking of myself as a dancer who sometimes wrote, to a writer who sometimes danced, to just a writer. By the time I was twenty-two I wasn’t dancing anymore, only the occasional class, and I was at work on what eventually became my first novel, Last Night in Montreal.

HUGGINS

Have you written about dance or ballet, drawing on your experience?

MANDEL

Maybe it’s still too close. I may write about it at some point, but I haven’t yet.

AILEEN KEOWN VAUX

In addition to your novels and essays, you write book reviews regularly, which requires a different skill set than fiction writing. How has writing reviews influenced your other work?

MANDEL

Writing reviews has made me a better fiction writer. It forces you to deeply consider a work in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise, even as a careful reader. With a review you have to take a stance and defend it. Some people learn how to do that in their academic education, but that wasn’t part of my experience because of dance school, so I found reviewing to be helpful, forcing me to think about books in a more rigorous way.

There are some downsides to reviewing. I strongly dislike writing negative reviews. If someone gives me a book which in my opinion has a lot of problems, I hate that position. It’s possible I’m a little too soft-hearted to be the best possible reviewer but I try to be honest. There’s usually something good about a book or it wouldn’t have been published in the first place, but if there isn’t, I contact my editor and say “I don’t want to trash a book in the New York Times,” and they’ve been cool about it.

ANTHONY PAYNE

In the acknowledgements for The Lola Quartet you thanked author and critic Gina Frangello for her review of your first two novels, and you’ve written for The Millions about the sting of a bad review. What effect do reviews of your own work have on shaping your writing?

MANDEL

In the case of Gina Frangello’s review, she observed that in Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun, the female characters tended to have an ice queen aspect to them, perfectly controlled and impeccable and focused. It stung, but I thought, You know what, she’s right. They need to be more human, more flawed, a little messier. That shaped the writing of The Lola Quartet, and I was grateful to her. But I try not to read too many reviews at this point. When you get tagged on Twitter with a hundred blog reviews and they all contradict each other, there’s not a clear lesson to draw. Generally speaking, I don’t find them helpful. The bad ones do sting, especially when you feel they’re based on a misreading of your work. Of course you can’t respond without seeming like a lunatic. But even good reviews are subjective, representing one person’s point of view, and if you open yourself to being affected by the praise you also have to consider the negativity, some of which can be intense. I try not to read my reviews at this point, and I find I’m happier for it. It’s good for your sanity.

PAYNE

You wrote a lovely review of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, which portrays life in France after the German army invaded. I saw some similarities between Station Eleven and Suite Française, in terms of traveling bands of people affected by cataclysmic events. Was that book an influence on your writing?

MANDEL

I want to say that it was. It’s hard to remember—you write a book and then four years later you try to remember what you were thinking at the time—but yes, I believe I had started Station Eleven at the time I reviewed Suite Française. There’s such a clarity, lucidity, and power about her prose, that I do find myself thinking about those qualities when I’m writing. I think her work’s extraordinary.

KEOWN VAUX

You’ve worked with small presses and big publishers, as well as online and print venues. Could you talk about the editing process and your relationship with editors?

MANDEL

Editors have made my books so much better than they other- wise would have been. My first editor, Greg Michalson at Unbridled Books, worked with me on the first three novels. He had a great line for what happens when you’ve been working on a book for a long time: you get snow-blind. That’s absolutely true. You could have a typo in your opening sentence and you won’t notice because you’ve been staring at it for two and a half years.

For Station Eleven, I made the jump from Unbridled, which is quite small, to a larger publisher. I agonized over it because Unbridled was great, but where small presses are concerned, I think it’s fair to say there’s a problem with book discoverability in this country. It’s extremely difficult for a small press title to gain significant momentum, readership, and attention, so I felt like I had to jump to a bigger publisher to find more readers. We sold the book to Knopf in the US, after I’d spoken to probably seven American editors in the lead-up to the auction, but I knew when my editor was the one. She was great. But the next day we sold it in Canada and the Canadian editor said, “Well, we’ve made an investment here, we’d like to be involved in the editing process.” I spoke to that editor on the phone, and she and the American editor were in agreement about where they wanted to take the book, so my agent and I decided, Okay, we’ll have two editors. Then the next week we sold in the UK and they said the same thing: “We’ve made an investment, we’d like to be involved.” We drew the line at three editors. I was really nervous about it; I was afraid it would be an editing-by-committee nightmare. It turned out to be extraordinary. Having three talented editors give you slightly different but complementary takes on the same work made the book so much better.

KEOWN VAUX

Would you be willing to go through that same editing process in the future?

MANDEL

With those three? Yes.

PAYNE

You mentioned the problem of book discoverability. You wrote an essay a few years ago for The Millions about a book tour that you financed yourself. Could you talk about that experience compared to what touring looks like for you now?

MANDEL

There were certainly no interviews in marble rooms back then. Unbridled Books did send me out on tour but it was short because it’s a small press and limited budget. I wanted to be able to say I’d done everything I could for the book, so I decided to do another tour in the Midwest where I knew there were booksellers who were interested. They set up a five-city tour, which I paid for. I justified going into debt to pay for it because I was expecting a check from my Canadian publishers the next month (which ended up being delayed for a year). So I put myself in debt to send myself on a tour of sketchy airport hotels in the Midwest. Tours like that are difficult because you’re out on your own, and I don’t drive, so there were a lot of uncomfortable Greyhound experiences and creepy hotels. At a couple of stops, I slept on friends’ floors. Touring at that level is difficult, but it was worth it because it helped build goodwill with booksellers, who appreciate it when you make an effort to visit their stores.

The current tour has been sort of endless. Last night was my 115th event for Station Eleven. That’s a lot of events, and audiences often have the same questions. But I’m grateful for being in this position. A lot of writers would love to have that problem, of touring “too much.” One of the pleasant things about touring is that I saw my career change over the course of the Station Eleven tour. I went out upon publication in September 2014, and there was some momentum, but when the National Book Award long list was announced while I was on the road, and the shortlist while I was still on the road a month later. . .it was incredible to see that gradual build over the course of my tour.

HUGGINS

It’s refreshing to hear you talk about the realities of the DIY tour. It sounds so romantic: strike out on the road to promote your art, be independent, visit bookstores across the country, but the reality—

MANDEL

—is a 4 a.m. airport pickup the fourth day in a row and it’s too early to get breakfast so you’re eating almonds from your bag. It’s funny, though, because even at this level—my hotel in Spokane is beautiful and it’s been such a pleasure being here—but a few days ago I was in a small town in the Midwest for a few nights and that was a very different experience. Even when you’re lucky enough to sometimes stay in lovely places, you still stay in places where breakfast is inedible and the creamers in the restaurant are spoiled. You’re doing laundry in hotel room sinks and hanging it out to dry overnight, which is actually good because then you don’t wake in the morning with a sore throat from the dry air in hotel rooms. Sometimes I’ll steal the flowers from room service trays delivered in my hallway and by the time I leave, I’ll have a little garden.

As the tour goes on, I’ve found myself more and more interested in spending time alone in my room writing. At events, you’re constantly talking to people. It can be nice to spend time by yourself after all of those interactions and conversations, instead of being out in the city. You get some work done and remind yourself, I’m a writer, that’s why I’m here.

KEOWN VAUX

In her praise of Station Eleven, Emma Straub said, “It’s the kind of book that speaks to the dozens of readers in me—the Hollywood devotee, the comic book fan, the cult junkie, the love lover, the disaster tourist.” The novel incorporates elements of multiple genres, and you’ve spoken about being surprised that it’s been categorized as speculative fiction. Can you talk about the experience of having genre labels applied to your book, and how those affect audience?

MANDEL

Genre is such a subjective, confounding thing and I’ve dealt with it with all four of my books. With my first novel I thought I was writing literary fiction. But then rejections started coming in from publishers, many of whom said, “We like the book but we’re not sure how we’d market a book that’s more than one genre.” Hearing that response, I thought, Wait, I put a detective in it so it’s automatically detective fiction? I suppose I should have anticipated that. With the two books that followed, The Singer’s Gun and The Lola Quartet, I wanted to play with genre and take it further. Could I speed up a story into a fast literary novel with a strong narrative drive and flirt with crime fiction? Then, of course, it’s categorized as crime fiction.

Except when it’s not, in which case it’s categorized as literary fiction. In France I’m a thriller writer, based on the same books. You start to realize how incredibly subjective these labels are.

With Station Eleven, I set out to do something different from those first three books. As much as I respect crime fiction, I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a crime writer. I wanted to be free to write anything I wanted. But again, if you set a book partly in the future, apparently you’ve written speculative fiction.

As readers, we have an unfortunate tendency to limit ourselves in regard to genre. I hear from a lot of people who say, “I really liked your book, but ten people had to tell me to read it before I picked it up because I don’t read sci-fi.” Okay, but you are cutting yourself off from a massive, rich literary tradition by taking that stance. Do you not read Margaret Atwood?

There was a great essay about genre in The New Yorker, and Joshua Rothman made what should be an obvious point: a book can be more than one genre. Look at Jane Eyre or Crime and Punishment. Both books are literary fiction and genre fiction. A novel can be science fiction and literary fiction, or literary fiction and a love story and a detective novel. I love that idea. It seems to me to be a more expansive way of looking at books.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a seminal book in this conversation, in terms of showing people that you can have a book that’s serious and literary but set in the post-apocalypse territory formerly reserved for pulp novels. The Road gave a generation of literary writers permission to write books that cross over, and it may have given readers a greater sense of acceptance for books that are more than one genre. A few years later there was a book called The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, which was very successful, won some of the top awards in Canada, and it’s essentially a Western. It’s also a spectacularly written literary novel. It makes for an exciting time to be a writer and a reader, that so many people are trying new experiments.

HUGGINS

With each successive book, it seems as if you’ve pushed a multi-point-of-view, non-linear structure further and further. How do you view that progression in your work thus far?

MANDEL

My first novel, Last Night in Montreal, had multiple points of view from the first draft, jumping back and forth between two characters, Eli and Lilia. My concept, in terms of the structure, was that it might be interesting to build toward the moments of greatest tension and perhaps in two plotlines simultaneously, rather than moving straight from linear time A to linear time B. That was an idea I tried to push further with each work. The structure lends itself to noir or crime fiction-influenced works because you can withhold information, flash back to the past, and sustain a lot of tension. With Station Eleven, I took it further, creating interview segments and sections about comic books, jumping back and forth from the interviews in year fifteen to Jeevan leaving Toronto. It created more of a collage effect, which I find to be effective in terms of character development. If you have a chapter from the point of view of character A, and the next chapter is character B looking at character A at a completely different time in her life, the reader gets a more complete vision of character A. I also found juxtaposition useful for contrasting the two worlds in the book. Rather than having a character say, “Oh, it was amazing when we used to have cell phones,” you can drop in a scene where they have cell phones and see the contrast in a visceral, immediate way.

HUGGINS

How do you decide a strategy for how much to divulge to the reader and when? With multiple time frames and multiple points of view, it seems challenging to decide how to parse out information while sustaining tension.

MANDEL

It’s a hard balance to strike. We’ve all read books where a writer withholds information in what’s ultimately an obnoxious and manipulative way. You think, “You could have just told me that and spared me twenty pages!” You try to put together a complex, interesting story and withhold enough information to sustain tension, but you don’t want to be a jerk about it. I read a book once where a chapter ended with a guy holding a knife to a woman’s throat and she was about to die. As a reader, you think, “Oh, my God, he just killed her” and then she comes back twenty pages later because, guess what, he decided not to at the last minute. You want to throw the book across the room. I try to avoid that.

PAYNE

Many of your characters are interested in freedom from their past: Anton and Elena in The Singer’s Gun, Gavin running from his disgrace in The Lola Quartet, and all of the characters in Station Eleven, particularly Miranda and Kirsten. What interests you about characters trying to escape their pasts?

MANDEL

I left home when I was eighteen, moved by myself from rural British Columbia to Toronto, roughly 3,000 miles. I found that to be a profound experience, how you can leave one life and at the other end of an airplane ride, a new life is waiting. I wasn’t escaping anything horrific, only the restlessness you feel as a teenager when you want to leave home and be independent and have your own life, but I think that’s why I seem to be obsessed with escape. Aren’t we all aspiring toward freedom, trying to be free within the constraints of our lives, our obligations and commitments? It’s something I struggled with in my own life, in terms of always needing a day job. How do you find a sense of freedom when you have to do a job you strongly dislike? It’s part of being a writer; you do a lot of unfortunate things to pay the rent. How do you find an internal sense of freedom when you’re forced to spend the finite hours of your life doing meaningless tasks? I’ve thought about it a lot and I keep returning to those questions in my work.

HUGGINS

Your characters have some great lines on that subject. In The Singer’s Gun, Elena says, “Work is always a little sordid.” For her, the difference between being a model for a somewhat pornographic photographer is not that different from her terrible office job.

MANDEL

It’s certainly not worse. I was really burnt out at my day jobs while I was writing The Singer’s Gun, so those questions of freedom and obligation were important to me. We’ve all been there. It’s a difficult, soul-crushing thing to navigate: how to make a living as a writer. I was particularly struggling with it when I wrote that novel.

HUGGINS

Because of the success of Station Eleven, you were able to transition from your part-time job to writing full time, though you’ve been occupied speaking practically full time. What did that shift mean to you?

MANDEL

It’s a transition I never thought I would be able to make. It never occurred to me that I’d be able to quit my day job. I was a part-time administrative assistant to the Cancer Research Lab at the Rockefeller University until August 2015, almost a year after Station Eleven came out. It was an interesting environment, working with scientists doing breast cancer research—my colleagues were brilliant, my boss was great—but it was getting a little ridiculous trying to be an administrative assistant remotely during my book tour. I realized I had to quit when I found myself in a hotel room in London at midnight on a Sunday, booking plane tickets for my boss.

The reality is that it’s hard to quit your job when you grew up without much money I know what it’s like to be poor. Plus, having grown up in Canada, I’m slightly traumatized by the American health care system. It felt like a leap to quit my day job because I’m acutely aware that while people are paying me to do events this year, that doesn’t mean they will two years from now. So much is out of my control. It’s not like a traditional workplace where if you do a good job, you’ll have some guarantee of future employment. What does “a good job” mean in literary fiction from one year to the next? Fashions change; maybe a jury will pick your book for an award or maybe they won’t. It was a little terrifying to make that decision, and because of that fear, I held on to my job for much longer than made sense. But it has made a huge difference. It’s great not trying to deal with scheduling meetings in New York while I’m six time zones away overseas. I’m looking forward to seeing what my life is like when the travel slows down.

KEOWN VAUX

I was struck, after reading Station Eleven and your other novels, by the way that you handle dead or dying elements of culture. The character Eli in Last Night in Montreal studies dead languages; in Station Eleven, Kirsten searches for additional issues of Miranda’s comics, Clarke curates the Museum of Civilization, and so on. What compels you to write about elements of culture that are fading, endangered, or lost?

MANDEL

It never occurred to me to draw a parallel there. It does fascinate me, the way we hold on to things. It seems as if the instinct that drives a person to create the Museum of Civilization in an airport is similar to the linguist recording the last speaker of an endangered language. I suppose I have that instinct for preservation, too.

