Joyelle McSweeney : part one

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books, most recently Toxicon & Arachne, poems; The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a goth ecopoetics; and Dead Youth, or, The Leaks, a verse play. She co-edits the international press Action Books and is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works. She teaches at Notre Dame.

What are you working on?

Right now I am reading Mary Shelley's journals and working on a long poem in daily installments called Deathstyles. 

I haven't returned to Deathstyles for a bit because of the chaos of daily life, but in that sense my own chaos seems to have merged with the defunct dailiness of Deathstyles and with M.Shelley's journals. I feel a sense of self-recognition, self-contempt and of course fondness as I read about the chaos of the Shelley set, the amount of time PB Shelley spent not-writing, but rather going around trying to scrape together loans, the gossip that was traded about and circulated back to them, the seriousness with which they approached such endeavours as publishing anarchic texts via fire balloon, the random ways catastrophe arrived--by germ and undertow, not fire-balloon. I feel very reflected in the book, in all of its characters and settings, improbable successes and boisterous failures, sublimities and calamities

The Deathstyles are narrative poems about trying to want to live and trying to help children live in a world made of death. The title is a reference to Ingeborg Bachmann's novel trilogy about trying to want to survive a world revealed to be structured by patriarchy's death-dealing. In a world designed to be unsurvivable, is death an act of resistance or capitulation? I have one answer for myself, and another for my daughters, so, like Mary Shelley, I just keep going.