Alexandra Teague is most recently the author of the poetry collection Or What We’ll Call Desire(Persea, 2019), described in The New York Times as “passionate, quirky, and righteously outraged.” Her prior books are The Wise and Foolish Builders (Persea, 2015)and Mortal Geography(Persea 2010); the novel The Principles Behind Flotation; and the co-edited anthology Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Alexandra is a professor at University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided Press.
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Lisa Compo: In your book The Wise and Foolish Builders, you use a contrapuntal form in your poem, “Stereoscope: Annie Oakley and Sarah Winchester” and I am struck by the way the form is able to both create a conversation and a fused image of the two women’s experiences. The use of the term “stereoscope” seems to suggest to the reader to see the two voices as both separate identities and conjoined. I am wondering why you chose the contrapuntal form as a way for you to create conversation in this poem and would love to hear why “stereoscope” was chosen as a guide?
Alexandra Teague: I first encountered contrapuntal poems through Tyehimba Jess’s incredible work in Leadbelly, and was so impressed by the complex conversations he was able to create, with their conflicting yet also overlapping versions of history. Since stereoscopes were very popular in the 19th century (at one point, Oliver Wendell Holmes predicted they would replace actual travel!), I thought of them as a particularly apt metaphor for considering that time, and as a way of creating an overlay between voices that also, I hope, speaks to the overlays between our own time period and that period’s history. What I love about stereoscopes (and Viewmasters, the modernized version that was popular when I was young) is that the two images merge to become three dimensional. I love the idea of trying to access more three-dimensional history, and in this particular poem, of taking Sarah Winchester, who became famous for the house she built using money from the Winchester fortune after her husband died, but who wasn’t personally involved in gun manufacturing or shooting guns, and Annie Oakley, who was known as one of the greatest sharp-shooters, and considering what their two voices might say if they each spoke on their own, but also spoke across to one another. How might this add dimensions to the ways we understand the acceptable roles for women and the history of guns in this country—both still pressing questions today.
LC: This idea of how we understand the acceptable roles for women throughout history and the present draws me to your poems in your book, Or What We’ll Call Desire that both speak to and explore “muses” such as Audrey Munson and Phyrne, and I wondered what prompted you to want to explore the dynamics of women in art in the roles of muse and model? Do you find that desire also manifests across your work in not only Or What We’ll Call Desire but in The Wise and Foolish Builders too?
AT: In The Wise and Foolish Builders, I was interested in reconsidering the usual (and I think very gendered) legends about Sarah Winchester to see her as a more complex person, but I was also aware of my role as writer who was imposing my words on her, an actual historical person, through persona poems and my own interpretations of her story. Researching hat book, I ran into references to Audrey Munson, at one point, early 20th-century-America’s most popular artists’ model, who posed for many Beaux Artes allegorical statues such as Memory and Beauty, and who spent the last sixty years of her life in a mental institution, largely forgotten even by her own family. I was struck by the disconnect between the idealized woman she represented in the statues (many of which are still present around New York City), and her lived experiences, which were affected by limited financial options, mental health struggles, and a patriarchal society that uses, shames, and discards young, beautiful women. Thinking about Munson’s role as an artists’ muse/model in the poems that became the core of Or What We’ll Call Desire eventually allowed me to also consider my own role as an author using these historical women as muses. I wanted to consider the ways I might be unintentionally objectifying my subjects, or using them to talk about myself, even as I continued to explore the broader societal questions of women being idealized and jeopardized in a patriarchy. I’m extremely interested in the stories that we tell ourselves socially, including through legends and music and public art, and the formative role those play in shaping our society and values, and that interest is intrinsic to both books. And as a woman myself, I’m also very interested in the roles that I play in those dynamics, and I see writing poetry as a way to become more honest and vulnerable, and to surprise myself–e.g. by writing a poem in which I admit that I wanted to be like the nude artists’ models at my college or one of the dancers in CATS.
