New Voices: The Weight of Words & The World of Aftermath

Newfound Interviews, Spring 2018

C. Morgan Babst

Everything, Even Love, Even Home: An Interview with C. Morgan Babst

Lush with the scents of ligustrum, a fallen magnolia, an evening breeze off the Mississippi River, New Orleans author C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel, “The Floating World,” sings the world of aftermath—of devastation, desire, the city’s dead. Here is the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, above and beyond the ruptured levees, inside the psyche of a family wrought with longing and despair at the sight and reek of their drowned home. The five members and three generations of the Boisdoré family reveal this story in ribboning, intersecting storylines, emphasizing the truth of the novel’s epigraph from Virgil’s “Aeneid”: “Each must be his own hope.”

Hilary Zaid

The Weight of Silence, The Weight of Words: An Interview with Hilary Zaid

Bay Area author, alumna of Harvard, Radcliffe, and UC Berkeley, Hilary Zaid surprises, and her debut novel, “Paper is White,” is indeed an astonishing and successful surprise. Balancing weighted subjects with blue skies and beautiful slices of cake, with wedding arrangements and secret encounters, Zaid measures out humor with generosity, hope with passion, even grief with impossible understanding. Through narrative spun in first person, lead character and heroine Ellen Margolis finds her way in late 90s San Francisco, where elderly Holocaust survivors reveal their stories, relationships grow close and become divided, and the past lies like a wedding veil across the future.

Fort Starlight: A Florida Story

reading Fort Starlight en route to Prague

When traveling by train from Berlin to Prague, I began reading Claudia Zuluaga’s debut novel, Fort Starlight. Immediately caught up in the Florida tale of lost souls, swampland, and strangely discovered dreams, I was startled every now and then at the sight of cliffs and castles outside the train windows. Perhaps I was missing the sights of central Europe, but this is typical of me—I head off on adventures and find myself longing for home, which means “the South,” specifically the age-old stomping grounds of Florida. And so, Claudia Zuluaga’s words gave me permission to do just that, with a story that calls up uniquely believable characters, a vibrant and true sense of place, and just the right sway of narrative voice to carry the piece from start to finish. Engine Books’ editors, Victoria Barrett and Andrew Scott, have their sights set on fine writing, and Fort Starlight is among their many well-received titles. Curious about the author’s inspiration, the novel’s themes, and the astounding writing that adds Fort Starlight—by The New York Times Book Review’s standards—to the latest shelf of “Southern Literature,” I asked Claudia if she’d consider an interview, and I’m thrilled that she said, Yes!

Port St. Lucie, Florida

“past the beach houses built on stilts”

“Past the Beach houses built on stilts, past the ocean highway that runs along Erne City, past an inlet that is a shade lighter than the ocean, past more houses, past small streets, past the Florida turnpike, past dark clusters of trees, two North American blackbirds, male and female, fly west over the southeastern shore of the Florida peninsula.”-Claudia Zuluaga

The prelude to Fort Starlight—a novel about leaving the familiar and discovering the unfamiliar, about isolation and longing, about desperation and dreams—is one of place, and our first view, reminiscent of Eudora Welty’s opening passages in “A Curtain of Green,” is from above, an aerial shot of that place in Starlight County where the story will unfold.

The wetlands and heat and flat brilliance of Florida’s east coast are familiar to you, Claudia. Could you tell us a little about your background, how you, too, once found yourself in Florida, and why this setting is integral to your main character Ida’s story?

I’m the sixth of seven children. I was born in White Plains, NY. My parents, who had never owned a house, had bought a parcel of land in Florida around the time that I was born. I don’t think it was ever worth much, but the summer before I turned sixteen, when all of my older siblings were living on their own, they traded that plot of land toward the purchase of a villa in Port St. Lucie. At that time, Port St. Lucie wasn’t fully developed, and there was nothing but wilderness to the west of our planned community. Only maybe half of the villas were occupied, and for a teenager, pulled away from her friends and her pedestrian life, it was profoundly disorienting. And the heat. The whole thing felt like a dream. I would try to go for a walk, but five minutes in any direction was just swamp, tall grass, or asphalt, rippling in the heat. I spent most of that summer, after I gave up on the walking, inside the villa, in the air conditioning.

