BRANDI GEORGE: We first met at Northern Michigan University. I was getting my M.A. in Lit, while you were pursuing an M.F.A. in Poetry. I still remember the first poem of yours I encountered, a villanelle titled “Of the Mantras in Your Voice, This Too.” I was blown away by the intensity of the lyricism, the way the syllables are stitched together by grief, how grief is a tide swelling beneath the surface of the poem. I wanted to do that, too. When and how did you find your voice? Were your poems always so musical?

LISA FAY COUTLEY: NMU feels like a lifetime ago now, and that poem, too. That was my favorite writing time, not just because I was surrounded by people like you in such an amazing part of the country, but because I think I was discovering my voice then. Studying with poets who complemented one another had a real impact on me. Austin Hummell urged us to follow sound, which felt natural to me, and Beverly Matherne required immersion in forms, which did not come easily.

“Of the Mantras…” was my first attempt at a villanelle, and while I broke the form, of course (because that’s just me) it asks for musicality and a point of obsession, such as grief. The poem contains so many long vowel sounds—o and e mostly—which was typical of the poems I wrote then. During that time I read my poems aloud so often and through so many drafts that I’m sure those aching vowels simply felt natural to my body, to the human I am, and to the ways in which I’ve experienced the world and a fair amount of loss.

My first love was music. I grew up singing, dancing, and analyzing song lyrics with my dad, though it was all very casual (not the result of any study or formal training) yet became a part of the way I felt about, the way I moved through, and the way I survived the world. As I see it, to “find your voice” means letting yourself be vulnerable on the page—to be yourself. For strangers. For you. It’s hard to let that happen naturally and to know how to balance that with craft. Maybe a poem’s movements (sounds and stresses) are akin to a person’s body language and happen more organically and often complement or betray the things we say. They’re less cerebral, perhaps, than the choices we make in ending and shaping lines, though once those things come together the voice is more apparent and the poems are more crafted yet more genuine, if that makes sense.

Forgive me for going on so long, but all of this brings me to Gog. There’s a great deal of variation in structure or the ways in which you use spacing or indentation from poem to poem, and I wonder if you can talk about the effect such structural diversity has on the collection as a whole and how that contrasts or coincides with the consistency of your own voice.

BG: I really love what you said about how “a poem’s movements (sounds and stresses) are akin to a person’s body language.” This is certainly true for me. Gog was written from a place of rage and intense emotional distress. The forms reflect that, too, and the order of the book reflects the order in which the poems were written. The poems became more formally chaotic as I delved deeper into my past experiences. The section, “Possessed Girls,” is perhaps the most so. When I was thirteen, my parents burnt my writing notebooks, and these poems attempt to recover what was lost. As a result, there’s a lot of white space. That’s the healing power of poetry—it can help to recover what was lost.

The body’s reckoning, the mind’s reckoning, the form’s reckoning—for me, poetry is all of those things at once. The poems contain the girl I was, the lost parts of myself—I believe that. This is all to say that the structural diversity of Gog is a landscape, a space where lost things manifest. My voice is the girl who lives there.

How do you feel about poetry’s healing potential? I know you have said that poetry saved your life—how so?

LFC: John Rybicki—another poet who I met in the U.P.—once told me, “we’re trying to heal ourselves in some ways in each poem,” and I suppose we are, though for some reason I hesitate to use the word healing. When I was a young mother with a toddler, an infant, and a partner who wasn’t right for me, I started staying up while everyone slept, and I’m pretty sure I never thought about what I was doing, writing every night in that brown recliner by one dim light—I just knew that my life felt broken, and writing felt like the way through it. Looking at it now, I can see that it’d been a long time since I’d been asking questions of my self or about my life or the world (if I ever really had), and that was the point when I realized I needed to change things. I try to make discoveries via language in an attempt to make sense of my life, the world, and myself. I don’t always find answers. What matters is that I keep asking questions. As I’ve said elsewhere—to write is to tend my desire to keep going. All of that said, I prefer growth to healing because persona poems or other poems outside of the confessional, like those in my current manuscript, aren’t necessarily about reckoning with my wounds but about asking other questions.

It’s interesting that you said your “voice is the girl who lives there,” which sounds like a version of you and also a constructed self, which is almost always what we’re dealing with in confessional poems, right? The mother in In the Carnival of Breathing and Errata says and does some things rooted in my life and imagination that I’ve fictionalized, but I wonder if you can say a bit more about how you approach that girl and if you feel that by making a relic of her you’ve made it possible to relinquish her. Furthermore, I wonder if we have different notions of voice, then, and—when you’re writing poems not about her—does that sense of voice shift?

BG: You’re right—I think growth is a much better word. I would even say transformation. The speaker of a poem is always a persona, although the artifice is to make it appear otherwise. This is a technique as much as line breaks or meter. It’s not something I did intentionally in Gog, but it’s something I understand now. The events in Gog happened, but I was a terrified teenage girl with little self-awareness. The bravery and rebelliousness of the speaker in Gog is an invention. I rewrote the history of my emotions. I mythologized my past in order to gain power over it, to become someone else.

I thought I “found my voice” in Gog, as if voice is an authentic representation of a singular essence. I don’t believe that anymore. My new manuscript is written with a polyphony of voices. Helene Cixous says it best: “Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most of my I’s?” How would you define voice? And how does the mother in In the Carnival of Breathing and Errata fit with your definition?

