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Monica Ferrell - Beasts for the Chase
Interview
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Your work is rife with fairy tales and mythologies, particularly from Egyptian, Nordic, Greek, Turkish, and Biblical sources. What draws you to these ancient stories?
The impulse toward these sorts of stories has always been with me. When I was a kid I loved D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a comic-book series narrating Hindu religious stories, and an illustrated history book so old and distorted it was practically mythology; I think of those three as the texts that have most influenced my poetry, in that they shaped my mind. They appeal to me in part because they run on “magical thinking,” which — perhaps it should not be admitted! — is what my own approach to the world runs on, too. In addition, the elements and visual keys of myth strike me as steeped in meaning, like the half-comprehended, shadowy emblems that cling to you after a dream, or the elements of a memory repeated by the self so often it becomes legend. For me, the six pomegranate seeds in Persephone’s palm the moment before she eats them throb with an incredible intensity of significance — because we know what she is on the brink of, we know how her story will turn out and that that outcome is tragically ineluctable. There is this concept of “mythic time” I became interested in when researching my undergraduate thesis on the Hindu goddess Kali, visiting temples in Calcutta and interviewing devotees. In “mythic time,” what has happened strangely goes on happening; a goddess remains somehow not only what she becomes at the end of the story, but what she was to start. The concept reminds me of the totum simul, the everything-all-at-once referred to by Dante in Paradise. This collapsing of linearity in mythic time is not that different in essence from “lyric time” — I am thinking of that trait lyric poetry is said to possess, of being compressed, contracted in time like a point in space, presenting “spots of time,” as Wordsworth phrased it, and stopping time. Rereading a poem, you feel what happens at the start strangely go on happening, and all over again the next time you read. So there doesn’t seem to me anything that odd about myths entering lyric poems, and in any case the stories I steal never feel to me like dry allusions to a canon.
On this same note, many of your poems use lines of original text to jump-start your own imaginative renderings. “Eleven Steps to Breaking up a Hart,” for example, uses excerpts from Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan as the starting point that eventually dives into more personal poetry (“I trusted in you as one trusts in a pear: / That it is a fruit; that it wants / To give itself in sweetness”). Am I correct? Do you feel comfortable with confessional poetry, even if approached from a neutral
stance?
“Hart,” “Self-Story as Spheres of Egyptian Industry,” and “Paradise” have sections headed by quotations: from von Strassburg, the captions on a piece in the Metropolitan Museum, and the dictionary definition of paradise. For the most part, it was only after writing the main text that the other materials were added. After drafting the “Hart” poem I realized it reminded me of something I had read that had haunted me: I slipped Tristan off my bookshelf and searched out that passage, where I found an eerie matching of content and sensibility to what I had just written. But for the Egyptian poem, the references were indeed jumping-off points — the work I saw in the museum seemed to open up a series of worlds I explored through writing the poem. And that’s what’s happened with other poems: “A soul is a number moving by itself,” say, where a phrase I came across shook something loose in me. I tend to get so excited about the linkage I’ve come upon that I want to share it with others and to enshrine it. The sense is that I’ve come upon a hidden design in the world that others have discovered before me, like having a premonition of a certain unfamiliar landscape and then, seemingly quite accidentally, finding yourself in that precise place. I also like the structural backbone the quoted materials provide, as a matter of technique, and there seems to me a kind of interesting drama in the dynamic of a speaker who emerges, recedes while someone else speaks, and returns again after a costume-change from behind the curtain, speaking now in a slightly altered voice.
Lions, dragons, wolves, and other predators frequently make an appearance in your work, as do their prey, especially deer. Could you discuss the significance of this to your work and the choice of your book’s title, Beasts for the Chase?
The book’s title comes from the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of paradise: an oriental park or pleasure-ground, esp. one enclosing wild beasts for the chase. As far as I can tell, this is the earliest sense of paradise; etymologically the word seems to come from a term for the personal hunting-grounds of Mesopotamian rulers. Have you ever seen those bas-reliefs of Assyrian kings on horseback, their beautifully muscled arms outstretched holding an arrow-fitted bow? You’re at once taken aback by the
glory of the image, and by the senselessness that the potential of this person — skill of the eye and hand, but also the mind’s keen strategizing, as well as qualities like bravery and determination — can only be manifested through an act of destruction. So there is violence in the image, but also a kind of tremendous celebration of life. Even the tigers pictured struck and roaring seem to be aware of this paradoxical doubleness in their noble death-throes: they hardly seem to be angry, and in a way have “met their match,” met their perfect opposite so that a fusion ensues, which is annihilating and permanent. What may be said of those Assyrian hunters may also be said of the animal predators in the book; I am thinking of the beautiful carving on Henri Cole’s The Visible Man, where a lion hungrily sinks his teeth into the neck of a man who seems almost to be spurred into orgasm, it’s that devastatingly intimate. I would be lying if I said that this trope didn’t have to do, for me, with romantic love. But
there are other senses to it as well, and indeed at times the predators are envied for being able to give themselves away completely to something in way that we humans — vacillating, compromising, trained since birth to interpose other, interfering voices between ourselves and our truest, rightest impulses — often are not able to do.
In an interview with Fishouse, you make mention of Keats’s negative capability and compare being a poet to a certain kind of homelessness. This is echoed in the first poem of your book, “Harvest:” “I am homeless. I live everywhere.” Could you talk about this and your own efforts to live with “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason?”
I write a lot of persona poems and feel at home in the act of trying to open myself to possession by someone else’s spirit. I steal from everywhere. I have non-Western friends who feel totally cut off from Western cultural icons, feel that saints and Spanish kings have little to do with them. But to me it’s always seemed that whatever happens in this world, now and forever, is equally connected with me just by virtue of my being alive, part of humanity. Being connected with everything also has its opposite, being specially connected to nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem solidly aligning myself with any one camp or fixed identity. Even in poems not spoken by a specific character, I’m trying to let something that wants to come into being do so — poetry as uncovering, rather than invention or rhetoric, and a form of devotion and service: the poet may be like a pilgrim who sets out with his little cloth bag filled with a day’s provisions, having no idea where the holy sites will present themselves, nor where the next meal will come from. It’s a pretty uncertain life. Sometimes you can’t even be sure you will be lucky enough to write another thing. But at least you can be happy about the degree to which you were unstinting in your service.
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