Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and teacher based in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, 6x6 and the Boston Review. She holds a MFA from Warren Wilson and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Rabins tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, and is currently completing her first manuscript of poems.
Her poems, "How to Confess an Affair," "How to Be a Prophet," and "How to Make a Red Velvet Cake," appeared in Issue Forty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about whimsy, prose poems, and the form of the "how to."
Could you talk about writing these “How To” poems?
I’m fascinated by self-help literature and also by ancient spiritual texts. Is there a difference beyond the patina of years? I’m not sure. I lived in Jerusalem for two years in my early twenties, immersed in Hebrew, Aramaic and sacred Jewish texts and practices. Studying (and living) those texts, the relationship between words and spiritual practice made a strong impression on me—the texts were quite beautiful, but also legalistic, so the words lived on a level beyond the simply aesthetic, with prescriptions for actions that shaped my days. I like working with a How To form because it frames the aesthetic and meaning-making pleasures of a poem within the power, directness and pragmaticsm of spiritual texts addressing needs in daily life. Also, I love Julio Cortazar’s instructional manuals and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit.
I’m curious to know about your choice of form for these poems. I’ve written in this sort of mode before (the “How To”), and I always tend to revert to numbered lists. Why the prose poem or the lineation? Do you think the weight of calling them “How To” allows you more freedom with the form, since the reader has a better idea of what to expect?
I do have a couple list poems in the series, as well as some small, lineated poems, but as you’ve noted, the vast majority are prosepoems. I don’t remember consciously making this formal decision, but I think is was my instinct because the prosepoem most closely resembles the form of the ancient texts which inspire this series. Midrash and mishna in the Jewish tradition, as well as Buddhist and yoga sutras, come down to us in the form of a series of interlinked, brief sections without defined lineation—what we could call “prosepoems.” This probably reflects the process of oral transmission; lineation requires literacy and access to duplication, whereas small chunks of nonlineated text are ideal for memorizing and passing on. Another way of saying this is that a numbered list draws more on a modern technical writing model of instructional text, whereas I am drawing on the ancient spiritual mode of instructional text.
And yes, I think (or hope) the “How To” form has the formal benefit of building a container which generates some surface tension for the series, allowing for greater experimentation and risk within the poems.
In these poems, the body is broken open and made whimsical in a devastated way (for example, the torso turned to fish bowl with the fish swimming inside in “How to Confess an Affair.”) How do you see whimsy working in these poems? Is it just the movement to metaphor often found in poetry, or something else?
To turn your question back on you if I may, I’m curious what “whimsical” means in this context—is it the same as imagination, or something else?
The most powerful writing class I ever took was called “Imaginative Writing,” with Kenneth Koch. One thing I took away from that class was a delight in imagination itself—that, as the Surrealists knew, as well as the creators of Greek myth and so many other writers, there is sometimes a truth beyond the literal truth, one that can only be accessed through imagination and metaphor. I suppose I am interested in a use of metaphor that is transformative rather than simply comparative. I believe in symbols, and that sometimes a body is as much fish bowl as body, and a lover a goldfish, and a piece of information a hook in the fish’s lip. Is that different from other poets? Now I’m curious.
What should we be reading, from your perspective?
Oh, I don’t know about what people “should” be reading, but here’s what’s on my desk right now, by which I mean my bedside table: Maggie Nelson, Joanne Dominique Dwyer, Claudia Rankine, Dorothea Lasky, Filip Marinovic, The Possessed by Elif Batuman, a book of accounts of westward journeys by American pioneers, and a self-help book called Mothering from Your Center (I have a toddler). Also, a plug for Hoa Nguyen’s excellent and innovative classes—she’s based in Toronto, but offers a remote version—reading and writing through a poet’s collected works. So I am currently immersed in the Complete Philip Whalen with Hoa’s guidance.
What else have you been writing? Do more of these “How To” poems exist in the world?
I’m currently finishing up my first full-length poetry manuscript, which includes about fifteen poems from this series. There are lots more, and I’m also, separately, hoping to publish a chapbook of the complete How To series. There are a couple in the current issue of Sentence Magazine, a few appeared in American Poetry Review two years ago, and one was in the New Delta Review this spring.