I was only fifteen, and my parents had put everything they had into starting a life there, but all I could think about was that everything I had known, all the people I had known, were gone, and I had to find a way to make something for myself, because I couldn’t imagine anything coming next. It seemed, at that point, impossible. And then, like Ida, I realized it was something I’d just have to survive, and that maybe I’d never know what it meant. But I did find things to hold onto. I made friends. I made it work as well as I was able. It didn’t take away my urge to escape, to undo what I felt had been done to me, but I found beauty there. It is beautiful.

North American Blackbirds

The blackbirds, first introduced in novel’s beginning pages, appear throughout, at first to show us the way and then, more than literary device, more than motif, they reveal their own story. Like the characters of Fort Starlight, they, too, are trying their best to survive the harsh and beautiful wetlands, “a place where anything dripping and new could step up out of the muck and begin its existence.” And inside the act of survival we witness the imperfections and vulnerabilities of the creatures and characters.

Would you expand on the importance of the world here, “the seven square miles of muddy rivers, scrubby trees, swamp, the forest hammock,” in relation to your characters and the intertwining stories?

The world of south Florida, of this wild part of south Florida that doesn’t touch the Atlantic, is something you can’t deny, can’t get away from. There is no ocean breeze to cool you off, no reassuring smell of salt in the air.  It’s something that makes you think, “People probably aren’t supposed to be living here.”

But they are. And they are in Fort Starlight. Nature has pushed (almost) everybody inside to shelter, and inside is where they have to deal with their weaknesses, their problems, their pain. The place makes me think of a sweat lodge, somewhere you go to sit and sweat and suffer, all for the purposes of purifying, of moving forward.

A friend of mine says, “You can’t get away from your shit. It’ll track you down and eventually make you deal with it.” Everybody in Fort Starlight is at that place in their lives. They can’t run any longer. This is what unites all of the characters. This is the basis of their community, whether they know it or not.

“An alligator could snap you up in two seconds”

“the body of… a twelve-year-old boy is guarded by a thirteen-foot alligator”

As I read Fort Starlight, I noticed the idea of imperfection casting itself into the storylines, and in each successive chapter, with subtlety and great care, the perfection of imperfection beginning to fold itself into scenes in which characters interact with each other and with nature. Careful narrative threads, crosscutting, and lyricism work together and create a landscape in which the perfection of imperfection is revealed. Pairings appear: Ida and her long-lost brother, Peter and the memory of his wealthy father, the at-odds gay couple Ryan and Lloyd, the neglected and wandering boys Donnie and Carter, Nancy and her terminally ill great-niece, even the body of twelve-year-old Mitchell Healy and a four-hundred-pound alligator, and yes, the blackbirds.

What might you tell us of the meaningful isolation and imperfection of your characters and of the physical, emotional places in which they find themselves?

I wanted to make Ida stuck, with no easy way out. The only way she is going to grow, meaningfully, is by being stuck with herself. It is so tempting to think that everything will change, if only you pack up and move away from the familiar, if only the background and the noise and the weather are different. Of course, it’s not that easy. The only things that change are the background, noise, weather. As soon as the disorientation has dissipated, you are back where you started.

Despite the difficulties that Ryan and Lloyd are having, that Nancy and her great niece are having, that even the boys are having, they all have each other for support in their journey. Ida has only the imaginary companionship of her brother. Peter has only the memory his father and the illusion of his superior intellect. These two are the most in need of figuring out who they are and how their lives are going to be, and both are brave about it, if a bit misguided. They have to be alone, until they don’t anymore. And I see their relationship—one of parallel growth rather than intimacy—continuing beyond that last moment at the beach.

