Poetry Can Handle This: On Trauma and Radical Exposure

NE: What you said earlier, about a lack of novel information, reminds me of this Wittgenstein quote that serves as the epigraph for one of Rosa Alcalá’s poems, “Voice Activation” from MyOther Tongue: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” Alcalá then begins the poem with the fantastic response, “This poem, on the other hand, is activated by the sound of my voice, and, luckily, I am a native speaker.” It is a poem about her dying mother but is also about linguistics—that is, who gets to speak the right tongue in order to live and continue living.

There are such slogans in 20th century poetry, that information is not for poets to speak of, or, as Stevens would have it, “poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully” and all that. We know, having come into our voices in a different century, that a poem can in fact be activated by the language of information in order to determine the author’s will, and any modicum of determinism. Alcalá says midway through the poem,

So when I say, I think I’ll make myself a sandwich, the poem does not say, I drink an isle of bad trips. Or if I say, my mother is dying, where is her phone. The poem does not say, try other it spying, spare us ur-foam. One way to ensure the poem and its reader no misunderstanding is to never modulate. I’m done with emotion, I’m done, especially with that certain weakness called exiting one’s intentions.

I could probably just continue writing this poem out. The point is, we are at the mercy of information, living in the bodies we live in. Poetry has always prioritized more technical muscles, synthesis over analysis, so we end up with the metaphor and prosody of despair (“try other it spying, spare us ur-foam”) rather than what’s at the tenor of that artifice (“my mother is dying, where is her phone”). I can’t tell you how often I was told in grad school that if I was going to write the kinds of poems you find in Indictus, I should “just write an essay.” Modulate, never modulate.

DA:  The scholar Jenny Edkins notes, “Remembering is intensely political: part of the fight for political change is a struggle for memory.” Which is why I certainly don’t want to dissuade people from creating art that engages with memory, but also hope that when I pick up a book I will be exposed to something that will inform my thinking in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

I suppose it’s about considering who you want your audience to be, who you want to reach, and why. How does one engage creatively with the content of life that perhaps—rather than saying “provides distinction” from others with similar experiences, to shed the capitalist language—challenges the reader, differently? This likely compels me because, as I mentioned, I came to realize my two separate manuscripts weren’t presenting a new challenge to readers. Not really. Writers generally enact “difficulty” in a myriad of ways: opaque language, textual shape, references, topic, etc. (See Sarah Vap’s End of a Sentimental Journey for more on this.) The “difficulty” of Playing Monster :: Seiche paradoxically lies in the poems’ spareness and the book’s compelling narrative. It seems “accessible” or “easy.” But then of course what you’re accessing is horrifying, and you have to think about that, what it means that you’re attracted to it. The spareness gives the space for that introspection (I hope). So my attempt at a new approach to the politics of remembering, and my challenge to my readers, is on a book-length scale.

Of course, I’m trying to challenge myself, too. More and more I’m leaning toward Confessionalist ideas of just baring anything. A friend once told me that if you’re as open as possible it’s harder for people to maintain feelings of anger toward you, which I feel to be true. We are often humanized through details. I have heard that Derricotte pushes her students to write toward that which makes them feel the most ashamed, the most afraid. That, I think, may help cultivate comprehension of those different from ourselves and also give us insight into how those we see as similar to ourselves are actually quite different. This isn’t to say it’s an easy venture, or simple. I certainly bear enough privilege to engage in the practice compared to someone who, if they reveal parts of their identity in a hostile place, say, might be in danger.

NE: I literally gasped reading about what your friend said about openness, and I think that this is such a poignant point. The word resistance has been thrown around a lot lately (and for good reason!) and still, the idea that we are more inclined toward revolutionary change through a more open source of information remains radical. I guess time will tell how revolutionary this ends up being. There’s a rich welter of books that engage in the body as politic, as resistance, as a reckoning. We are far past the idea that the body is a metaphor or transcendent experience. In other words, we can sing the body electric, or we can recognize the privilege in the body electric and see the duller, shameful areas; we might put that electricity into the streets, and annihilate the prioritizing of a singular, central (and centralizing) “I.”