LFC: Well, like I said above—I think that voice means being yourself on the page and that certain movements are natural to a person’s body, thoughts, rhythms, etc. When I explain it to my students, in order to try to make it simple and to strip poetry of some of its mystery, I usually describe voice as personality, which is often consistent from poem-to-poem, whereas tone shifts from subject-to-subject (I might always be morbid and sassy, but I do not feel the same about taxes as I do about love…not quite, anyway). That distinction/definition may be a simplification and doesn’t necessarily speak to personae, but even when I’m writing persona poems I find that something of my voice is still present in my style. In Errata or In the Carnival, for example, the speaker is a total back-talker who presents a great deal of bravado before allowing vulnerability its due. In many ways, that’s me (or my constructed self in those collections) yet supporting that sass is a whole host of elements and craft choices—the way that I employ a lot of masculine word endings and Germanic diction, long vowels and cutting consonants, etc. The speaker is not just back-talking in what she says but even in how she says it. The latter, it seems, is indicative of my voice and carries through even into persona poems if I’m not actively revising toward another end or another type of person(ality).

In the course of arranging and revising Errata—and by studying the exaggerated voice of the constructed self in the poems—I noticed that tension between bravado and vulnerability, though I’d never really noticed that about myself, or that maybe that’s how I’m construed (a hard exterior despite my sensitivity). In that way, I learned from the poems by seeing the ways in which the voice and style stitched those traits together. I first noticed this in “My Lake,” which is also in In the Carnival of Breathing, though I think I noticed the consistency of the bravado v. vulnerability in Errata given the length of the collection and the time I spent with that speaker.

Would you say that there is a poem in Gog in which you can pinpoint a moment when you realized what you were learning about your voice and about that girl? That is, did you know you were mythologizing this girl in order to empower her, or what is it something the poems taught you about the process afterward? It’s a little chicken and egg, but in a similar way I’m curious about how you “mythologized [your] past in order to gain power over it.” You wouldn’t say that the poet and adult woman you are possessed that power already and recreated the girl in order to give her that power, but that you both grew more empowered in the process of writing those poems?

BG: Yes, I grew with the poems, not before them. I use techniques like automatic writing, erasures, and other formal games. In fact, most of the poems in Gog are about events that I had told very few people. I couldn’t talk about my past, but I could trick myself into writing about it. The poem, “To Cora Goldman, My Exorcist,” helped me realize this. I was studying at FSU when I wrote it, and I couldn’t workshop that poem. For a long time, I couldn’t even read it. I knew that the poem was way ahead of me, and I had to catch up to it.

In the first poem of In the Carnival of Breathing, “Staying Afloat,” you write, “To dominate water / with this delicate spine, this alphabet of cells, you must / tumble through webs & chains before you can rise, / lungs full & cinched in a body heavy with disbelief” (9-12). It’s a poem about survival, discovering strength. For instance, in “My Lake,” the lake possesses characteristics that the speaker of the poem desires. Would you talk a little about how images of water represent potential and wildness in your work?

LFC: I grew up on a bay of Lake Michigan and, as you know, later fell in love with Lake Superior, so inland, freshwater seas have always been a part of my rhythm and experience. They are lulling and ferocious. They are wonderfully paradoxical in that they are sources of life yet they are also deadly forces. Despite the personification in “My Lake” I try to avoid using nature in a Romantic way but instead try to let lakes and mountains and other natural bodies/landscapes speak for themselves, revealing what they will of an emotional landscape that may or may not parallel human struggle and can in that way be explored as a vehicle for whatever tenor arises organically. To me, the Great Lakes demonstrate potential and wildness like nothing else.

In Gog, you don’t seem to settle on any one wild creature to support the emotional landscape. There are birds, snakes, insects, and on and on. Can you talk a bit about that wildness? And do you see a foil or a counterpoint to that wildness (in the same way the lakes offer creation and destruction)?

BG: I believe that the physical landscape effects and informs the emotional landscape. It’s a Romantic idea, but one I’ve found to be true nonetheless. Wildness includes the will and consciousness of nonhuman beings. Growing up in a rural landscape allowed me to observe many other forms of life, and it allowed those forms of life to observe me. It’s this reciprocity that I’m interested in. I quote Nietzsche in “The Shadow of My Black Dress”: “If you gaze into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

I wonder if my relationship to wildness is less complicated that yours because I don’t have children. One of my all-time favorite poems of yours is “On Home.” You write:

I joke, but someone should / tell these boys—in the wake of black mascara, / mothers drive away. All winter long I’ve left / feel-good Post-its on the bathroom mirror, / the espresso maker, the edge of my razor. / Every day, I’ve given myself reasons to stay.

Of course you never act on this impulse, but the pressure to care for other beings, to often put their needs before yours, must be immense. Your language is on the brink of wildness or chaos, and yet it’s reigned in by intellectual intensity. Do you think that parenthood shaped your aesthetics, perhaps your sense of restraint?

LFC: Definitely. The poems in ITCOB often explore or point toward the body as a vessel in which we are trapped, and I’m sure that feeling of being hemmed in (and the desire to feel freer) is the result of an overwhelming amount of demands on my time and more needs than a woman can reasonably meet. Certainly that has seeped into the imagery, the diction, and the tension in my poems.