LC: In Or What We’ll Call Desire, your series of poems, “Letters to Phryne” is the first poem in that series, “1. From the Sip N’ Dip Mermaid Bar, Great Falls, Montana” and the opening line, “I’m trying to understand pity that might/ just be lust” makes me think of this idea of being concerned with unintentional objectifying in your subjects. The voice in this poem seems to be questioning that exact notion. But it also seeks to align itself with the subject or muse, such as in the third poem of the series, “3. From a Post-September-11th Anti-War Protest, San Francisco, California ” with the line “(But again, I confuse us.)” as it acknowledges the collapsing of both voice and subject. Did you notice that desire was functioning in this way throughout many of your research and historical driven poems before this collection? As a poet, can you tell me more about how it might be important for us to be concerned with how self and desire affect our poems?
AT: Oh my goodness: self and desire! These are huge, wonderful questions. “Letters to Phryne” was the first poem I’ve written in which I so directly turned the gaze back on myself to ask how I was speaking about my subjects. The poem begins and ends with the famous trial of the artists’ model and courtesan Phryne, who, legend says, was acquitted after her lawyer had bare her breasts in court to prove, as I say, she was “too beautiful to hurt.” The story is wonderfully contradictory since her original crime was public nudity. How could her body be both guilty and innocent of the same nudity? I thought of all those jurors staring at her body, and how she’s represented in statuary and paintings, and how I was representing her, and why I even wanted to speak across twenty-four centuries to her. I’m sure I was influenced in part by Adrienne Rich’s fantastic lines in “Twenty-One Love Poems”: “am I simply using you, like a river or a war?” and how capaciously that whole poem moves between desire and politics and refuses to divide them. I started thinking more too about how I’ve used my own body for representation, and what I’ve desired in terms of inhabiting or escaping it or hoping it stands for something else (as at an anti-war die-in). And the ways in which desire and self often feels like a spilling over of all these categories and questions.
Part of how I understand my own body and self as a woman in this century is by listening to earlier women poets and artists, and considering their lived, embodied experiences. Eavan Boland has perfect lines about this in “The Rooms of Other Women Poets” when she opens, “I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions / of daylight, falling as dusk across your page, / make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think / I see that gesture in the way you use language.” I honestly wasn’t thinking about these sorts of moves or Boland’s work specifically as I was writing Or What We’ll Call Desire, but she’s been such an influence* that she was definitely present, as were Rukeyser and Rich and others more overtly. Some of my all-time favorite lines of poetry are Muriel Rukeyser in “Kathe Kollwitz,” writing “my lifetime / listens to yours.” I know that Phryne and the other figures in the book can’t really “listen” to me, and I’m only hearing echoes of their lives, but I hope that the poems also become a space in which we can imagine listening more closely across history and to ourselves and the contingencies of bodies and desires in as many ways as possible.
*In a piece I more recently wrote for The Harriet, “Where a Woman Stood: Eavan Boland and the Power of Perspective,” I discuss how much I learned from the poetry and teaching of Boland in terms of the politics of perspective—including where we situate the reader/viewer in a poem, and where we situate ourselves. In an interview, Boland said, “For me, I felt the interior of the poem could only be changed [including from masculine and nationalist traditions] by changing where the poet stood in the poem.” I hope the poems in Or What We’ll Call Desire keep changing that position so we revolve around questions of self and desire.
LC: Your wonderfully detailed answer makes me think so much about how not only desire and self and the body affect our poetry but it also seems to me that there is a type of inheritance involved. The writers you have listed here are especially interested in how self and language intertwine, especially as women, and how the position of self in relation to our experiences shapes how we communicate and choose to inhabit the poem. From your book, Or What We’ll Call Desire, the poem, “Baba Yaga Invites Fort Worth Girl Scout Troop #23 for a Campout” seems to be interested in the transition of girlhood to womanhood, for example, the opening line (one of my favorites) begins, “Dear girls: It’s normal to feel afraid at first/ in the woods.” The personification of Baba Yaga also pulls in folklore that is particular to the experience of being a woman, a figure known for her maternal and two-sided nature. The position of the voice shifts as well when it addresses a type of privilege with the lines “Don’t worry./ These are first-world woods. A few Texas pines…” Could you tell me more about your process for this poem when deciding to use themes such as folklore and storytelling as a way to transcend inherited experiences while also acknowledging individual privileges (such as living in industrialized countries, or even whiteness, being cisgendered, etc.)?
