Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and Torah teacher. Her book, Divinity School, was awarded the APR/Honickman First Book Prize and is forthcoming in fall 2015. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Boston Review, 6x6 and American Poetry Review. Alicia tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, an art-pop song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two small children.
Her poems, "No One Can Give You What You Take from Yourself" and "Home Birth Videos," appeared in Issue Sixty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Allison Jarrett about essential self-love, how musicianship informs poetry, and the psychedelic stillness of pregnancy.
“No One Can Give You What You Take from Yourself” and “Home Birth Videos” have some thematic similarities. Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of these poems?
Last summer, I was pregnant with my second child. He was due July 31, and I decided to write a poem a day throughout the month of July, to trace this heightened and strange time with words. There is a psychedelic stillness in the last weeks before a baby is born, when you literally embody the term “pregnant pause.” Both these poems come out of that moment and that series...full of birthing imagery, energy, and thoughts.
You employ different forms of repetition throughout both of these poems. In “Home Birth Videos,” repetition serves to showcase a number of juxtapositions: “sometimes red sometimes white,” “the woman is crying / I am crying,” etc. How intentional was your use of repetition in the drafting of this poem, and how do you see it working here or in other areas of your writing?
For better or worse, don’t really think about those kinds of things—what we often call “craft”—while I’m writing. I am more of a wild intuitive writer, and then I use my craft brain to tighten things up in revision. But I suspect that repetition, like much of my writing, is influenced by my being a musician as well as a poet. In some ways repetition (and its shadow, avoidance of repetition) is the fundamental building block of music, and so it feels normal to me, like a grammatical structure rather than a strategy. If I were to overanalyze it I might say at that reproductive moment in my life, where cycles of nature were front and center, repetition and iteration mimicked my experience. But that’s all after the fact.
“No One Can Give You What You Take from Yourself” explores the conflict between the perception of oneself as lacking in some crucial way and the realization of self as whole and autonomous. What does that perceived void look like to you? More specifically, what are some things that you think we take from ourselves?
People can give us so much, but I was thinking about the things we have to give ourselves. Compassion for ourselves. Self-love (in the good sense.) Essential, basic faith in ourselves; trust in our paths; the conviction that we deserve to take up space, to be heard. I used to think I had to earn those things from myself, and maybe I did, but now I wonder if I could have just given it freely, as a gift. I have more of that basic self-love, I think, because I’m older. At this point, I have watched myself fail and pick up and keep going, and I have met my own standards here and there enough times among the failures, so that I have found some basic compassion and love for myself. But it also occurs to me that I could have decided earlier that I was fine, I was good enough, I was loveable, and living from that assumption would probably have been more pleasant for everyone.
What are you currently reading?
Here’s the current rotation:
Poetry: Arielle Greenberg’s Slice, Roger Reeves’ King Me, Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam, Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. Series | India.
Fiction: Elisa Albert, After Birth.
Nonfiction: Sonia Sotomayor’s My Beloved World, Eula Biss On Immunity, Rachel Cusk A Life’s Work.
What writing projects are you working on?
Macro: my second book. Micro: a lot of poems about pregnancy, birthing, motherhood, living in a body, looking to ancient texts for wisdom, thinking about what it means to be human, that kind of thing. And my first book, Divinity School, is coming out from APR/Copper Canyon in September, so I’m setting up readings for that, which is super exciting.