Interrogating the Human Experience

KARAN

Irène, thank you for your poems. I love that you’re a pediatrician and a poet. “lesson on the spring equinox” opens with “what we thought was science is actually poetry. / what we called history is simple math.” That collapsing of categories feels essential to your work. How does being a doctor shape your poems? Are there similarities in the two practices, or do they pull you in different directions?

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IRÈNE

Medicine and writing are, for me, two approaches to getting at a core question – what is it like to be human? Where we bump up against the limitations of our bodies, our language, what forms of expression and therefore connection do we have? The practices feel very different. The delivery of health care is inherently relational, and while pediatric medicine definitely calls for creativity, its practice is fundamentally based more on the synthesis of physical information. Poetry is created in solitude and involves a great deal of internal work (arguably this is a type of emotional synthesis) – although the best poems are relational in that they connect us to others. But the practices inform one another. Writing deepens my appreciation for the myriad ways people communicate their experiences to me in the exam room, and what I see as a physician informs the questions and obsessions of my poems.

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KARAN

“still life with chemical pregnancy” is devastating. You’re bleeding while “the emcee at the / literary gala cries, drunk, / about the beauty of libraries / & democracy & freedom, / supporting our allies.” Meanwhile children in Gaza are told to flee. You write, “my body is authoritarian. / someone should give her a / history book.” How do you hold personal grief and political catastrophe together in a poem without one consuming the other?

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IRÈNE

I have to acknowledge the careful eye of my dear friend the poet Joumana Altallal. I was struggling with how to hold both of these things in the same poem – and at moments, doubtful about whether they should be in the same poem – but she helped me think through line placement and the poem’s progression in a way that allows both to sit together. Ultimately, this poem describes true events, and I think an essential feature of it is to show how private catastrophes can and do occur alongside very public horrors – and that a core part of the human experience is making sense of them both, sometimes simultaneously. It felt ambitious, but I didn’t want to separate these two – genocide and an early miscarriage – because that’s not how life is.

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KARAN

“Flowerson” imagines your baby son grown, buying flowers at the grocery store among “the noble, brave and brown-skinned men.” You end with him “walking in the light of it / righteously as a peony unfurling.” The poem is so tender, so hopeful, even as you’re aware of the danger Black men face. How do you write hope for your children without denying what you know about the world?

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IRÈNE

The tenderness exists alongside the danger. I have to be hopeful – not only as a parent, but also a pediatrician. Without the possibility of a more humane, righteous, and light-filled world for all children, what would be the point of this work? Hope doesn’t come from things going well; it’s a survival mechanism and a movement machine for when things are dangerous and scary. I wouldn’t consider myself an adept practitioner of hope, as I often find myself battling cynicism. But I take heart in the fact that the future remains inherently unpredictable, and we are the ones making it. Indigenous attorney and activist Sherri Mitchell contends that we should spend 80% of our efforts building the world we want to see; this is why I try to keep my poems open to the possibility of more tender futures.

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KARAN

The “still life” poems move between the domestic and the cosmic. Sleep deprivation becomes “I was in the escape room in which I’d lived my entire life.” Chemical pregnancy becomes surveillance of Gaza. What draws you to the “still life” frame? How does that art historical term change what you can say about bodies, about violence?

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IRÈNE

When I experience intense or bizarre moments, I sometimes have the feeling of watching myself from the outside. It’s a sort of meta-awareness of how strange or extreme whatever I’m experiencing is. The “still life” form allows me to recreate this feeling by freezing the moment in time, so I can make sense of it by drawing on both my internal experience and its situatedness in a more global context. When I write a “still life” poem, it forces me to slow down and examine intimate subject matter that might otherwise be overwhelming.

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KARAN

“convalescence / postpartum” uses the Spanish “dar luz” (to give light) and Frankl’s “What is to give light must endure burning.” You write, “every time you create life / you die a little bit.” That’s such a different metaphor than the usual motherhood celebration. How do you write about motherhood without sentimentality? What does it mean to be possessed by your child, then cast off?

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IRÈNE

Motherhood isn’t sentimental! It’s gritty and ecstatic and brutal and terrifying and transformative and intoxicating and intense. For me, being pregnant was a beautiful and enjoyable experience in many ways, but it also felt slightly creepy to know that a being was growing inside me and siphoning resources from my body. I couldn’t think of a better notion to describe it than possession. In another sense, the intense physical and psychological changes that come with pregnancy are also a form of possession; I often felt utterly unlike myself while pregnant, and I found this both fascinating and mildly alarming. And then you give birth, and the child is out in the world, finally the possessor of their own (mostly) independent body, and you, the recently pregnant person, are left to pick up the pieces. For many birthing people, as I write in the poem, the pieces can look like night sweats, hair loss, “baby blues,” blood pressure fluctuations, breast engorgement, vaginal bleeding for weeks, tendinitis, etc, etc, etc. We don’t talk about this experience enough, and my hope in writing this poem – and others in the series – is that a more realistic, non-sentimental depiction of motherhood can become more mainstream.

