Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey
BOA Editions, 2023
instead, it is dark by Cynthia Hogue
Red Hen Press, 2023
Jeannine Hall Gailey and Cynthia Hogue have always written about embodiment. Their first poetry collections addressed what fairy tales and other inherited stories say about womanhood, and what they erase. By mid-career, each was exploring how chronic illness and disability can shape identity and alter the self’s relationship to the world. Their perspectives and voices, however, differ dramatically. This interview sprang from my desire to put their new books in conversation and see what reverberations might occur.
Hogue, also a scholar of modernist and experimental poetry, writes poetry of witness. Her meditative, sometimes fragmentary lyric poems address gaps and tangles in historical records as well as in contemporary experience. Instead, it is dark draws from interviews, dreams, and intuition. It begins with stories of the burned villages of World War II France then connects those traumas to school shootings, health crisis, and other personal and public catastrophes. I’ve long been fascinated by how Hogue combines documentary poetics—a fierce determination to record the truth of suffering—with an acute sense of what’s unknowable and sacred. As Ilya Kaminsky writes of instead, it is dark, “Cynthia Hogue has written a beautiful spell of a book, one that investigates the real, yes, but also opens the door into mysterium of time.”
Gailey, whose background is in science and tech, also has a flair for the layers of meaning that language can open, but the tone of her voice-driven poems is often darkly funny. As Beth Ann Fennelly says, Flare, Corona (BOA, May 2023) concerns how “a mistaken terminal cancer diagnosis resolves itself as an MS diagnosis accessorized with a coronavirus crown.” Again, personal crisis parallels public disaster, an apocalyptic twinning Gailey explores in “mutant sonnets” and ominous similes and metaphors: “the wind smelled / like bullets,” “My first flare came on the week of the solar eclipse / when the shadow fell cold over us.” Flare, Corona is continuous with Gailey’s earlier books in subject matter and style, but in shifting emphasis from persona poems to an autobiographical first-person, her concerns about the world become even more urgent and keenly focused on survival and legacy.
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Lesley Wheeler: Jeannine, congratulations on the publication of Flare, Corona! Could I start by asking how the “Self-Portrait” series in Flare, Corona came about? Sometimes the self-portrait is “as Radioactive Girl” or “as Seismologist”—a human character—but sometimes they’re stranger: “as Murder Mystery,” “as Desert During a Superbloom.”
Jeannine Hall Gailey: The self-portrait poems were the first poems in the book that became Flare, Corona. I started out writing funnier ones, like “Self-Portrait as Weather,” but as the health news kept hitting, they became more thoughtful, like “Self-Portrait as Migration” where I compare snow geese poisoned during their flight by stopping at a poisonous mining lake (which was in the news at the time) with tumor cells poisoning and moving throughout the body. Starting to see the body as “other”—well, that probably happened sometime during a previous book, but seeing your body as a surviving invasive plant—wisteria, or as a character in a murder mystery—it was a way of processing all the things that were going on in my life.
LW: I love that and see something similar going on in instead, it is dark. Cynthia, these poems often prioritize other perspectives than your own, with an emphasis on what it means to experience or witness terrible violence during war or otherwise. Bodies and spirits are under assault, yet you find continuities among people and the more-than-human world. I’m wondering if that’s your experience of chronic illness or maybe of just being a human being—that permeability.
Cynthia Hogue: I want to thank you, Lesley, for suggesting this interview, and for asking me this particular question to open, because it applies to both the lived experience of chronic illness and to the poetics of witness (which I’ve spent so many years contemplating, researching, and practicing). One of my first experiences at the illness onset thirty years ago was of the split between mind and body. I wrote about it first in The Incognito Body (2006). To become an “other” to oneself, that alienating phenomenon that often accompanies illness, is to experience a profound existential crisis. What happens to someone whose life has been stopped in its tracks, and who no longer recognizes the body she inhabits. That conjunction of well / ill, self / other can open to other possible modes of being, most particularly to empathy for the “other” —perhaps first oneself, but eventually, other sentient beings. I could see other people in their humanity, their vulnerability. I could feel the harm war caused to people, animals, the environment. Eventually that empathy enlarged my vision or perceptivity. “Permeability,” as you term it in your question, is a perfect word for that condition or state of perceptivity.
LW: You are so scrupulous about how you represent other people, their voices, their histories—your process in the interview-poems from When the Water Came seems exemplary of that care. This sensitivity comes through just as strongly in the new book, but am I right that the boundaries are blurrier now, as you write from the perspectives of survivors of the Second World War? How was the process different, moving from interview to poem?
