Small Spiral Notebook interview

Kim Garcia’s first book of poetry, Madonna Magdalene, was called “a startling book of origins, a mature and passionate first book of poems” by Edward Hirsch. In Madonna Magdalene, Kim expands known Biblical and mythological narratives by using her personal experiences and gently but unequivocally questioning what is known.

On a surprisingly kind November morning in Boston, Kim and I discussed poetics, politics, women and poetry, and of course, the process of writing Madonna Magdalene.

Angela Veronica Wong: Recently, I’ve been really interested in defining the “confessional” poetics. I’m not trying to label your poetry as “confessional,” but I do think that your poetry does explore, return to, and depend on the self. So I ‘m interested in how you see and understand “confessional poetry.”

Kim Garcia: Just that it's hard to say where poetry is not confessional in a sense. If you're looking to the personal. Confession used to have a strongly religious meaning. You confessed your sins to another person. There was also the sense of confessing as witnessing or telling the truth. It was testimony. So the term changes with what people hang their meanings on. Most people are no longer talking to God like Milton or even to the capital “I” Imagination as the Romantics did. The first poets who were called confessional—Lowell and that crowd–were hanging their meanings on psychotherapy—Freud and the talking cure. You're still “justifying God's ways to man,” or making some kind of narrative, but it's a different frame. Poets are not going to escape from the hard work of laying bare their particular moment with their particular meanings.

I don't think poetry should escape confessing. The term is meant to be a little snide, I think. A way of distancing yourself from vulnerability, or a way of putting that down.

AVW: You mean, putting confessional writers down?

KG: Yes, if you're saying that this is therapy or this is confessional, maybe all you mean is that it's not working for you, it's not where you hang your meanings. Maybe it's just too emotionally hot, or you'd like the formal container to resist it a bit more.

I think it's more a matter of taste, and that particular moment–breaking out, with passion, about where you think your meanings are locate—I don't think that's going to pass out of poetry. I think that's human.

AVW: I agree - technically, you can argue almost any poem is confessional.

KG: Look at Basho - when he's talking about the fleas and the inn and how lonely he is. Does it get labeled as confessional? It's a loaded term for a certain kind of inescapably human project.

AVW: I feel like the term “confessional” is demonized and also feminized—possibly demonized because it is feminized. I'm wondering where that comes from. Is it because “confessional” has become associated with Plath and Sexton and the physical female body?

KG: Plath and Sexton are writing for their lives and you feel that. But so is Coleridge and so is Donne, and you can go all the way back. If you're not writing for your life, then probably there's no charge and nobody is going to be interested in you later. It's going to be an exercise, a sort of courtly exercise to show your skills. Having your feet to the fire and writing passionately is something I think women—and it does feel to me that it is because they're women—get belittled for. When they have that kind of writing happen, then that's called hysterical, overemotional. The argument used to be that it was because the critics were so often male, but that hasn't held up over time.

I think women at a certain pitch scare both men and women because for children, the angry, emotional mother is dangerous. We probably have to be more alert to our own sense of threat— those tricky, suppressed ambivalences we have towards our mothers—if we want to evaluate these poets fairly.

AVW: Because your work, too, centers very much on the female body and the female bodily experience, do you ever think or fear that you'll experience a similar backlash?

KG: I'd be happy for backlash, since that would mean that there was interest in the first place. I consider serious engagement of any kind a compliment.

As a reader, I could live without drive-by reviews where the reviewer is using the work as a pretext for showing off because I don't find out much about the work, but as a writer all discussion is good discussion.

AVW: It seems the masculine is universalized while the feminine is somewhat demonized—your writing is very different than Plath or Sexton, but this is the female tradition in which women poets write in now. Does this ever concern you?

KG: Demons are interesting, much nicer than being universalized, no? Sounds like a universal sink stopper. I'm kidding. I know what you mean—dismissed, right? Dismissed with a certain shiver, as though they had touched the wet, uterine wall.

As I was suggesting earlier, I think it's a matter of being more conscious about fear of a certain pitch of maternal anger. And yes, I know I'm risking that response. It's a scary and powerful place in women, and dismissal is one of the ways that people deal with fear. But I also think there is a healing at those places where we are most afraid, so I'll keep going there.

AVW: When you were assembling and writing Madonna Magdalene, did the potential backlash or dismissive reaction towards the womanness of the poems even in your head, or were you dedicated to writing your personal truth without regard to external judgment?