Florida tree house

Tidal pool, tree house, or a beachside table spread with a sunset supper of cold white wine and deep-fried gator?

I’m torn between the tidal pool and the tree house. When I was in high school, we would go to a beach called Bathtub, and when the tidal pools were full and warm, at night, we’d bring goggles. You could swim in some of these pools in darkness, without having to worry about riptides or sharks. There were these phosphorescent organisms, and if you moved your hands underwater, watching with the goggles, it was like you were parting the stars. Amazing.

One of my brothers moved to Florida for a few years, around the time I moved out of my family’s home, and he and his wife did live in a tree house for a time. It was tiny, dark wood, with bunks instead of beds, no real furniture. Something from a fantasy movie, like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. It wasn’t open to the elements, but it was up in a tree, up over swamp water, cozy. He moved there with his wife, just after they were married.

Florida map

Claudia, you’ve lived in the South, and your writing, so far, concerns the South, a place that for many, including myself, has a mystical, powerful, sinkhole kind of attraction. There are the harsh realities of hurricanes, overzealous religions, and unsettling heat, and then there are the gentler ones of salty ocean breezes, herons in flight, the taste of grilled pompano.

Do you find that you are drawn still to writing mostly about Florida? What is it about this particular setting that inspired you to write the Pushcart-nominated story, “Okeechobee,” and then the much-praised novel, Fort Starlight?

There is something in the very shape of Florida that makes it feel cut off from the rest of the country, the rest of the world. Once I moved there, I never once drove up and out of the state. It just seemed so far. We’d go south, west, east. Never north.

I moved to an efficiency near the beach just before I turned nineteen, and then to Orlando for a few years, where I worked as a waitress. As a matter of fact, I didn’t leave Florida until I was twenty-one and flying out on my very first airplane ride. I’ve never been back to my home town. Not even once. Miami, the Keys a few times, but no more Treasure Coast. This wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t really feel I had roots there, and even my parents gave up and moved back north, because none of their children lived down there.

That isn’t to say that Florida doesn’t have culture or joy or possibility, because of course it does. I think my feelings about that particular part of Florida were really colored by the fact that, when I did live there as a teenager, I was under the thumbs of my strict parents, and I had no car or freedom. I was away from everything I’d ever known and believed the rest of the world was gone; there was no evidence of it anymore. I couldn’t even go for a walk, because there was nothing to walk to. I couldn’t get my bearings, really. All of this combined made me really disoriented and unsure about how to figure out who I was. I fled, thinking I needed the distraction of other people to be able to figure it out. Maybe I did.

Now, I’m a grownup, I can drive, and there’s the magic of the internet, connecting everybody. The place I lived, as I knew it then, doesn’t exist anymore. I wouldn’t experience it the same way.

I didn’t realize I had to get it out of my system, work through what it all meant, until I was in the noise and chaos of New York City. People have described my writing as atmospheric, very setting-oriented. I’m not sure if that is the case in anything I write that isn’t based in Florida. I think I may be done with Florida, but who knows! I have other Florida stories, one called Be Your Animal, published in the now defunct Lost Magazine.

Okeechobee

Trailers & Palm Trees

At David Abrams’ literary blog, The Quivering Pen, you wrote of earning your first paycheck for a story accepted by Narrative Magazine. I love the humor and honesty of this account, and even more, I love the story itself. “Okeechobee” is a sweet, sad short-short about how childhood and family are rough and rare.

Would you tell us something about the narrator, a young girl who notices the world around her—her own version of Florida—in terms of the tension between her parents, the hot afternoon of canned colas and closed trailer doors, curses and class differences and broken-down cars?

Kids take in what they are ready to take in. There is an age when children start noticing the things that are not right about their lives, not right about their families. They start to imagine what their own life will be like someday, and this causes them to notice and judge and long for what they don’t have. My narrator has just begun to have this awareness. She sees the tension between her parents, the lack of joy, affection, spontaneity, and starts to put the pieces together, trying to figure out where it all came from, trying to figure out what it means for her.