Often, it’s a matter of my interests adhering to specific characters. With Last Night in Montreal, I read a fascinating article about dead and endangered languages, so I wrote about a character obsessed with it. I was fascinated by how there are 6,000 languages spoken on Earth, but half will be gone in the next hundred years and one disappears every ten days. The profound loneliness of the concept of last speakers, that it always comes down to one last speaker who looks around at the age of eighty-five and they’re the only one left who knows the language they grew up with. . .that’s haunting. With The Singer’s Gun, I was interested in illegal immigration. It was interesting to have a character who’s engaged in that field in a somewhat criminal way—he sells fake passports—and made research difficult. If you Google “how to fake a US passport,” those are not links you really want to click on, so ultimately, I had to make it up. In The Lola Quartet, Gavin is obsessed with the past, he loves mechanical cameras and fedoras and jazz—things that I love. You can attach your obsessions to particular characters; I find I’ve done it a lot.

HUGGINS

In The Singer’s Gun, you wrote a scene where one character tells another about a geology student who chopped down the oldest living tree on earth without realizing it. The character hearing the story says, “Gosh, that’s awful,” but the character telling the story is horrified that the first person doesn’t comprehend how truly upsetting the loss of that tree is.

MANDEL

That was an article I read in The New York Review of Books that just broke my heart. The reaction of the person telling the story was me; I was like, Oh, my God. Basically, in 1964, a grad student was doing climate change research in what later became Great Basin National Park in Nevada, and he was using a corer, this little device you drill to take a sample to study the rings. His corer got stuck in the tree, and it’s kind of an expensive tool, so he got permission from a park ranger to cut it down. After they cut it down and started counting the rings, they realized it was the oldest living thing on earth. Doesn’t that just make you despair of humanity? Apparently there’s a slice of that trunk on display in a bar in Nevada.

HUGGINS

In a previous interview you called Station Eleven “A love letter to this extraordinary world in which we live. . .a love letter in the form of a requiem.” Within the novel, so many characters are engaged in fundamentally hopeful activities—Clarke curating the Museum of Civilization, the symphony continuing to travel and perform, and Jeevan becoming a doctor—while at the same time grappling with whether there’s a reason to have any hope for the future. Could you talk about the push and pull between hope and hopelessness?

MANDEL

I think a cataclysmic event needs to be handled with the lightest possible touch. It can get melodramatic so quickly. It was important to give it a light touch without trivializing it, which is why I wrote the chapters set during the collapse in Toronto between Jeevan and his brother. I thought it’d be a little bit dishonest to completely glide over what happened, so the book touches on it briefly. But I was interested in avoiding the nihilism of most post-apocalyptic works. Post-apocalyptic is often shorthand for horror, and I was interested in going a different direction, moving from “look at this horror and mayhem and chaos” to thinking about what comes after horror, chaos, and mayhem. I loved The Road, but it functioned as a kind of negative example when I was writing Station Eleven. I kept thinking, This can’t be The Road, that’s been done. I was interested in what comes next: the new culture that begins to emerge, which does imply evolution and hopefulness, and made for a more hopeful book. It wasn’t really about the end of the world; it was about what happens as people try to reconstruct a new world.

KEOWN VAUX

The idea of consciously writing the inverse of a particular story is fascinating. When you’re reading fiction, is that always percolating?

MANDEL

As a reader, it’s always interesting to consider. There’s a book I really liked, After Midnight by Irmgard Keun. The author is German and it’s about the German experience in the late 1930s, when the vise was tightening and Germany was becoming a police state. It was revelatory to me because as much as you know, intellectually, that the German people suffered terribly, most World War II fiction we’re exposed to centers on the suffering Germans inflicted on other people. It’s fascinating to see the flipside of that story.

HUGGINS

It seems that each of your books is concerned with memory, with what we want to remember, what we can’t remember, what we want to forget. In Station Eleven, Kirsten says, “The more you remember, the more you’ve lost.” How does memory function in your work?

MANDEL

I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon where three different people were witness to the same event and tell three different accounts of it and nobody’s lying. I used that in The Lola Quartet, where everybody remembers the last concert in a different way. Memory was also one of the most interesting aspects of writing a post-apocalyptic book. How would we remember this world when it was gone? For people who didn’t remember it at all—who were either small children when it disappeared or were born afterward—all of this that we take for granted would seem like science fiction. I love that idea. In terms of character development, the younger people in the post-apocalyptic world are generally doing better, because the more you remember, the more you’ve lost. It’s the older people who can’t stop thinking about when sixty wasn’t old and when diabetes wasn’t a death sentence and when we had antibiotics. For them, they’ve lost so much. But for younger people, it’s abstract.

KEOWN VAUX

You’ve said that you love linear narratives as a reader but that you haven’t found a way to write them—which isn’t to say that you have to. Is that something you’d like to try?

MANDEL

I admire linear storytelling, but I don’t know if I could sustain it for a novel; I might write a straightforward linear novella instead. As a reader, I am drawn to those books. I love Stoner by John Williams, which is such a beautiful example. The story moves forward from the beginning to the end and that takes real skill to sustain, particularly over the course of a character’s lifetime.

HUGGINS

You’ve mentioned Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto as two of your favorite books. Reading Station Eleven evoked both of those books for me: the innate sense of hopefulness in Bel Canto, and Tartt’s ability to move readers back and forth in time while still keeping us grounded, which is something Station Eleven does so well. It seems like it would be challenging to balance a large cast of characters in the way that all three of those books do, to establish each of them as complex individuals. Did you begin with a particular character in Station Eleven?

MANDEL

Both of those books achieve brilliantly, in my opinion, something I’m always striving for: they are of the highest literary quality but also have narrative drive and are exciting to read. I love those books. Patchett takes such care with her characters. They are never allowed to be two dimensional; everybody is human.

With Station Eleven I knew I wanted to write about the lives of actors, which was more concrete than the beginnings of my other books. The first three, I began with a wisp of a premise. With Last Night in Montreal, I had the image of a car driving across the desert. That image raised questions like, Why is it driving across the desert? An answer to one of those questions formed the plot. Same for The Singer’s Gun: the starting point for that book was the question, What if a man left his wife on their honeymoon? Why would he do that, you ask, and the plot comes out of that exploration. With The Lola Quartet, I wanted to write about disgraced journalists and the economic collapse.

The first character I had for Station Eleven was Arthur. I had the idea of an actor dying of a heart attack on stage during the fourth act of King Lear as the opening scene of the novel. I knew I wanted to borrow a particular staging of Lear that I’d seen—James Lapine’s direction at the Public Theater in New York in 2007. I mention this in the acknowledgments, but he had three little girls on stage in nonspeaking roles as Lear’s daughters, and that gave me my next character: one of the little girls, imagining what happens to her. Those were the first two characters to emerge. I also liked the idea of having a guy in the audience trying to save him, so I thought, Okay, there’s character number three; I can follow him. I thought about Miranda from fairly early on, and other characters came along later.

HUGGINS

In Station Eleven, you employ many devices: letters, lists, interviews for a newsletter, and so on. Was that fun for you as a writer, playing with multiple conventions?

MANDEL

It was. I loved writing the interview segments, particularly. Writing only dialogue in that way is what I imagine playwriting would be like. I enjoyed writing the list you mention, in chapter six. It was probably twenty pages long before I shortened it. The letters created an opportunity for me to see a clearer image of who Arthur was, by giving him a first person voice.

KEOWN VAUX

You talked about your personal interests finding homes in your fiction. Do you see yourself as someone who would explore personal interests in memoir or creative nonfiction?

MANDEL

Probably not. I’ve been on social media for a really long time—I was on BBSes when I was fourteen, not quite pre-internet but close—and I always felt comfortable in that milieu, sharing a lot of my life online. What I find lately is that I’m less and less interested in revealing much of myself online. I’ve come to find immense pleasure in privacy. It’s an interesting dynamic because there is a certain pressure, particularly on women writers, to write personal essays in the service of a book. You go to the New York Times website and you’ll read the most harrowing, excruciatingly personal essay—the loss of a parent, the death of a spouse, the most wrenching subjects—and then the byline will be “and Lucy Smith has a novel coming out next year” and you’re like, Of course she does. That’s how we’re promoting our books these days, mining our lives for material. I prefer to do that in fiction. So many of my personal interests and even autobiographical aspects of my life work their way into my fiction. For example, Miranda’s background in Station Eleven. She grows up on the same island as me; she has an identical experience with moving to Toronto and finding that the anonymity of living in the city feels like freedom; she’s an administrative assistant. . .there are many parallels. I find it more interesting to explore my interests and write about certain parts of my life through fiction than doing it through memoir or personal essay. I love reading essays, and I sometimes enjoy reading memoirs, but presently I don’t have that instinct to share my life.

KEOWN VAUX

Another reason to preserve your privacy are the trolls on social media.

MANDEL

Absolutely. You find yourself thinking, Life is so short, why do I care what anybody is saying on Twitter? I’ve been ignoring my Twitter account for months and it’s opened up this space in my life. It’s so nice. I don’t know if I’ll go back. Same with Facebook. But you also see writers like Margaret Atwood or Neil Gaiman who are highly prolific and all over Twitter. How can they pull it off? Somehow I find it too distracting, but Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood are publishing multiple books a year.

KEOWN VAUX

Is community something that plays a significant role in your writing life?

MANDEL

No. Which is kind of strange, I realize, since I live in Brooklyn and there are so many writers there. People come to Brooklyn because they want that sense of community, which can be hard to find outside of an MFA program. To tell you the truth, when I first started writing seriously in my early twenties, what most attracted me was the solitude. I loved the contrast with dance, which is such a group activity. You’re always in classes and auditions and all the rest, but writing could be done alone in a room or alone in a café. I’ve accumulated a few friends over the years who happen to be writers but I mostly avoid the Brooklyn literary scene. It’s distracting and somewhat incestuous; you see the same twelve people at every event. It can get a little gossipy and small in the way that any scene can, in the way the world of academia can or any pod of people who spend a lot of time in close proximity and are engaged in the same pursuit. I go to readings if it’s a friend or an author I really admire, but for the most part I don’t go out of my way to attend events and mingle.

KEOWN VAUX

Do you feel any pressure after the success of a book like Station Eleven?

MANDEL

There is a certain pressure. There’s also a certain confidence, I have to say. For me, those two things have balanced each other out. I hope it stays that way.

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“I WISH I COULD GO through the poem image by image, line by line, and tell you where it is me, and where it is somebody else,” D.A. Powell says in an interview with Nashville Review. “But to tell the god’s honest truth, I don’t know if l know all of that one hundred percent, nor should I.” Powell’s exploration of the world as a way to explore the self—and where the two become indistinguishable­—is part of the draw of his poetry, which is personal, inventive, yet a somehow familiar look at the world.

D.A. Powell is the author of several acclaimed books of poet­ry, including Chronic (Graywolf Press, 2009), Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), and Repast: Tea, Lunch, and Cock­tails (Graywolf, 2014). Chronic received the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

Of Powell’s collection Repast, Christopher Richards writes in the New Yorker, “it is a jagged, one-of-a-kind opus, which endures both as a personal testimony and as the rare poetic work that manages to capture the ineffable on the page.” Richards also notes that a “sense of belonging both nowhere and everywhere is evident in Powell’s creative magpieing,” which comes from Powell’s imaginative blend of cultural references, including “gay hanky code, Whitman, The Weather Girls, Hollywood romances, and biblical heroes.”

Although Powell is known for addressing gay culture in his work and, specifically, the AIDS pandemic, his poems also explore Chris­tian tradition and elements of contemporary culture, demonstrating an acute awareness for the way film, music, and art impact society. Underlying many of Powell’s works is a view of survival that subverts familiar tropes of suffering and illness. With lines that look to both the past and future, Powell gives new life to the subjects of his poems. In the poem “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the half shell and roller skates’ in the song ‘good times,’ by chic,” Powell writes:

it’s still 1980 somewhere, some corner

of your dark apartment

where the mystery of the lyric hasn’t faded,      and love is in the

chorus waiting to be born.

Powell has received a Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Paul En­gle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation, and the Bos­ton Review Poetry Prize, among other awards. Carl Phillips, a judge for the Boston Review’s Poetry Prize, wrote of Powell’s work, “No fear, here, of heritage nor of music nor, refreshingly, of authority. Mr. Powell recognizes in the contemporary the latest manifestations of a much older tradition: namely, what it is to be human.”

We met with Mr. Powell for tea during the Montana Book Festi­val in Missoula, where we talked about exile, Jesus, and the difference between being a poet and writing poetry.

DANIELLE WEEKS

So many of your poems are so funny. Do you think poetry takes itself too seriously?

D.A. POWELL

For God’s sake, it’s art, but the kind of ponderous pontificating that people do around it, you would think it’s semi-precious metal. Yes, poetry takes itself too seriously. I was first drawn to it as a kind of humorous interaction—not because I thought it was saying deep things, but because I thought it was saying things in funny, inter­esting ways. I love poems that poke fun at the idea of a status quo or an ordered world. I have always been drawn to poetry that’s casting a gob of spit in the face of art, to quote Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: “This is not a book. . .it is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art .”

JESS L. BRYANT

Is irreverence one of the effects of your poetry?

POWELL

I use lines as pressure releases. I take something and tighten the tension of its muscles and then release it. That was particularly helpful when I was living in Iowa. In the Bay Area, I was visible. In Iowa, I was invisible. Imagine you go someplace where any manifes­tation of the community you lived in before is hidden or obliterated. But it was actually helpful, because I didn’t have to worry about any­ thing other than writing. Those long barren roads in the winter were my life. It’s like I was working with flatness, working with a poten­tially obliterated landscape. The line had to erase time and space and history. Though that’s not what I thought I was doing at the time—I was just writing . But looking back, I realize I needed to take myself away from California in order to write about it.

The songs of exile are the greatest songs of history.

MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Were you thinking of any particular song of exile?

POWELL

I like a passage in the song “By the Waters of Babylon” that goes sort of like: By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept when we remembered Zion, but how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

In Iowa, I felt like I was in a foreign land. Whenever I was writing about the world I came from, I got to choose it, in a way, so I was pro­miscuous about choosing. I tried to be careful about populating the poems in ways that were plentiful and had many tones and many kinds of language. I think that was my reaction to the barren world I was living in: This has to be pretty—this has to be something else. It’s the problem of the open field. You have to figure out how to make it look like something more than boring housing develop­ments. Please, I would rather see your filthy old barn.

BRYANT

I’ve read that the conventional canon of male poets did not inform your work.

POWELL

Neither did white poets. My reading direction, the path that got me into poetry, was through African-American poets. I thought there were maybe three or four white poets in the world, all of whom probably weren’t very interesting. I would go to the library and get my books and never notice there were other poets except the poets I was already interested in. I do remember I once checked out a book by Ted Hughes because I thought it was by Langston Hughes. I was reading it and I thought, Wow, this is really bad. He’s so off his game.

WEEKS

Does it bother you when people assume your poetry is at least somewhat autobiographical?

POWELL

I don’t worry about it. I feel like that’s on the readers. In no other art form would we assume we’re getting the creator’s life, because most people’s lives, including my own, are super boring. As Alfred Hitchcock said, drama is life with all the boring bits cut out. A poem is a kind of small drama. Short stories are drama. All writing is es­sentially the drama of what, who, how, those age-old questions that propel us forward to read more. You can populate a poem with as much true experience as you want or need, because that’s how we know the world—through our own selves—but I think it would be egotistical for writers to imagine that the poetic version of what they present is in any way a resemblance of their own life. There are cer­tainly poets who speak from an authentic and consistent “I,” but even they’re inventors, right?

