Interview: Montana Ray

Sarah Clyne Sundberg
Aug 4, 2015
6 min read

Montana Ray is a feminist poet, translator, and scholar. She is the author of five chapbooks and bookworks. Her first full-length poetry collection, (guns & butter), is now available from Argos Books. She’s a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at Columbia University and the mom of Pokémon enthusiast, Amadeus.

http://montanaray.com

I want to be Messy: An interview with Montana Ray

Interviewed by Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Published with permission by TCJWW

I’ve seen Montana read many times and am always struck by how urgent and visceral her work is; How she isn’t afraid to address the messier, fallible side of being human. Her first full-length book (guns & butter) features concrete poetry in the shape of guns, alongside recipes—juxtaposing a form of expression considered lofty, with one considered utterly mundane. The poems wrestle with love, sex, race, motherhood; the baggage that is dredged up when we connect with other people and are shaped and undone by those experiences. It gave me the excuse to talk to her about her work in more depth.

Sundberg: The gun is a symbol, but it’s also this very real thing, depending on your situation.

Ray: Visual art and fashion use the form of the gun pretty rampantly: On necklaces, on bags—appropriated as some sort of indie design feature. I wanted to do that in poetry. To utilize the gun as mechanism in the way concrete poets made poem-machines. But the book is also conscious of guns as, as you say, very real, machines. The difference is a dead boy. Or woman.

Sundberg: Visually in your poems, they add this sense of looming menace that’s not necessarily in the text.

Ray: Yes, the gun is a specter. When I was pregnant, Ami’s dad kept a gun in our group house. I didn’t really know about it. It was a secret. He asked when he moved in if he could, we all said no. Then he casually mentioned it to me a few times throughout our relationship—that a gun was hidden in the house. It haunted me, but I also forgot about it consciously. I swallow them all the time. Even now, when I see cops with guns, I’m afraid of what they bring onto the scene, but I just suppress that. Poetry is a form in which I can deal with them in a way that feels barefaced and yet non-threatening and fun.

Sundberg: Were the images of guns a way of talking about a kind of violence, or threat of violence, that can be inherent to sex and love?

Ray: Totally. This book deals with the dub side of what I was just talking about: the glamorization of violence. A gun and a woman together is a violent situation, but it is also a sexualized situation. This book was also a process of working out what's cultural versus personal in terms of conditioning that relationship.

Sundberg: Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?

Ray: I was trying to figure out if the terms of my intimate relationship(s) and my personal fantasies and my picture of self are unique to me, or inevitable given the way that the language of violence and the language of romance, or sex, are spoken. Am I trapped in a discourse, or am I speaking from something primal?

Sundberg: You frame yourself as a feminist. Do you think sexuality complicates feminism?

Ray: I think I was trying to perform an examination of culture in this book, trying to think about how this relationship was conditioned by media and conditioned by my family heritage. But I wasn’t really systematic, or academic, in my approach. I was just kind of in it. I was interested in the slippage between feeling crazy, feeling like your sexuality is not your fault, feeling like you’re the only sane person for a three-state radius and then feeling like you’re totally insane. And I think that’s a really common experience for feminists.

Sundberg: It’s a common experience for feminists. But also if you don’t match up perfectly with the majority power in how you see the world, and few of us do.

Ray: Yes, and we get pitted against each other. Raising a son who is Black and wanting to protect him from feeling all of those crazy things, from feeling crazy. Trying to talk about both feeling like a crazy white feminist and feeling like a crazy Black man in this culture, together: The way in which both people become unhinged in these different moments in the book. How accountability goes back and forth, in terms, and requires relentless awareness. But the pathology of that—of being the one thinking for two. I'm forever for books. There's this series for kids right now by Flamingo Rampant, and I would really recommend it to any parent wanting in vocabulary re: raising a feminist, racially-aware, LGBTQ, and body-positive kiddos.

Sundberg: Motherhood is another theme in this book. How did becoming a mother change your writing?

Ray: I became a writer when I became a mother. I wrote my first real poem with Ami in my belly, in the style of Audre Lorde. I needed so badly to write, based on what was going on. The prescience I had as a pregnant person saved our lives. I wasn’t a hundred percent tuned-in to how to have the best life for myself at that point, but when I was pregnant I applied to an MFA program because I knew I needed to be writing. And when Ami was born, I left the abusive relationship I was in and started school, he was six months old. Ami will never know me as anything other than a poet, that's how he describes me.

Sundberg: Do you feel like motherhood and writing are parallel in terms of creativity?

Ray: Absolutely. I felt very powerful the day that I gave birth. They put Ami on me and all of the shit I was in kind of went away. Not for good. But it was at least three days of being high on my ability to birth. For sure there’s a link there. Creating an alternative. A new possibility.

In terms of career, this also has everything to do with class (and perhaps the way gender and class are related is of note?) but to the point: it's about being able to pay for a babysitter. Being able to say: I’m paying the baby sitter X dollars today, so that I can write Y dollars worth of poetry. When X > Y, always. It's a huge privilege.

Also though at one point I really saw writing as a viable career. When I had Ami I was like: Got to win some bread. I was so young that I had the energy to conceive of that as possible. I was also psychotically out of my brain in this relationship, doing a bunch of crazy things. It was: Decide if I'm going to accept Harvard or Columbia, birth my baby. Then go have a fight on a street corner for three hours. It was a really insane, generative time that I feel much fondness for now, even though it was horrible in so many ways. I feel a fondness for how I managed to survive and just continue being my aspiring, flawed, creative self.

Sundberg: Lust or sexuality is also a force that runs through this book.

Ray: I trust lust. Passion. Not just for a person but how do I write about why I’m so in love with this situation, or how do I understand these intense feelings that are creatively driving. I also trust that lust comes to an end. There is something about writing about something once you’re through it, in a moment of reflection that involves nostalgia, that involves grieving, that involves kind of a therapeutic hurt but also a detachment. It's not you. You don’t enter language as "I," it doesn’t link up like that. The "I" that represents the past-self is one way of exposing languages’ lie. Which is the point of art.

Sundberg: Tell me more about that translation from lived experience to the fictive.

Ray: I want to write about the relationship between writing, memory and the unconscious, the translation of experience and the translation of self. I’m not that interested in tackling language head-on. I’m interested in the way that meaning is attached to language; the way in which biography clings and there is some sort of semantic cultural clash happening. I don’t want to be above all of that. I want to be messy. I take for granted that words don’t mean what they say. But I’m interested in different ways that they might be read by different people and in trying to maintain some control over that.

Sundberg: You’re also a translator, what place does translation hold for you as a writer, do you think of it as part of your overall writing practice?

Ray: If you’re interested in characters, if you’re interested in telling stories, the practice of getting inside of other people’s heads, especially those who are very culturally distant from your experience, is very good to cultivate. Lucky for my writing, I have a six-year-old child and I’m a translator. Both being a mother and being a translator help me to feel grounded and also really fly—able to instigate an imaginative leap.

You can buy (guns & butter) from Argos Books HERE

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