An Interview with Jenny Grassl, conducted by Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Abigail Ardelle Zammit: Even before I started reading your collection, I was immediately intrigued by the epigraph from Leonora Carrington’s The Seventh Horse and Other Tales. Both of you draw from myth and fairy-tale, using animal imagery for subconscious distillations, engaging with surrealism, yet never confining yourself within its bounds when it comes to meaning and connotational resonance. I was wondering whether you’d like to talk more about your relationship to Carrington’s life, art, and writing and how it plays itself in Magicholia.
Jenny Grassl: What attracts me the most in Carrington’s art work is her imaginary rendering of the ordinary world, creating ambiguous spaces as realms for fantasy. Haunted yet playful, she creates alternate realities. In Magicholia I explore the tensions among elements of illusion and fact. The spatial arrangements of my words, as well as their content, create a field for the connections between magic and the everyday, a place for transformation. She suggests the creative potential of madness in her writing and art, face to face with the horror. This is a core idea in Magicholia. Magic can be both the illness and the cure.
AAZ: The four subsections of your collection are introduced by artwork featuring alphabets, animated dresses, wolves, cats, birds, mythical creatures and mutating bodies reminiscent of archetypal symbols, here featured in black and white, but, as I learnt from your interview with Kristina Marie Darling in the Tupelo Quarterly 31, coming into the world primarily as wood-cuts. I am fascinated by the way in which your art and writing appear to feed into each other; I imagine that being an artist has taught you to reflect more deeply on how to scatter and layer images, how to make them resonate with and against each other, and how to use the space on your canvas-page for the proliferation of meanings. Could you talk more about this process, explaining how it shapes the poems into being, how it allows you to develop your main thematic preoccupations, and how it provides an imaginary space that readers can inhabit? I am enamoured with the “boa-curling sky” (28), the “ladies of the night removing their lips” (32), as well as the brilliant image in “Framed Edge of Forest”: “and who wouldn’t want to ride a zebra / creaming with stars perspiring over the skyline.” Perhaps you’d like to use these as springboards into your argument.
JG: It is impossible to know which came first, the art work or the writing, but the question about process is a really good one. I do know that after I received my MFA from Bennington, I dove headlong into art work with poetry embedded in it. This was primarily using photography and typography, with some drawing and painting collaged-in. I believe I learned to see the poem space as more of a poemscape, inspired by landscape, but shaped by the imagination. I created woodcuts, and the drawings freed the animal and hybrid kingdoms onto the page. I incorporated writing as automatic writing, an old surrealist and spiritualist technique. The difference in my work is that I intentionally scrambled the words, leaving a record of the thoughts that is unreadable. I enjoyed the duality of revelation and concealment. I write imagistically, and am impatient with declarative philosophy in poems! The zebra image and the poem came from a recent photo collage, an ekphrastic poem from my own art.
AAZ: What I admire most about Magicholia,which I read as coined word for magic and melancholia, is your faith in language as spell and antidote for the ills that have assailed humanity across time, the empowerment they offer through the sheer beauty of sound, music and philosophical musings when they are worked into a memorable phrase, or a line such as this revelatory simile—”like the frog clear-eyed in his brine cured so we can poke and name his parts” (“Conserves”). In order to achieve this effect, you’ve used a wide compendium of literary devices ranging from ellipsis (“listening shell or a half-hinged”, 23), (“say I took my own” 77); syntactical inversion/ambiguity (“Girls and Ouija Glow the Silence”, 41), (“to be seen you can be loved”, 24), (“where changed to why were you born”, 33); puns (“I am fine / fyne—” , 39), (“a personal hanging”, 27); (“starry ices”, 30); lexicon used atypically, as in verbs morphing into nouns, or nouns into verbs (“facet an infinite”, 34); a multitude of alliteration, assonance, auditory doubles (“grip grail”, 58), (“crow craw hair”, 57), (“silver sliver”, 60), and internal rhyme (“woe in the oak/ upon a once“, 34), (“know bone and lone”, 41); and, most crucially, line-breaks which allow for multiple readings. Are there any particular practices that you embrace in order to come up with such verbal jouissance, and to forge your own way through language? How do you know when you’ve brought the poem to its truest articulation through linguistic play and experimentation?
