QUESTIONS, DIAMONDS, ARTIFICE: AN INTERVIEW WITH CAMILLE GUTHRIE

In the poem “Wise Woman” from Camille Guthrie’s new collection Diamonds, the poet’s speaker asks: “What’s the song I have to sing to myself?” To me, this feels like a central question of this collection—where does a self trying to make a life amidst unstable conditions find energy, community, strength, the will to keep going—both in the big ways and in the little, daily, folding-the-socks-and-making-the-lunches ways? Diamonds offers power ballads and quiet moments, dazzle and dust and dearness. These poems are tender, and they’re fierce.

I’ve held these lines from Articulated Lair, Camille’s poetic homage to Louise Bourgeois, in my heart for years:

You choose enactment

& its difficulties

& delight in it

Diamonds abounds with difficulty, and with delight, and might even offer a map of what it could look like to choose enactment. Camille’s responses here are also worth delighting in, as I have been throughout this correspondence.

—Joely Fitch, current editor-in-chief

JF: I want to start with a question about questions, which I'm doing here by stealing a question (thinking/hoping that this is some kind of feminist-poetics-of-citation in action). There’s a 2013 group interview in Boston Review in which B.K. Fischer frames a set of questions I think are really wonderful and useful: "What do you think is the right question to be asking, right now, about feminism and poetry? What are you asking yourself? What are you asking of poetry, and of yourself?"

I love all of that, especially the last double-question, and I want to ask you a set of questions jumping off of those questions—what kind of questions do you think Diamonds is asking, as a collection? What kind of questions were you trying to write into in these poems? Are there questions you would hope the book inspires a reader to ask? Maybe my real question here, which I don't necessarily expect you to answer but will throw out here anyway, is: what is a question?

 CG: B.K. Fischer is indeed a brilliant poet, scholar, and literary critic! Well, I don’t quite know what questions are essentially! The human condition perhaps. Poems are a kind of questions, that’s for sure. Ideas for poems often come to me in a question. In Diamonds in its final form, I see many questions. Why are poets competitive about their affection for Keats? What kind of dating profile would Hieronymus Bosch write? What would a to-do list be for a Pict woman in Scotland of Late Antiquity? Is there a special circle of hell for tired parents? What if a sleigh shaped like a dragon was the ride of Madame du Barry? Will anyone love me when I’m old and very crabby? Can I write a good sonnet? Why is Rembrandt unbelievably awesome? Is Sylvia Plath’s prom dress a magical object? Why do people always say that poems are “beautiful” and not other adjectives? A question I learned from reading Ann Lauterbach’s The Night Sky. How do I keep owls out of my hair? I could go on.

 Honestly, I don’t think about what a reader would ask or think. It’s better for me, at least, not to worry about what a reader wants or might ask as it makes me nervous being a natural pleaser. I get an idea from somewhere, such as a visit to the Clark Art Institute with a friend, and a long stare at a Rembrandt and a John Singer Sargent, then follow a train of thoughts and connections that led to the poem “Family Collection.” I’m preoccupied with the genre of ekphrasis, so I’m often asking myself how to write about paintings, which I approach in an indirect, yet narrative, and only sometimes descriptive way. I am asking how to describe what I’ve seen and experienced in a way that is exploratory—not realistic. I’m curious about what meaning I can discover as I write the poem. When I’m revising, I’m asking myself whether I can make it a good poem or not.

 When I read the poems in this book to others, people often come up and talk to me about their marriages, divorces, or children, which I find moving and generous. When I read poetry, my ideal reaction is to ask, Can poetry do or say that? Wow, yes, it can. I felt that recently when reading Friederike Mayröcker’s études (Seagull Books, 2020), which was translated by the poet Donna Stonecipher. Those prose poems blew me away; I am swooning when I read them; and the whole time, I am asking, How was this written? How was it translated? In awe.

 JF: Could you write a description of your new book, Diamonds, in the form of a list of seven nouns (not including 'diamonds')? Abstractions are allowed.

 CG: That’s too hard. I can’t do it! Okay, here goes. I guess the obvious nouns would be themes: motherhood, love, writing, reading, divorce, midlife, paintings. I prefer to list the proper nouns. The characters, friends and inspirations, the poems converse with in the book and in no particular order:

 Hieronymus Bosch, David Bowie, Madame du Barry

A Young Daughter of the Picts, Virgil, Hamlet, Björk, Judith Butler

Emily Dickinson, Sei Shōnagon, Sylvia Plath, Milton

Plato, Rembrandt, Roland Barthes, Joan Jett, John Keats

JF: Each of your books thus far feels to me like it has a distinctive poetics, even as I'm drawing out threads and connections between them. The voice of Diamonds feels more conversational than that of many of your earlier poems, and I also find myself reading—although I could be off the mark here!—your speaker or speakers here as a little closer to your lived 'you' in terms of historical particulars than those of your earlier books. (Obviously, this isn’t true of every single poem.) But I’m also thinking of these lines from the last section of "To Bring You News"—

            I hung up my underpinnings in public

            Constructed an ironic simulacrum

            Post-poetry post-human post-time

            Yet the real prevails

I have so many questions clustering around these lines, but let's start with—where does "the real" go, in poetry, and what does a reader's "phantom attention" have to do with that? Could you speak to how the ways you think about these things have changed over the time from when-you-started-writing-poems to right now?

 CG: Definitely. The voice in these poems is more chatty and personal than the one in my previous books. I had gone through a midlife crisis—I moved from Brooklyn to rural Vermont, went through a divorce, fell in love, started a new job, moved houses—and I decided to be brave and write about things that perhaps would have embarrassed me earlier. When I was in graduate school, a very famous poet visited our program, and she told me that my poems had “an elaborate scrim.” I was insulted! And, I wanted that scrim. I rejected confessional poetry. I wanted to write through other texts and decenter the self. I also, of course, wanted her to like my poems.

