Justin Bigos: Your second
collection of poems, Our Lady of the
Ruins, is mesmerizing – for all its violence and horror, I cannot look
away, and I feel if not a desire, maybe even a need, to keep listening to the
voices on the page. In her
introduction to the book, Carolyn Forché writes that the world of your poems is
“our post-apocalyptic present.”
It’s true that the horrors in your poems seem both present and past,
with the latter dimly remembered if remembered at all. What is this apocalypse in Our Lady of the Ruins?
Traci Brimhall: I suppose I think the apocalypse is the
present, or what the present would feel like if we could feel all of history at
once. In one of my graduate
classes several years ago we read Merwin’s The Lice, and the teacher referred to it as mid-apocalyptic. That idea awed and horrified me—the
notion that the apocalypse is not a single cataclysmic event but a way of
living in the world. The fear. The desperation. The knowledge you were unwanted, damned.
As a child, I thought the rapture
was imminent, and then I wondered if it was already here.
JB: The language of your poems is pitched
very high. The poems swell, line
after line, with intoxicating images.
And I sometimes feel an uneasiness with the beauty of the language
because the images are often so violent.
Just from one poem: “Assassins kiss our fingers.” And: “how the coroner found minnows/
swimming in a drowned girls lungs.”
From another poem (in prose sections): “We wipe snow from the sundial
and tell a cardinal in the frozen fountain about women dancing in basements
during the raids.” This is an
assonance of dread, a master’s portrait of death! It is incredibly seductive. Can you talk a bit about the relationship between beauty and
violence in your poems?
TB: Some dead poets will tell you
beauty is truth, some will say it is a lie, some will say it’s the offspring of
death. I guess I’m in the last
camp with Stevens. It’s the
temporality of the world that affords the love we feel for it and the beauty we
see in it. Mortality is not a threat; it’s a fact.
And then there’s violence—not the natural decay of that temporary
beauty, but the theft of it, and the aggressiveness of choice implicit in
violence.
When I wrote most of Our Lady, I
maintained a practice of gratitude. I was living in my car at the time, either staying with
friends or sleeping in parks/parking lots, and I tried to say thank you three
times a day. There were always at
least three things to be thankful for.
I bring that up here because it was the time my life felt the most
beautiful and the most precarious.
JB: Your account
reminds me a bit of a similar time in my life. I’m not sure what would’ve happened to me without the help
of a few very good friends. I know
what you mean about gratitude. And
the precariousness of life. And
how sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can not only survive but make some of our
best art during these times. I
want to ask an honest, and maybe ridiculous, question: Do you ever miss it, this
time in your life?
TB: Absolutely. Even though I would not welcome back the
poverty or fear or loneliness, it also brought with it joy and wonder and a new
understanding of my strengths.
JB: Your poems are
often titled as prayers, novenas, dirges, requiems, nocturnes, and other
musical forms. And considering
your title, I sense maybe you had a Catholic education. Am I right? If so, how has Catholicism influenced your work?
TB: I had a very chaotic religious
education. My family changed
churches often, trying everything from Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian,
Lutheran and Pentecostal. Perhaps
the constant spiritual upheaval of changing churches made me desire ritual, but
the only mass I ever attended was with my first stepfamily.
The way I see my religious upbringing most directly affecting my work is
in the earnest doubt of my speakers. I was always ashamed of my doubts growing up. Knowledge, after all, is the most
sinister desire. To know is to no
longer be innocent, but it’s a power humankind shares with its God, and that’s
extraordinary. That’s worth losing
a garden over.
JB: Most of the
poems in Our Lady are written in
couplets, and a good amount are in tercets. Can you talk a bit about the possibilities of each stanza
pattern, and when you know a poem needs a particular kind of stanza?
TB: I adore the
line. I’m fascinated by how it
functions in terms of tension and temporality. I want the language to sing, but I see lines as measures of
music. When I revise, I often read
my poems backwards from the bottom up in order to test their music and make
sure they sing as fragments separated from their syntax and narrative/lyric
flow.
