Her prose poem sequence “[show me a depressed mother]” appears in the forty-third issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the prose poem “[show me a depressed mother].”
A: This poem excavates the idea that depression and mothering are interdependent—even that perhaps “depression” and “mother” are metaphoric for self-annihilation and care. I remember hearing once that per the DSM IV (back when it was IV not V) women by definition fall under the depression diagnosis—this was a casual observation I heard somewhere and I’m not intending to affirm or deny such a thing—but I’m interested in the ideas both that the medical diagnostic community regularly omits and obliterates everyday female experiences—like motherhood—and that we also have terms like “postpartum depression” to diagnose what seem to me to be absolutely essential, natural, and unavoidable conditions of building, baking, forming, making an entirely new human out of one’s own self’s cells—or just the condition of motherhood more broadly, the constant caregiving, caretaking, prioritizing other humans over one’s proper self—looking after others—that all might lead one to conclude, from outside the house, from inside the room, that such a character fulfills the definition of “depressed” by being unmotivated towards the self, overwhelmed by other. And as she spirals on, the speaker claims a refusal to break that down, while very much breaking that down, performing the audacity of stating what is, showing the mother, putting girls to the front, which we know only happens when some others step to the back. Maybe if the boys in the club were more motherly, the girls could see the band.
Q: How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: This piece is part of a piece—it’s been one hell of a decade! This is part of my ongoing verbal investigation into gender trauma, as relates specifically to mothering and womanning. It’s something to realize the past 10 years of life have been occupied quite publicly by a kind of unfettered misogyny on the American political stage—all the while, personally, giving birth to a female child and caring for a partner with multiply recurring life-threatening cancer. The responsibility of bringing a future woman into such a world weighs on me—even as my hope is that gender dynamics are upended and changed by the time my daughter is conscious, in a teen or adult way, of these forces shaping her life, I am also aware that even being born into and existing in this time is both better and worse for her than ever. Is that all in this piece or in all the pieces all together always saying, it was the butler, the butler did it.
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting?
A: I think my writing thinks it’s funny. Like Maria Bamford, Kate Berlant, or Tig Notaro’s “stool movement” funny. Specific funny females who wear mental health like a puffy sleeve. But my writing is also willing to admit it might not be that funny, not as funny as my models funny, because maybe sometimes it’s time to be unfunny, or to perform failure and lack of virtuosity as a badge of humble honor. Like, what if Rachel Cusk made less sense and more poetry—and why are we all reading George Eliot these days? I might not be modeling, but I might be in the room. Here’s who’s in my room right now—Olga Ravn, Ali Wong, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Mia You, Merve Emre, Xenia Rubinos, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cat Power, Poog. Pissed off people everywhere, mostly women.
Q: Over the years, you’ve composed work both solo and collaborative. What do you feel your collaborative works have allowed that might not have been possible otherwise? What do you think your collaborative efforts added to your solo writing?
A: Most of the collaborations I’ve worked on have been composed with the poet I live with, Ben Doller, so that is a collaboration that’s always happening. Over the years, the form of that collaborative relationship has changed, like, well, like a relationship. That work has always been about the relationship—it’s a very meta relationship—and has probably sped my own return to a sort of talky writing, which is where I started in writing, long ago—as a playwright. I’ve always been interested in the inside joke and writing that is able to take that outside—so this sort of intimate collaboration tends to favor that. But Ben and I are, at heart, very different writers (people) with very different speeds and energies—our recent collaboration, called Not Writing, manifested as me doing lots and lots of writing—I hogged the dance floor and had too much prose, so I just turned back into my own projects—letting Not Writing stay not writing for a bit. (Life and health and parenting and domestication intervene in that space even more than they do in the regular writing space.) Translating is another form of collaboration I engage in and one I’m interested in spending more time on in my elder years (are we there yet?)—I have worked with a brilliant writer and translator, Éric Suchère, and we’ve translated each other’s work over the years, so I have a theory about that sort of reciprocal translation—when you translate your translator, does it become a collaboration? Are you changing each other’s work in ways you wouldn’t if they weren’t also translating yours? And because Suchère is a conceptual writer, I also wonder can you translate a procedure, a concept, or a project in addition to or instead of translating the language? I’m looking into it.
Q: With a handful of published collections over the years, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?
A: It’s an infinite regression—golden spiral—internal return. I find myself coming back to ideas, words, rages, places. I didn’t start in poetry, but in performance—playwriting and solo texts for movement—so the more I write, the longer I live, the more vocality rears itself. My work is heading towards more voice—maybe even more voices—maybe it needs to be spoken—maybe it will be. My work is heading someplace where I make recordings of myself reading aloud very, very fast in different voices, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Q: You mention working towards voice, but are there other elements of performance you feel that influence, or even underpin, the way you approach text? And how do your texts themselves allow for their own potential performance? Are the visual elements on your page notational?
A: Coming to text via performance—and via film—does create a space where my own writing becomes something other than writing, it becomes a situation. A problem, even. I think of Maya Deren, Gertrude Stein, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Christine McNair—how can writing be a rehearsal? And what is the actual performance of the text—is it the writing itself, the reading after the fact, the uttering of the words, or the desire of words to remain unspoken…? In terms of visual elements, I used to work more with the page in a sense that was rhythmic, and as you say, notational—that may still be true, in that my prose blocks are intended for speed, and my line breaks are intended for breathing. I have a certain way I hear my words in my own head, but that doesn’t mean I’m right.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: Lucy Ellmann—and her mother Mary Ellmann—are constantly with me—we have a family joke in our house about Moby Duck—both of them are tragically brilliant in a way the world remains unprepared for—every phrase contains three puns and staircases to other worlds of intertextualities—even though Lucy is writing fiction and Mary wrote about women writing—both of them work in sentence structures that are more like brutalist office building architectures with a dash of organic modernism—I could live happily with the mother-daughter pair of Thinking About Women (ME) and Ducks, Newburyport (LE) as my only furniture.
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