Interviewed by Josephine Yu
Beth Gylys is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Georgia State University. She has published two award-winning collections of poems and a chapbook, Balloon Heart. Her collection, Bodies that Hum, won the Gerald Cable First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, the Antioch Review, The Columbia Review and other journals, as well as several anthologies: American Poetry: The Next Generation, the 1996 Anthology of Best Magazine Verse, and Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary American Poets from 1951-1977. Her most recent full-length book of poetry, Spot in the Dark, won the Journal Award from Ohio State University Press.
Q: You write very frankly about sex in your collections, Bodies that Hum and A Spot in the Dark. What reservations about dealing with such intimate subject matter did you have to overcome?
A: You know, I didn’t have any reservations when I wrote the poems. I think I have more reservations now. I’ve done a lot of readings. I’ve been very public about certain sexual subjects, but I think just being older, I’m a little less—it’s not that I’m uncomfortable exactly—but I guess I’m a little less free about some things. There are some poems that are harder for me to read. But mostly, I didn’t worry about it when I was writing them. I worried a little bit about my parents seeing the books. That was my biggest concern, I think.
Q: That makes me think of “My Father’s Nightmare,” in which you describe a man’s nightmare about his daughter reading sexual poems at some big reading event, and he wonders as she reads a poem about an affair and another about kissing a woman, “Why can’t she write poems about nature, / something along the lines of Robert Frost?” Was that how your parents responded to your work?
A: My parents were very good sports, but my father is a little squeamish about some of what I’ve written. And he says that that poem is his review of my book—which isn’t really true. I think he actually got a kick out of some of the poems. But, yeah, some of it makes him a little uncomfortable.
Q: You said you feel differently about the more intimate poems as you’ve gotten older. Have you identified what’s changed?
A: Hmm, I guess there’s a kind of in-your-face quality about some of the poems that is not really who I am in person. I think that partly I was needing to come to terms with issues of sex and sexuality, particularly in my early work, in the book Bodies that Hum. And it’s not that I had something to prove.… It was more that I needed to be upfront about all of human experience. I came from a somewhat conservative family; sex wasn’t really talked about at all. I’d had some pretty intense physical experiences, including being date raped. So there was this disconnect between what happened to me personally and what was talked about—certainly in my family, but even culturally. There’s joking about sex, but there’s not a lot of frank discussion about sex and sexuality, so in some ways I was trying to bring those pieces together in the work. When I felt more integrated, the in-your-face quality became less comfortable for me—just reading the work, reading it out loud. The tone seems too much like, “You are going to listen to this.” Some of the poems that I’m not crazy about anymore felt important at the time that I wrote them, though now I’m like, “Yeah, it’s not a great poem.”
Q: In “Desire” the speaker commands, “Close your eyes / and feel the truth of sex. It signifies / our wish to find the other side.” What is, or was, the truth of sex you’re searching for or hope to reveal?
A: Oh, that’s a really good question. I have thought about that really long and hard for a long time. I think probably what the poem was getting at was the kind of other worldly quality or transportation that sex allows. A transportation out of the self. That’s what the poem is speaking to, or hoping to speak to.
Q: Another reoccurring theme in your work is the search for happiness and success—an often misdirected and fruitless search. But at the end of “How I Was,” the most hopeful and content poem in Bodies that Hum, the speaker says, “I wanted nothing, and was nothing, and was fine.” Is this the answer or the end of the search?
A: In some ways it is. It’s a Buddhistic poem, isn’t it? Because it’s not as if the speaker has found happiness; it’s that the speaker is alright with where he or she is at the moment. And I think that that is the ultimate happiness. Right? Because we look for happiness outside of ourselves, but happiness really comes from being at peace with where we are and who we are. So probably that is ultimately what the speaker hopes for or what the speaker has found.
Q: When the speaker of that poem has that moment of revelation, of peace, at that point in the poem, you step back from metaphor, writing: “It wasn’t / truth, but the sky, the wind, the clouds (and they / were not like continents or sheep, but simply white / wisps tumbling past).” This seems to be the opposite direction poetry often takes … Can you talk about that move?
A: It’s the moment of total sensual experience. It’s not about what something is like, it’s about the thing itself. It’s a stepping into the sensual, and not looking at “What does this mean?,” “What does it represent?,” “What is it like?” … It’s just what it is. And, can I experience this? Can I step into the sensual experience of it and appreciate it?
Q: In “Balloon Heart” a woman takes pleasure in the slow deflating of a balloon souvenir from a wedding, which, tied to her car’s antenna, eventually freezes and knocks against the hood. I saw this poem as representing a woman’s participation in but also defiance of society’s rituals and expectations concerning romantic love.
A: I like that read of the poem. When I got married, I had a balloon and I tied it to the antenna and it really did freeze. It slid down the antenna. So the poem is actually grounded in reality. When I wrote it, I thought it was funny, but also there’s a portentous quality about it. I think the poem suggests some resistance to a cultural expectation about what weddings should be and what weddings mean, and the frozen balloon becomes emblematic of that.
Q: Returning to the intimate quality of your work, do you consider yourself to be the speaker of those seemingly personal poems about sex, desire, and divorce—or is the speaker a created persona?
A: I identify with some of the speakers, but they are definitely personas in the poems. People always ask me, because the poems are pretty intimate, “Is that about you?” The poems spring out of experience, but they’re not me. They’re an amalgamation of characters and self. So, I don’t know if that answers your question, but I think it’s a little bit of a blend, maybe.
Q: Do you see yourself writing in the confessional mode, or as Sharon Olds has said, do you feel the term implies you’ve done something wrong? What title would you propose for 21st century women poets writing revealingly of their experiences?
