Rare Wondrous Things by Alyse Bensel
Green Writers Press, 2020
Interviewers: Michael Knotts and Hallie Sneed
The book’s epigraph from Maria Sibylla Merian reads: “Quite curious, as there are many wondrous, rare things in them that have never come to light before. And no one would so easily undertake such a hard and costly journey for such things. Thus, this work is not only rare now but will surely remain so.” What made you undertake the task of writing this poetic biography?
Women and their contributions are grossly under- and misrepresented across history. I have always had an interest in the natural sciences (I was an environmental studies major in college), and I happened to encounter Maria Sibylla Merian and her work in 2008, which aligned with the explosion in scholarship on her as both an artist and naturalist who made significant contributions to our understanding of metamorphosis and ecology.
During March 2008, I visited the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam while studying abroad. My visit coincided with the Women of Art and Science exhibit, an exhibition of Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughters’ art. I had no idea who Sibylla Merian was at the time. All I knew was that her watercolors were compelling and looked far more modern than their late 17th and early 18th century dates implied. I quickly wrote down her name in my notebook, then promptly forgot about her until my M.F.A. program.
Around 2011, I began sifting through the scholarship on her work and life, voraciously reading volumes like Kim Todd’s Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis and early modern historian Natalie Zemon Davis’ work. What was compelling about this scholarship was the often-unconventional approaches these historians took when writing about Sibylla Merian; since so little is known about her personal life, scholarship has to often discuss the gaps and unknowns in her life. This speculative turn felt like the perfect opportunity for poetry to imagine what lies there and will probably never be uncovered. During the research process, I began writing poems, which eventually became my dissertation for my doctoral program, which became the published poetry collection.
In the poem “Apprentice, 1659,” you write about the inadequacy of language to describe the complexity of emotions within us and the complexity of the world around us. In what ways do you hope your poetry supersedes this linguistic limitation?
I have no illusions about my poems’ ability to supersede language. Language is just that, an attempt, if not an outright failure, to describe. There will always be a disconnect between what words can provide us, but I find it’s the attempt that matters in trying to give some kind of structure and meaning to the world. That’s the best I think anyone can do.
In poems such as “Letters to Clara in Nuremberg,” “Manual of Piety,” “Fever,” and others, there is an undercurrent of urgency in the words and imagery that raises the question of legacy. How are we to be remembered—in the vivacity of our lives or in the wilted fluttering of our deaths? What does this innate longing for a world beyond mean when we consider Merian as a scientist and as an artist?
Sibylla Merian’s posthumous legacy is important to me, but not because I think she was some kind of ideal human being. While I don’t want my work to fall into hagiography, I do want to celebrate her. I’m also reinforcing the call for another addition to a long list of scientists, which are still predominantly white and male, who made contributions to how our understanding of the world operates even today. Sibylla Merian was lucky enough to be remembered, by some more than others, in that we have evidence of her contributions because her folios, which included both scientific observations and her illustrations, survived.
In Rare Wondrous Things, I’m remembering Sibylla Merian both ways: as a woman who lived a complicated life full of contradictions, who was both traditional and defiant of her societal role, and as a woman who died in obscurity and most likely in significant pain. But her work, and at least some of her writings, survived beyond that. The illustrations Sibylla Merian produced were meant to be collected and preserved, and her scientific contributions fed into a long line of inquiry. In some ways, she survived into the future. The fact that we’re still talking about her is evidence of that.
Several poems draw inspiration from the paintings and pigments created by Sibylla Merian during her lifetime. In what other ways did her art influence your book?
Sibylla Merian’s illustrations were the first thing about her that struck me–I didn’t know anything about her incredible life when I was a 19-year-old staring at the paintings in that exhibit. She was a miniaturist, as you can note in the fantastic, obsessive detail found in her engravings and paintings, and I think that micro focus shaped parts of the book. As a friend pointed out to me recently, these poems can often be visceral, and I was often thinking about how her work was watercolor on vellum (made from calfskin), both gorgeous and fleshy.
In “After Tulipomania” you speak of humility and diligence represented in the moth. What made you choose the moth for this? Moths crop up frequently in your book; among the insects which Sibylla Merian studied, why did the moth catch your gaze the most?
One of my most vivid childhood memories was when my dad came home from work with a Luna Moth in a jar. He had assumed it had died, but around sunset it woke up and began thrashing around inside the jar. Startled, we immediately rushed to release it into the front yard. I share that memory because it shaped my ideas about moths very young—while yes, they can be fragile, they are incredibly resilient. Even now, I find them on the walls of my house. When even the swallowtails have left my butterfly bush by early fall, the moths are still there, feeding off the wilting blooms. Out of all the insects, they have always had one of the greatest presences in my life.