In order to be an artist, I don’t think you can worry too much about an audience’s reaction. You can worry about it in terms of, Oh, nobody likes my work, but once people are there to read you and hear you, it’s kind of your duty to turn your back, the way the conductor turns his back on the audience. We’re looking at the person who is re­sponsible for the art, and I think as an artist, you have to do the same. You’re looking inward at that moment when you’re most vulnerable. You’re deep inside yourself, trying to bring up the courage of convic­tion of your writing, not worrying about whether anyone is going to get up and walk out. I kind of hope they will walk out.

BRYANT

Do they ever?

POWELL

All the time. I don’t think anyone has ever walked out for any terrible reason, but you never know. I’m always encouraged by the people who show up. I gave a reading in Tyler, Texas, at the universi­ty there, and these folks showed up—grad students, a heteronorma­tive couple—with their child, who was in a Boy Scout uniform. I’m like, “Um, I don’t know if this is age-appropriate,” and they were like, “Don’t worry, he’s been to a lot of these,” and I realized they were the kind of parents I’d had. My parents didn’t filter content. They didn’t say, “Is he reading things that are dirty? Is he listening to things that are criminal?” They didn’t care. In that way, it made it possible for me to indulge myself in reading and experiencing literature at what­ ever level I wanted. So I realized these folks were good parents, and I didn’t curb my reading, didn’t pay attention to whether they left. They might have. They sat in back, just in case, and I think we were all a bit relieved.

SCHMIDT

Do people ever expect too much from poets?

POWELL

I think that does happen sometimes. I’m glad people reach out to me, but there’s only so much you can do in a day. I can’t blurb books for everybody who asks—I am physically not able to do that. And you don’t want your endorsement to be just a rubber stamp. One year, nine people asked me for letters of recommendation for Guggenheim Fellowships, and I said yes to all of them. I wrote letters and none got in, because the committee must have thought, Well, he’s not very selective. That taught me something. You have to pick the moment when you step forward and say, I’ve been told to help this person.

I love poetry, and I love that people are passionate about what is, really, one of the most esoteric and hermetic things in the world. It’s really like we’re having a big conference about masturbation, and we’re being frank and candid about what hand we prefer—or toys and lubricants and all those other things. It’s this intimate thing we share. It’ s marvelous, but maybe it’s just a metaphor for other things we can’t talk about.

WEEKS

Do poets need to attend conferences?

POWELL

Those are really good things to do if you want to be a poet. If you just want to write poetry, you don’t need any of that. I think you have to be able to separate those things from each other. Many times, young people unconsciously or subconsciously try to be poets, instead of just writing poetry. If you write poetry and people like it, then all the other things you’d hoped would happen often happen. So it’s misplaced energy. And at times, all that misplaced energy is working in ways we don’t realize, but not in ways that help. Send to a dozen contests if you feel like you want to publish this book right now, but if you’d rather wait until someone asks you to publish the book, do that. There’s not any right or wrong way. Whatever way you choose, you want to be able to offset the footprint of that choice in some other way.

When you advertise yourself, whether for good reasons or bad, you’re selling a little bit of your soul, and you have to buy that back by doing good things for people. Every time someone comes up to you and has you sign a book, you feel like you can get that piece back somehow. But you can’t pay it back to the people who are reading the work—it has to be to the art itself, the energy within that art.

I’m always happy when I sign a book, because I’m glad it’s a book somebody cares to hold. Even if they turn around and throw it in the bin at the thrift store, I don’t care. Somebody cared enough about the book to have that interaction. It’s wonderful and unexpected and weird. I remember how timid I was when I would approach a poet to sign a book—how much courage that took—and then how like a deer in the headlights I was if they talked to me.

Oh, my Lord, Gwendolyn Brooks would make everybody who got a book signed sit across from her, because she didn’t want to look up at people. She was like, “We’re going to be like civilized people. You’re going to sit down and talk to me.” So every person in the long line would sit and have a conversation with her. I remember I was at her book signing, the last person in line. She goes, “Sit down, sit down,” and I was like, “Oh, no, you must be tired,” and she says “I’m not tired, I’ve been sitting.” So I sat and engaged in conversation with her, but the entire time I felt that I was unworthy in that conversation.

I realize now I was being stupid, silly, but there was something about the power of her words and the kind of energy Olson talks about—poetry as energy transferred. That energy made me feel like she was a kind of divine being, which I’m not entirely sure she wasn’t, but she didn’t see herself that way. She saw herself as a poet. She went out and did readings and gave back to the community. I try to remember those moments. How can I help the person who’s sitting
across from me at a book signing?

They say that President Obama spends 98 percent of his time with the person he’s meeting assuring them that everything’s okay. That’s actually the bulk of it. All those photo ops you see are just Obama saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll get through this, you’re doing great.” He has to realize that he has this power people are investing in him. And it’s the same as a poet. People are investing a power in you that you have a responsibility for. You also have a responsibility to remind them that it’s not a big deal. We all pay taxes.

WEEKS

Poets aren’t the public figures they used to be. But they still have some kind of power. . .

POWELL

Isn’t power a bad thing? Doesn’t power corrupt? I would rather not have power. At work I’m always thinking, whatever other people want, I’m going to go along with that, because I don’t want to be the decider. What kind of power do poets have? Very, very little, and yet, what power we have can be monumental, though we can never guar­antee that that’s going to be the case.

I’ve known Claudia Rankine for a long time, and she’s recently become highly visible. She understands and respects the power of hope people are investing in her. She understands it’s a terrible bur­den of responsibility to bear when you’re at that most visible moment. But what a great honor, as well. I think it’s like what people say about having children. You become your better self. It’s like what people say about having an audience, too: you become your better self, and if you don’t, you won’t have an audience. Unless you’re Bukowski, and then people go to be abused.

I saw Claudia Rankine’s video work, and now with Citizen, she’s this public figure who’s stepped into the world out of necessity. Wouldn’t you rather choose that no unarmed, innocent people are being killed by police without warrants? There are all sorts of things you would trade for that position.

WEEKS

Do you use social media?

POWELL

I love Twitter, in the sense that I get a lot of information that way—a quick sort of digest. But I find that I don’t click on a lot of articles from big media companies like Slate or Newsweek because I’m getting too many ads. I’d rather go to the library and read. But I do like the social dynamic of Twitter.

I’m noticing that more and more poets are on Twitter. Oliver de la Paz, Robert Pinsky—people you thought would not be there­—Carissa Chen, Ada Limon. I keep up with what’s going on in the world of poetry. Not that I always approve.

WEEKS

Is there something useful about the 140 character limit of Twitter?

POWELL

It ‘s the same number of characters or spaces as the number of syllables in a sonnet. Someone must have thought of that. It’s not too short, and it’s not too long. Goldilocks would be happy there. People can ask you questions, but they can’t ask you more than one question. Unlike email, it doesn’t become a to-do list. And you can see what other people are doing without having to have all the interaction. It’s just: What ‘s Nancy Sinatra up to these days?

BRYANT

You make references to popular culture and to specific brands, such as Twitter, in your work. What do you think about the impulse for writers to avoid these references in order to attain some kind of timelessness?

POWELL

Nothing is timeless. Scientists have been trying to figure out a language that people in 20,000 years will be able to read, something visual to warn people away from radioactive waste buried in Nevada. They have to think of a future that doesn’t include any language we know. Would someone translate our poetry into that language? May­be, maybe not. Most of what you write doesn’t last. That’s the beauty of it. The beauty of art is not the timelessness, but the ephemerali­ty—the idea that someone paid attention to a moment in such an arbitrary and decorative way and let it go into the world.

SCHMIDT

Does this ephemerality influence the structure of your poems? Is that why Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails contains no complete sentences?

POWELL

There’s an inevitability in syntax—beginning, middle, and end­—and I wanted to resist end. Thematically, this had to do with HIV and the AIDS epidemic, but I didn’t make that connection right away. I thought I was just being a stubborn poet—Yeah, I don’t like complete thoughts; I don’t like this idea of syntactic order. Isn’t it the job of prose writers to write in complete sentences?

One of the great things about poetry is that it doesn’t have to do that. I was being defiant, and it turned out to be a choice that made sense. But I didn’t know that. You can’t plan everything in advance. I talk to people all the time who are like, “Yeah, I’ve got this idea for a book,” and I’m like, “Well, there’s your first problem. Don’t have an idea. Just write. Having an idea for a book is a mistake. You’ll never get there because you won’t achieve your ideal.” People labor over books for years, like, no, this isn’t what I wanted. It’s not working out. Well, why don’t you be happy with what you did write? Why don’t you throw away nine-tenths of that and write more?

BRYANT

You experienced the AIDS epidemic firsthand. How important is it for writers to write about their own time?

POWELL

For me, to be a writer is to be irresponsible to begin with. There are certain subjects we can’t shut up about, and that’s our nature. The question becomes, do people want to hear it? Do they like it? That goes to the idea of shaping, deciding what will be a palatable ver­sion of this idea for a reading audience, something I always try to undercut immediately. I don’t want to worry about people’s ideas of proper subject matter. I like being improper. I like being irreverent. That’s one of the things we’ve loved about literature for centuries. I’m reading Gulliver’s Travels right now, and Swift’s constantly writing about shitting and pissing, all these things polite novels leave out. He’s reminding us that we’re beasts, that we’re animals.

BRYANT

Speaking of beasts, would you discuss the use of violence in your work?

POWELL

I’ve experienced physical violence, and I feel like it’s a subject one must be truthful to. At the same time, I don’t want to use it in any kind of exploitative or sensationalist way. I’m reading Sula by Toni Morrison now, and the violence in that book happens unexpectedly and in a world of absolute beauty. That’s what violence is: a tear in the fabric of one’s nature, one’s life, one’s experience of the world. I try not to set it up too much, and I try not to make too much of it. Having violence come in unexpectedly, and having it not be too explained, is like when Hart Crane can’t help yelling out this unfor­givable thing at the end of the first Voyages. He sees the kids playing by the ocean, and he says: “If they could hear me, I would tell them the bottom of the sea is cruel.” You don’t want to say to the world, “The bottom of sea is cruel,” but at the same time, Hart says that this is the case, and one must be aware of that.

In my experience, you could leave a gay bar and be in the middle of a shooting. It has not always been a world of acceptance. I don’t think that’ll be the same in twenty to thirty years. We’ll look back at the literature of the period and say, “Wow, people were barbaric then.” That’s a good feeling, to notice that everyone prior to us was a barbarian.

WEEKS

Earlier you mentioned “the ordered world.” Why do you think humans feel a compulsion to create order and to suppress anything outside of that order?

POWELL

The universe functions on rules, so humans are doing nothing new in that respect. The question is, who gets to write the rules, and what do the rules exclude That’s always changing . Abbie Hoffman said ev­ery law is political, because when you have, for example, a law against murdering, you will see the investigating police approach somebody who looks like they have no money before they approach somebody who looks like they have a million dollars. That’s politics. That’s not morality. That’s a decision based on economics or appearance or looks or sexual identity or gender, and when we find society making those kinds of assumptions, it’s our duty to intervene. Whether you choose to do that in your art or not is irrelevant.

I feel like the act of writing is a resistance to the order of law, the order of mankind. It’s a resistance to governance, to all the implied and stated rules that say we actually have to have a physical address, to carry an identity card.We have to have an income—and if we have an income, we have to be taxed on it. Art is interrogating all those kinds of things at all times, whether we’re aware of it or not.

I think writing means writing in your time. You don’t have to stand on a soapbox. Writing is a political act because you are using a language that is used against you every day to tell you there’s a Clean Air Act to protect you. You’re using language to say, “No, the air today looks gray.” Even by writing a simple line like that, you have made a mark against the world in which you’re living and shown it to be something other than what people are selling to you.

WEEKS

How does the unconscious work in your writing?

POWELL

I try not to think when I’m writing. At the same time, I recognize that once words are on the page, they have meaning, and I try to look at that. A couple of years ago, an editor asked me for work. I sent some, and the editor said, “I want this poem,” and then it turned out later that the editor didn’t understand the poem. I was like, Should I be insulted by that? And I thought, No, because there are a lot of things I like that I don’t understand. I’ll often like a poem before I understand it. The understanding is the value of the appreciation. I want to go back in there and think about why I like it, but there’s something really wonderful about living in the realm of the pleasure of the senses and saying, “I don’t know why I like that line, but it sure sounds good.”

In the first poetry workshop I took, we had to translate something from a language we didn’t speak–into English—and I was deter­mined to make everything make sense, even though there were words I didn’t understand. It didn’t fit, but I wanted to make it fit. We came to class with our assignments, and one of the guys read a poem that repeated this line: “The killing kills the cakewalk.” He was working with a language that had a lot of hard consonants. The instructor, David Bromige, said, “It’s such a wonderful line. What do you think it means?” and the kid said, “I don’t know, I just liked it.” I remember being jealous of the fact that this guy got to have such a good line in his poem without it having to mean anything. I thought, I want to do that. I want to do that more.

I don’t think that guy ever went on to take another poetry class or to publish poems—he was just taking the class as something to do­—but that line has stuck with me. That’s the power of poetry: even if you don’t understand it, you can remember it and go back to it time and time again. Every time you do, you’re going to find a different relation­ship to it. Over the years, “the killing kills the cakewalk” has occurred to me at various moments in my life as a kind of pronouncement on what was going on in that moment. I know the author of that line and the teacher of the author of that line had no idea what it meant, and yet, there it is: a line of poetry forever stuck in my head. That’s what poetry should do—create in you this lasting affection without it be­ing about anything except when it pops back into your mind.

We all have lines like that that we remember vividly. A woman in one of my early poetry classes had a line in her poem that began: “Mother, I have always been a black child standing against a white wall.” So powerful. I don’t know if she ever wrote another poem, but it was a great opening. Those things stick with you. You can’t help it. You can’t unlearn them. Poetry is unlearnable language. Un-unlearn­able language. Maybe both.

I love surrealism, and I teach it because I feel like people mis­understand surrealism as the early definition of surrealism, which is to be beneath reality and in the dream world—to have access to the irrational and all that. Surrealism as a literary device has those irrational qualities, but at the same time, it’s also a powerful means of expression. In a culture or language or world or community in which certain things are unsayable, you can resort to a kind of surrealism­ which is code, which is information, which is speaking about vio­lence, about queerness, about things the society can’t or won’t accept in ways that are surreptitious or sneaky.

What African-American poetry taught me was the complexity and depth of signification, which is to be able to talk about being an other, while at the same time denying to a huge chunk of the audi­ence that you are talking about those things. The brilliance of layering language is something I learned and absorbed early in queer culture. We could send messages to one another across the room in language that was not intercepted by heteronormative society. Surrealism can be used as a defense mechanism as well. In Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union, surrealism was often used to talk about op­pressive government, and I think sometimes we do that in the United States, as well. It’s one of the lenses we can use as writers.

BRYANT

Would you talk more about language that rises from oppression?

