Candice Wuehle : part five

How does a poem begin?

With a glitch. Most (maybe all?) of my poems begin with trying to think through something that resists comprehension, something that is managing to exist outside my own intellectual economy: an excess/affect/aura that can’t be accounted for in my schema. This takes a lot of different forms. I think in my earlier work I thought a lot about emotional excess, but I’ve really become more obsessed over the last few years with thinking about psychic excess. So, for example, every poem in my last book, DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, takes its point of departure from a moment of sublime uncanny in a photograph by Francesca Woodman. The poem “i’m trying my hand at fashion photography” (forthcoming in The Bennington Review) takes these lines:

[…]                           Frames
become us all. Lift
a limp glove with a glovved hand
to estimate the importance of a body. Everything
i say is nude
propaganda, is spiritual inseam. Spit
ash. Pin the fur to the wall. […]

from this photo of Woodman’s. The engine for the poem was really just thinking through the weirdly animated quality of the empty glove, trying to figure out why it was so effective.

Candice Wuehle : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Every poet I read changes the way I think about writing a little bit. But the most directly influential would be Lisa Robertson for her unapologetic intelligence, Hannah Weiner for her radical expansion of what a poem is, Carrie Lorig for her ability to create work so raw and sincere that it feels a little religious (in the best way) to read. And Johannes Göransson for completely disrupting the way I thought a poem should (or could) speak, for expanding my notion of voice into something beyond the lyric “I”—beyond human, really.

Candice Wuehle : part three

Why is poetry important?

It makes room for slowness. I think most of the forces we get exposed to on a minute-by-minute basis encourage (or insist) on completion and product. We’re encouraged by the structure (most of us) live in to produce something packable, comprehensible, digestible. We’re always working towards the “end,” but poetry refuses that. First, because a poem is always evolving in relationship to the reader and the reader is always evolving in relationship to…everything. Second, because to even move towards comprehensibility, it’s necessary to think very slowly. I think the reason people resist engaging with poetry is the same reason poetry is important: it's practice in resisting perfection.

Candice Wuehle : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I think I first began writing poetry in part because it doesn’t ever have to be finished. (I wanted to be a poet as a teenager, quit and studied literature, and then came back to it after a neurosurgery that made it hard for me to sustain concentration during the months I was recovering. That was 10 years ago, but the sense that the most difficult expression is not sustainable in any linear manner has not left me.) Since poems don’t have the burden of narrative/exact meaning/sense-making, they can expand into indeterminate, unqualified, unclassified areas in order to deal/cope/consider the spaces where narrative/exact meaning/sense-making fail. For me, the supernatural thing about poetry is its ability to address fissure, breakage, excess, lack, interstitial space. That said, I don’t ever wonder if a poem is finished; it isn’t. It shouldn’t and can’t be. 

Candice Wuehle : part one

Candice Wuehle is the author of BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, 2018) and the chapbooks VIBE CHECK (Garden-door Press, 2017), EARTH*AIR*FIRE*WATER*ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015) and curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs, (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Berkeley Review, The Bennington Review, The New Delta Review, and Fugue. She is originally from Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Candice currently resides in Lawrence, Kansas where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow at The University of Kansas.

What are you working on?

I’ve just finished the first draft of my first novel, The Creature’s Creature, so I’m in the revision process. When I first began the novel, I thought it was going to be very hybrid—a mix of poetry, flash fiction, dreams, transcripts from the episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that terrified me when I was a child. But I only got about a 1000 words in before I realized that what the novel really wanted to do was hybridize genre (as opposed to form) and so I’ve ended up with a manuscript that's equal parts Stieg Larsson, Clueless, and The Hour of the Star. The impulse to write the novel was prompted by a conspiracy theory I heard and couldn’t get out of my head. In short, the theory is that the CIA recruits assets for behaviour modification programs (like MK Ultra) from beauty pageants because pageant contestants display personality traits that lend themselves to programming (they’re good at memorization, dealing with authority, conforming to their environment, are physically fit, have a capacity for rapport building, and are overall intelligent). My research for the novel was a disturbing mixture of Toddlers in Tiaras, YouTube testimonies from women who believed they were CIA sleeper cells, the Errol Morris documentary Wormwood, spy movies, and just a lot of podcasts interviewing conspiracy theorists. The main idea that I kept coming back to in response to all these sources was the sense that trauma is the estrangement of the body from identity. Also, that there is a huge profit for any force that can successfully separate the two. Of course, this is a subject that poetry is well-suited to address but it felt really satisfying to me to subvert the genres themselves that had originally delivered messages about the body (everything from teen movies to YM magazine to Calvin Klein ads, etc.). So, ultimately, it’s a novel that asks questions about how we learn to construct identity; how does our sense of “beauty,” sexuality, gender, etc. become a sort of possession; how do we learn to see ourselves without a frame?