Karl Zuehlke (KZ): When I read your
poems in Tongue Lyre, I find myself constantly intrigued in the most enjoyable
way by how you negotiate your subject matter. Greek myth, classical
music, writers and visual artists often offer you the opportunity to
write from a persona or to create a poetic conceit to express an
emotion. To begin I would like to ask how you begin? How do you
arrive at your moments of combined self-reflection and myth? Do you
begin with language and evolve allusions and mythic capacities, or do
you begin with a concept and work toward language, or perhaps you
employ a process more masterful than I have yet to imagine?
Tyler Mills (TM): When I was working on
the poems of
Tongue Lyre, I was interested in the interaction
between the mythic story—what is “outside” the poem—and the
lyric material of the poems themselves, which are inspired by a love
of language (such as sound, metaphor, citation, visible texture, and
connotative meaning). I remember wanting to resist the idea that
there would be an immediate one-to-one correspondence between what
the myth already brings to the poem and each poem’s individual
lyric arc. Allegories really become dynamic when one thread, the
prior story, unwinds from the second thread, the materials of the
imagination. What keeps bringing me back to writing poems that are,
as you said, “moments of combined self-reflection and myth” (a
phrase I love) is this dynamism, the tension between that unresolved
space between both things: self-reflection (or, imagination, to draw
from Stevens) and myth.
KZ: So perhaps then, you began
these poems with play? Whether it is playing with language or
finding play in myths? Your poem “Circe's Notes” is rich with
both elements. I want to read the form (the conceit of note-taking)
as subverting the Homeric narrative that domesticated and
disenfranchised Circe. I also want to read your play with language
as aligning cliché and myth, and re-appropriating them both to
reveal a cannibalistic masculinity. Is your poem a palinode in Hilda
Doolittle's or Anne Carson's sense?
TM: I do begin my poems with play,
perhaps in the sense of playing a musical instrument. I like to think
of the way a poem begins similarly to the way I think of the start of
a good practice session when I’m practicing the violin. If I know I
want to work on something in a particular key, I’ll just have fun
playing around in scales and chords in that key so I’m ready to
work on the piece. Perhaps in this analogy, the myth functions as the
possibilities within a score (Levi-Strauss compared myth to a musical
score). Language itself is the delight I find in meditating on words,
experience, and memory in order to open up the possibility within a
prior text or narrative.
“Circe’s Notes” certainly began
with this kind of play—as creative and destructive force. It
begins, “Socrates decided to be executed. / And the execution of
art?” (30). I kept thinking of how Circe typically functions as a
symbol of power—she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs—and
then of the function of symbols in general:
In a public garden, a tree
wears a skirt
of hard green apples
with a white crescent bite
out of each skin (30).
One could say that I collected this
image from my life. Once, I found myself in a city park, where I
noticed a tree that seemed to promise the most delicious apples. They
looked full and sweet. However, I quickly realized that many people
had also been tricked: the grass was covered with discarded apples,
each with one bitter bite ripped out. I could see the teeth marks; it
was almost like the moment of realization—of the bitterness within
the ripe appearance—was marked in each one. Of course, I couldn’t
help but think of an allusion to the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden
of Eden. But I also kept thinking about the image as a concept, as
image itself. How are appearances deceptive? What is a symbol? In the
case of “Circe’s Notes,” the image of the apples came to me as
I prepared myself to work with the prior text of the Circe myth. I
suppose I found this particular image to be one of the essential
notes (as in musical note, though it does pun with the poem’s
title) that I could play with in the goal of working with the myth.
However, I’d like to say that how I
begin isn’t always like this, so tidy to explain. In reality, much
of the time, I am not sure where the materials of the poem come from,
other than from that well of internal quiet where the most vulnerable
and raw part of the self can be found (or, more like, glimpsed). And,
the material also comes from reading as many different kinds of texts
as I can, and being open to what they can teach me.
Your question about the palinode is an
interesting one. A conservative reading of the definition from the
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics would lead me to think that
the answer is no, my poem is not a palinode, because my poem does not
explicitly retract a prior statement about Circe or another statement
made about her. But I’d like to look at the way H.D. and Anne
Carson both investigate Stesichoros’s palinode for Helen of Troy,
which absolves her of the blame of the war. I’d like to quote
Carson’s translation of Stesichoros’s fragment (from
Autobiography of Red):
No it is not the true story.