POWELL

It’s being able to say, “Is she family?” in a small town and knowing most queer people wouldn’t think someone just asked if she was your relative. We know what that word means. We know it’s code. Being able to develop that language in places where you don’t want to be revealed is one of the great things queer culture has given us. And now so much of that language has been co-opted by non-queer culture, and we think, well, that’s kind of a compliment, but at the same time, what do we do when we don’t want to be picked up by everybody in the room?

Also, there’s the fucked up thing that happens when people misuse your language and the signals get crossed. Like when a heterosexual man says, “Yes, my partner and I recently broke up,” and you’re like, Oh! Are you telling me you’re not straight? You’re misusing my lan­guage.

We had to say partner because we were never allowed to say wife or husband. Give us that much, until you give us full equality. Which we now have, except for, God rest her soul, Kim Davis.

BRYANT

That’s like a surrealist performance.

POWELL

But isn’t it wonderful that we can see it as the bizarro version of culture, rather than the normal version?

BRYANT

With growing acceptance, do you see more co-opting of queer language and identity?

POWELL

I certainly see it in San Francisco, where the entire city has become metrosexual. Queer bars are no longer queer bars. Straight bars are no longer straight bars. People actually have to talk to each other in order to know, and no one assumes gender or gender identity or sexuality or marital status or anything without actually having a conversation. I try to go back in my mind and think, what is it that we really wanted all along? Isn’t what we wanted the ability to be different, the permission to be different? Not to be absorbed into the melting pot of assimilation.

I think that LGBT rights have come far on the coattails of mar­riage equality. But that’s essentially a middle-class concern, having to do with assimilationist values rather than people focusing on, say, job equality, protection from being fired, protection from discrimi­nation, protection from violence, those things that particularly affect people in the transgender community who are at subsistence level or homeless. We need to be protecting them, and the conversation is still more about, will Bob and Bob get their marriage license so that their adopted kids will have two fathers? That’s about property and inheritance, and some of us don’t have property or inheritance and need to be taken care of. That’s why I’m more interested in helping the Larkin Street Youth Center, helping people who are still on the run from a place that won’t accept them, rather than working for the benefit of the middle class, which I think usually takes care of itself.

BRYANT

What about the permission to be different?

POWELL

I live in San Francisco, where if we need to pee, we pee. I’m not going to qualify this or quantify that or ask permission, or anything like that.

That’s actually one of the wonderful things about Toni Morrison. She’s not trying to write a book that explains black culture for a white audience. She’s simply writing about a world that exists partially in real life and partially in the imagination and that is true to the life of the characters.

I want to be truthful to queer culture in all of its forms, not just the thematic, society-version harlequin. The African-American poet Haki R. Madhubuti writes about what he calls “the small doors of tokenism” and of the acceptance that exists only in terms of, Are you our kind of people? Will you fit in here? I never want to be that guy who’s like, Oh, you can take me anywhere.

You can’t. I often will end up putting myself into uncomfortable situations, going to a small college in rural Utah, for example, to read poetry to an audience that includes queer people who don’t feel safe in their environment; it feels like visibility has come for a moment. I don’t want them to feel like the freaks of their class, or like they’re freaks in my work. In my work, everyone’s a freak.

BRYANT

That’s what I love about New York City and San Francisco. The anonymity gives everyone permission to be a freak.

POWELL

And it’s changing. The Castro used to be a place where there wasn’t Pottery Barn. There wasn’t Starbucks. There wasn’t all of that shit. When we would go there, it was kind of raunchy and danger­ous and ugly and perverted and wonderful. Unapologetically sexual. Unapologetically S&M and leather, and all that stuff just out in the streets. It wasn’t as welcoming to diversity as it is now. If you wanted to meet black men, you would go to the Pendulum; if you wanted to hang out with your lesbian friends, you would go to Josie’s. There wasn’t the cross-pollination that there is now. But at the same time, the development of subculture and of subculture strategy and subcul­ture history—it was a fortress against what was really an ugly time in human history. The violence against gay, lesbian, and transgender people is ongoing, but we’ve made so many strides. We know now about killings. It used to be that they were buried in the police blotter and nobody knew. Your friend would disappear, and you’d find out weeks later that he’d been found with twenty-six stab wounds and ruled a suicide. You’re like, No, I don’t think my friend would have stabbed himself twenty-six times.

SCHMIDT

In Cocktails, you wrote about movies because you said you were tired of your own mind. Does that outside perspective reach into the internal and renew it in some way?

POWELL

The fact that one is writing from a mind other than one’s own is a purely enabling fiction to begin with. I think what I meant was that I wanted to put the camera in a different location. Sometimes you want close-ups, sometimes you want medium shots, sometimes you want the worm’s eye view, looking up at the world. I felt that in those poems I wanted to not be responsible for the content. They didn’t all start out as what they ended up. Intent on my behalf is usu­ally running around 1.5 on a scale of 10. Fifteen percent of my writ­ing is intentional—I said it that way, I meant it that way, that’s my literal mind. Most of the time I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m always surprised when I open my mouth and say shit. Why did I say that? It just came out.

Even my completely original poems are arrangements of things I’ve written and said at various moments. Even if it’s one continuous draft of a poem, the poem that you’re writing at 4:22 in the afternoon is different than the poem that you’re writing at 4:23 in the after­noon. You’re veering off-course all the time. That’s the experience of writing. What are the paths I could take with this image, with this idea? I think you become comfortable and conscious of the choosing nature of language. And that helps you because at any given mo­ment you could say, “Well, would this speaker in this poem say sofa or would they say couch or would they say davenport.” All of those things change the rhythm of the line, the music of the poem, the culture of the poem, the geography of it, the history of it. Every word you choose is a stain you’re putting on the page, and the idea is to have the stains work in such a way that they create, for the spectator, for the reader, some pleasurable experience. It doesn’t have to resolve itself in an image, but it often does. It could just as easily be about a mood or an encounter or a perception.

All of those different words–you’re aware of them in the way a painter is aware of the round brush and the flat brush, in the way a drummer is aware of the difference between the tom-tom and the snare. We’re using language all the time. We’ve just become more conscious of how we use it. Then you have to unkink all of that feeling and become natural to the form of whatever it is that you’re doing. The idea of going back to the natural—your original perception—you can spend years trying to figure out how to do that, and by the time you figure it out, you’re doing something different. Basho said you want to be quick and clean as if you’re slicing through a cold water­ melon. But we can’t always be like that. It takes a lot of trial and error to get to that point, so you choose your best moments.

SCHMIDT

You’ve written poetry entirely composed of section headings, cor­rect?

POWELL

Yes, from the apocryphal and pseudographic writings of the lost bible. We seldom invent words, and when we do, I doubt we own them. It’s not really a word if no one else uses it—it’s just gibberish. Most every word you use came from some place. If you can really do something cool and new and amusing with someone else’s language, of course do it—but it shouldn’t be the only thing you know how to do.

Sometimes you just do it by accident. Hart Crane sat down to type, ”And yet this great wing of eternity,” and accidentally typed, ”And yet this great wink of eternity” and thought it was so much bet­ter. He said, I’m going to keep that. Of course eternity is just a wink. If it were a wing, everybody could do that. When you read that line, it seems so true that you just take it as gospel.

WEEKS

Do you see an underlying connection between spirituality and writing?

POWELL

I believe, as Keats believed, that writing is “the vale of soul­ making.” It is this place where we are developing. Lucretius reminds us that everything is equal parts fullness and emptiness, and it is the emptiness that creates sound. Lao Tzu tells us that it’s not the clay, but the hollow part of the vessel that’s of use, its emptiness that aptly makes sound reverberate inside us. All that internal space is connect­ed by a vast network of signals, waves, sounds . We are creatures of light and sound, and so my spiritual self is rooted half in this con­scious embrace of the fact that we’re all really just nothing—truly nothing in the world—and yet we’re in these units, these bodies that have connective tissue designed to bring in information about the other nonmaterial that’s around us that we perceive as material. Part of my spiritual life is in recognizing the absolute interconnectedness of all things and the absurdity of the separation of bodies into sepa­rate little colonies of molecules and atoms.

At the same time, I recognize that everything takes its creative energy from friction and from a kind of a volatile existence. I recog­nize that all ways of seeing the world, all ways of being religious, all ways of being spiritual are going to be in conflict with one another. No one—well, perhaps one person—knows the truth about existence. My spiritual path is to be wrong about most everything in ways that are mostly instructive, at least for myself. I feel like in order to stay on that path, I choose from the greatest writings I encounter, including the Bible, which happens to be a problematic text in so many ways. Even St. Paul, homophobe that he was, distinguishes between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. If you tap into the spirit of the language of our sacred texts, it’s essentially good. And don’t worry about the letter of the law—that’s somebody else’s problem. If you don’t like the letter of the law, change it. If it offends you, if I offend you, then suck it up. If there’s a passage in the Bible that’s no longer relevant to your life, like owning slaves, or having multiple concu­bines or wives, or supporting incest, there are lots of other things that the Bible does include that are overlooked.

God destroyed the city of Sodom for what, exactly? It’s never quite clear. You have to take a giant step back and say, “If people want to pervert that text into a platform against other people, that’s really fucked up.” It doesn’t mean I have to participate. There’s a lot of beauty in God’s words, whatever words those are, whatever form they’re in. They come as easily in ordinary life as they do in the writ­ten text. The written texts are something we can agree on and argue about and have a conversation about. What people said cannot be debated, and that’s the big problem of the gospels. And the great beauty of them. There are at least four versions that we recognize, and thousands of others that we don’t recognize, so who knows what really went on with Jesus and all them boys? I’m sure there were certain things they weren’t able to talk about and had to signify. Brotherhood and all that.

BRYANT

Christ was celibate and chose to surround himself with men.

POWELL

If we choose to believe he was celibate. John the Divine was, repeatedly, in the position of being the apostle whom Christ loved. Leaning on his chest at the last supper. Being loved by him. Even at the moment of crucifixion, the narrator of the Gospel of John has Jesus look down at John and say, “Lo, here is thy mother.” Saying to Mary, “Go, here is thy son.” And the tradition is that John and Mary lived together with an emphasis that she treated him like a son, and he treated her like a mother. For all intents and purposes, John was Jesus’s significant other. But if that makes people uncom­fortable, which apparently it does, it gets left out. In the Acts of John—which are perhaps not by John, since he dies in them and it’s hard to write about yourself if you die—John has this beautiful con­versation where he says,”I didn’t want you to marry. I wanted you for myself. I wanted you as my beloved.” I can understand why people left that out. It can be frightening for some people, but why is that? Why is love strange?

---

…I’m saying
in the beginning was the word
and it was good, it meant one human

entering another and it’s still
what I love,  the word made
flesh. Fuck me, I say to the one
whose lovely body I want close,

and as we fuck I know it’s holy,
a psalm, a hymn, a hammer
ringing down on an anvil,
forging a whole new world.

These lines co me from Kim Addonizio’s poem ” Fuck” from her fifth collection of poems, What Is This Thing Called Love. It is for moments like these that Addonizio was referred to by Steve Kowit as “one of the nation’s most provocative and edgy poets.” Yet provocative and edgy seem like surface examinations of a body of work that is deeply beautiful and supremely intelligent. Her poems are honest reflections of human experience, instinctive and electric—like a first kiss, a first touch—the word made flesh.

Kim Addonizio was born in Washington, D.C. in 1954 to tennis champion Pauline Betz and acclaimed sportswriter Bob Addie. Although she was raised in a family of athletes, Addonizio herself was never interested in sports. In her essay “For My Mother, One Last Grand Slam,” recently published in the New York Times, Addonizio writes, “I used to have a really snotty attitude toward sports, convinced that they were trivial compared with Art, but that was when I was young and ignorant. Now I know better. Now I understand the importance of the body.” Indeed, her honest depictions of the body compel us to her work. Throughout her writing she examines the body, boldly facing its most  intimate details—the long vein rising up along the underside of his cock… the strawberry mole on his left cheek—facing how it succumbs to age—curled yellow toenails and a belly as milky as the swirls of soap.

Addonizio is the author of collections of poetry and short stories, as well as two novels and two books on writing, one of which, The Poet’s Companion, she co-authored with Dorianne Laux. She has earned numerous awards for her work, including Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowships, Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and nonfiction, and a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award. Her poetry collection Tell Me (2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award. At the time of this interview, Addonizio was anticipating the release of her latest collection of stories, The Palace of Illusions, including the story “Intuition,” which first appeared in Willow Springs 74.

An accomplished blues harmonica player, Addonizio often incorporates music into her public readings. In fact, much of her poetry is tied to American blues. Her most recent release, My Black Angel, is a collaborative collection of her blues poetry alongside woodcuts of blues musicians by artist Charles D. Jones. Of this collection, singer­ songwriter Lucinda Williams wrote, “I don’t just hear the blues in these poems. I see the blues inthese poems. I see myself in these poems.” Addonizio is drawn to the intimacy of the blues, what she describes as “one consciousness speaking to another about what is really true for them,” and she sees her poems as part of an ongoing conversation with these traditions and musicians. “It is a call and response,” she says, “a way to be part of the same song.”

Addonizio teaches creative writing classes privately and spends most of her time between New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. We met up with her at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference last year, where she taught a blues and poetry class with Gary Copeland Lilley. On a summer afternoon, we discussed blues, sex, the life of the artist, and pushing boundaries.

KRISTIN GOTCH

In the introduction to My Black Angel, you mention growing up with bands like Led Zeppelin and the Stones, and then coming to the blues after that, which felt like coming home. How did the blues feel like coming home?

KIM ADDONIZIO

Because I had those chord progressions in my head already, by listening to rock ‘n’ roll and the blues of Paul Butterfield. A lot of those musicians were responsible for some of the revival of interest in early blues figures who had faded into obscurity. They brought some of them back to perform for audiences, and they kind of had a second career later on.

What turned me on to blues harmonica was Sonny Boy Williamson—it was like being struck by lightning, which was the same way poetry hit me. When I heard Sonny Boy Williamson play, I sat up and took notice, and that’s when I began to get interested in the blues and blues harmonica. I was into Chicago blues first and then I learned a lot about early country blues from another harmonica player who was into the Delta stuff. I started going to music workshops, which are a lot like writers’ conferences, except that you have harmonica players wailing away and making strange sounds.

GOTCH

In What Is This Thing Called Love, you open with a Willie Dixon quote: “The blues are the true facts of life….” How so?

ADDONIZIO

There’s something primal about the blues, so much about feeling first. That’s what speaks to me. The language of the blues hits on those primal subjects—love and loss and getting through hard times. There’s also a subversive element that Gary Lilley was talking about in class, the way those songs are about struggle. So you can take it to the political level, but it is also personal. The blues singer is a singular figure, you know, singing about his or her own sorrow, but singing about it for everybody. That’s what I like. The intimacy draws  me in—which  is something I feel in lyrical poetry too, one consciousness speaking to another about what is true for them.

JEFF COREY

When did the blues begin to insert itself into your poetry?

ADDONIZIO

As I was learning to play harmonica, ten or fifteen years ago, I started doing it right away, even though I wasn’t sure how, exactly. I would just get up and torture audiences with my bad blues harmonica. I had to make myself play in front of them because I was terrified. But I made myself step up and do it. Luckily, I got a little better at the music. I began to figure out how to make it work—the harmonica is in your mouth so it’s a little hard to speak a poem while you are playing. One of the first things I did was learn a simple harmonica song and tag that on to the end of my reading.

