If every writer’s path has its twists and turns, Jessica Cuello’s has been particularly circuitous. Cuello’s latest poetry collection, Yours, Creature, (JackLeg, 2023) explores the turbulent life of Mary Shelley and the well-known creature of her world-famous novel, Frankenstein, through persona poems.
A lifelong writer and teacher, Cuello’s first book of poems, Pricking (Tiger Bark, 2016), came out when she was in her mid-forties. As it did for some other well-known “late bloomers,” this debut opened the floodgates. In rapid succession, Cuello published three more books—in 2017, 2021, and 2023. Much of her work to date has been driven by achingly powerful persona poems, particularly the complex women in Pricking, and creatures in Hunt (Word Works, 2017), followed up by a foray into confessional verse with Liar (Barrow Street Press, 2021).
A series of epistolary poems that reflects deep research, Yours, Creature offers keen insight into what fueled Mary Shelley’s imagination, from the wound of losing her mother when she was an infant to her confusion about her stern and distant father; from her vexation about her complicated relationship with Percy Shelley to the grief of losing baby after baby to early death.
I first met Cuello at the Frost Place in 2019, and then later worked with her as she progressed through her MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. I reached out to her via email in the wake of her latest publication to learn what brought her to poetry, how she has persisted, and what draws her to persona poetry as a vehicle of the imagination.
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The Rumpus: When did you find poetry, or when did it first find you? Was there a specific poem or moment of writing that set you on this path?
Jessica Cuello: Poetry began at age five when my mother remarried and we started attending my stepfather’s church. I was obsessed with the hymns. I learned them all by heart and sang them in the backyard, especially those early Shaker hymns like “Simple Gifts.” We also used to play hide-and-seek in the church, and I would go into the tiny church library and climb onto the windowsill behind a high bookshelf. No one ever found me there. I would take books off the shelf and read them on the ledge. The Bible, hymnals . . . those were my first encounter with poetry, with language that was doing something other than the language I had known. The window looked out onto an enclosed courtyard, and I was completely hidden. The whole experience had a Narnia-esque feel, something secretive and magical that I associated with the words.
As for what we call “real” poems, those began with teachers. I was fortunate to attend public school during the era of rockstar English teachers, a generation of brilliant women who had few career options. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Perry, did a poetry unit, and I fell in love with it. I wrote my first poem in my head while driving over a bridge after my parents told me we were moving to Syracuse. I was unhappy where we lived, and my joy was overpowering but I couldn’t say it aloud, so I wrote the poem in my head and memorized it. When I presented it to my teacher she gushed over it and called me a poet. That attention stayed with me. It was not a time period when people gave compliments. I did not grow up with any, and if I got one, I kept it.
Rumpus: Did you feel like a poet after that, or was it just gratifying to be seen that way—that your words, and in some sense your feelings, were validated by Mrs. Perry? And does she know her influence on you?
Cuello: I don’t know, I was eleven. I mean, I knew on a deep level that I was a poet, the way we all know everything true somewhere within us, but then there is the second level layered with all our doubts. I often live in that second level. It wasn’t until much later that I definitively knew I was a poet, while watching the film The Lives of Others. It flooded through me with relief and certainty, “Oh yes, I am an artist.”
Mrs. Perry was special. A lot of my elementary and middle school teachers were hostile, racist, or hated poor kids and the kids who were different. Kids notice that. But she respected all her students. We moved away from that town, and I did not keep up with her. She is probably dead now, but I often think of her and send blessings her way.
Later, in tenth grade, I had this phenomenal teacher named Kay Kasberger. She was way ahead of her time pedagogically. When I became a teacher, I drew heavily from her methods. She used to hand out packets of poems typed up on an old-fashioned typewriter. I kept them for years. We read Etheridge Knight, Hardy, Robert Frost. I distinctly remember the moment I read Frost’s “Out, out—” about the boy who loses his arm in an accident. The experience was otherworldly. I forgot I was in the classroom, I lost sense of time. The personification of the saw blew me away, the turning away of the others “since they were not the one dead” knocked me over. I’d never read anything like it. I see now that I was also drawn to the sister in the poem that the boy calls out to: “don’t let him cut my hand off—sister” and her silent witnessing of his pain and death.
Rumpus: I love that anecdote about the Frost poem! Did you wind up studying literature and/or writing in college?
Cuello: I knew at an early age that I was going to study literature in college. Creative writing wasn’t really developed then as an area of study at Barnard College. There were not many courses offered, but I did take courses with Katha Pollitt and Kenneth Koch, neither of whom liked teaching very much. I double majored in French and English literature with a creative writing concentration. I was afraid to speak in class or take up space, so I didn’t go to office hours or learn how to fully belong.