AT: I really like that wording about using folklore and storytelling to “transcend inherited experiences” while still acknowledging “individual privileges.” I definitely hope that my poem does both of those. Baba Yaga is an interesting figure for me because, for reasons I still don’t understand, since they’re not part of our cultural background, my mother read me Baba Yaga stories when I was quite young, and I grew up in Fort Worth absolutely terrified of Baba Yaga with her iron teeth and chicken-leg house. I tried writing about her on and off for years, and none of the writing worked until I realized that I could speak as Baba Yaga, and imagine her strong, wise, terrifying, cross-cultural, and cross-temporal voice responding to current events and situations. I realized that she offered an imagined vantage point that I couldn’t get as a 21st-century mortal woman, and instead of seeming merely frightening, she became a voice that could clearly, fiercely speak both to some of my own privileges and behaviors (as in this poem, parts of which are based on my real life) and to social systems (e.g. patriarchy). I wanted to call out the privilege of going camping as a white, housed American while so many refugees are living in tents in dire situations, and, while I could call that out in my own voice, I feel as if Baba Yaga, who exists beyond/before/outside all these systems, can call it out with more humor and bite and authority than I could access, since I’m still enmeshed in those systems and privileges. Of course, I also realize that I’m taking on a voice that doesn’t belong to my own heritage, and there’s a privilege in borrowing that tradition and reimagining it, but one of the beauties of folklore is that it does change with the telling and teller, and often appears in different contexts, and I hope these poems are playfully in that spirit.
LC: I really love that you had the idea to use Baba Yaga as a point of view and voice to expand beyond even your own perspective! It seems that your poetry is an act of discovery not only for the reader but you as well. You have many persona poems in both books we have talked about and, for me, there is this experience of enacting through the voice while I’m reading it, creating a new perspective on how to interpret my own reality. Do you find that you aim for discovery when writing these poems? That perhaps poetry itself is a form of science or device to uncover the unknown?
AT: I definitely think of poetry as a way of discovering the unknown. Honestly, some of the best advice about writing I’ve ever gotten came from my first poetry professor, Michael Burns: I told him that I’d written a poem to get to certain final lines, and he said that I should never know where a poem ended when I started it—that to do so was death to the poem. I didn’t fully understand why, but I trusted him, and he was so right: poems should lead us all kinds of places we didn’t expect to go; we should surprise ourselves by saying things we didn’t know we believed, but that we somehow do.
I read an interview a couple of years ago with Tracy K. Smith in which she wonderfully said, “There’s a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, ‘This is what you think you’re certain of, and I’m going to show you how that’s not enough. There’s something more that might be even more rewarding if you’re willing to let go of what you already know.’” She means, and I mean, that poems can allow both writers and readers to let go of certainty, so we can move beneath what we initially think or feel to something more complex. That’s one of the reasons that I love working in form: the constraints (whether of repetition or rhyme or meter, or a combination of those) push me beyond what I might initially say to something stranger and truer. And by “truer” I mean something like Adrienne Rich’s idea that truth is “an increasing complexity.” For instance, in the modified pantoums including “Self Portrait as Curious Lunatic’s Sketch of a Dancing Girl,” early in Or What We’ll Call Desire, the repetition forced me to say more vulnerable and true and surprising things than I would have otherwise. That particular poem came about after months of thinking about an image I’d seen in an old magazine, and trying to figure out why it resonated with me so much. Most of my poems come from an image or phrase or idea that I can’t get out of my head, and I’m writing to discover why it matters to me and what I have to say about it that hopefully might also matter to someone else.
