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Rumpus Book ClubThe Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Rebecca Wolff
Rumpus: Along with being “about” motherhood The King strikes me as being “about” the very thin (perhaps permeable) threshold between the maker and the made (poems such as “The Lord is Coming: All bets are off,” “In my Jesus year,” and “The Letdown,” specifically.) “You cannot have the body/ until you make me one/ in exchange,” says the speaker of “Where’s the Funeral?” I’m recalling the final chapters of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson—she suggests that in the master/mastered dialectic of Emily’s poetic development, she eventually sought to make the Lord up, in his absence (or, more precisely, to be his Lord or guardian). To what extent is the King/Other/Lord/Man of your collection a byproduct of your own resources, whether material or immaterial?
RW: Well, this is an interesting counter-reading to my own, aforementioned pre-packaged presentation of The King/Other/Lord/Man as representing that-which-is-essentially-too-real-for-me-to-construct. Not exactly a priori Truth-with-a-capital-T such as Rorty refutes above, but at least subjectivity and/or material reality that is equal to my own and which presents an immutability in the face of any whammy-jammy I might try to place upon it with my indefatigable store of Making. The Higher Power that we all must recognize if we are to achieve Nirvana, to completely scramble lexicons of actualization. The irony of all this being that recent reading in philosophy and literary theory is making me realize that for my next trick I’d like to write a memoir, of all things, about this really agonizing, completely authentic existential crisis I endured in my late teens/early twenties, which rendered me absolutely convinced that, in fact, I really did create my own reality. Literally. Does everyone go through this?
I refer again to the short, plainspoken poems in the section called “Depth Essay”: these poems try to express a kind of calm-after-storm pleasure in epistemological inquiry (such as into finding a good recipe for cookies) as anodyne, if not remedy, for that kind of division (see below about Buddhism). Here I feel I’m doing a bit of packaging again, in order to explain, but please trust me when I say that there’s other stuff going on in this section too.
Rumpus: Buddhism is mentioned several times in The King , and several of the poems (“Because He So Loved,” and “Deep Down”) are distinctly aphoristic or haiku-like.
“Because He So Loved”
Short eyes
moral compass
You’re wasting your finest thought
on me
peaceable kingdom.
What about the Buddhist sensibility do you find most appealing (in terms of philosophy or when structuring a poem)?
RW: I think you’re more right on with the aphoristic or epigrammatic tag: I’m actually not familiar with Buddhist philosophy or sensibility, except in a very glossy, undergraduate kind of way. I have been friendly with several Buddhists (impossible not to be when one lives in college towns); I once almost got a job at Tricycle (a Buddhist periodical); I took a really fabulous course in college (while still pretty deeply in the throes of the hysterically Western existential crisis) on East/West dualism that helped me reconcile myself to some pressing irreconcilabilities concerning spontaneous speech vs. silence. It’s more the American-Buddhist lifestyle I grok than anything deeply real about Buddhist practice. I can’t meditate for the life of me and honestly don’t, at a deep level, understand why anyone wants to. (I’m sure meditators are going to have a field day with that one. I actually DO really understand why people meditate.)
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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…