From Form to Force: an Interview with Rae Gouirand, Contributor 17.2
Wed, 04/18/2012 - 11:16
Rae Gouirand’s first book, Open Winter, has garnered a remarkable amount of acclaim. The collection, one of whose poems, “Firewood,” is featured in Fourteen Hills 17.2., won the 2011Bellday Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Four Way Books Levis Prize, the Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud Prize, and many others. Currently, it is up for the Audre Lorde Award, a California Book Award, and the Montaigne Medal.
It is no wonder this superbly organized volume with four sections of fifteen poems each has earned such attention. Gouirand’s cool, keen eye takes us into the winter dimensions of our vision and emotion, as if looking through a crack in the board fence around our backyard: the nearness of snow, the distance of “lapis galaxies.” Right from the first poem, “By Infinity,” we examine what “pulls at the eye” and the paradox of existence, that “thread between presence and absence.” Throughout this generous volume, we continue to find permutations of other lines and dots, those points that “measure our particular instance” (“Low Stars”).Recently, poetry editor Sandra Wassilie asked Rae Gouirand a few questions so that readers might experience the multidimensional nature of her work more fully:
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Fourteen Hills: Rae, your work demonstrates to me so well what I often profess: the poet and the scientist are very close in having a sense of wonder and the ability to observe the ordinary in extraordinary ways. Take the line “Lumen accumulation, curtain of blur” in the title poem “Open Winter,” which to me is as much a scientific statement as it is a poetic line. Both presume knowledge about how things work. How do you cultivate such knowledge, and how do you recharge your sense of wonder?
Rae Gouirand: There’s a difference between knowledge and wisdom, and between knowledge and insight. I make this distinction because I’m not sure I believe in knowledge anymore, though I definitely believe in wisdom and insight, and in questions. I think questions are about as close to knowledge as we can hope to get. I don’t think, however, that there’s much of a difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Things become extraordinary when we allow ourselves to assume an attentive relationship to experience, when we open to perception. We are all much more deeply perceptive than we know. All of us are wise underneath our contorted relationships to ourselves. I’m uncomfortable with the way we talk about inspiration in general in our culture—as though it’s something that comes to us, as though work aspiring to an inspirational state is responsible for getting through to us, and either does or doesn’t, based on how “inspiring” it is. The work is ours. Scientists understand that understanding is work, that inquiry is the way. So do creative practitioners. Songs are born in the singing.
I recharge my sense of wonder by letting my heart lead. Into creative work, into community and teaching, into love, into extraordinary messes, into solitude. I work on keeping my perceptive window wide open in a variety of ways: practicing yoga, communing with wide open California, reading. I am supremely lucky to enjoy an extraordinary community of friends, writers, teachers, students, heroes, chosen family, & soulmates who remind me constantly of devotion.
14H: Your work shows a remarkable cohesiveness of style and focus from section to section. Would you comment on your process as you write and organize your work? For instance, are you one to write a piece and finish it fairly immediately or do you let your work age? Does one poem lead to another?
RG: The poems in Open Winter were written over a period of about ten years and represent a fairly wide spectrum of concerns I have in verse—concerns about narrative and the narrative I, concerns about the poetic line and about what that tradition represents, concerns about space (literal/thematic, within the line, within the poem, within the human heart and mind), concerns about never and always (as in the title poem and the collection’s overarching concern with winter—an open winter is actually a winter with no snow, a season marked by a lack of signs). And of course the concern that seems to unite all poets—the limits of what is sayable. That one never dies.Narrative poems tend to come one at a time. More formally exploratory ones (like the sixteen line poems in couplets, the ones that break with colons all over the place) tend to develop in small batches, in conversation with one another. My poems tend to know most of what they want to do within the first draft, and then reveal a little more in the second. I don’t draft endlessly; I don’t go back years later. I do sometimes take long breaks from writing, but I don’t ever take breaks from moving forward—lots of reading. Lots of exploring. Lots of imagining.
14H: Open Winter drips with paradoxes. You show what is visible while you allude to the invisible: “so many to fold / into folds of one” (“Plurals”). The barrier of glass permits sight but limits the experience of what is seen in several poems such as “Paper Snow” and “Visual Interest.” What role do your paradoxes play with respect to feeling and emotion which often seem to be distant from the narrator?