One of the best things I took from Barnard was a friendship with Edyta Bojanowska; she was the opposite of afraid. We both waitressed at Goldberg’s Pizzeria (incidentally, the best pizza I have ever had) and the owners called her the Polish Rocket. It was apt. After graduation, she convinced me to travel with her to Poland to visit her family. She introduced me to the work of Szymborska and Milosz. I remember going to a bookstore with her in Kraków and marveling at the number of books she purchased at one time. She taught me to surround myself with literature in a way I had always wanted, and for years afterward I thought of her in that bookstore whenever I felt guilty buying multiple books.
Rumpus: You’ve named a number of teachers. Did they have an influence on your professional vocation as a teacher, and how did you get to the point, alongside teaching, where you began publishing poems in journals and books?
Cuello: My relationship with teaching is complicated. Yes, it came from my love of learning and the teachers I loved. I knew I was meant to be a teacher. I used to line up my stuffed animals when I was a child and teach them. Teaching gave me value as a person. I was beloved. But it was also a way to hide, a way to be safe. I overworked when I first began teaching. It can be the easiest job or the hardest job. Actually, even when it’s easy, it’s hard because teachers manage a couple hundred kids a day. Even teachers who are bad at it are working hard. Sometimes I would grade into the night in my portable in Texas. Early on I also worked a second job grading standardized tests in an old Levi Jeans factory in San Antonio. At times I feel like I have given away too much of my life to teaching. On the other hand, I have supported my family with teaching for twenty-seven years. It has steadied me.
Though I had been writing and reading voraciously since my teenage years, publishing came later. I always made book lists and prescribed myself a rigid schedule. Writing early in the morning. Reading books constantly. I grew hungrier for more and took a couple one-day classes at Gemini Ink, a literary center in San Antonio.
From there I did a few mentorships with poets. One of these mentorships was with poet Marian Haddad. She understood that my reticence was doubt. I don’t know what she understood, but she rooted for me, she believed in me, and it was incredibly affirming. “Why aren’t you sending out work?”she asked. But I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. I don’t know why. I think I was waiting to get better. But really, I was just too cut-off, doing things in a lonely, solitary way. She bought me a copy of Poets & Writers and circled things I should try. She recommended lit journals. She urged me to put together a manuscript, which I did. It was a finalist at Bull City, semi-finalist at Crab Orchard. A poem got taken by Jake Adam York at Copper Nickel. I don’t know how to explain my mentality before I met her, but it was as if certain things didn’t exist for me. I didn’t see them or know them. I was ambitious, but in an abstract way, not in a real way. I guess we cannot underestimate what encouragement does for people. How it changes them. These things in the world that did not exist for me—they did not even enter my mind. I had not allowed them in. Yet, I continued writing and reading daily.
I saw myself as a writer, but I was not connected to any community that involved writing. I didn’t know it mattered. I thought discipline mattered. Now I see that community and connection matter as much. I have come to that part late—mainly because I was severely independent, to a fault.
Rumpus: Three of your books have elements of project books, but they all share an obsession with working with erased or othered subjectivities—particularly women’s voices—in literature, from Joan of Arc to Mary Shelley. Two of them, Hunt and Yours, Creature, dialogue with classic works of literature (Moby-Dick and Frankenstein, respectively). I’d love to hear about your method of working through dramatic monologue. How did you discover it and how has your approach shifted over time?
Cuello: Oh, a hard question with many answers. My first book, Pricking, a triptych of medieval French women, had its genesis in an old travel guide that the previous French teacher had left in the classroom. It had these startling black-and-white photos from the Languedoc region of France with accompanying facts about the history of the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusades. I can’t explain the effect of these photos on me, but it is most akin to the feeling of reading the Frost poem—that suspension of time and the blissful feeling of leaving the mind. The poems began with those photos, and from there I read more books on Cathar history.
For all of the persona projects, I read multiple books: books on Joan of Arc, the transcript of her trial, biographies of Shelley, the works of Wollstonecraft, and so on. I set most of the details aside to write the poems, but I liked to be saturated with the language and history. The voice in the poems often began with intense physical sensation. Several poems in Pricking came to me on runs and while lying in bed at night. That probably sounds weird. In one instance, I literally felt like I was being rocked in a boat as I lay in bed one night. I wrote the poem in my head. Something else: because I was alone a lot and often silent as a child, I grew up deeply attuned to image. That’s my sense, anyway. Many of these poems existed first as images. I vividly saw the things I was writing about.
