Rebecca Lindenberg is a writer, educator, and editor. She’s the author of Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible (BOA Editions, forthcoming October 2024), The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series, 2014), winner of the 2015 Utah Book Award, and Love, an Index (McSweeney’s 2012). She’s the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Excellence Award, an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, among others. She has also been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the MacDowell Arts Colony. Her poetry, lyric essays, and criticism appear in The Missouri Review, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, The Best American Poetry 2019, Poetry, The Believer, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Journal, Seneca Review, Prelude, DIAGRAM, Third Coast, Smartish Pace, Conjunctions, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati where she is also Poetry Editor of the Cincinnati Review.
The cover of Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible features a mandala of NPH insulin bottles that center around the circular puncture of the skin from microneedles on top of a beige-washed background. The speaker’s reality of living with Type I diabetes is one where the imagination is delimited by the limitations of her body: it “would not be exaggerating to say” the insulin pump is literally keeping the speaker alive. I am amazed by the speaker’s resilience–which couples the epic of the ancient Greeks with her own reimagining. Lindenberg writes: “apocalypse / means not the end of the world but / the universe disclosing its knowledge / as the sea is meant to give up its dead.” There might be days when “I’d tell you all my choices have been disastrous,” the speaker says, as we see the cracks in the pharmaceutical dialectics of diabetic care. But there are many other days where we–through the speaker’s vision–see how even her failure to attain a type of normalcy and stability is splendid and worthy of our contemplation.
Tiffany Troy: How does the first poem, “To My Insulin Pump,” set up the poems that are to follow in Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible? To me, it immediately evokes the NPH insulin mandala of the cover as you describe how it “would not be exaggerating to say you/ (weight of a deck of cards, cost of a small car)/ are literally keeping me alive.” At the same time, there is a wistfulness that is carried throughout for those living with chronic diseases to find anything other than their constant memento mori/ anatomy extension that’ll save them “difficult to love.”
Rebecca Lindenberg: I really appreciate this question because of course a first poem in any collection has some work to do, doesn’t it? I chose this particular poem to open the book because I think it briefly alights on many important concepts and related to my own experience living with Type 1 diabetes, but it also represents some of the artistic and poetic challenges that writing about my disease presented to me once I finally committed to doing so. (It’s also one of the shorter poems in the book, so I hoped that it wouldn’t scare readers off.)
In terms of theme or content, I hope the poem uses the fact of my insulin pump in a literal way but also as a symbol. Because in Type 1 diabetes, the physical object of the insulin pump is a sort of concrete manifestation of a lot of the more elusive emotional and social and intellectual challenges of living with chronic illness. In addition to the basic quotidian challenges of just keeping oneself alive, there’s the physical, financial dependence upon the prosthetic organ that can be a real mixed bag – I feel deep and abiding gratitude to have this incredible technology that has changed my life, but also anxiety and resentment at how literally tethered I feel to systems (the health insurance system, medical corporations, device engineers, medical supply chains, capitalism generally, etc.) that I find to be deeply problematic. In this poem, the pump also represents the ways in which chronic bodies and disabled bodies can be (or can be perceived to be) obstacles to intimacy. While I believe all intimacy is an ongoing and endless process of discovery – both self-discovery and the deep learning of another – chronic bodies have a few extra chapters in their how-to manuals, and that can be exhausting for the person with chronic disease and/or disability, and sometimes concerning or confusing for our loving partner(s). I think the idea of what is or isn’t “difficult to love” is related to that idea of intimacy and self-awareness, but also serves as an expression of the paradox of living in a chronic body. What I mean is: my body, which is of course the very thing keeping me alive, is also the thing that makes my life sometimes so, so scary and hard. I think the gesture of embracing the insulin pump and my life as a kind of cyborg is a radical form of acceptance of what that whole complicated life is all about. So I try to make the pump, the device, feel organic (like a purring cat, for example) while I try to make the body feel less-bodied (compared to an ocean, or fictionalized as a “spy”), to make the question of where I end and the pump begins a little muddy, a little impossible. Which is, these days, how I feel about it.
And in terms of the poem representing some of what I found hard in writing a lot of these poems, I’ll say that one of the enormous difficulties in writing this project orbited this question: How does one manage explanation, exposition about something as complicated as Type 1 diabetes in a form (verse) that I’ve been relentlessly taught should eschew and resist exactly all of those things? How does a poet attempt to make information evocative? And how much of it does the reader need? After thirty-five years living inside of this disease, I found the process of curating the right details really difficult. Which of the millions of many details matter most, will work as the best metonymic gestures for the ideas I’m hoping to actualize in the work? This poem was certainly an exercise in trying to figure some of that out in a concise way. And I’m a very structural thinker, as a poet. So while I never envisioned this poem as a sonnet, I did always want the poem to have a kind of “volta” at the end that made the gesture of a turn or “twist.” But to be honest, as with many poems in this book, when the words showed up, they took even me a little bit by surprise.
