Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s Joy Is My Middle Name is probably the smartest, funniest book I read all year. She not only writes about culture, race, girlhood, sobriety, boys, desire, joy, but does so with an unmatched and honest fervor.
In this collection, the speaker unashamedly and unabashedly takes the reader through her young years as she interrogates her relationship with beauty, being perceived as a woman of color, humor as a coping mechanism, and writing poetry to make sense of it all. Throughout the collection, she weaves in her obsession with the presidents of the United States, placing figures of historical importance next to important moments of the speaker’s personal life. The obsession manifests not only in her visiting their museums and learning lesser-known facts about them, but also through her poetics. For example, she has a poem in the collection titled, “Sestina Where Every End Word Is Lyndon Johnson,” playing with the rigid form of the sestina to unearth facts and feelings about the subject.
Often deceptive and overwhelming, her obsession is not only limited to the presidents. It, at times, messes up body image and ideas of beauty, and at other times creeps up in romantic relationships. Debevec-McKenney’s book, I would argue, is all about perception (of the world and how it operates, and also of oneself). She isn’t afraid to be termed a “confessional poet” nor is she afraid of writing about sex, drugs, and alcohol. While for some, these may not be traditional topics to write poems on, this collection reminds us that life is about finding the balance between seriousness and unseriousness.
In this Zoom interview, we talked about being angry, being wise without being condescending, having fun while writing, and how this is portrayed through her poetics.
The Rumpus: In the very first poem of the collection, you write, “At its best / America has never been / about facts. It’s been about belief.” What is your relationship to facts and belief, and how do you separate or cohabitate them on the page?
Sasha Debevec-McKenney: For a really long time I wanted to be a historian. I love going to little museums (and big fancy museums too). In my sophomore year of college, I got a grant from my school to visit what I called “lesser known presidents of the 19th century.” I was particularly interested in the presidents leading up to Lincoln, like Buchanan and Pierce. I went to all these little museums that were mostly funded privately, and it’s all some tiny towns have. That was life changing for me because I had this interaction—there’s a poem referencing it in the book called, “Poem For The Racist Tour Guide At The Franklin Pierce Manse”—where the tour guide said something about Pierce not wanting to free the slaves because he knew that their quality of life was better enslaved. This woman was an elementary school teacher and a tour guide. It was definitely this moment for me where I freaked out to my favorite professor, Beatrice McKenzie: “This woman is saying and teaching people these things. What do I do?” She told me, “If you aren’t asking these questions, then you’re not a real historian.” It is difficult to have these conversations with people who live in this fantasy world. What makes you a historian is that you’re willing to confront exactly what you’re saying, that intersection between fact and belief.
That probably would have been summer 2010, so it’s fifteen years ago, but I think about it all the time because that’s the place where the poems come from, too. Where you’re so confused about what to believe and how to feel, and you just have to write about it until maybe there’s some sort of answer, if you’re really, really lucky. As a writer, one of the things I do is put myself into situations that confuse me. Like going to presidential museums and seeing half the truth, and knowing that 85% of people who go through Benjamin Harrison’s house are not going to question anything or consider it in a larger context.
I have these questions and I like to learn about this stuff. In my poems, sometimes I sneak in a little fact and teach people something. Do I think that the people who really, really need to learn are necessarily the people who are reading poetry? I don’t know. I’m not saying I know everything or [that I’m]coming from a moral standpoint. I write about the things that interest and confuse me. I think it’s important to come at it from a place of not being preachy.
Rumpus: You talk about freedom, both in your book and in interviews. How would you define freedom in your poetics? Who do you learn from?
Debevec-McKenney: I went to an art high school, majored in creative writing in undergrad, and then I had a period of five and a half years where I wasn’t involved in poetry. It’s not that I didn’t think of myself as a poet. I studied poetry and I was serious about it. But I didn’t want to walk into a poetry classroom and have a conversation with my students, whose poems were in an antiquated language. The poets that helped me realize that I was allowed to sound like myself were the poets available at Barnes & Noble–Billy Collins, Charles Bukowski, Lucille Clifton– people who I read and could understand what they were saying.
