CONVERSATION


A Conversation Between First Book Poets:
Wendy Chin-Tanner & Valerie Wetlauf

Wendy Chin-Tanner is the author of the poetry collection Turn (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014) and co-author of the graphic novel American Terrorist (A Wave Blue World). She is a founding editor at Kin Poetry Journal, poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown, staff interviewer at Lantern Review, and co-founder at A Wave Blue World. Born and raised in NYC, she was educated at Cambridge University, UK and now lives in Portland, OR.
 
Valerie Wetlaufer is a poet, editor, birth doula, and teacher. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for her first poetry collection Mysterious Acts by My People (Sibling Rivalry Press 2014), Valerie holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University, an MA in Teaching & a BA in French from Bennington College. She is the editor of Adrienne: a poetry journal of queer women, and author of three chapbooks. Her second book, Call Me by My Other Name is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in March 2016.

Wendy Chin-Tanner: Even though we come from different backgrounds and different lifestyles, I've noticed a number of striking similarities between our books. For example, both books have 3 chapters or movements, both acknowledge form and prosodic traditions, both use persona poems as a method of self-narration or as a counterpoint to self-narration, both feature poems rooted in the body, and both have a relationship with critical theory. Of course, we are press sisters (Sibling Rivalry Press), so one would expect some relationship between our books, but what do you make of all those distinct similarities? How much do you think identity matters as far as poetic and aesthetic kinships are concerned?
Valerie Wetlaufer: I think identity does matter, because I'm writing from this body with these certain experiences. All my work is filtered through my experience as a marginalized person in this society. I write a lot about the experiences of queer folks, mentally ill people, disabled people, fat people. I use my experience of the world as the jumping off point for my poems. I want to express my intersectional identities on the page, and write the poems I wanted to see in the world. I hope that my work isn't just queer content, but a queer poem—something new and different about it, though I know my newer work is more experimental than this debut collection. I want form to be as involved in the sharing of stories as my words are. In your work I see this representation of women throughout history as well as a very embodied voice of motherhood, all of this woven together with racial identity as well. I think that, in this way, there is certainly a kinship in our work, beyond just the formal similarities you've identified. It makes sense that both our work is rooted in the body and employs persona poems, a way of recording a real or imagined lineage, perhaps. Some of my favorite poems in your book are about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. Since this is a topic you deal with extensively in the book, I wonder if becoming a parent affected your writing?
WCT: Oh, yeah, it absolutely did. I started writing Turn after ten years of not writing poetry at all. I got derailed on my first go-around in Lit-Biz and I hopped on the academic train in Sociology instead. Then I had my daughter Maddy and a funny thing happened. In the bleary haze of her infancy, memories, sounds, and images, started bubbling up in my head almost as if her birth had opened up a portal between the present and the past where they fought and looped and collapsed into each other. I started to write into that space without a real agenda for what that writing might be or become, and out came poems about my childhood in Brooklyn, my family, my child, the maturation process, confronting illness and death, and how all of that works in the human life cycle. The constant negotiation between the self and the other in parenting became in a sense reflected in the negotiation between the self and the other, or the personal and the universal, in the poetic process.
VW: As Eduardo said in his blurb, you do an excellent job of mixing the mythic with the personal. I'm interested if you did research into these myths that you weave throughout the book, or if they were just always important myths to you?
WCT: Some of the Chinese myths and fables I reference in the book are ones that I grew up with at home and at my grandmother's house. "The Ballad of Mulan," for example, which was written in the 6th c AD, is a cultural staple. Mulan's like the Chinese Joan of Arc. She's an archetype of filial piety and self-sacrifice for the greater good. She's a heroic martyr. So when I was working on the section of Turn that deals with the relationship between mothers and daughters, the ballad came to mind but I also wanted to research the real life historical figures who might have inspired it. My poem, "Magnolia (Hua Mulan)," incorporates an amalgamation of some of those findings with elements that tie the myth back into the narrative landscape of the book.

Similarly, with Joan of Arc, I was interested in her as a figure with whom I've always identified (yikes!) and when I started writing the poem "Joan," I did some historical research on the real Joan or Jehanne, as her real name happens to have been, for elements to weave into the piece.

As far as the many references to the Classics, I had a pretty classical education as a kid complete with study of Greek mythology and philosophy, Homer, Horace and Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid. The usual suspects. References and influences from those readings can be found scattered throughout the book. Then I did my BA and MA in English Literature at Cambridge University which, as you can imagine, was pretty old skool, so the characters and personalities of classical literature have been a part of my imaginative landscape for a long time. They're like old friends.