Then I started to write songs in those blues forms, in the basic AAA—that call and response and a turn that takes it someplace else. I think “Blues for Robert Johnson” was the first one I did where I figured out how I could say the poem between playing licks on the harmonica.

AILEEN KEOWN VAUX

As a writer and a musician, how are your experiences similar and different as a performer?

ADDONIZIO

When I first started reading my poems I was terrified. It took a while to get comfortable in front of an audience. That doesn’t mean I never get nervous now, but I am a lot more comfortable getting up in front of people and reading. With the harmonica, I played with a blues band for a year and that helped me enormously, because we just got up and put out our equipment and did it. Ultimately, it’s about practice, about rehearsal. If I’m doing a solo piece or if I’m doing a reading where I know there is going to be music, I will really practice those pieces. I’ll have my set figured out between the words and the music and which harmonica I’m going to play.

KEOWN VAUX

How do you begin to explore a new art form, as you did with the harmonica, and incorporate it into your life as a new practice of art?

ADDONIZIO

You can study this throughout your whole life. And I hope to. I don’t listen to a whole lot else. I like a lot of different kinds of music, but I find myself listening to more blues, because I’m also trying to learn the music, so if I have any free time, I’m sort of making use of it in that way. If I’m making pancakes, I’m listening to the blues. If I’m making dinner, I’m listening to the blues. I’m driving, which is when I practice my harmonica, I’m listening to the blues.

I’d probably get good really fast if I were playing six hours a day. I mean, that’s what professionals do—the guys who really play, and I’m not one of them. They practice six to eight hours a day. I don’t have that kind of time. I feel lucky I’ve gotten someplace with it that I can be okay. I don’t think I’m going to get to the point of mastery, because I’m too focused on writing. I’m just glad I’ve gotten to the point where I can enhance what I do as a writer with music.

KEOWN VAUX

How does your writing practice differ from your musical practice?

ADDONIZIO

Right now, I have a regular writing practice, usually nine to noon, five days a week. That has been my time. Morning is good for me—wake up, have some coffee. I have this time that feels completely free and mine. I don’t have to get dressed. I’ll close the curtains, shut out the world. And then sometimes, that will fuck me up, because I’ll get into that interior space and not be able to get out of it. So I won’t go out that day, because I’m too into it. It strips away the outer layer, and I feel so vulnerable sometimes that I can’t deal with the outside world. Sometimes it’s hard for me to stop it. But that’s the time I try to carve out.

COREY

Ralph Ellison says that the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of the personal catastrophe, expressed lyrically. In your book Ordinary Genius, you say, “When you explore your own life in poetry, it’s good to remember that no one cares.”

ADDONIZIO

You know, I had to sugarcoat that a little bit.

COREY

These two sentiments ring true, but they also contradict one another. What do you think about these two ideas in relation to one another in the context of writing the blues into your poetry?

ADDONIZIO

I think it’s about how you make an audience or reader care. How do you make an audience care about your personal troubles, your personal sorrow? That’s where the craft comes in. You’ve got to make it interesting. Nobody’s going to listen to you singing off key. You have to find a way to get the notes right. In poetry or any kind of writing, it’s about getting the words right. It has to beguile someone. It has to attract. It has to entertain or offend them. Wake them up or knock them down. Writing works in so many different ways. There is writing that hits us with its raw power. Then  there are quiet things that put us into a hypnotic space and take us into other realms. But you can’t assume that your life is going to be important to anyone. It’s never going to be what it is to you, because you are the hero of your life.

COREY

What themes do you find emerging in your work when you write about the blues?

ADDONIZIO

Love is one of my preoccupations, as I’m sure it is with a lot of people. I think about Joni Mitchell in relation to this, actually, and how when I was a teenager, her album Blue was an important soundtrack for my life. All my poems are about my search for love, which doesn’t seem to cease—so many of her songs are about that struggle with finding love or negotiating love. I’m sure that was an influence.

Another of my preoccupations is human suffering, trying to comprehend it. Every writer has those obsessions that become their territory. Kafka said his whole writing  territory was  about going back to the two or three images that first gained access to his heart. I think all of that starts to become the focus of your writing, what you circle around, whether you’re writing about yourself or you’re writing persona poems.

I just wrote a piece for New Ohio Review called “Pants on Fire”­ they wanted essays on the subject of lying and truth in poetry. My essay mentions several of my poems and how I lied in them and what’s not true. I think those states of feeling are true, even if I might borrow something to make it a little more interesting or troubling or dramatic.

KEOWN VAUX

You talk about the “truth of the idea” in Ordinary Genius, and it struck me that—well, the details matter, but whether or not they actually happened shouldn’t be the primary concern.

ADDONIZIO

Right, and that’s where it goes back, for me, to song. Because the blues singers, you know, they’re singing, “My baby done left me.” Well, probably, sometime during their life, somebody did leave them, but they’re writing it like it happened yesterday, because it’s more powerful if it happened like, “Woke up this morning and my baby was gone.”

COREY

You said the blues struck you like lightning. And then it gradually evolved to this active impulse to play and a routine of practice. Did something similar happen to you when you started writing poetry?

ADDONIZIO

When I was struck by poetry, I had been playing the flute. I took it up in my twenties, and played it seriously for about seven years, seven days a week, playing, living with a composer. Then, when I got struck by poetry, I realized immediately it was an art form, that just as I’d had to practice three hours a day on my flute to get anywhere, to get better, I would have to practice poetry. I understood that, which a lot of people don’t when they start writing. They just think, I’m going to write. But I understood right away that this is a discipline, I had to start applying myself, and that’s when I went to graduate school, at San Francisco State. My writing time was haphazard because I had a baby and I was a part-time single mother. I had to work and go to graduate school part-time for four years. It was like, write when you get on the streetcar and write on the way to school.

GOTCH

I was reading a piece Robert Palmer did on Led Zeppelin, in which he discusses how the blues became an important lesson for Robert Plant. He quotes Plant as saying, “With the blues, you could actually express yourself rather than just copy, you could get your piece in there… I could use several blues lines, well-known blues lines, but they were all related to me that day. And that’s because the blues is more elastic.” What makes this genre such an effective outlet for self-expression and collaboration?

ADDONIZIO

I’m doing that not only with the blues but with literary traditions as well. I’ve found myself writing more allusive poems and bringing in lines, whether straightforward or torqued from other poems. It’s the same as jazz. A musician will steal a lick from somebody or play a lick in homage to someone else. A horn player will drop in a Charlie Parker lick, and everybody will recognize it. I think I’ve just been doing that more as a practice in my writing in general. It’s a way to interact with the tradition, with those songs, with poems. As Janis Joplin said in “Ball and Chain,” “It’s the same fuckin’ day, man,” and I think that’s true—it’s all just the same fuckin’ song, man.

It’s call and response. Which is part of what the blues is about. You know, poets and writers don’t use melodies, but we’re still singers. And I think allusion is a way to blend, connect, be a part of the same song. Whitman was talking to us when  he was writing. He didn’t know us, we weren’t alive yet, but he was talking to us. And we can talk to him.

KEOWN VAUX

The idea of collaboration seems like an important facet in your work—from My Black Angel to the craft book with Dorianne Laux. How has collaboration affected your work?

ADDONIZIO

It’s broadened it, and I hope to collaborate more, especially with musicians. My Black Angel is going to have a CD with it. We’re going to Houston to record, and I have no idea what that’s going to be like. But I’m really excited, because we’re going into a studio with professional musicians and some of the poems to figure out what the CD is going to be. It’s a cool direction.

I don’t have enough music people around me to do it a lot, so when I come to Port Townsend, I can do it here at Centrum, because I have collaborators that I know I can work with. In general, in my life, in Oakland or New York, I don’t really have those people. One reason I’ve tried to do some stuff on my own is that I can still pull in another art form I think audiences like. I feel like I’m an—I don’t want to say ambassador, but I want to bring this music, this African American music, to audiences. Because of where I am as a poet in my career, I have that audience. I want to bring the blues in front of them, say look at this tradition, look at this part of our history.

I’m performing at a blues and word festival in Florida. After I visited the first time, they decided they wanted to have me back and to have a blues band this time, so I’m going to collaborate with musicians, where the students are going to write blues poems and have a competition to read their work on stage with musicians. It’s nice that these interests I’ve had have come together in a way that I’m lucky enough to perform with some people and to make something happen.

COREY

In that sense, do you think of your full body of work as collaborative?

ADDONIZIO

Yes. It’s ultimately all part of the conversation. It’s one little part. It’s one voice.

COREY

Outside of the blues, another subject throughout your work is drugs, alcohol, addiction—do you see the relationship your characters have to their addictions as romantic?

ADDONIZIO

I have romanticized it, like a lot of people have. And that’s probably not a good thing to do.

COREY

You’ve said you write from emotion rather than autobiography. Do drugs and alcohol serve as a kind of tool to access that emotional truth in your work?

ADDONIZIO

The first rule of fiction is that only trouble is interesting, so you go where the trouble is. I think that’s part of it. Any kind of bad behavior is interesting and compelling, in the way that the ordinary and routine of life aren’t. So I think that’s definitely a big piece of my process—looking for trouble. And I spent a lot of my twenties doing drugs and drinking heavily, so that comes into it.

COREY

The way you maintained the narrative throughout Jimmy & Rita made me reevaluate what a short story collection or a book of poems is.

ADDONIZIO

I wrote one poem about those two people, and I decided that for some reason, I wanted to figure out their story and write a book about them. So from one poem, I had the idea of writing a novel in verse about them. That’s when I had to figure out who they were and write the book.

COREY

And then another book—

ADDONIZIO

I wrote a novel, continuing their story. I had to do it as a novel at that point.

COREY

What is it about these two characters that led to so much creation?

ADDONIZIO

They came to me and wouldn’t leave me alone. I was involved with them for a number of years. I think the narrative impulse has always been there for me; I was a narrative poet. Now I think that narrative impulse has gone into stories. I created characters and felt that they were very much alive. I thought I was done with them with the book of poems, but then I wanted to get them to a better place. I wanted to know what happened after the  ending of Jimmy & Rita, when Rita is in a homeless shelter and Jimmy is God knows where. So I started the novel where Rita returns to the shelter one night, and she’s looking for Jimmy in San Francisco.

COREY

Are there any current projects where you’re like, I just need to blow this up into something bigger or into a different genre?

ADDONIZIO

No, there isn’t. I don’t know what’s going to be next. I have a play I wrote a draft of that’s not working at all, that I’m afraid to go back to because I don’t know if I can fix it or make it work. Other than that, I sort of have nothing, which for me is a scary place to be. I like it when I can say, Okay, I’m building toward a project. And then, when the project is done, my immediate feeling is, Where’s  my next project?  Help, I need a project! I have to find something to focus on.

COREY

Jimmy & Rita: The Musical?

ADDONIZIO

It would have been a great play.

KEOWN VAUX

Stuart Dybek has said that when he sits down to write he doesn’t really know what direction he is going in. He might write a story for a little while and then stop when he realizes, Aha! That should have been a poem, revising the piece in that direction. You write in so many genres. Do you prepare and plan for your work by genre? Or do you wait for the piece to show its true colors?

ADDONIZIO

I usually do have a genre in mind. Like one day, I might say, I want to kick back and write poems, so I’ll start reading through books of poems. Or I’ll decide I want to finish a story collection, like The Palace of Illusions, the collection that’s coming out. Once I decided I was going to work on some earlier stories, I was inspired to write new ones. I was supposed to be writing poetry at the time—I was on a poetry fellowship—but I was reading fiction and getting inspired to write it, so I ended up doing that.

Recently, I’ve been working on a book of essays, so it’s either essays or poetry right now. Poetry is sort of my fuck-off time, because writing poems feels the best to me. Like I’m just going to do what I want and write poems. Whereas everything else kind of feels more like work—even though nothing comes super easily. I actually have notes from my agent about this book of essays I’m working on that I haven’t looked at yet. Because I didn’t want to have to think about what I needed to do to work on those essays while I’m here. I just thought, I’m going to wait until I get back, pick a day where I go, Today is essay day, then sit down and read my agent’s comments and start to work again on those essays. But really when I go back, I’ll probably go, Fuck it, I just want to write a poem today.

I have to read in the genre I’m writing in—I have to be really careful not to read out of the genre. Because if I started to read stories, I’d probably start working to write one. And I don’t want to do that now. I’m done, right now, with the stories. Right now, I don’t know if I’ll ever write another short story or start another novel. I don’t ever want to write another novel, if I can help it. They’re so fucking hard. It just so long and, God, you never know where you are. If you go down the wrong road, you have to throw away a bunch of pages. It makes me crazy. I guess I did it to see if I could, because I like to challenge myself, but at this point, I don’t really want to do that again. Right now, I’m reading essays, and I don’t want to read anything else. Except poems. If it’s a poem day, I’ll read poems.

KEOWN VAUX

You mentioned a new collection of essays—do you have a shape or theme for this new project?

ADDONIZIO

It’s called Bukowski in a Sundress. That might give you some idea. And the subtitle, right now, is Confessions from a Writing Life. It’s personal essays about sex and writing. Everything is from the lens of being a writer, but it’s also certain experiences from my life. It’s more memoir, in that it’s supposed to be entertaining essays about being a writer and situations I’ve found myself in.

COREY

Speaking of sex, what is the relationship between loneliness and sexual desire in your work? I’m thinking specifically about “Summer in the City.” [hands her the poem]

ADDONIZIO

I have not looked at this poem in a long time. It’s like somebody else wrote it. I remember at the time that I was taken by Hopper’s images that seem so isolated, so full of ennui, and I guess I was drawn to those and wanted to recreate that effect in a poem. I wanted to do a series on Hopper. It didn’t pan out. There is only “Summer in the City.” His images make you want to know what the story is. The poem was triggered by the image itself and trying to recreate that in language, whereas other poems may come from my own loneliness and trying to express that state.

KEOWN VAUX

I notice that across all the genres you write in—the way you express this state of longing, specifically centered around how women look at men. Do you think you’re creating something akin to the “female gaze?”

ADDONIZIO

I don’t think I tried in any way to do that. Whatever came out came from my perception, but there wasn’t an attempt to turn around the male gaze, or do anything like that. It was more about trying to write something, to be honest about a certain perspective. I don’t tend to think in abstractions, it’s more what the moment brings out and then stepping back to take a look.

KEOWN VAUX

In A Box Called Pleasure, characters  talk about performing for one another, then they say to the reader, “We are performing for you.” Performance and pornography are inextricably linked. Would you talk about the intersection you see between explicit writing and writing in the pornographic mode? Have you, or others, ever categorized your work as pornographic?

ADDONIZIO

In that book, for a number of pieces, I was figuring out different ways to write stories. I was reading people like Kathy Acker and George Beattie. I was reading Marquis de Sade. I was reading literary, pornographic texts in addition to Sontag’s essay on the pornographic imagination, in which she addresses using pornography as a literary mode. I was interested in these writers who were pushing boundaries. I could go out in this book and not have any limits on what I was writing. I could say the most outrageous things. I think that’s what Kathy Acker taught me. I feel the same way in poetry when I read Sharon Olds. You know that feeling of—What? What is she saying in a poem? I had no idea you could say things like that. I decided imagination is free and I can make it go anywhere I want.

