Thanks to Shark Forum for this lovely picture of poet Simone Muench, author of Orange Crush.
The title of this book, Orange Crush, is significant historically, imagistically, and metaphorically throughout this collection. Could you discuss?
I think many people, upon hearing the title, immediately think of soda—bright, bubbly, and overly sweet, almost childlike, almost nostalgic. But “crush” is one of those wonderful words that pivots so quickly from the innocuous to the dangerous—from having a crush to being crushed. “Orange” becomes the illuminating adjective highlighting the danger and the sweetness. The title also references “orange girls” and how various hegemonies—economic, medical, religious, patriarchal—have tried to crush them, while also alluding to the “orange girl cast” in the book who are all living women and poets who’ve helped re-write history through their industry and voice.
The phrase “orange crush” also acknowledges that this is ultimately an extended love letter to my friends; to the women who’ve inspired me; to the girls we once were; to the girls who didn’t get to be women but who still reside in our peripheries; to the women who lived to talk about it; to the women who didn’t live but whom we still hear; to all women who want to be multiple; and to the boys and men who are willing to listen.
In the third section of your book, “Recast,” each poem is dedicated to a woman in your life. The poems in this section are fierce and playful, offering an unexpected twist to the woman-as-victim pressures of the preceding section, and aptly enough, open with a quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Could you talk about this?
When I announce I’m a Buffy fan, many people initially think I’m joking, but those who’ve only given Buffy a passing glance don’t realize its brilliance, the ways in which it so skillfully and playfully deals with language, its scrutiny of people’s prismatic natures and of power disorders, specifically gender inequities, and finally Buffy’s reconfiguration of outdated media representations of women. For me, Buffy represents one of the most significant art works of the 20/21st centuries by creating a necessary rent in systemic (epidemic even) beliefs of women as subsidiary. This particular section, “Recast,” acts as individual episodes in which women are cast as main protagonists, but together they interact and reinforce to form a stronger series.
Your work is often seductive and erotic, tinged with fetishes like whips, corsets, and silk stockings. How does this toy with the violence in your poems, often so littered with the bodies of slain girls?
If I may, I’d like to trade out the word “toy” for “examine” as “toy” implies a subjugation, instead of an investigation. The staging of marginalization and metamorphosis become key conditions of the book. That marginalization is examined in sections one, and specifically in two, and then reconsidered in sections three and four. The eros of my work is never about violation of others, even though there are narratives of voyeuristic tendencies of masculinist hierarchical structures that we so often see in popular culture, and the tragedy of that. I would like to imagine that I examine both the scopophiliac proclivity of our culture, while trying to redress and re-position women as agent—the morphing of the victimized into the victor—by addressing outdated notions of women’s expendability as in the great found lines:
No help, nor pity thee;
Tho’ seven kings’ daughters you have drownd,
But the eighth shall not be me
As an eight-year-old, I was captivated (both meanings intended) by True Detective and its various offshoots: magazines tailored for a male readership that often featured distressing cover photos of women being dominated. We are handed these images at early ages, images that clearly advertise that women should simultaneously be desired and despised; I think as a culture our ideas of eros and violence often, and unfortunately, get cross-wired. My work attempts to explore this cross-wiring, highlighting the dilemma in that which enables our creation and our fleeting pleasures is sometimes foundational in our own destruction. Though the poems speak to our cultural obsession with images of the dead girl, I think women experience the concept of “dead girl” less as a fascination object, and more as a subjective residue. In a world that still devalues women at birth, regrets us, or in worst cases, wants us dead, we retain a connective ghost tissue of dead girls in our psyches. And not just in the figurative sense of being silenced, violated, and erased, but the real accounts of girlfriends, sisters, mothers who’ve been beaten, raped, murdered.
The poem “Where Does Your Body Rest?” is “for the woman who said I lacked duende while undergoing chemo and radiation.” Do you feel comfortable telling us more?
A couple of years ago, a woman wrote a review about my second book that felt personal in that she repeatedly pointed to my being a doctoral student at the time, and the book that she seemed to be asking me to write was my first book. What was unsettling though, was her argument that my work contained no duende, which may be true, but the irony of this comment is that I was diagnosed with cancer on September 11th, 2001. Lampblack & Ash was a book written during this period. I spent a year and more in and out of the hospital undergoing surgeries, radiation, and chemo for a rare cancer typically found in men aged 60-80. The morning of my diagnosis, my friend Lanko Miyazaki was supposed to be on a plane bound for India for three months. She left me a message to watch the news. By that time, I was already waiting in the doctor’s office so I turned on my radio. In the midst of listening to news of the World Trade Center attacks my doctor walked in. Within a minute of him telling me I had cancer, all the sirens in the hospital sounded and we were evacuated. It was probably the most surreal day of my life, especially given the World Trade Center devastation against my singular and insignificant (in light of the circumstances) ordeal. So instead of writing reality-based poems about hospitals, explosions, radiation treatments, and overhearing a doctor tell a man in the next bed over that he was going to lose his penis to cancer, I chose, in part, to write to/for the French surrealist Robert Desnos, who had maintained a beautiful optimism even as he was dying in a concentration camp. (Lanko, who didn’t go to India, ended up taking care of me, along with my close friends Stephanie McCanles and Bill Mondi, and because of them, I’m okay today.)
In regard to Orange Crush and “Where Does Your Body Rest?”, I debated for a long time whether or not to leave that acknowledgment in the poem, until a friend who read the manuscript told me it was necessary for me to admit my experience in order that I be a participant in my own book, in effect casting myself as one the “orange girls” that I write about. The poem certainly isn’t meant to be mean-spirited; it’s about the sadness that multiplies itself and reverberates to all those you love when you’re ill. If anything the poem was written as an attempt to heal both a large hurt (mortality) and a small hurt (having one’s work dismissed).
Tags: author interviews, duende, Orange Crush, poetry, Simone Muench