“Walking in Tall Grass with Violence,” the title poem of Rachel Marie Patterson’s full-length debut, demands a reflexive reader, one who can hold themselves as accountable as they hold Patterson’s elusive speaker and the decaying landscapes she occupies: “a boy’s neck was severed / in the back of a police car. Now/ green sap blankets the car and / the trashcan lids.”
This breakneck and bullet-shaped fourteen line poem weaves moments of natural tenderness with man-made brutality. The speaker recounts a walk by the creek in the same breath as she describes a murdered child. And that’s where accountability comes into play — Patterson’s actively passive protagonist bears witness to instances of inhumanity but is unable (or, perhaps, unwilling) to stop it.
However, as a whole, Patterson’s debut explores a spectrum of moral positionality depending on the individual memoryscape/fantastyscape of each poem. Tall Grass with Violence is divided into four sections, each with its own thematic focus and stylistic personality: every poem in section Ⅰ is titled “Metairie,” after the Louisiana suburb of the same name, and captures the many small violences of mundanity; section Ⅱ enters a more reflexive space, as the speaker looks back on the familial landscape of childhood and its associated traumas; in section Ⅲ, the speaker takes on historical, mythological, and fantastical personas, including Mélusine, sirens, and selkies; and section Ⅳ takes the reader full circle, feeling tonally parallel section Ⅰ, but retextured by the context of the previous two sections.
The ultimate effect of this cyclical structure is an unnerving interrogation of who, or what, constructs the self. By leading with the confessionally-oriented “Metairie” series and unfurling the collection into a more expansive, persona-drive space, Patterson suggests that the “self” subject of her work is a collective consciousness.
These implications are especially urgent given the class structure of Patterson’s collective: the many voices that occupy Tall Grass’ rich and troubled geographies are women. But the women Patterson describes aren’t the mass-produced, pink-washed archetypes of a hyper-patriarchal capitalist contemporary.
These women don’t fit cleanly into binaries of madonna/whore, or of good/evil: the loving mother described in “Strawberries” is the same woman who poisons rabbits in the yard. These are women with multifaceted, multilayered relationships to violence: in “The Seal-Wife” a selkie’s victimization is what ultimately sets her on a killing spree (“I won’t stop until / the salt glows red—until men’s / split bones ring this island.”) Patterson’s ability to lean into the inherent complexity of a class of people who are so often rendered incomplex, especially in their relationship to violence, is what defines Tall Grass as a tour de force of a debut.
Patterson articulates the gendered hermetics of violence she is (and we all are) beholden to, but gracefully refrains from editorializing it. In the world of Tall Grass with Violence, there are no victims. No heroes. There’s just the violence, and those who bear witness to it.
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MADELEINE POOLE: Tall Grass with Violence is your full-length debut. How did you go about assembling the poems in this manuscript?
RACHEL MARIE PATTERSON: My challenge in assembling TGWV was how to incorporate the “Metairie” poems. Because I was working with a series of poems that was, in many ways, self-contained, I worried about how and where they would appear, and the weight they would have, in the overall manuscript. To be honest, there was a period of time when I didn’t think I’d be able to include these poems, even though I loved them and had the instinct that they belonged. Ultimately, I decided to open the book with the “Metairie” series and leave it fully intact.
Originally, the book was in 2 sections — “Metairie,” and then the rest. When my publisher, Diane Kistner, asked for a rationale behind these two seemingly imbalanced sections, I was able to see clearly that 4 sections of equal length worked best. Her intuition organically led me to the book’s true form.
MP: Were the “Metairie” poems also the most difficult to generate? Alternatively, what individual poems or series of poems brought you the most joy to write?
RMP: The “Metairie” poems were, by far, the most difficult poems in this manuscript to write. The response of trusted readers to the drafts of the “Metairie” poems told me I was onto something, however painful the material was for me. I was examining a world that felt vital, but also forbidding. The truth of those poems is that I was examining a broken landscape, a broken world — while my personal life was also breaking down. I think this is why so many of the details in the “Metairie” poems feel intense or uncanny to readers. I was not writing these images from deep memory — I was observing and imagining these details immediately.
None of these poems brought me joy while writing. My co-editor at Radar Poetry, Dara-Lyn Shrager, and I love to say, “Great poems make everyone sick.” There is drive, impulse, imperative to write — and there is relief when the poem that feels necessary is on the page. But the act of writing — the act of truth-telling — is often uncomfortable. Joy is holding my published book in my hands. I feel fulfillment and satisfaction that I have brought these poems into the light, that my voice can join the many.
MP: So many of the poems that made up Tall Grass are a single stanza — the thematic density and visual construction of the text propelling readers both horizontally and vertically, across and down the page. How did you determine that one stanza is the best container for this work?
RMP: I have always written one-stanza poems, and have always felt drawn to this form. I would say it’s sort of a proto-sonnet, or pseudo-sonnet. Although, of course, they’re not in iambic pentameter. But meter is important to me. Rhythm is important to me.
Part of the reason I think that I’m drawn to that form is because of the intensity of the work. My style is get in, get out, say something relatively devastating, and then just leave.
During the editing process, I sometimes experiment with other forms (couplets, tercets), but most often land right back where I started. As I’ve become a more mature poet, I feel that the form of my poems is more consistent because I’ve found and inhabited my voice. My poems want to be like this.
