The Fantasy of the Perfect Version
This week, I’ll teach the last night of my class Writing the Body at Looky Here in Greenfield. (Did you miss it? I’ll be teaching a class on the Confessional Poets this summer!) This class has been a total joy. Last week, along with reading and writing some deliciously charged pieces, we talked about how the kyriarchy (the system of interlocking oppressions) not only wants us to stay detached from our bodies, it requires it. Rebuilding relationships with our physical selves, our desires, our sensual and erotic (note, this is not exclusively sexual) selves is a liberatory act (yes, Audre Lorde wrote beautifully and extensively about this in Uses of the Erotic).
I’ve started each class with a body scan, and then a freewrite, simply taking an inventory of our experience of being in our body that day. An inventory is not an act of judgment. If there’s flour on the shelf or not, if there’s 5 eggs or 6, you note them down, without a moral qualification. We can practice turning attention to the body with this same sense of simply noticing.
And we can bring this attention into our writing—what the speaker or character(s) feels, desires, and is repulsed by, all of these carry energy and information. I shared this poem by Lynn Emmanuel last week, which I will restrain myself from telling you endlessly about how delicious and brilliant it is, and just insert here instead:
Frying Trout while Drunk by Lynn Emanuel Mother is drinking to forget a man who could fill the woods with invitations: come with me he whispered and she went in his Nash Rambler, its dash where her knees turned green in the radium dials of the 50's. When I drink it is always 1953, bacon wilting in the pan on Cook Street and mother, wrist deep in red water, laying a trail from the sink to a glass of gin and back. She is a beautiful, unlucky woman in love with a man of lechery so solid you could build a table on it and when you did the blues would come to visit. I remember all of us awkwardly at dinner, the dark slung across the porch, and then mother’s dress falling to the floor, buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate. When I drink I am too much like her— the knife in one hand and the trout with a belly white as my wrist. I have loved you all my life she told him and it was true in the same way that all her life she drank, dedicated to the act itself, she stood at this stove and with the care of the very drunk handed him the plate.
When I’m not teaching, I’ve been busy using my body planting fruit trees, hazelnuts, and the first plants in the garden (potatoes, some flowers, sorrel, arugula, lettuce…). The cats have been extremely excited about me digging large holes in the yard.
Finally, I have a treat this week, which is a Q & A with poet Carolina Hotchandani, whose book The Book Eaters came out with Perugia Press in 2023.
AR: A few weeks ago, you were talking with poetry students at Smith College about your debut collection, The Book Eaters. When discussing how you chose to order the poems, you talked about how the order of the poems creates an "argument." Tell us about this idea.
CH: As I was considering the structure of The Book Eaters, initially, I entertained a fantasy that there was one perfect version of my book, and I was trying to discover it as I fiddled with different arrangements. Sometimes, I’d order the poems to suggest a chronology. Other times, I’d consider the sections of the book pieces of an argument on the nature of selfhood. Needless to say, this latter sort of thinking did not emerge until long after most of my poems had already been written. But once I’d achieved a certain critical distance from the poems, this mindset about the sections of the book began to emerge. I ultimately decided that I wanted my book to delineate a narrative that seemed chronological (it should be noted that the published book’s chronology is not true to life), though the sections would also collectively question what it means to have a “self.” The first section of my book depicts my father’s memory loss and cognitive decline. The second section explores shifts in my identity and self-concept as I entered motherhood. I started to think of these two sections as “arguing” that the very idea of an identity depends on fixity: “Here’s who I am,” one might say, in referring to an identity, and it seems so real—that idea of a self—but doesn’t the “self” rely upon narratives we recount to ourselves about who we are? And...what if we stop believing those narratives or lose our memories of them? Anyway, I decided the last section of the book would include poems that grapple with the tenuousness of identity. In short, throughout this process, I started to ask myself NOT, “What’s the perfect sequence of poems for The Book Eaters” but rather, “If I order my poems like this, what meaning emerges? If I change the order, what's the new argument that the book suggests?” This thought process felt much more fruitful.
AR: What's been something about having your debut collection out in the world that has surprised you?
CH: Now that my book exists in the world, I’m surprised by how…uncloseted (I suppose?) I feel. Previously, I’d not claimed I was a poet when I spoke to non-poets about my profession. It always felt odd and vaguely shameful to admit that, behind closed doors, I engage in this art form that’s associated with archaic self-indulgence and navel-gazing. I would tell people that I’m a college professor, which sounds like a more sensible, legible thing to be. Now that I read my poetry publicly, I feel strangely and newly free. And I’m so happy when people connect with my poems. I think I’ve never felt so comfortable with myself as I am now that I’m sharing my poetry more openly with people.
AR: What is your poetry practice like currently? Is it consistent, or has it changed over time?
CH: Currently, I’m trying to find my footing in my new manuscript whose working title is Spineless. My poetry practice in the early stages of writing The Book Eaters felt similar to this; each poem I’d write was reaching for the book in which that poem might be embedded, yet each poem was a lonely, bold adventurer, holding its little flashlight into the abyss of the as-yet unwritten book. I find this process both exciting and a bit scary. Later, when something closer to a manuscript draft exists, a sort of dialogue can take place between individual poems and the whole book, but until that point, each poem seems like a pressure cooker that contains itself as well as my idea for the book. I am in suspense about what will emerge!
Looking forward to sharing more herbal recipes soon—it’s time to go out and harvest nettles! And to start planting seeds, which I’m off to do, myself.
I’ll be teaching an online class with Write or Die this June called Speaking Up & Talking Back: Troubling the Archive. Registration is open & I’d love to see you there!
Yours in love and rage,
Adrie