Sunday, October 18, 2015

Chapbook Chat: Jessica Cuello Discusses My Father’s Bargain





My Father's Bargain

Author: Jessica Cuello

PublisherFinishing Line Press

Publication date: 2015












Worn-Out Dancing Shoes by Jessica Cuello

My sister’s hair
as she walked in front,

had light metallic strands
she couldn’t see. I knew
her colors intimately,
and our silent footsteps.

At Christmas we gather,
our children run out back.
When I mention the stairway
and the boats we rode across,
middle sister leaves the room
and eldest laughs,
I remember how we played—
we knocked on the bedpost,
pretended it opened
like a door.


The shoes were proof;
I’m the only one

with memories. Each night,
last in line, I learned
by heart their shoulder blades,
part butterfly against blue
crepe and yellow silk.

It seemed to happen at once—
my sisters forgot,
were distracted if I spoke
of the boats in darkness

outside the lit dancehall.
We spun with our weight
flung back, holding tight
with sweaty hands.


(Originally published in Rose Red Review.)

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Jessica Cuello is the author of the chapbooks My Father’s Bargain (Finishing Line Press 2015), By Fire (Hyacinth Girl Press 2013), and Curie (Kattywompus Press 2011). She was the winner of The 2013 New Letters Poetry Prize and the recipient of the 2014 Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. Jessica was selected as a Juried Fellow by the Saltonstall Foundation and will be a Writer-in Residence in summer 2015. Her first full-length poetry book, Pricking, is forthcoming from Tiger Bark Press in 2016.

Author blog: https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/


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[This interview was conducted via email in September 2015.]

Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook My Father's Bargain.

JC: The poems are inspired by fairy tales, in particular the vulnerable experiences of women and children.



How did you arrive at the title?

JC: It’s a line from the poem “Rumplestiltskin.” Bargain is connected to the idea of the body as capital—that her body (in the poem) is not her own; it is to be traded by her father. In many of the fairy tales, fathers are either malignant or clueless. In fact, men are often unaware of the plot itself like the bridegroom in “The Goosegirl” or the father in “The Dancing Princesses.”

Manipulation and trickery, which we view as negative qualities, are often the only means for women in the tales to escape abuse. We need these traits less than women in the past, but I do think we’ve inherited these kinds of survival skills by necessity. The title points to the character’s awareness of how she is both part of a deal and also excluded from the deal at the same time.



Diane Green wrote in a 2007 Rhizomes essay “Exploring Border Country: the Use of Myth and Fairy Tale in Gillian Clarke’s Poem Sequence, ‘The King of Britain’s Daughter’”:  “[M]yth ... is such a familiar tool in the work of female poets writing in the latter part of the twentieth-century, particularly in its feminist revisionary role, as advocated by Adrienne Rich, and especially where nationality is an issue.” And in Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990, Ian Brinton writes “[A]n interest in myth and fairytale is a recognisable attempt to remove the poet s self from a lyric expression into an embodied narrative. Traditional fairytales have a residual power of rethinking the roles of women and the ways they are represented within society.” (49)

Could you speak a bit about your use of myth and fairytale in your poems and your response to one or both of the quotes?

JC: Fairy tales are powerful for women. The domestic realm possesses its own terror. Domestic violence means that the very place where we expect safety and rest is the place where we are most vulnerable. Childbirth hurts. One of my friends said that her experience of childbirth was like volunteering for a car accident. Sexual violence, marriage, the powerlessness of being a child in a family you can’t leave—these are unspoken kinds of pain and fear, even the tedious work that women do every day that is unpaid and unacknowledged, like feeding, clothing, and cleaning others. The other part of it is the responsibility for the bodies of others, particularly children. Many women who have grown up being careless with their own bodies suddenly find themselves responsible for the bodies and safety of others. That particular responsibility is primal. We see it on the faces of the refugees trying to enter Europe, holding their children in their arms. There is a negation of the father and mother’s self in that kind of crisis. Rumplestiltskin has this chilling theme. How can she save her child? How can she keep her child?

Certainly myth is a way to absent the personal self from the poem while retaining all the emotional connection to the poems. I did not choose to do so consciously. I never said, I don’t want myself in these poems, but unconsciously it began when I first read fairy tales at age 5. We negate ourselves and latch onto these stories; it is a way to cope with pain. I think an underrated quality of literature is its ability to comfort and soothe us, to literally help us survive. I think there is a self that exists in a story when we read—whether a self that identifies as the protagonist or a self that accompanies the protagonist. I watch my children do this. My 9 year old daughter writes journal entries in the voices of characters from her books.