JG: Music and wordplay often surprise me, and I can’t really say where they come from. I do know they tend to develop only when I have accessed a creative place through living life, attending to nature, and reading favorite books. The question about when a poem is done is obviously not a science, but I do go through the whole history of my poetry writing in many poems. I start, simply. Then the lines bloom into images. then I over-write, and pare back down. My paring down might appear as excess writing to some! I prefer to leave the lushness when it suits the subject. I often think of what Lucie Brock-Broido said to a student: “I want to see you go crazy on the page before you go so fiercely scarce.” Intuiting the end is a matter for the ear and heart.
AAZ: My next question ties in with what we have been saying about form and music. For many years I’ve reflected on Roland Barthes comparison of modern poetry to phosphorus, shining its brightest at the point when it’s about to be extinguished (Writing Degree Zero). It is a brightness which I equate with our battle against the expected, the cliché, the mundane—Our duty, as creators, is to regenerate the language in which we write. This is very prominent in your collection, especially in the way your experimental poetics approximate music and the visual arts. In the context of contemporary readership, are there any risks which you equate with this way of writing? How do you juggle this kind of risk-taking against the demands for flat fabulas and dichotomous world-views? How may we nudge readers to listen differently, to slow down in their quest for signification, much as they do when they are listening to a piece of music?
JG: Battling the cliche and mundane as our duty. I love that! It could also be understood as the idea that the work of invention and dismantling the expected is a radical act, critiquing the status quo in the big picture, politically, socially. The risk as I see it is that novelty should not be valued solely for its novelty, devoid of meaning, as a poet strives for the unexpected. Perhaps the slowing down has to be achieved by seduction, rewarding the effort with enough music, image, and content. As a reader, if I am not rewarded in this way, my interest is not sustained. Also, I do think we all need to “stop scrolling.” Scrolling has robbed us of meditative attention.
AAZ: Central to your references to fairy-tale, apart from the figures of Snow White/Briar Rose Prince and evil king, is that of the wolf—”Earth’s wolf not fixed in her roams” we are told at the very start of “Wandering Womb as Cause of Hysteria,” and then again at the end, “in a euthanizing lake the lost wolf.” I read this unorthodox treatment of the wolf trope as a critique of the way in which patriarchy has attempted to control all wanderings of mind, flesh and soul, and of ecriture feminine‘s attempt to break free of what in “Hysteria Medicine” is good-humouredly referred to as “this age of reason.” Perhaps you could talk more about this vis à vis the whole collection, and more specifically about the generative capacities of these maniacal wonderings.
JG: The discursive thought, the roving line (Physically) and their electrical connectivity create a resistance to that control. The wolf, as a symbol of wildness, lives within and without, moving across open terrain. Maniacal wonderings at their worst lead to fear and disorientation. At their best they open new territory and offer archetypal symbol-making to lead the way back to wellness. Images rise and create unconventional maps for healing. Figments can offer an alternative life story.
AAZ: This ties in with the way the split-self becomes the necessary locus of the creative impulse because, as the narrator “Mania Diary: Plumed” explains: “I am porous for signs landing inside me / amulet ambulant to chime every cashier’s ring with fenghuang,” which read one way could mean delusion and paranoia, but read another way, can have the capacity of allowing the speaker to be the weaver of the golden web (“repair the net regold twist with noonsong [...] can survivors weave havoc with shine),” or the Arachne-creatrix of “Debacle Web.” Perhaps, these are also poems about writing’s restorative power, its capacity to dignify, to transform shame, to listen more sensitively to—if not to heal—an aching planet on the brink of environmental collapse?