My second summer in Florida, I had a boyfriend who seemed to be, at the time, the only thing I had going for me. Naturally, he dumped me. I was despondent, because I had thought I’d found some direction, something to hold onto that made me who I was. If I mattered to someone, then I was connected to the world. The dumping happened around the time my mother wanted to visit her friend in Okeechobee, and though I was a mess, she made me come. Maybe she thought it would cheer me up, or maybe she just was wary of leaving me home alone. We got in the car and drove, meeting her friends at a rodeo (where they did, I think, have warm cans of cola). It was so hot. I thought it was supremely ugly. I sat with my shoulders hunched, too numb to cry.

A bull collapsed. People rushed over, then just stood over it, watching while the beast’s heart gave out. It seemed that there could be no more miserable place on earth at that moment. Hot and dusty, warm soda, a heartbroken girl, a dying bull, all of this happening even closer to the center of the state, where there seemed to be no escape. Why had my mother made me come? Did she not understand my despair? There was definitely something about the disconnect that inspired the story of Okeechobee.

“Small fishes, sand, bits of seaweed, scallop shells, whole and cracked”

And finally, I want to acknowledge the ending of Fort Starlight without giving it away. There are moments of resolution I feared might become too carefully tied, and so I was relieved that the characters and their story lines remain a bit smudged, as well as lovely and imperfect. Ida’s character expands exponentially once she finds the Atlantic, and as in the beginning, she experiences a new place with “tide pools on both sides… the water… so clear… [she] can see the bottom… Small fishes, sand, bits of seaweed, scallop shells, whole and cracked… a stingray in the last… just before the sand bars end and the open ocean begins.” Here, there is a widening, the possibility of moving forward, the moment Ida and all Fort Starlight’s characters have longed for. Is this perhaps where you as a writer also found a place from which to move forward? And from this easterly view, where are you headed next?

Yes!! I am working on a novel right now that goes to an even more challenging place for me, emotionally and psychologically. Before Fort Starlight, I wouldn’t have had the courage to jump into the strange, unknowable thing I’m jumping into now. Now I trust the process of writing a novel and know that it will work itself out, as long as I keep at it. Fort Starlight was a mess for years. I had all of these pieces and had no idea how they connected. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out who Ida was. I would see her doing things and I didn’t know why. All I had was atmosphere, and it took so long for the people to emerge from this atmosphere, and this is echoed in the prologue with the bit you excerpted: “a place where anything dripping and new could step up out of the muck and begin its existence.”

So I’m looking east, yes. At the deepest, darkest, most unknowable trenches of the ocean. With my fingers crossed.

CLAUDIA ZULUAGA

Photo Credit: Christian Uhl

Claudia Zuluaga is an English Lecturer at John Jay College (CUNY) in New York City. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her short stories, which have been nominated for Pushcart and Best American Short Stories, have been published in Narrative Magazine, JMWW, Lost Magazine, and Linnaean Street.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

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First posted at Hothouse Magazine.

Brad Richard: from Aubade to Bacchae

“Aubade”

7:01: the first rain of the last day

of August starts to fall, then hesitates,

postpones itself to let the light

that would have come here anyway break in.

Nothing is amazed. None of the azaleas

have changed their minds about not blossoming,

and the lady cardinal who visits the lawn chairs

between 7:15 and 7:20 assumes her station

and finds the yard in its ordinary order.

But she must notice how the long branches

Of the euonymous, yesterday so straight,

Now are bending under days of dryness;

how the fig tree’s leaves are browning,

as if burned by a slow, exhausting fire

the small rain did not extinguish. Summer’s

steady certainties, the creeping

increments of heat and leaf, falter

and break, utter final colors.

No expectations could sustain these last

intact yet stunted primroses. After all,

what is the soul? The black ant

mazing through the rose’s sex?

These tendrils shrinking from the endings of air?

The repetitions of cloud and sky,

the kinetic clocking down of things

caught in the cardinal’s eye in flight?

