11/13/2008
Interview with Rachel Zucker
by Rose Bunch
Q: First off, let me just say I love the title. Did you choose this title to play upon the perception of what a good wife is? And if the poems in this collection are the “handbook” for bad wives, what do you think a bad wife can glean from the book as a whole? Is everyone ultimately, naturally, a bad wife?
A: One morning my nine-year-old son told me he’d woken up the night before and couldn’t fall back to sleep. He had gone out into the living room and, after finishing Crisis on Multiple Earths (Volume 2), read my book cover to cover. He admitted this to me tentatively, with the same tone of voice he’d once used when telling me he’d read an email on my computer. I wasn’t sure what to say. I tried to mentally (and instantaneously) re-read my own book from my son’s perspective and silently chastised myself for leaving a copy lying around where anyone could get his hands on it. Next I’ll have to hide the liquor, I thought. “Why did you call it The Bad Wife Handbook?” he asked. I found myself talking to him about the 1950s and what it meant, in the 50s, to be a ‘good wife.’ I described traditional gender stereotypes – man as protector/bread-winner/ lawmaker and woman as submissive/ nurturing/ follower – and asked him if that sounded like Dad and me. He laughed. I asked him if that kind of ‘good wife’ is really good? I asked him what he thought it might mean to want to be a bad wife. Despite the fact that I made it up on the spot, as a way to dodge his questions, it was all true and is half the explanation of the title.
Q: In Part One, there are three separate poems with the same title, “Monogamist,” the only duplicated title in the book. When I read these together, they seem to express a myriad of the conditions of monogamy, a harsh polarity that ranges from desire for others to the “lusty gravity” that pulls us together and entraps us. What made you choose “Monogamist” to be the first in your collection?
A: I could have titled all the poems in the book “Monogamist.” That would have been descriptive of the monogamist’s state because, yes, no matter how one feels on any given day, one is, when upholding the vows of monogamy, monogamous. In the rain, in the sun, in lust, in boredom: monogamy. Sort of like the post office but without postal holidays.
Q: “Bridle” indicates the harnessing of a woman to monogamy, or the process of becoming a bride, more as a death than a celebration. Is wifehood a death knell for the self?
A: Everyone’s marriage is different. I have a poem about that in my second book. Even my husband’s marriage and my marriage are dissimilar because we aren’t the same person. Perhaps some people experience marriage as a state of constant and unremitting joyfulness. Good for them, I guess. I do think that the institution of marriage itself, like most important rites-of-passage contains both dark and light – death and life – within it. Marriage entails (and necessitates) a death (or suicide) of one kind of selfhood.
Q: Although there are numerous poems addressing monogamy and the balancing between two selves (a man and woman bound in matrimony, in flesh) they are often more reflective about the nature of motherhood and the physical balance of our bodies in relationship to the world, even the universe. The children have greater presence than the husband, perhaps because they are of you and therefore have the physical ties that bring them thematically into the biological nuances of your poems. Would you say this is more a book of motherhood than wifehood then?
A: Good question; I’m not sure how to answer it.
Q: In many ways this collection reminds me of a scientific formula for procreation, existence, stressing the order and continuity of life within the confines and complications of the physical world – and yet also, at times, despairing in it. Am I off here?
A: This is very astute.
Q: Your poems taken altogether stress the scientific nature of relationships, bodies of land, bodies of water, celestial bodies and of course our own inescapable physical selves. What about the “science” of things do you find most compelling? Anything you find disgusting? Cold?
A: The fact that we are animals and part of the cosmos and largely determined by physical and neurological processes is comforting to me. It is also horrifying and leads me to existential despair. Being an animal makes me feel less alone and makes me want to take my anxieties and desires less seriously. Being an animal also makes me want to give up poetry and reading and art. Being an animal makes me want to have more babies. Being an animal makes me want to abandon the ones I have and take off for parts unknown. Also, I really like the language of science, the jargon and scientific way of thinking. Also, the contemplation of serious science occupies part of my brain in such a way that allows poetry to come through. Abulafia meditated on letters in the alphabet as a mystical exercise; I find that engagement with difficult texts and dense language often provokes poetry.
