Phobia as Poetic Device

KARAN

Beth, I like this series of poems a lot, and have myself wanted to do something similar for a long time. Thanks for beating me to it! These are brilliant. “linonophobia” opens with your father into the poem through a wound. He’s sliced off the tip of his thumb, trying to hide it in your mother’s embroidered towels, asking for the sewing kit so you might stitch him up. And then: “30 years later I cannot tell you how this story ends. I know we bleached the blood-soaked towels. I didn’t stitch him up.” That ending is unforgettable. Tell us about your relationship with your parents (whether in childhood or now or both) & how it’s shaped your writing.

BETH 

One of the interesting things about having an idyllic childhood is not even realizing how lucky you are until you get older and learn that not everyone had the same experience. I was/am blessed with amazing parents who made me feel safe and loved. My mother actively encouraged a love of books and music and movies. One of my earliest memories is reading Mother Goose nursery rhymes when I was 3 years old and later, A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. I don’t remember a time when books were not part of my life. From my dad, I learned the importance of taking care of family – he was an engineer and good at solving things and fixing things. That “problem-solving” mentality is one that I’ve incorporated into my everyday life, and it has also spilled over into my approach to writing poetry.  Also, my father died in 2020 from Alzheimer’s and I’ve written numerous poems about his illness and death - “linonophobia” is one of those poems. 

KARAN 

Every poem here is titled with/tied to a phobia, and fear is at the center of these poems. Linonophobia is the fear of string, and the poem holds a sewing kit and a thumb that needs stitching. Microphobia is the fear of small things, and you’re “the girl who cannot see fruit flies or dividing cells through the microscope’s lens.” Mnemophobia is the fear of memory, and there’s Facebook asking if you want to share one. How did this device/idea come to you? Are you a fearful person? Also, my version of chicken or the egg for you: does the fear generate the poem, or do you find the fear once the poem surfaces?

BETH 

The device of the phobia poems came to me from another poet and I’m sorry to say I can’t remember who. But I was reading a collection and there was a phobia poem in it, and it was an odd phobia…which fascinated me.  I started wondering what other phobias there are and discovered there’s pretty much a phobia for anything. It’s a great example of the “problem-solving” aspect of poetry that appeals to me. I first realized that I think of poems as a puzzle in 2018 when I was trying to write a poem about my grandson, Theodore. I had recently read the book, Endurance, which is about Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to Antarctica where the ship got trapped in ice. Throughout the saga, the crew has to make difficult decisions about what to keep for survival and what they can leave behind. What got my attention was that they kept a banjo throughout all of it. I also had watched a Civil War documentary and wrote down a line which was “during the battle of Gettysburg, the Union band played polkas.” This was also during the first Trump administration, and I was appalled by the culture of celebrating toxic masculinity and thought a lot about how I didn’t want my grandson to be that kind of man.  I knew all of these ideas were related and my job as the poet was to write the poem in such a way that the reader understood those connections.  I know this is a very long-winded answer to your question…but the answer is that I don’t think of these poems as being about fear. Instead, I’m writing about different ideas and using the phobia device as a way to connect seemingly disparate ideas. 

KARAN 

An empty crib recurs here. In “gerontophobia”: “Nobody questions me about the empty crib.” A sunflower rises “to cradle the motherless eggs.” In “theophobia” you write about having no interest in the moment of your own conception. In a sense all poetry circles absence (of love, god, innocence, pleasure, safety, harmony, etc), but these poems make absence a physical presence in the room. Will you speak to us about the empty crib, about how you write what isn’t there?

BETH 

Loss and absence are recurring themes in my poetry because of numerous sudden, unexpected, and tragic deaths of people in my life over the past 15 years. The most significant of these (for me) was the death of my granddaughter, Daisy, in 2013 at the age of 7 months from SIDS. It’s the moment that almost destroyed me and my family…but it’s also the moment that ultimately led me back to writing after over 20 years.  I never thought of absence as being “a physical presence,” until you asked the question…but yes, it absolutely is. And it’s because those losses are part of who I am. They don’t fully define me, but they definitely change the way I move through the world and perceive existence.  

KARAN 

Your forthcoming book is titled Alchemist or Arsonist, and fire moves everywhere in these poems: self-immolation, spontaneous combustion, “a bonfire of bougainvillea” (chef’s kiss), windows closed against smoke, etc. I’m thinking of the inherent dichotomy in the title: the alchemist transmutes, the arsonist destroys. Where do you locate yourself between those two? Is writing a poem an act of transmutation or of burning something down?

BETH 

The short answer is that I don’t think alchemy is different from arson. The title is from a poem in the collection. “Alchemist or arsonist: the end is the same. Something becomes something else.” For me, destruction is inevitably tied to creation. When the wren eggs hatch, the fledglings are created but the eggs are destroyed.  When I’m writing, it’s definitely more of the alchemist, I admit. Writing for me is discovery, incantation, a celebration of the mystery.

KARAN 

I love how science and magic braid together in your work without either winning. “I’m certain it has something to do with particle physics: vector calculus: quantum computers: transmutational magic disguised as nuclear fission.” Fingerprints hum “like mitochondria.” What draws you to the language of physics and biology?

