Rochelle Hurt lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she teaches for the Hinge Literary Center, the Carrboro ArtsCenter, and the Loft Literary Center online. Her poetry and prose can be found in recent or upcoming issues of KROnline, Crab Orchard Review, The Southeast Review, Hunger Mountain, Arts & Letters, Columbia Poetry Review, Passages North, Meridian, and Image.
Her poems "Poem In Which I Play the Runaway," "In Between, Georgia," and "In Hurt, Virginia" appear in Issue Thirty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, Rochelle Hurt talks with interviewer Amber Cook about weird town names, kinds of homes, identity, and complexity throughout her poems.
1. What made you write the three poems “In Hurt, Virginia,” “In Between, Georgia,” and “Poem in Which I Play the Runaway?” Were they all inspired by the same things, or did you have a separate impulse for each?
“In Between, Georgia” was the first of an ongoing series of poems titled after oddly-named (real) towns in the US. I can’t remember where I first read about Between, Georgia, but as soon as I did, I knew that I had to write a poem about it. Though I knew logically that the town’s name has nothing (necessarily) to do with its character, I just kept imagining a town full of people and things in a state of constant limbo, always between one place and another. That imaginary version of Between, Georgia seemed like a sad place, full of waiting—but also a little whimsical or goofy. From there, I started to seek out other weird town names for the series, finding Hurt, Virginia, among others.
“Poem in Which I Play the Runaway” started as part of a different series of poems written in the voice of Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde). Of course, I was using Bonnie’s voice to talk about myself, so in the end I just decided to take off that mask.
2. For me, each time repetition is used, a word is altered or changes in definition, ever so slightly. Do you think that the continued repetition of “I was born” in your poem “In Hurt, Virginia” changes or transforms with each use? How does repetition work for you in your writing?
I don’t use repetition much, but when I do it’s usually as a way to establish a structure for an idea that I find initially intimidating or unwieldy—or when I am trying to transform the meaning of a word, as you say. While writing “In Hurt, Virgina,” I was playing with feelings of inferiority and difference in a way that required a certain kind of pride and frenzy. I didn’t want to write another sad poem about being an outcast or coming from a bad place. Something about repeating the phrase “I was born,” which feels so revelatory and unashamed (like “Here’s what you need to know about me”), seemed to help build momentum in a way that was transformative—a way of working up to pride. Of course, it’s also a great set-up for saying something crazy in each line.
3. The speaker in “In Hurt, Virginia” seems to attach herself to being born as small or lesser (i.e. a fleck, a stick, a kernel, a breadcrumb, etc.) Is that the way you intended for the speaker to be read?
(sort of covered in the previous question I think – also, I’m glad to hear that you got that from the poem, as it was intentional)
4. In C.S. Giscombe’s book, “Giscome Road,” he seeks out and examines a place in Canada that he shares a surname with and assumes that he could be tied to the place, though he does not know for sure. Did you actively seek out the location Hurt, VA because of your last name? Do you have any specific attachment to Hurt? Is place something you often focus on in your poetry?
I have never been to Hurt, Virginia, though I will probably try to go next time I’m in Virginia. I have no idea what it’s like there, and on the one hand I hope that I’m not being unfair or offensive by appropriating these towns’ names, but on the other, I don’t really believe that writers of poetry or fiction have an obligation to truth. So, yes, I chose it for our shared name. There are so many complex emotions and ideas tied to one’s surname (family legacies—good or bad, ownership, identity, authenticity), so when I discovered Hurt, Virginia in my search for more weird town names, it called out to me as a symbol of the links between identity (and all of those other things mentioned above) and place.
The intersection of place, home and identity is a theme that I am continually exploring in my poetry. I grew up in a rust belt town where there was always a strong sense of ambivalence among residents toward the town itself. Even today, I talk about that town (Youngstown, Ohio) with a mixture of deprecation and pride. All this is to say that the idea of place haunts me in a way conducive to writing poetry. I’m not familiar with Giscombe’s book, but it sounds like something I should read—especially since I just learned that we share a birthplace (Dayton, OH). Maybe this obsession with place and identity is an Ohio thing?
5. Between, GA, like Hurt, VA, is a factual place but seems more fantastical throughout the poem with its namesake due to the things that happen there. Did you intend to mix fact and fiction, and if so, do you use that tactic often?
When writing the poems in this series, I thought it was important to use the names of real towns, even though I totally made up the contents of poems. In that way, the town names functioned simply as symbolic jumping-off points. I guess I usually mix a tiny bit of fact with a lot of fiction in my poetry. I find that the best way for me to “document” anything is through metaphor, so even those of my poems that could in some way be called historical or documentary wind up being pretty fantastical.
6. I love how “In Between, Georgia” opens with this string of beautiful lines to describe the body like “empty eyelids/ an orchard of four-fingered hands.” Is the physical body often something that you bring into your poems?
It’s a motif that I find myself returning to, often as part of the larger theme of home—because the body is the most important and difficult kind of home, and the one that is most inseparable from identity.
7. To me as a reader, there is definitely a loss of innocence that comes after the first stanza in “Poem in Which I Play the Runaway.” The stanzas that follow seem to combine sexual undertones and violence. Did you mean for this shift to occur? How does this shift affect the speaker of the poem for you as the writer?
I think that by the end of the poem, she has relinquished any illusions about her identity—and disillusionment is a loss of innocence that is more profound than a sexual loss of innocence. Of course, the sexual and violent imagery parallels this loss as something to which the speaker grows accustomed (that is my intention, in any case). So perhaps the homelessness she refers to at the end is literal and metaphorical (self-image being yet another kind of home).
8. Formalistically, all three of your poems have distinctively different forms. Are you often varying form from one poem to the next?
Absolutely—I work with whatever form the content seems most at home in, including prose.
9. Is there something that you read lately that you think other people should read as well?
Yes—so many books by so many brilliant women. To name a few: Pretty by Kim Chinquee, Doll Studies: Forensics by Carol Guess, Murder Ballad by Jane Springer, Sing, Mongrel by Claire Hero, The Necropastoral by Joyelle McSweeney, Heart First Into the Forest by Stacy Gnall, All of Us by Elisabeth Frost, Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall, Small Fires (nonfiction) by Julie Marie Wade, and (fiction) Labrador by Kathryn Davis. Also, this amazing story by Kerry Ryan at the Kenyon Review (“The Cleverness of Crows”).
10. The poems feel very connected to each other because of their insistence on accepting place or rejecting place. Are they from a larger project?
They are all part of a book-length manuscript I’ve been pulling together (which, for better or worse, appropriates some Wizard of Oz themes). Right now, I’m calling it No Place.