RG: Oh, man. The question of emotional distance. I have learned, teaching, that some readers want an almost infinite amount of room within others’ language projects to inscribe their own emotional dynamics, and that other readers, by contrast, read primarily to study how emotional life is inscribed by the author—and are frustrated when they perceive the emotional life of said author to be kept off the page. It’s our job as readers to know what our prejudices are, and to admit them.
We are, as bounded beings, much smaller and more compact and abbreviated than our actual empathetic/spiritual/energetic/interpersonal experience, which explodes us over and over and over again, and sends us scurrying with the urge to occupy space that sometimes feels like it exists outside our actual selves. Writing is emotional: it is motion; it is a motion. What the author’s emotional life looks like on the page will always be as varied as the faces worn by the authors themselves. One job writers can assign themselves is the job of articulating feeling, but there are many more jobs available than that one. In verse in particular I find other assignments more interesting. My poems are born of profound struggles with language. They’re live, bound things; spirits in bodies. What I can say in the gesturing-to-myself vein here is that I generally want to write poems that are impossible. That’s not unemotional. Nor is it cerebral. It’s my relationship to language.
14H: “Address to Naos” seems quite abstract, but the “naos” of the title suggests to me it could be about the treatment of adoptees: “…never count / within a room for form.” I then think back to “Foster” and the image “ashes of roses” takes on freight. What do you consider the role of writing in the abstract to be, and how do you make it function in your work?
RG: I love abstraction. I think it’s my native water. My friend Lucy yelled at me once over popsicles for being too abstract—we were talking about relationships and she was having a hard time understanding what I was saying, even though there was a ton of emotion in my voice. I think about that conversation all the time. Language goes abstract on me when I am reaching most utterly and completely for language’s tools, for its familiar functions. When, as in song, there is such an intensity of feeling attached to the locating of the words, and the laying of the lines, that the medium at hand itself changes. I think more about solid, liquid, vapor, gas, about how the forces of the earth itself direct what happens to molecules. Is there a difference between abstraction and obliqueness? Abstraction is not the opposite of concreteness. Abstract language, just like abstract imagery, articulates exactly. Its references just belong to a different plane.
“Address to Naos” is one of the poems I like most in the collection. I wrote it for one of my best friends when he first went on antiretrovirals—during that transition, he was in this incredibly dense place (density of feeling, of meta-feeling, of register, totally wacked-out dreams…). I think about switchbacks with really tight corners when I think about that time. I was doing some reading about cell science, and when I hit the term naos—which is the word for the space that exists between cells, the non-stuff that makes up most of existence—I knew I needed to offer something in a poem, to remind him about all the parts of us that aren’t nameable and that don’t get thrown by circumstance. In the end, that’s the majority of the space we call us.
14H: I read on your blog that you teach creative nonfiction. What draws you to this genre? Does it interact with your writing of poetry?
RG: I both teach and write creative nonfiction, though I’m approaching the point where I’m going to have to jettison that term specifically and move over to ‘essay’ once and for all. I don’t really feel the genre distinctions between poetry and fiction and nonfiction(s) etcetera anymore, and am particularly uncomfortable with the lines we draw between fiction and non-. I don’t need to get into that stuff here—John D’Agata has done a beautiful job of articulating everything I could possibly want to. But yes, essay is incredibly important to me. As is poetry. As is story. They’re forces, not forms. We just have certain traditions for the expressions of each—just like we have traditions for all expressions (gender, faith, family...), as well as breakthroughs.
What draws me to essay is what draws me to love. Its potential to educate, to awaken and deepen inquiry, its capacity to challenge, the space it grants story and relationship and realization. Its power to help us remember our relationships to one another as participants in a human conversation, and its thank-god insistence (when the essaying is good) on engagement. I am thrilled to be alive and writing at a time when so many gifted writers from so many seemingly distinct traditions are discovering the essay and moving some of their work into its deeply investigative territory. Talk about territory and kinship. The entire last year of my life has been about prose, about taking up the work of finding a story form that can support my own narrative. I’m learning what it’s like to commit to poetics on an entirely new level. It’s the steepest reckoning I’ve ever undertaken. Forgive me if I sound abstract here, but it’s huge. Like working with everything.Sandra Wassilie
Poetry Editor
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