You mentioned the high pitch of language I’m fond of, and I think that’s
why I stick to smaller stanzas. I love the muchness and strangeness of this
world, and my choice of image and tone often reflects that. I don’t want to
overwhelm the reader by asking them to confront too much of it at once. In that
way, I see poems as a museum of wonders. Each stanza is a room full of wild and
terrible beauty that wants to dazzle gradually.
JB: Oh, don’t think
you can just drop the phrase “terrible beauty” without me bringing up
Yeats! I’m really interested in
what you said earlier, about the apocalypse as “not a single cataclysmic event
but a way of living in the world.”
I think of perhaps Yeats’s most famous poem, “The Second Coming,” and I
shudder – as I do when reading the poems in Our
Lady – with foreboding. But I
wonder if Yeats would sign up for this idea of apocalypse as omnipresent. I mean, he seemed so seduced by ideas
of historical markers, often occult and highly obscure. What do you make of Yeats and his sense
of history as chaptered disaster and rebirth? Is he a big influence on your work?
TB: I think the
disaster/rebirth, death/resurrection idea is everywhere—the Bildungsroman arc,
the hero’s journey, the promise of some religions. The problem I have with that idea is that it is something
that happens once—you come of age, you travel to the belly of the beast and
return, you’re born again. Resurrection is a metaphor we constantly live, not something
we live once. We can save
ourselves as many times as we need to.
JB: The title poem
is the only poem in the book that has a dual voice: one on the left side of the
page, and another (italicized) on the right side. I hear the latter voice as Our Lady of the Ruins, and the
former as a collective voice of people refusing salvation, insisting on a life
of unclean hedonism. I first read
the poem left to right, hearing the two voices interrupt/continue each other;
then I read the poem’s left column first, then its right column. I don’t have a preference, as each
reading was rewarding in different ways, but I’m wondering if you’d rather your
readers read the poem one way or the other.
TB: I see the two
voices as you do—one as Our Lady and one as the collective, although I don’t
see them as solely hedonistic. They
desire more than pleasure. I think
they want a god worth believing in because everything they’ve trusted in so far
has disappointed them.
This probably sounds absurd, but I don’t know how to read it
either. I imagine the voices
occurring simultaneously. Perhaps that’s why prayers go unanswered—we’re too
busy talking over each other to hear what the other is saying. I think that
something gets communicated despite the competing voice since both sides of the
poem end in a rhyme.
JB: Your poems often
seem placed in ancient or medieval times.
We encounter hired mourners, whalers, monks, penitents, soldiers, butchers,
prophets, amputees, and landscapes “where aspens quake with the old/
ecclesiastical terror.” Despite
the boasts of modernity and globalization, much of the earth’s population still
lives in this kind of world. Can
you talk about prose works you’ve read, or any travel perhaps, that has shed
some light on the kind of primeval suffering we encounter in your work?
TB: Some of the
books I remember reading while writing these poems are Thoreau’s journals,
Kabir’s poetry, an atlas of remote islands, travel brochures from towns I
travelled through, and Nick Bantok’s postcards from an invented country that
had no borders. I don’t know that
my reading list speaks to suffering. Actually, much of it was filled with facts, observations, and
a little ecstasy.
I never actually thought of the representations of suffering in the book
as ancient or medieval. Penitents,
prophets, and hired mourners all seemed like corollaries for things I see in
the modern, global world. Suffering
doesn’t seem to cease over time; it seems to change. Metamorphosis is often a hopeful idea (other than the example
of poor Gregor Samsa). Transfiguration
or being born again suggests an ascension, a better self, but time and
experience don’t necessarily improve us or help us make better choices. Surviving our suffering doesn’t mean we
come out clean on the other side or with some handy lesson to pass onto others.
Sometimes it just means we’re
still breathing. I realize this
answer contradicts my answer to the Yeats question, but I believe both are
true.
JB: Can you tell us
what you’ve been working on since Our
Lady?
TB: I’ve been
writing a strange and messy biomythography based on my mother’s childhood in
Brazil. Every time I write a new poem, I seem to understand it less and love it
more.
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