Interview: Carolyn Hembree
Carolyn Hembree was born in Bristol, Tennessee. Her debut poetry collection, Skinny, came out from Kore Press in 2012. In 2016, Trio House Books will publish her second collection, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the 2015 Trio Award and the 2015 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, The Journal, Poetry Daily, and other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. An assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, Carolyn teaches writing and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
TCJWW: Skinny reads as a narrative—almost like a novel or play. Who is “Skinny?” How did you find the voices for these characters (or how did they find you)?
Hembree: Yes, the collection relays a coming-of-age story, while individual poems may develop nonlinearly and shift modes (narration here, a lyric lament there). As a longtime student of theatre, I often incorporate elements of that tradition: players, a chorus, acts, and catharsis. Also, intertitles from silent films about women serve as epigraphs for the section breaks. One Goodreads reviewer called “The Venus de Milo Tree,” the series that ends the collection, a closet drama.
I like that your query—how “did they find” me?—gives the characters agency. Then again, perhaps I found myself within a forest dark. Frank Bidart said in a 1983 interview with Mark Halliday that the voices of his personae “were already inside” him, and I feel that as well. Although “inside” us, a persona allows us to “trick ourselves into writing about things that feel too close, or too personal, or too undigested,” as Elizabeth Alexander said in a 2003 interview. So, I find the ways my life intersects with that of my persona or character more interesting than the ways our experiences diverge.
The eponymous Skinny, my book’s sometimes persona, and Bird announced themselves to me in a dream, a dream that later became the bones of “A Real Movie Star,” the first poem in the book. I wrote most of Skinny in seven months. Factors that informed my pace and my dreams: I was ill (an autoimmune disorder from childhood returned), and I was in my second year of a two-year MFA program. When I wrote “A Real Movie Star,” my teacher advised me to throw away everything that I had written prior. I did. I threw away the hard copies. I erased the files.
TCJWW: In Skinny, we meet Ophelia and Venus. I find myself drawn to poems that incorporate mythology or folklore or somehow re-tell a story. This may not be reflective of anything but my tastes, but I’ve noticed that several contemporary women poets in the South write using folklore and myth. Do you think there’s something about the region that encourages this turn to myth, this idea of re-telling?
Hembree: Classical mythology has always been a touchstone for poets; to “get” so much canonical poetry, one needs a working knowledge of the Bible, Shakespeare, Ovid, Dante, and/or Wikipedia. On a practical level, such allusions can serve as useful shorthand; naming Venus in a title immediately lends the poem context and austerity that I can either further or cut against or both. What’s most interesting to me—and your question seems to suggest as much—is why Greek myths have served as wellsprings for writers who belong to groups traditionally excluded from the Western canon, such as women and people of color. The late poet Reginald Shepherd, whose blog is among my favorite resources on poetry, speaks eloquently to this impulse: “I wish to make Sappho and the South Bronx, the myth of Hyacinth and the homeless black men ubiquitous in the cities of the decaying American empire, AIDS, and all the beautiful, dead cultures, speak to and acknowledge one another, in order to discover what can be made of a diminished thing (to quote Robert Frost), and thereby to salvage the promise of happiness (in Theodor Adorno’s words) that the lyric embodies.”
In my southern family, women dominated domestic space and males public space (when they held down jobs); thus, we were the custodians of family lore, especially the back-stories. That the Susby’s kept a “slow” child in the attic, that Aunt Mary caught her husband with the maid, that my great-great grandfather was my great-great grandmother’s rapist and employer (she was a family milkmaid in Wales)—these accounts got told over the making of meals, not the consuming of them. It was while frying salmon croquettes, soaking limas, creaming potatoes, and crushing peppermints for cake icing that the matriarchs, women who had suffered and doled out their share of abuse too, would recount our stories in tones mischievous, weary, defiant. I was an imp, the youngest, “Little Carolyn,” looking on amid those big-legged women. That family is gone now. So, writing for me, especially writing Skinny, preserves the texture of their voices, the radiant and dangerous ambience of a world I knew.
Family lore, music, recipes, and the gospels bridged the gap between, say, my grandmother and me; as with many families, generational divides fall along the same lines as educational ones. Being a breech baby, I came into this world Chaucerian style—with a fart and a holler. Just a newborn, I fell off a high canopy bed and onto my head in Savannah, Georgia, in the bedroom where Conrad Aiken’s father killed his mother then himself. And thus, I write.
