Joyelle McSweeney : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

When our baby was born with a grievous, unexpected birth defect,  flown to Riley, and lived thirteen days, we had no words to describe what we were feeling. In fact I'm not sure we were even feeling-- a word like 'feeling' might be too comprehensive, and even the word "describe" seems like drawing a line around something that cannot be bound. To gesture towards it, I'd say: the feeling was like falling down the stairs--pain, disbelief, peril, terrible momentum, perceptual intensity, and knowing that it will be worse when it is over. Time went so quick. And yet, it was the time of illness, it was hospital time, so it also distended and dilated, we were inside some stoma of time, bacteria living in the lidless eye of time. 

And our baby in her warm room on her raised white bier began to remind us of an image, from Art--  it was the image of Mario Montez at the beginning of Jack Smith's queer, underground, and notoriously unfinished film, Normal Love. In the opening shots, Mario Montez is black-eyed screen-goddess, in white bonnet, in a bath of pearls and milk. Everything that happens in the film goes away from and returns to this image. And so it was with our baby, in her incredible glamour, under her heat lamps, arrayed on white sheets, her black hair swirling around her white bandages, and tubes cycling all of her holy blood out of her and bringing it back at the neck--  we couldn't take our eyes off her. I would glance at my husband sidelong, and, in extremis, repeat:  

normal love, normal love.

I found at the hospital that Art did not desert me, and I realized then that Art was truly my faith. And, for a creed, lines of poetry, images from film-- when my consciousness could not collect itself to form a thought, my brain relayed images and lines, and it gave me comfort to rub my raw self up against that Art a child rubs a scrap of soft worn shining fabric-- the more drastic the Art, the more it was able to reach me in my extremity. Artaud, Cendrars, Bataille, Breton--all that intensity and frottage. When we finally removed the respirator, when the tube came up from her throat, I was afraid to watch, afraid I would see something ugly that would flap like a black cloth over my whole life. But I didn't turn away. I opened my eyes in the dark (Ro. Bolaño tr. Chrs. Andrews).  I looked on my dying baby and felt a prayer come to my lips:

Let beauty be convulsive or it shall not be at all.

Later, at home,  in the dark, when I could not close my eyes, I would recite: "Night is the insane asylum of the plants."  That's the great Chilean poet Raúl Zurita translated by Anna Deeny Morales. And often are the times I recall this quote by Zurita, translated by David Shook:

I felt that pain and death should be responded to with a poetry and an art that was as vast and strong as the violence that was exercised over us. To place in opposition the limitless violence of crime and the limitless violence of beauty, the extreme violence of power and the extreme violence of art, the violence of terror and the even stronger violence of all our poems.

And often are the times Johannes and I will turn to each other in our Rust Belt kitchen, in our distraught, 100-year-old diva of a house, with the house and the world falling down around us, one dead child, one foster child we love fiercely, two adolescent daughters picking a path through a world of ruins, and we paraphrase a sacred dialogue for Blaise Cendrars and Little Jehanne of France:

--Are we going to go all the way, Blaise?

--Yes, we're going to go all the way. 

And then, like Mary Shelley, we just keep going.

Joyelle McSweeney : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The most difficult thing about writing poetry is not writing poetry. Reading about everything the Shelleys sacrificed to make their life entirely about art, thought, and writing, and everything that crashed into their life anyway,  has partly eased my anguish and self-blame. Even with my kids in school and on days which should feel 'free', I spend so much time on the phone with doctors and dentists, time sorting out health insurance, shopping for food, dealing with the foster care system, attending meetings, trying not to look and then looking at the unbelievably bad news crashing in at every orifice--

But I also know: to write is the real drug. To write is to break the law and get kicked out of the republic for whatever little intoxicating grain of time you can find. The more time I actually get to spend writing with any kind of dailiness, the more of that drug I get, and the more I want it, and the happier I am. 

 

Joyelle McSweeney : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Yeats says a poem should end like a well-made box, closing, but these days I know a poem is finished when I want to go live there, when it doesn't bother me anymore. Close me up in the book, in the vault. And then, like Madeline Usher, I'll spring out! 

  

Joyelle McSweeney : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

My introduction to poetry was extremely random and archaic-- two qualities which may be found in my poesie to this day. An important and dubious early accident was the gift of a red-vinyl bound anonymous-feeling anthology of 'best-loved American poetry", which included poems in supposed regional and racial dialects, patriotic ballads about George Washington and Paul Revere, "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley (the famous  "Hoosier" poet who wrote the supposed "Hoosier" dialect) and also weird bits of decadence, like Thoreau's poem "Smoke" which begins "Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird!" or "I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying" (John Crowe Ransom) and then, like, "Casey at the Bat." 

I had no fucking idea what any of this was, it all seemed so cryptic, cartoonish, violent, boisterous and random, but I felt compelled to read and re-read it. Something of its hectic exclamatory nature and its random throngdness has certainly stuck with me, and made me at least a fearless reader, a reader who goes by ear and loves a crowd. I think there was some Sandburg too to balance it out, which is sort of shocking in retrospect, given his socialism. The people, yes. Of course the chaos and racial violence of American languaging was also evident in this book, entirely audible and threatening. Even alphabetical order felt like being pelted with pebbles, and what was this thing at the back--this index of first lines, which just mashed the whole thing up and regurgitated it again, this time with rhythmic, quasi-religious delivery? 

Next up I read a sexily-illustrated edition of Poe, which introduced me to a lot of decadent logics, decor, costumes, hair-styles, architectures, motifs and narrative mechanisms. These would seem far-fetched and thrilling for a long time until they just started to seem true. 

Later our own little baby would live and die at a hospital built and named as a memorial to James Whitcomb Riley, The Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, Indiana. Whenever I was not in her room I was in a little Gothic-style library, which was v. quiet, since literally not one of my fellow Hoosiers  (except for Johannes Göransson) were ever in there. A very Bruce Wayne feel to this library, and a very haunted feel to this hospital. I continue to be haunted by this hospital, and I would like in turn to haunt it. I would like to live there as the library ghost.

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.