— from Habitations

 by Brad Richard

Brad Richard, New Orleans poet, writes with an incredible sense of perspective and place, reaching out toward history, mythology, art, and nature. Focus and attention are revealed in his poems, as well as questions regarding gender, an understanding of the world, literary and otherwise, and a way in which to examine it. Though I’ve known Brad for years, I’ve learned so much more in this interview about his way of seeing and about the form and fabric of his poetry.

Backyard Ferns

Confederate Jasmine

Brad, I’m thinking about the idea of perspective in your poetry. In your first collection, Habitations, many of the poems focus in on nature, as in “Aubade” and “Dirt-Dauber’s Nest,” and then lean away to widen and expand. And then there are those pieces that steal in and single out details that perhaps we’ve no business knowing, like “Everybody’s Little Secrets.” I felt a terrible, wonderful sense of voyeurism here, the digging down into places that are usually off-limits, and realized that these sorts of poems have a literary kinship with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

Would you speak about your process, in terms of perspective? And about how that process may have evolved over the years?

First of all, Karin, let me say thanks for this interview. I’m really honored to be one of your subjects.

To the question at hand: I love looking at things and I love describing them. I hope my eye doesn’t censor what it sees, that whatever is seen is fair game for thinking, feeling, writing. Still, at times I feel incredibly obtuse, like I miss things that are right in front of me. Then again, I’m always surprised when someone reads one of my poems and something I’ve seen, something I may have thought was so obvious as to be banal, strikes a reader as perceptive. I think it’s just the habit of looking that makes me notice things in a particular way—something particularly beautiful, or odd, or telling.

Imagination is the next step, and that involves a looking out as much as a looking in. That is, if I can imagine myself into something (a person, an object, a painting), I hope that I can see from that particular perspective and generate some sense, however partial, of how that consciousness would think. I’ve written a lot of persona poems and dramatic monologues and variations thereon, and that mimetic habit of imagining a different perspective runs closely parallel, I think, to the habit of seeing I described above. What interests me the more I write is how I locate whatever I consider to be my perspective.

I love Sherwood Anderson (“Death in the Woods” is one of the most brilliant and haunting things I know) and As I Lay Dying is a touchstone. And yes, the sense of being a little too close for comfort is something I admire and am a little frightened of in Anderson and Faulkner’s best work.

Fiction

Poetry

You’ve written poems as tributes to other poets and to artists, landscape, mother, father, lover, self. And that’s all very nice. But here’s my question: have you ever written a poem of thoughtful, quiet revenge? And (even if you haven’t) what, pray tell, is the best poetic form for writing of reprisal?

I love this! “Writing well is the best revenge,” said a writer with a famously poison pen. And George Garrett perhaps wrote the wickedest bit of literary revenge in his novel, Poison Pen (dedicated to the memory of Joan Rivers). I can think of lots of examples of well-turned vengeful daggers in prose, but I think what makes literary revenge work is the same in poetry. It’s a matter of finding the appropriate balance of irony, ire, and bile, and singing your hate-song in perfect, pissed-off pitch.

Now, in my own work . . . hmm, is there anything I would admit to as arising from wanting to settle a score? I’ll take a kind of middle road with the two poems I’ll cite. One is “Eye-Fucking,” from Butcher’s Sugar, which is in the persona of a gay-bashing murderer. Letting him speak for himself is, to my mind, pretty good revenge. The other is “The Artist’s Wife and Setter Dog,” from Motion Studies, in which I play a trick with point of view, withholding the identity of the speaker for as long as I can until it’s clear that it’s the wife, that is, Mrs. Thomas Eakins. He and she had a very complicated relationship, but I felt she deserved a chance to speak her mind about how that horrific portrait portrays her. Withholding and then revealing the speaker was a way both to complicate and dramatize how Eakins repressed her and her image. I hope a little brute justice was served in that case.

Now, if you were hoping I would reveal some juicier, more personal poetic revenge . . . sorry!

