Emily Bludworth de Barrios // Incessant Pipe: A Poetry WebSalh0n
On Tuesday, April 28th at 7:45pm, H_NGM_N’s Emily Bludworth de Barrios will give a live-streamed internet reading at Incessant Pipe’s monthly poetry salon, held at the Salem Athenaeum. The salon, which is run by Scott Jacobs and Clay Ventre, has hosted past readers such as Paige Taggart and Emily Pettit.
Incessant Pipe’s Scott Jacobs first met Emily when he invited her to contribute to Flying Object’s Poets and Poems Workshop, led by Emily Pettit, an editor at Flying Object’s Factory Hollow Press. From there, Scott interviewed Emily about her chapbook, EXTRAORDINARY POWER (Factory Hollow Press, 2014). You can read this interview below, and if you find yourself anywhere near Salem, MA on April 28th, head over to the Athenaeum for a promising night of readings.
Scott: You chose the titles of the poems in EXTRAORDINARY POWER from The Castle of Otranto. Did you conceive the idea for this collection after reading this novel? Would you come across a line that you liked and work the poem from there?
Emily: It was serendipity (a word coined by Otranto's author Horace Walpole) that I was reading The Castle of Otranto while writing the earliest of these poems. While taking an excellent class in Gothic literature with Jedediah Berry, I had to read The Castle of Otranto. To be honest, I had difficulty with the knotty, purple prose, and I had trouble following the plot. While I read, my brain would inadvertently start to meditate on the meaning of individual phrases, like "the holy man remained absorbed in thought." What would be the sensory, emotional, and visual experience of a holy man absorbed in thought? That poem (not the first poem I wrote of the series) was the only poem that was specifically spawned from the text in that way. Once I used the text for a title, I loved how I could bounce the two texts off of one another. The main character of Otranto, Manfred, is this blustery, highly-emotional, self-centered, King-Lear-like character who is almost cartoonishly flawed. So that connects to some of the themes in the series. And I personally felt admiration for and connection to the "outsider art" and DIY quality of The Castle of Otranto and Horace Walpole's mock-Gothic, work-in-progress estate at Strawberry Hill. So, for example, Walpole published The Castle of Otranto himself, creating his own press, and wrote an introduction to the text in which he falsely claimed that it was a medieval Italian manuscript that he'd translated himself. (I'm writing this from memory, so some facts may be fuzzy.) To write the odd text that is The Castle of Otranto, to self-publish it (no small task in the 18th century), and to boldly lie about its origin – all of that takes a bizarre, brave, and idiosyncratic mind. I like artists who are unapologetically, wholly themselves.
We talk about and share in our workshop about different forms of art that inspire us to write – to open our eyes and point us in directions we maybe otherwise would not have gone. Aside from the obvious relationship of this chapbook to a novel, what are some other art forms, artists, etc., who you seem to draw the most inspiration from for your own art?
When I was writing these poems I was thinking a lot about non-verbal forms of art, like landscape design, cooking, dance, and architecture. Language, on the one hand, comprises, almost totally, our understanding of the world. It adds nuance and understanding and makes sense of our experiences. But language also narrows and diminishes and does not capture fully what happens to us as we move through the world. I kept thinking about the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London – to rise up on the escalators through the space is to be lifted into an enormous, empty, glass-and-white cavern. I can describe it in words but it's really an experience that exists below language or without language. So, even though it's impossible, I was trying to write from that non-language space of not knowing and not defining or not having expectations about the shape or trajectory of a poem. That was really important to me. I have read so many poems where the conclusion felt predetermined from the start – tonally, imagistically, and so on.
I like looking at visual art because I don't know very much about it and can think about as a novice. Cy Twombly's paintings are good, potent, and important to me, and I love that I don't have to articulate why to anyone (although, one day, it may be good to try).
Recently I went to a Monet exhibit here in Houston that brought together paintings he'd made throughout his life of the River Seine. The river remains the same but he looks at with different sensibilities as he gets older. He went through periods where he would paint the same exact spot at different times throughout the day to capture the shifting light. He also painted the river in snow (not just snow but the particular purplish, caked-on, hazy quality of very cold wintry air). I loved the paintings and I liked seeing, through the paintings, how he showed us how he was seeing. (He was painting the river but not really painting the river – painting the day, the daylight, the morning light, dusk, the time.)
in many of the titles, you can feel the language of a different time speaking (1764), yet the poems are invariably contemporary, which for me created a lovely contrast that worked wonderfully to create something that needn’t be placed ‘in time.’ Do you consider time at all when writing and could you maybe talk about what excites you or even doesn’t excite you about playing with time in writing?
