Conversations: Carolyne Wright and Judith Baumel
Carolyne Wright is a Seattle native who has lived and taught all over the United States and on fellowships in Chile, Brazil, India and Bangladesh. She has eighteen books and anthologies of poetry, essays, and translation, her latest books being Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne has received NEA and 4Culture grants, and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award received in early 2020 and delayed by Covid took her back to Bahia in June and July 2022, with another two months upcoming in 2023.
Judith Baumel is Professor Emerita of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. Her books are The Weight of Numbers (Wesleyan, 1988), for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; Now (Miami University Poetry Press, 1996); The Kangaroo Girl (GenPop Books, 2011); Passeggiate (Arrowsmith, 2019) and Thorny (Arrowsmith, 2022). She has served as President of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, as director of The Poetry Society of America, and as a Fulbright Scholar in Italy.
Judith Baumel: I want to ask you about landscape and place because that is central to the way you’ve constructed the chapters of Masquerade, a memoir-in-verse, in which you’ve written about so many kinds of “home.” For example, there’s the temporary and hugely fertile home of an arts colony, there are rental homes in down and out neighborhoods surrounded by down and out neighbors. Maybe they are not down and out but merely colorful neighbors. Above all, I’m struck by the betrayal of what happens regarding a home purchase. Your money—half your savings—goes to the down payment on a place in which your lover installs another woman while you are working out of town. This takes place in New Orleans, your chosen city, which you contrast with your hometown of Seattle. In between are places you are calling “The Stop-Gap Motor Inn” which seem to me to be perfect symbols of American rootlessness.
Carolyne Wright: There was indeed a lot of moving around during the years this story takes place: from Cape Cod (“Cape Indigo”) to a month-long residency in southern California (in time for “Fire Season”!) and to visit family in Seattle; to northern New York state (for one of those one-semester visiting teaching jobs, but I was glad to have it); to New Orleans and through Phoenix to Seattle again, all via Greyhound bus!; back to New Orleans for the first long stay there (our “blue period”); then a small college town in Missouri (another teaching job), a move for a job which threw into high relief the contingent,” Stop-Gap Motor Inn” nature of life at the time; back to New Orleans, again via bus, a terrible bus accident and the other “Head On” of the first shocks of betrayal; then to New York City (for a wonderful NEH Summer Seminar at NYU with the great M. L. Rosenthal, a professionally serene and validating experience but under-laid with anguish about the relationship and the betrayals underway in NOLA while I was in NYC); New Orleans again for the ultimate showdowns of this relationship, and the hard decision-making on my part, certainly—and likely on his part as well, though he didn’t share many of his thoughts by then . . . really he didn’t share much throughout those years); and then to the broad affective landscapes of “Reflections in Blue,” the final section, with moments of re-encounter in an unnamed mountain town, and a final imagined reconciliation on the heights of an interior Machu Picchu!
This previous paragraph, I realize, creates a film-like montage—a blur of sensation and occasion, perhaps, for those who weren’t there. But I don’t want to create a “You had to have been there” sort of exclusionary scenario. The scenes are all so vivid still, and writing these poems and organizing them into sections, as determined by the locations and the movements between locations, helped to inscribe a sort of aide memoire for me to sustain the vividness of scene and of emotion connected to each scene. The towns and cities where the poems take place lend their landmarks and features to the dramas occurring between the speakers and the various characters—on “Cape Indigo,” in the Crescent City (aka the “Big Uneasy”), and all the locations in between—characters who can seem like actors on location, various locations, in a film.
I noted this sentence from the blurb by Jehanne Dubrow (a poet I much admire but whom I have not yet met), that your “Thorny is a book filled with leisurely, sensorial strolls—passeggiate—through European and American landscapes, through the ruined geographies of the Shoah, and through the more private terrains of family history.” Though I have not yet had the pleasure of visiting Italy, I have spent much time in lands with closely related languages (Spanish, Portuguese), so I appreciate the cultural pleasures of such strolls: contemplative, reflective, taking time to absorb, internalize, interact with and respond to the cultural surround. I want to ask you about several things, but let’s start with the passeggiate of the aptly named first section of the book, where the speakers of these poems move through Mediterranean landscapes of classical allusion (Aphrodite of Phidias) overlaid upon the terrain of the Lenape of the Bronx River, the catacombs of Siracusa and the turtle’s back of the indigenous New World, to pick just a few examples. Also the only reference that I have noticed, in these poems filled with gardens both classical and Biblical, to the book’s title: “the thorny labor of marriage and its rare yield.”