JG: Writing can bring artistic order to both rigidity and chaos if the themes and symbols that are stirred are not ignored or feared. The chaos of climate change is harder to deal with. Art can certainly address environmental ills. It may not fix them but it offers the most compelling argument for trying. Art and poetry accompany us meaningfully on this difficult journey, much as they can for a dying patient. Given the present political climate, one can only observe a collective death wish of at least half the population. The rest of us need poetry as a countering life force.
AAZ: When I read your work, I feel that despite the obvious differences, yours, like mine, is a poetics of beauty and that perhaps this aesthetic principle is the driving force behind your creativity. I’d like to quote from “End Song” to illustrate my point: “she sees a blue place / in the warm and cool of telescoped stars / in her phone aroused billions of light years ago / sparking in a pocket of space a planet begins in galaxy foreplay”—this last playful but sublime pun, the poignancy with which the woman in the poem aims for a space where she can live on, the faith in a looping time where there is no end and no beginning—all this is beauty at its most ethereal, and I’d love you to talk about how this kind of poetics informs your writing.
JG: I think it is quite radical to embrace a poetics of beauty, and I am more than delighted to join you and your poetry there! Edgar Allen Poe said, “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” The modernists tried to eradicate beauty as a value in art, attempting to break with tradition. What actually happened is that they changed our ideas of beauty. For example cubist work is often experienced as beautiful.
I think your experimental work and mine reach to expand and alter the notions of what is beautiful. How far can you take language to the edge without abandoning beauty?
An Interview with Abigail Ardelle Zammit, conducted by Jenny Grassl
Jenny Grassl: Your poems arrive as deft travelers across space and time, carrying music and shifting shapes with which to imagine the female body and experience, and also the compromised earth. Often playing out in individual and collective mythological realms, they are intrepid stories of devastations and transformations. On the theme of death, the poem “My Ears—antlers carved from light, Tomb of a Roman woman, first half of 300 A.D.” gives the story of a woman experiencing her own burial: “I taste soil in my mouth,/ lapis lazuli, then the thud of a stone.” “Let no man visit me in the afterlife.” “If life has dealt me its scorpion blade,/ only death can leave me light.” The poem “A Killing, Corazon de Madera” is about the death of a tree in Panama. You employ movement across cultures as a lens for understanding their particulars and how they fit together and into the larger universe. In the hands of a lesser artist this vastness would be prohibitive. Could you talk about the geographical and historical leaps in your work and how they create a new and relevant story?
Abigail Ardelle Zammit: I suppose time, reflection and changing locales are necessary catalysts for my creativity. This collection has been in the making for over seven years and at the start I did not much envisage how it would grow and spread, but over the years I’ve learnt to let the topographical and historical seepage occur, like ink spreading on blotting paper, layering itself thickly on key preoccupations in my psyche, mortality being inescapable. I follow where it takes me, encouraging its expansion through reading, research and travel, when possible. Perhaps every death-story is a narrative about learning how to live anew—how to change one’s life—in Rilke’s words—but also how to delay that final closure via the act of writing. You mention magic and the everyday as a locus for transformation; looking outside my specific island-territory and space-time is also deeply transformative for me. I look outwards to be able to look within, to dig deeper into what it is that ails me into writing/being.
JG: The book’s title, Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, intrigues me on many levels. I find the word ‘borrowed’ especially evocative. The myth of Daphne and Apollo in your poems comes foremost to mind, the woman pursued who turns into a laurel tree, but also the women in “Transplanting a Landscape,” “Do Early Blossoms Take Swift Leave,” and in many of the erasure poems which have a relationship to the title’s mystery. Borrowing implies that something may be returned. What does the idea of ‘borrowing’ mean to you in the title, and context of the book?