While My Father’s Bargain is your third chapbook, from what I understand, the poems in it are the first poems you wrote that you intended to publish. How long did it take to write these series of poems and what, if any, was the impetus to start writing them? What’s the oldest piece in this chap? How did that timing come to be, e.g., that it isn’t the first chapbook that you published? When you started writing these specific poems, did you intend to create a chapbook or collection?

JC: I had always wanted to be a writer, but for years I spent far more time reading than writing. When my daughter was born, I felt a sense of urgency. I learned what time truly was for the first time. I wrote these poems then—intending them to be part of a full-length. I kept cramming them into books where they didn’t belong. I published two unrelated chapbooks and had a full-length accepted (forthcoming in 2016) before these poems found a home. A smart editor told me to take these poems out of my book and put them in a chapbook. Though my style has evolved since I wrote these poems, I still value them and wanted to see them in the world. The oldest poem is probably “Rumplestiltskin.” It was one of my first acceptances—published in Copper Nickel when Jake Adam York was editor.



What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?

JC: The first poem in the book is important to me—I think because it is the only poem that addresses the idea of hunger and the importance of hunger and food in familial relationships. If a mother cannot feed her child, does she abdicate her identity as mother? I am still writing poems about this idea, nine years later.

Gretel

Where to put our bodies?
We knew how to sit

and pretend we didn’t want
to eat. Our hunger grew

into our skin. We fit
inside a hollow tree. Branches

were the ceiling
and we played in a second house

where I served up
a feast of dandelion and rock.

At night I pressed a stone
against my chest

like a Mother’s hand.
Not our Mother (though she was)

who whispered the fact of our mouths.
Not our Father (though he was)

who led us in the dark.
I looked back at the symmetry—

a door amid doors. A yard intimate
with metal: the outgrown slide,

rust that flowered
like lichen moss.

As we fled, I curved my neck
to peer into the other houses:

shoes lined on a porch,
meals at the times

of meals: dawn, dusk,
and middle day.



Who were you reading when you wrote these poems? e.g., other fairy-tale poems or Grimm’s fairy tales or other books of myth? Which a fairy-tale related poem written by another poet is your favorite?

JC: I was reading Jack Zipes’ translation of Grimm (not the new one just out—I don’t have that yet) and I was reading a lot of Lucie Brock-Broido. Her poems are not fairy-tale related, but the energy in them captures the kind of darkness and visceral fear I wanted for my own poems. I love all her books, but I must have read Trouble in Mind twenty times during that time period. Her poems capture the witchy darkness of childhood and I was more interested in that tone than fairy tale poems. Many contemporary poems are ironic when they write about fairy tales and I wasn’t interested in that. I mean for the terror to be real; I am in earnest!



In addition to the theme of fairy tales, what are some of the other themes, metaphors, and elements of craft that you used to unify your chapbook?

JC: Childhood, siblings, loss. They are free-verse poems and I was thinking about line when I wrote them, particularly syntax and the breaking of it. The ideas about line were important because so many of the poems are about being mute or about animals and objects speaking.



Have you given a public reading of the chapbook? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

JC: Yes. I have given one public reading from this chapbook and the poems made me very sad. They were almost impossible to read. I’ve done lots of readings and that has never happened before. The poems are old but apparently the material is still raw. I like to be in control when I read so I may read less of these particular poems at my next reading.



What are you working on now?

JC: I’m working on a series of poems based on the absent feminine in Moby Dick. Moby Dick is a myth too—an American one—so clearly I am stuck in writing from the mythic.

Monday, October 5, 2015

An Interview With Poet Jessica Goodfellow



                               November Nocturne by Jessica Goodfellow

                               Even planets turn away from the easement of light,
                               sometimes. Night’s a rehearsal for the orb
                               and distance of winter, its map-unmaking
                               and its unmap-making, its failure to ravel
                               wander from resist. All night the night sounds
                               like children not breathing. I am afraid
                               of a thing and its opposite: leaving and not,
                               subject unspecified. The curtain stirs
                               though the window is closed. Stars flash
                               like bees abandoning the hive, humming a lullaby
                               in drone, in monotone but with the Doppler effect
                               of a death mask, coming right at you, wind
                               pulsing around the edges because there is
                               no mouth-shaped hole, no eye-sized emptinesses.

