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Rumpus Book ClubThe Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Rebecca Wolff
Rumpus: The New Yorker staff editor Jenna Krajeski praised The King for being “resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive”: similarly, John Kinsella noted that the “deeply private and often tormented spaces” in The King function as “survival tactics, even celebrations of resistance.” Do you think poetry lends itself more to “resistance art” (art that arises in response to conflict) than prose? Have you written any fiction since leaving Houston?
RW: Well, I do think that for many of us, poetic language arises out of certain kinds of collisions (to quote myself, from a poem that talks about language acquisition: “Out of pressure arises concentration/ out of concentration a kind of fission”). Poetic language is responsive to states of, if not crisis, certainly conflictedness, or mental/emotional spaces in which reason is insufficient or is at least silent. There is a kind of sonic exigency created by unthought thought, thought that comes to one as speech already spoken, already verified if you will.
I go to prose for clarity and—there it is again—subject matter and the expediency of sentences. I love sentences! I just read a few pages of this old book by the philosopher Richard Rorty and found him saying that “[t]ruth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.” This is so relevant to The King!
As for my own fiction writing: I’m shocked and delighted to announce that my novel The Beginners will come out sometime in 2011 from Riverhead Books. This is a novel that I’ve worked on for a long while, to the exclusion of any other fiction writing, and it’s super exciting to feel that I’ve now got the go-ahead to begin another.
Rumpus: Did editing the anthology Not for Mothers Only with Catherine Wagner help to create a sense of solidarity between yourself and other contemporary poets who also happen to be raising children? Do you feel your relationship to the women in this anthology as fellow mothers to be incidental to your connection to these women as fellow poets or people?
RW: I’d say more that raising children created for me a sense of solidarity between myself and other women who happen to be raising children, and it was then just bonus to realize that this solidarity would be immeasurably amplified by locating mothers who were also poets. As we spoke of in our introduction, the anthology was directly inspired by our participation in a listserv of “Poet-moms” (mothers of children under ten with at least one book of poems out or a comparable degree of involvement in poetry, career-wise), and that listserv remains active and incredibly sustaining for me as a mother and actually just as a woman, I’d say, now that the critical early years of mothering have passed for me (my children are 5 and 7). I’ve never been a big joiner—more of a hideous solipsist, actually—so the experience of identifying as part of a self-selecting community like this one has been almost embarrassingly important. To answer your question, it is important that these women are poets, and it is important that they are mothers, but it would be very difficult to extricate these importances from each other.
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October 7th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Rebecca, This is such a great interview! I’d been looking for it ever since you mentioned it was forthcoming. Really excited, too, about The Beginners…