KG: I didn't need to have voices in my head, the world was happy to hand them to me in stereo. When I wrote a poem about the virgin and unicorn of the Bayeux tapestries, readers went off on Rainbow Brite. And then a really wonderful poet, who I admire and who I consider a mentor to women poets, told me that the moment for this kind of women's writing—writing from the body— was over. Luckily I was far enough in that these voices only made me more stubborn. I don't have much luck with ignoring. I should work on that in my next life.

AVW: How in control are you of the message of your poems and where readers may take them?

KG: Images ripple in all directions, and sometimes as a poet you're not aware, either from personal ignorance or lack of experience, of some of the directions it might go. It's impossible to use an image or a phrase without having effects that you don't entirely intend, because language is constantly accruing new meanings and associations. That's going to happen. What you hope is that it will always be interesting and build the tension of the poem and draw people in. But if you're too naive or ignorant—not in control or aware of common ways an image can go, then it's not going to work. So you try to be intelligent about what the poem is doing, but you're aware that language and images attract associations all the time, and you aren't in control of that. Poems are still half-wild things because language is half-wild.

AVW: I’ve also been interested in the definition of witness poetry and the question of legitimacy in witness poetry. Is it more legitimate if you're experiencing or if you're tied to it in some way, or could I write a really great poem about the Holocaust or is it a different way of valuing it? KG: IF you can write a great poem about the Holocaust, do it. IF you can write a great poem about the Armenian genocide, do it. There aren't enough great poems—so do it. On the other hand, do you run into some ethical questions in some cases? Yeah. Do you feel comfortable making certain things up? It's slippery. The poem probably won't stand as a great poem if the slippage is too great. I have that faith in the practice of poetry. A poem will bite back. If you're a Holocaust denier writing about the Holocaust, even with lovely images and great form, that poem is going to fall apart, because again, you're not in control of the echo. You want these facts to be read a certain way but they're going to echo all these other ways, and the poem will expose you.

AVW: Do you think, as a poet, it's your responsibility to think of all the different directions, these different ripples, that an image, or word, or phrase, can take, especially something potentially controversial? Even though sometimes you just can't, sometimes you're just not going to see.

KG: You're feeling for the ways in which the voice both seems honest and holds up under scrutiny as honest. And that's complicated. Complicated and wonderful when you think about it. Every image speaks and speaks slightly differently for each person. You can't enter poetry without entering a tradition of all of human speech in your particular language up to that point, and that's going to be echoing around—and your history, which you're only seeing partially because of where you are in history. All of those things are going around whenever we speak. It's wonderful and humbling. For us speaking right here—it's happening.

There are all these blind spots, also operating, but what happens for certain poems is those blind spots start to tip the poem out of relevance or truth. They aren't read anymore because there was such an enormous blind spot about something like colonialism, for instance. A poem written about how wonderful it was that England owns India was eventually toppled by its own blind spot. We just don't know what our blind sports are right now. Willed ignorance we can avoid, if we have the courage. Blind spots we should assume and hold onto a little humility when we're critiquing the dead.

AVW: In terms of poetry and its role politically, would you say that there is an obligation towards political statements or engagement?

KG: What's the alternative? I think I know what people are saying when they say poetry should be apolitical. They don't want to use political materials and images and phrases. And I think there are good reasons to avoid that—jargon is no friend to poetry. But right now if you pay attention to good poets, you can hear the war. Even the most domestically situated or psychological, you can feel the disturbance, the fact that we're in a wartime situation where bodies are coming home and disappearing without any kind of ability to stop that from happening. You can hear that we're right now in a country where we decided that torture is okay.

I would say if you look at any of the good poetry being written right now, you're going to hear that disturbance, that sense of something slipping away from us. But it might not be directly witnessing in all cases, so the question is how much does it have to be directly speaking about particular circumstances. It's not going to be something that fits on a bumper sticker. It's not going to be unidirectional. It's going to be conflicted in some way. For people who want a unidirectional, “throw the bastards out” politics, it's going to look like the poetry is apolitical because it doesn't lend itself to that kind of use.

AVW: Your poems in Madonna Magdalene are not overtly political—you're not titling anything “The War in Iraq,” for example—but certainly the reader understands that there is a point, a theme to the poems as a collection. I'm always impressed by collections that are collections. Did you just start writing and come to this theme, or did you know you wanted to write it beforehand?