So I wanted to ask you about the conceptualization and development of this first section of the book, and also about your choice of the title. (We both went for one-word titles. )
JB: The happy marriage I’ve built with my second husband—23 years—has taught me that marriage is labor and often that labor is thorny. There are softer love poems to him in the book but this one starts from that sarcophagus in the catacombs of Syracuse which portrays a married couple who are together and not together. The Bible scenes which surround them serve as commentary on the conditions of marriage. The poem is a kind of prayer and it’s in my own voice.
Most of the poems in Passeggiate, however, are spoken by characters who come from classical pastoral poetry and straddle the old world and the new. It seems a good way to address the inheritance that we don’t always notice but that influences us nevertheless.
This strategy came to me during a visit to Sicily where so many people talk about places where such-and-such a myth happened as if it were family history only a generation or two removed. For example, in Syracuse the Fountain of Arethusa is understood to be the spot where she emerged after escaping Alpheus. It also is the spot where Admiral Nelson watered his ships before the battle of the Nile and they talk about that too. The lake of Pergusa is supposed to be where Hades captured Persephone. A modern autodrome circles the lake and along it one can see historical markers pointing to the marshes where the crime was committed. By the way, Book V of the Aeneid provides a still current guide book; as Aeneas rounds the island also known as Trinacria we can often see what Virgil saw. Most impressive for me in that regard was the town of Erice above the North West corner of the island.
A few other forces were at play in my formal decision. The Greek poet Theocritus, “inventor” of the pastoral poem, the idyll, was born and lived in Syracuse. His work and Virgil’s eclogues have in common the conversational form. They are discussions, sometimes debates, between two types—for example, the country person and the city person, the free citizen and the slave. These poems are at once philosophical essays and psychological portraits. I transposed certain ancient characters into my contemporary life. One of these “translations” happens in “After the Battle of Long Island, the Battle of Pell’s Point.” In it, my brother and I are talking a few days after the Twin Towers came down. I’m Meliboeus and he is Tityrus from Virgil’s first eclogue in which the characters mention land confiscations after the Battle of Philippi. I’m using real places my brother and I were located during the confusion of 9/11 when we couldn’t reach each other because the phone system was down. These also happen to be sites of American Revolutionary war battles.
In “On the Deaths of Boys” I have the three fates Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos and their mother Nyx debate the implications of an actual story of the drowning of four Bronx boys in 2009. Here I’m also arguing with Milton, whose “Lycidas” (named for a character from Theocritus and Virgil) lamented the drowning of a young man.
One last thing. I was born in the Bronx, grew up in the Bronx and still live here. I know its landscape and history very well. Though I know Sicily less well, I do know it was a center of a great period of multiculturalism. From roughly the 9th to the 11th century Arab, Christian and Jewish artists, writers and thinkers collaborated. Each culture still calls it their “Golden Age.” When I was in Sicily it felt like the Bronx. I grew up with many Sicilian immigrants who had brought their culture and language to my childhood. My poem “Class Roster as Sicilian Atlas Index, PS 97, Mace Avenue, The Bronx, 1964 (A Reverse Ovidian Meditation)” is only a slight exaggeration of how surprised I was to find so many names of my childhood classmates were place names in Sicily. “Passeggiata and Memory in Palermo” is a more serious examination of the similarities between 20th century New York and Palermo and the disruptions of immigration.
CW: Thanks for your passeggiata of a reply to my thoughts and questions about “Passeggiate“!
One thing I meant to mention was that I loved how the opening poem is called a “Binding Spell With Iynx, Rhombus and Common Pantry Items” a fusion of invocation to the Muse of classical poetry and an incantation, creating the effect of cultural palimpsest that I perceive throughout this section, even when I’m not sure of all the allusions. You are truly a person deeply rooted to a place (the Bronx) and with roots as well in Sicily, and it’s amazing to have the ability to see the layers of historical event, the individuals involved, as if the events had occurred recently as you say.
I had a somewhat analogous experience in the Lake Country years ago, where I could truly see the places that Wordsworth described—or, more accurately, quite often it was Dorothy whose journal descriptions he “borrowed” and rendered into poetry! Seeing those landscapes helped me see more deeply into the poems. But though I have read the Aeneid, for example, I have not visited the places where this epic takes place, so the fact that this poem could still serve as a guide book is an exhilarating notion! And I appreciated the key to a few of the poems—who is speaking in the voice of whom in the dialogue of “After the Battle of Long Island, the Battle of Pell’s Point,” and the overlay of the Twin Towers attacks on these earlier battles.
