Poetry Can Handle This: On Trauma and Radical Exposure

Diana Arterian: Because our recent poetry collections both address violence enacted on us as children, and the impact of those violences, I’m hoping we can hash out the issues regarding producing work like this that others haven’t articulated. One of the things that surprised me, perhaps especially as Playing Monster :: Seiche is my first book, was the psychological effect it had on me in its transition from manuscript to physical object. Of course writing the poems had been taxing but, as often happens, I had finished the writing years ago and believed the manuscript “done” for a while. Yet as my launch date approached, I often felt as if so much was happening in the world around me that pointed me back to my abusive father, a kind of closure.

Instead of any definitive sealing off, the book existing, and reading from it time and again in front of audiences, provoked an intense emotional upheaval in me for a while. I think at one point during an editorial conversation we had about Indictus, I tried to provide a kind of warning about this—and I periodically offer a gentle caution to poets I know well whose work is emotionally difficult. I guess it’s information I wish I had had. The trials and experiences of a debut collection feel like a separate matter, but it is also a first encounter with your work moving into the hands of strangers on a relatively large scale and having to reckon with that. While Indictus isn’t your first book, I’m wondering if it was hard for you at all when it came out in the world, considering the traumatic and personal content.

Natalie Eilbert: Oh my goodness was it. I could probably write an entire book about the experience of revealing all this violent information to my parents by way of Indictus. It was as though my entire history of abuse was being dragged across panels of time only to be dropped on my family’s dining room table. When you go your whole adult life without having that big conversation with your parents/guardians about the past, it’s for a reason. It’s protective, silence part of the coping mechanisms. I remember having one trauma conversation with my mother over banana bread years ago, which is as disorientating as it gets—to swallow a food still warm from your mother’s labor as she shakes her head and reminds you, We could have pressed charges. But that was much earlier in the process of the book editing. The week the book came out, I did an interview with Vi Khi Nao in which I was quite explicit about childhood violence.

It’s interesting, I think, when the book is in post-production and publicly available: You are asked to be literal, to take these technical and aesthetic dimensions of the book and telegraph it to a wider audience. I suppose there is this moment in the promotion where one must insist upon that wider audience, because sales, because marketing, because surviving the labor of your own hands. So, we interview and tell our stories in the most un-Dickinson way (“tell the truth but tell it slant!”).

I was in the practice of blocking my family from seeing my posts around Indictus. I made sure that my launch event was on a night that would make it impossible for my parents to attend. It’s beautiful that my parents are so supportive, but I needed to sabotage their love in order to survive. When that interview launched on Entropy, my brother somehow got wind of it. My brother is mentioned in the interview, because he was present for my child abuse—he had a blurry sense of what was happening from the next room. After reading it, he confirmed that everything I had imagined was exactly to his memories too. It was kind of beautiful in its long overdue validation, if ever such a thing can be more than gruesome and ugly. Over takeout with my parents a few days later, they told me they also had read my interview. My dad buried his head in his hands. My mom nodded. They asked for names. I couldn’t do it. They asked again, this time taking guesses. I couldn’t not confirm when they landed on the right name.

Playing Monster :: Seiche is specifically directed at family confrontations of violence. I can’t imagine this wasn’t extremely hard for you as well. Did the physicality of your, I’ll call it “book truth,” change dialogues within your family/family dynamics?

DA: My own internal shifting lies in the empowering feeling of knowing anyone with $17 and two hours can know a variety of truths my father worked very hard to keep from his social and professional world. In terms of my nuclear family, I think some shifting certainly happened when “Playing Monster” was its own manuscript, which I sent to each of my siblings and mother after I turned it in as my MFA thesis. For some of them it felt (and still feels) very disorienting, as repression has been the means of survival. For others it was affirming to feel seen, the abuse addressed directly, though we have generally been open with one another about the abuse from early on.

I didn’t really know what I was doing when I wrote those poems. It was like pulling a thread on a seam and documenting what it had held shut. The work seemed to have an impact on my readers in a powerful way, and that’s all that mattered at first. But I learned in the writing of this book that when you make something, especially when it involves the personal lives of other people, it is a knotty thing. Maggie Nelson describes it as the “unsolvable ethical mess that is autobiographical writing,” and that feels right. That was something I had to reckon with pretty quickly with my family, and it made me uncertain about pursuing publication. I was afraid I might only conjure pain in others as they read it. It’s something I still struggle with.

I visited a class that had been assigned my book and one of the students, wringing their hands, asked if my siblings and I were “okay.” I didn’t really know what to say other than that we were. Mostly I didn’t want the person to add our potential instability to their pile of worries. I recently had another experience in the classroom where a student wrote on a midterm evaluation something to the effect of, “We deal with a lot of heavy topics in this course, and I appreciate that—but can’t we read something funny?” And so I planned to send links to humor pieces I loved, handle the request that way without totally disrupting our schedule. Then I re-read the work I had assigned to prepare for class that week, and it was all about death and murder and grief. I felt terrible, terrible about what I was feeding these students who were all dealing with a lot in their own lives, according to what they were turning in for workshop.