Q: What is the significance of your repetition of references to the spine?
A: I’m obsessed with the spine. It seems so fragile, so smart, so important, so ridiculous.
Q: A wife, a mother, seem in many ways to be a feral, mammalian construct with biological parts working in mechanical harmony. Yet at times, I sensed a horror in the physical inescapability of this process. This may relate to your referring to the body as a cage in the act of sex, “ribs heavy on the bed my body a cage pushing” as well as in pregnancy, the child “knock[ing] on the cage of my body.” Care to comment further?
A: Inescapability is horrible.
Q: The squirrel is mentioned in two poems, and then is inhabited in a third in first person. This is the only creature, besides humans, that pops up in multiple poems. Can you tell me more about the squirrel who “feasts on hope”?
A: I probably should have cut that line. It sounds almost cute to me now, although I really meant it.
Q: The collection seems to shift from the general to the specific. Does including the poems related to 9/11 help stress the continuity of everything, earth, sky, spirit, biology, right down to your own street and what is happening specifically on a particular day? Tell me more about these poems.
A: I couldn’t avoid writing poems “about” 9/11. The language, the fear, the metaphors, the details seeped into everything. Later, when organizing the book, I realized that many of my concerns and metaphors and preoccupations echoed but also prefigured 9/11. So some of the poems that are about 9/11 also aren’t “about” it at all. Maybe they are just the consequence of being a New Yorker.
Q: What more can you tell me about the choice to break your poems into five parts, the different forms they take? Was this an organic process or planned?
A: Both. This book was very difficult to shape. The manuscript was twice as long for a while. It was in every order possible. For a while, it was just the three long poems. I have many (too many) explanations of why it is in the order it’s in. Many of these reasons sound sort of smart, but the truth is, they are mostly retrospective reasons. It finally felt right. I did intend for the last section to restate the first section in bolder terms. My husband pointed out (after he heard me make that comment at a reading) that the book is like a five-paragraph essay. I like that idea.
Q: I’m going to throw out some favorite lines here, and if you wish to expand upon any of them then feel free:
“desire won over by desire is not the same as satisfaction nor lust nor yet resolve
I don’t believe in happiness” (40)
A: Katy Lederer liked that line. She called me a bitch for using it.
“there is an advantage of self-possession but I can’t remember what” (balcony)
A: Wayne Koestenbaum liked that line. I don’t really know why.
“the bad girl breeze
blows in everywhere, finding the cracks and torments” (Autobiography 3)
A: What does it mean that I remember every time anyone ever said they liked one of my lines? Now I’ll remember that you liked this line. Thanks!
Q: From your online biography:
“She is currently working on her fourth collection of poems, Museum of Accidents, which will be published by Wave Books in 2009, and a novel for which she has no publisher, no publication date and no clear path torward progress.”
Want to talk any about your next book of poems? How closely will they relate to the title poem from the current collection? What is your novel about?
A: The poem “Museum of Accidents” is like a mini-sketch for an idea that came to be the organizing principle of my next book.
My novel—sad, neglected novel—is an historical novel about my great-grandfather. It’s all very Jewish and traditional and I haven’t made any progress on it for almost three years. I just finished writing a book-length lyric essay in collaboration with Arielle Greenberg, about homebirth. I’m writing essays here and there and trying to revise a memoir I wrote a few years ago.
Q: How much did your parents, storyteller Diane Wolkstein and novelist Benjamin Zucker, influence you to become a writer?
A: A lot, but not necessarily in the ways you might think.
Q: What poet has inspired you the most?
A: After all this time, I guess I still have to say Jorie Graham. Sort of like a first love.
Q: What are your writing habits?
A: I don’t know. I have three children.
Q: Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.
A: Nathan Englander and Nin Andrews.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: Difficult, defiant, recalcitrant, resourceful.
Q: What's your relationship with rejection like?
A: I don’t like rejection, but I have an even harder time dealing with other people’s jealousy.
Q: Did you suffer in the process of writing this book?
A: How? Greatly.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in writing these recent pages?
A: How difficult it was.
Q: Do you have a writerly habit you'd like to break?
A: Despair.
|