Poetic devices

Place informs so much of your writing. Your childhood in Texas, your adult life in Louisiana, the interim in Iowa and Missouri. Armadillos, levees, gulf waters, wasps, acorns, mockingbirds, sweet potatoes, wild sweet-peas, locusts: details of those places.

Within place in your writing are intonations of desire—to be home; to be elsewhere, near the shore, examining things washed up; to be wanted, loved, understood. What do you think? Places, people, passion. Sound familiar?

Of course. A person who will remain nameless (note to self: subject for revenge poem?) once made fun of me when I told him I was considering learning more about birds so I could identify them more precisely. Clarity is my absolute standard for good writing, and precision is fundamental to clarity. This is all essential to understanding place in a meaningful way. Places, people, passion: these things are very specific, and it’s their specificity that moves me.

Motion Studies - by Brad Richard

“Motion Studies”

I. [1929 / 2005]

We’ll never make it in time: you’re twelve,

Riding west to see a corpse in a flood,

I’m your grandson at forty-two, riding east

to see my city’s flooded remains.

Gueydan to Port Arthur, Austin to New Orleans,

you in a pickup with your daddy and one brother,

another brother waiting in a funeral home,

laid out in somebody’s suit on a cooling board,

you trying to imagine that body past this rain,

me in a rental car with the music cranked,

trying not to think about stories that got snagged

in stories that failed to hold up, to hold

water—

—   from Motion Studies by Brad Richard

Motion Studies, the title of your second collection and of three movements within the collection, becomes the telling of stories within stories, like sketch boxes inside the set of suitcases that, from smallest to largest, fill the old leather trunk in the biggest closet of your father’s art studio.

Would you tell us about the circumstances surrounding the writing of these poems? How they came to you, from the art examined to the exodus from and the eventual return to New Orleans?

I love how you imagine this big leather trunk in my dad’s studio! There wasn’t one, but you’re absolutely on target with the metaphor of stories packed into stories. And I’m delighted to talk about this.

I began writing the Eakins material in Motion Studies in 2003, after seeing the Eakins retrospective at the Met in 2002. I really didn’t know his work before then, and was in the middle of working on the poems that would find their way into Butcher’s Sugar. But Eakins work really got to me: I admired it, I was annoyed by it, and I wanted to make it give me something back for all the energy I was putting into looking at it, especially that damned Swimming painting. I ended up doing a considerable amount of reading and research and was planning to write a book of poems almost entirely about Swimming. By the summer of 2005, I was pretty far along with that project, and well into its explorations of impossible yearning. And then that stupid storm happened.

Among the many ways that Katrina affected me, one of the worst was it (or my reaction to it) made it impossible for me to continue the Swimming poems. Fortunately, I had already written a lot of those poems, and probably even more fortunately, they weren’t just about that painting. While Tim and I were in Austin, during our weird, extended evacuation period (our apartment was fine, the city wasn’t, and we didn’t need to return immediately), the Ragdale Foundation graciously offered me a residency. I went there to write one poem, “The Raft of the Medusa,” based on the very famous and much-written-about Géricault painting; that poem ended up taking months to finish, and I really meant for it to be my only Katrina poem.

In the summer of 2008, I received another Ragdale residency; I hadn’t been writing much during the previous year, and I was frankly unsure what to work on. I knew I didn’t have enough Eakins material for a book, but I also knew that work was good enough to become part of a book. I was also wondering if I could find a way to write again about Katrina that would mean something to me, just as the writing of “The Raft of the Medusa” had: not something merely didactic, but something really felt. About a week before I left, I had one of the few “eureka!” moments I’ve ever experienced as a writer. I suddenly realized that my Katrina story, a story about my paternal grandfather trying to get to Texas during a 1920’s flood to retrieve the body of a dead brother, and Zeno’s paradox were all related and could generate a single poem. It took a lot of work, including genealogical research, research about cooling boards (thanks, Audrey Niffenegger!), and imaginative re-creation, but over that four-week residency, I came up with most of what become the “Motion Studies” series that forms the spine and nervous system of that book. I’m still amazed that all of that meshed so well with the Eakins material, plus a few other poems I had written previously. I don’t expect to ever again have such an incredible experience of unity in creating a book.