TT: The insulin pump as a metonymic gesture of the self took me entirely by surprise and delighted me, because oftentimes we do not pay attention to chronic diseases or the medical devices that literally keeps the chronically ill alive. What was the process like in putting together your third poetry collection?
RL: Honestly? Laborious, confusing, anxiety-producing, and interminable. But also necessary, cathartic, incredibly meaningful, and enormously relieving. I think I’ve been circling the project of writing about my chronic illness – the event in my life that initially hurt me into utterance – for a very, very long time. But I don’t think I had the confidence nor the wherewithal nor the emotional maturity nor the artistic capability to approach it before. And I didn’t really want to approach it for this book, initially – I was still circling the idea as I circled the world on an incredibly generous Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship. And many of those poems, which now feel like “showing my work,” appear in the second section of this book. It was, as I hope the poems suggest, the pressure of the pandemic that finally demanded I turn my attention to this inescapable aspect of my existence. And I could not write about my condition without writing about my family – both my family of origin and my own nuclear family with my husband and children. My disease and my experience with it is both literally and genetically tied to my family of origin (my grandfather was diabetic, and my uncle, and a cousin) and the way my family has supported me and helped me but also sometimes have hovered or wrung their hands, all impact the way I feel about my disease. And how I feel about my disease, of course, impacts how I manage it. I wrote many, many more poems than are included here. Some of them are just bad. Some of them are just not for others. I hope I gathered together the right ones – I think I want the poems to explore not only the immediate and obvious impact that Type 1 diabetes has had on my life, but the ways in which it affects all of my relationships, my ways of thinking and being in the world, the lens through which I see both the familiar and the strange, and how both living with and sometimes rebelling from my disease are two of the forces that most dramatically have shaped so much of who I am as both a person and as a poet.
TT: How did you choose which poems go to the collection’s three sections and how did you sequence the poems within each section? The first section feels more contained whereas the last section feels less so, perhaps because it is looking towards the overarching structure of the pharmaceutical dialectics of diabetic care and its impact on the speaker. Were the poems–like the wandering, traveling, perhaps slightly haunted second section–mostly written during a specific period of your life?
RL: RL: Thank you so much for these excellent questions. The structure of the book is, I hope, pretty intentional, but I should say that I always think of the organization of a collection as being somewhat intuitive. To be honest at one point I had all the poems printed out and taped up on the walls of my house and I just kept shifting them around until things “felt right.” But there were a few things I kept front-of-mind as I did so.
First, I wanted this to feel different than my first two poetry collections, both of which are very narrative. My first book, which is about my life with my late partner (poet Craig Arnold) and his mysterious disappearance in Japan in 2009, and then living with the aftermath of his vanishing and declared-death had a “before” and “after” and the long centerpiece title poem, the abecedarian called “Love, an Index,” smack in the middle in between them. My second book, The Logan Notebooks, is very much structured by the seasons and the elements so it’s easy to see that the book takes place over the course of more-or-less a year and reads like a kind of daybook. While I enjoy writing those kinds of emergent narratives and I also enjoy reading them, I wanted this book to be different. I wanted it to feel less chronological and more suspended-in-time-and-space. I wanted this in part because I think time for people with chronic diseases and disabilities works differently from “normal” time. But I also didn’t want it to feel too linear because much of this book was written during and because of the Covid pandemic, and during the initial weeks and months of that experience, I think a lot of us felt like we were existing in some kind of bizarre, scary suspended-animation.
Another consideration I gave to the structure of the book has to do with that quandary I mentioned earlier – managing information in a lyric (rather than rhetorical) situation. I knew I wanted to introduce certain pieces of information early in the book because I felt they were very important for the reader to have a grasp of (for example) the fact that I’m diabetic, what Type 1 diabetes is, how the disease affects more than the physical body, etc. I hope that gesturing towards those kinds of questions early in the collection might help contextualize the later poems and give them a different kind of resonance. So the first section of the book I envision as a kind of “origin story” of sorts emerging. The second section I imagine as trying to situate the individual in a bigger world, with its ongoing wonders and conflicts that affect us all in ways that can be unpredictable, and that show the person with the chronic disease and disability trying to navigate that world. And the final section, I think, tries (and sometimes stumbles) to look forward, to continue, to be-ongoing, which is an aspiration of mine as both a human and a poet.