The poem “Housewife” seems to connect the perceived elasticity of an insect’s body with the bereavement of the female gender, while casting light on the scrutiny directed at each. What else might it be saying about the dynamics of gender?
Oh, it’s saying a whole lot! Sibylla Merian conducted much of her observations on metamorphosis inside her own home; she was expected to be a caretaker, homemaker, researcher, artist, and breadwinner (her husband was not always reliable for income). This frantic flailing between these different roles felt so much like how much an insect can thrash and struggle, especially when being held captive. In “Housewife,” I thought of Sibylla Merian as a captive, on the verge of escape, like how many of her own captives ended up crawling and flying loose around her house.
The direct quotes from Sibylla Merian and the ethos of her research are masterfully interwoven into the compelling poetic narrative you’ve constructed. Was there ever a point in your writing where the two voices clashed?
In her writings that survive, Sibylla Merian is almost always very businesslike; it was incredibly difficult to gain any insights into her observational notes and correspondence. Most of the early poems I wrote were more on the ekphrastic side, as I hadn’t yet figured out how to fully access her voice or understand how our voices could exist in tandem. Fortunately, I located moments in which her voice softens, opens up a bit, like in her letters to Clara Scheurling. The poem ”Letters to Clara” was an important turning point for me working on the project as I began to feel a kinship through her own fondness for Clara in those letters.
“Fever” is broken into five sections and chronicles the hardship that Sibylla Merian suffered from the heat and sickness during her insect experiments. What made you choose those five phases: [flowering above], [consummation], [pain], [surpass], and [bed]? I was particularly struck by this quote from the section on pain: “Is pain the reaction / or the reaction to the reaction? / A chemical coursing / through shorted nerves.” Could you discuss this question about pain?
The “Fever” sequence was originally a much longer sequence and far more fragmented. The poem was composed using both a cut-up method and burial method. I cut up words and phrases I had gathered from research on Sibylla Merian and her own writings, then drew the phrases and words out from a bag to compose the poems. After the poems were composed, I buried and placed them around my yard for a few weeks and used the legible remaining fragments. I wanted to replicate some of the tensions between control and losing control, which is what much of Sibylla Merian’s life was like after she returned to Amsterdam from Suriname. She had complications from malaria, and, after her stroke, she could no longer produce her work. She relied heavily on her daughters in the last few years of her life. I wanted to create a sequence that would enact more than just describe that fever state and its aftermath.
The final poem is entitled “Biographical Subject” and seems to be written in a different voice from the other poems. Is this voice your own; is the subject your affection for and fascination with Sibylla Merian? If so, why did you include a final poem chronicling your love of her more explicitly? The opening stanza: “If what I love is ungraspable, like a cat-eyed marble that easily slips out of my hands, how much netting will it take for me to cocoon its brilliance?” seems to address your struggle to properly present Sibylla Merian and her work. Do you feel as if you accomplished this goal?
There are a few poems in the collection where the voice is much closer to my own, and “Biographical Subject” is probably the closest. Over the course of nearly 10 years working on this collection, I often felt frustrated, defeated, and questioned my own motivations and reasons for wanting to write about Sibylla Merian. This poem became a kind of answer for me, a response to all of my doubts and anxieties about the project. Toward the end, I realized these poems were a record of my process, of the different ways I viewed her throughout the years, and that I should embrace all of these various approaches and mixed feelings. Using that framework, then yes, I think the collection is a successful record of those years that I hope will prompt readers to undertake their own journeys of inquiry, wherever it may lead them.
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Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things, a poetic biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, July 2020). Her recent poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, Ruminate, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been featured at The Boiler, Entropy, and Pithead Chapel. She is also the author of three poetry chapbooks, most recently Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). Her book reviews have appeared widely in journals such as AGNI, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Mama, and Tinderbox. She currently serves as poetry editor for Cherry Tree and as a section editor for Theory, Culture, and Craft for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. She teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
Michael Knotts is a recent English graduate from Lee University. Born and raised in Alabama, he currently resides in Chattanooga where he writes nonfiction essays and criticism, while fostering his lifelong love for movies.
Hallie Sneed is a recent English literature graduate from Lee University. She currently resides in Chattanooga, TN, where she is pursuing a post-graduate career in publishing.