No you never went on the benched ships.
No you never came to the towers of Troy
(17).
What interests me about Carson’s
treatment of the palinode is that the recantation, in its negation,
seems to even more fully realize the fictional narrative than had the
statement been issued as that of a truth. In saying Helen is a
fiction—that she “never went on the benched ships”—the
speaker appears to fortify the assumed falsehood with the kind of
believability that can only come from a place of inalienable truth.
Perhaps this is what the rhetorical gesture of the palinode is
supposed to achieve.
What interests me about H.D.’s
treatment of the palinode is how Helen functions as a figure, if she
is retracted. In the prose passage before the second section of
“Palinode” in Helen of Egypt, Helen of Troy is said to be
“a phantom, substituted for the real Helen, by jealous deities,”
the result being that “[t]he Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an
illusion” (174). For H. D., the palinode instantiates a duality
between memory and forgetting. Also, the prose section before the
second part of “Palinode,” reads “But Helen, mysteriously
transported to Egypt, does not want to forget. She is both phantom
and reality” (175). I suppose, if one looks at Tongue Lyre as
a whole, one could say that the figure of Philomela functions this
way, as a figure that is “both phantom and reality,” as she does
and does not forget the violence.
The critic Allen Grossman has said that
the mythic archetype of the song of Philomela emerges from the bird
pressing her throat against a thorn; the thorn at the throat is a way
back to that glimmer of memory that the song marks, the cause of the
violence that she forgets. In other words, the song, the lyric, is
caused by violence, yet it itself exists out of forgetting the
violence. Memory is willed. In my poems, what is retracted? Is it
this forgetting? Tongue Lyre ends with an insistence on
memory. But is it redemptive? Or is it another kind of entrapment?
I’m not sure I have the answer to these questions.
But to return to “Circe’s Notes,”
inasmuch as the poem interacts with the myth as a kind of prior
story, or prior text (what we might think of when we hear an allusion
to Circe), I suppose one could say that it could function as a
palinode: the Circe of “Circe’s Notes” chooses symbol as a
choice—so that the transformation of men into swine, or the
“cannibalistic masculinity,” as you so adeptly put it, becomes a
symbol of something entirely different. It absolves Circe from the
cultural blame of taking a power assumed to be male; perhaps she even
dismantles what this assumption about power might even symbolize.
KZ: I very much like the idea that “
Circe’s Notes” is not a palinode, yet accomplishes the work of
one. As I read it, the end of the poem exemplifies a sense of play
so powerful that it can transform cliché; the cliché that “men
are pigs,” which the poem conflates with myth and ergo transforms.
The facts of Circe's story are not recanted, but they are given new
insight. Made new, if you can stand to be in contact with Pound's
phrase. The emotional tenor of your poem's end:
O my potbellied
pig,
I'll eat
you.
And when I cook
pig,
one pig cries and
cries
for another pig
(30).
Such a mix of empathy and justice.
The poem's line breaks become more severe, as the intensity of
emotion escalates. Circe as she was, not dependent on masculinity
for any power. And clever in the way most poets envy. I read this
as the payoff to all your well-wrought images. Contradictory signs
clash and meld. The bitter apple tree, the quarter glued to the
floor that fools people who try to pry it up. Socrates, who
preferred death over exile, works as a foil character to Circe, who
found power in herself and outside centralized power structures.
I think “Circe's Notes” is the
counterpoint to your book's book-endings of Philomela’s myth, by
which I mean it expresses a moment of contrast, contradistinction,
the ugly note that makes the sweet note that much sweeter. Or, the
other way round.
Perhaps part of the story you take
into mind when thinking about myths is that of Anne Carson and H.D.?
And I do not mean to imply imitation on your part in the least. Yet
both are such muscular women writers: I feel daunted and envious when
I read either. You mentioned The Autobiography of Red, as well as,
Helen in Egypt, both of which are canonical in anybody's reading-list
worth anything, and which I did introduce to the conversation.
