I’m curious: what’s your elevator
pitch for your book?
That’s a
good question to start with because I actually recently wrote a few sentences
about what my chapbook Bone of My Bone
is about: Through the
half-lit poems in Bone of My Bone runs
a troubling line of questioning – what’s
beyond this life? – as the narrator contends with death on a very visceral
level: “The hip is
something/ no longer examined in the light.” In these poems’ rooms, which are
like the ruins of a cathedral open to a night sky, the haunted narrator
explores the real ways that we take which is ours, both in this life and in the
next. There’s a chance to seize at “what is also the
divine: There is no saint/without a past.”
How did you come upon the subject
of your book?
I was
raised in the Catholic tradition and was taught to pray throughout the day –
and if you forget, every breath or every heartbeat can be a prayer if you
desire. One day, I was reading Blackbird and
came upon Malachi Black’s poem, “Quarantine,” a crown of
sonnets that follow the 10 movements (Lauds, Prime, Terce and so on) in the
Christian monastic prayer known as the canonical hours. These movements follow the
passage of one day, so Lauds is a predawn prayer, None is the afternoon prayer,
Vespers is sundown’s and so forth. Black calls “Quarantine” a poem “to the
possibility of God.”
Black’s
poem struck a familiar chord: one of the books that has stayed with me for
years is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of
Hours. It’s wonderful, thinking of the 23-year-old Rilke writing intense love
poems to God, incantations coming to him in “an inner dictation,” as he
described it. He had visited a monastery in Russia and was moved by the
Christian practice of praying throughout the day. It’s
a departure from a God of fear (as is Black’s poem) – and I love Rilke’s
self-discovery in these poems: “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across
the world.” And, there’s a deep, contemplative peace between stanzas.
But, you
know, I don’t really experience a lot of peace in my daily life, as probably is
true of most of us. And poet Anne Carson said something that makes sense of
this disquiet. I’m paraphrasing here, but Carson described the feeling as
walking through your life with an inkling of what’s also running alongside you
on the other side, the flame of God, the afterlife, the darkness or light. So
that sense of mortality, of an internal straining toward something – St.
Augustine of Hippo said that our hearts won’t rest till they rest in God, so is
that what it is?
I often
feel an internal crying out, a sense of loneliness. So I wanted to portray that
journey in this chapbook – call it carpe
diem, call it searching, whatever it is you need to feel full. But this
struggle happens among the quotidian, and that’s where the book is rooted. As
in, you’re taking a walk with your kids and you have this feeling wave over
you, that we’re together here so short a time, and yet the beyond, eternity, is
endless and unknown. Where do we root?
And the title? Sometimes, it
seems to me, titles can strike like lightning or can be extraordinarily
elusive. How did you go about finding your title?
I wrote
the title poem “Bone of My Bone” when I felt un-rooted. So the
poem started with me considering maternal lineage, how I can follow my
grandmother, who’s now dead, back to her birth more than a century ago. The
poem begins:
I’m my
own land, unmanageable. There’s a cross
road where my hands and lips
intersect
with an illumined city’s open windows …
with an illumined city’s open windows …
I chose Bone of My Bone as the chapbook title
because we originate from someone else and we also put part of ourselves
forward, whether it’s through our children, our art, our stories. I wanted the
chapbook to be about searching for roots, for somewhere to call home.
Tell us something about the most
difficult thing you encountered in this book’s journey.
My son,
my second child, was born nine weeks premature. I woke up at 5 a.m. to find
that my water had broken, so we took this eerie, awful drive to the hospital
with my daughter chattering in the backseat. I didn’t feel him move for more
than half the trip, and I kept thinking we had lost him. It was surreal and
terrifying. Several of the poems in the chapbook are concerned with this – what
if I lose a child I had never met?
On the
drive, I finally felt a flutter in my gut. He wasn’t gone. My son spent time in
the NICU, though, before he finally came home. So writing those poems with the
cast of how do I look toward God in this struggle was painful. Here is a part
of “Driving to the Hospital After My Water Breaks Nine Weeks Early”: “Hold
me, Lord / his
face as he dies / his winds shake me / shake me through / my body doesn’t move
/ while his waters / shake through me.”
And the most pleasurable?
I
remember December 19 of last year, reading Bone
of My Bone in the evening before I sent it in to Blood Pudding Press’ 2015
Chapbook Contest, and feeling like it was done, that it captured for me the
idea of carpe diem – and also of the
struggle of being an embodied spirit that’s straining toward your God. When BPP
Publisher Juliet Cook sent out the announcement that I was one of the three
winners, I was elated – I felt so happy this chapbook had resonated with the
press. And then, recently, just before I resent the copy-edited manuscript to
BPP for layout, I again felt like it was a complete little collection whose poems
spoke to the concerns I was addressing. I feel hopeful that others may read it
and find a bit of their own struggle – and maybe some movement toward answers.