I like that, by using a certain word or phrase, I can recall, in a reader's mind, the deep past or another writer or century. I also love that something so absolutely tied to a particular historical moment can speak across centuries. Like Catullus writing "I hate and I love." George Herbert, writing in the 1600s, could be expressing my feelings when he writes, "My thoughts are all a case of knives." Once I read some Pharaonic poetry which read: "You who are alive on Earth / I speak to you of what happened to me." It's amazing to me how texts survive the ages and twist and change in translation (or not in translation, sometimes just continuing on in their original form, if that language is still being spoken and read) and arrive powerfully in the present, these long (and forever) dead voices. It really is astounding, this technology of written language, which is like telepathy across time.
Here is a poem in which time does something startling (from Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson):
Hesterno Licini Die Otiosi (Yesterday Licinius At Our Ease)
Catullus addresses Licinius with affection.
I guess around sunset we started to drink.
And lay on the floor writing lines
For songs that cold
Night smell coming in
The window I left about four went
Home.
Opened the fridge.
Closed it lay down got up.
Lay down.
Lay.
Turned.
Not morning yet.
I just want to talk to you.
Why does love happen?
So then I grew old and died and wrote this.
Be careful it's worldsharp.
I like what happens to the poem when he says "So then I grew old and died and wrote this."
I'm always curious about 'leaps' in time and how that translates to art—how and why and what it means when that happens. What I mean is something like, when an Emily Dickinson enters the world and begins to write poetry and that poetry or art seems to have reached a point far ahead of what maybe was happening in the world around it. That it took a little while for the rest of the world to 'catch up.’ These little hiccups that end up being magnets for others to be sort of pulled a little faster forward. This may be one of the extraordinarily rare things in art or anything. Is this something you have seen in anybody’s work you can think of? Or is it almost like the idea of a buddha, only appearing at times when the world really needs it, almost created by its own necessity?
Each maker is totally comprised of the time he or she was born in. The people in his or her life, the things he or she read, the conversations that were had, and so on. So in that sense the leap forward seems more realistic and grounded – you could, given enough information, map out how, say, Jane Austen or Sylvia Plath or Mary Shelley developed her vantage point and voice and idiosyncrasies. Viewed from afar, however, when time has worn away the contexts that contributed to each of their particularities, these voices appear to be anomalous, out of time.
There are so many quotable lines in this book. Every line feels thoughtful and perfectly polished and in place. “To be loveable isn’t to be good but to be consistently going for it.” I love this line because it has such huge arms that could carry a lot with it to someplace special — a place of freedom. So much of this book felt like overcoming forces — forces of self, advertisement, spiritual, etc., transformation of need and desire to acceptance, which is a form of freedom unto itself. Could you perhaps talk about the freedom and transformation you may or may not feel while working on your own craft and/or which you may feel investigating someone else’s artwork?
I was thinking about a lot of abstract nouns when I was writing these poems (shame, entitlement), but I didn't think about freedom. Considering freedom, here are some things I'm thinking of: Freedom from the self (from your flaws, your narrow way of thinking). The freedom you feel when writing and it's going well and you accidentally say what you wanted or surprised yourself in a nice way. Freedom from strict logic or symmetry. Freedom from convention – I mean being able to think beyond the boundaries of convention.
Last night we went to an exhibit of contemporary Japanese pottery. According to the exhibit notes, after WWII, Japanese artists felt disillusioned and distanced from traditional techniques after the war, and a particular groups of ceramicists formed a group dedicated to striking into new territory and exploring different techniques and approaches to making pottery. And walking through the exhibit, you can see how different artists forged different techniques (black sooty glazes, reworking ancient glazes, inserting stones into their clay, building bulbous floating shapes, making surfaces that look like rust or water or frozen ice), and then their students used the techniques and approaches of their mentors and applied them in different, personal ways to make them their own. A lot of the artists were influenced by their mentors, their peers, international artists, the national and ancient past. It seemed like they were working in the territory and tension of freedom/constraint, tradition/innovation, influence/invention, (national) shame/repentance/absolution. And then maybe in another, more important space not governed by binaries.