TCJWW: There are several quiet moments in Skinny, which I appreciate as a reader because they give me a chance to settle into the work. How do you see these moments—poems like “Skinny on the Stage” or “And the Twelve Gates Were Twelve Pearls”—as working within the collection?
Hembree: As a poet and person, I’m a bit “no brakes” (and no breaks); I really don’t have “quiet” impulses, so the poems you mention and the other short lyrics (“Still of Mamie and Bird” and “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”) were consciously crafted to deviate from the dense texture of the book. “Skinny on the Stage” and “And the Twelve Gates Were Twelve Pearls” are six lines (12 words) and four lines (10 words) respectively, the shortest poems I have written. Aside from the variety their brevity provides, they also contribute to two motifs of the collection: the biblical language and New York City/Manhattan as locales.
TCJWW: There are two instances of ekphrasis in this collection: “Meditation on Picasso’s Guernica” and “Another Meditation on Picasso’s Guernica.” As a poet, do you write from visual art often? What was your experience of making these poems?
Hembree: The poems you mentioned are the only ones I’ve written that qualify as ekphrastic. However, visual art (graffiti and pieces in local galleries and museums) and ephemera (play bills, religious flyers, postcards and such) contribute to my creative process. I write in New Orleans behind a room divider at a dining room table that belonged to my paternal grandparents; my “corner office,” as I like to call it, may only measure five feet by six feet, but the eleven-foot ceilings are wallpapered in personal photographs, letters, maps, notes, and poems related to my current writing project. As a respite from this intense visual orientation, I take a daily constitutional with my sixteen-year-old beagle, Sissy Sappho Belle. I walk to loosen my grip on a poem, to cross-pollinate the poem’s imagery with that of this pulsing, subtropical organism that is New Orleans, my home.
After my friend, the Nigerian writer Ségun Ògúntólá, and I—this was years ago—took in an exhibit of Picasso’s sketches for Guernica, Ségun relayed his experience of political turmoil, having witnessed the Nigerian military coups of the 80s and 90s. My poem started with a question: Why did I, as someone who had never experienced such civil strife, feel so personally connected to the piece? In a process akin to a method actor’s, I used my experiences as a girl and a young woman to inhabit the painting.
TCJWW: Skinny is a tight collection in the sense that every poem takes place in the same world as “our heroine,” Skinny. What were you reading while working on these poems? What poets and books inspire you?
Hembree: Thank you—that “tightness” was hard won! And good question—a first book can say as much about what the “young” poet was reading as it says about her “original” voice or voices. While working on Skinny, I was reading John Berryman, Ai, Heather McHugh, C.D. Wright, Etheridge Knight, Jane Miller, James Whitehead, Frank Bidart, and Frank Stanford; they remain among my favorite poets.
Inspirations—Emily Dickinson, my mother poet; D.A. Powell's trilogy; Thylias Moss’s Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler; Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge; Anne Carson's Nox; Stéphane Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole; Theresa Hak Cha’s Dictee; Lyn Hejinian’s My Life; Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Atsuro Riley's Romey’s Order; Anne Marie Rooney’s Spitshine; Milton’s Paradise Lost (that glorious drag opera!); Nikky Finney’s prose and poetry; Shakespeare (the plays); the metaphysical and proto-metaphysical poets; Lorca’s lecture on the duende; Beckett’s plays; Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls; Camus’ L’ Étranger; Kafka; and Faulkner.
TCJWW: Congratulations on winning the 2015 Trio Award for Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague. Tell us about this book! What poems and voices can we expect from it?
Hembree: Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague is a sequence of poems arranged like a truck owner’s manual. Set in rural Appalachia, “a truck up on concrete blocks” functions as time machine for V. Cleb, an accursed wanderer trapped and liberated by the limits of his world. The “V.” is short for Vitalis, the name of a star listed in The Old Farmer's Almanac. Other characters in the book include: Cleb’s girlfriend (Eyecandy), his daughter (Adeline), his mother (Mama Cleb), and his ancestors (Forebears). The sequence borrows plot and style elements from murder ballads, Appalachian folklore, and the King James Bible to treat questions about the nature of time.
Photo credits:
Author photo courtesy of drunkenboat.com