                                         - first published in Boxcar Review

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Jessica Goodfellow grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but has spent the last twenty years in California, Florida, and Japan. She received an MS degree from the California Institute of Technology and an MA in linguistics from the University of New England. Her first book of poetry, The Insomniac's Weather Report (three candles press), won the Three Candles Press First Book Prize, and was reissued by Isobar Press in 2014. Her new book Mendeleev's Mandala is available from Mayapple Press (2015). She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland (Concerete Wolf, 2006), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in the anthology Best New Poets 2006, on the website Verse Daily, and has been featured by Garrison Keillor on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac." She was a recipient of the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal, and her work has been honored with the Linda Julian Essay Award as well as the Sue Lile Inman Fiction Prize, both from the Emrys Foundation. Her work has appeared in Motionpoems Season 6. Jessica currently lives in Japan with her husband and sons.

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[This interview was conducted via email in September 2015.]


Tell us a little about your book Mendeleev's Mandala.

JG: Mendeleev’s Mandala imagines the thoughts and attitudes of different personas from various historical eras, in short different differing worldviews. I have felt bifurcated for a lot of my life, needing to balance conflicting worldviews—for example, a deeply religious, conservative upbringing and an education based on science and reason—and instead of feeling torn up about it, as I have during much of my experience, I wanted to have fun with it—to explore it playfully. The nation as a whole also experiences that kind of conflicting multiplicity of world views, and I wish as a people we could cope with it with less rancor. So that’s partly what Mendeleev’s Mandala is, for me.



I find the title beautiful and compelling for a number of reasons, one being the mashup of science and religion. The poem after which the collection is titled is fascinating as well. (Poem can be found in the March 2012 issue of Thrush, second poem on the page.) What led you to write a poem about Dmitri Mendeleev? How did you arrive at the idea of a mandala? In an interview at Tell Tell Poetry, when asked “If you had unlimited time to create, what would you make,” you said “I’m interested in weaving …” Do you carry that desire of weaving into your poetry? I’m wondering specifically about an impulse in your work to weave, braid, or possibly even integrate science and religion, or other seeming opposites.

JG: I have been moved by reading about Oliver Sacks’ relationship to both the periodic table of elements and to Dmitri Mendeleev (the ‘discoverer’ of the form of the table we use now), prompting me to do more reading about Mendeleev. My favorite podcast Radiolab had an episode about him and I was fascinated by what hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad said about his life, details in his family experience that resonated with my own—for example, a disability that occurred in both our families, and that he had a huge groups of siblings. They talked about how he rode around on trains when he had to think, and riding around on trains and in cars has always been useful for me creatively. In short there were a lot of parallels that drew me to him, even as I feel this great gap between his amazing intellect and what I am able to comprehend.

I thought about how the periodic table represents all known chemical elements, and then thought about how a mandala is supposed to be a visual representation of everything in the universe, and the parallel and contrast of these two worldviews struck me, particularly in light of the central tension in my life between the spiritual and the logical.

As for weaving, I’m so appreciative of what you said about perhaps weaving conflicting themes in my poems. I haven’t done well with textile weaving, despite my interest, and I find that disheartening, so your metaphor has cheered me up. I suppose you are right—I do often juxtapose opposites, and it’s certainly more pleasant to think about it as weaving contrasting colors into a pattern than to think of it as courting discordance.



The Motionpoem film of your poem "Crows, Reckoning" is absolutely stunning. (You can find the film here and poem here, second poem down.) How did that film come to be? What was that collaborative experience like—that experience of having other artists interpret your work?

JG: This year Motionpoems worked with VIDA to promote the work of women poets, and they put a call out for submissions. I didn’t expect to have my work selected, and it was one of the thrills of my artistic life when it was. The collaboration from my end was minimal; after having had my poem selected, I had no more say in the process, which was fine by me.

Early on in my writing career, a group of poets asked to read a poem of mine in public, and when I heard what they did with it, I was shocked—not that I disagreed with their extreme interpretation, but it was not what I had ever envisioned for that poem. I talked with a friend about it, and he said it was like sending your child out into the world, and seeing them choose a life that you never would have predicted for them. He told me that poems are going to have lives of their own, just like my children will eventually, and that I’d be happier if I just embraced that. Which I have. I’ve had a few other experiences where artists have responded to my work, or paired one of their pieces with my poem, all without any additional post-poem input from me, and I’ve written a few ekphrastic poems myself, so I’ve gotten really comfortable with non-collaborative collaborations like this, responses really.