Before we return to Philomela, I have a two-part question: in what
way and which writers have influenced you? And, in what ways and
which musicians and composers have influenced your writing or your
own musicianship? Is one stronger than the other?
TM: The idea of “influence” makes
me think of
Lethem’s“Ecstasy of Influence” essay from Harper’s a while
back. Sometimes influence calls to mind the idea of citation, though
I find that backtracking through my thought process can quickly
become impossible. When I think about the question of influence, I
always think about the rotating stacks of books next to my bed (right
now there is Ashbery’s
Houseboat Days, Carson’s
Nox,
and Lerner’s
Leaving Atocha Station). I pick them up and
read them until my eyes begin closing and I turn the light off. I
think about phrases I remember from conversation or the radio, or
random magazines (
Vogue, usually) I bought three months ago
and should have thrown away by now, but I find myself looking at.
These texts enter my brain: what do they do there?
When I was writing the poems of Tongue
Lyre, I was deeply influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses. “The
heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” I wanted to
make language do that. I wanted to try thinking about how a
mythic subtext could allow a field of language to enact an emotion
(in poetry) rather than a narrative—though I am often interested in
subverting narrative in my work. I wanted, and needed, to work
through the material of these poems, and I found that Joyce was a
guide for doing that somehow. I was also deeply influenced by my
teachers (particularly our shared teacher, Stanley Plumly and his
Marriage in the Trees, which I read over and over). And, I
read and re-read Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Bishop’s
Complete Poems. And Plath’s Ariel. And Levis’s
Elegy (“Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope”
knocks the wind out of me every time.) And I read street signs. And
newspapers (the Washington Post, the Onion, the New
York Times). And the labels of works of art in the Smithsonian
and the Hirshorn. And I read different pieces of music I would
work through when I picked up my violin. And the little notes I wrote
to myself in the sheet music to help myself through difficult
passages. And I read emails. And student papers. And my student loan
deferment letters… The list of texts that might have influenced me
is difficult, if not impossible, to track.
Playing the violin gives me such
pleasure, but it is tinged with a kind of sadness—one that I have
learned to welcome. I have to forgive myself every time I pick it up
for not being as good as I used to be. I liked too many things to
ever really become fantastic at the violin, but I did become serious
enough about it that my senior year of high school I’d skip class
to get an extra hour of practice in so I could prepare for my music
school auditions. I was in music school for a year, but the violin
taught me lasting lessons, the most important of which is how to
work: how to break something down that seems impossible into
manageable pieces. How to figure out why something seems impossible
and approach it like a puzzle. It has also taught me to trust
myself—the muscles of the body, the thought that is too quick to
become truly legible. Sometimes the most difficult things to do with
an instrument seem to just happen. Writing poems can be like
that. The poem arrives, and it seems like it’s not even part of
yourself. But, then you have to remind yourself that it is the result
of reading, writing, discipline, revision, etc.
As for composers that have influenced
me, I could ramble endlessly. I like a huge range of composers and
bands, and I like finding new things and going to hear live music
when I can. (I got to hear Neko Case live in Chicago recently and was
really excited about it!) And I like making crazy play lists that I
listen to when I go running so I feel like I’m dancing. I can say,
though, that I’m obsessed with Jascha Heifetz’s recording of the
Tchaikovsky violin concerto (Fritz Reiner, Chicago Symphony). When I
was trying to train as a violinist, I would listen to it endlessly. I
can’t listen to any other recording of it. I heard Sarah Chang do
it once, and the whole time I was checking it against that one
version in my mind. I could ramble about Heifetz’s recording
endlessly (and probably not very intelligently).
KZ: Thank you for sharing so much of
your writing process and what you were reading. I think you are
really on to something when you compare muscle-memory built playing a
violin to the process of writing a poem; likewise, the irreducible
moment of spontaneity and clarity – the act of creativity – from
which a lyric poem or piece of music springs. That moment cannot be
reduced.