What’s the best and / or worst
piece of advice (writing or publishing or similar) you’ve gotten?
The
best? Imitate, and then don’t imitate. You probably remember an early writing
class where the teacher read you a poem or two, say by Emily Dickinson, and
then said, “Write a poem as if you’re Emily Dickinson.” And then you clumsily
(or maybe not so clumsily) wrote a poem after Emily. And that advice is good,
when you’re a starting writer, to find poets you like and to try out their
styles or how they construct a poem. I wrote some pretty awful poems while
trying to imitate some good poems – Jon Anderson, Lyn Emmanuel and Jane
Hirschfield among them. When I guest-edit or read from a journal, I sometimes
come across these types of imitative poems, that of course, give homage to the
poet in the title, the first line or an epigraph. But most times, these poems
are at best imitative. The other side of this advice is to stop imitating. At
some point, your voice arrives. You write a good poem, and then another. They
get accepted at some good journals. And people tell you that they can recognize
your work. So when that happens, start trusting that voice and honing it. Of
course, read other poets voraciously, but don’t rely on that crutch of
imitation. Jump into your own abyss.
Here’s
the worst: When I was in graduate school, at one of my end-of-year conference
with my poetry professor, a widely published older male poet, he told me that
except for one very talented woman in our class, he didn’t expect anyone else
to publish books. He was right – in the short term. This woman poet in her late
20s did go on to win a large poetry prize for her first book and then publish a
second book relatively quickly. However, what I’m seeing now is that many of
the people I wrote with back then are really coming into their own as poets in
their 30s, publishing their first chapbooks or books in that decade. The point
is that developing a voice can sometimes take longer for one writer than for
another. It’s a very real thing, writing out all the bad poetry before you can
start to create good art. I published my first chapbook at age 27, and now in my
mid-30s, have three chapbooks coming out and a full-length collection later
this year. So persevere and keep writing, right? Because the best work is to
come.
Tell us one of your favorite
books you’ve discovered recently and say a little about why.
Oh, I’m
so glad to mention a poetry book that I love right now. Cynthia
Marie Hoffman’s gorgeous poetry book, Paper Doll Fetus (Perseus) is a collection of haunting
poems about pregnancy and motherhood, and the history of obstetrics, from
medieval midwives to early doctors who were pioneering the field. There’s an
unusual cast of characters who speak in this collection, like a deformed ovarian
cyst apologizing to the woman in which it grows, or a phantom pregnancy
speaking to a nun who wanted a child. Since so much of my work does center on
pregnancy and motherhood, themes that also figure in this manuscript, and the
role this act of creation within the body plays for women in different time
periods, I was happy to encounter this book now. I have a review posted on LiteraryMama.com, if you want to learn more.
Can you share an excerpt from
your book? Give us a taste.
Sure.
This short poem is part of the Christian daily movement of prayers. I wrote all
of the prayer poems in the sequence, but only selected certain ones to appear
in Bone of My Bone. They still do
reflect the passage of a day, or of the way an individual searches continually for
a God – and is that God a loving deity, or a cruel one?
Nocturne
Question: If you can’t enter
yourself, what makes you think you can enter heaven?
Answer: There are wolves within me, creatures I’m
afraid to name.
Answer: I’ve spread blood on my
mouth’s lintel. Death can’t enter this way.
Answer: I hang skulls in the
trees. They clink in the wind, death’s sturdy music.
Answer: The resurrection plays
over again every night. The stone letting you in and out of the tomb.
What’s a question you wish I
asked? (And how would you answer it?)
How
about: What does your poetry attempt to do? I’m stealing this spot-on line from
poet Amber
Rambharose: “A mentor of mine told me that a successful poem is ‘someone
in trouble singing.’” When I write, it
comes from a place of chaos, a place of many whirling and disturbing things.
Many disparate things. And I try to make music, a song, from the chaos, joining
together the grotesque and the gorgeous. The visceral and the sublime. The dead
and the living.
OK, we’re smitten. Where do we go
to buy your book?
You can
purchase Bone of My Bone from Blood Pudding Press. This chapbook was one of three winning
manuscripts in Blood Pudding Press’ 2015 Chapbook Contest.
Nicole Rollender is
editor of Stitches. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming
in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best
New Poets, The Journal, Radar Poetry, Salt
Hill Journal, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word
Riot and others. Her first full-length poetry collection, Louder
Than Everything You Love, is forthcoming from ELJ Publications. She is the
author of the chapbooks Absence of Stars (dancing girl press
& studio), Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House
Publications), Bone of My Bone, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s
2015 Chapbook Contest, and Ghost
Tongue (Porkbelly Press,
2016). She’s the recipient of poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate
Magazine and Princemere Journal. Find her online at nicolerollender.com.
Author social media
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ASI_Stitches
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15241987
No comments:
Post a Comment