As for how my approach changed over time, before Yours, Creature I meant to abandon persona poems. I never intended to write this Shelley book. It took hold of me between other book projects, but it felt good to set the self aside. There is a pleasurable freedom and release in persona, whereas when I write from an autobiographical place, I run up against so much shame. It feels more dangerous. But there’s another reason, too, and I finally understood this when I began translating. My relationship with books began in childhood, and, at [its] core, it was about having an intimate connection with others. There are no restrictions to this intimacy; you can speak with strangers, the dead, the fictionalized, the imagined, the unreachable. Literature is a balm against loneliness. I feel close to these other writers, to the characters in their books, to these women in history. Writing persona is a form of connection for me.
Rumpus: The cover of Yours, Creature features an image by Edvard Munch called Madonna with a woman looking askance at a homunculus in the corner. In contrast to the main character’s horror in Munch’s painting The Scream, the visage of Madonna appears aloof, proud, and distant. Her torso’s turning reminds me of some depictions of the Annunciation. I can’t help but think that I see both Mary Shelley and the Creature from her famous novel in that image. I love how, in the poems, you can see Mary’s own identification with the creature. Can you talk a bit about what drew you to the cover image, as well as the complex picture of Mary and her life in your poems (including, especially, her griefs over mother, husband, and children)?
Cuello: I love this question. Frankenstein’s creature is a kind of homunculus! I was partially drawn to the cover image because of the relationship between the two figures. I see an ambivalence in the Madonna toward what she has made. It now must be cared for, and also, what pain did it cost her to bring it into the world? I was taken especially by the wariness of the creature who looks up at her with suspicion, as if doubting that she will care for him. And in fact, she seems separate, in her own reverie or her own animal-like dissociation, like a person after great physical pain or exertion, or even ecstasy.
Shelley wrote Frankenstein shortly after her first baby died. Her grief would have been unbearably fresh when she, Byron, and Percy Shelley gathered in the mountains of Switzerland to write their ghost stories. I imagine that she wished for the power to endow this baby with life like Frankenstein did with the dead. There is a poem in Yours, Creature that borrows a line from one of her letters: “I dreamed we rubbed it by the fire . . . and my little baby came to life again.”
Three of Shelley’s four children did not survive. A question that was with me as I wrote these poems: how does one bear such loss?
Mary was aware that her own birth killed her mother and I wonder if this knowledge compounded her own pain. So, while the cover Madonna evokes Mary Shelley, it also nods to Shelley’s mother, Wollstonecraft, with Mary Shelley as the homunculus in the corner. You noted that Shelley identifies with her monster in these poems and yes! that’s true. Wollstonecraft died from an infection shortly after Mary’s birth. She would have been distant in her physical pain, already turning away from her child. It’s interesting that you read the expression in the painting as proud and aloof. Isn’t that a female response to pain or rejection? I’ve always thought so.
Another mood I took from the painting, ever-present in Yours, Creature, is disgust at one’s creation: the baby that is repulsive or murderous to the mother. We see this as the central pain of Frankenstein’s monster: his total rejection by Victor Frankenstein as if Victor had not made him at all. Victor is one of the biggest assholes in literature. Everyone he loves is murdered because he can’t take responsibility for his creation, and he just passively allows it. By the way, Victor was one of Percy Shelley’s pen names.
The lack of self-consciousness in the Madonna depiction feels like it could be a response to childbirth or creation—no one feels self-conscious during the pain of birth—but there is also a sexual tone in the painting that appealed to me. By fifteen, Mary Shelley was already having sex with Percy Shelley. Percy Shelley was married with a child, yet Mary left her home and turned her back on her father to run away with him. So I’m drawn to the sensuality of the cover. The pairing of sensuality with the creature in the bottom corner felt apt for Mary Shelley.
Rumpus: What did you learn about Mary Shelley, and about yourself, that you didn’t know before you wrote Yours, Creature?
Cuello: The way creation and art soothes has probably always soothed, and how connected it is to survival and endurance. Writing is an insistence against a world insisting otherwise.
I also learned about my love of the epistolary form, a form that has been with me since childhood. I kept a diary from age five to age thirty-one. I was always writing “Dear________.” It’s a form that allows one to speak fully, to say everything, a form women and children gravitate to because they are often interrupted and forced into silence. There is also a one-sidedness to it, an absence of the other who may or may not answer.
I realized after I had written the book how much I identified with the monstrous. I see it reflected in my teaching. My classroom is a place for everyone to be seen and valued, especially those on the outside. If I go back to when I was that girl lining up my stuffed animals, it was about creating a space of belonging and love.
Rumpus: I wonder if your work in persona poetry and dramatic monologue paradoxically offered you a way to approach your own life, since these poems largely take on a child’s point of view?
Cuello: Isn’t that what we are all doing in persona? Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” It’s hard to understand our own experience. We get at it sideways, through imagination. There are always voices conspiring against us, urging us to distrust what we know. Imagination is a place to be free and also a place to hunt for what’s true.
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Author photograph by Colin Usher
