Rebecca Wadlinger is a writer and translator whose work can be found in recent issues of Tin House, Ploughshares, and more. She lives in Portland, OR.
Her poems, "If You Feel Terrible," "Things of Consequence," and "The Woodgrain Forest Reports," appeared in Issue Fifty-One of The Collagist.
Here, she talks with interviewer Darby K. Price about subversion, hinges, and how poetry connects us.
You had three poems published in Issue Fifty-One: “If You Feel Terrible,” “Things of Consequence,” and “The Woodgrain Forest Reports.” As a reader, I feel that they fit well together, but I’m curious how you as a poet think of these three pieces side-by-side. What are some of the pleasures and/or surprises about them as a group?
I agree that they fit. Each is their own world, but the trio is altogether me. One pleasure in seeing them together is noticing how many places poems can go. To limestone buildings, to cheap hotels, to banana scientists, to clean socks, to cow molars. I like the span of things and distance between them.
While “If You Feel Terrible” has more serious subtext, you are also employing humor throughout, as in the opening lines: “If you feel terrible, try to remember a time/ you really worried about cannibalism./ If you can, I’m sorry. That makes me feel terrible.” Can you talk a little bit about humor’s place in poetry, and what your goals were in using it in this particular poem?
For me, poems are meant to provide pleasure--either linguistically, with their narratives, or however else. They make readers think and feel and a lot of that involves entertainment. Humor is a kind of entertainment in poems. But I've come to realize that audiences will laugh at things I take very seriously and vice-versa.
Humor was essential in writing the terrible poem because I was talking about cannibalism, brutality, murder, torture, etc. If the images in this poem were translated into photographs, the result would be horrific. Yet somehow when I read it, people laugh throughout. In this poem, subversion was key.
Throughout “If You Feel Terrible,” the speaker actively creates a connection between herself and all of the other terrible-feeling people in the world: a murderer, her father, her friend Frances, and, ultimately, the addressee (who I thought of as myself, the reader). In the final lines, the speaker’s “terrible feelings” literally “[contort] out of” her “/and into” the “you”. Can you tell me more about this connection, and how it drives or otherwise works within the poem?
Everyone feels terrible all the time. "The world is ugly, / And the people are sad" (Wallace Stevens). I think it's nicer if we can all feel terrible together.
Poetry connects us. Writing poetry is like having a conversation with everyone else who has written it. Sometimes when I sit down to write, I reflect on this connectivity and think Wouldn't it be nice to talk to Emily Dickinson (or Baudelaire, or Mary Ruefle, or Sigbjørn Obstfelder) today?
“Things of Consequence” seems to hinge upon a question the speaker wants to ask of people who don’t want to bother with mating their socks: “When did you stop trying?” What is the significance of that question in the larger landscape of the poem—one full of dying bananas, peacocks, fossils, and grateful socks?
Ah, the ineffability of poetry! I've always thought of that poem as a gradual build to the end, where the speaker declares: I will spend my life trying to explain what is crucial to me (a thought that might as well be written on my tombstone).
That one smart reader thinks of the sock question as a hinge is wonderful. I would love to hear more about that.
A 'hinge' is also a paper mount used to attach stamps in collectors' albums so you can lift up the stamp and read the concealed text underneath. Someone should write a poem with those physical kinds of hinges.
Finally, the speaker in “The Woodgrain Forest Reports” is navigating through a world full of consumption (“gem-cut lipsticks and hum-lit aisles/ of glut and disposable lore”) and kitsch (“As authorities on abandoned tourist attractions,/ we visit the president’s dentures.”); but the poem is also book-ended with images of trees and the natural world. How did you build the poem, and the world within the poem, toward the final, chilling question: “What won’t we chop down/ when we are made wealthy/ masters of a hatchet?”
I was reading Parson Weems's apocryphal George Washington stories and saw the phrase "wealthy master of a hatchet" and could not get over it. Many of my poems start with sticky bits of language like that.
The world of the poem, though, is inspired by and a tribute to the poet who appears in it--S.E. Smith. We studied together in Austin and are both originally from Appalachia, which gives insight to the natural landscape. Readers, find her book I Live in a Hut. It is strange and lovely debut collection.
What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?
I subscribe to Wave Books and Ugly Duckling Presse, so I'm always reading their new titles. But the last five poetry books I bought/preordered are:
The Gorgeous Nothings by Emily Dickinson (beautiful book of her envelope poems)
Alphabet by Inger Christensen
How to be Drawn by Terrance Hayes
My Feelings: Poems by Nick Flynn
War of the Foxes by Richard Siken
What writing projects are you currently working on?
I've been working on two poetry manuscripts: a collection of poems similar to those in The Collagist and a different book-length poem. Some days these manuscripts converge, other days they seem completely unrelated. Sometimes I want to scrap both of them. Stay tuned.