Interviewed by Vincent Guerra
Mary Jo Bang graduated from Northwestern University, in Sociology, from the Polytechnic of Central London, and from Columbia University, with an MFA. She teaches at Washington University. Her work has appeared in New American Writing, Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review. Bang was the poetry co-editor of the Boston Review from 1995 to 2005. The Bride of E was published last fall.
Q: The scholar Nancy Armstrong has written that the modern subject is first and foremost a woman; The Bride of E seems to take a similar stance in presenting subjects who say—as if giving voice to a portrait of a woman within the frame of a John Berger essay––“Only when I’m posing do I feel real.” How do see your role as a poet, especially a female poet, in regard to the representation of women in art?
A: That’s a difficult question. I’m not a theorist so I’m not sure I can speak intelligently in theoretical terms. Plus I think Armstrong is writing about the novel, no? And novels consist of narratives. And perhaps one can argue that the narrative is a cultural and psychological space in which desire can be erotically enacted. But we’re not talking about novels here. Poems are far less contextualized, dramatic verse and the epic aside. They gesture toward rather than enact. A poem’s rhetorical surface continually breaks up the narrative of desire. The traditional arrangement of the poem on paper is one of continual interruption in the form of line breaks.
In terms of my own poems certainly desire is encoded in them but I posit myself as a speaker and not “the poet.” For me, the speaker is an abstraction, and I consider my speakers to be more or less androgynous. I want to disappear behind the speaker the way an actress or actor disappears behind the role they are playing. Just like the viewer forgets momentarily (or at least ignores the fact) that the character is really an actress when she goes home at night, I want the reader to forget for the moment that I exist. My hope is to both refresh the reader’s sense of the world, and the language that describes it, and also to cause the reader to question received ideas about both the world and language, and to appreciate the essential ambiguity of both.
To that end, I try to create a parallel world, which of course is what a stage is. So each of my poems is a stage and I stand on stage playing an actress who has a role in a play. And it’s all done by improvisation. I have to sometimes get in costume first to know what role I want to play (or rather, want to play at playing!). But even so, no matter how I dress when I’m a character, or who or what I call myself—Mickey Mouse, Alice, Cher, or Freud—I become a new entity once I get transferred to paper and am then taken into the mind of another.
There the reader adds material to whatever the text was meant to represent. This may be even more pronounced with contemporary poems because their use of poetic strategies like disjunction and avoidance of closure leaves more room for the reader to be an active participatnt in meaning making. The poet has no control over what gets added, and no knowledge of it. If feminization takes place, perhaps it’s there. I remember when I first began writing poems, I considered using my initials instead of my first name so as not to insist on a female poetic identity but I decided against it. I decided to do so would be succumbing to some anxiety about being a woman writer. As if a woman couldn’t hold up a mirror in which anyone could see him or herself.
Q: Continuing with the theme of representation, The Bride of E, with its richness of reference and quotation, seems to embrace the often-heard idea that there’s really nothing to say that hasn’t already been said. While this idea discourages many writers, you seem to run with it––that, for you, this idea is, if not inspirational, usefully problematic. How would you describe your relationship with this issue that for many––perhaps especially for young writers––is an obstacle to the creative process?
A: What I tell young writers (and tell myself) is that of course everything has been said but it hasn’t been said by you (whoever you are). And if you can find a way to speak that is inimitably yours, then you have a chance to add to the legacy of utterance about common issues. That’s where invention comes in. And imagination. And formal innovation.
Q: Your poem “B is for Beckett” simply reads “There is so little to say.” Another idea that’s prominent both in much of Beckett’s work and in The Bride of E is that, when we do have something to say, when we want to communicate what is most important and essential, language fails us: “Even death is a joke when it’s spoken.” At the same time, both you and Beckett manage––through language––to communicate what is most important and essential, whether that be the strangulating feeling of uncertainty or moments when, “There is seldom but sometimes / That sort of love. Where the one in the chair / At the end puts on your greatcoat and cries.” Which writers or works, for you, overcome the failure of language and succeed in speaking to you?
A: Well, you’ve mentioned Beckett. And I’ve mentioned Beckett. He’s major for me. I think my idea of writing changed entirely when I first read “Happy Days.” Nabokov too, changed my expectations of what a novel was. Or could be. I took a course in college with Alfred Appel who was a Nobokov scholar. I think that was the first time I really understood the concept of ambiguity, of layered meaning, and how many layers could be added atop one another. That concept is essential to poetry. Early Eliot speaks to me. Hopkins. Dickinson. ee cummings. Ronald Firbanks. Henry Green. Plath. Berryman. Woolf. Joyce. Stein. All of these writers give me a certain kind of permission, to break with received notions of what a poem is or should be or has been.
Q: Your work thus far, from book to book, has taken a variety of forms including ekphrasis, elegy, and, in your most recent collection, The Bride of E, the “alphabet book.” What forms or traditions are you currently working with?
A: I’ve just finished a slightly slant translation of the Inferno. “Slant” in that it attempts to translate the poem into contemporary language, and to substitute the music of contemporary lyric poetry (alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme) for terza rima. And I’m thinking about memoir. I’m reading memoirs with the hope of learning about the genre. I’d like to write one but I feel a need to create a form that doesn’t involve strict linearity (this happened, then this, then this) and yet tells a story.
Q: Your work also seems to draw from a variety of inspirations; the presence of Pee-wee Herman and Plato in the same poem, for me, testifies to this diversity. Outside of literary genres, what interests you in contemporary art, pop culture, or scholarly discourses––who or what should we be paying attention to?
A: I could never say who or what anyone else should pay attention to. Art and culture are fluid. A person is drawn to whomever, whatever, for such complicated reasons. I do think people should read a good newspaper every day. I read the New York Times. I think it’s important to know about the world if you’re going to write literature that mirrors it. I think it’s worth spending time in museums, looking at how visual art parallels literature’s attempt to gesture toward the human experience. I’ve learned a lot as a writer from my exposure to art. I think television is deadening. I do think we should all stay away from that medium as much as possible.
Q: Name a writer who is currently making you jealous.
A: James Joyce.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: Silent and secretive.
Q: What is your relationship with rejection like?
A: It feels like a pinch. Sometimes a little pinch. Sometimes a hard pinch. The discomfort of a pinch doesn’t last very long; on the other hand, it’s never fun to be pinched.
Q: What book did you suffer for the most, and why?
A: Elegy. The answer to why should be obvious.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
A: I’m often surprised when I’m able to return to the draft of a poem I abandoned several years earlier and see new possibilities for it. I find comfort in that. It makes me think that I might have become smarter as a poet in the meantime. Which is a nice thing to think whether it’s true or not.
Q: What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A: Writing in regular stanzas.
Q: Lastly … what did you have for lunch today?
A: A forest. And four mountains.