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KARAN

You work in multiple forms—lineated lyrics, prose poems, fragmented pieces. “still life with sleep deprivation” moves like delirium: “My tongue took on water and fishtailed out my hands. / My pockets full of keys, I sank to the carpet at the bottom.” What does exhaustion/sleep deprivation as a mother of a young child do to syntax?

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IRÈNE

I asked myself this question a lot during my older child’s first couple of years. For a while I found it really challenging to access poetic language in the way that I’d done before giving birth. I’m still not sure if this was due to sleep deprivation, the documented brain changes that happen to new parents in the postpartum phase, the psychological impact of becoming a caregiver, or some combination of all these. Practically speaking, I was unable to sit and write out a full draft of a poem, which is typically how I work. I had trouble finding the words for things. Poetic language came to me in scraps and fragments. Some of this was due to the logistical aspects of parenting; I might start to write a poem and then my baby would need to be breastfed or have a diaper change. Some of it was about the novel experience of having a child to think about, always, even if subconsciously, even when that child was asleep or elsewhere, under another’s care. Some of it was probably profound fatigue. Mothering a young child splintered my attention, particularly during those first few years, and as a result I found my language splintered. Part of what guides this series of poems, though, is a curiosity about what new ways of writing might emerge from this new reality, rather than mourning what I could no longer access. I decided to approach my altered relationship to language as a poetic experiment instead of being disheartened by it. I’m curious about what it would mean, socially and politically, to embrace this mom-brained form of writing not as something to be conquered or recovered from, but rather an inherently meaningful and significant literary approach.

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KARAN

Irène, what does diaspora mean in your work? There’s a sense of not belonging in these poems that I’m unable to point a finger at. Can you guide me?

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IRÈNE

Diaspora is a central theme in my work; my second collection, Grand Marronage, deals with this very explicitly through the lens of family history. My family has origins in West Africa, indigenous North America, and many parts of Europe, via the Gulf Coast and the mid-Atlantic of the U.S.A. as well as several countries in South America. Three of my four grandparents are from New Orleans, but they all moved out of the city in the mid-twentieth century, and the New Orleans of their day has acquired the kind of mythological sheen that people who emigrate often develop toward their place of origin. You can never go home again, as they say. I have always carried a feeling of being from many places and also nowhere, likely due in part to not feeling connected to a larger community during my childhood and the sense of unbelonging many Black Americans experience. I’m always looking for threads of belonging as I write, trying to feel my way to a more settled sense of cultural identity.

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KARAN

“toward a unified theory of the artist” asks, “I wonder if to make art / you must be aware you’re making art.” You’re painting tomatoes on cast iron (such a wonderful way of looking at cooking), pushing your daughter on a swing, getting an ultrasound. I welcome you to share any thoughts on making art.

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IRÈNE

If art is a creative expression of human experience, then we are always living the fodder of art. When I wrote this poem, I wanted to know what art I was developing through the mundane experiences of playground trips, cooking dinner, and postpartum pelvic pain. This quotidian mundanity is a blessing because it stands in contrast to the potentially traumatic stories that didn’t happen. That early phase of motherhood, when “the days are long but the years are short,” is as worthy of artistic exploration as any dramatic adventure. I wanted to honor that and also give voice to the gratitude and awe I felt/feel for even the most ordinary moments.

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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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IRÈNE

I’m definitely soul + body! I have a hard time picking just one, as I think my poems are equally grounded in the somatic/visceral and the spiritual/mystical.

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KARAN

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Additionally: what would you tell other poet-doctors, other poet-mothers, about making time for the work?

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IRÈNE

If you want to be a writer, then you can call yourself a writer. No one else will bestow that title on you. All you have to do is the work. How to make time? Be creative about what writing can look like. I have written pieces of poems on scraps of paper between seeing patients, voice-recorded in my phone while on car rides, scrawled down thoughts during kids’ nap times or late at night. And remember that reading is the pre-work for writing. I do not have the discipline or circadian rhythm of someone like Toni Morrison, who notoriously rose hours before her children awoke to write for hours each day (and clearly my work reflects this!). But I do what I can when I can, and when a voice inside me says there is something that must be written, I listen.

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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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IRÈNE

Take a photo of a typical or extraordinary scene of your life – it can include people, animals, objects, anything at all, but don’t stage it. Then write a poem entitled “still life with _____.” How does the photo capture something important about your experience right now?

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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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IRÈNE

The novelist Claire Adam’s writing, especially her more recent book, Love Forms. It’s such a gorgeous and devastating book about motherhood.

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KARAN

And finally, Irène, 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? 

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IRÈNE

Most recently, the poets who directly inspired some of the poems in my recent series – Brian Teare, Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Safiya Sinclair, Bhanu Kapil, Molly Brodak, Kendra DeColo – but also so many more.

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