CH: In When the Water Came, I was scrupulous about using only the words of the interviewees, because I had a specific intention as I approached the material. I was concerned to represent points of view that were being erased in the news coverage of Katrina. I was shocked, for instance, at the inherent racism of the visuals of people of color stranded in New Orleans. I wanted to create a space for their own voices to be heard. I didn’t at first know what genre I was writing in, or even what I was doing: simply transcribing interviews, seeing what was there, beginning to distill from the raw interviews narrative arcs. But what were these pieces? Were they prose, poems, or not-poems, as one editor wrote me? Eventually, I called them interview-poems, and I worked collaboratively with the interviewees to make sure the poems accurately reflected their experiences.
With the new collection, the first poem I wrote was “After the War There Was No Food.” I knew I was writing a poem based on a dream my husband had told me a number of times about being hungry as a child, but I didn’t attempt to rehearse his words. I made a poem that had a fable-like or allegorical quality. The poem drew on his memories but did not reiterate them. When I began talking to his extended family, the “interviews” were informal, often over a meal or family get-together, and probably no one I spoke with (except for the subject of the very first poem in the collection, “Witness Triptych”) experienced the conversation as an “interview.” I was working across languages, asking questions in my mediocre French and understanding the answers as best I could. “Blurrier” is a good word for my method. I would get an impression of an experience, and later, the voice and the story would call to me. And I would create the persona via the voice.
LW: Cynthia, that answer describes so well how flexible poetry of witness can be, and how it can be shaped by your personal relationship to the material as well as to your own sense of self. As I pivot to Jeannine, I’d like to ask about another connection between these books: an interest in time. A current favorite of mine in Flare, Corona is “Not Dead but Post-Life.” It shares exuberant energy with a lot of poems in the book, a refusal to be cowed by terrible diagnoses. There’s freedom to being “post-life”: “I’ll be lighter and all my vanities / and anxieties extinguished.” This poem even uses the future tense, which is rare in poetry and often makes it seem magical, like a spell or prophecy. What kind of future do you want to conjure? And can poems ever help make certain outcomes happen?
JHG: One of the original titles of the book was Post-Life. I was having a discussion with someone who was talking about being “post-doc” and it just led my imagination to think about what if I was that excited to be “post-life,” not dead, which was an interesting spin to me. Post-life has so many more possibilities. Hence the future tense! Since I started writing the book under the shadow of a terminal cancer diagnosis, my hope was just to leave a little something behind—but I wanted something more than a funeral dirge, something more funny, more hopeful. I have to say my essential personality is “hopeful pessimist” or “optimistic realist,” depending on how you look at it, and even with the worst news, I never really lost hope. My thought at the time was: what are the positives in leaving life behind? Which sounds a little crazy. My last book, Field Guide to the End of the World, was all about hope after the ultimate sorts of endings, so this was sort of a smaller, more personal version of that. (I did worry a little that writing Field Guide sort of conjured an apocalypse, you know?) So Flare, Corona isn’t trying to create darkness—it’s trying to focus on light, so to speak—the corona of the eclipse, the bright red of the Blood Moon, the coyote in the street—ominous, maybe, but bright.
LW: Is that one of your mutant powers, the flipside of damage, that you see the corona? Or does being a mutant give you super-poetry-powers? I notice that no matter what comes, you keep writing poems and working to find audiences for them.
JHG: I’ve been writing poems pretty constantly since I was ten, so I don’t think I could shut it off if I wanted to. I think every poet’s superpower is noticing things—in this case, I was extra attenuated to strange solar and lunar weather during all these medical ups and downs, but I’ve noticed for a long time that my health swings tend to happen during “supermoons” or solar eclipses. There’s also an anime character named Flare Corona who is “pale with red hair” and was raised on a sun planet who I only discovered when I started checking if anyone else had the title Flare, Corona for the book. So maybe I have some superpowers involving modifying my hair, like the anime character.
LW: I see pink hair as a kind of magic—willing yourself to become who you want to be! Cynthia, a version of the time question for you: instead, it is dark begins with World War II, but later sections explore how violence and loss resonate and repeat, as in the poem about your sister’s coverage of the Columbine High School shootings. And then, of course, the book closes with love poems. What do you think about poetry’s conjuring powers?
CH: What a great question, Lesley. By way of framing the central project of instead, it is dark, let me cast back briefly to its roots in lived experience. Early on in the chronic illness chronicle of my life, I became more fully alert to others, very curious and even a bit nosy, because I discovered I could see / feel / perceive the vulnerability and humanity of others, as if I could see into their hearts. A gift of pain, I might say, which developed into empathy as I aged.