I also agree wholeheartedly that physical landscapes can convey emotional landscapes. Both of the collections I’ve mentioned here rely on that relationship. That said, I try to resist the Romantic poet’s impulse to project human emotions onto landscapes rather than to allow those landscapes to reveal their own emotional terrain that may/may not align with human feeling mostly because I’m interested in collapsing the boundaries between my internal and external landscapes. I recognize moments in Gog where you attempt a similar collapse by projecting human emotion: “Birds liked to watch us, me and Lily,” which opens the Heathen in Fishnets section of “Lily and Gog.” I can see how that builds a relationship between the speaker and her environment while also adding to the tension of her anxiety or uneasy sense of self in a wild or dangerous world.
To that end, how did you approach creating an emphatic arena via exclamatory punctuation, repetition of phrases, pleading diction, such as “O,” or forceful verbs—“exploded, abandoned, roiled,” etc. I’m always afraid to overuse emphatic elements. Did you attempt to control or track your employment of those devices? Did you read the poems aloud to gauge the level of intensity? Or did this not concern you at all because you felt these gestures were of this world and of this girl?

BG: I don’t have a lot of restraint. Wildness tends to take over, which is why I cut a great deal of what I produce. I do try to let the girl in the poem have a voice, and this is often a dramatic one. I feel like there’s an honesty to the drama, even if the adult me is sometimes embarrassed by it. Maybe this is why my voice changes so much from book to book.

Are you working on a new collection, and if so, how does it differ from In the Carnival of Breathing and Errata? Is there a consistency of voice and/or form?

LFC: I am finishing my second collection, yes, which is quite a bit different in form, style, and approach. As I mentioned earlier, these are mostly persona poems, and there are two personae in particular who are separated by time and distance and are carrying on a dialogue about the universe, humanity, life, love, etc. The book is all up in the air—that is, exploring clouds and space. I’m also playing a great deal with spacing versus punctuation, collapsing syntax in ways that I had begun to explore in the latest poems I’d included in Errata.

Though, again, even in persona poems, I know my voice carries through. I’m interested in exploring facets of one’s imagination from different perspectives and in new, removed places as a way to create temporal distance and thereby gain proximity to the self or to understanding, in the same way that the Apollo astronauts saw the Earth with greater clarity once they were headed toward the moon. What about you—what are you working on now? How is it the same or different from Gog or any other collection you’ve assembled?

BG: I’m working on a book-length poem titled Faun. It’s about a young girl named Lily who grew up in my hometown of Ovid, Michigan. She undergoes a series of transformations, including plants, animals, and insects. The poem is written in Lily’s many voices as well as the voices of the nonhuman beings she encounters. Each character speaks in a different form, including blank verse, villanelles, erasures, and typography.

I’m also trying to gain distance, although for me that can only be achieved inside of the body. Lily never escapes a physical form, but she does transform away from the human. By allowing Lily to become an animal or insect, I’m able to gain a different perspective, to find a new way to think about what it means to be a human living in the twenty-first century.

Gog, as my first book, allowed me to see beyond myself. Now I’m working through collective tragedies, such as climate change and mass extinction. And yet, I can only approach these issues through the polyphony of voices issuing from my own body. Sometimes writing poetry feels absurd, and sometimes it feels absolutely necessary. Either way, I write because I write. It’s that simple. What do think about poetry’s role in our culture? Does it have a purpose?

LFC: Metamorphoses is one of my favorites, so it makes me geekily happy to know that you’re writing a book that nods to Ovid (and that it’s your hometown because I thought you were from Petoskey)! Fabulous.

You know, I do think that poetry is alive and well in our daily lives, but I’m guessing that I probably mean that in a way that doesn’t quite jibe with your question. Do I think that people are as engaged with written poems in the same way that they might have been at one time and that it carries the same sway that visual art once did in persuading the masses and therefore effecting change? No, I don’t, but then I’m not really sure how much poetry reached all people beyond its antiquated, oral tradition. Maybe it’s wrong to assume that written poetry had some grand historical reach. How many people born into lower classes or with less privilege were reading poetry, and if it doesn’t reach everyone how does it effect change?

Maybe that’s too negative. I realize that poetry still has oral forms—slam and song—but even beyond that, the devices of poetry are used to change the world all the time, for better or worse.  One of the first exercises we go through in my Fundamentals of Poetry class is to examine jingles (ads from the 80s are so very amazing). We scan them. We see the ways in which various craft elements contribute to rhetoric. We learn to recognize the tools that poets use and to see how others have used them to persuasive ends. I don’t think that the majority of people are immersing themselves in written poetry, however, which really is a shame because I do believe in its power to change our lives, not just by presenting us with other perspectives but also by allowing us—and showing us how—to ask questions.

The New Age of Political Protest

By

John Sandford Friedrich

 

Clouds hung low above Logan Circle in the final hours of the Obama years.  Over two-hundred black clad protestors commandeered the statue of the eponymous general, chanting as school buses full of riot police with U-hauls carrying their gear rumbled down the half-empty streets.

I stood with three legal observers from North Carolina.  Unidentified photographers with modern equipment began taking panoramics.  Most faces were covered in bandanas or balaclavas, rendering the value of such images rather less than under normal surveilance.

Few permits were issued for the inauguration despite the certainty of large protests, making it all the easier for the group to spontaneously pick a road to march in contempt of law.  A few taxis were surrounded by the crowd chanting and setting off fireworks of a grade illegal in some states.  Some of these drivers cheered and honked in support even though their times is money.

