Being Shameless In Poetry

KARAN

Lexi, these poems are fearless. And I love that you don’t shy away from a title/subject like “My Mother’s Dildo.” It’s hilarious — “We poked it / with a stick as if it were roadkill” — while being sincere and serious. You’re writing about your mother’s sexuality, your own shame and curiosity, and that devastating image of bees pouring from her breast. Tell us how you’re able to be so “shamelessly” honest in these poems?

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LEXI

Bill Knott has this wonderful line: “Poetry / is the shadow writing its / name upon the person.” When I tackle a taboo topic, I’m not trying to be as open and honest as possible; I am trying to let the shadow of the poem, or a deeper truth, impose itself on me. This slight reframe is so permissive. I am not a shameless person, but I am a curious one. When I have the idea for a poem (in this case, “write about my mother’s dildo”), I want to see what it will teach me. For me, the stranger a poem’s subject is, the higher the diving board. It’s a challenge to let a seemingly silly subject land somewhere deeper, but I like that challenge; in this way, I don’t feel like I am revealing something so much as figuring something out.

Most often, I am writing “to” a title or first line. In the case of “My Mother’s Dildo,” I wrote the title first, almost using it as a prompt to riff on—another way of saying this is that I write in what I think of as “ode mode,” reflecting on a central object or idea tinged with admiration. Every poem in this selection, with the exception of “Blue Candle,” was written this way: title first. I think writing in “ode mode” means I am often writing from a place of affection and gratitude.

Another tool for writing more shamelessly is figurative language. I think of figurative language like lingerie: it is not covering up or obscuring a poem’s truth but rather doubling down on its nakedness. Figurative language makes writing about an awkward topic fun, and it’s a great way to open a door in the poem to go somewhere unexpected. Mark Doty wrote, “I think our metaphors go on ahead of us; they know before we do.” If my figurative language isn’t opening a door in the poem to somewhere new or truer, it doesn’t stay in the poem—but the act of trying to be figurative enables me to focus less on what I’m revealing and more on what’s being revealed to me.

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KARAN

I used “shameless” not as a pejorative in the previous question. You have a line in “On the Black Underwear My Roommate Left on Her Bedroom Floor” (another great title!): “It’s sexual, my desire to be / that unashamed.” And it ends with “We are filthy with joy.” The poem transforms dirty laundry into “a riot / of Queen Anne’s lace, fresh / snow kicked from a winter boot.” I’m curious about shame and shamelessness in your work. Where does your hunger to be unashamed come from?

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LEXI

I had the image in my mind for years of that underwear with discharge on it and I remember shaming myself for just thinking about it! I would never tell someone in my off-the-page life, hey I have this vivid memory of a friend’s dirty underwear and yet I love my speaker for being able to do so. In that way my speaker is both myself and my alter ego. To me, living shamelessly is a creative act. Shame says things are worthless, creativity is the opposite of that—it says everything can be transformed. 

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KARAN

Let’s talk about performance. “Fake Orgasm” gives us taxidermied sighs “with perfectly posed wingspans.” You write, “All my life I’ve felt my life has this false back, and it doesn’t matter what’s there, just that you can’t reach it.” That is brilliant, Lexi. I think I’m getting back to the idea of honesty/authenticity. You’re being honest about being performative. I like that paradox at the heart of that poem. And of course, there’s an aspect of performance to the act of writing per se. I don’t know where I’m going with this, so I welcome you to share whatever you like.

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LEXI

I love that poems have a “speaker,” because I think of the speaker of the poem as permission to perform my way into a new self. I think this ties back to shame and how I am able to be so “shameless” in my poetry. Perhaps this is possible because I am not the one being shameless—my speaker is. I think each poem I write creates a “higher self” who knows so much more than I do.

There is a crucial difference between performance and deception, with deception there is an intent to mislead. Performance is for someone; it’s a gift. My poems are a gift to myself and to my reader. I am not speaking off the cuff; I am honing language with the intent to deepen into a feeling.