GOTCH

During her reading last night, Erin Belieu talked about some poems being uncomfortable for her to read in public—but she read them, and I think she even said a few times, you know, “I’m never reading that one again.” Have you had a similar experience?

ADDONIZIO

It depends on the poem, it depends on the audience. I keep saying poem, but I have to remember I’m a fiction writer as well. I remember reading from Jimmy & Rita at a community college and feeling like, This is a big mistake. And at the end of it, sure enough, one of the students raised her hand and said, “Why does your work have to be so nasty?” I said, “Well, what do you mean?” And she said, “It has a lot of curse words in it and these bad things happen and I don’t understand the people.” I said, “Life is like that sometimes. And maybe it’s not for you right now, but this is what some people’s lives are like.” I’m trying to present that because I think all aspects of life should be presented. There shouldn’t be anything we’re not writing about or thinking about, in terms of human experience.

KEOWN VAUX

I’m curious about how you address what it is like for a woman to walk around in this world, specifically, with respect to two of your poems. If you put “Dead Girls” and “Augury” in conversation with one another, what would they talk about?

ADDONIZIO

I think they’re both about being a girl in the world, a woman in the world, you know, because we’re powerful, but we’re vulnerable, too. I think that’s what it is—both aspects. Boys and children are vulnerable in that way too. Also, the predatory aspect of sexuality is so powerful. I have a daughter. At the time I wrote “Dead Girls,” Polly Klaas had been taken from her home in Petaluma and raped and murdered. My daughter was the same age at the time, so I think there are three poems in that book about children who are abducted. It was very much on my mind, being the mother of a girl child, and thinking about how vulnerable she was in the world. And ”Augury” is the other side of the coin, a women’s beauty and power, girls coming into the awareness of their power, a girl on the verge of beginning to recognize her sense of herself. I know it happens for boys in a different way. But I don’t know that—because if I would have had a boy, I would have been writing different poems. I had a girl, so I didn’t get to see that side of it.

COREY

Because augury means how things will happen in the future, do you see this more as inevitability or an idealization of things to come?

ADDONIZIO

You mean making my daughter Helen of Troy? I think parents do feel that way about their children. We admire the hell out of them.

We love them so much. And when you see your child so uncertain about herself, and getting dressed up for the prom and getting ready and checking herself out—Do I look okay?—and you’re looking at her, just stunned by her beauty. It’s interesting, not seeing your own beauty, which you know, we all struggle with.

COREY

You’re someone who has built a career as a writer without being affiliated with any particular institution or university.

ADDONIZIO

I basically chose to be an entrepreneur, to be in business for myself I didn’t like working for people much. Over the years, I’ve worked  as a waitress, at an auto parts store, for a car dealer and at a ball bearings manufacturer—a lot of auto-related jobs. I didn’t like having to go to a job every day. So teaching would seem the ideal thing, because you have a lot more freedom when you’re teaching, but then when I got into academia, I felt stifled by it. I loved going to graduate school, I had a great experience at San Francisco State—I learned a lot and had some good teachers and met fellow writers. But I was teaching composition, and I didn’t like that much. So I thought, I’ll teach creative writing, teach to people who want to hear what I have to say and not the comp students who don’t care and aren’t interested in creative writing. But I didn’t have the credentials to teach creative writing full time—I don’t think I had a book out or anything—so I started trying to do it on my own. I tried to become a bartender, and then right when I was about to take a bartending job, I thought, Well, maybe I could start a writing class, and if I can, maybe I won’t have to take the bartending job. I got enough students after my third attempt for a private class. It’s about temperament. I couldn’t handle academia. I wanted to be an artist first, which meant I had to figure out my own shit. On the other hand, without the university, I don’t think I could have survived. The readings I give around the country at different universities are significant pieces of my income.

COREY

When you talk about being an artist first, does that influence how you allocate your time?

ADDONIZIO

I have made art the priority, and that’s not to say anything about people who have university jobs. Everybody has to do something to survive. I’m at the point now where I wouldn’t want a full-time university job, but I’ll be a visiting writer in a heartbeat. I did that recently and loved it. It was fun to come back to a campus. Although I remember arriving at San Jose State and feeling a little freaked out, like, okay, there are grades, I have a little cubicle, I have these keys, I have an office, I have to have office hours. I was nervous my first day there, but then it was great—because I love teaching.

I pay my own health insurance, and have for most of my life. Right now, I’m on really cheap insurance in New York that doesn’t cover anything unless I get seriously ill and land in the hospital, in which case I’ll only be set back $10,000. Because that is my deductible. And it covers just about nothing. So this year, I’m just not getting sick. I’m not going to the doctor. I can’t afford the health insurance I had before. So I’m not sure what my next step is.

KEOWN VAUX

Move to Minnesota.

ADDONIZIO

Yeah, exactly. Because they have a really good arts council there and you can get big grants from them. Or Massachusetts, where health care is basically free. That’s another possibility. But those are the kind of things that are my considerations. Whereas, if I’d been teaching in a university for twenty years, I would have health insurance, I would have all kinds of benefits I don’t get as a freelancer. So it’s a little more uncertain, but I’ve gotten comfortable with that. I’ve gotten used to the ebb and flow. Ah, shit, I have a great life. Let’s face it. I mean, oh, God, the ebb and the flow and the uncertainly, the drama of it all? I fucking love my life. Because it’s all centered around doing what I love to do. I’m a writer. That’s my primary thing. And I get to do that, and make some kind of living at it. It’s amazing.

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“How I would love to be the speaker of my poems!” declares Cate Marvin in an article published in the Los Angeles Times. “For then I should know such liberation.” This liberation is exactly what draws us into Marvin’s poems. Her speakers are free to love, to seek vengeance, to exert authority.

Marvin grew up in Washington, D.C., the only child of a military intelligence analyst. Although she admits she was often unhappy as a junior high and high school student, she found salvation in poetry. Marvin defines poetry as “sacred space.” Her poems are constructed with surprising images, insistent music, and textured language, as illustrated in the following lines from “Landscape with Hungry Girls:” “There is blood here. The skyline teethes the clouds / raw and rain’s course streams a million umbilical / cords down windows and walls. Everything gnaws…” The images are surreal, but the poem’s experience remains tangible, and each line break creates a raw, stunning musicality.

Marvin is the author of three books of poetry, including Oracle, forthcoming from Norton in 2015. Her debut collection, World’s Tallest Disaster, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, and her poem “An Etiquette for Eyes,” which first appeared in Willow Springs 72, was chosen for Best American Poetry 2014. Critics often compare Marvin’s work to Sylvia Plath’s, but as Jay Robinson points out in his review of her second collection, “It’s difficult to classify the poems of Cate Marvin’s Fragment of the Head of a Queen. Of course, comparisons are handy, but inadequate, and claiming Marvin akin to Plath is off the mark. For one thing, Marvin’s poems are more narrative than Plath’s. And also, Marvin goes places not even Plath would dare.” Marvin’s poems are often bold, but her purpose is never solely to shock; rather, she aims to portray a complex range of human emotion.

Cate Marvin holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston, an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in English and comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati. She serves as Director of Operations for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and teaches English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. We met with her in her room at the Hotel Max in Seattle during last year’s AWP Conference, where we drank wine from coffee mugs and talked about motherhood, risking sentimentality, and “lying like the truth.”

KRISTIN GOTCH

One of my favorite poems from your first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, is “The Whistling Song from Snow White.” I love the speaker’s sense of confidence in lines such as “I command. Make yourself look like you want to get fucked / because in my land, nobody gets fucked over…”

CATE MARVIN

I wrote that when I was twenty-five, so it’s nineteen years old. I was writing pared-down poems at the University of Houston, and my instructor, an amazing poet, Adam Zagajewski, said to me, “Your poems are anemic.” That was part of a series of poems where I was letting myself swagger a bit. I remember writing that poem and knowing it was a moment of change for me.

That was a good summer for writing. I was working with a lack of self-consciousness and a better idea of who my reader might be, maybe someone like me. That poem is very much a statement of poetics; I was claiming my turf. Poetry has always been a sacred space for me. It saved me. I was a miserable high school student. I started writing when I was eleven, didn’t fit in, like most poets, and poetry was the thing— I realized when I was seventeen—that I was going to do. So when I went to a graduate program, I had a very high notion of the importance of poetry. In some ways, I had to reclaim what poetry meant for me. When you’re in that situation and you’re duking it out, you have to be strong. That whole change was like, I’ve got my own motherfucking country. This poem is my land and I make the rules.

I was talking to a friend of mine and asked if she recognized Free To Be You and Me as a reference in that poem, and she said, “I’ve heard of it.” But if you were born in the late sixties or early seventies, and you had progressive parents, you would have known that record, Free To Be You and Me, by Marlo Thomas. It’s like, we are all equal and everything’s cool. The notion of equality we know now is problematic. But at the time, you were raised to believe you could be anything, the American dream. The irony of that is thinking you can be president, and then realizing that, well, no. And then, there’s this assumption: Oh, well, I’ll get married. And that becomes your worth—someday someone will marry you! That’s why romantic comedies trigger such sentiment in us. Because they provide catharsis. We’re taught that this is what to hope for, and if we don’t get it, then we did something wrong as a woman.

KATE PETERSON

Are you going to let your daughter watch romantic comedies?

MARVIN

I’m going to let her watch anything. My parents let me read what I wanted. They were very open-minded. I was reading adult books, explicit books, at a young age, and I don’t think it messed me up. I don’t think we can prevent our children from seeing things today, with access to the internet. I don’t want my daughter to find porn sites online and I intend to figure that out as I go, but parenting is something I try to compartmentalize. I try not to worry too much about what’s going to happen five years down the road, because I have tomorrow to handle. My kid asks a lot of questions, and a lot of them are about death. We’re dealing with mortality now. A good friend of mine died last summer and several of my daughter’s fish died, so she’s curious. I get nervous when she’s crossing the street, because she’s like, “Oh, well, and then we’ll die.” Most parents will tell you their kids have predilections to certain things, often gendered. There’s not a lot you can do about that, and if your kid likes princess stuff, you’re going to let her dig princess stuff, because that’s what makes her happy. Of course, later on you can talk about the larger issues. My daughter’s not interested in princess stuff. She’s interested in dinosaurs and unicorns and animals. But she asks me every day if she looks pretty. A lot of that comes from people telling her she’s cute, and her girlfriends evaluating each other’s outfits every day. One day she came home from school—she was four—in a very bad mood because no one liked her outfit. This has been disconcerting for me. I was not a cute kid. I was skinny, with buck teeth because I sucked my thumb till I was eleven, and I had not the greatest haircut and was a total tomboy. My daughter is blonde—she’s not blonde anymore, but she was when she was a baby—and she has gray eyes, so it’s weird, because I have brown hair, brown eyes. I never thought I would have a kid that was fair. It was interesting to watch people dote over her when she was a little blonde girl. It felt like something that separated us.

STEPHANIE McCAULEY

In past interviews you’ve mentioned that earlier in your career you were too busy with school and writing to be in a successful relationship. But now you have a daughter and you’re finishing a third book—how do you manage everything? What’s changed?

MARVIN

I made the decision to have a kid when I was thirty-seven. I found out I was infertile, so I had to do IVF. I had to make a decision pretty much then and there whether or not I wanted to have a child. I wasn’t prepared to make that decision because I thought, like all of us think, that we can wait until we’re fifty to have a kid. That’s not really true. It’s actually quite difficult. And I still haven’t found a relationship that will work for me. I got frustrated thinking I would have to settle for a relationship in order to have a child. When I found out I had to start undergoing fertility treatments, I was told that most clinics would probably show me the door. I had to make a decision, and I decided that it would be for my work and my life. I had spent so much time by myself, smoking cigarettes and holed up reading books and writing poems, I felt like that could come to a very poor end in terms of my life—not the persona of my poems, but me. So I got pregnant. It took three tries.

Having a child changes everything and changes nothing. My life improved by having a kid. But you’re really much the same person. In some ways, you’re almost more who you are. But you have to kind of fall out of love with yourself. Narcissism has to go out the window. That’s painful, to break up with yourself. Juggling it all has definitely slowed my progress, but a couple of things have happened. First of all, I write differently now, and because I was writing so much for so long, I can work on a lot of stuff in my head. I also work on things over a very long time. I was working on a poem last night that I started in 2008, when I was pregnant. I’m finishing that up, and rewriting it again. The process is different now. You don’t actually get the time to sit and write, but you write differently, and if you’re a writer, you have to write and you end up writing things in spite of yourself.

So what happened to me is that I discovered I had a book. I didn’t think I had a book, but when I pulled together my poems I realized I had a manuscript. It was not the third book I’d planned to write, which was some dense, elegiac, almost philosophical thing. This book is more irreverent than my previous books, weirder in a lot of ways, because I had to do away with some filters in my life.

I recognized that having a daughter was ordinary, and before that I had lived comfortably with a sort of special woman’s status. I almost thought of myself as a guy in some ways, and you can’t think of yourself as a guy when you’re so obviously not. Then you have this kid with you and people are criticizing you or blessing you, and you’re pushing the stroller around and you can’t be at the house. When I found out I was going to have a daughter, it scared the shit out of me. I thought, Oh, my God, this person who I already love—it’s really weird when you get pregnant, you’re just like, I love this kid already; I don’t even know this kid. I was convinced I was having a boy. When it was a girl, I was like, Oh, my God. No.

Having a kid has made me figure out I have to say no to a lot of things. But it’s also forced me to take some downtime I might not have otherwise taken, because if your kid wants to go to the park and play, that’s all you’re doing. And it’s nice. I’ve met a lot of people as a result of having a kid. I used a sperm donor to get pregnant and I know a lesbian couple who used the same donor. They’re part of my extended family and our daughters know each other as sisters. As an only child coming from a small family—just me and my parents—it’s nice to have that extension and to sort of move in other parts of the world. My kid is like a living poem. She says stuff that blows me away. It’s wonderful to have that kind of love in your life. It puts everything into perspective. But I don’t worry about what my daughter is going to think about my poems. My writer’s office is separate from me running around day to day.

McCAULEY

You mentioned realizing you had a book. How does it compare to the first two?

MARVIN

I don’t know yet. Wallace Stevens has a great quote from the essay “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” and I’m just going to paraphrase it, here. He says: I don’t know what the poem is going to be, except it is what I want it to be once I make it.

The sense is that you have to accept the poem on its own terms. You have to feel it and dress it and allow it to create its own shape. It’s almost like I picture an invisible form I’m putting clothes on so people can see it. This new book came out of nowhere. In a lot of my projects, I’m interested in the post-confessional mode, taking it further. It’s a good rhetorical mode for talking about some things people aren’t necessarily ready to read—what I call stealth poems. I don’t know if I can speak to that yet. I also haven’t gotten to the point in the press kit and stuff where I get asked a bunch of questions and I look at my book and say this is what it’s about. Right now I can say that it’s about death in a big way and, in some ways, it ends on a rebirth. It’s full of elegies, and while I wouldn’t say it’s slapstick, there’s a lot of whacked-out humor in it.

PETERSON

Can you expand on what you mean by the stealth poem?