KG: I had written these poems over a long period of time. All the time I was a young mother, through lean and fat years. And there was a certain point (the children were old enough) when I was at Hambidge Center for the Arts in Georgia and I was in a cabin for two weeks. I had this beige rug, and I figured out it was probably the size of a manuscript. So I laid my poems out on the rug and stared at them. At a certain point, after a day—I was staring at them, drinking coffee, way too much coffee—and a breeze started blowing the poems around so I went outside and got rocks, weighted them down, and looked at them some more. It was something like waiting for a poem, waiting for my own preoccupations to emerge, and then to see if there was anything to make of them. Finally on the third or fourth day of coffee and rocks, I realized that in one way or another there were an awful lot of poems talking about prostitution, at least as I thought of it, as a state of the heart—the ways in which we negotiate, rather than yield to love. And there were a lot of poems about motherhood, perhaps not surprisingly, and a longing to completely yield yourself to loving another. I had all these voices—I wrote a lot of dramatic monologues—but they were all struggling with love, yielding and negotiating. For me it's a constantly oscillating way of thinking about love. It's not a finished issue.

AVW: It's interesting to hear that you first wrote mainly monologue poems as opposed to “I” poems. Do you feel that you had to write those monologue poems to get to the self? Were you afraid of putting too much of the “I” in, or was it just the way it turned out?

KG: I think some of it was that I started writing monologue poems when I was quite young and I didn't have anything to say. I hadn't had enough life experience to be able to have anything rich enough to say. And the poetry that I knew, because I came from a family that had very very little poetry, just what you got in the public schools in Texas, so what I knew well was the Bible.

AVW: Which is poetry.

KG: Right. And there I was five o'clock in the morning reading poetry every morning out of this Bible. And at that time, they didn't have the study questions after every chapter—they just let you loose with this thing, and they're probably not too pleased with what I did with it. But that's what I had in my head—I had those rhythms, those preoccupations. When you look at the Psalms, they're at this pitch, this point where everything doesn't add up, where there's this sense of forsakenness or joyfulness all at a certain pitch. And basically those complaints are put to God in most of those dramatic monologues, certainly biblical figures—their complaints are to God.

It's interesting right now one of the talking points in poetry is about the “I” and about getting rid of the “I”— like “let's get beyond the I” and it's funny because I started with doing all dramatic monologues in poetry. I had a strong sense of the “I” in my fiction, but not in my poetry. There were actually more dramatic monologues than ended up being in Madonna Magdalene. It started with very little of my own voice. So I went the other way. My trick was discovering that “I” that was somehow mine or somehow who I was going to be on the page, for me, that felt truthful. Somebody that I would want to listen to and be lead into the wilderness by. I started out the other way, I started out the Psalms, basically. I would take different biblical characters and at that point where they reach their aria, where they have their complaint, then that would be the moment where I would write the poem.

AVW: Why do you think there's this desire to “excise the I”?

KG: I don't know. Maybe linked in some way to the reaction against memoir. Maybe a salutory effort to broaden the horizons of the typical lyrical poem, that is, beyond something like “Here I am, telling you about my poetic mood and what I can see out the window without moving around very much.” But I'm not convinced that excising the “I” is going to do much to stop us from obsessing on ourselves. Only love does that, not a technical fix.

AVW: You say the negotiation and yielding to love is not a finished issue—has completing Madonna Magdalene helped “finish” it at all for you? Or has it just made you even more interested in exploring the question of love and power, prostitution and motherhood?

KG: I really don't know what people who aren't thinking about love and power do all day. Oh yeah, they're thinking about death.

No, don't think I'll finish this subject. Not in this lifetime. In terms of prostitution, I was thinking about it in terms of the problem you have with differences in power, when you're in love with someone. There's a power difference because of the way that patriarchy is set up. I believe that men aren't the enemies or the villains here, but the power differential is a real problem. How are you going love under that circumstance? And then there is that wounded part in everyone that wants to negotiate instead of yielding to love. The mother poems, on the other hand, are lot about yielding to love and maybe finding out that you don't have as much as the Madonna in you as you would like.

I thought about the Madonna/Whore split we talk about in Catholicism—in fact I had the manuscript working title was “Madonna/Whore—but I realized it was way too dualistic. That's not the way that I experience my own ambivalences, and I don't think that's the way most men and women experience it.

AVW: The Bible, in ways, does forsake its female characters. Because many of the dramatic monologues in your book are those of female Biblical characters, did you understand that you would be rewriting, or challenging the way the Bible treats and portrays women?

KG: I try to hear the voices as living voices, not the interpretations. Interpretations are too small. I act like I can do this because I can. I always had that rebellious side where I would go to Fundamentalist prayer meetings and read the Psalms and change the articles because they couldn't say anything—no male or female in Christ, says Paul, right? Because they were claiming it was inclusive, so I would just say “if a woman does, and if she does,” and so on and you could see where eventually I wasn't going to be able to be tolerated in that environment. But for me it was already implied in the text. It was already there. It's just the way that it is read and the way that some of the cultural aspects of the Bible ended up being translated into rules. That's a problem. That's a problem all the way through the church. It's a problem with interpretation of anything sacred and full of fire. And I'd like to think that I just went to the spirit of those stories and said, “Well. Here you are.”

