The first poem of your collection, “The Dream of the Rotten
Daughter,” inspired the title of your book. Why did you choose to use
what had to be such a painful statement?
The initial title of this collection was
Underground Parking, chosen because the book’s central theme was death.
How could it not be? For seven-plus years I had been living in a world
filled with end-of-life issues: illness, nursing homes, grief, guilt. I
was actively engaged in the putting down of my father and the care of my
mother who died when she was ninety-five. Those years, the most difficult
of my life.
The poem “The Dream of the Rotten Daughter”
was written after I put the book together. It was written after my mother
died, while in the rest of the book, she is still very much alive. (I
might argue here that your parents never really die. They are with you
always, in dreams as well as in waking hours, whether you like it or not.)
But as I said, that piece was written much later. I had a great deal of
difficulty putting this manuscript together. How to keep it from becoming
a one-note samba—death, death, and more of the same. It’s when, with
Michelle Boisseau of BkMk’s help, I realized that the book isn’t about
death, but about the living’s reaction to it—me, the rotten daughter
—that I added that poem, and the collection fell into place. A painful
statement? Those seven years were a painful statement. How could I turn my
back on them and look away?
Tell us about the provocative photograph on the cover of your book.
What does the tattoo, Pegasus, symbolize for you?
The story of my getting a tattoo is explored in
depth in the essay, “Inking In the Myth,” which appears in Sleeping
with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (U of Georgia P).
To make a long story short, my getting a tattoo was more like experiencing
a visitation than anything else. Understand, I had it done twenty years
ago, well before today’s tattoo/piercing craze. Too, I come from a
middle-class Jewish family which would have seen getting a tattoo as
something only drunken sailors do. Indeed, I probably thought so too. It
took me five years of being haunted on and off by this desire before I had
it done. Who can explain it? In 1986 in Indiana, where I lived, except for
medical tattooing, tattooing was illegal. Then one day I saw a photograph
of “The Tattooer of the Stars”—Kevin B____, friend of Mellencamp,
tattooer of Steve McQueen—fighting for his license in Bloomington,
Indiana. I studied his face a long time and knew that if he were allowed
to open shop, he was it, the bringer of the gift. I chose Pegasus the
flying horse not knowing then that it was the sign of poetry. Only later
did I find out that Pegasus rose from the blood of the slain Medusa,
kicked a hole in the side of Mount Helicon, home of the muses, to let
loose the fountain of poetic inspiration —the Hippocrene. Then, all I
knew was that I wanted something that was mine, and nobody else’s,
something I could take with me when I died. I put it on my back. So there
it is, always behind me, pushing. This poetry, this sweet hell. It was
later that I found out that only a poet can ride Pegasus.
The photograph was taken by my daughter, who, at
the time, was a photography major at Purdue University. I was her senior
project. When her classmates asked her where she got the model, and she
confessed it was her mother, I guess I got some points for that.
The idea of putting that photo on the cover was
hers. A mirror image of self-reflection. Perfect.
The poems in this collection are full of intricate detail; “After
Shooting the Barbados Ram” is an excellent example of this detail. In
this poem you write about watching your brother-in-law dissect the ram,
because you must watch. Are you conscious of being drawn to detail, and do
you see yourself as an observer?
All people who create are
see-ers. An artist is
someone who knows how to see. You can teach anyone to draw, to write
poems—even good ones. You can teach people to compose music. But you
can’t teach people how to be who they are. And who they are matches the
way that they take in the world. In other words, how they see. How many
people do you know who really see? When was the last time you really
looked at, say, an orange? A chair? How birds fly? We don’t even look at
each other. An artist is someone who looks at the world and writes what
he/she sees. That’s an artist’s job. Not too many people do that work
for us.
You’ve included several poems, “Osteoporosis,” “The
Fall,” and “Dressing the Skeketon,” which focus on caring for your
mother while she was living in a nursing home. Did writing help you deal
with the intense pain of this situation?
Well, I wish I could say yes, because I think
that’s what people want to hear. Maybe the writing kept me sane. Maybe.
But no, it did not help with the pain of the situation and the emotional
wringer I was going through. That took its toll on me physically, I’m
afraid. Writing isn’t a catharsis. Not for me. Maybe experiencing other
people’s finished work acts as a catharsis as Aristotle implied, but not
the act of writing my own. Here’s an example: let’s say you are
knee-deep in garbage. You take it and form it into a lovely design; in
other words you made art out of it. It still remains the essential
ingredient it is. Nothing takes that away. Writing about the holocaust
doesn’t change the holocaust: horror is horror. Writing about great pain
doesn’t reduce it; if anything, in the act of writing it, you experience
it again and again in recollection. It’s like looking for the bad tooth
in your mouth with your tongue to make it hurt so you can describe it.
When I re-read those poems you refer to, I experience again the misery I
was steeped in. At the time I wrote those pieces, there seemed to be no
way I could write about anything else. My despair was too big, filling up
the spaces, taking up all the room.
After reading several of the poems—“The Dream of the Rotten
Daughter,” “Ghost Story for December,” “Footnote”—it seems
that unresolved issues with your parents are a major theme running through
the collection. Did writing the poems help you reach a resolution?
Perhaps the answer to the previous question
informs this one. No, there was no resolution. That’s a hard thing to
accept I know—that there are certain things, betrayals for instance,
that can’t be resolved, made sense of. They just have to be swallowed
down, an act I liken to swallowing a sofa. It doesn’t get easier, and
you never get good at it.
This book, The Book of the Rotten Daughter, seems to come from such
a different place than your previous BkMk collection, Inverted Fire.
Looking at the theme of the poems and artistic development, how would you
compare the two?
I think if you look closely, you can see the
seeds of this book in Inverted Fire, surely in the opening piece of that
collection and in such poems as “Flying Home” and “Snake Hill”
where I am predicting what will happen in a not too distant future. The
Book of the Rotten Daughter is darker, of course, and more concentrated.
The fact that the poems cover a shorter time frame adds to its concision.
I’m afraid there’s little “comic relief” in this one. Between
these two books, I published Zoo (U of Arkansas P), based on my travels in
Africa and Hawai’i, in which I turn outward, the poems not as personal
as they are in the two BkMk collections. A new manuscript, The
Mythological Cod, is a different kettle of fish altogether—funny and a
bit wacky. I add this information so that readers will not give up on me
altogether.
Is there a change in your self-conception/appreciation from the
beginning to the end of the book ? Do you still see yourself as “the
rotten daughter” in the end?
This is a wonderful question to illustrate the
difference between life and art. Art, after all, makes sense. There’s
cause and effect, beginning and end, logic, order. Maybe there’s
sometimes even justice and redemption. At the end of The Book of the
Rotten Daughter, there is acceptance, yes, and, I hope, a sense of
completion. The rotten daughter has, at least, pulled something out of the
fire. She has created something. Does the rotten daughter in the book see
herself differently by the end? That’s for the reader to decide. But if
the question is whether the author still sees herself as “the rotten
daughter,” the answer is, of course, of course.