The poems were written over many years, but poems from different times are all mixed in with each other. The first section, for instance, has probably the first poem I wrote that found its way into the collection, which is “A Brief History of the Future Apocalypse.” I wrote the first draft of that in, I think, 2016. But it also includes one of the most recently-written pieces, “On Memory,” which I wrote after talking to my sister about how we perceive our own autobiographies, or more specifically, my observation that the way we perceive our lives at any given moment can profoundly change how we feel about and interpret our past actions and things that happened to us in the past. We talk often about how our past influences our present but maybe not always about how our present affects and influences our past (or at least, how we interpret it). I would say that sometimes unintentionally and other times very consciously, this book is really about trying to bring the past, present, and possible future into some kind of alignment or co-existence with each other. So perhaps a way of thinking about the final section is as a reaching-towards that desire, knowing it will always remain just out-of-grasp. But then, we don’t tend to write poems about the things we imagine we’ll ever get to the bottom of.
TT: The speaker throughout the collection peppers in the realities of living with diabetes (“First it took his eyes, then his kidneys, then his hands and feet, and it turns out you can survive awhile without those things, but not without a heart”) and the history of scientific advances as it relates to diabetic care (“But I am diabetic, in part, because in January, 1922, a fourteen-year-old boy dying of diabetes in a Toronto hospital was given the first ever human dose of insulin. / Insulin from cattle, which earned Banting and Macleod a Nobel Prize. / if not for that, those eldritch sciences, I wouldn’t be diabetic. I wouldn’t be at all.)
There is this interesting tension between the scientific language which demands testing with the mythos (the nymph Ondine, the self-mythologizing of causes of diabetes), wherein the restraint that is caused by having chronic illness (and the corresponding fear of failure) becomes the momentum that drives the narrative forward. What is mythology to the speaker? Is it a type of escape, or perhaps a means to better see the green shade in the red splendor?
RL: Oh, how I absolutely love this question, and I’m so genuinely grateful to you for asking it. And this is also such a tremendous insight into the book, and I’m very moved that you picked up on it so astutely and articulated it so generously. I think in some ways I hope that some of these poems collapse the imagined binary of “factual” and “poetical” languages by trying to interweave them. I also hope that by juxtaposing things like myth and science, we can see how each plays a crucial role in our understanding of the world and of ourselves.
I’m absolutely fascinated with myth and with mythology from around the world and I always have been. Myth is the blueprint, I think, of all kinds of fantasy – they’re full of magic and transformation. But I also think myth serves as a blueprint for ways that storytelling can shape our sense of personal or collective identity, as well – something with very real-life consequences. Like, if your people sent even a single boat to the armada listed in the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad, you’re Greek (a concept as much as an identity). For my part, I can’t help finding ways that so many kinds of myth and mythology feel ever-relevent as metaphor and symbol, as archetype and fable because they often represent Big Questions, like: Why do we die? What is love? Why do bad things happen to people who seem to have done nothing to deserve it? What is right? Who decides? What does trauma do to us? What does trauma do to our world? Should we want to be strong or should we seek to be wise? Should we value longevity or should we prioritize fame? If you have to choose between loyalty and safety, how do you choose? How should we treat a stranger? What is a good life, well-lived? I think the book I was trying to write inevitably bumped into some of those kinds of questions as I was writing it, thinking about what is and isn’t within our control, thinking about what choices we make and are sometimes forced to make, what it means to live with the Damocles sword of our own mortality hung over us. So using myth to illustrate certain moments or concepts in the poems happened very organically.
I think myth is also just a language I have knocking around inside me. I have Greek ancestry and I definitely grew up being told Greek myths (not always the orthodox versions) as bedtime stories, and reading children’s versions of Greek mythology. I also had an anthology of fairy and folk tales from around the world that sort of imprinted on me as a young reader. And while I was brought up in a pretty secular family, I had a lot of community exposure to the Abrahamic religions and the many iconic stories of that tradition, too. When later I began exploring more deeply epics like the Popol Vuh and the Bhagavad Gita, my sense of awe deepened. Here are these beautiful poems, basically, that have shaped and changed and witnessed and recorded and handed down the world for generations – honestly, I don’t know how any kind of storyteller (even a reluctant storyteller with a deep mistrust of narrative, such as myself) could help from being captivated.