When I went to NYU, my first workshop was with Rachel Zucker. Her poems now, at least, are, really, really, really long, and she made us write a really, really, really long poem. It’s funny to talk about freedom and poetry because the way I usually think and speak is hectic and crazy. The reason I love a poem is because I can organize everything. Yes, there’s freedom in all these ways, but it’s also about control. Taking the class with Rachel and reading my classmates’ poems, I understood that not every last line has to be a punchline or a revelation. My favorite book of all time is I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On by Khadijah Queen, where the ends of poems are like, “Okay, next poem” and by the end, through the buildup of reading it all, you feel joyous and repulsed and angry.
I learn from my friends from the MFA, Peach Kander and imogen xtian smith, poets who don’t write anything like me, but were my closest friends. I think it is important to have friends that don’t write like you. Chessy Normile is my favorite poet and she once said, “I like poetry that’s funny. Not witty or satirical.” Chelsey Minnis is someone who’s really important to me because I learned that you can do whatever. Kate Durbin has these poems that are transcriptions of episodes of The Hills or Real Housewives. The whole girlesque thing was really great for me to understand. I am so obsessed with how I’m being perceived and manipulating the reader that reading some of this stuff taught me not every line is tight.
Rumpus: I want to build on what you said about girlesque, which is a word I love, by the way. You once said in an interview that you write for the girls. So much in this book is about loving being a girl and hating every single aspect of it too. How do you approach this complex embodiment in your work, and how do you maintain distance from the speaker?
Debevec-McKenney: People love hating things that girls like. For my whole life, I thought Uggs were stupid. And then I put my foot into an Ugg, and thanked whoever invented Uggs. I feel it’s similar to what you’re asking, “Are my poems too confessional?” Confessional is a word people use to berate. Like, “They’re not actually using craft.” Or, “Oh, girls write like that.” This is a question I’m trying to understand differently now that the book is out.
Now that the book is out there, it’s not mine anymore. You can go ahead and read what you want into whatever you want. That’s on you. Someone reads it and they think it’s about a particular thing, or they think it’s all true or all fake. I’m totally fine with that. Everything in my poems is processed through my weird brain, synthesized, condensed, and retold. I’ll even read the poems and think that’s exactly how that happened. Then I think about it harder and realize it actually didn’t happen like that at all. We all have different levels of what’s vulnerable to us. It’s not vulnerable for me to talk about having sex or being angry. But for some people, it might be.
There’s a poem in the book called, “Johnny Teaches Me How To Use A Power Drill
In Reverse.” It’s one of four poems in the book that’s really vulnerable for me. To say, I genuinely love this person, or we’re sweethearts. Whereas, other people could write about falling in love so easily. That’s not easy for me. I have a poem that I wrote while going through that breakup two years ago, and it’s about my stomach getting upset. I wasn’t eating. I was drinking a lot. I was depressed. I was in a new place and I got really bad hemorrhoids. It’s how my broken heart was represented. I posted it on my second Instagram. So many of my girlfriends were supportive, and that vulnerability was well received. I don’t know if you experience this too, but as a woman of color, I feel people want me to write about presidents, about history, about race. So that moment of me writing a butthole poem, and all my friends being like, “Wow, I felt this way too,” was a moment where I felt like my work has value.
Rumpus: Talk to me about organization– it is pretty rare for a poetry book to not have sections. What guided you toward this choice? What was your organizing principle for the collection?
Debevec-McKenney: Sometimes I read a book where the sections are really relevant to the book. For example, Tiana Clark has a book called, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. The first section is, “I Can’t Talk About the Trees” and the second half is “Without the Blood,” connecting the book together. One of my favorite books of poetry, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A by A. Van Jordan, has defined sections with polyvocality and non-linearity. These are some books with sections that I like, but for the most part, I feel like we’re putting too much artifice on it. I hate poems that are in sections too. It transferred over to me not wanting a book that’s in sections. But also, I write about the same five things and I always will. The book might come across as having well-defined ideas but in reality, it’s my debut book. It’s all the best poems I wrote in the last ten years, and they all happen to be about the same topics, and I’m fine with that.