MARVIN

The stealth poem is something I was doing unconsciously when I was at the University of Houston, where they like you to have nice, neat, quatrain poems, a tight, shapely stanza. You can have chaotic and unseemly content in a poem, but visually, when it’s crafted really well, it impresses; you can imply any number of political opinions or agendas in this poem that are not necessarily picked up by the reader, because the reader is like, Oh, well, this is a very well-made poem. It’s what literature does all the time—makes the reader empathize with someone they may not have previously empathized with, whether they know it or not, because they can see themselves in the speaker. It’s a kind of code; women have been writing that way for a long time. As have queer people, as have people of color. It’s something I do a lot less of in my third book.

PETERSON

You mentioned that your daughter is talking a lot about death and that your third collection is about death. Do you think your daughter influenced your third collection?

MARVIN

No. My book was done before my friend died of liver failure. She was my age. It was very unexpected. A good friend died in 2005 and that was hard, because he represented to me the most awesome way to be in the world, a very funny, offbeat person who connected with a lot of people in a way that was contagious. He enjoyed life. One of the problems with our culture is there’s no proper way to grieve. Poetry can be one place to explore that.

GOTCH

I want to go back to what you said about “The Whistling Song from Snow White.” You said that up until that point your poems were “anemic…”

MARVIN

My undergrad poems—people would get appalled at what I wrote about. I’m tame compared to how I was then. I’ve learned over time to have a better understanding of how I’m coming across, how I might be affecting my audience. One of my flaws is that I can be oblivious. That’s a bit of a gift, because it means I’ll say things and not think too much about them and not realize people are taking me seriously and are like, What the hell is she saying? Maybe some of that comes from not being heard for a long time. When I was in junior high and high school I was unhappy, and that particular generation, the parents were like, Okay, you’re unhappy, deal with it; we’re going to work now. When I first asked to see a shrink, it was like, No, you can deal with your problems yourself. It was a typical suburban upbringing, but it was existential for me, the way I think it is for a lot of kids, and even more painful because you can’t put a finger on what’s wrong. Or it doesn’t seem legitimate to be in psychic pain. I went to college and was among people I had a lot in common with, but when I was in high school, I was a bad student. My self-esteem was for shit. I think some of that comes out of not actually thinking anyone will care.

McCAULEY

In your essay “Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant,” you say you’re pleased to discover that you “tricked someone into believing the world of [your] poems is true.”

MARVIN

I don’t want to waste my reader’s time. We’re not on this planet for long, and I get frustrated with indulgent writers. I know I’ve been indulgent at times and I apologize for wasting anybody’s time, but I really do try, first of all, to be entertaining. I write a lot of poems no one ever sees that are boring, self-indulgent—no one wants to hear about my cats. But you want to write about everything. So anything that comes to fruition, the stakes have to be high, there has to be an emotional input on my part, I have to feel convinced in the poem. All of that has to do with language, with creating something unique with language, so that every line or phrase is something no one has encountered before, something actually changing someone’s experience of reading, something visually and viscerally communicating, giving someone a scene or an atmosphere or an experience. You want your poem to be interesting, you want to know that there’s trouble, great trouble, that something is going to happen. As far as tricking someone into believing the world of the poem is true, all the best writing is trickery. It’s lying like the truth.

McCAULEY

So, trickery is actually good for your readers?

MARVIN

Absolutely.

McCAULEY

It’s not manipulative?

MARVIN

Manipulative has a bad rap. Rhetoric is manipulative; all language is manipulative. When we use language we are moving to get something we want. We’re always making arguments for something, always trying to negotiate a space. If you know your way around words and are good at manipulating them, that’s good. On the other hand, if it’s a formula you’re using over and over to manipulate someone, that’s a lie. But if you’re writing something that you can’t even believe you wrote, and you yourself are convinced of the truth of it—I mean, sometimes I write something and the experience of the poem becomes that experience itself in some ways. I think it’s naive to think that any writer who’s good is not manipulative.

GOTCH

In that same essay, you mention how Sylvia Plath’s work was criticized based on facts from her personal life. People are still reading Plath and other poets that way. I had a professor tell me never to read Plath. He had reduced her poetry to a cry for help. Why do you think readers mistake intense emotion for autobiography or a cry for help?

MARVIN

It seems like a reductive way to approach a craft that is endlessly changing itself, endlessly complicated and fascinating. That view of Plath is conservative, old school, pretty much over. It was supposedly “uncool” to like Plath when I was an undergrad, but I loved her anyway—I wrote a seventy-page paper on her. I also think that to dismiss the personal in poetry—that kind of dismissal almost always takes place when it’s women’s poetry. People are sympathetic toward Lowell’s plights or John Berryman’s plights. In those cases, within the confessional mode, the transgression is to display weakness. For female confessional poets, the transgression is to display strength. Your professor said Plath’s work was a cry for help. This individual was probably not Plath’s intended reader, probably didn’t grasp the irony of her work. You have a poem like “Daddy” and it works on multiple levels. It employs the second person, it seems like a dialogue, but it’s not. It seems sincere, but it’s not. It’s mercilessly artificial. It winks at women with irony. Every woman loves a fascist. Plath knows every woman loves a fascist and, of course, in life, no woman loves a fascist—she’s working off of that fifties advertising jargon. There’s a lot packed into that. Also, one of the primary things you learn from Plath is craft. From her syntax to her punctuation, she’s a master. She keeps a poem moving.

PETERSON

In the conversation “Your Silence Will Not Protect You” between you and Erin Belieu, you mention that you have born the brunt of the “angry poet persona.” How do you feel about readers inventing a Cate Marvin from what’s on the page?

MARVIN

You’re probably doing your job pretty well if someone thinks they know you. I can’t take issue with that, but I would hope my poetry is challenging enough that people don’t come to it with a reductive interpretation that my life is on the page. I get frustrated with that because it’s silly, though it happens to pretty much every writer. People make assumptions. I make my students swear not to show their work to anyone outside the workshop for the semester because I don’t want a boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, reading their work. They need to understand that their poems will be written for people they’ve never met and never will meet. Those are the people they’re going to move. If you’re really ambitious as a writer, those are the people you’re writing for. If you’re worried about someone reading you, you don’t experience the liberty of writing whatever you want and shapeshifting, being whoever you want to be. Poems that are fun to write are fun to read.

A student once said to me, “Aren’t you scared to put these things out there?” I don’t have a sense of people paying a whole lot of attention to me. I go through life pretty oblivious. I’m not especially paranoid, I’m not especially self-conscious. I spend a lot of time by myself and I am just like, you know, poetry is this other world, so I can’t really worry about it.

PETERSON

We listened to one of your poems on YouTube, “Yellow Rubber Gloves—”

MARVIN

I had no idea that had been unleashed onto the world. That’s fucked up. And that poem’s very Plathian. I was totally thinking of her. I hope you laughed.

PETERSON

It’s so powerful. I didn’t really laugh, I just felt like, Yeah, this is it.

MARVIN

The thing about the speaker in the third book…she’s getting old. She’s aware of herself in relationship to younger women. She’s not nice about other women. There’s a poem called “Poem for an Awful Girl” that’s about competition with other women and jealousy. It sucks to get old, to realize you’re not in the running anymore. With “Poem for an Awful Girl,” I’m plotting this woman’s demise. She has the guy I want. But then the speaker realizes that this woman she’s wishing horrible things upon isn’t even aware that the speaker’s alive. The speaker’s talking about needlepointing, and she’s at a needle point. It’s like this focus for women, that there’s this division in some ways which is funny, because I love my students and the age they are, and I hang out with them all the time and they’re my favorite people in the world to talk to, but I’m always registering the fact that I’m older than them and worried about that, freaked out that I even got this old. There’s also this thing like, Don’t be so carefree, don’t think it’s all so good because look at where I am now.

GOTCH

The speaker in “Yellow Rubber Gloves” seems to have a direct purpose when it comes to relationships—could you talk about the impulse behind that poem?

MARVIN

That poem has an autobiographical impulse. In fact, there are a lot of autobiographical impulses in my third book. It’s more personal in a lot of ways, more connected to my actual life. I’m not ashamed to say that, because the poems, I hope, completely transform that, and I don’t think anybody should be ashamed about the personal. I think women are often made to feel bad, that their writing is inferior because it is not “objective,” because they are writing inside their experience—but that attitude directly invalidates female experience, or anybody’s experience. It’s like, We don’t want to hear your complaints. You’re just whining. So in “Yellow Rubber Gloves,” I was married and always washing the dishes. I was the dishwasher and I used yellow rubber gloves because my hands would get fucked up if I didn’t use them. There’s a disaster to the situation, being in servitude and washing someone’s dishes all the time. I was a PhD student and writing. I decided I wanted to reclaim the term “confessional.” I was like, If you’re going to damn me as being confessional, then I will be confessional in a way that will scare the shit out of you. That’s been really fun, because I think it scares people who should be scared.

The poem started back in 2000. I started with the image of the centaur. But the mop and stuff, the whole idea was that the end would be like, Oh, my paramour—. But how do I confess this, how do you tell the new lover where you’ve been in a past relationship, that you’ve been denigrated? At the time, I had this new lover who’s mythologized in the poem as Pan. But how do you explain that you’ve been defiled and still seem whole to someone? I always wanted that poem to work. I’d show it to my friend, my main reader, and he was like, No, no, no, and I would rework it. And then I finally just finished it one day, not too long ago, one of the last poems to go in the book. I was doing this big run, writing poems all day and night to finish the book, and I just wrote it. It’s a general address to women. It’s also like this huge, you know—I’ve cashed it in. I’m ready, I’m done with it, I’m going be that old woman with cats.

It’s meant to be awful in that way. It names it, like, Yeah, I’m the fucking cunt who should have shut her hole long ago. I was laughing the whole time writing it. And I think you should use rubber gloves when you wash dishes, because I am a huge proponent of skin creams and lotions and I’m like, Use gloves!

So it’s supposed to be funny and awful, but the thing is—be careful out there, just be fucking careful. Because you could spend a lot of time negotiating relationships where your time to write is being taken away maybe by someone who is not a writer who thinks maybe, Oh, you’re not spending enough time with me, and if you live in New York or anyplace you can take public transportation, you know the ease with which men take up space on a subway. And there is a whole tumblr or tweeting thing of photographs of men taking up space. All women writers—it’s like we’re here, tucking into ourselves because we’re afraid. And that’s no way to live.

PETERSON

A lot of your poems go to uncomfortable places. Do you ever think to yourself, I shouldn’t write this?

MARVIN

No. I’m kind of compulsive and revealing. My father was a military intelligence analyst and his whole life was about keeping secrets. Whenever I feel like I shouldn’t say something, that means I’m about to blurt it out. For me, typos or coming across as sentimental are far more embarrassing than saying something unseemly. I’m working on a poem right now that has patches of sentimentality that I really need to work out of it. I’m rewriting it line by line, to wring that out.

GOTCH

What is sentimentality in poetry?

MARVIN

Well, with women it’s often a rhetorical device employed at a point when the reader’s not expecting it, and it gets them. It’s like in the movies, a technique. I guess we should look at the definition of sentiment; is sentiment less than love? What is it about sentiment that makes it bad? Is sentimental not beautiful? You know, hell, we’re all sentimental at some point, aren’t we? Because love leaks into sentiment. People are worried about sentiment, worried that people will be sappy or something and write love poems. I don’t know. I actually think sentimentality can be used as a rhetorical weapon in some ways. Like very ironic sentiment.

GOTCH

I think there are people who confuse sentimentality with love, like in a love poem—as if, just because it’s about love means it’s sentimental…

MARVIN

What would Pablo Neruda say about that? What would Garcia Lorca say? It’s easy to make someone feel bad about expressing a feeling when we pretty much go around feeling things all the time—that’s part of being human. I don’t like poetry that doesn’t have feeling in it. And you know who also didn’t write poetry that doesn’t have feeling in it? Robert Frost. A lot of people looked to him as the model for neo-formalism, but Frost was a tormented person, suffering a lot of the time. So it’s interesting to see what’s happening in his poems. He says, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” Okay, so let’s see. Sentiment. Exaggerated or self-indulgent feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia. Exaggerated or self-indulgent. I guess that’s the problem with sentiment, or that’s the criticism, but I think if you didn’t have some sentiment in a poem, you might not have the whole pallet of human emotion. I want to create an emotional atmosphere in my poems.

PETERSON

Jonathan Johnson says poets should risk sentimentality. Why does it have to be a risk?

MARVIN

Because it’s always a risk. It’s a risk when you’re in love with someone, a risk to reveal your feelings; it shouldn’t be but it is. In a poem, if you’re sentimental in the beginning, you’ve already given it away. It’s the writer’s job to seduce. You’re not just going to walk in buck naked and be like, Here I am. You have to lure them in from the title on.

McCAULEY

That goes along with T.S. Eliot and the New Critics and the idea that personality shouldn’t factor into reader response.

MARVIN

T.S. Eliot is always saying the opposite of what he means. When he says there’s an absence of personality, he means that in some ways you can be anything, but it’s clear that absence actually allows your real self to be present. The way he states these things, it’s always sort of wonderfully complicated, like the objective correlative, which is where he’s just making an argument that you should employ figurative language, that you should show, don’t tell. It’s Ezra Pound all over again. Eliot is interesting because you can mold him in a way to make many of his statements advocates for just reading a poem on its own terms, reading a poem by its own rules.

McCAULEY

So the self-sacrifice and the extinction of personality can actually allow for the personal?

MARVIN

Personality is, in some ways, almost a process, because what he’s talking about is like body odor. He’s talking about the state of personality. Where it’s like with poetry, you can’t be that person, you can’t be the daily person—in some ways it’s like getting rid of personality to allow a voice in.

PETERSON

On the back of your latest collection, Rodney Jones says that, “The work bristles with the intellectual and emotional contradictions that face single women of this time.”

MARVIN

I asked him to take out “single” and it didn’t end up getting taken out. I didn’t think it was fair. First of all, sometimes I’m single, sometimes I’m not. In fact, when a lot of that book was written, I had a serious boyfriend who helped me with a ton of those poems—Matthew Yeager, who is now a good friend, a brilliant poet, who totally understands my poetics and helped me get through this book. “Muckraker” is a poem he saved. I’d thrown my hands up and was done with it. It’s probably the best poem in the book. So, sure the speaker is not having such a great time with relationships, but she’s having a lot of relationships. She’s not single. She’s maybe kind of getting around a little bit.

McCAULEY

So a woman has to be either single or married.

MARVIN

I guess facebook gives us those options, right? I mean, what if you’re married to a fucking idea? You know, I’m married to poetry. It’s like what Adélia Prado, the Brazilian poet, says in her poem “With Poetic License.” She says, “I’m not so ugly I can’t get married.” She says, “When I was born, one of those svelte angels…/ proclaimed / this one will carry a flag.” She says, “It’s man’s curse to be lame in life, / woman’s to unfold. I do.” And that’s sort of like saying, “I’m married to poetry.” Rodney is one of my favorite people in this entire world and it was important to me that he blurbed the book, because he’s an exquisite poet and one of my mentors. I also wanted to show that someone who is a male, Southern poet gets it.

PETERSON

What are the emotional contradictions he was talking about?

MARVIN

Contradictions women face all the time regarding what they’re told by media, what they’re told they should and shouldn’t be. We’re told we’re on the brink of death every moment we leave the house at night; if we wear skimpy clothes, we’re probably not only going to be raped but probably deserve it. That’s what culture tells us, what media tells us. And women are adaptable, we kind of go along, we’re going to be friendly and kind and shit like that. But what we’re doing is accommodating a vocal and almost banal expression of violence toward us all the time. It’s not just women who see this—plenty of men see it and find it repugnant too.