I like your attention to the
“execution” of art. Vivaldi was introduced to me as a “one hit
wonder” and yet I judge every recording against an out-of-print
Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra’s performance of “The Four Seasons”
in which the limited orchestra draws a heightened attention and
resonance to each note. Everything is audible, in contrast to a huge
number of musicians that can drown out the subtleties. In that state
Vivaldi becomes transcendent for me. As I experience classical music,
some of it presents itself to me as myth simply because I heard the
piece so often as a child (only later did I understand the instances
in which the composer was evoking myth). Wagner, Mozart, Bach,
Vivaldi, Beethoven, Grieg: certain pieces snap me back to an almost
pre-verbal state, expressing an emotion I was not complex enough to
grasp with words at the time. How were you introduced to classical
music, and does it have anything to do with your attention to myth?
The craft of your book is such that,
I think also, we have been talking about Philomela all this while.
Her myth works as a framework, a backdrop of backdrops against which
your poems riff so successfully. “Edith Wharton's Age of
Innocence by T.C. Mills” is where I would like to nest my
argument here.
To start with I would like to just
step back and say “wow!” On its own this poem is worth attention,
and yet set against Philamela's myth, the referent in the title
directs and redirects in such an enjoyable way. Dovetailing perhaps.
I read an intent need to understand and think about innocence, where
it starts and ends, in both this poem and your attention to and use
of Philomela's myth. How do you experience that boundary? Could you
perhaps talk about how juxtaposition helped you create this poem?
TM: When I was writing “Edith
Wharton's Age of Innocence by T.C. Mills,” I kept
thinking about the opera: how in Wharton’s Age of Innocence,
the opera is its own theatre of sex and desire. I kept meditating on
desire and the body, identity and gender. Juxtaposition happened when
I started working in couplets: how could I distill a series of images
into their most vivid and visceral form in a way that still moved?
As I was working on the other poems in Tongue Lyre, I was also
reading Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The
Philomela myth joined the poems of the book after the arc was
starting to take shape. The silenced woman, the violated woman: how
could I in different ways think about the relationship between the
nightingale and memory, the victim and artist? The myth was meant to
give form to the sequence of poems where the psyche returns to a home
that is both the female body—and the will that returns us to
memory.
KZ: Your poem sets up its scene,
“New Years Eve in Central Park” and evolves to a moment of
juxtaposition. Just the beginning and the end leaves out the entire
narrative in between, and this creates an operatic tension. I focus
on the moment, where, after the poem has introduced where innocence
begins and ends. It breaks into repetition:
Or the age of
innocence begins with my cousin
holding a green
razor between her legs (4).
These lines activate about ten
narratives in my brain, because the poem has established some
expectations that this is a narrative. The first narrative I think
of is a young girl who is about to start shaving her legs: a token of
femininity. But this narrative seems too easy. The razor is
stationary, held. Indecisive perhaps? Then I begin asking what kind
of razor is it? There are straight razors that are green. But with
all of this thinking I think I am wrong. This fascinates me because
it is symbolic. Narratives cannot undo its power. It is a way of
returning to safety in remembering. Narratives are, in one sense, an
end to innocence if they attempt to situate a subject within a larger
context. Innocence is the inability to recognize the culturally
specific narrative one is situated in.
Your poem lulls me back to a moment
before I could fluently read events, as a child. I remember in
parts. I am convinced that the form accomplishes this, by
introducing a narrative and then collapsing it. In this way, I think
your poem enacts tension. Or as William Meredith writes in “About
Opera,” from Partial Accounts that our words are mundane,
but in opera, “they yearn to take the risk these noises take”(85).
I think “Edith Wharton's Age
of Innocence by T.C. Mills” is emblematic of the
dialectic your poems explore and synthesize. On the one hand your
poems in Tongue Lyre follow closely some
narrative techniques in James Joyce's Ulysses,
while on the other, your poems stake out new territory. There is a
fulcrum or a balance in your work that produces a tension between
narrative and narratives undone. Unfortunately my interview we must
miss some of the complexity of the arc of your book, but it blends
and re-appropriates personal narrative
and myth; it varies in form from cohesive narratives to an erasure
poem (if that is what “Ithaca” is). Another node is your
understated poem, “Cleaning Out the Lyre” that was featured on Poetry Daily. You also
mentioned Blake, who shows up in an epigraph for your seven page
meditation, “Rose.” I find an elaborate complexity I want to
dwell upon. At what point in your process did some of this congeal?