JB: I’d like to ask about the performative aspects of this relationship, beyond or maybe in the inverse of the fact that an interracial couple can’t be their true selves in public in America (“racist” seems a redundant adjective) which remains racist 40-plus years after the events of the story. Sometimes the only way to understand what we have gone through is to stylize our gestures. I think that is what you do when you show us the masquerade that the lover performs in private with your speaker. In short, he wears masks in this most intimate of relations. Among them, the name he goes by is not the name his family gave him at birth. In itself, that is not problematic. But wait, there is more: He has a daughter whose existence the speaker discovers by accident. From the very start of the relationship, he has other lovers about whom he dissembles or outright lies. He is not straightforward about the money for a down payment on a house. Meanwhile, what the speaker does not know, what is unknown in the privacy of their relationship is widely known and shared by the outside public. Friends and anonymous notes tell the speaker what she doesn’t know. Or, and here is another question of masking and performance, is it what she knows but doesn’t want to acknowledge?
CW: Thanks for your very hard-hitting comments and questions, and here is my lengthy reply! I spent much of the day at a house-and-museum, the House of Rio Vermelho, where the writer Jorge Amado and his wife lived for over 40 years. He is as large a literary figure, in Bahia especially, as Hemingway or Faulkner in the U.S; or in Chile, Pablo Neruda. Then I came back and wrote this!
Whew, these observations of yours hit hard, as did the progressive discoveries of betrayal at the time. What is the term of art for this in prose memoir? Rate of revelation! Revelations which, when spelled out here in a few sentences, add up to What Were You Thinking, Carolyne? Well, I asked myself that, many times, back then. Of course, when the group of under-40 artists and writers arrived for seven months’ residency on “Cape Indigo,” some were married or had stable partnerships, but most of us were single, with the shifting, short-term, provisional relationships that we singles went through until we found someone we could really live and work with. So it was not quite fair to expect a blank slate of a recent past from each other. . . until the man in question begins to express the urgency to be in a relationship with the speaker, which becomes a very compelling hold on her. He is determined to have her, and his mix of pressure and desperation is hard to resist. But she has the right to ask for the same exclusivity that he seems to insinuate that he wants from her! As a woman acutely aware of the dynamics of misogyny, overt and subtle, this speaker has always stood for fairness and equality, the same respect from others that she tries to accord to others—especially from a man whose whole life, at least until he entered literary circles, seemed to have been an experience of injustice! At least that is how he told it.
But he always wanted, even needed, to be the exception to the rules that apply to everyone else. So in those poetic circles, even back then when we were “all just starting out, all of us / too young for blame,” fellow poets (most of them white) were in awe of him, they fell all over themselves to accord him every deference. And with his cultivated air of mystery, cryptic and even oracular pronouncements, he took full advantage of that awe—he was good at subtly manipulating the guilt of well-meaning whites who had had comparative advantages. As I said before, this air of mystery, this masking of most of his thoughts and actions, may have started as a survival skill; but has it morphed into a mechanism not just for “getting over,” but for prevailing and predominating?
How much of the masking on his part is what she wonders about, when she meets many of his family members gathered before Christmas: “the shame of self-revelation” in front of white people? Including the concealing of his real name, his daughter’s existence, and also, probably, his real age! How much of the masking derives from shame, insecurity (as white people call it!); and how much is arrogance, the sense that he can get away with this, in part because white people don’t really understand him, and that redounds to his advantage?
About his juggling of multiple women—did I mention that as far as I know, they all were white?—and his masking of this behavior to the speaker. One of the other women who makes a cameo appearance in the narrative later said something to the effect that playing women off against each other seemed to give him energy—he could sit back and watch them go at each other, and then write about the agonizing struggles of women, their weakness for men, with a sort of bemused, detached show (masquerade?) of compassion.
Ultimately, the speaker leaves this man because she cannot live with such masking in what is supposed to be an intimate and trusting partnership—there is little trust and little partnership. She needs to drop her own masking—which would have involved the unleashing of a lot of (hopefully) controlled fury and verbalizing of the complex, nuanced problems. In other words, attempts at real conversation… which he always sidestepped—but she needs to go on with her life.
Writing all this, delving into the convoluted nuances of motivation, helps to confirm for me the reasons I wrote this in poetry, a series of lyric-narrative sequences. Focusing on form was a prosodic challenge that helped deflect from the raw emotion—the agonized prose narratives and overwrought analyses that filled my journal pages over those years. I gave myself both the formal poet’s and the playwright’s job: put the characters onstage and let them reveal themselves through dialogue, gesture and action, and the ironies that show the discrepancies between proclaimed values and actual motivation. Let the speaker’s emotions, her judgments, be for the most part implicit. Also, as I have written elsewhere, “Because both protagonists—the speaker / narrator and the man with whom she shared this complex and nuanced experience—are still living and still active, I wanted to preserve a certain dignity of privacy, to stick with the dramatic essence and not let the story bog down in guessing games about, for example, Who He Is. I have great respect for Who He Is, and as is clear, the memories here are both fond and fraught; but the story here is about two people as they were back then.”