What surprised me about “Fake Orgasm” was this idea of the beauty of keeping things to yourself—actually no, for yourself. I think there’s something beautiful about not letting someone see every part of you, not for some shame-based reason, but because not every part of a person needs to be given away to have a fulfilling relationship…

Outside of my poetry I am a pretty private person. I like secrets, but I don’t always like how much I like them. I created a speaker who was confident in her desire for privacy.

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KARAN

“The Intimacy Coordinator,” too, is brilliant. Instead of “kiss” she says, “Close the distance between your mouths.” (!!!) The poem is about choreographing sex scenes, yet it becomes a meditation on consent and language itself. “She’s undressing language.” How did this poem come together? 

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LEXI

This poem is based on an article I read in The New Yorker. Many of the details were simply curated from the article. One of the advantages of writing a poem based on an article is that you have an image bank of sorts to play with—I believe I found “Wet Ones” on a list of items in an intimacy coordinator’s kit. How could I not include that in the piece?

One of the things that stood out to me in the article was the intimacy-coordinator lingo, which on its surface is just rewording, a kind of reverse sexual innuendo. I think, as poets, it’s our job to defamiliarize images and ideas; we are constantly undressing language and seeing what’s underneath. The entire time I wrote the poem, I kept thinking about poetry and intimacy, and how poetry is often a form of choreographing intimacy.

I try to really tune in to my interests when writing a news poem. If an image or idea sticks out to me, I ask myself why. Why did I remember the language aspect of the article and not some other detail? Usually, what sticks out to me is the thing that wants to reveal something to me.

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KARAN

Bodies in your poems are gloriously messy—nipple hair, slick thighs, pimples on bare asses, mouths tasting “some delicious invisible dessert.” In “Self-Portrait with Unplucked Nipple Hair,” you write, “I want to collective-noun / my desire, part my life like a labia / and jaywalk across prayer.” How do you write about the body without falling into either shame or celebration? Is there a third way?

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LEXI

I love this question! I have thought nonstop about this Margot Kahn line I read a few months ago: “In the yard, the dog sleeps / with her legs splayed wide, / the fir cone tuft of her vagina.” I look at my dog Luna’s tuft almost every day, and yet it wasn’t until I read that line that I actually saw it. Reading that description was like putting my glasses on in the morning—the world came into sharper focus. Maybe the third way isn’t celebration or shame, but attention. And not just any attention, but attention to the things that don’t normally catch our eye. You know that Ellen Bass line: “What is the word that fuses this freshness / with the pity of having missed it?” I think that word is poetry.

Sometimes I play a sort of reverse I-spy with myself, where I try to find something in the room I wouldn’t normally look at. When I find that thing, I try to find something even stranger and more unexpected, and so on. You can do this with memories as well. What do you remember that you don’t remember remembering?

Back to the body: we all know which parts get the most attention, but by focusing on the more unexpected ones I was able to move away from what I already know. I have no preconceived notions attached to butt acne or nipple hair; if I want to be associative, I don’t have a list of “expected” comparisons for these body parts. I’m free to go somewhere new because there’s no “old” way of describing these things—at least not that I know of. 

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KARAN

In “Blue Candle” you listen to your mother forgive you while you “clomped / around in her forgiveness / the way I did as a kid / in her famous red heels.” Will you speak about guilt in your work? And perhaps, dare I ask, tell us a bit about your relationship with your mother and how it has shaped you as a poet?

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LEXI

One of the ways I try to hold myself accountable to the truth when I’m writing is to write as generously as possible about others and less generously about myself. In most of my poems, I am the transgressor in some way (poking the dildo, forgetting my mom’s birthday, lying about an orgasm, etc.). There’s something interesting that happens when you aren’t the hero of your poems. I like a flustered, sweaty, blushing speaker—that’s who I am most of the time.

This particular moment is true, but what I don’t say in the poem is that my mom LOVES surprises, so I know for a fact that she was sitting at that dinner expecting to be surprised. That thought, to this day, makes me want to cry every time I think about it. Although I know she was disappointed, she really did comfort me about it the next day. I think a healthy amount of guilt can be a good thing. When writing I think it’s important to tilt toward accountability not shame. “Blue Candle” is a much-deserved apology to my mom.