A 1990’s model police Impala was left unattended in a park.  Hammers quickly appeared from pockets and made quick work of the windows of the vehicle, which police might have considered their least popular in the fleet and needing replacement in their budget.

Like a school of fish sensing either danger or sustenance, the group then veered down K Street.  Police kept their distance until the psychological energy reached a boil.  “Fuck Starbucks!’” “Fuck Bank of America!” and these spaces were also suddenly converted to al fresco through the removal of windows.  Paintsprayer technology repurposed for pepperspray began knocking down these protestors en masse.  A few escaped by slipping through the national guard, who do not have authority to arrest civilians.  Approximately 100 people were sealed in and arrested, including credentialed journalists and legal observers through the National Lawyers’ Guild.

National media have been baffled by the ’Black Bloc’ since 1999’s ’Battle for Seattle’ against the World Trade Organization.  To be clear I am on the periphery of these circles though, unlike many journalists, I have had the opportunity to spend days in dentention with this stripe of activist.  Jail affords many hours of frank discussion.

Black Bloc is not an organization.  It is considered more of a ’tactic.’  The goal being chaoes and anonymity allows a person to ’’leave the bloc to perform a direct action as they see fit, and then return.’’

Even those who are sympathetic to protesting are reflexively quick to condemn such tactics. When dealing with anarchists, or now more broadly self-termed as anti-fascists, we are often dealing with mostly white activists coming in by foot, stuffed car or hitchiker’s thumb from out of state.  This marks it somewhat different than the fires and havoc wrecked in local communities such as Baltimore and Charlotte, as residents responded to killings by the police.

The question is whether such actions have a place in the American protest movement.  Doctor Martin Luther King Jr is famed for bringing great results strictly through non-violent direct action combined with legislative pressure.  The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was rather more edgy.  To go further, John Brown’s assault on Harper’s Ferry is retroactively seen as a heroic step in abolition but at the time was considered domestic terrorism of the highest order, punished by death.  The KKK’s North Carolina ’victory party’ after Trump’s election was cancelled due to black bloc type protestors.

Property destruction is a form of violence. Six police officers were reported injured, two of whom were sent to hospital.  The only fatality in the twenty years of such escalations has been Carlo Giuliani, an Italian killed by police during the 2001 G8 summit.

Are such tactics necessary? They allow a relatively safe outlet for those infuriated to extreme measures, and have become almost ritualized at major confabs of the global leadership.  They command a certain respect from polie forces and journalists, though the purposes of this violence may be obscured and mystified for the average onlooker, or even average co-protestor.

In contrast the pipeline protests, most notably Standing Rock, are a form of rural Occupy Wall Street.  The prevailing attitude among the thousands there is more of a peaceful, overtly feminine strategy.  Though property damage in the form of outright sabotage is not unheard of, as is facing stiff sentences for chaining oneself to machines in order to slow work on the pipelines.  This, even, is considered violence by the authorities.

To break the window of your neighbor and be caught doing it is usually an act that a street level police officer can resolve without burdening the court system.  To break the window of a corporate person as political theatre is to face multiple years of incarceration.  Even those with but the scantest sympathy should take pause to examine the justness of such disparity of punishment.

Perhaps the Black Bloc mentality has become detached from specific causes and is more akin to Civil War re-enactors.  Perhaps people resort to property destruction and providing their bodies for arrest because like segregationist governors of fifty years ago, the authorities are impenetrable and unresponsive to demands for a new energy plan or new model for education funding, among other unrequited demands.

The center is not holding.  Faith in nightly news, political parties, academia and consensual reality itself is at an ebb not seen in a full generation, and perhaps worse than the malaise of the post-Watergate years.

More questions than answers abound about the path forward from today.  Dismissing every form of protest beyond that of writing letters to congressional aides locks out many energetic activists and locks in many moderates who will grow desperate.  If prison time is handed out for occupying city parks, this serves only to encourage true violence and proto-terrorism.  Might as well have something to show for your lost years.

As I ripped off my black sweatshirt without disturbing my hat and sunglasses in an elegant motion, a woman going about her business on the sidewalk smiled amusedly as I revealed a pink outfit and drifted into the crowd.  A realistic response.

Felix Morgan sat down with Dale Bridges over pancakes to discuss his current projects, writing processes, and the rather gloomy state of the world in general.

Felix: Tell me about your work as a journalist.

Dale: I had come back from Prague and was sleeping on my friends couch in Colorado. I had failed to write a novel and needed a job, but also didn’t really want to work. I had never done any journalism, I hadn’t even done yearbook in high school. But I had a couple of freelance articles in a Canadian magazine and a few other random things so I put together a portfolio and sent them to a couple local places. Boulder Weekly had just had someone quit and they needed someone right away.

I had lied about all my experience so when I started out just editing, I was googling terms I didn’t know. Somehow this turned out okay and I got a food editor position. Which is hilarious because I don’t know anything about food. But I was mostly just editing and I must have done okay because I managed to get a weekly beer column. That was a great gig, I’d leave the office to get free beer and start my weekend a bit early.

I eventually angled for a humor and pop-culture column where I was allowed to write pretty much whatever I wanted and that worked out really well for everyone.

Felix: How do you get your ideas?

Dale: Getting ideas is the only part of writing that is easy for me. I have ideas all the time. Especially when it comes to satire. We live in a ridiculous world were Donald Trump is running for president. The ideas are all over. That can be hard, though. I used to have a problem where I’d have a great idea and I’d sit down and write a few paragraphs and then it would get bogged down. And there was always another idea I could jump on to. I had so many unfinished things. At a certain point I just had to force myself to finish things.

These days I sit on ideas a lot longer than I used to. Like if an idea keeps coming back there’s really something to it. I explore more parts of it, characters that would be part of it, and let it grow legs. The longer I let it marinate, the easier it is to commit to it and follow through. But I seldom know how it will end. Even when I think I know, I’m usually wrong.

Felix: What are you working on now?

Dale: I recently wrote a manuscript for a Sci-Fi novel in just seven days but I’m not sure it’s salvageable. It was important to me to finish because I’ve failed at novel writing three other times. But I’ve already moved on to another novel and I’m about 50,000 words into that one. It’s very different. More literary fiction with a comedic edge.

It’s based on a guy living in Colorado and working for a newspaper so there’s a lot of real world-experience there.

Felix: Is there any thread that ties all your work together?

Dale: The humor. There always has to be a comedic element. I can’t write without that. I can’t really even live without that because it’s the way I process and cope with the world. The world itself, and most of my stories, can be pretty depressing. Without being able to inject humor into situations I would have a lot of trouble producing anything.

But each project is different too. You take something like Sci-Fi and it’s going to be a lot more broad, a lot more about larger social issues. There are personal relationships too, of course, but the larger idea is where I start with something like that. Literary stuff is the opposite. The personal relationships are going to be at the forefront and they might cast some light on larger societal issues.

I like having multiple things going at a time so I can switch back and forth. Using different tools and having a different focus can help me avoid getting burnt out.

Felix: Is there any genre or topic that you would never write?

Dale: I used to be a lot snootier when I was young. I didn’t even want to do journalism. I really like to think that I have to be passionate about a story to be able to work on it. To be able to sustain interest in it long enough to finish. I can’t imagine having that level of passion and interest in a genre like romance or mystery. But, then again, it’s all a matter of perspective. If someone threw $50,000 at me I’d sure as hell come up with 50,000 words of a romance novel.

Felix: What’s your favorite part of being a writer?

Dale: Not the writing process itself, thats full of fear and self-doubt and loathing. But the publishing process is great. Finding out after all your hard work that someone liked what you did, seeing review and ratings. Hearing that half shock in your friends voice when they say something you wrote is actually good. But I don’t think all those good things weigh out over the bad and so ultimately writing is at least a good bit masochistic. Some people say they enjoy every part of the process. I hate those people. I have to write, it’s how I process and deal with the world around me. It’s like forcing your loathing and your depression about the world into a constructive form.

Notes on the Women’s March

By Leslie McGrath

 

It’s the day after Trump has taken office and I’ve just marched for the first time. I didn’t make it to Washington D.C. or New York City. I just drove ten minutes from my well-heeled, overwhelmingly white town on the Connecticut River to another small town, where I met my friend, the poet Marilyn Nelson. Together we walked—she wearing her “Make Racists Ashamed Again” cap and me my “Make Racists Afraid Again” t-shirt—to the Old Saybrook town hall.

Marilyn and I were counted as protesters #610 and #611 of what would eventually become a protest march of nearly 1100 people. It’s a drip compared to the hundreds of thousands of marchers in cities across the U.S. and the globe, but 1100 people marching up and down the sidewalks of a small town feels like a lot. Marilyn’s was the only Black face.

I’ve never marched before. Not for the environment, not for the Equal Rights Amendment, not for Planned Parenthood. I’ve wanted to. I’ve come close. But I live with chronic PTSD and depression from childhood sexual abuse that often make it difficult for me to leave the house, much less join a chanting crowd of protesters. I just haven’t been able to muster whatever it is that people need in order to not feel overwhelmed and panicked.

When Marilyn mentioned that there’d be a “sister march” close by, I wondered if I were chickening out by not driving to the larger events in Hartford or New Haven. There, the crowds would be larger and more racially and economically diverse. Then I thought “Why not? This is where I live. It’s my community.”  So we joined the group of women old and young, some pushing strollers, others holding signs calling for impeachment,  supporting Planned Parenthood, the NEA, environmental protection, and more. And there were men, yes. A young man wearing a wool cap and a bushy beard told me my shirt was awesome and asked for a hug. It was at that moment that I realized that I, a gray haired woman about to turn sixty, was an elder in his eyes. It had taken me this long to make it to a march.

I drove home a couple of hours later and posted the few photos on Facebook I’d taken that I hadn’t ruined with close-ups of my thumb. I was flush with a small flame of accomplishment at this ordinary act of civic mindedness. As the likes and supportive comments began to appear, I scrolled through my feed reading posts from friends. Many were marching in D.C., Chicago, New York City and elsewhere. Others watching live news feeds from around the world expressed enthusiasm and wonder. But here and there I came across posts by younger feminists calling out white women who, like me, were marching for the first time. Where were we all these years when Black men and women were protesting and risking physical harm on the streets? Our white privilege had allowed us to ignore their pain. Our white fragility was now the reason for our whining, er, protesting.

I’ve heard these criticisms before. They’re legitimate questions and legitimate issues for thorough, thoughtful discourse. But to toss them into the global protests on the very day they’re occurring is like tossing a concussion grenade into a crowd—it’s a painful distraction. No one owes an explanation for the nature of their activism.

 

CM: So what does the word “Salvage” mean to you and how did it become the title of the collection?

KB: I had been thinking terribly literal (as I always maddeningly do…lol) about “salvage” as the things that get taken from a wreck, the leftovers of a disaster. I guess I didn’t even think about the second meaning — that it also means “to save” until I read the blurb that Laura Madeline Wiseman wrote for me that mentioned it. Since mermaids featured prominently, “salvage” was obviously a sound choice, but other sections of the book, that are definitely more landlocked, sort of resonate with both definitions, whether it’s the “wreck” of illness or bad relationships or just situations that don’t work out in an ideal way.

CM: Both of our books have a strong connection to “body” whether it’s a mermaid in foamy lingerie, a woman growing birds in her chest, or the realization that body can be armor or a pathway. How does “body” inform your work and what impression of “body” should readers leave with?

KB: I feel like this whole book is about the body that is endangered, whether it’s the illness-guided poems in the first section or the mermaid guide poems in the last section. There’s endangerment, but also transformation, sometimes through that very same endangerment, particularly in the “ghost landscape” series. I feel like the body in these poems is always at odds with everything, the mind, the language, the environment, probably more so than anything else I’ve ever written.

KB: When I’m reading, I keep thinking your concept of “body” is almost inseparable from language and history, more maybe more of a deep entanglement..I’d also be interested to know how would you describe the “body” in your work as well.

CM: For me body is the first thing people see when they look at you; its color, shape, height, and from there they judge you. Now sometimes the judgment is innocuous – oh she’s a woman, oh she’s brown, oh she reminds me of xyz but at the other times it can be harsh – oh she’s too brown, she’s not that attractive, she has nothing of importance to say, etc. Then the body becomes how you judge yourself, – you walk taller, you slump, you know your best outfit, you model behavior based on levels of safety, and you’re uniquely aware of every exit in a room. In my book, the body is endangered but is aware of its endangerment. So in the poems, the body questions, posits, celebrates, and it mourns.

KB: When reading BH, I was struck so intensely by the lush sensuousness of the first section of poems, the writing so bodily present, but also swimming amidst history, both on a grand scale and a more familial scale. As I moved through the book, I almost got the sense of a widening lens—first the body and the individual, the sensory, out on through the family and society and history. By the end of the book, you are dealing with larger universal questions and epistemology. Was this intentional? How did you decide the order in which the sections occur? How did you decide on the overall organization of the manuscripts?

CM: When I writing Blue Hallelujahs, I didn’t know I was writing Blue Hallelujahs (lol, if that makes sense). So the poems came first and arrangement came second. I was writing poems sparked by some thing, phrase or memory and then as time went by I was thinking of the speaker’s place in the world. So the poems contain multiple geographies and lenses. And you’re right, in the beginning our world is so small, we only know what surrounds us. But then you look to your senses and that expands, then what expands, expands again to witness. I definitely learned from poets like Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and Nikky Finney who taught me to think of the speaker and what’s outside the speaker as two parts happening simultaneously. When organizing the book, it really came down to which poems talked to each other but I knew I wanted to end on “Blue Hallelujahs from the Hands.” Surprisingly the order of the sections came easily like plot points along a curved line, but order within the sections was more difficult. I have to thank Leigh Stein and Brooklyn Poets for their helicopter view because at one point I was just too close to it. Having other poets read it in its entirety helped me decide the organization and remove poems that tripped when reading.

CM: It was difficult for me to think of my work visually when it came to my cover art. What about you? Was your cover art a journey and what was thinking behind it?

KB: Since I bounce back and forth between writing and visual art and do so many cover designs for dancing girl press, it’s usually almost second nature to me, but weirdly, I was drawing a total blank on this project. I thought about just a lot of blue, watercolor abstract seascapes, something oceany. I initially didn’t want a mermaid at all because it seemed so literal. Around the time we started thinking about the cover, also been totally jonesing to get an old-school Sailor Jerry mermaid tattoo somewhere on me (it would be my first, so I’m still procrastinating even now.). When Diane asked me what I was thinking, I sort of offered it off the cuff but was totally convinced when she sent me some options. I mean, really, what is more bodily than a tattoo? She did amazing work with the text and the banner and the whole thing turned out more beautiful than I could have imagined.

KB: Your cover design is so beautiful and so perfect. How did you decide to use that particular piece?

CM: I’ll admit it was tough. I knew I wanted a woman because the books’ identity is formed around woman, body, memory, and race. I wanted a woman looking toward or away because there’s a duality in the word Hallelujah – its praise and its lament and you can’t have one without the other, and you can’t go forward without knowing how to go back. Diane gave me the option of finding my own cover art or having Black Lawrence design something. So I was researching and I had to come to terms with the fact that Blue Hallelujahs isn’t a “light” book (lol) There is definitely levity and joy, but I knew the cover color palette couldn’t be purple, yellow or pink – it just didn’t fit 😉 Then I found the artist Ify Chiejina and she had a gorgeous piece that stopped me in my tracks and it was unavailable (gasp) but she was willing to draw me something similar. So I sent her a picture of my Mom in her 20’s and a couple of chapters from the book. She created silhouette and pattern that’s on the cover. But then Diane, Amy and had to agree on the color palette which took a couple of weeks. I know appreciate all shades of blue!
CM: Tell me about the making of house made of mothers
Sometimes, mother is a nesting doll, a doll-faced mess,
feral beneath her skin and skimping on potatoes.
Sometimes she’s a hotel fire, and I’m on the wrong side
of the door.