I worked with my editor, Rachael Allen at Fitzcarraldo, who I have a really close relationship with and trust. She complimented me a lot so I was able to take her criticism better. I’m a very delicate person. But if I know you like me and have my best interests at heart, it doesn’t bother me. I sent Rachael my MFA thesis which had 40 poems I’d written since then, and I sent her all of them. She organized it over the course of a couple of months and brought it back to me. I was actually not that involved in the organization of the book. Of course I was neurotic and controlling about some things, I’m not going to lie. But through most of the construction of the book, I let her take the reins.
It’s really, really hard to organize a book. A lot of these poems are older, from a time before my MFA, before COVID, when my brain chemistry was different. Again, I’m so obsessed with how I come off to people that I’ve almost come to terms with the fact that I’ll never know. That’s how I felt about the book too. For example, the first poem in the book, “Cento For The Night I Tried Stand-Up” is a poem I almost didn’t attach to the email I sent Rachael. But when I got back the organized manuscript from her, it was the first poem. It made total sense. It covers all the topics in the book. I just kind of let go and let God, as they say. Maybe that’s going to be a struggle for me to write a second book, because it’s going to be a little bit from scratch.
Rumpus: Since it is Halloween today, what was the scariest part about writing these poems and/or putting this collection in the world?
Debevec-McKenney: Knowing my family was going to read the book, not because I didn’t want them to read it. My poems are pretty accessible and that makes me really happy. My parents are both huge readers, though not of poetry necessarily. What was nerve-wracking was me knowing that the version of me in the poems isn’t exactly me. Also, I haven’t been the most accessible person. I live really far away from my family, so there’s lots about my life they don’t know. I’m not that open about it with them. That’s the kind of person that I am. I’m like my dad. I will ask him, “What are you reading?” and he will tell me and then I ask him, “Did you see the new Stephen King movie adaptation?” and he will react with a thumbs up. That’s kind of how I can be too. So, showing my life to my family was a little nerve wracking, not because they’ll know I have sex or anything, just that they’re going to know me. It’s also scary to have poems in there about exes who I don’t talk to or have romantic feelings for anymore. The scariest part was also thinking how my life is going to be different now. And it’s the same.
Rumpus: Lastly, what is a poem or poet you love to teach, and why?
Debevec-McKenney: I teach Sharon Olds obsessively in my intro classes when we have a day on exposure to talking about poetry. We read her poem, “I Go Back to May 1937,” where she talks about going back to seeing her parents meet for the first time. And she’s like, “Don’t do it.” But towards the end she writes, “but I don’t do it. I want to live.” I feel it’s such a perfect poem to read when you’re nineteen. For all of high school, all I wrote about was my parents and my imagined histories of them, their history, them as kids. It’s also such a brilliant poem because you read it on the first try and totally get what’s happening. Then as you develop your skills as a poet, as you learn more making intentional choices, you can go back and rediscover the poem. As we go along through the semester, I reference that poem constantly and compare it to other poems. For line break day, I will make them go back and look at the lines.
Something really important to me as a poet is conflicting feelings. In that poem, Olds talks about her parents in a way where there’s no room for forgiveness. But then, a few weeks later, we read her poem, “The Glass,” and it’s about this moment where she is sitting next to her dad. He has cancer so bad he can’t swallow, so he has a glass that he spits into. This poem is about losing her dad and that could only exist out of love. I tell my students, look at this poem where she’s talking about how her parents are evil and going to do bad things to children, and then how she is watching her dad die, and how both of those are true. I teach Olds because she’s someone who’s a victim of “confessional” poetry, like we talked about. I think she is a great poet. I love reading her because I feel like I’m in her lineage. She’s one of the poets I read really young, and I think it’s important to model to your students that this is something you’re passionate about. I don’t teach poems I don’t like.
That’s another thing we tell ourselves, that the poem has to be about beautiful things. Or we’re trying to elicit sadness from our reader. But that poem makes me feel sick and I use that as an example to help people understand that pulling a strong emotion out of your reader is equally impressive and difficult. It does not have to be just sadness.
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