I think the longer you live with stories, the more they become a part of who you are and how you make sense of the world. In Turn, I call on many of them as a way of finding, as Eduardo so wonderfully says, "the mythic in the personal and the personal in the mythic," and maybe also as a way of mediating or balancing confessional and autobiographical elements more timeless and general sets of truths.
VW: Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me. It's not exactly mythic, but the center section of my book, based on the real 19th century "Window Smasher" who escaped from asylums across the Midwest was a way for me to explore threads of womanhood throughout history. How our "mysterious" bodies were criminalized and exploited, and, to a certain extent, still are today. This woman was initially institutionalized for what we would now call post-partum depression after a miscarriage. My doula work led to my interest in this, but I know that my own study of classics like Ovid and Virgil and the historically awful treatment of women informed this section as well.
WCT: I love that your research into the "Window Smasher" led you to become a doula. I love how creative projects can sometimes have such a powerful impact on our lives. Have you ever been asked why you chose poetry instead of memoir or prose to deal with the material in Mysterious Acts by My People?
VW: I haven't ever been asked that, have you?
WCT: Believe it or not, I actually have!
VW: My book isn't as autobiographical as people assume it is. It is rooted in truth, but I change quite a lot by the time it gets to the page. I started as a fiction writer, then became a poet, and while I love the nonfiction genre, I don't have any desire to write it. Poetry is not easy to write, not at all, but it came to me more naturally than did the writing of other genres. When I try to write fiction, I get a prose poem—it's all lyrical—and when I try to write nonfiction, I can't keep myself from lying, so I stick to poetry, where I get to play however I like, and enlist the form to do some of the work of telling the story.
WCT: I hear that. I guess like a lot of writers, my work tends to be grounded in experience but I hope that doesn't confine it to mere confession. Confession alone isn't enough to move me as a reader. For me, literature is about connection, communication, and creating a sense of identification in the reader. It's almost an act of transference and so, in order for confession to vibrate on a frequency that resonates for others, I think it really has to embody something of universal experience, too. What do you think about the whole "confessional" issue?
VW: As far as confessional goes—I can understand why people might think the term fits. I do write about the "taboo" and about mental illness, sex, suicide, and other subjects that the confessional poets of yore tackled, but my poetry is not autobiographical. I do think that term has a negative connotation these days, because people misunderstand it. People assume "confessional" means an outpouring of every inner emotion with no filter, but there was so much craft involved in, for example, Plath's work. What an honor it would be for someone to lump me in with her! I still don't really think it's the right term for my work, though.
WCT: Have you been confronted yet by folks who think your work is TMI? If so, how do you deal with their discomfort? How do you even respond?
VW: I've really only gotten positive feedback on the book so far, so I'm very lucky, but when I gave a reading in my home town, they noted in the paper that the reading would contain "adult content," based on the book, though I had no plans to read the erotic poems that night. I wish I'd been consulted about that, but I think that-whether there is explicit sex described or not—queer is often seen immediately as obscene. I think I've been more concerned with other people's potential discomfort than they are. It isn't comfortable to think of my family members reading my erotic poems, but everyone has dealt with it very well. I'm lucky to have a very supportive family. What is it like to write about people in your life who will read your poems? What has the feedback been like from your family when they read poems about them?
WCT: I gave my parents an early draft of the manuscript to read with the caveat that there was some highly charged and "adult" material in there. They gave me their blessing to go ahead and submit it for publication without much comment. I'm honestly not sure how much they read or took in since poetry can be such an impenetrable medium for a lot of people. My parents are both pretty concrete thinkers, so the world of metaphors and multiple meanings might seem hazy and obtuse to them.

My husband Tyler has read and reread many drafts of the book and he seems to really dig the poems I've written about him, especially the spicy ones. In fact, if he happens to be present at a reading of one, I half expect him to stand up and take a bow. My now seven-year-old daughter Maddy is thrilled to be the subject of so many poems and is actually under the impression that the entire book is about her, or at least that's what she was apparently telling all the kids at school! I actually really appreciate the fact that my closest loved ones don't take me or my career as a "Poet" with a capital "P" very seriously at all. It helps me keep my eyes on my own page and my head out of my ass.
VW: How has your work as an editor influenced your writing?
WCT: Have you been confronted yet by folks who think your work is TMI? If so, how do you deal with their discomfort? How do you even respond?
VW: I've really only gotten positive feedback on the book so far, so I'm very lucky, but when I gave a reading in my home town, they noted in the paper that the reading would contain "adult content," based on the book, though I had no plans to read the erotic poems that night. I wish I'd been consulted about that, but I think that-whether there is explicit sex described or not—queer is often seen immediately as obscene. I think I've been more concerned with other people's potential discomfort than they are. It isn't comfortable to think of my family members reading my erotic poems, but everyone has dealt with it very well. I'm lucky to have a very supportive family. What is it like to write about people in your life who will read your poems? What has the feedback been like from your family when they read poems about them?
WCT: Being an editor at Kin Poetry Journal and The Nervous Breakdown has exposed and opened me to an appreciation of forms and styles of writing that I might not naturally gravitate to on my own. I think this can only be a good thing and I hope that by osmosis, it might vitalize my work and encourage me to experiment more and try new things. Much of my work falls under the category of lyrical narrative but I also like to play with meter and form. I enjoy writing that's rooted in confronting uncomfortable ideas and experiences, so I strive for that in my own work. I push myself to take risks in both content and form because within those risks lie an acknowledgment of human frailty and of failure, and that to me is very beautiful.

Being an editor has also taught me that rejection is inevitable and impersonal, and to just keep on submitting, though perhaps not to the same places that have rejected me more than a few times. How about you? Has editing Adrienne influenced your writing at all?
VW: Being an editor has changed my work formally. I now understand the difficulty of layout, and how hard it is to revise a poem to fit a printed page. I tend to wander all over the document in a Word document, but knowing that the printed version will be smaller, I tend to write with that in mind, to a certain extent, because form is so important to me, and I want the end product to match what I originally envisioned. Beyond that, though, I'm continually inspired by the high quality of submissions we receive at Adrienne. The queer women's poetry landscape is vast and varied, and that gives me hope, and glee that everyone who tried to pigeonhole me was so wrong about what defines a lesbian poem. While a lot of my work is rooted in identity, I think of it the same way our publisher, Bryan Borland, described it: "Labels can help an audience find you, but the only thing that will keep your audience around is if your work holds up. . I like to use the label of gay poet not to box myself in, but to build a box, bust through the top, and stand on it so that everyone — not only an LGBT readership — notices me."








Boxcar Poetry Review - ISSN 1931-1761