I’m so curious about some of the choices that led you to merging your two books. Did the books on their own feel incomplete? I’m thinking about this because I worry that all my poems and stories about trauma will always be incomplete, or else they challenge me in a direction I will never predict. I think I go into each new thing with the desire of excavation, that my suffering the trauma again will excise it. In your book, the two ideas start to feel like two sides of a landscape joining together for a rescue mission that will last forever. Does this work ever end?

DA: Your worry that work on trauma will always be incomplete feels similar, in a different way, of my own concern about being mired in the same originary trauma in my writing. I was recently at an artist residency where someone was writing about a terrible loss that took place 40 years ago—and had been writing about it for that long. I don’t want to write myself in circles, caught in that eddy. Bringing these two books into one volume—on the advice of multiple friends, which took me years to heed—showed me the work of healing doesn’t ever end, and hopefully it illustrates that point. I have found that people, generally, try to avoid painful feelings. We do this in all manner of ways—numb it out, ignore it. It’s understandable. The work of engaging with pain is exhausting and terrifying.

I recently read about the explorer Henry Worsley who was attempting a solo trek across Antarctica and, near the end, began to get sick. He pushed on, much to his family’s worry, though eventually gave in and had to be pulled out. It seemed like he was okay and recovering (standing up, drinking tea), but he wasn’t. He had already begun experiencing organ failure and ultimately died. And I guess that period—of seeming like he will survive but actually being a dead man walking—is terrifying to me, perhaps because I am someone who pushes herself to the limit in lots of ways both physically and emotionally. It’s an impulse I fight more and more as I recognize the toll it takes.

Creating art presents a similar danger. How do we learn and honor the boundaries of body and psychology? We all know artists who seem to take themselves to the brink for their work and succumb to the darkness there in one way or another. The potential cost can feel so great, the emotional limits far more nebulous—difficult to recognize. So it feels like a delicate balance between the ultimate exposure—bounding towards that which makes us feel ashamed and fearful—and our limits, what we can “take.” I suppose this is something that comes with experience.

NE: Recently, the writer Carmen Maria Machado referenced this scientific article about extreme cases of scurvy. (I’m not able to find the source anymore, but I point you to this National Geographic interview with the historian who wrote the book on scurvy.) This scientist who has worked with these extreme cases spoke of what happens to the body—that completely healed cuts and wounds opened back up. I haven’t stopped thinking about this idea that the body has a map of every minor cut and major gash, that we walk around in bodies that have an archive of these small and big violences. Map, archive. It seems too poetic to be true: that the wounds we have suffered and healed from are merely dormant, always on the verge of waking; here is the body’s extreme proof. There are so many metaphors to be found in the reality of the corporeal body, that which is coterminous with and conflicted by what we believe the figurative body to be. We try to keep record when the body is the best record-keeper. The body is always ready to open up and gush if we don’t feed it adequate vitamin C.

I think about how this translates to trauma, which is always already cursed to repeat. The breaking point of our emotional headspace is much more nebulous, but I think that poetry, more than any other medium, can act as a kind of extreme scurvy—albeit with more benevolent consequences. That’s what makes it so special: that poetry holds an alienated majesty above all things, that we can rely on its bursting when we are trapped in a minefield.

I recently told a group of students that anything could be a sonnet, because the sonnet’s transaction of argument and resolution is always going to be a lie. I proposed that the sonnet is actually the hum before the poem is even conceived, and that no matter how the sonnet comes out, whether it’s 14 lines or 50, that so long as it possesses the mechanisms of argument and resolution, with some sort of midway fulcrum (volta), there isn’t a good enough reason not to say, “Hey, I wrote a sonnet.” It’s a stretch. But I love seeing how permission changes minds, that a poem can resist its own history of technique to be itself, that the poem is you, as Ashbery would have it. Maybe that’s a bit New Agey but I’m intrigued more often by what the poem offers outside of its regulated shape. It’s how I understand trauma—absence in presence, a dream realm fooled by the nightmare in the foothills. It’s important that trauma not be a collapsible or solvable concept: It must shiver and shake itself into the unpredictable. I’m suspicious of the subject-verbing of trauma and memory, as much as I’m suspicious of any formula for poetry that compromises the epiphanic. As we’ve both said, writing into trauma must insist on the achronological, its messy admittance. It is a suffering before it is a poetic, and it is a poetic before it is a poem. A map or archive that precedes the poem.