an interview with Chandra Mayor

This interview was conducted in March 2005.

CV2: In your work there is a particularly difficult aesthetic of home, one which implies a struggle of self against the house or home of the body. In August Witch you tackle emotional breakdown and the need to physically punish the body you inhabit. In Cherry you write of a violent domestic arrangement, and the little solace available to the main character comes when she gets pregnant. How do you manage the fine line of literary and personal revelation? What is important to you to communicate about poetry—you as a poet and writer—and your view on the world?

Chandra Mayor: I think bodies are tremendously interesting; they’re the one thing that, like it or not, we have to haul around with us our entire lives. Of course they’re unreliable, dangerous, and sometimes seem to operate completely independently of our minds and desires. Those people lucky enough to be dancers or athletes have a wholly different and more intimate relationship with bodies than most of us do. How do we separate self from body, and how do we find ways to cohabit? I think that our bodies are the primary place where we play out all our fears and desires and contradictions and longings.

What’s important to me to accomplish through my writing is to communicate something truly, truthfully. Of course, by that I mean the emotional truth, not necessarily an accurate portrayal of facts (though a measure of factual accuracy is important too, especially in a work like Cherry, which is set in a specific time and place—inaccuracies in that context only serve to throw the reader out of the story). But in the bigger picture, I think analysis of what actually happened and what is fabricated is irrelevant, as long as the emotional truth comes through. It’s like debating whether or not Sylvia Plath was sexually abused by her father, as “evidenced” by the poem “Daddy.” Ultimately, who cares? It’s a great, powerful poem that resonates with readers. That’s what’s important.

CV2: How has the experience of being a queer or lesbian woman formed your expectations of poetic space, and how has that relationship influenced your writing? What do you feel changes in one’s relationship with writing when the writer comes from what we view as the normative heterosexual life experience?

CM: My connection to the world exists not through physical spaces, but relationally, with other people, with the struggles and joys of community. I have found the queer community (both the actual one made up of real people whom I have met and known, and the theoretical one that exists as a culture and a shared and diverse perspective) to be welcoming, difficult, grounding, revelatory, challenging, accepting, and incredibly diverse and endlessly interesting. It gives me the doubled experience of being both an insider (within the community) and an outsider (to the heteronormative world)—a set of perspectives that I think are useful to any writer. It allows me an understanding of other possibilities and other truths than those that are available to someone who’s never really engaged in a critical analysis of herteronormativity, who’s never really stepped outside the status quo. Being a part of queer communities has been a tremendous gift for me—so many configurations of self, of community and family and society, of love. So much resilience and creativity and imagination.

CV2: How would you describe your relationship with poetry? How does it work in you? Is it you locking horns with the Muses or is it a more internal and less aggressive struggle? How has that relationship changed from when you first began to write?

CM: Poetry is usually a struggle with me; I fight for every word, every image, every line break. It makes my stomach hurt. The process sucks—once every year or so I have a blessing poem—one that just seems to happen on its own. Of course, it’s only because of all the hard work that I’ve spent years doing that those poems seem to just “flow”—it’s an illusion. For me, writing is devastatingly hard work, especially poetry.

CV2: Bachelard talks extensively about the poetic process, in particular about how a poetic image appears in the imagination through a process separate from the human intellectual process, one he differentiates as emanating from the soul, as it exists in us as a more original or unformed consciousness, and this kind of imagery appearing in a complete “aha” or sudden occurrence—the intellectual process begins when a person takes the image and attempts to create a poem with it. Many poets talk about getting back into poetry as if it were a place they travel to and from in between all the other practical requisites of life. Where do you go when you write, and is it a different space or part of the psyche?

CM: Poetry for me is a space of intense concentration. I don’t think I agree that images emanate from the soul; I think they come from really paying attention to the worlds we inhabit and the ways we inhabit them. I’m cranky and short-tempered when I’m writing, especially when something or someone interrupts me, but that’s only because I’m concentrating so exclusively on elusive language.

CV2: How does the poetic process work for you? Describe the experience of how a poetic image comes to you, and how, then, you proceed to formulate a poem.

CM: Sometimes the genesis of a poem is an image, which I write down and then start to pick and peel at, to expand and condense; it symbolizes for me a feeling that I want to communicate. Sometimes I want to write about a situation or tell a story.

CV2: In terms of immediacy, would you say that poetry has a more intimate voice or way of speaking with the reader? Does it put the poet in a more vulnerable position than, say, a novelist; do you feel more vulnerable as a poet? Does your sense of the relationship between home and creativity have anything to do with that?

CM: I think that in general, poetry does communicate more intimately with a reader because it bypasses or transforms clunky constructions of formal language—sentence structure, punctuation. It also speaks in the language of symbol and metaphor, which communicates feeling more intimately than description. I don’t think I’d use the word “vulnerable”; I prefer the word “connected.” I feel more connected to the reader in poetry than I do in short fiction, although I felt that same intensity of connection while writing Cherry.