KB: The series of poems about houses is very much about houses as actual location, as place, and as a more abstract concept of “home”. So many of us have complicated relationships with our mother’s in terms of body image and eating, so this poem stems from that. The image of the nesting doll at the beginning seemed perfect, how the larger body can be reduced and made smaller and yet somehow still live inside the larger, almost as if women, especially those who have fluctuations in body weight, can have all of these smaller women existing simultaneously inside her. My own mother once stood in front of mirror and admitted that she had never in her whole life been happy in her own body and it kills me. This poems is sort of a dialogue with that.

KB:I feel like place plays such an important role in this book… Can you talk a bit about where you grew up? Where you write from? Places that inspire your work? (past or current)

CM: The poems are set in different parts of the North and South. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, but my parents and relatives are all from South Carolina. So I remember traveling down South on the greyhound bus with my mother. And even though my parents are separated, when they see each other, they always end up talking about who’s alive or dead from back home. (lol) So in a lot of the poems the speaker is looking back, trying to create a tapestry or trace an origin story from overheard conversations, imagined events, recipes, and music. In other poems, the speaker is in Brooklyn or up north and the actions in those poems follows the geography. Also kitchens appear a lot in my work, you’d be surprised at how many things come together and break apart in kitchens.

CM: In the poem codex the love of language is apparent to the reader as you describe perfect words. “I write glottal but I mean goldfish . . Butterfly becoming butter knife becoming flying buttress.” What are some your personal perfect words? Are their words you avoid? One of mine was peaches . . . I used it all the time until someone pointed it out me.

KB: I have certain words I use way too much—girl, dress(es), dark, throat, water. I am conscious of them now and try to be sparing, but they’re still there in places. One of my favorite words is “dulcet” which I use as a name for my online shop, but have never used in a poem because it seems weirdly pretentious and too “poetic.” I think as I get older, I have more and more odd mental misfirings where I can’t recall the perfect word for things, which is where the boggled language in the radio ocularia section stems from.

CM: Your book is a mixture of the physical and the ethereal with lines like “my mouth spewing wildflowers” in contrast to “if only I can sleep late and break shit” (which I love by the way!). How do a balance the real with the fantastical? Is it a conscious decision?

KB: I sometimes say I’ve spent the last 20 years writing poetry that is attempting to get away from, well, poetry. My initial impulse is to fill every piece with as much image as I can layer on, and the prettier the image, the better. Since I have a tendency to do that, I try to balance it with the opposite as much as I can. If I can strike a balance between the “poetic” and the sort of normal stuff that comes out of my mouth on a daily basis, as mundane or crude as it may be, I find I’m happier with the work.

KB: There is so much music here, some of which I’m familiar with and some I went of searching for as I was reading. A publisher I worked with a couple years back (Sundress Publications) had their authors make a mix-tape of musical influences, a sort of soundtrack for our books after publication. I’d be so curious to see your list for this project, including both things already explicitly named and others behind the scenes.

CM: Music is such a big part of my writing life. I usually have it on while I’m writing and when I think of life events, it’s music that I remember first. There are a couple of artists and songs mentioned in the book: Etta James “Groove Me”, Koko Taylor “I’m a Woman”, Louis Jordan “Ain’t You My Baby,” Ella Fitzgerald “Summertime”, Cab Calloway “Minnie the Moocher,” and “Down Down Baby” is chant we used to sing in elementary school; it’s a clapping game. In passing I mention Lena Horne, Diane Ross, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker because those are the artists I’d hear on the radio when the elders got together. But there are also phrases that are sung but aren’t necessarily song like I’ll be your Clementine which is play on “Oh My Darlin Clementine”.

KB:I find the rhythm and internal music so beautifully wrought in your work. Do you compose out loud or more visually when you form your lines?

CM: I actually don’t compose out loud; it’s always via paper from one image to the next. In real life I’m a fast talker (I think I get that from my mom). So I’m careful with line breaks, so that when I’m reading the poem, I know not to read it too fast. Visually I’m also looking at line length because that can inform the breath. For me couplets equals fast past, blocks of texts means “I’m working stuff out” and tercets are usually a rolling narrative. After a poem is page ready, then I’ll start reading out loud and realize yes this part works or no this line feels uneven, or this word feels too rough for a particular line. Luckily the actions of my poet brain equals a poem with rhythm.

CM: I always consider every poem I’ve written a part of me, almost like a baby and you can’t have a favorite baby 😉 That being said, what’s your favorite poem in Salvage? Is there a lynchpin poem; the poem that made you nod and say “this is definitely a collection?”

KB: Oh yeah, that’s tough. I think I can look at older books and say that this or that poem is something that I like better than others, but that’s only after time. My first book, the fever almanac, which was published in 2006 has only a couple of pieces I look at now and think they are solid and the rest are annoying in some way. With SALVAGE, it’s all still pretty new, the majority of those poems having been written in the past 4 or so years, so I’m not sick of them yet.lol. I think the “care and feeding of mermaids” segments in the last section are my favorites though, and the entirety of that section holds the entire book together. I tend to work in small series that I usually publish in small edition zines alongside visual components, so the majority of my longer projects are these small projects stitched together based on similar themes and feel. Only when these smaller projects start to constellate somehow, do I start thinking about pulling them together.