Freddy’s tail

Butter Boy!

Influences: literary, cultural, culinary, gender-wise, otherwise.

I always go a little stupid when I have to answer the literary influence question. Once I start listing the usual suspects (Bishop, Stevens, Yeats), I feel obligated to start listing everyone whose work I love and has had some impact or left a trace on my own work and then I freeze up, can’t think, babble. So I’ll try this.

Literary: Gilgamesh. Moby-Dick. King Lear. Yeats, Stevens, Bishop, Plath. Tomas Tranströmer. Michael Alexander’s introduction to The Earliest English Poems (Penguin, 1966). Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.”

Partially literary/extra-literary/cultural/etc.: I have and have had many important literary friendships, and Dana Sonnenschein and Reginald Shepherd have been the most important of those. Dana’s friendship sustains me in all kinds of ways, and Reginald’s changed me, big time. I’m in a talented and invaluable workshop group—Peter Cooley, Melissa Dickey, Carolyn Hembree, Andy Stallings, Andy Young (and past members Jessica Henricksen, Major Jackson, Ed Skoog, Liz Thomas)—and am lucky to live in a city with a vibrant, diverse literary community. My relationship with my father is where my relationships to the visual arts, music, and food begin. Gender-wise = otherwise. OK, that’s a joke. Sort of.

Gladys – former bridesmaid, always the hen

Crawfish: étouffée, bisque, or boil? And how come?

I have to choose?! Well, boiled is the most fun, so I’ll go with that.

Butcher’s Sugar by Brad Richard

“The Men in the Dark”

Dropping shut the trapdoor that opened the dark

above my childhood bed, they don’t want me

 

to tell you about them, those two men

who left their smell with me each night

until I was no longer a boy. In tee shirts

or sometimes shirtless, they sat on bunks

as in a cell, smoking cigarettes and staring

down as I whispered. They liked to hear

about my parents, my dog, hurricanes, the wasp

and the dandelion, how blood tastes, how deaf people talk.

– from Butcher’s Sugar by Brad Richard

In your third collection, Butcher’s Sugar, you step out onto the ledge of gender, curling your toes toward “dirty boy” poetry, then lean over the edge toward yearning, sex, and even homophobic violence.

Tell us more. What else were you moving toward with these poems? And have these pieces led you into another dimension in your writing, a place where you can take off into the next stretch of work?

The first poems I wrote that ended up becoming part of Butcher’s Sugar were exercises in form: “Queer Studies” came from practicing the sonnet, “The House that Jack Built” from practicing the villanelle. I wrote sonnets and villanelles on other subjects, but in these particular poems I was interested in queering the forms. I didn’t think they would necessarily lead anywhere; they were exercises. I did play around with similar material, most of it also in forms, but a lot of it was pretty bad; this was back in the mid to late ‘90s, when the manuscript for Habitations, my first book, was basically done, and I was looking around for a new direction. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do and a lot of the abandoned work from then reflects that.

There were two turning points. One was “Eye-Fucking,” which was a response to reading about gay-bashing killers in Texas. Although I had played around with writing about creepy material, that was a more visceral writing experience, one that made me confront the real horror of what I was dealing with, and made me question why I wanted to write about it. After that, I couldn’t deal with material of that gravity without feeling more certain that it was OK—morally and artistically—for me to do so.

The other, more liberating one was a re-encounter with ancient literature, specifically Gilgamesh and Greek mythology. That gave me a frame of reference for dealing with material that was quite personal, even in poems that don’t refer directly to classical myths. I’m not a Jungian, but archetypal material is undeniably powerful, deeply referential in ways that heighten the intensity of a poem and give them a certain density (which I hope isn’t merely borrowed). I feel that, too, in the kind of material I drew upon for Motion Studies.