For me, the Magnificat [interviewer’s note: the Canticle or the Song of Mary] should be seen as this revolutionary document. It's just amazing. It's not read that way in the church. This is a woman and she's just about to have this child out of wedlock, and when she says it—through me, through my body right now, the world is going to turn upside-down. The people who are at the bottom are going to be at the top. She's talking like a radical Marxist and a radical feminist, not in theory, but in “it’s coming through my body right now, this incarnation.” It's this fabulous, really inflammatory, revolutionary statement. But that's all tamped down through the cultural baggage that comes with being a tradition. You're not going to get away from that—you're going to have to keep pushing on it and banging on it. You don't get poetry or faith for free.

AVW: Would you say you're giving a voice that isn't there?

KG: Giving a voice and looking at the story again. Taking off the dominant reading of it can look like it's doing something pretty radical. So I don't think my manuscript is exactly a rewriting. I think it’s looking at it from an angle where some of the energies that are already implicit, I make explicit. For instance, what is Bathsheba's role when she gets chosen by a king who says, “Now you come to the castle.” She's not the one doing the looking. He's the one doing the looking. Then he's the one making the decision about her husband. That's already there in the text. But Bathsheba's thought as her husband is sent to the front, that's not something we've thought about. So in that way, I'm not saying let's rewrite the story, I'm saying, “Have you thought about the fact ...”

AVW: It's a little bit subversive.

KG: Yeah, it can be subversive. I think reading the Bible with an open heart is subversive. We censor out what wakes us up to radical love, or radical fearlessness. At least that's what I do most of the time.

AVW: You've said that you left out some of the monologues—how did you decide what to keep and the order—the technical parts of preparing a manuscript?

KG: This is where it helps to have other pairs of eyes who can look at your manuscript with you. John Anderson and Sue Roberts were so helpful. We put the poems up on a “white board” which made it easier to change the order than on the rug.

AVW: I find how the poems interact with each other one of the most engaging aspects of the collection. You use different voices—the personal “I,” the she/he, the third-person storytelling, you use prose poems and poems with contained lines, set stanzas and free verse. You manage to keep a balance throughout the collection. How much were you conscious of the way the different styles of poems would act against each other as you were writing and arranging the poems? For example, you scatter the “Beastiary of Desire” poems in Part Two, instead of say, gathering the all together as a clump, which is a decision that seems very deliberate. Was something like that more intuitive or did you have a “formula?”

KG: For the “Bestiary poems,” I did consciously spread them out. I felt they didn't require being put together. It was strongly intuitional. The collection felt like a piece of music, like how you know when it's time for a refrain or a bridge.

AVW: What other “technical” decisions did you make? You said you had originally thought to name the collection “Madonna/Whore.” What made you change it?

KG: Part of it was that it was too dualistic. But I wasn't happy with the term “whore.” “Magdalene” seemed a little more fluid, and this is where I was playing with language, instead of having one figure, one part of ourselves negotiating.

AVW: Was it hard to call it “finished” and stop working on it? KG: Yes—it was hard to turn in. Sometimes I'm still a little unhappy with it, but I try to think about something else, what's next.

AVW: I guess this is the million-dollar question: what is next? What are you working on now? KG: I’m always writing poetry, unless of course I’m not, in which case I’m trying not to slit my wrists. I also have a lot of book promotion and readings to do now. I’m a good reader, I think, but it’s always painful. I wonder if people can see my legs shaking. I sometimes wonder if I actually give a better reading because I have to pay for it emotionally. Either way I love meeting the audience. I love to connect with other readers and writers. It’s my world.

AVW: You are both an undergraduate creative writing teacher and a graduate creative writing student. How does being a workshop teacher and a student affect your work?

KG: I think it's important to work in a group, but sometimes I feel the workshop culture is focused on editing down instead of developing poets and writers.

It's important to work with people who are invested in you as a writer, who are not interested in making something perfect in itself, but in your development as a writer. I'm a believer in a small group of fellow writers—you don't want editors, you want teachers. In a small group, you truly get a sense of people as poets over time.

Poetry is a human activity—you can't read it if you can't write it and I'm glad to have any of my students try to write, even if they don't end up being writers, I hope that they will become loyal readers of poetry.

They say right now the soldiers in Iraq are writing poetry on the walls of the barracks. I’m so moved by this, and not really surprised. We need poetry. We need to read it and write it and have it in our mouths. No one knows exactly why. It’s not just a record of experience, it is experience.

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