The first half of instead, it is dark built and gathered as I gained clarity on the project. I didn’t set out to conjure the past, but as I wrote the poems, which mostly emerged as voices placed by location (occupied France) and time (World War II), I began to realize that I was “entering” these voices, each person, and that they would present themselves to me in their humanity. I could locate poetry’s conjuring capacity in just such an action, to feel the presence as if a vision, the voice narrating his or her own story. My access to these voices was via actual conversations and interviews I had with the elders in my extended French family. I realized eventually that the conversations were, in fact, firsthand research (I was also reading fairly extensively books about occupied France). I never knew if a presence, a voice would come back to me and start speaking. I would wait.
Poetry can work like spells or prayers, in this sense. The language is so concentrated, in a lyric project like mine, that, if it is doing what I undertook with intention, making the condition, the person’s experience, palpable, it will perhaps shock the reader into realization. The poem completes its work beyond its own borders, its frame, leaping into our awareness, possibly changing our minds.
I didn’t want violence and cruelty to remain abstract, as they do if we just read the news, or if particular kinds of violence are seen too often or from too distant a point of view. We live in such a violent country that we are in danger of going numb to get through our days. I wanted these phenomena to be felt. First at a distance in time, for perspective. When I had the recent conversation with my sister, who just about word for word spoke what I began to realize was a poem, she was recounting an experience she couldn’t process, couldn’t touch deeply, but to do her job had abstracted in her news coverage. That assumption of objectivity. But as she spoke, she was accessing a memory she had repressed, and was bringing into consciousness to remember, to share with me as empathic witness.
Empathy opens us to a broader range of feelings so that we don’t shut down. As for the love poems—the whole book has its roots in the love I felt so urgently as I drove behind the ambulance carrying my husband, who hovered between life and death. Finally, that oldest of subjects, made present to me in poetry’s witness. Perhaps what I’m saying in this roundabout way is that poetry has the power to conjure / awaken the capacity to care. Robert Duncan said that a poet’s task, a sacred duty, is to remain response-able, by which he meant to retain the capacity to be responsive to the world.
LW: Both of you have helped me take heart when I was discouraged; the literary landscape keeps changing, and it’s not easy to keep my head on straight as I navigate it. What do you hope to see ahead for poetry and poetry publishing?
CH: You have been an inspiration to me, too, Lesley, moving poetry scholarship into the realm of social and engaged criticism with the hybridity of your project in Poetry’s Possible Worlds. You cross discrete borders that have kept scholarship from reaching a wider potential audience (and along with that, the poetry which may be a scholar’s subject of study). I say “inspired” because my first response was: These essays are so interesting to read, and they go a long way to making poetry—the art, the particular approaches to language—relevant and seen anew. My second response was: I hope to undertake some essays like this myself! So a huge brava. I think it helps everyone in the field.
Poetry as a genre and a practice seems to me alive and well today, although I do realize that I live (we three live) in a fairly rarified world in which poetry matters. Although I think so many people live quite well without poetry, I’ve noted that the times—the pandemic, for instance, or war—bring people to its shores. It can touch people in extremis very deeply, or they suddenly feel moved to write poetry. Poetry is diversifying in some important ways because it is more inclusive. Its range is larger because it isn’t segregated, as its voices were in earlier eras. Today there are more forums for inclusion and representation. One example would be a workshop I attended recently on documentary poetry by Tyehimba Jess at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. In addition to his own extraordinary work, he focused on the poetry of A. Van Jordan, Layli Long Soldier, and Martha Collins, among others. Their poetry comes loosely under the category of lyric poetry, based on a documentary technique. Tonally, substantively, and formally, the books range across the spectrum. Jess chose these books because of their similar approaches to various subjects (that is, the books involved research and none were personal lyrics). The poetry was not categorized by the poets’ identities. That’s what I mean by enlarging the conversations in and about poetry.
In addition, I want to applaud all the work in translation, which infuses English with the influences of other cultural practices of poetry. Many kinds of formal experiments and hybrid projects are being undertaken. More cross-genre and transnational connections that are possible today will ensure that connections continue to expand in the future. I’m inspired by the sheer brilliance of some of this work, although I, too, find myself unable fully to absorb it all.
JHG: I hope to see more presses and publishers run by women and people from underrepresented groups in the future. It still feels almost hopelessly lopsided if you look at the numbers, the awards, the “top tier” publications. I do think it might change with the next generation, generation “Z” —I have a lot of hope when I talk to younger writers that they feel more empowered, less bound by the rules or the canon or whatever. I envy their feelings of freedom, and their courage, which I definitely didn’t have when I was younger. I hope the poetry world starts to feel less like a competition, more like a meeting of like-minded friends, though that might be hopelessly naive of me.