But for all that, I don’t think I see myth as a kind of escape, but rather as a tool to help me “zoom out” when I do feel trapped inside of an idea or a feeling or a paradigm. Myths are often stories about cleverness, about out-witting, or just about outside-of-the-box thinking. Atalanta tosses bright baubles behind her as she runs, to distract her would-be suitor-pursuers, send them side-questing so she can get away. Odysseus secrets his army inside of a giant statue meant to be a gift – so exquisitely cruel and cunning and ruthless his enemy never saw it coming. Scheherazade plots with her little sister to outsmart a murderous king by telling such a good story with such good cliff-hangers he can’t help but eavesdrop and get sucked in, keeping her alive so he won’t miss the next episode. These are characters whose quick-thinking gives us all new models for the imagination. And mostly, I don’t think the best use of imagination is escape from reality. I think the best use of imagination is a deeper and more personal and a more (though I dislike this word) authentic relationship to the real. I hope this answers your question.
TT: It does! And the idea of myth as a zooming out is related to what you wrote about the apocalypse. You write, “I didn’t / always know that in the ancient Greek / apocalypse / means not the end of the world but / the universe disclosing its knowledge / as the sea is meant to give up its dead.” And it goes on, even perhaps on days when “I’d tell you all my choices have been disastrous.”
Part of the world-building in this collection is about form: the recurrences of prose poems/ lyrical essays like “Notes” or “Discourses,” multi-sectioned travel poems on Roman ruin, odes/ elegies in couplets and a breakdown of form in poems like “At Teufelsberg in the Subjunctive Mood.” What I’ll observe is the incredible complexity of the parataxic (the “and”, “-” or “,”) and hypotactic (nested dependent clauses) in the prose pieces that mirror the kind of breathlessness in the dead-pan reveal: “To give a little context, he had the same disease I do, and it killed him. First it took his eyes, then his kidneys, then his hands and feet...”
I am wondering if you could speak first about the prose poems/ lyrical essays in this piece, and your thoughts on prose poetry. Then if you could turn to the other poetic forms engaged in this collection, I would love to hear (how if they do) help construct that sense of time for people living with chronic illness.
RL: First, I really appreciate your attention to detail in how you’ve looked at these poems and I love that you found these syntactical patterns I’m not sure I was always consciously aware of. That being said, I think a lot about syntax. I taught a whole graduate seminar a couple of years ago, an iteration of the University of Cincinnati’s “Techniques and Forms in Poetry” course, where I focused on The Sentence as the form for the semester. So I could go on about sentences for many sentences. And I think you kind of have to talk about sentences to talk about prose poetry, because prose poems are poems that use sentences but not lines. This seems obvious, of course, but raises questions: What, then, makes it a poem? Why would a poet deprive themselves of such a crucial advantage of poetic craft – the suspense built by enjambing a sentence over multiple lines? Seems almost silly. But prose poems operate in their own tradition, and provide their own unique advantages. This, too, is something I could go on and on and on about, but I will try to focus.
I think most people would agree that the prose poem is always-already a hybrid form, and that it’s “both-and” as well as “neither,” it resists definition and resists classification and therefore lends itself very tidily to a poetics of resistance, rebellion, marginalization, subversion, innovation, etc. When writing about the problematic language that the medical establishment has used with diabetic patients, then, or writing love poems in the context of a somewhat unconventional (long-distance) marriage, the prose poem seemed apt.
But if I’m thinking about less in terms of the tradition of the prose poem and more in terms of the experience of the prose poem, I have other thoughts. For example, I think that when a reader encounters a block of prose, they expect the language to be fluid, legible, comprehensible, and communicative. So part of the fun of writing prose poems can be about disrupting that expectation. I think, too, that prose poems (in both the reading and writing of them) inherently allow for a very different kind of momentum to build throughout the poem, because you can build up a lot more velocity running through a field than you can running down a flight of stairs or bleachers. But prose poems can also do exactly the opposite of that. Prose poems with a lot of punctuation in them (periods, semi-colons, back-slashes, hyphens) really frustrate that forward-momentum and can evoke a sense of stuck-ness or interference. And finally, a prose poem can also just operate like a frame. Most lineated poems really need some kind of “turn” in them somewhere, something that gives a sense that you’ve moved from “part one” to “part two” of the poem. But prose poems can act as a simple repository of words, wherein no word, no phrase, no gesture counts more, no language is particular hierarchized over any other within the frame, and all of the words in the poem reside within the frame like a painting or photograph.
