Performances In Poetry

KARAN

Adele, thank you for these poems, I’m excited to speak about them. “Unloved Among Waters” opens with a Simone Weil epigraph: “Love is a sign of our wretchedness.” Then you give us beach sex, rum from a watermelon, “I mounted you carefully like a thing wild on the sand.” The catalog of “You” statements are so tender & refreshingly beautiful: “You, my cabbage pie. / You, my blind cure. / You, who lobbied flesh for fact.” How do you write about desire when the epigraph has already declared love wretched? What does that Weil quote do for the poem?

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ADELE

I am obsessed with how virtuous and/or pious affects can be/are nasty. 

That epigraph is from Weil’s chapter, “Love,” in Gravity and Grace and the full paragraph reads: “Love is a sign of our wretchedness. God can only love himself. We can only love something else.” 

Like, what?! Weil goes so hard. Who even says shit like that. Emerson does in his own way in “Self-Reliance,” where, if one plumbs deep enough, he is emphasizing that we are God. If we can only love something else (ultimately a God), and God can only love himself, how does being God (re: Emerson) and of God (re: Emerson x2) diffuse or collapse that idea? 

God is Love is Art is God is Love. 
But being human is naaaaaasty. 
But being human is Love is Art is God. 

This poem is about that. 

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KARAN

“Man-sized” is brilliant! You’re living in a dollhouse where everything is tiny except your ego, which is “ballooning.” You end with “I am monstrous / and the dollhouse / cannot contain me.” That refusal to apologize for taking up space is thrilling. Where did this poem come from? How do you think about the body as excessive, as too much?

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ADELE

I grew up with the pressures of a very specific type of Deep South gendered etiquette. I am overly-apologetic, reserved in social settings, wildly polite and appreciative… I struggle to speak up for myself or dissent; confrontation takes me out. This poem is about a specific type of power-performance—it is a power-performance: I am spectacle. I am concerning. I am threat. I am destroying shit (I love) in the name of my own validity. I am 42 and just this year, sincerely, have learned to tell you (all of you) that you shouldn’t sleep on me. 

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KARAN

“Bus Stop Madonna” confronts class directly. “Right now, / I am trying / to be smarter / than ever before / but the whitetrash / displays regardless.” You reference Lucille Clifton’s twelve fingers and Sexton’s “Ms. Dog.” The poem refuses shame while acknowledging it. How do you write about class without either romanticizing poverty or performing upward mobility? What does it mean to claim “whitetrash” as identity?

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ADELE

As someone who has lived distinctly classed realities, and performed various classes within those realities, I play with these assumptions/understandings in my own work. My writing is anchored in the edges, blurs, and possible collapses of designations. Class is an economic reality, a social performance, an aesthetic… It is gendered, geographic, cultural, and religious. Nearly every single claimable thing is slippery. Class is no different. What are the implications for high art and knowledge, if class is slick?

On another note, I point to Clifton and Sexton in this poem, because it is, largely, about being a freak in devotion or an idiot in devotion (to a God, to a body, to a poverty). Clifton was born with twelve fingers; mark of a beast! Sexton believed herself to be her own naughty God. It’s just me and the Bus Stop Madonna in this poem; my stupidity is performed, her Jesus is figurative. What are we really ashamed of here, anyway?  The thing or the performance of the thing? 

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KARAN

The South appears everywhere in these poems: Texas heat, bayous, Live Oaks, herons falling like pennies. In “A Poem for Texan Summertime,” you write, “A poem should turn eventually, / offering respite and release, ending / with beauty or hope—but my lines / are tight, my images alive, / and the real truth is / there’s no good cheer here.” Arghh!!! That refusal of consolation is devastating. I’m very interested in how geography influences us, so will you tell us how the South has influenced you & your work?

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ADELE

I grew up in Baton Rouge, living there until I was 11. We traveled often to Long Beach to visit my grandparents and to New Orleans for fun. We went to Destin every summer and to Memphis a few times a year to see my paternal grandparents. We went to Houston occasionally. No matter where we went, it was hot and a little trashy. It was always so deeply cultural. It was distinct and sticky. The food was insane. The music was survival. 

But it was hard. I don’t know how else to say it. I know my experience of the South was critically informed by my own insecurities and fear. I was a terrified child. I lived in a safe, classic American neighborhood, and I was in panic of home invasions and being abducted. I feared sleeping alone.

The thing about the Gulf South is that something is always off and around the corner—a storm, a legislation, a tragedy. I do not know what else to do with all the tensions but make them lyric. 

