Angela Hume: Rebecca,
dear poet and woman friend, I am so delighted to talk with you about your
poetry in this format! Over the years we’ve known each other—since 2006, when
we met in graduate school—we’ve discussed poetics and practice at length. It’s
been exciting to watch your project evolve. Here I want to ask you some
questions that I think gesture toward some of the key formal and thematic
concerns of your work.
So. To begin. Your book is called Correct Animal, and in it I spot geese, whales, a beetle, a
mammoth... Even human figures become animal, “noising and flapping.” Can you
talk about animals and “animality” in
your work?
Rebecca Farivar: That
is a tricky question to answer, but one I thought about a lot as I was bringing
the collection together. The animals and the humans in the poems share many
qualities. As you pointed out, the humans take on animal qualities at times,
but the animals are attributed with human motivation and emotion, too. So they
blur together for me. Whether human or animal, they all operate under the
control of instinct and pattern, as well as exerting thought and reason. In
that way, the humans and the animals register as the same force in the poem for
me.
AH: You say
“whether human or animal,” but it
seems to me that the poems are actually working to deconstruct this limit. Also,
it’s interesting to me that you name the human/animal in the poems “force.” Can
you say more about “force”?
RF: Force as in
energy. The animals and humans in my poems have energy that is distinct from
the plants or objects. They can exert themselves. They act. Regardless of when
or why they act, or even if they have control of their actions, the fact that
they move on their own makes them feel like a force to harness, rather than a
material to manipulate. I’m not saying that they act on their own in the sense
that they are just coming out of me onto the page. There are no Martians or
Muses taking over my brain and speaking through me. But rather that’s just a
true thing about how animals and humans exist in the world—we have the ability
to control our motion. And because of that we can attribute reason to those
actions. This fundamental connection between humans and animals is what leads
to that deconstruction of the line between us.
I’ve tried to play with objects in my poems by imbuing them
with same motivation and thought as humans. I even published a poem several
years ago called “The Humanification of Things.” But there ultimately is
something that doesn’t resonate when an object is thinking. (You’ll notice that
poem is not in the book.) It just doesn’t matter if a blender’s scared or a
table wonders about its place in the world. Their lack of movement so clearly
marks them as not alive that anything that seems human-like just won’t stick.
AH: In other
words, perhaps: the table is worldless.
That’s Heidegger. And that’s a conversation for another day! But just briefly:
I appreciate that, for you, the poem is a vehicle for philosophical
speculation. For you, writing poetry is doing ontology.
Let’s talk about your poetry as it relates to place. I want
to ask a couple of questions. First of all, you’re a Bay Area native. Not
surprisingly, the materials of your
poems are often distinctly Northern
Californian. There’s morning Bay fog; the smoke and ash of the region’s fires;
coastal debris; the big, empty sky. How does your poetry relate to space,
place, and local
(material) cultures? Secondly, you’ve spent several years
living and working abroad, in France and in Germany, since writing (much of) Correct Animal. How has this experience
affected your poetics? Do you ever find yourself doing a
kind of “travel
poetics”?
RF: I’m going to
answer these two questions together because in my head they are related. I have
thought a lot about the impact of place and how it influences my writing, and
perhaps because I’ve been thinking about place in particular for the last few
years as I’ve been writing abroad, I can see it other poets’ work as well.
Recently I was flipping through some poetry books on my shelf and it just
happened that I picked up two books in a row that were written by poets in
California, and both those books referenced Eucalyptus. And then I happened to
pick up two books that were written by poets in the Northeast and they both
referenced bears. So it seems only natural that the local place around you while
you're writing, whether you’re from there or not, would start to seep into the
work. If every day you walk down a street lined by Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus becomes
part of the materials you work with to build your poems. It’s in your space, so
it’s in your head, whether you realize it or not.