Tongue Lyre is
asymmetrically bookended by Philomela. “Tongue” and “The Myth
of Philomela” offer two takes on blending narrative and myth. In
“Tongue” personal narrative is set ominously against myth,
whereas in “The Myth of Philomela” a third-person narrative
inflects the mythological. Both poems create a somewhat cohesive
narrative, in counterpoint to moments where a narrative comes undone.
We have spent a great deal of time considering moments of fracture
in your work. And while these poems are fractured to a degree, the
unity the narrative offers is powerful. What do narrative and form
offer these poems, as others in your collection, from your
perspective as the poet?
TM: I would like to begin my answer
with your statement, “Narratives are, in one sense, an end to
innocence if they attempt to situate a subject within a larger
context. Innocence is the inability to recognize the culturally
specific narrative one is situated in.” I am fascinated by context
and citation: to a certain extent, my use of Joyce and prior myth is,
at times, one of re-contextualizing a prior narrative. The poem
“Ithaca” is an erasure of a passage from the “Ithaca” chapter
of Ulysses:
Ever you will wander,
selfcompelled,
to the extreme limit
of cometary orbit,
beyond the fixed stars
and variable suns and telescopic planets,
astronomical waifs and
strays,
to the extreme boundary of space (56).
One could argue that we are endlessly situated and re-situated
within a larger context. A favorite passage of mine from Barthes’s
S/Z comes to mind:
“The text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and
smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the
soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary
rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the
flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain
zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of
meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations” (14).
Of course, this is one very specific theoretical view of
narrative; I just wanted to complicate the question about narrative a
bit. I mean, from a Barthian lens, how can we ever gain perspective
over one’s narrative—within such an infinite textual cosmos? But
conversely, one must ask the other question. If one is to think about
innocence as a lack of knowledge of the myth in which one is
situated, who is the observer “reading” the narrative? Whose
reading is producing the narrative and therefore concluding the
framework in which a perspective is situated? In what way, then, does
narrative structure itself become a kind of wingman for hegemonic
values? For, one cannot ignore that narrative itself fixes language
within a particular kind of arc. I suppose all of this is to say that
I have a healthy skepticism about how narratives—historical,
cultural—are used, and by whom. I enjoy working with myth,
but myth itself is a difficult mode of language; throughout history,
it has been implemented by nations in need of a hero, or in the aims
of claiming land as a territory (and therefore the cultural and
historical narratives of others). Myth itself is a powerful cultural
force. As narrative, it is often read innocently—as something that
represents what we want to see, or what values we hold (I am thinking
of Bruce Lincoln here)—but at the same time, it wields its power
via playing a key cultural function.
In narratives about sexual violence,
often the victim is powerless: what that means is that the victim’s
perspective is effaced, or even rendered unreliable. The myth of
Philomela is a rape narrative. The woman in the story has her tongue
cut out. And Philomela becomes a nightingale. In using this myth, I
wanted to try to activate this voice—albeit via fragmentation. I
suppose I was trying to overturn the narrative itself. Philomela of
the original myth does end up weaving a cloth to communicate what
happened to her. In a culture that silences victim’s narratives,
and within a psychology of trauma where often the narrative—as in,
memory—can never quite become whole, I wanted to explore an
archetypal rape narrative through the masculine myth of Odysseus so
that I could turn it on its head. I wanted the female psyche to find
a homecoming in the body: the female body. And I wanted to use the
poems to engage with memory as an act of will: one that can overturn
the trope of forgetting that exists in the nightingale imagery of the
myth itself (here, I am drawing from a recording of Allen Grossman’s
lecture on Keats). In Tongue Lyre, perhaps the Odyssey poems
themselves become this cloth. As a poet, as a person, it is difficult
for me to speak more directly about this other than aesthetically.
When I was writing these poems, writing them was my lifeblood. I
couldn’t not write these poems.