AAZ: Thank you for this thought-provoking question. The title-poem, which was the last to be written, is a bit like a postcard revealing the distance I’ve travelled and the people—real or imaginary—I’ve met along the way. It is a nod at Ovid and all those writers without whom my words wouldn’t have been made flesh, for I have borrowed intertextually, but also from others’ lived experience, as well as from my own. There were times when suffering was so deeply-inscribed in the other’s body—the assassinated journalist, the dear friend whose suicide was inseparable from the misogynist framework in which she lived, the silenced and dispossessed—that I wanted to acknowledge the ephemeral nature of my work, each poem no more than the paper-leaf on which it is written, the ‘leafing through’, an act of solidarity with the subjects of my discourse without whom this kind of artistic metamorphosis would never have been possible. To lend those often violent transformations another voice is also to acknowledge the endless intersections between life and art. Perhaps there is no art without this perpetual return to a slightly different origin story.
JG: Erasure figures prominently in this collection. Sometimes black print spiders into a white void, and other times white clefts appear in a bedrock of blackness. In both types, loss and absence tell a shadow story, the missing parts as eloquent as the chosen words. The effect of the heavy black redactions on the page is a palpable assault, obliterating consciousness in chunks, narrating despair, a loud and broken silence. And yet, the words “Voice plays beneath these branches,” remind us that the silence is not complete. How did you arrive at the art of erasure? Were there any writers who influenced you in this direction? How does erasure enter the conversation around the female body and the threatened earth?
AAZ: It wasn’t until the lockdown that I started looking into work like Jen Bervin’s thanks to an online conference where Yedda Morrison’s Darkness and other found poetry was discussed. For some time, I’d been trying to write about the brutal assassination of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, but it was difficult to find the right form given the risk posed by the political content and the fact that the investigation was (and is) ongoing. It was by some kind of lucky conflation that I’d also started to revisit classical texts, amongst which Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And because the real-life Daphne and the mythological Daphne had suffered a terrible violation, that November evening in 2020, I decided to pore over Ovid’s tale to see whether I could bring to light something new, a process which Isobel O’Hare refers to as an ‘archaeology of language’. That first erasure was indeed an unsettling act of uncovering, so I worked feverishly at it for a number of weeks, re-reading stories of transformation and researching newspaper articles at the National Library from which I would eventually extract titles and sub-titles for #wearedaphne. In an interview with Kristina Marie Darling, also appearing in the TQ, I discussed how blackout erasure gave me a satirical standpoint from which I could comment subversively on the silencing of dissident voices. In the following months, however, I came to appreciate the value of self-erasure, a safer enterprise in terms of publishing permits, and one which would allow me to mine my own text in order to explore the connection between the page as canvas, and artistic dissolution as ecological breakdown. My greatest joy came from constructing formal poems and then burrowing deep in search of a polyphony of erasures which amplified the discourse and allowed new voices to surface. The dactylic hexameters in ‘Speak to Me’, the villanelle ‘Earth, Wake One Heart’, the heavily trocheed iambs in ‘Variations on Hata Kamac’ are unfinished investigations into how art might rescue and re-ignite that which has been lost or erased.
JG: Violence co-exists with metamorphosis. The story of Daphne’s brutal murder would on the surface yield only misery and darkness. How do you see the transformation of her death into voice and change? It appears risky, but so important, to share this poetry with the world. Do you experience the work as risk?
AAZ: Because Malta is a liberal democracy, as well as a highly polarized island-nation where corruption and impunity are forces to contend with, there is always an element of risk, but within a population where readership is relatively low, poetry—especially experimental poetry in English—is much less likely to catch the public eye than, say, the work of an investigative journalist exposing corruption at the highest levels via her much-followed blog. The black-outs and white-outs from Mary M. Innes’ prose translations and Mandelbaum’s poetic versions respectively, provide a shield of Bakhtinian voices superimposing themselves across time and space and engaged in an endless play of hide and reveal. Whatever is recounted bears the mark of craft and narrative selection, rather than undisputed Truth or Objectivity. Moreover, within the context of the whole collection, Daphne’s stories of transformation become melded with all those other historical and ecological narratives of violation and resistance.