LW: Are there any questions you’d like to ask each other?
CH: Let me first say that it is a pleasure to be interviewed in tandem with you, Jeannine, and I’ve looked forward to your answers. You come across the page as sparkling. Now to my question: You say earlier in the interview that you are always writing. You narrate your extraordinary poems of self-transformation (as you put it in one of the self-portraits, “Take me in your arms, / I will not remain the same—”) as if you have never missed a beat, as if everything you’ve gone through is transformed in the body of your poems. Is that the case? Are poems a way to process your lived experience, or have you had to reinvent yourself and your practice a few times over?
JHG: Thank you so much for your kind words. I think that mythologizing the self is part of the way I process different traumas—being raped as a child led me to an obsession with Eliot’s portrayal of Philomel, and all my body mutations, illnesses, and being set up for testing and many diagnoses (and as someone who studied biology myself) has increased my sense of being other—as Poseidon’s children were all monsters, as women being portrayed as “other” —mutants and mermaids and goddesses, dragons, or demons. A doctor once asked me if I had superpowers, like the X-Men, because I had so many mutations. I understood the joke way too well. So yes, I think seeing myself as changeling, as being remade in different images, has helped me survive.
Cynthia, for me you were an inspiration as a leader in feminist writing and ecopoetics, long before that became a popular word. Can you tell me a little about your own influences, and how you’ve been able to persist in keeping a clear view and voice in a world that seems to whirl against us? peace? itself? sanity?
CH: What a great question, and I am especially honored to hear that my work in ecopoetics and feminist poetics has reached you. My poetry wouldn’t be possible without others, of course, some earlier and some more or less contemporaries. I won’t try to name more, but I will emphasize that without the strong feminist poetics of Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, I wouldn’t have had the orientation that made all the difference. Without the theorist Angus Fletcher, and such poets and critics as Harriet Tarlo and Ann Fisher-Wirth in ecopoetics, I would not have been inspired to explore this field in both poetry and criticism. The feminism that I first brought to poetry now deeply infuses my perspective and how I approach the word and world. I’ve used a term that seems apropos my poetics, which I’ve drawn from Joan Retallack’s Poethical Wager. The question of “poethics” comes up for me as a way of using language that is alert to others, and to characterize an approach that develops an ethos of understanding and response-ability in the world.
In the end, I think it’s about remaining open-hearted in life, open and curious, curtailing judgment, and keeping the poem free to discover its raison d’etre. It’s hard work, don’t you think? Increasingly, I approach a poem as a field of ethical / philosophical inquiry and formal experiment. As the appalling violence of our country has intensified along racial and gendered lines, I became obsessed with why and how people can be cruel. It’s a choice, right? How can people make the choice to be brutal and feel justified? I sought ways to undo that thinking, in order to explore how to “write peace.” I honestly don’t know if my poetry succeeds, but it’s what I attempt.
JHG: My last question is for you, Lesley: how do you think publishing a book of fiction and a book of scholarly essays / memoir / creative nonfiction has affected the way you think about poetry? (See what I did? I turned the interview around on you!)
LW: Sneaky! It’s been a good stretch for me as a poet to write in other genres, and not just stylistically. It’s made me think harder about literary courage, as you say above—the positive as well as the potentially negative consequences of taking risks. Poetry can be an art of metaphor and ellipsis, but prose makes you say it. I think I’m becoming braver about revealing my own vulnerabilities. Thank you both for speaking out about so many difficult subjects, here and in your poems.
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Jeannine Hall Gailey is a writer with MS who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and is the author of Becoming the Villainess; She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers; The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize; Field Guide to the End of the World; and, most recently, Flare, Corona (BOA Editions, May 2023). Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares.
Cynthia Hogue’s nineteen books include Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets; the co-authored When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, published in the University of New Orleans Press’ Engaged Writers Series; and three co-translations with Sylvain Gallais, most recently of Nicole Brossard’s Lointaines (Omnidawn, 2022). Fortino Sámano (The overflowing of the poem), from the French of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy, won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Among Hogue’s honors are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland and two NEA Fellowships. Instead, it is dark (Red Hen, April 2023) is her tenth collection.
Lesley Wheeler is the author of the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds; the novel Unbecoming; and five books of poetry, most recently The State She’s In. Her poems and essays appear in Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Poets & Writers, and Guernica, and her work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop. Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, she posts at @LesleyMWheeler.