Motion Studies is a very elegiac book with some hope for the living, for those who can remember, for the lovers at the end. Butcher’s Sugar is also elegiac, but brutal: of all the classical influences in it, the strongest may really be Euripides’ The Bacchae, which is, in my reading, about the question of whether it’s necessary to destroy the self in order to have self-knowledge.

Right now, I find myself working between two impulses. One is directed outward, toward the idea of the city and of history, in a partially completed manuscript about the capitol of an imaginary kingdom and in another about New Orleans (which is also kind of an imaginary capitol). The other impulse goes more inward, and a lot of that material is very domestic; there are poems about things growing in my yard, and about my life with my husband, Tim. (Not coincidentally, I’ve been going back more often to James Schuyler’s beautiful poems.) Related to these are some memory poems, some cousins to poems in Butcher’s Sugar, others more like poems from Habitations. Which means, I guess, that I keep coming back to place and perspective, trying to get my bearings again and again.

Reprise of Freddy’s tail

Tim Watson & Brad Richard – Hansen’s Sno-Bliz – New Orleans

Brad Richard

Brad Richard is the author of Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011), Butcher’s Sugar (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012), and Habitations (Portals Press, 2000). He chairs the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans.

All photos – with permission of Brad Richard and Karin C. Davidson.

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The Poppy: An Interview Series

Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis, 

black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.

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This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.

Annie, Sandy, Chloe

Annie Liebovitz’s exhibition of her Master Set opened at the Wexner Center for the Arts in September.  Hordes of beautiful and not-so-beautiful people showed up for the opening night to view the beautiful and not-so-beautiful people, the made-immortal icons of Annie’s art.  The Cashes and Carters, the Obamas, the Neville Brothers.  Meryl, Nicole, Whoopi.  Emmylou, Lucinda, Roseanne, Patti.  John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Billy Carter and Margaux Hemingway, Meg and Jack White.  Soldiers, heads of state, longhorn steers, poets, politicians and their brothers, singers, dancers, cyclists, weightlifters, actors, artists.  Indeed, Annie has described hers as “a life through a lens.”

Then came October, which ended in a storm of the century, though we seem to be having a lot of those lately.  Katrina, Ike, Isaac, others in between.  And then, like a sister that no one paid enough attention to, that sat around and fed off too many wrong-headed ideas about hurricanes, who loaded up on fistfuls of salted fish and seaweed, Sandy punched her way through the Caribbean and past the Carolina coast to fall hard on the Northeast, slapping Virginia and D.C. on her way up to New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.  Not a nice girl. 

Chloe is complicated, but November seems to have given her enough room to settle in.  Not that she wasn’t already settled in.  A tuxedo cat of large proportion and larger personality, Chloe seems to have decided that biting is indeed her preferred form of communication, the food bowl can never be full enough, and reaching through the open back of a chair to swat at fine-spun sweaters or corduroy trousers or whatever passes by is terribly pleasing.  Much more pleasing than chasing the field mouse up the serviceberry tree and hours later giving up the pursuit to boredom.

Three autumn months gone, gone, going.  Three names.  Annie, Sandy, Chloe.  Artist, storm, feline.  Each has owned the world in her exceptional way.  Vision, destruction, insistence.  Focus, deluge, seduction.  Film, surge, teeth.

"Eliza, in the Event of a Hurricane"

"Eliza, in the Event of a Hurricane" is now up on the website at Precipitate Journal. (Re-established & renamed in 2012 as NEWFOUND JOURNAL).

"On this particular night we get weathermen, talking and talking.  And when El pulls the ottoman up to the television, it becomes evident that you’re in this for the long haul.  She looks at you and winks and cracks the same joke she told five minutes before.  Something about a girl walking into a warehouse where nobody works and nothing is sold.  Smile, but don’t laugh."

Read more at: 

"Eliza, in the Event of a Hurricane" - Precipitate - Journal of of the New Environmental Imagination - PRECIPITATE is now NEWFOUND JOURNAL.