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KARAN

Religious imagery too is a recurrent in these poems: the Madonna, stigmata, God calls, heaven and hell. In “Bus Stop Madonna,” the woman nurses a full-grown man and “we’ve made a God of him.” You end with “we all need a mountain / to die on.” What’s your relationship to faith? Does Southern Christianity haunt you, sustain you, or a mix of both?

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ADELE

I was raised primarily Catholic, and in the Deep South Catholicism is its own mystical thing. It was all miracles and women and suffering. So much ornament and sacrifice and magic. I loved the narratives, especially of the Old Testament. I loved prayer. I loved all the rituals; I have obsessive compulsive disorder, so, naturally, that spoke to me, ha! I adored my own mother and she adored hers and we all adored Mother Mary. And the saints! Saints are the best, no? 

There were all these different folks I could pray to, and I found that really liberating. And we lived in this hotstickyslippy region where witchcraft and hoodoo and voodoo and Southern superstitions slinked into it all—that was permissive as well. Also, my father is Jewish which added another layer of blurring.

But, I hated going to Mass! That was real; I just fucking hated it. I’m excellent at not holding grudges, so the Mass trauma doesn’t traumatize me. Now, I am fascinated with all facets of religion. I don’t think I sincerely believe in a God, not even in an abstract sense, but I really want to (in an abstract sense). I am slowly convincing myself that art is God. So there’s that. 

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KARAN

“Deep South Augury” is a catalog of warnings. “Beware the black symbol of planets. / Beware the whack pull of spandex.” The sound play here is wild: “Beware for beware’s sake, wear flair for handshakes.” So fun! Are you preoccupied with rhyme and rhythm? And/or, how consciously/actively do you think about sound in your work?

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ADELE

I hope one day I am dead and gone and archived and folks are like “That bitch. That bitch right there was a poet of sound.” 

I learned lyric from songwriters and spoken word. Rap and 90s alt rock. It was music first, then the stage, then the page. So, yes. I am very preoccupied with rhythm. I read out loud as I write. I am doing that now.  I wouldn’t say that I am musically inclined as much as I am phonetically-driven. Or something like that. Or maybe, it is just that I am most affected by sound. Rather than, image, for example. But that’s not true. A heavy metaphor is all I want. 

I suppose the truth is that sound anchors me because I grew up in a loud house with The Band blaring and going to Masses of incantation and song. Maybe?

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KARAN

Violence runs through your work, Adele. Here we have a girl strangled and thrown into the bayou “again and again,” a man so hungry “he ate his own / beard for breakfast,” a black snake eating baby birds, and other dark subjects to whom dark things happen. You don’t look away from brutality. How do you write about violence without either glorifying it or turning it into mere imagery? When does documenting horror become a form of witness?

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ADELE

When it has been witnessed? I do not mean to be snarky here! When a violence has been witnessed firsthand, I do not understand how the witness could possibly sensationalize it. Or reduce it. Well, I could see reduction. Absolutely. I take that back. 

A part of what is going on here, in this poem, are the iterations of witnessing. There is a sort of boredom, a consequence of the relentless loss. It is all so familiar. Another part is leaning into that reality (how suffering can be mundane). I like leaning into the bad parts (acceptance and release often follow). That is the last part: me just staring some of my shitty realities down. Letting go. 

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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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ADELE

I see my poems pulling from the excesses of all four, living where they leak and then pool.

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KARAN

You won one of the most coveted book prizes, Adele, and I love that for you! What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

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ADELE

Oh thank you, Karan!!! What an utter honor. Truly. 

The best advice I’ve ever received about artmaking is from my husband who taught me to always make art/write poems for myself. And to never compromise. When I start making art for others, I am in trouble. 

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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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ADELE

Write a poem about a social phenomenon. Include either a crowbar or hair or both. Include shades of pink. End with an image of your/a mother. 

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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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ADELE

The lore of the cosmic egg. 

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KARAN

And finally, Adele, 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? You reference Lucille Clifton and Anne Sexton, both of them wrote about the body, about excess, and how vehemently they refused shame. Patricia Smith selected your first book. How do you think about lineage? Who are your poetic mothers?

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ADELE

Lineage and Tradition are critical to poetry writing. There is the poem ignorant of its own history and there is the poem, informed. I don’t believe one is “better” than the other, but I do have preferences.

Moreover, I am a glutton for mothers. It is sort of my thing. 

My birth mothers: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Tori Amos, Patricia Smith, and Patti Smith. 

My chosen mothers: Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Ani Difranco, Sharon Olds, Audre Lorde and Anne Carson.

My MUTHAS: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Yoko Ono, Eileen Myles, Wanda Coleman, Judy Grahn, Mother God, and Gloria Anzaldúa.