KZ: Thank you for unpacking the
complexities of your approach to narrative. I feel that sense of
urgency: that your poems have to be said. While other poets have
used tactics similar to your own, your poems are set apart for me as
a reader by the sense of presence and urgency they convey. As you
put it, that the female psyche finds, “a homecoming in the body:
the female body.” I feel that sense of presence. In spite of the
effaced and unreliable representations of women, in your work I find
a counter-force. Often, as you note, narratives about sexual
violence against women, or violence in general, silence and efface
the victim. The victim's tongue is cut out. Yet your poems navigate
and activate other possibilities; narratives break apart and become
multiple, or are reconstructed in a new way. The power to rearrange
and remake myths is equally as powerful as the nefarious uses of
myth. Well, at least I'd like to think that. Your poems find life
in the ruins of one hegemonic culture, laid over today's hegemonic
structures. The image of the tongue, your tongue as the poet and
the amputated tongue of Philomela, takes on a meaning of
“will-to-speech.” These poems are vital. I mean they have a
pulse. I mean they need to be said aloud.
In “Tinsel Halo,” the sounds of
your poem are so intricately crafted. Your passage, “The tidewater
/ as warm as the twist / from the tap you wash your hands with”
(65) is unmistakably music. It does not seem to conform to
traditionally received poetic meters, however, the words have a
particular cadence along with the consonance of w, t, and h. Your
entire book is rich with sound, but this poem seems a superabundance.
I read it as a kind of “Tinsel Halo,” a false halo of sorts. Or
overly glamorous, perhaps. Or perhaps the texture of your language
has to do with the meta-poetic gesture towards Picasso's women lying
naked and exposed for the male artist to appropriate. The texture of
your phrases are almost cubist, in that they draw attention to the
surface of the poem. We get fragmented glimpses of scenes, but the
words force me to pay attention to them and how they are shaped
sonically after a particular aesthetic tactic. The sounds are the
surface of this poem, and I feel forced to confront it. Throughout
your book, it is clear that the sounds of words are important to you.
What insights can you offer about your approach to the sounds of a
poem? I listen and listen continually for new words and new music
between old words, but perhaps that is not true of you?
TM: Thank you for the beautiful
reading of my poem, Karl. I find myself turning to Stevens’s essay,
“The Noble Rider” (The Necessary Angel) in order to answer
your question. Stevens writes, “above everything else, poetry is
words” and that “words, above everything else, are, in poetry,
sounds” (32). When I was writing “Tinsel Halo,” I was thinking
about the theatricality of holiness (in painting). I was also
thinking about representations of the body and even the sexuality of
aesthetics. I wanted the poem to enact a different kind of lyric; I
wanted to push the fragment to the limit. I thought about achieving
unity through sound, but also letting sound carry me “off the
subject,” so to speak. When I wrote the lines you quoted—“The
tidewater / as warm as the twist / from the tap you wash your hands
with”—I thought about how the body feels in water, pushed by the
waves. I didn’t want to force that kind of rhythm on the poem, but
I also wanted to see if the poem could enact it somehow. Stevens
writes, “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist
without the words” (32). In a way, “Tinsel Halo” especially
functions as a kind of thing made of words, the words being the
shapes (or, images) and sounds.
KZ: Tyler, thank you again for all
of your poems in Tongue Lyre. I have truly enjoyed reading
them and thank you also for sharing so much of your knowledge about
how they were crafted. Would you share a little about what your new
poems are doing, or might do?
TM: I have a difficult time talking
about my work when it’s in progress…I’m revising a new
manuscript right now, and it keeps growing and developing in new ways
as I write more poems and revise older ones. I love this part of the
writing process. Since I tend to be obsessive about revisions, it can
also be pretty challenging for me to just let things go when it is
time. All I can say right now is that the project deals with the
themes of flight, history, document, landscape, memory, governmental
violence, and art. My poems are always about art in one way or
another, it seems. My new poems yearn for the “what could have
been” and the mystery in what the past reluctantly gives the
present: as a record of history that is also a fiction of history.
Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre (Southern
Illinois University Press, 2013), which won the 2011 Crab Orchard
Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have received awards from
the Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Third Coast and have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets, The Antioch Review, Georgia Review, TriQuarterly Online,
and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Maryland (MFA, poetry),
Tyler Mills is currently a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at
the University of Illinois-Chicago.
