Interview

This collection is your second, following World’s Tallest Disaster. How has your work changed since your debut?

I would hope my poems have become more challenging in their formal technique as well as the subjects they address. I wanted Fragment of the Head of a Queen to be darker than World’s Tallest Disaster, more subterranean, for its poems to draw the reader more deeply into the speaker’s psyche and therefore tried to build longer, more metaphorically complex pieces. I also think the poems in Fragment tend to meditate on their subjects with increased and increasing intensity and in this manner they are more obsessive than those in World’s Tallest Disaster.

When talking about your previous collection, you mentioned “an outrage” that fuels your poems. “It is an anger,” you said, “exercised against the dishonesty ones finds so calmly practiced in daily life.” Did that anger fuel this new work as well?

I said that? In the context of our current political climate, this statement sounds a tad too earnest. Lying is so commonplace nowadays I don’t know if I’m angry about it or bored by it. I like to think the poems in Fragment move through a range of emotions, the most prominent of those being dismay.

You and Michael Dumanis worked intensely for several years to select and arrange poems for the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Has that experience informed or influenced your own writing?

I tried to keep the anthology project as separate from my writing as possible, to the extent that when I was reading for Legitimate Dangers I didn’t work on my own poems. I generally do not read my contemporaries when I’m writing; rather, I limit my diet to dead poets and/or poets in translation. When you’re very close to your own writing, as one must be when working on a book, the mind isn’t terribly receptive to divergent aesthetics. That said, the fracturing that occurs in many of the poems in Fragment is a strategy I arrived at after reading Tessa Rumsey’s Assembling the Shepherd. Something about that very elegant book helped me to allow some of the poems to crumble, to not be so consistently severe with regard to formal constraint.

You have mentioned that many of your poems are “hinged on a love that has, by necessity, become something other than affection.” The theme of sexual aggression and its opposing desires to both repel/annihilate and nurture / rescue the lover are apparent throughout this collection. Could you talk about this?

In Fragment, love is regarded more as a disease than anything, as it causes the speaker to lose her head (hence the title of the book) and dedicate herself to the beloved with an intensity that, while intoxicating, has resulted in an ugly hangover. In such poems, the speaker wishes to rescue/destroy certain individuals not only because she is addicted to a fantasy of power, but because she believes violence is a means by which to control her fate.

Similarly, your poems seem to recall for a return to realism, or at least get away from the “cherry stench” of romance and its fabrications. Do you agree?

Yes, the poems are very much focused on self-destructive tendencies as perpetuated by idealistic/romantic notions of love.

Your poems are sometimes marked by short staccato sentences that give the longer lines of your poems a certain muscularity. Could you talk about the rhythm of your poems? Is there a process by which you decide to insert punctuation or break your lines?

I became interested in creating more elaborate, longer sentences, and putting them together was something that took great concentration; the process felt akin to building a fragile, often unwieldy, structure, something that could easily collapse were I not terribly careful and precise in assembling it. The shorter sentences give the reader a moment to take a breath and also punctuate/accent the mediations undertaken in the preceding, lengthier sentences. My process is to create a line of controlling length and to then tighten the following language in the poem to adhere that limit; this restriction requires constantly wrenching the lines tighter and, through constant rearrangement, allows me to experience the effect of different strategies toward enjambment, stanza length, etc.

Anesthesia in its many common forms—Xanax, vodka, NyQuil, or just plain fantasy—is a concern of your poems. In “Cloud Elegy,” you write: “And with just / a pill, millions of pills, the world didn’t / mind how awfully anxious and American / things had gotten.” Could you discuss?

The world of Fragment of the Head of the Queen is, like our world, medicated. The speaker and the figures she addresses/discusses are both fragile and destructive, to themselves, to others. In order to escape a reality that renders one paralyzed with anxiety, one proceeds to dull one’s senses, thereby destroying the self, or, ultimately, allowing the world to destroy the self. Several “medications” are motifs in the book: antidepressants, cold medications, alcohol and, in the instance of one poem, cocaine. “Cloud Elegy” mourns the previously liberated self, the self that existed freely, without anxiety, loud in the world. It’s not that medications have muffled the speaker’s ambitions solely, but rather that the world at large has become strangely hushed and deprived of its former vibrancy.

You play fast and loose with metaphors. In “Fragment of the Head of a Queen,” for example, her decapitated head is “a hive the bear’s pawed down / from its bough, smash to ground for sweetness, / honey leaking a yellow jasper.
Its furious center / dispelled . . . . thoughts now roam the air like aimless / troops, seeking recompense in the sticky jewels / of an empty soda can.” How do you keep from going overboard?

I think the way one keeps from “going overboard” when building a metaphoric system/structure is to be precise and consistent. The lines you quote from the title poem mine a central metaphor: that the head is a smashed beehive.
Literally, the bees (which are also the speaker’s thoughts and therefore represent her logic, always in the process of disintegration and regeneration) have no home and no queen: they have lost their compass. This image, at the time I wrote the poem, brought to mind those ill-fated bees drawn to trash, seemingly neglectful of their duties to the flowers. While they come to represent something else entirely (being attracted to false promise, the real self sacrificed for a fantasy) they originate in the primary image/metaphor of the hive. I try to build my metaphors until they become dense and layered, resulting in a reef/stalagmite effect: an accretion of feeling and thought.

“Teens Love Horse Dick,” “Landscape With Hungry Girls,” and “All My Wives” speak of the sometimes devastating trappings of being a woman. Do you consider these three poems to be feminist?

The poems you mention, among others in the book, do interrogate gender. It’s one of my preoccupations as a female writer. How does the women writer assert herself within a tradition that has been, to a great extent, male-dominated? What sorts of pressure does one need to apply to the boundaries erected by gender construction so as to see their cracks?
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