I teach a course on Japanese poetic forms, and one form, the haiga, pairs haiku with art. The best haiga have images that don’t repeat the images in the poem, but that deepen the feeling or meaning. That’s what directors Edward Chase Masterson and Alex Hanson did with the Motionpoems film—added new imagery to mine in a way that deepens the experience. It’s really stunning work they did, and I’m so honored to have had my poem be a part of it.



In Mendeleev's Mandala, what is one of the more crucial or important poems for you personally? Why?

JG: “Burning Aunt Hisako” was a poem I worked on for a long time, a poem about the cremation of my husband’s aunt; I knew there was something crucial in the experience, over and above the particular loss, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It was the first time I had attended a post-cremation ceremony, which is described in the poem, and I thought maybe that the visceral experience of coping with the remains of a family member was what haunting me. But I continued to have trouble writing about it. Finally, when I was on vacation, surrounded by snow and consequently thinking of the death of my mother’s brother (which occurred on Denali), I had a kind of personal breakthrough. My uncle’s body was never recovered, and that is one of the reasons his death has always been so hard to talk about in my family, and contrasting that lack of a body, with all that implies, with how my husband’s family was involved actively with the final rites for my husband’s aunt’s body after her death was compelling me.

Burning Aunt Hisako

Afterward we sifted through her ashes
with long chopsticks—one bamboo
and one willow, for this life and the next.

The furnace-keeper lifted bone by bone.
“Her ankle bone,” he tendered. “Her left thumb.”
A plate-shaped bone he named “her face,”

just before he smashed it into pieces
small enough to drop inside a dull bronze urn.
“What are we looking for?” I whispered

as we sifted. “From her throat, a bone
that’s said to hold a seated Buddha.”
From Adam’s rib to this, does at least one bone

from every body belong to someone else? Never
mind—what use are their own bone Buddhas now,
to Aunt Hisako smoldering on her slab,

to my mother’s father sealed beneath a hard
and glittering snow? Bits of mica, memory
of fireflies—my own hand on my own throat—

of what use is this thirst for things
resembling other things, this endless trying
to wring milk from a two-headed cow.

(originally published in diode)

In the diode version the poem says ‘my mother’s father’ instead of ‘my mother’s brother,’ as it does in Mendeleev’s Mandala, because I was afraid to write about my mother’s brother—afraid of breaking taboo and upsetting our family. But in writing this poem , though I wrote in code for the diode version, I came to the understanding that I was going to have to explore the subject eventually. I figured I could write it and not publish it, and I thought it would be a few poems, maybe a suite, and then I would be done with the topic. But that’s not how it worked out; eventually I wrote an entire book-length manuscript. And this poem was the breakthrough that caused me to realize that I needed to do that scary taboo thing.

In fact, my mother has been fine with me writing about her brother. She showed me documents and photos and newspaper clippings and letters, and we talked about his life, the accident that took him, and she told me she hoped I would eventually write about his life, not just his death. This was not something we had ever talked about before, but because I approached her with my idea to write about her brother, she opened up. So this poem is important to me.




Your chapbook A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland was the 2005 winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award and your debut full-length book, The Insomniac's Weather Report, was the 2011 winner of the three candles press First Book award. Please give us a synopsis of each book. With either contest, were there things you thought would happen as a contest winner, yet didn’t? unexpected things that did happen?

JG: The chapbook A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland is very directly about my religious upbringing and my education in analytic fields, and about how and where they dovetailed and collided. It’s only about my experience—it’s a personal book with big themes, far less playful than Mendeleev’s Mandala, which has similar themes but includes my imagined experiences of other people thinking about these themes. Lana Hechtman Ayers, the owner and editor of Concrete Wolf, championed my work more than anyone ever has, and she made me feel like a legitimate writer despite it being my first venture in publishing. I had no idea what to expect from a press, but Lana set the bar quite high.

The Insomniac’s Weather Report is about my experiences in domesticity, in becoming a wife and mother. After it won the three candles press First Book Award, the press folded suddenly, with fewer than 100 copies in print. That was devastating, but luckily a few years later I was contacted by Paul Rossiter of Isobar Press, a Japan-based press publishing poetry in English, who offered to reissue it. Steve Mueske of the defunct three candles press was supportive, and we were able to do it. Both those publishers have been great.