MP: Section Ⅲ is especially intriguing because you present the speaker’s persona-selves (my personal favorite being the serpent woman Melusine) with such dignity and care. You also explore the life and unabashed livelihood of Rosemary Kennedy in section Ⅱ. To me, placing these persona poems in conversation with the speaker’s embodied experience challenges a tenet of Western thought and theory: that what we consider the “self” is one isolated and whole being, separate from the outside world.
How do you define the speaker’s sense of self? Does it include the personas she takes on, the geographies she occupies, etc?
RMP: As a contemporary woman writer, I feel the weight of all women’s experiences in my work. I feel not only a communal connection to all women, but also a responsibility to all women. Any opportunity to embody other women and their circumstances is one I embrace, and I was very conscious of that while writing these poems. Although my poems are not ‘nonfiction,’ they require a great deal of empathy, and that’s part of the work I wish to do. Great poetry steps outside the self. I do not have a sense of my ‘self’ as disconnected from others, and I resist the idea of the selfish self, the selfish ‘I.’
I think that so often, women are seen as just the survivors of violence. I am more interested in inhabiting spaces where women can also be the perpetrators of violence. I think “For Rosemary Kennedy, Lobotomized Age 23” is a good example of these complicated, dualistic spaces that I want to occupy, not to turn away from or simplify. Many times our impulse is to simplify, and my impulse is to complicate and to explore or examine. The family who tenderly cared for [Rosemary Kennedy] is the same family that made the decision to lobotomize her. They were also victimized by her during her chaotic teenage years, as she wrestled with mental illness.
MP: What about the moral positionality of the speaker? In the matrix of violence that you’ve constructed, it seems like the speaker is at once witness, perpetrator, and victim. The speaker reads as multifaceted in the ways that they are participating and/or not participating in violence.
RMP: You hit the nail on the head. Not only are we an observer or witness to breakdown — to the violence of climate change, of police brutality, of war, of our culture — we are also participants because we are part of that culture.
MP: That spectrum of violent passivity/activity seems especially salient in the “Metairie” poems.
RMP: That is one of the reasons they were so hard to integrate. There is cognitive dissonance in those poems. Observer, perpetrator, witness — how can you inhabit all these spaces at once? And yet, in our culture, in our moment of time, we are asked or are forced to do that. Many of us don’t want to hold up the mirror and examine ourselves as not only the victims or the observers of the violence, but also the perpetrators and the condoners of the violence. I think it’s necessary to have that conversation.
The last line in “Metairie Ⅴ” is about driving through the city at night and seeing people’s lit windows. Yes, life is going on, life is continuing, everybody is having their personal tragedy, everybody is having their personal success. It’s not just one of us. There are all of these little windows. There are all of these little televisions in the city going out. Everything is bigger than us.
MP: For our readers, the line is, “Some nights I drive with my headlights / off until the last television in the city flickers out.”
RMP: Yes. We occupy a landscape that wants to disconnect us, that wants to isolate us, that creates systems of individualism. Really, these are poems about loneliness. I was personally in a place of loneliness when I wrote them. Although they’re not about me, I was able to tap into that.
Even though you’re lonely, look outside and you’ll see the TV’s — there are all these other people, even if you can’t touch or feel them. There’s the tension: you can’t reach out and touch them, but you’re aware of them, and remaining connected to that awareness of others can help.
MP: It’s interesting that we have repeatedly defined the “Metairie” poems by their dark subject matter, loneliness, and violence. I definitely see that in the work, but then again, the opening line of “Metairie Ⅰ” is, “The moon in the curtains has teeth.” It’s written with such lush description and precise attention to detail that I feel it evoking the inherent dignity of these memoryscapes alongside the darkness.
RMP: I think dignity is a very interesting word, and one that I hadn’t considered before in a direct way, but I think that you’ve identified something that I was trying to do: which is to say that we are valuable. We are still valuable. There is value here, even though there are so many messages that we are not valuable. There are so many messages that we are worthless, or that we’re only worth what we can produce.
Yes, things are hopeless. Climate change, for example, is already at its tipping point, and you can’t undo it. There are many horrible knots that we can’t unravel. But I think these poems endeavor to say that our lives are valuable, and maybe even beautiful, despite that hopelessness.
My poetry both unflinchingly observes the despair of now and imagines worlds that could be — my poetry tries to find reasons to go on, and tries to find joy in what we have here. Hopefully, in doing that, I’m entering that conversation, or I’m starting that conversation for others.
MP: That’s reflected in the cover, too, which I noticed you designed. Not only is it beautiful, but it’s the perfect companion for the book’s content; the deteriorating building reflects the haunting violence of girlhood and womanhood in the American contemporary. What drew you to this image?
RMP: I am fortunate that I had the opportunity to work with a publisher who invited me to participate in the design process. I began by searching for images that might capture the themes and tone of the manuscript. There is a great deal of despair in this book, but there is also human effort — as Aliki Barnstone so beautifully put in her blurb, “the imperative to put one foot in front of the other with whatever joy you can gather.” When I was searching for a cover image, I was also conscious of the book’s title, which is fabulous (of course), but includes words that aren’t normally juxtaposed and that evoke strong emotions in me, and hopefully the reader. I was looking for an image that would support the title (and the book itself), not compete with it. I settled on this photograph, and I love it. I wish I knew who took it, but the truth is, in the end, I found it through a stock image search, and it is unattributed.
RACHEL MARIE PATTERSON