That’s something I’ve come to really realize from living
abroad. Bonn is on the Rhein and I would see the river almost every day, just
on my daily commute. Many of the poems I wrote while living in Germany have
imagery from the river in some way or the other, so much so that I’ve assembled
a chapbook with these poems and titled it Am
Rhein.
Perhaps it seems obvious that the local place would enter
the work, but it’s something that I didn’t appreciate or notice before because,
as you pointed out, I’m from Northern California and most of the poems in Correct Animal were written in Northern
California as well. So it seemed like those poems were more influenced by my
past experiences than the actual landscape as I was experiencing it at the
moment, when in fact looking back, I think it was the other way around. It’s
not the original place but the current one that has the most impact for me.
Maybe this seems obvious, but I really expected that the
German language would have had more of an effect on my writing than the place—maybe
I just wanted it to have more of an effect on my writing because I wanted to
feel like I knew German better than I do! But really the language has had
little impact. Sure, I do have some poems that use a German word here or there,
but German grammar, structure, or sensibility are nowhere in the new poems.
What is there are rivers, castles, trains—pieces of the Rheinland. I don't
think of this as a travel poetics, but just a fact of place.
AH: Ah, the
Rheinland. As you know, it’s been my home for the past year, too. I look
forward to reading your new manuscript.
I’d like to ask you about your form as it relates to your
content. Your poems are incredibly compressed, and in this way the bodies,
objects, and materials that constitute them—so daily in nature—are rendered
strange. On my reading, there’s more than a touch of Williams here. “No ideas
but in things”?
RF: Yes, I do
subscribe to the Williams line of thought on images! I don’t think I ever
consciously thought that I wanted to write like an Imagist poet, but ultimately
I aim to create an impression of an emotion or sensation, and usually it’s tied
to an image. I do remember being drawn to the Imagist poets when I first
started studying poetry in college. I love it when I immediately feel something
from a poem and don’t really understanding why I felt it, but still not
doubting the feeling. I try to recreate that same experience with my own
writing.
AH: The type of
poetics you’re describing actually sounds very Romantic. And I do mean
Romantic-with-a-capital-R—as in that lyric that draws from local, “natural”
settings to achieve or name an insight (to name one capital-R Romanticism). To
what extent do you see yourself as drawing from the Romantics?
RF: I have a
complicated relationship with the Romantics. I don’t normally gravitate to
those poets, but when I’m forced to read and really think about the work in a
detailed way, like when I had to teach “Ode to a Nightingale” in Germany, I do
appreciate their complexity. But when you present the Romantics in comparison
to my own poetic intent, I can see the connection you’re making. Though when
I’m using the pieces from my local environment, it’s not to exalt the natural
world, but rather just another material making the poems. I also feel like the
Romantics have a much clearer sense that what they’re expressing is a truth
about the world and I think my poems are much more ambiguous—I hope a feeling
or emotion comes through and feels authentic, but I also know that it’s not
“true” for everyone (or even every speaker in my poems). It’s an experience or
feeling that happens in the world, not a truth about all existence. But maybe
I’m being a little too hard on Romantics there.
AH: It’s good to
be hard on them, since most of us are Romantics ourselves—at least to a certain
degree. And again, the Romanticism we’re talking about is just one form of it.
There are many.
I want to ask you about the women in your poems. From an
unnamed “she” at the center of so many of the poems to the female protagonists
in American literature who crop up in the middle section, women's bodies
populate your book. In the poems there’s also talk of conception, wombs,
birthing, and milk. Is this is a feminine and/or feminist poetics?
RF: Once last
year, after I gave a reading, an older man asked me if I was a mother, and I
said no, to which he said, “Oh, well you write like you’ve had children.” And
that is definitely true, and something I’ve sort of wondered about in my
writing, why I use so much birth/pregnancy imagery when I have not experienced it
myself. I think it does come down to the fact that I am distinctly interested
in expressing a feminine poetics. My speakers are female and I assert that they
are.
