Lauren Russell is the
author of What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta, 2017). She was the 2014-2015 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry
Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the 2016 VIDA Fellow to
the Home School, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Creative
Writing Fellow in poetry, and the 2018 Cave Canem Fellow to the Rose
O’Neill Literary House at Washington College. Her chapbook Dream-Clung, Gone came out from
Brooklyn Arts Press in 2012, and her work has appeared in The New York Times
Magazine, boundary 2, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, and Bettering American Poetry 2015, among others. She is a research assistant professor
and is assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics
at the University of Pittsburgh.
Prose Poem in Response to Twenty Interview Questions from rob mclennan
(Numbers in parentheses indicate which questions I am responding to at
a given moment.)
My mother is a
cultivator of roses that smell alternately deep red and light pink but always a
little sharp, a little free, never perfume sweet to be worn once and shut up in
a drawer—no, not these (13). My mother’s roses grow on neatly pruned bushes,
but I imagine roses growing wild on high walls, stabbing any intruders with
their thorns, like the brambles in Sleeping Beauty, who is sometimes called
Briar Rose. Such walls are made to be bulldozed. Or fitted out with windows and
secret passageways. Or parachuted over. This is a comment on genre (10).
I am trying to
construct a poem or other artwork with these interview questions (20). (Did I
say that walls are meant to be bulldozed?) I have written all my responses on
index cards and shuffled the deck. The process of transcription is also a
process of reinvention. I am changing the language and the sequence as I go
(3). Hence you will not be surprised that I would like to take up collage in a
serious way (16). I’d also like to befriend a horse (16).
Writing is a process
of discovery, through many drafts by hand in a notebook (3). In the face of a
block I can neither bulldoze nor parachute over nor scale on real or imaginary
horseback, I simply rewrite the previous section. By hand. This exercise of
hand-and-brain-muscle coordination generates a momentum that nudges the draft
forward, bit by bit, and I refine my older work with each new iteration while
at the same time reaching further ahead (12).
My life has not
changed in any bolt of lightning sort of way, but gradually, the public
distribution and consumption of my writing have made me seen (1). This aperture
or porthole of visibility is not, however, why I write. I am more invested in
the process than the outcome (9). Sometimes I think this is because I am an
introvert.
I have a poetry job
that often interferes with the actual production of poetry, but it gives me
some flexibility in the summer, so I can shut myself away at writing
residencies for a month or two at a time and maintain a temporary but sustained
attention to the page (11).
In the face of a
wall I cannot crack or scale or bulldoze or parachute over, at the very least I
can tell the truth about it (7)—though increasingly I think that who owns the
narrative matters more than what actually occurred (6).
Origin story (my own
narrative): Poetry came for me in second grade, when the poet Cecilia Woloch
began conducting after-school writing workshops at my elementary school through
California Poets in the Schools (2). But I was a writer before I could write.
The impulse was in me from birth (18). I often think of Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our
Mothers Gardens”: What
if literacy had been denied me? Would I be a storyteller, a songstress, an
arranger of flowers, a piecer of quilts? In this life, I have always been a
writer, so I have been lucky, but surely I would exercise my creativity in
whatever life held me (17). This is one of the concerns of my manuscript Descent, in imagining the life of my
great-great-grandmother Peggy in freedom and in slavery (6).
Today I finished
reading Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake,
which concerns the afterlife (the wake) of slavery (19). This is also a concern
of Descent (6)—a hauntology, to take a
term from M. NourbeSe Philip (15).
If the content
determines the form and vice versa, apply the same logic to the book—“bookness”
varying from project to project. What’s
Hanging on the Hush is a collection of discrete poems assembled after the
fact, whereas Descent was conceived
as a single book-length work (4).
Descent is rendered as song, and it’s a song that will never stop hurting. If
you want to know how I hear my work, how it lives in my body, come to my
readings (5). Sound is essential to poetry, which I first learned from the work
of Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen and Alice Notley’s essay “American
Poetic Music at the Moment” (15). Poetry is what Terrance Hayes calls “music without full
instrumentation” (15).
Instruments come in
many forms. A good editor can pull a sentence taut like a wrench tightening a
socket, but the most aggressive or proactive among them may also alter the
shape of the art (8). (Did I say that walls are made to be bulldozed? But first
should I have specified who’s driving (10))?
Ultimately, why do I
bother with structure when I keep suggesting that construction only invites
demolition? Am I implying that genre by its nature is a site of rupture (10)? I
hate how academics use the term “violence” so expansively, but there is a
violence to what I am asking: Should I, writing away at a table quite safely,
even speak of walls and bulldozers and border crossing metaphorically given the
literal fact of what is happening today (6)?
Because walls are
made to be bulldozed, I am not in a monogamous relationship with poetry. For
instance, the films of Todd Haynes call to me, especially Velvet Goldmine—its approach to narrative, image, allusion, time,
and desire. Desire! (14).
Desire: Suppose I
say that at this precise moment, my love is writing in the adjacent room, and
at the same time that I wish not to be interrupted, I also wish he would come
over and kiss* me? These are two contradictory desires that
held simultaneously are poetry (2). They are also the conditions of my genre
crossing: Can two possibilities be realized equally? And if not, how do we name
such yearning (10)?
List of questions:
1 - How did your
first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare
to your previous? How does it feel different?
2 - How did you come
to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
3 - How long does it
take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come
quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their
final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
4 - Where does a
poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces
that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a
"book" from the very beginning?
5 - Are public
readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of
writer who enjoys doing readings?
6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
7 – What do you see
the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have
one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
9 - What is the best
piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
10 - How easy has it
been for you to move between genres (poetry to reviews to short lyrical prose)?
What do you see as the appeal?
11 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?
12 - When your
writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better
word) inspiration?
13 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
14 - David W.
McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms
that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
15 - What other
writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of
your work?
16 - What would you
like to do that you haven't yet done?
17 - If you could
pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what
do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
18 - What made you
write, as opposed to doing something else?
19 - What was the
last great book you read? What was the last great film?
20 - What are you
currently working on?
*Suppose kiss stands in for a word I can use in a
poem but not in an interview, which wears no frame to artify it. So in a genre
that advertises its authenticity, the last wall standing is the wall of “good taste.”
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