JB: I note that your pseudonym for the “other woman,” she of the shabby blue night dress in New Orleans, is Sibyl. Lots of suggestions in that name. Your speaker and your Sibyl have a bit in common with the speaker of the first poem in Thorny. In “Binding Spell With Iynx, Rhombus and Common Pantry Items,” Simaetha is a character directly out of Theocritus. An ordinary woman, betrayed by her lover, is attempting a homegrown version of the binding spell of Hecate. We are meant to laugh at her I think, but not too much. I prefer to read her with a contemporary feminist lens of empowerment. Her curses become more and more graphic and destructive. I’m glad you see the poem as a take on the invocation to the muses. My intention is to ask for the poetic strength to tackle my topics.
I want to ask you to talk about the way jazz appears in your book. I will leave this large question open-ended after suggesting that jazz functions at least three ways in Masquerade: historical fact—what was playing on the turntable, in the club, etc; as counterpoint text with all the irony and deepening thereby pertaining; and as a formal structure for the movement of individual poems and the entire book. Any of this feel right to you? Would you add any other ways? How?
CW: First let me say that I am no expert on jazz—I simply have listened to a lot of it, and attended a fair number of jazz concerts and club appearances.
I wasn’t trying for a specifically jazz-like structure to the poems, although there are a lot of thematic through-lines, and variations on these, analogous to the theme-and-variations developed in jazz compositions. But much of the language strives for an openness and freedom of turn of phrase, a poetic analogue to the improvisational aspect of jazz, even in the formal poems (particularly hendecasyllabics, rounds and triolets) where the improvisational energy is directed and channeled by the constraints of the form.
One poem in particular, “Round: What Love Is,” follows the contours of a number from the Great American Songbook—that loosely defined collection of popular songs, jazz standards, and show tunes that became jazz standards—it is based on the show tune turned jazz standard, “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” Dinah Washington’s definitive recording was in my mind, as the version I have most heard, but I did not attempt to study the song as I wrote this poem.
I wanted to ask you about the second section of Thorny, which crosses the Atlantic from Europe to America and the Bronx as it travels “through the ruined geographies of the Shoah,” as Jehanne Dubrow phrases it. The first poem—proem!—in this section is heartrending, and though it must have been written before this past February, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has brought the world much closer, and in color, to the horrors of the 1930s and WWII recorded in black-and-white in the photo described in this poem. Yet though the overexposed German propaganda photo renders the crowd of Jewish people soon to meet their deaths as “faceless,” the speaker of the poem affirms their humanity: “each / one was a library of infinity.” And then we meet vividly rendered “The American Cousins A – Z” in all their yearnings and vanities, seemingly far from those “ruined geographies.” But the section concludes with a gesture back to the recently arrived—immigrants or refugees from those Old World horrors—the lucky ones who make their way to “this land of pizza.” There is the cautionary note, though, to these recent arrivals: “staying where we landed close / to dust brought us to bitter dust.”
Could you talk about your conception and structuring of this section?
JB: In the middle section of Thorny, I’ve tried something new for me. I see it as an experimental, free form, almost musical structure of Jewish women’s voices in the US, post war. When you say you are not an expert on jazz, I really mean it when I say I know very little about music—history, categories, theory. I’m one of those “just know what I like” types. The songs I heard growing up are studded through “The American Cousins.” Union songs—“Joe Hill,” “Solidarity Forever.” A Yiddish lullaby (“Oyfn pripetshik” “By The Fireplace”), Yiddish swing. My grandmother lived with us my whole life and she listened to WEVD, which was largely a Yiddish, socialist radio station named after Eugene V. Debs. She read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s racy short stories as they were published in the Yiddish language Forverts daily newspaper. I use an out-of-date metaphor when I think about “The American Cousins.” I imagine I am channeling the sounds and voices I hear as I turn the radio dial.
I have a lot to say about Ukraine. The town my father was born in was Polish and is now in Ukraine. I’ve been there three times to do historical research and literary activities. I’ve translated Ukrainian poetry, I have a lot of friends who are writers and professors and journalists in Kyiv and Lviv and I’m in close contact now with them. It’s going to be a long and devastating war. Most Americans forget that Russia and Ukraine had been at war for eight years before Russia’s current brutal, terroristic escalation.
I visited the monument to Babi Yar a decade ago. It’s not very good artistically. But it’s haunting. There are many such spots in Ukraine where the ghosts of those who were murdered feel very present and terribly disturbed. One reason, I suppose, is the inhumanity of dumping people dead and also alive into mass graves. The Nazis did that and now the Russians are doing it. I’m trying to pluck out some of the stories from the mass grave at Zasulye Yar. Or maybe I’m extending, by way of Borges, the often quoted line from Talmud that “one who saves a life is considered to have saved the whole world.” We’ve lost an infinitely large library of personal stories.