GOTCH

In Fragment of the Head of a Queen, you have poems that seem to be written from a male perspective, such as “All My Wives” and “A Brief Attachment—”

MARVIN

That’s a female speaker in “A Brief Attachment,” a female speaker in a relationship with a woman. I tried to make that explicit. There’s something ironic about that poem, because the speaker is a poet, and has this attachment, this affair, with a younger poet who is really driving her crazy, but who is also someone to admire. There’s a lot of arrogance on behalf of the speaker. That’s what the poem is about. Both of the characters are problematic. That poem riffs off Thomas Wyatt’s “Noli Me Tangere.” Do not touch. It’s trying to work off of Wyatt, a sixteenth-century poet, but it has a lesbian spin, even though people expect the speaker of this book to be heterosexual. I thought that would be amusing. Twisted. That poem deals with a great unease regarding sexual ambiguity—bisexuality or homosexuality. With “All My Wives,” I was reading a Michael Burkard poem that had that line, “All my wives,” and it just clicked for me. That poem is strange. And ominous. There was a reading series in New York where actors read your poems, and this actress read that one and scared the fucking shit out of me. Basically, that speaker is the figure in “Muckraker,” a silly, arrogant man. But I also like him. You know how fiction writers say they like all their characters? When I read that poem, I am so him in that. But of course, he’s totally evil. He’s also pathetic, because he’s just this high-dictioned combination of two of my ex-boyfriends, someone I dated when I was twenty and then someone I was married to. I assumed that attitude. It’s kind of like, Oh, I see how he sees women. And the whole thing is like, Why would I desire to look in your eyes when I could pick up a book? “It’s like buying a book I’d never want to read,” he says. But also, you see in the end, he’s scared because he knows there’s this animal sense, that there are women waiting for him and he’s talking about his inheritance as a man.

PETERSON

You dedicated your second collection to boys and their mothers. What boys in particular are you hoping to reach and why?

MARVIN

That’s a cynical dedication meant to operate as a technique in the book. And the book, there’s a lot of criticism in there inherently about gender norms and stuff like that. At the time, I was frustrated with mothers who hadn’t let their boys grow up, because there are a lot of boys out there who need to be men. But I’ll also say that that was a dedication to my ex-boyfriend, who I love still. He’s a brilliant poet, Matthew Yeager, and the book was originally dedicated to him, and I probably should have kept it dedicated to him, but I was bitter about our breakup and I was sad and lonely. I felt like his mom was overprotective and had sort of been the one that came between us, and I think that was probably a miscalculation on my part. I was talking to a colleague of mine, a guy, and I said “Maybe I’ll dedicate it to Catholic boys and their mothers,” and he said, “Why don’t you just dedicate it to boys and their mothers.” It was a last minute change that went through. I think it’s funny as hell.

McCAULEY

What’s the difference between boys and men, or a factor that makes boys men?

MARVIN

Basically, just taking responsibility for your actions, taking responsibility for yourself, something a lot of people quite far along in age don’t feel obligated to do. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to be like, Hey, maybe I didn’t do that right, maybe I wasn’t very nice to that person, maybe I need to actually step up and mentor someone, instead of criticize them. That’s something I’ve come to realize, especially since having a kid, but also just because now I’m in the middle of my life. I work with college students and I don’t want to fuck it up for them. I remember the people who helped me and the people who did not, and how much it meant to me. So, I take that role seriously, and while I’m certainly not, like, a noble person, I’m sure as shit going to try to be the best person I can be. I have a lot of good examples in my life, friends with exceptional character, who I’ve learned a lot from. I’ve met a lot of these people through VIDA. This is a long way of saying I think everybody should try to be their best selves. It’s hard. I mean, God knows, wisdom comes too late.

PETERSON

Regarding VIDA, in what ways are women still underrepresented?

MARVIN

It’s fascinating that underrepresentation can still be so blatant, especially in so many progressive magazines. It’s always been obvious, but people would get angry if anyone brought it up. I was very lucky to see Francine Prose read from her essay “The Scent of a Woman’s Ink” way back, maybe in 1998, when I was at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. I had read that article in Harper’s examining the question of whether or not women write a certain way. Does a woman have a certain voice? Can you tell it’s a woman writer? I have a lot of male friends, and I have a lot more female friends now that I am involved in VIDA. But a guy I was good friends with didn’t really see what she was getting at. He just dismissed it. That stuck in my craw.

I have a lot of dialogue with male poets. I’m interested in what it means to be a man in a poem or to express masculinity in any way, because the activity of literature is learning what it’s like to be someone else. So, at the time that VIDA came about, I saw the essay by Juliana Spahr called “Numbers Trouble” in which she looks at an avant-garde anthology and sees how skewed the representation is. And I thought, I am always counting the authors. I go down the table of contents and I count, and I’m like, Oh, look, there’s three women and seven men. I know other women do that, too. When I started VIDA I had a lot of conversations with a lot of female writers, and I was like, We should count everything, which struck me as funny because I’m bad at math, but we started what is now known at the VIDA count.

There’s a disconnect between what some magazines produce and their readership. The majority of readers are women. Women can read men, women can read across the board, we’re trained to read both genders from a very early age, because we’re forced to read stuff that’s male focused. Then we read stuff on our own, books that are more about women. And we are the biggest consumers of literature. So it seems misguided. There’s a learning curve for these magazines to actually serve their readership; it’s important that they look at the numbers. It’s not a blame game. That’s too easy. We all have our biases. I’ve had to question a lot of my own since starting VIDA. Both Erin Belieu and I were schooled in the male canon. We have both had to look at what we’re teaching, look at our reading lists and ‘fess up. We can’t blame anyone but ourselves for the fact that we are not representing a diverse enough group of people in our classes. And that’s about growing, about not being reactionary and defensive, but saying, Okay, we’re all part of this. Why is it happening? There are going to be a million reasons. A lot of it’s shaped by capitalism and what
people want to sell.

GOTCH

We did an interview with Joyce Carol Oates in which the VIDA count came up. One of the interviewers mentioned that after the count in 2012, Tin House started digging into their own numbers and noticed an equal number of men and women submitting to the journal, but men being five times more likely than women to resubmit.

MARVIN

Women, for a myriad of reasons, are not willing to come back to the table right away. I can speak as a mother—maybe I don’t have time to submit like I used to. I used to submit like a man, but now I can’t be bothered. I think women need to put themselves out there more. We all have to, and it’s scary. But one of the great things about being a writer is that it’s kind of not you, except when you publish and people know who you are. When you’re starting out, though, no one knows who you are. You could be a ninety-two-year-old grandmother. That’s the liberty of poetry. I don’t have my body dragging along behind the poem. You know what it’s like to walk around being in a body—it’s what W. E. B. Du Bois calls Double Consciousness, being aware of having this identity, but also being aware of your identity as a person. That’s a conundrum.

GOTCH

Joyce Carol Oates mentioned a woman she’d published, the first submission this woman had sent in forty years. Because she’d gotten a rejection, she stopped writing. Joyce Carol Oates was like, You’re a really amazing writer. Where have you been all this time?

MARVIN

In our forums for VIDA we hope women of different generations will be conversant with one another. In the older generation there are a few very prominent women and a ton of women who are fine writers ushered into this invisible realm. They feel out of touch with younger female writers. And the fact is, we all are dealing with the same obstacles. Whatever genre we write in, whatever aesthetic group we call our camp, if we have a camp, we’re all facing that difficulty. Our work is not only not fairly represented, given that we’re half the population, the production of our art is being hindered by the fact that our work is not represented in these venues. Because the cold fact is that publications that are anointed are often gateways. If someone has a poem or short story or essay in something or they produce a play or publish a book with a good press, they’re going to sell books, a library is going to adopt that book, reading clubs might adopt that book. Maybe an award will give them a foot up to a better job. If they’re teachers, they might get a lighter teaching load. Maybe they’re applying for grants and the publication will provide a better chance of getting that grant. All of these things are going to give them more time to write. That’s why the VIDA count is important.

Everyone involved in VIDA has their own particular reason they’re involved. Mine is because I’m interested in women’s literature and not just the literature I produce. I don’t even know half of what’s out there because all these voices are being vetted for me as a reader. It makes it difficult to access people I could really enjoy. For me, reading fiction is a pleasure, like eating chocolate. I have much more access to poetry because I’m in that world. But some of these boundaries between genres and between aesthetics have harmed women writers. We’ve felt isolate and haven’t seen how connected we are to one another. We’re all disenfranchised, all struggling to find time to write, all struggling for validation. And the conversation is really going public now. I hope what VIDA can do on its website and when we have a conference (I hope in a few years), is create a space where you can learn about women’s literature. That seems to me like a totally intellectual undertaking, just wanting to know that stuff. Part of this is my education and educating my students. And also keeping literature alive.

VIDA focuses on literary arts. We can’t focus on everything. But there are a lot of organizations for women in different disciplines doing similar things. There’s a woman who writes about women in Hollywood. Women are forming organizations in every single discipline, and it’s not just women who are disenfranchised. I opened the Missouri Review the other day, because we received it as part of our count, and there were pictures of the authors on the front page. They were all white. Not a single writer of color in the whole issue. As we work to diversify VIDA, that’s something increasingly problematic.

PETERSON

I saw your Twitter conversation with Roxane Gay regarding that and was wondering how you might move forward to solve that problem.

MARVIN

I don’t know about the word “solve.” One person’s solution might not be another’s. “Solution” is actually sort of a scary word. But I think, first of all, we have to make space for the conversation and work practically. That’s what happens in a nonprofit—you think about what you can do. You start with ideas, with what you want to change, but then you have to think about action. You have to do it as a group, an incredibly collaborative project. I’ve never worked like this in my life. We’re having our first board of directors meeting on Friday—we have a larger board now—and a women of color initiative is going to be a big topic. We need to look at what it means to diversify the count. That’s difficult because the whole identification issue is tricky. What I would like to do is seek the assistance of like-minded organizations representing underrepresented people. It’s also an issue of class, which is the most invisible thing. Regarding solutions or strategies, you have to work with the help of so many people to get something that is really effective.

McCAULEY

When young writers look at the data, how should they use it? How do you consider it in your own writing?

MARVIN

As a poet, I don’t have to worry about this so much. I did the first count with a few people in the summer of 2010. I would use the public library and I didn’t have any daycare because I was too broke. I teach sometimes at Columbia, so I’d end up using their library or the New York Public Library, and it was hard work, in the trenches, and depressing when you’re doing it, because you find that some information can be presented in such a way graphically that you think there are more women being represented than there are. Then you look at the numbers, and you’re like, Oh. You’ll think, This is a really good issue, with a lot of women, but you look and there are only four. You start to realize that “a lot” of women to you is actually not a lot of women. It’s just what you’re used to. So what do young writers, what do old writers, what does any writer do with that data? Well, no one is going to look at those charts and feel good. But it also depends on what your aspirations are. You write because you have to write. And if you’re letting that tell you your writing is not important, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. It’s a long, tough, gratifying life, but you already have been doing something that nobody wants you to do, if you’re doing something interesting.

In some ways, women writers have an advantage because we write a “minor” literature, and so we’re not so much heard. In some ways, our literature is extremely provocative, is some of the most exciting literature being produced. It’s an advantage. Not having time to write, that sucks, but fighting for it and knowing it’s important, that’s good. And a lot of people will say, “Oh, you won’t have time to write. If you have this job, you’re not going to have time. If you have a kid, you’re not going to have time.” But if writing is a priority for you, you make time, whether it means you have to say no to a bunch of things or slack off in a bunch of things.

When I was trying to figure out whether or not I was going to have a kid, a friend of mine said to me, “I promise you this, you won’t ever write again.” So I decided I wasn’t going to have a kid. Then I started to think about it, and it’s one of those things where you’re doing that squirrely thinking at the back of your mind, mulling it over, and I thought about her photography and how she had not pursued it. No shame in that. That’s her business. But I would rather be dead than not write. If I couldn’t write, there’s no point in anything. So I thought about it and I was like, I’m conditioned to work really hard. Having a child is a lot of work—in some ways it’s not work, but it is work, too, you’re caring for your child. You love your kid. But it’s not like you’re going to some fucking horrible office where you don’t like the people and you have to make photocopies when you’d rather be doing something better with your time. You’re hanging out with a human being you love. So I was like, I think my friend’s version is not my version.

PETERSON

Some male characters in your poems come across as not so great, and some people ask, “What’s the deal with these men?” But are men ever asked this question regarding women in their work? Is it a double standard that people ask you about the men in your poems?

MARVIN

A reviewer of my second book said that he imagined several ex-boyfriends had nosebleeds as my book went to press, a very uncool thing to say. You know from that book that there are a ton of poems that aren’t about men. In fact, that assumption might have been more applicable to my first book, a book with a woman’s voice in the tradition of a love poem, in the tradition of the troubadours, of Petrarch, a book about unrequited love. It’s a young book, the viewpoint of a young woman. People will take those poems and use them as a mirror, and say, “Where are you in this?” But it’s not supposed to be a mirror. It’s not supposed to look back at the woman, though that’s what we’re accustomed to, because typically the woman is the muse or the object in a poem. The woman is not the object in those poems in my first book. That’s why she’s a little unnerving, because she’s strategizing. She has issues of control.

PETERSON

She’s thinking a lot, too, about her situation. There’s one poem, “Me and Men,” in which the speaker says, “I can’t blame them for owning what I wanted back when what I wanted was had only by men.”

MARVIN

What’s really funny about that poem is that whole play with language at the end, where she’s like, I would rather think about animals that I’ve had, the idea being that men are the animals she’s had. And what’s really funny—and this is how utterly guileless I can be as a writer—when I was writing that, I literally meant, I would rather think about my pets. And then I was like, Oh, genius! I trumped myself— language did its work for me. That poem deals with what we do when we’re thinking about marriage or being with someone. We see a pool of people—and I don’t care what you’re orientation is, you think, Okay, who am I going to be with, because I’m supposed to be with someone. Maybe this one or maybe that one will work. It’s such a fucked-up way to go about connecting with people. The speaker’s making a gross generalization. That poem is really about one person, though it shouldn’t be interesting, being only about one person. But one person in a relationship can represent a lot of people. We all know this, I think. We return to archetypes in our lives. It has a lot to do with the mythology we create within our poems if we’re writing personal poetry. It’s recognizing patterns.

You ask about the men in my poems. The thing is, I’m kind of obsessed with men. It’s always been a struggle for me. I’m heterosexual. I often wish I wasn’t, but I am interested in men, and interested in how I will get a man to see me. Maybe it’s a desire to be validated, but it’s also a desire to communicate. I’m also confused by betrayal and dishonesty, and in the landscape of relationships, that’s where a lot of that shit goes down.

PETERSON

When you say you’re confused by betrayal and dishonesty, do you mean you’re confused that it happens or confused about how to react?

MARVIN

I’m confused that it happens. I know that sounds naive. That mummy poem by Thomas James has a speaker who blacks out in her father’s garden and her body is being prepared to be mummified. She says out of the blue that she’s going to come back to her life, back to the garden; she’s going to meet her young groom. His eyes will be like black bruises. And she’s like, Why do people lie to each other? It’s a really good question. It’s something my poems work hard against.