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Rumpus Book ClubThe Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Rebecca Wolff
Rumpus: How would you pitch this anthology to a father?
RW: It’s “Not for Mothers Only”!
Seriously: Everyone was at some point born to a mother. These poems should be of great interest to everyone.
Rumpus: Alicia Ostriker’s blurb of The King references Freud’s formulation “His majesty the baby,” but was this connection deliberate on your end? Does Freud or any other so-called authority on women factor at all into the darker aspects of The King?
RW: I wasn’t at all familiar with that formulation when I composed the ms. nor when I titled the book. I was super-pleased to find out about such a happy accident. That’s the kind of accident I rely upon, in my poems. I’m practically an automatic writer.
Rumpus: Your work in The King has been compared to several great writers, contemporary and past: Plath, Sharon Olds, Beth Ann Fennelly and Rachel Zucker, among them. My objections to drawing a parallel between style and “subject matter” aside: do these intertextual references resonate for you? Is it the fate of any writer in whose oeuvre “motherhood” plays a role to walk in the shadow of Plath?
RW: It is so funny to see my own work and the work of Rachel Zucker and the work of Catherine Wagner all get the big P (for “Plath”). I couldn’t revere Sylvia’s poetry more than I do, and I have a terribly complicated relationship with the poems of Sharon Olds (my first book features a loving pastiche of her called “The Sharon Olds Poem” and my next book (god willing) also has a poem in response to her), and have read Beth Ann Fennelly with delight, though I think among this list our work bears the most superficial similarity, and Rachel Zucker made my shortlist for blurbers so you can see that with her I feel no small sympathy.
All that said I see what you’re getting at and concur: It’s annoying and absurd to be painted so broadly with the motherhood brush. It’s surprising to find Plath so brushed as well: Her poems about her children are amazing but they are not the ones I most think of. That she stands as the flagship mother-poet is disturbing given that she offed herself when they were small.
Rumpus: Your poems in The King take place in a wide range of contexts: the speaker’s head, the great outdoors, and in a variety of so-called “domestic” scenes (baking cookies in a kitchen). Manderley’s atmospheric mood is the sepulcher-like setting of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (as alluded to in the epigraph) and Figment inscribes the call to wanderlust (“I make it harder than it has to be./ The perfume of longing for elsewhere”) as well as the vertiginous qualities of terra firma (“instrument to medium in the meantime// stuck out here in the devastation in the forest/ in the middle of fucking nowhere/ between landmass and incontinence/ camp and derangement, the more songlike/ the further we row/ from our figmented shore.”)
Do you think poetry should manifestly take place outside of the mind of the maker? Or is “place” just one more construction?
RW: I think rather that “should” is just one more construction, and not to be applied to much about poetry. One “should” be open to all kinds of modes in writing, and I’d say that poets whose concerns are with the reality of place—Eleni Sikelianos’ The California Book, eg—are doing something super interesting with that. My first book, Manderley, took its title in a heavily ironized fashion: Manderley is a manor house in a film by Alfred Hitchcock called Rebecca (and of course in the novel by Du Maurier) but the place I’m really referencing is the evacuated place created between these referents and my lack of intentionality in referring to them—if you see what I mean.
The fictive place is #1; the metaphorical place conjured in the mind of a reader is #2; the putative intentionality in the referring poet is #3; and the lack of intentionality is #4, “Manderley, we will take each other/ seriously. That which does not kill us/ blah blah blah,” to quote myself. It’s a disturbingly high irony. I actually used to try to write about this disassociative aesthetic action when I was first in college, at Bennington, and called it “The Triple Click.” It was very spacy and self-referential, as a literary-critical position and as an aesthetic philosophy, and didn’t go over well with my professor.
But when you talk about the poem in Depth Essay taking place “in a kitchen,” I think: Never never never, though I can remember the kitchen I was using when I wrote it, in Boise, Idaho. For me that poem takes place inside those 30 words, and their flatness. I would never proscribe or prescribe this to anyone. I can see how “place” as subject matter is political (in its incontrovertibility) but I’m not sure how to articulate anything about that. Perhaps once I really start putting together my next book, which is called Upstate, I’ll start to understand more what I think about “place.”
Rumpus: Can you elaborate on your reference to high irony, for those who easily misconstrue a speech act in the mode of high irony? I’ll be purposefully hyperbolic—who or what is antipathetic to high irony? Or, how might “high literalism” be a necessary bedfellow of high irony?
RW: Well, I’m not sure the two are doing it in anyone’s bed but mine, and I often wonder just exactly where on the autism spectrum I might place myself. Or find myself. A poet friend, Rodney Phillips, the same genius who supplied me with the title Manderley, suggested that my poems (back in that day) were being written by a gay man trapped inside my female body, and I guess I could think about the ways in which campiness fits into Otherness. High camp is full of pain. High irony, arising from the kind of extreme detachment in which one hears one’s self speaking as though one were an audience member, can also be described as “a bad sense of humor,” in that what I find funny, or sayable, through that kind of filter, is often not what others do—my misperception—and the flipside or consequence of a lifetime of disassociative disorder is a desperate attachment to what one perceives as emotional truth—the kind of truth that makes you cry: the truth of the sadness of roadkill, say, or the truth of other people’s romantic attachments, or the truth of other people’s position from which to take offense: phenomena that seem to attest to a much sought after incontrovertibility, and the poignance of that, from a distance.
The enemies of high irony are many and mighty and noble, and include: poverty, injustice, love, and, yes, babies. Children are another thing entirely: Mine show early signs of getting all my jokes! It’s like Rosemary’s Baby, their glowing eyes.
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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…