This curates a sense of simultaneity. I love Gertrude Stein for how her prose poems do this in Tender Buttons, for instance. And it pushes back against the cause-and-effect logic of narrative or the if-this-then-that logic of argument. In fact, it sort of resists even the this-makes-me-think-of-that associative logic we sometimes call “lyric.” Obviously, most prose poems can’t manage to do all of those things, but if a prose poem manages to do any of them effectively, it’s probably a pretty good prose poem.
So having said all that, I hope that the various prose poems in Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible all work a little differently from each other. I think the “He Asks Me to Send Him Some Words...” poems are sort of repositories or frames from which a scenario kind of emerges. I hope that “Discourses of Diabetes Care” operates in the category of frustrated movement – I hope the form kind of annoys the reader, honestly, and evokes that sense of wanting to move quickly and wanting to move forward and feeling like it should be easier than it is to read. And I hope “Introduction to a Poem at a Reading” does some of that momentum-gathering that I mentioned, that it reads as an accumulation of griefs and hurts and hopes and loves until the poem is basically too full to continue and has to just end. Whether my instinct-slash-intention is my reader’s experience, though, someone else will have let me know.
When it comes not only to prose poems but form generally, I think I’m a very structural poet. I would certainly not consider myself a formal poet, but I like to think inside of certain kinds of scaffolding. Form, when it’s working best for me, feels like its own kind of short-hand in poetry. It’s an additional layer of meaning in a poem, and one that works sometimes in concert with and sometimes in juxtaposition to the poem’s language or assertion.
As with prose poems, I think form can bring some expectations to a poem because of the tradition of the form – what kinds of poems did practitioners of the form originally or historically write, using the form? Like, sonnets were initially almost always love poems. So we’ve come to expect something intimate from sonnets, I think. But also, and I really believe this firmly, when it comes to formal poetry in English-language traditions, we have always honored forms more in the breach than the observance. Form is an evolving and fluid and dynamic and living thing. So in my humble opinion, sonnets do not have to rhyme. Or be written in iambic pentameter. Maybe some don’t have to have 14 lines. Maybe it’s important to call it a sonnet but make sure it does not have a turn or volta, to enact a point about the subject matter. Like anyone, I can be razzle-dazzled by someone whose poem manifests the kind of “sprezzatura” of the Italian and English courtiers who invented and then embraced the form. But, like, when Thomas Wyatt first translated Petrarch into English, he did so in a way that would have made him sound just a little old-fashioned to the English court, practically handing them permission to update the form and change it to make it their own – and they did. And thus the tradition of changing the sonnet somehow every time you write one was born. I say all of this just to explain, I suppose, why I myself as a poet have never felt particularly beholden to the rules of certain forms, though sometimes I like to give myself the artistic challenge.
What’s most important to me about form or perhaps more aptly structure is that it helps me think, as a poet, in what feels to me like a more multi-dimensional way. For example, I have a pantoum in the book, “Spiel: A Love Poem.” I chose the form because I really see that poem as being about access intimacy, and the low-key exasperation of having to explain and re-explain my body to people, especially intimate partners. And the corresponding frustration, too, of having to disabuse people of things they think they understand about diabetes that are incorrect – sometimes dangerously so. But pantoums are also great because they allow so much repetition-with-variation, which is how a “spiel” typically works – it gets sort of refined as it’s rehearsed over and over. Also, pantoums allow for a kind of interweaving or braiding of multiple strands of thought and narrative together, stitching them to each other at multiple points and in varied ways. So in this poem I could weave history, scientific fact, myth, personal experience, etc., without having them feel too separate from each other (in their own stanzas, for example). Finally, the movement of the pantoum, because of its repetitions, has always felt to me like a kind of two-steps-forward-one-step-back procession, which is I think how life in a chronic body can feel, and it’s also perhaps how trying to find lasting love can feel. The other forms in the book are things like odes, which are of course modal rather than metrical forms, meaning the form is more about the occasion than the constraints, or they’re free verse poems and so they’re organized more organically – trying to capture ways the mind wanders in real time. I think I have many poems across the years about language acquisition, like a “phrasebook” in my first collection. So here in “At Teufelsburg in the Subjective Mood” the poem is structured around that again – learning a new language becomes the organizing principle for a poem about learning another person and your relationship with them. There’s also a poem, “Within,” whose structure came from playing a word-finder app. And I always, always love making lists. List poems are among my favorites to both read and write. I love the logic of curation.