BETH 

I  love words. Sometimes, I’m just attracted to the sound or shape of certain words, e.g. quantum computers.  I can’t say I understand what a quantum computer does but I love using scientific words in the same way as I use “magical” words. The experience of language is a physical sensation for me. Sometimes when I’m writing, I have a kind of out of body experience where I’m existing in the same ethereal space as words and I can reach out and take what I need for the poem. In another snub to binaries, I also don’t think of science and magic, or science and faith,  as different.  There’s a great book called The Language of God¸ which solidified my belief that when you study science, you will find God.

KARAN 

Ghosts too are everywhere. “All I see are ghosts.” And that piano image in “mnemophobia” I can’t shake: your grandson plays “a minor-keyed melody by dragging monster trucks across the dusty black stripes: avoiding the dusty white: he says grandma, don’t touch them, they look like ghosts.” I love that mix of tenderness & (hauntedness?). How do you understand the presence of the dead in your poems? Do they haunt, or do they keep you company?

BETH 

It’s funny, as much as I write about them…I’m not sure if I believe in “ghosts” in the way they are presented to us in modern, American culture, i.e. the idea of being haunted by something sinister. I wouldn’t say they keep me company, either, because I don’t want to burden the dead with the trivialities of the living. Instead, I always carry some part of them with me, and their presence in my poetry is no more supernatural to me than the presence of the living.

KARAN 

These are all prose poems, and I’m a devotee of the form. Your sentences accumulate by association and leap: a howl to a gunshot to a stripped kitchen to your father’s soap. What does the prose block give you? In your experience, what can happen in that unbroken field that a lineated poem wouldn’t allow?

BETH 

Prose poems allow me to accelerate or decelerate the movement of a poem solely through language. I don’t see a block, and I don’t see an unbroken field. To me, prose poems are fluid. I can create from the inside out. And I’m still thinking of meter and rhyme and even line breaks (which I know prose poem purists would argue with). 

KARAN 

Your poems look hard at the aging female body. “The average woman loses 3-5 inches of height in her lifetime due to osteoporosis.” You write about menopause, about a town where “50% of the population is older than sixty.” Aging women are so often unseen in poetry. What is it like to write from and about a body the culture prefers to turn away from?

BETH 

It’s an act of joy to write about aging as a woman. Alchemist or Arsonist, at its core, is about reclaiming the crone as a powerful, magical woman. The idea first came to me the year I turned 60 and started referring to myself as old. I was not attaching any value to the word “old,” I was just stating a biological reality, that I was no longer middle-aged because I’m certainly not going to live to 120. I was taken aback by the very strong, negative reaction people have to the word “old.” It was as if I said I was murdering kittens.  I would also get the “age is just a state of mind” response which implies that there is something wrong with aging. I like being in my 60s…I’m comfortable in my own skin in ways I never was as a younger woman. 

KARAN 

This is a question we ask all our poets, though 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?

BETH 

I think my poetry sits at the intersection of poetry of the mind and poetry of the soul. The “mind” part is that “solving the puzzle” aspect I bring to my poetry and the “soul” part is my fascination with the spiritual/mystical/magical/unknowable/unsolvable.

KARAN 

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Or something you’d offer to poets just getting serious about the craft?

BETH 

I earned my MFA from American University in 1990 (speaking of being old) and my mentor was the poet, Henry Taylor.  He taught me that the power of a poem cannot be derived from the subject matter alone. That advice really came into play when I started writing again in 2014 about the death of Daisy. In other words, just because the poem is about a dead baby, doesn’t mean that it’s a good poem. And, yes, I give that advice to poets when they ask about craft. It’s so easy to get carried away by the emotion of a poem, especially if it’s something very personal. Instead, ask…do I have something new to say about loss or can I use language in a new way to describe tragedy?

KARAN 

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

BETH 

Write three poems about the same subject and do not use the word “I” in any of the three poems. 

KARAN 

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

BETH 

I love the movie, Arrival, because it pretends to be a movie about extraterrestrials, but it’s really about loss, language, and time. Also, the hero of the movie is a woman and a linguist. Bonus!

KARAN 

And finally, Beth, 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?

BETH

This is a lot but here are some poets, books, poems, and lines from poems that live in my head.

Robert Hass, Field Guide ("Letter to a Poet"): "There are tricks of animal grace, / poems in the mind / we survive on."
Robert Hass, Praise ("Meditation at Lagunitas"): "All the new thinking is about loss / In this it resembles all the old thinking."
Anne Sexton ("Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound"): "They call back to us / from the gauzy edge of paradise / good news, good news."
Charles Wright, A Short History of the Shadow ("Body and Soul"): "Some poems exist still on the other side of our lives... Unseen. World-long. Bone music."
Kevin Prufer, Churches ("Churches"): "There ought to be a word / that suggests / how we're balanced at the very tip of history..."
Mary Oliver, House of Light ("Singapore"): "I mean / the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds."
Marianne Boruch, The Anti-Grief ("Pieces on the Ground"): "The remember is not a road."
Dorianne Laux, What We Carry
‍Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song
‍And more recently: Matthew Olzmann, Constellation Route; C.T. Salazar, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking; Taylor Byas, Resting Bitch Face

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