Having the book go out of print within a few months of being published was completely unexpected, and so was getting an offer to reissue it. The entire experience taught me to be wary, but hopeful. You never know what’s going to happen. So just keep writing. In fact, I wrote Mendeleev’s Mandala during that period when The Insomniac’s Weather Report seemed lost, and I ended up being contacted by Isobar for the reissue and by Mayapple for Mendeleev’s Mandala within the same week, after a couple of bleak years.




If you were an animal or a place, what/where would you be and why?

JG: I am drawn to animals and plants that co-existed with dinosaurs yet still exist today in the same or similar form; for example, dragonflies, crocodiles, and gingko trees. I don’t know if I want to be one of these, but seeing them, being in their presence, always affects my conception of self and time, and just about everything.



When do you remember first being interested in poetry? Was there a mentor who encouraged you?

JG: I started rewriting nursery rhymes before I could actually write, asking my mother to write them down for me. I’ve been writing ever since, with a break during the years of my first graduate program and when I worked as a financial analyst—I found it too hard to switch gears from analytics in the daytime to poetry in the evenings, though there are plenty of people who can do it.

I took one creative writing class in high school, and one in college, and other than that, haven’t had any formal education in it, and no mentor. I’d love a mentor though. If someone wants to be my mentor, I’d love that. My high school creative writing teacher had also been my next-door-neighbor when I was growing up, and he and his family always encouraged me to write, and more importantly modelled for me that a creative life was a possibility—I wouldn’t have had that model otherwise. But I really would love to have a mentor.



Generally speaking, how do you approach revision? Do you use a checklist or have any tried-and-true practices? Do you have a writing group with whom you share your work?

JG: This isn’t an original idea, and I regret that I can’t cite where I heard it, but when revising, I like to take a line and change it to the opposite of what it says, and see what happens. Sometimes I replace a line with its opposite; sometimes I juxtapose the opposing lines, for the resulting tension. Particularly when I make big sweeping pronouncements, I find this interesting and generative to do.

I work a lot with sound when revising. If something sounds clunky, then it needs work, no matter how logical or poetical the sensibility. And I try to cut as much out of each poem as possible; any word, line, or stanza that can be taken out without damaging the integrity of the poem is looked at long and hard for justification for keeping it. And more often than not, it gets jettisoned.

As for writing groups, I had a great one when I was living in Florida, but now that I live in Japan, I no longer do. I have one fiction writer that I work with sometimes, and when I’m really stumped, I use the consultations from Black Lawrence Press . Often you can pay a nominal amount to have one of their poets look at a group of poems (five poems or ten pages, or something like that), and give you their take on your work. I’ve done this three times now, and it’s been hugely useful, and a solution to a problem that those of us isolated in the non-English-speaking world face. I think they do entire manuscript consultations too (which I’ve never done), and some of the money goes to (or used to go to?) a literacy program. So it’s a win/win.



What are you working on now?

JG: Currently I am finishing up the manuscript about my uncle, who at age 22 died in one of the worst mountain-climbing accidents in US history, on Denali along with six other climbers. I’m writing about the accident, and its effect on our family, even on those born after his death who never knew him, but whose lives are both diminished and complicated by his absence, and by the absence of his body, a circumstance that has long-lasting implications.



Finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

JG: Practice fearless receptivity. Notice what you notice. Of all the many words, images, thoughts, facts, impressions, etc., that rush by you in a day, notice which ones catch your attention. Then use that.

For example, today I heard a poem with the word ‘indigo’ in it. Then I listened to commentary about the poem, which mentioned how difficult it is to dye an item indigo. Later today I listened to a memorial podcast by the New York Public Library for Oliver Sacks, who recently died. Sacks talked about having only seen indigo twice in his life, and he mentioned the cultural and historical importance of indigo. Now indigo is on my mind. I might not have noticed that I was noticing indigo—I might have let it go, even if I had noticed the coincidence of hearing about it twice in one day—if I wasn’t in the habit of noticing what I notice, and jotting it down in a notebook. Eventually, if indigo is crucial to me, I’ll get around to it. But I might get there faster for having noticed myself noticing it now.


Jessica Goodfellow Online


For a sampling of Jessica’s poems, see the Poems and Prose page of her website.