P.S. Just as a quirky side note, since you mention Roman ruin above, I think there’s only actually one poem in the book that actually references Roman ruins briefly, and that’s “Imaginary Prisons.” The rest are either Incan (“Andean Pastoral,” “Sacsayhuamán,” “Reverse Engineering Their Sacrifier”) or Irish (“Sligo Abbey”) or they’re 20th-century ruins in Germany (Teufelsberg, Beelitz) or Hungary (“Drinking at Szimpla with Emily and Laurel”) or the U.S. (“Ohio”). And I only point it out because I think we have such a deep association with “Roman” and “ruin” (or just Rome as the archetypal fallen empire) that it’s almost hard to pull the two notions apart. And I sort of did that on purpose because I wanted to get away from the romanticization of ruin (though found it kept seeping through). I thought a lot about Emily Dickinson’s poem “Crumbling is not an instant’s act –“ when I was thinking about what all the poems in this collection have in common with each other, in terms of my own concerns. But to your terrific questions –
TT: I would like to turn a moment to the title, and focus on the word “splendid.” Who are some of your influences/ writers you look up to as you write of the splendid body that seeks “to feel everything it can find,” be in the “saffron, rainwater, fish-skin, chive”?
RL: I think one of the reasons I love poetry and have always loved poetry is because poetry gave me a safe space to feel things in my body without disrupting or dysregulating my body. One of the ways I think poetry evokes feelings in me is through imagery, particularly very specific imagery. I am a total sucker for a resonant image. But another thing I absolutely relish in poems is a strong sense of voice, a voice that has its own vocabulary and syntax and swing. And something else I love in poetry is the unexpected. I delight in being surprised. Not astonished, mind you, or shocked, but simply awoken to language and image and idea a little extra by something I wouldn’t expect. I find these qualities in many poets, but I can try to name a few. For the remarkable way her poems hold both jaunty colloquialism and academic erudition, as well as her gift for the visceral, I look no further than the incomparable C.D. Wright. I also really admire her restlessness as a poet; I do not think she ever repeated herself from book to book and project to project, though you can find connective tissue between and among her work. I admire poets of great verve, like Frank O’Hara and Ross Gay. For poets who I think really understand the relationship between concept and execution in their books, and who simultaneously write with spectacular quirks that set them apart from the crowds, I love Anne Carson, C.A. Conrad, Kathryn Cowles, Douglas Kearney, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Hua Nyugen, and many, many others. I love the work of poet Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, who I mentioned earlier, because reading her work makes me feel like I’m thinking her thoughts myself and she’s such a model of how mesmerizing a more rhetorical poet can be. I’m obsessed with the dense wordplay and the deep intelligence of Haryette Mullen. Denise Levertov is someone who imprinted on me very young, because I found tremendous vitality in both her poetry and the way she thought and wrote about poetry. Charles Simic’s surrealist impulses had a profound and lasting effect on my way of thinking about poetry and especially imagery. I’m deeply influenced in sometimes less obvious ways by my teachers and also my current colleagues, so Donald Revell, Mark Strand, Paisley Rekdal, Felicia Zamora, Aditi Machado, among others. And it’s impossible to explain how deeply and how permanently I’ve been influenced by the two men, both poets, with whom I have shared so much of my life and work, my late partner Craig Arnold and my husband, Chris. This is a woefully, woefully incomplete list, and I haven’t actually answered your question about the word “splendid.” I’m not actually sure that I can answer that one, other to say that “sacred” and “holy” seemed too closely associated with solemnity and suffering, and everything else seemed either too impermanent and changeable a state of being to be quite apt. I thought about “wonderous” briefly, and “sublime,” but the latter has too much of the masculine baggage of Kant and Burke and the former felt more like an activity than a state of simply being. Being simply imperfect but also remarkable.
TT: I love what you said about poetry being a safe space to feel and also to sound out the voice of the speaker, and am grateful for you sharing your role models and colleagues. In closing, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world?
RL: Only that I’m so grateful to anyone who reads and spends time and connects with my poems. I still really find the simple idea of someone who doesn’t know me at all reaching voluntarily for my writing and reading my innermost thoughts so strange and marvelous, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. To feel so powerfully connected to strangers I’ve never even heard of is such a weird and wonderful gift of this so-called work. I’m also very grateful to anyone and everyone who actually makes it all the way to the end of my ramblings in this interview! And I’m truly very grateful to you for giving me such terrific questions and creating this space and opportunity to think through my own work with such an insightful interlocutor. (And to BOA, for publishing the book that made this interview possible in the first place.)
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.