JG: Your forms vary, expertly elucidating content through your choices. The beginning stanzas have the effect of leaves floating, ordered in an air of white space, leaves that gradually accumulate as the book gathers darkness as in a storm. The leaves fly away or cohere, according to the poem’s meaning. Were there any guiding principles you followed or was it an entirely intuitive process to order and disrupt the space? Were there poems that first appeared in a different form than the one you arrived at? If so, what was that evolution like?
AAZ: Thank you for this fitting interpretation—though intuition is inseparable from the artistic process, putting a collection together is also about finding guiding principles to help you sequence the hybrid poems more effectively. Formal as well as narrative, thematic and dialogic tension were crucial to me, so I altered poems to make them converse more effectively with what came before or after; ‘Ode to a Pound of Flesh’ and ‘Tropic of Capricorn’, for instance, initially had tighter line breaks, but as Leaves evolved into its final utterance, they morphed into prose poems. You’ll have noticed how silence and white space become more radically altered as words/leaves scatter right and left, and into the margins, gathering momentum and then waning into that final line—’ “What burns but does not die” ‘?—which is also a question about life, art and temporality.
JG: Language is the celebration within the lamentation, a story of light in the shadows. Experimentation, music, and sensual/visceral renderings of landscapes rise from the page. Bodies flesh- and leaf-out through the language. The writing about the Atacama Desert delivers a mythic desolation. From “Sonata, Valle de Marte”: “Wind like hot rain, whipping / sand in your mouth. You’re / a volcano, a copper mountain / sprouting from the rock-face, skin coated in / tourmaline, heart racing / backwards into a big bang…” By facing the beauty and the wreckage you cast a spell. We are not left alone, we are in the presence of magic. How do you feel about writing with beauty in the face of ruin? Are you ever tempted to trample it? Do you have any influences or inspirations for not abandoning beauty?
AAZ: Perhaps your final question about ‘how far one can take language to the edge without abandoning beauty’ is what mostly awakens my curiosity. My leaning is unalterably towards beauty—I have yet to figure out why this attachment is so primal, why it appears to predate my attachment to language, or why no amount of intellectualizing can efface it. As you say, the desert is the beauty and the wreckage where a spell can be cast; it is also the focal point of my current research and will probably remain so for some time. Its wide expanse inspires desolation as well as infinite calm. Its beauty makes the self almost inexpressibly and impossibly small. I’m especially interested in how it opens up a space for the experience of the sublime, how by its very being it unravels that damagingly dichotomous worldview which tends to make beauty and the sublime mutually exclusive. Could beauty be that-endless-singing-our-disappearance?
JG: The book includes a number of poems ‘after’ various artists, poets, and a musician. Ekphrastic poems are often focused on description of the art, whereas your poems feel broadly inspired by it. The poem “Her Future Husband Appears to Her in the Shape of a Hawk,” after Victoria Brookland, is a real expansion of the experience of her work. “In her ribs, the flutter/ of dying swifts.// She only knows his claws—a memory of bruised lips,/” Can you tell us how the entering of these works of art impacts you? Could you use the Brookland image to tell us about this?
AAZ: I think of ekphrastic art as that which allows me to transcend the circumstances of my own specific existence in order to be visited by otherness. This is very much in line with my interest in the permeability of the self as explored by Deryn Rees-Jones in Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets. For this reason, the sexual violence in ‘Her Future Husband Appears to Her in the Shape of a Hawk’ in no way equates with a personal memory of physical violation, but the viscerality of the imagery taps onto the well of female experience, all the historical and mythological stories where a patriarchal inheritance branded our flesh—and so ekphrastic art must keep visiting the bruise to retrieve it and make of it something new, transformative and transformed. Would this too be a Magicholia?