At the point in my life when I was writing Diamonds (before Trump, before the pandemic), I no longer wanted to hide behind anything. There are times in one’s life you need to have some courage and say painful things. I write slowly and revise a lot, as I don’t have that much time, and I labored over the timing and line breaks so that the voice in the final revision would seem, in many of the poems, like a person speaking spontaneously. As if a dramatic monologue or improvisation. Or even a stand-up routine. That said, the poems are not memoir or realism. Anything that might seem confessional is transformed by the writing of the poem. The elaborate scrim survives! Because I love artifice, sound play, the genre of dramatic monologue, and hyperbole.

JF: That transformation-of-artifice makes so much sense, and I also love what you've said about "not wanting to hide." This takes me to something else that I'm wondering about in response to the idea of an "ironic simulacrum" and what it could mean to speak through one—how are you thinking right now about the difference between irony and sincerity, or the ways those might be in tension and balance with one another throughout a poem?

The tension between irony and sincerity is a concern of many poets—and stand-up comics. An example for me would be the title poem “Diamonds” in which I dramatize my feelings being single and middle-aged, compare myself to Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, call out Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, and make a big deal about everything. In real life, I may sigh heavily as I’m unloading the dishwasher, but many other things take up my attention. The world is on fire, and dammit, I am going to get these lunches packed. Poems contain the real; language is part of the real, especially if one is writing documentary poetry, for example. I love that quote from Emily Dickinson’s #646:

The Vision — pondered long —
So plausible becomes
That I esteem the fiction — real —
The Real — fictitious seems —

 I first learned about that quote as an undergrad when a few of us went to visit Susan Howe in her apartment in Buffalo. Reading her books for the first time was another one of those moments in which I read with awe!

My poetics in Diamonds goes for metaphor, performativity, humor, exaggeration. “Style is everything,” writes Susan Sontag in “Notes on ‘Camp.’” I love irony with tenderness. Of course, the real always prevails as we are experiencing now with the devastation of the global pandemic and climate change.

JF: I'm very glad to know this about you sitting in Susan Howe's apartment. I love that Dickinson too, so much, which I'm not sure I'd encountered before, and it makes me think of one of my favorite Woolf quotes, which I repeat all the time to everyone: "Nothing is more fascinating, than to be shown the truth which lies behind those immense façades of fiction—if life is indeed true, and if fiction is indeed fictitious," from her introduction to Mrs. Dalloway. Something I think about a lot in poetry (and maybe all kinds of writing) is how enchanting that feeling can be that one is being shown this kind of truth, that something is being revealed, but also how slippery and complicated that kind of 'truth' is—and how little the story-of-what-actually-happened can sometimes have to do with it.

 Could go on forever with that train of thought, but I also want to invite you to picture Diamonds on its ideal shelf. What are its neighbors? What other books is your book hanging out with, and why?

 CG: Oh, I have had a big crush on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury crowd since I was in college. You know, people tell me that I look like her, and we share a birthday! I will be extravagant and put my book between Sappho and Mina Loy. Or embraced by Robert Browning and John Keats. Or hugged by Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. Or touched by Sei Shōnagon and Shakespeare (especially the Sonnets). The authors I was thinking of when I wrote these poems. There are many more contemporary writers I’d like to be shelved with, but somehow it seems more outlandish to say that I’d like my book hanging out with books by Alice Munro and Diane Seuss.

JF: What an idyllic set of shelfmates! I can picture it (and, of course, can see the Woolf resemblance). My last question here is inspired by your delightful lines from the new collection's title poem, "Diamonds," in which your speaker is—as you mention above—talking to well-known theorist Judith Butler:

            I'm lucky, I get to teach you, Judith

            to students who eat up your words like candy hearts

 Having been one of said students (and having forever heart-eyes for JB's words), I'm wondering: what phrases would you put on actual Judith Butler candy hearts? Which should seriously be a thing.

 CG: I agree! And, we need Candy Hearts from Oscar Wilde, Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, Roland Barthes, Dorothy Parker, and Sappho. I’ve learned so much from Judith Butler. Here are a few candy hearts, excerpts from quotes, from Butler with many apologies to her subtle arguments and fabulous sentences:

“WE’RE UNDONE BY EACH OTHER” 

“LOVE IS NOT A STATE, A FEELING, A DISPOSITION, BUT AN EXCHANGE”

“WHO ‘AM’ I, WITHOUT YOU?”

“THE STYLIZATION OF THE BODY”

“POSSIBILITY IS NOT A LUXURY”

“TO BEGIN TO THINK CRITICALLY, AND TO ASK OTHERS TO DO THE SAME”

JF: I love these—especially "Who 'am' I, without you?" (Which sounds like it also might have come from Barthes; I'm now imagining a literary candy hearts collection with which one could play elaborate trivia games.)

The truly-worthwhile goal of becoming able to think critically (and extending that invitation to others) feels like a good place to end here. Camille, it's been so wonderful to be in conversation with you about these poems! Thank you, sincerely.

Camille Guthrie is the author of four books of poetry: Diamonds, Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois, In Captivity, and The Master Thief. Her poems have appeared in such journals as At Length, Boston Review, Green Mountains Review, Interim, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, and Tin House, as well as in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2019 & 2020, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and Art & Artists: Poems. Guthrie has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and the Yaddo Foundation. She received her MFA from Brown University and her BA from Vassar College. The Director of the Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College, she lives in rural Vermont.

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