That being said, one thing I’ve been concerned about is whether
I use the female body as a crutch to explain or access the female
experience—the body becomes shorthand for woman. I think I start to get away
from that shorthand in the middle section of Correct Animal in trying to speak to these female characters from
American literature about their experiences in a way that isn’t precious or
instructive to the reader, but a little snarky and unexpected. But of course
there are still lots of babies and mothers in that section, as well.
These days I’m trying to move away from using the female
body so much in my work. I’m still concerned with having a distinctly female
voice at the center of the poems, but doing that without drawing only on the
body.
AH: I don’t think
you use the female body as a crutch. I think yours is a poetics that thinks the
world in and through experiences of embodiment. It’s a way of asserting the
actuality of female embodied experience as it relates to all of the other
materials. It’s a form of insistence. Recall Rich: “No one has imagined us.”
RF: Oh, well, thank
you—I’m glad that it doesn’t come across as a crutch! Actually your reference
to Rich is so crucial here because she is a poet who has had a great influence
on me. The first poetry book I read and owned outside of a classroom was Diving Into the Wreck. Her commitment to
the female experience instantly drew me to her work early on and, thematically
speaking, still influences me today.
AH: I know that
you follow comedy culture—writing, standup, podcasts,
etc. And while I wouldn’t
describe Correct Animal as “funny,”
the tones of the book are wonderfully slippery. We have lyric sincerity, and
then we have irony; we have the intensity of witness, and then we have the
breezy tongue-in-cheek. How do you think about humor and tone in poetry? In
your poetry?
RF: One thing I
am constantly amazed by when I listen to standups talk about their craft (this
is via podcasts) is how similar the process of writing comedy is to the process
of writing poetry. A lot of the same buzz words come up in conversations around
comedy and poetry—there’s lots of talk about trying to get to the truth of an
experience, trying to be surprising, trying to be authentic. Poetry and
standup—at least good poetry and standup—are both trying to express some
reality about what it’s like to exist in the world. So it seems natural that
poetry would veer into comedic territories sometimes (the same way standup can
veer away from jokes).
I love it when I read a book that has a variety of tones,
either within individual poems or across the collection. It feels authentic
somehow and keeps me attentive while I’m reading. Both Zachary Schomburg and Mathias
Svalina who run Octopus Books have this tonal variety in their books (and I
would imagine that shared slipperiness is part of what drew them to my book
when I submitted it). I remember reading Mathias’ most recent book I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
(which is technically a novella though I read it like poems) in a park in
Berlin and it made me both laugh out loud and cry, two things that are usually
embarrassing to do in public when you’re sitting by yourself, but fortunately
it was Berlin so no one paid attention to me. I had a very similar experience
reading Zach’s most recent book Fjords
Vol. 1 in an airport. In that case, people did seem to notice. I’m
currently reading Bright Brave Phenomena
by Amanda Nadelberg (who read at Studio One in June) and she has this same
tonal variety, too, where I’m delighted one moment by a funny or unexpected
turn of phrase and then struck by the sheer sincerity or beauty of the next
line—sometimes within the same line!
AH: I love the
connection you draw between writing comedy and writing poetry. Tone is so
difficult to control. I admire how skillful you are at it in your own writing.
It’s been a pleasure, Becks. Thanks so much for this
exchange!
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Rebecca Farivar is the author of Correct Animal (Octopus Books, 2011) and
chapbook American
Lit (Dancing Girl
Press, 2011). She holds an MFA in poetry from St. Mary's College of California.
Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, 6x6, RealPoetik, The Volta, Word
for/Word, The American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She currently
lives in Oakland, California
Angela Hume lives
in Oakland. She is the author of Second
Story of Your Body (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011).
Poetics/poetry have appeared in such journals as Evening Will Come, eccolinguistics,
Zoland Poetry, Word for/ Word, and Spinning Jenny. Critical work is
forthcoming or has appeared in The Volta,
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment, ecopoetics,
and Evental Aesthetics.
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