A: I have never thought of myself as confessional though I’ve been labeled that way. I don’t know why I wouldn’t park myself in that camp. There are certainly elements of what I’ve done that would align with the confessional poets. Partly, it’s an issue of time. I always think of the confessionals as being poets writing in the 60s and 70s, and it was groundbreaking then. And partly, it’s because the formal elements of my poetry make it feel less confessional. It’s crafted and artistically rendered and wrenched so that it feels less about self and the expression of self. It feels more like some kind of crafted moment.
Q: Is there another tradition you place yourself in? New Formalism, maybe? Who do you identify as your poetry mothers and fathers?
A: I’m such a mix, aren’t I? Elizabeth Bishop is someone I love to read, and I read a lot, but my work isn’t like her, especially. But I think she is someone who would be an important figure for me. Philip Larkin was also important for me. Anne Sexton was one of my teachers. I read so widely and weirdly that I don’t feel like I fit into any camp easily in my brain. Maybe other people can look at my work and say, “She’s so clearly confessionalist, so clearly New Formalist,” but I don’t. I have a hard time thinking of myself that way.
Q: What inspired your sonnet sequence of personal ad poems, collected in the chapbook titled Matchbook?
A: I had been wanting to write a sequence of personal ads because I love personal ads, and then as I started to get into them, I realized I needed something to ground the poems. I just thought, “You know, maybe I should try a sonnet.” It turned out that the sonnet was a really nice structure for the personal ad, because it does have a two-part structure built in. Most personal ads have the this-is-who-I-am and then the this-is-what-I-want. Usually, the this-is-who-I-am is longer than the this-is-what-I-want, so it really worked with the sonnet, so easily and naturally. I wrote a lot of them over a couple of years. They seemed to be self-generating after a while.
Q: You are also a master of the villanelle. Tom Andrews said your work demonstrates that the villanelle’s “elegant restrictions” are “uncannily suited to address ‘the truth of sex,’ its unreliable revelations.” What are the benefits and challenges of addressing this still surprising subject within the parameters of a traditional form, which, with its history and rules, could be called impersonal or predictable? Does the form provide a tension that mirrors the tension created by desire?
A: It does provide a tension. The structure of the villanelle pushed me to say things in ways I wouldn’t normally say them. So, it worked for me like training a muscle. Many of my villanelles are about sex and sexuality. At the time I was writing a lot of the villanelles, and sex was an obsessive subject for me. The obsessive quality of the villanelle really fit my subject and my intense focus at the time. But just having a formal constraint was really interesting. I had not written in form much before I wrote all of the villanelles. It was really kind of fascinating how it stretched me and made me work the language in ways that I normally wouldn’t have.
Q: Matchbook includes poems written in the voices of “man seeking man” and “soul sister seeking soul sister,” as well as the voices of straight men and women, a Latina, a legless Vietnam vet, and others. Did you have any concerns about speaking for and from the perspectives of such a diverse group of people? What strategies did you use to ensure that the voice of the diver is distinct from the voice of the drag queen, for example?
A: I did have some concerns, especially when I wrote from the point of view of gay male speakers. I wanted to use language that was fresh enough that the speakers seemed like actual people and not stereotypes. I don’t know if I completely avoided that in those poems. But I did have friends look at them. You know, I had a gay friend look at a number of the poems from the point of view of a man seeking a man just to make sure I didn’t sound too maudlin or too caricature-like. I was especially worried about the drag queen poem. I don’t know if I completely avoided sounding generic, but I think using a lot of specifics helped me avoid that to some degree.
Q: Now, I might have counted wrong, but I noticed many of the last lines or couplets of the sonnets are hypermetrical … I was wondering if this is an intentional device. Is the addition of the extra syllable mimetic of the hoped-for outcome of a personal ad?
A: I think it was completely accidental. That’s a really interesting catch. I didn’t even realize that I’d done that. It could have been subconscious on some level.
Q: After the publication of Matchbook, you staged a reading of the poems by a group of writers, actors, and friends who each read one poem in character, and you also had some of the sonnets set to music. Could you describe those projects and discuss the value of continuing and promoting poetry not only as an oral tradition but as a community activity? In what ways does the interweaving of poems with other arts enhance or complicate the work?
A: The staging of the personal ads was so much fun for me. The poetry came alive in a way that it doesn’t on the page. Because it’s a multi-vocal project, the poems could be seen as dramatic monologues, as twenty-four dramatic monologues. They really lent themselves to being performed. Performance just enlivens and enriches the poetry and makes it have a more social element than poetry does simply on the page. The musical performance is in the process of being put together. Having the poems sung adds another dimension, makes it more multifaceted. I’m excited about that possibility for, certainly for this project, but also for other projects I might work on. I like the idea of poetry becoming something other than just words on the page to be read.
Q: Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.
A: Olena Kalytiak Davis is somebody I really love and who’s work I really admire. Alicia Stallings is another one. I love the way she puts her poems together.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: I was a pretty internalized, shy child.
Q: What’s your relationship with rejection like?
A: I guess I’m getting used to it, but I don’t send out my work enough, and I wonder if that’s because rejection is a little problematic for me. I don’t get bent out of shape when I get rejected. I always feel like, “Well, they’re probably right. All the work probably sucks anyway.”
Q: Did you suffer in the process of writing your last book? How?
A: I don’t think I suffered. I was disappointed. A Spot In The Dark was only published as a hardback, and it was way overpriced. I think we would have sold more books if it didn’t cost like twenty-five dollars for a stupid book of poetry. Or maybe it just sucks.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A: That I wrote anything at all.
Q: Do you have a writerly habit you’d like to break?
A: I would like to be more disciplined about sending my work out.