The last of the assigned readings was from CAConrad’s new collection While Standing in Line for Death regarding the murder of their boyfriend Earth. The first sentence in the introduction to the series of poems Conrad writes, seeming to almost steel themselves before engaging with something so damaging and horrible: “Yes poetry can handle this.” Poetry is an ancient form that has contained innumerable experiences that feel impossible to approach. Perhaps only painting is older. So Conrad gave me the gift of an entry point, an idea of what poetry and art can do, what poetry can bear for us, something to use at the beginning of our class when we met next to discuss the assigned reading in conjunction with the student’s kind request. Conrad’s quotation has since been a lodestar for me whenever I think, “Why do I think I can write about this? What good is it? What will anyone learn from this they don’t already know?” It’s still something I’m not all that sure about. I’m beginning to realize I don’t know how to write “happy.” Writing isn’t that space for me—luckily life is. 

NE: I think a lot about Primo Levi’s introduction to Survival in Auschwitz (speaking of heavy): “The book has been written to satisfy this need: first and foremost, therefore, as an internal liberation. . . . The work of tightening up is more studied, and more recent.” What I like about this is exactly what you’re speaking of with regard to messy autobiography. I don’t think it’s ever possible to write with clarity or “tightness” or even logical synchronicity about traumatic events that align themselves with liberation. This is to say, the wound does not heal simply because a logical succession was prioritized over any other. That work of tightening the narrative of trauma is for later (“After great pain, a formal feeling comes—”).

I do think, however, there’s a spectrum for how we speak of trauma. Especially in those terrible moments where you realize that your joys are completely morbid to a bunch of 20 year olds, who sit in their own thorny pasts. And I applaud you for acknowledging that sometimes the reason students don’t want to be inundated with “heavy topics” is they have experienced a ton. I would love to be one of your students.

At some point in my poem, “Man Hole,” I call myself out and say that what I’m doing is “disaster profiteering.” But I go on anyway, because I’m not actually addressing the truth of the book; instead, I’m capturing the paranoia I often feel about how larger systems might perceive (and question) my excavations. A reviewer, whom I won’t name, wrote that it’s a curious thing about my book, that I spend so much time talking about being oppressed. They offered an alternative: that if I ignore the oppression, it would be more believable that way. They didn’t say what that believability might look like, but I wager it would be not publishing a book like this, a book that supposes no such thing as silence can possibly replace the rupturing event. I expect reactions like this as I fear them. I expect an audience that is more willing to tell me that what I experienced is an exaggeration of events, a victimization for profit. (Profit!) I might want to write about happier things in the future, but the idea of this feels wrenching, false, a blunder of my remade chronology.

Later on in Survival in Auschwitz, Levi writes, “For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.” I think often women, especially women of color and GNC writers, are asked to explicitly not write about the violences they’ve faced, because it doesn’t “make them distinct enough”—I’ve seen this recently in the poetry community, where it is not enough to survive the traumas of the body, you then have to worry about editors feeling fatigued by stories of that survival, which is totally how centering a body politic works. I’m curious about how you talk about your book now, as opposed to how you spoke about it when you first entered the editing process. I imagine this could change dramatically as you internalize this idea of writing the very painful and reconsider who is in pain on the other side of your own writing.

DA: I suppose it shifted from Playing Monster as “a story about abuse, extraction from that situation,” and Seiche as “an ecopoetic collection about my mother’s having a stalker” to something that, when combined, became a larger project regarding aggression and its many gradations—be it out-and-out beating to a quiet, menacing word from a stranger while walking your dog in the dark. When they were separate manuscripts they weren’t doing anything instructive, I don’t think. I mean they didn’t shed light on a narrative that is perhaps more obscure, holds a more difficult reality than that to which we often gravitate (i.e. I was an addict, it was bad, now I’m all better!).

As time went on and I wove the two books together, I realized how they collapse what I think to be the farcical notion that you can survive and escape trauma and abuse—fin. Those who have endured such realities often find themselves in similar situations again and again, no matter how hard they try. It’s a project that continues throughout one’s life, to learn to protect oneself from these encounters. This is all to say, I hope my collection does some of that work for people. Closes off the easy ending—just as yours does. This includes giving my father the dimension I had denied for decades—acknowledging the likelihood of his also being someone who endured sexual abuse as a child and the profound impact that had. That was a very late addition to the collection, and I’m so glad I included it. Trying to humanize my abuser, while certainly not the path everyone needs to take, is something I have been cultivating in earnest. This does not imply a desire to reconnect with him, but ultimately aims toward internal healing (I hope).

I recently came across a quotation from Alice Notley when she was writing The Descent of Alette. She writes, “I wanted to make an epic / I want to find the Paradise of this minute, in this city, country, while I am suffering. That would be my greatest gift to people. But I’m not sure I want to keep on suffering so much in order to find it.” I also think of Toi Derricotte, who wrote in The Black Notebooks, “How can I publish these words when they come so much out of my own sickness? Without answers, do I cause more harm?…I want to burn the book until the sickness dies in me.” Of course, this is something we all pray for when we’re in the throes of emotionally difficult production: meaning, catharsis. I deeply connect with the worry that it’s not just about the creator of the art (“Without answers, do I cause more harm?”). The fact that these thoughts were in Derricotte’s published work (versus a diary, for Notley) felt revolutionary to me. It so baldly states the stakes that artists rarely discuss.

I think Notley and Derricotte’s concerns—how much do I need to hurt myself and hurt others to make my art?—are ones I have been circling a lot as of late. There are events my siblings survived, especially one of my sisters, that provoke little in me beyond a total seizing of the body. It scalds. I can barely glance at it. How—or why—do you render that? If I could burn my art and no longer feel emotional pain, I probably would. But then I also think about the Chilean miner stuck underground for weeks and writing poetry to keep sane. It can provide relief in a world where you can’t simply perform a fire spell and come out the other side liberated. I don’t know.

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.