CM: This is your second book with Black Lawrence Press, so I’m curious about your writing practice. I recently attended a talk with the talented Shonda Rhimes who said that you have write everyday and writing is a muscle. Do you agree?

KB: Definitely But like exercising daily I don’t manage to do that very well..lol.. Writing takes a backseat to all the other things I have to do in a day, be they the things required to make a living (I work full-time in an academic library) or other things I do out of passion but that require a big time commitment (like running dancing girl press as a one woman operation). Add in errands, bus commutes to and fro, sleep, etc, writing is the bottom priority and sometimes at the end of the day I’d just rather go to sleep. I had some good momentum going when I wrote the first book Black Lawrence (it was my MFA thesis and, at the time, the third full-length I’d completed.) The books since then have been slower going..I’ll go through spurts where I’m writing and finishing projects, and then months of writing very little. But even if I’m not writing myself, do get to spend a lot of time with the press immersed in other people’s work. I also am usually working visually (I dedicate my weekends to art-related projects, usually collage, but lately painting) so I keep the creative impulses flowing even if I’m not getting things down on paper.

KB: Can you also tell me a bit about your processes as a writer? Do you write daily? What is the spark that sets a poem in motion? How much revision tends to happen after that spark, or do things arrive more or less intact? Has your process changed over time?

CM: I know we’re supposed to have as many hours as Beyoncé but maybe poets need extra hours? I don’t write creatively daily. By day I work at a nonprofit, where I edit and do critical writing. I’m also involved with Jamii publishing and the Soul Sister Revue reading series. So when I’m not writing, I’m engaged creatively. I honestly write best when I’m in workshop or I have a deadline, without a deadline I think I’d over edit and no poems would get finished (lol). In terms of what sets a poem in motion – it’s usually a word or idea that I can’t shake. Images arrive intact but arrangement and focus can take awhile to come together. I have learned to put a poem away after its done. Many of time’s I’ve written something and thought it was great, 24 hours later I realized that it doesn’t work because of a, b or c. My process hasn’t changed that much, but I do send poems for feedback more than I used to; poems can’t live in a vacuum,

CM: As a writer, what experiences have shaped you the most? Is there advice from a writer that served as light bulb moment?

KB: In 1998, I was 23 and taking lit seminar in 20th Century British authors and got to spend a good amount of time with Eliot’s The Wasteland. I had been writing for several years at that point, but not very well, and while I was a grad student in lit and could talk to you endlessly about Bronte novels and feminist theory, outside of a bit of Plath and Sexton, I wasn’t all that acquainted with more contemporary poetry at all and it showed. I had only that spring began reading more current women writers–Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, Anne Carson–and those influences combined with the Eliot, sort of formed my poetics for a time and actually made me much, much better as a writer. It was still a few years before I started publishing on the regular and another 5 years until my first book was accepted, but I think of that period as setting the groundwork for whatever my “voice” became as a writer.

KB: What are your three greatest influences (writing, other arts, etc.)? What are 3 current authors or books you are loving now?
CM: In terms of a single writer, I’d have to say Lucille Clifton because she was so great a filling small spaces with infinite emotion. In terms of writing, the workshop experience has really influenced me because I’ve taken workshops with great teachers along with other poets, who were eager to learn and create communities within communities. You forget that people can be magic until you’re in a room and things click. I’ve been lucky to have a lot of clickable moments. Lastly, I want to buy a round for libraries because that’s where I discovered books. I also learned it was okay to be quiet and think because with words you can go anywhere (okay now the theme to Reading Rainbow is in my head lol). Authors I’m loving right now – Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Robin Coste-Lewis, and just started reading the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred.

KB: What are you working on currently?

CM: I have such a backlog of poems that I started and I need to finish. I just finished a poetry fellowship at the Poets House, so I have poems from that class that are on the editing block and an entire page of prompts given to me by Adam Fitzgerald. I have about 45 to 50 poems outside of Blue Hallelujahs, and I think I was in denial, but I’m pretty sure these poems are on the way to being book number 2. I’m still waiting for the light bulb moment. A while ago I found a 1940 census report that listed my grandmother in her early 20’s, so I’m interested in poems serving as a type of census report or found literature focusing on identity and femininity. Maybe poets are really under cover anthropologists. If people 100 years from now, found our poetry, I wonder what they would say?

Between Klimt and Giacometti

A room inhabited by paintings
seizes my mind, fluid unpredictable
lives, their secret eliciting
attention, Klimt’s innate aesthetic,
linear statements without tonality.
Their spontaneity transmits essential wisdom.
Dark eye shapes, dominant lip lines, upturned
corner of mouth, eyelashes and iris
connected, vine charcoal ready to tumble
like a Giacometti. Soft focus and impressive
looseness enhance anatomy,
allow latitude for creativity.
Every wall is a beginning.

***

A citizen of the United States, France and Spain, Hélène Cardona is fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, Greek, and Italian. A poet, literary translator, actor, and dream analyst, Hélène is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Hemingway Grant and the USA Best Book Award. Her books include three bilingual poetry collections, most recently Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry, 2016) and Dreaming My Animal Selves (Salmon Poetry, 2013), and two translations, Beyond Elsewhere (by Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac, White Pine Press, 2016) and Ce que nous portons (by Dorianne Laux, Éditions du Cygne, 2014). With Yves Lambrecht she co-tranlsated Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb.

[The above poem was originally published in The Warwick Review and appears in Life in Suspension. It is reprinted here with permission of the author.]