To answer the second part of your question, my mom is the person I am closest to in the whole world. My mom isn’t a poet or an artist in the strictest sense, but she is generous with her time and attention. My mom also loves gifts, and she loves ALL gifts. You could give her a roll of Scotch tape and she’d be over the moon. She loves receiving things—I think that’s a poet’s sensibility: everything you are given is worthy of furious attention and joy.

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KARAN

“Before Language, Singing” imagines Neanderthals crooning to each other “in wordless notes that could’ve meant anything.” You end with using tremolo to say “I like the place / your stubble starts to change direction / on your cheek.” The poem suggests that precision might be overrated. Do you believe language can ever really say what we mean?

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LEXI

Back to performance! I think precision is underrated to be honest, but the speaker here is questioning that belief for me!

Poetry is just eloquent howling—it’s inaccurate, but beautifully inaccurate. If we ever really said the thing we’d have nothing left to say. What makes a poem successful is how comfortable it is marinating in the uncertainty and unsayableness. 

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KARAN

Your poems are deeply narrative, grounded in specific moments—finding your mother-in-law’s nudes, grinding against someone at a school dance, ordering knee pads for a blow job scene. How do you select which moments become poems? What makes something worth writing about?

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LEXI

Mainly, I just pay attention to the images and moments that stick with me and then I interrogate my fixations. Why is this random moment the thing I remember most about my mother-in-law’s death? I assume everything I happen to remember—no matter how seemingly random—holds a deeper truth about myself.

I consider myself a reader first and a writer second. I try to write every day, but reading poetry is my top priority. One benefit of reading a lot is you learn what draws you in. I am drawn to poems that feel shameless, suprising, or unabashedly honest (see: Dorianne Laux’s, “I Watch My Neighbor Watch Porn Movies through The Kitchen Window” or Dion O’Reilly's "Oh for Fuck’s Sake”).  Quite frankly, I am embarrassed about some of my poem subjects when I think about them too much, but I know they are the poems I’d flip to if I was reading a lit journal. Sometimes I select moments to write about purely because they are moments I’d like to read about–or just to make myself laugh!

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KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, because the answers are always so wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes—poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all?

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LEXI

The obvious answer for these poems is poetry of the body, but underneath their skirts is all heart. I think every poem I’ve ever written is secretly an ode. 

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively: what would you tell other poets about writing the unsayable?

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LEXI

Marvin Bell wrote, “The poem ends, but the poetry goes on.” I understand this to mean your poems should leave the door unlocked behind them.

Something I’ve heard many poets say in various ways is this: beware of poems that are trying to make a point you already believe in; great poems are not assertions of the poet, but of Poetry.

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KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt—something simple, strange, or rigorous—to help them begin a new poem?

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LEXI

Write a narrative poem where the most “traditionally” interesting thing about the story is revealed in the title. 

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KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art (a film, a song, a painting, anything other than a poem) that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

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LEXI

Odalisque With Raised Arms by Matisse and The Musician by Tamara de Lempicka. I have a thing for bright paintings of dramatic women. 

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KARAN

And finally, Lexi, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets or artists who’ve most shaped your sense of what’s possible in language? Who taught you that poems could be this brave?

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LEXI

I’ll never stop being in awe of Marie Howe’s Magdalene, none of these poems would exist without that book. I love the nakedness of her language and the intimacy with which she describes her speaker’s interior landscape.

Francesca Bell has this line, “the necessary work of opening” in her gorgeously raw book “What Small Sound.” That line, and all her poems, have kept me open. 

Just thinking about Ellen Bass’s At the Padre Hotel in Bakersfield, California makes me want to play more with figurative language and write about every loud, unabashedly-herself person I meet. 

Alison Luterman has this poem called “Watching the Giraffes” about a giraffe drinking another giraffe’s pee. It has this line, “So that too is part of it./How they take/what they are thirsty for /without apology” I mean COME ON! Everything Luterman writes is brilliant, I love her ability to deftly move from silly to profound–one of my favorite types of poetry arcs. 

Oh God, Fuck Me by Ruth L. Schwartz is a poem that I have written out by hand at least 50 times, I’d write it on my bones if I could. 

Dion O’Reilly’s Gorge is the poem I think all my poems want to be when they grow up. 

See also: Leila Chatti, Susan Browne, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio