I consider myself lucky to have a connection with Jade Lascelles. We are connected as poets, as artists, as feminists, as booklovers, and in other more inexplicable (perhaps magical) ways. Most importantly, I believe we share a notion of infinite possibility.
So, when my co-editor and I began compiling a wish list of poets for what would eventually become Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, of course I thought of Jade. What I couldn’t have known is how deeply haunted I would be by her entry, “This is Why We Are Afraid,” and what it would mean to me to discover new aspects of my own feelings about violence and desire and grief through her writing.
Naturally, when I received her email announcing her first full-length book, The Inevitable (Gesture Press, 2021), I was thrilled. I devoured it in one sitting and then immediately started it over again. The book is slight and powerful—everything I knew it could be and yet could never imagine. Themes of darkness, brutality, and longing crystalized into two stories-in-verse—one full of electricity and fire, the other a loamy, shimmering dust. Each is somehow both delicate and brazen in its otherworldly examination of what it means to be human.
Jade Lascelles is a writer, editor, musician, and letterpress printer based in Boulder, Colorado. Selections of her work have appeared in journals, anthologies, films, and visual arts exhibits, She was included in the 2022 Bologna in Lettere festival this spring. Beyond her writing endeavors, she plays drums in a few different musical projects. With so many different approaches to creative work, I tried to weave a bit of it all into our conversation.
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The Rumpus: Your poem, “This is Why We Are Afraid,” was my entry point to your work. It’s such a haunting and visceral exploration of how we experience the ever-present threat of violence against women in our culture, and The Inevitable—particularly the first part, “The Moths”—feels like a natural progression from there. Would you share a bit about the recurring themes of violence, desire, and the feminine in your poetry?
Jade Lascelles: It makes sense you feel a connection between the two, as they started out part of the same larger manuscript. A few years ago, I’d begun feeling very claustrophobic about the violence I was seeing in the world. It started to feel more acute somehow, more frightening than ever, and then like it was creeping closer.
Within a few months of each other, a series of horrific murders occurred in close proximity to my own life. One of the victims was a friend of a friend, another lived in the same neighborhood as a loved one. I used to regularly walk on the same path where one occurred. And someone I’m very close to was going through a break-up, and the threat of her ex-partner acting out in a violent and dangerous way was a real concern. It felt like I was being haunted or hunted by the violence, its steps tracking just behind mine. I often caught myself looking over my shoulder for it.
And so I did what we writers do when faced with big, heavy situations: I attempted to write my way through them. As a result, the themes of violence, desire, and the feminine radiate through the work because that’s exactly what I was trying to examine—the intersections of those things in my own life. In a way, I think all of my work is a recursive attempt at making sense of how to sit beside contradiction and ugliness. The desire inherent within all violence. The strength in refusing victimization. The fact that terrible and unjust things happen constantly to good people, and yet structures of power somehow keep persisting in their horribleness. It’s an uncomfortable pill to swallow, but I think accepting the “both/both” or the “yes, and” is key to next-level thinking. To finding unexpected routes away from the binary and exclusionary ways of thinking we’ve entrenched ourselves within.
Once the writing was complete, I could more clearly see that, though they had the same point of origin, there were two distinct and different manuscripts happening. So I teased them apart. One half became The Inevitable and the other half (which contains “This Is Why We Are Afraid”) is a separate manuscript still in search of a home.
Rumpus: So much has changed from the time you began writing this book. What is it like for you to have produced something so intimate in the midst of a paradigm shift? Has your relationship to this body of work changed?
Lascelles: It really is such a different world now, isn’t it? I recently abandoned a manuscript I’d been submitting that focused on my attempt to preemptively process a trauma. It came out of my struggles with medical anxiety, with falling into the worst-case scenario around some health problems I’d been dealing with, as well as my deep fear that something very bad was going to happen to my physical body. So I decided to write the poetic narrative as if it had happened. If my fears came true, how would that feel? How would I respond?
But now we’re in this onslaught of actual, on-going collective trauma, and so play-acting through how I imagined it to be seems so silly. The writing feels stale, lacking any innovation (and decorum) that I originally hoped was there. So I’ve decided to put it away, at least for now.
As for this current work, yes, I’d say my relationship with it has changed. Since the entire publication process for The Inevitable took place during the pandemic (and all its concurrent social and political and cultural shifts), I certainly felt twinges of worry about whether releasing it was the correct choice. (Was I really putting out poetry at a time like this?) But I kept on with the plan, having to remind myself daily that art is essential, that human connection is possible and necessary in myriad ways. Those reminders and worries have helped fortify my dedication to writing in a way I haven’t felt before. Additionally, the past two and a half years have been saturated with death, particularly within my family. Through the grief process, I have reframed some of the things I was tugging at before, when it was more conceptual. Navigating through revisions with an open wound of mourning helped me refine and distill the writing more, ground it in specific emotion (at least, that’s my hope).
All of this is to say that I suppose I feel more of the personal in it now, whereas before it was centered on larger and more all-encompassing, macro ideas.
Rumpus: I’m interested in the way you invite otherworldliness into your poetry, particularly as a way to engage with difficult realities and explore emotional landscapes through magical realism. Would you say this is a conscious part of your craft in The Inevitable?
Lascelles: I think my natural tendency is toward magical realism. I am drawn to things that feel otherworldly. There is beauty and possibility and heartbreak (in both pleasurable and awful ways) within what’s mystical and strange. Ever a Libra, I think I have a compulsion to make everything beautiful, even the grotesque. Not that I’m trying to glorify or diminish the horror of it, but I strive to recognize the poetics within the full spectrum of human experience. I suppose that gets back to the “both/both” intention I mentioned earlier. Something can be terrible and contain poetry. Something can be heinous and interesting to examine. And yes, I think part of this approach is my need to find ways to both cope with and distance myself from what is out of my control. To not ingest it so fully into my own body. That’s where the title The Inevitable comes from. Much as I want to believe with my whole heart that non-violence is possible, the fact is there has always been violence, there will always be brutality. So how do I co-exist with that without being complacent or nihilistic? What if I step back here and take in the panoramic view? Or what if I lean in close and look at the small details, the magic that is glistening just below the surface?
Rumpus: The Inevitable is categorized as poetry, but it clearly bleeds through conventional boundaries of genre. As a writer, artist, and musician, what are your thoughts on artistic boundaries?
Lascelles: It’s a funny thing that happened. For so many years, I was a definitive poet—all stanzas and line breaks and open fields of composition. Then somewhere along the way, sentences began to sneak into certain poems, and then those sentences would sometimes clump into paragraph blocks. Heather Goodrich (my magnificent editor at Gesture) and I wavered on how to categorize this book because neither of us really knew what to call it. In the end, we went with prose poetry because it was written from within a very poetic mindset. I’ve begun a fiction project recently, and the way I approach that writing is quite different from anything I’ve done before. Sure, my poetry can be narrative and flow across the page in full lines, and my prose is still filled with poetic flourish and (perhaps excessive) figurative language. But the sensation of sitting down to write a “scene” is somatically, emotionally, and intellectually different from writing a poem, at least for me. And the latter is where I was while writing The Inevitable, so I consider it poetry no matter how it looks on the page.
If I’m honest, boundaries on creativity make me cringe. It’s like when someone wants to know what kind of music your band plays, as though there’s a tidy little fence to place around it. I think having influences and genres you’re inspired by or constraints to push you into a challenging conundrum can be great starting places. But if you go into any artistic endeavor with a finalized definition already in mind, you’ve strangled a certain amount of breath from the creation process. I’m often surprised where a project can wander, especially in circumstances where I’ve decided it was something else entirely. And it can be uncomfortable to allow those surprising turns to take over, but in my experience, that’s where the most magic tends to happen. It’s a great example of practicing sincere vulnerability.
Rumpus: I love this. Could you say a bit more about the practice of vulnerability?
Lascelles: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways I’ve used poetry in the past to find safety in obscurity. How I could veil what I was trying to say with enough metaphor and fancy language that I could avoid actually having to say it. I could distract the reader with emotionally unclear beauty. It was a way of deflecting responsibility and blame if I got it wrong, as well as protecting what felt like the most tender parts of me. (Not that this is true for all poetry, but I see a pattern of it in my own previous work.) In all of my artistic practices now, I’m working on being more forthright—which is not the same as plain, as I’m learning. It’s certainly illuminating, and at times quite frightening.
Rumpus: There has obviously been a lot of transformation happening in your work—and your process. I believe you that it is frightening at times, but it’s also very badass. It makes me think of the back cover of The Inevitable, where Gesture Press invites us to visit their website “for more punk as fuck feminist books.” What does it mean to you to be a punk as fuck feminist? Where do these values come from? Who and what, in your opinion, should we be reading to continue this journey of resistance?
Lascelles: I love this question so much! Similar to what I was just saying about creativity, punk for me has always been about an approach to life that defies constriction and definition. “Punk as fuck” conjures all the things I see as counter to the greatest toxicities of culture. I’m thinking here of selflessness, of kindness, of critical thinking, of conscious and conscientious non-participation, of bravery to speak your truth with compassion, of empathic outrage, of social justice, of refusal, of respect and value for other people and beings and our planet. These things are all very punk to me right now because I think the core of punk is living in an honest way that defies what we are told is the right way to be (yet know in our hearts to be so very wrong).
And feminism, at least at its best, ties into all of that. The feminist part of the equation brings in conscious equity and inclusion. Decentering authority and other patriarchal constructs that are keeping us all down and at each other’s throats in various ways. It’s binding together in a collective resistance, making sure we’re not stepping over others to get to the end goal.
So what to read to help get us there? For starters, I can say what we absolutely should not read. We need to get off social media and away from corporate news sources. We need to read (and talk to) each other instead of being drawn into agendas and curated aesthetics that are killing our ability to be brave, experimental, unrelenting in our curiosity. Because having a clear sense of our own actual thoughts and beliefs will help us live in a way that nourishes imagination. A dear friend of mine inspired me to really dial back on my social media use, and the relief I’ve found in its vacancy has done wonders for my creative drive. I feel silly and embarrassed that this online space took over my psyche so deeply in recent years. Not that we need to be complete luddites or hermits, but exacting intentional boundaries around what/how much you allow into your mind is deeply necessary work right now. Those are the kind of boundaries I can get behind.
As for specific things to read, you can never go wrong with Kathy Acker. CA Conrad’s somatic experiments inspire me to push against any monotony I’ve allowed into my own art and remind me that healing and playfulness are not mutually exclusive. Julie Ezelle Patton blows my mind, as does TC Tolbert (oh, those “Dear Melissa” poems!), Cody-Rose Clevidence, Hoa Nguyen’s investigations into family history and grief, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Natalie Diaz, All people with intersections between the punk (as I define it here) and the poetic that really rev me up. I’m also always looking for writers who have slipped by my radar, so I’d love suggestions. Again, that gets back to needing to talk to each other, to have real conversations instead quick flashes of posts as we scroll. Conversation and curiosity are essential to keeping momentum in this journey of resistance, as you so beautifully put it.
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Author photo courtesy of author
