Arielle Greenberg: How to Buy a Bus Ticket, an Interpretive Dance

On a rainy Sunday afternoon in June, poet Arielle Greenberg and I sat on the porch of the H.B. Plant Museum in Tampa and had a long conversation about feminism, family, sex, writing, and what happens when all of them dovetail.

And I’m not going to tell you a single word we said, because the front porch of Plant Hall is like Vegas, and what happens there stays there.

I will tell you, however, that I wanted to know more, so we got together the following week and talked about collaboration in writing and the role ego plays in an artist’s life.

So, you recently moved from Chicago to an itty-bitty town in Maine. What gives?

I had a great job in Chicago teaching at Columbia! I had some wacky, arsty students which is always fantastic. It was a really vibrant poetry program, but my husband and I both worked full time with two little kids and it became unsustainable in terms of the kind of family life we wanted.

Food politics was part of the decision, too. It was important to us to buy local, good quality, organic and that wasn’t really possible in a big city. We couldn’t grow our own food. And how are you supposed to compost in a condo? So it was a lot about the values, the way we wanted to live as a family.

Why do you think so many people are unnerved by poetry?

I think poetry feels out of step with the ways in which we are used to language being used. We also use language for daily, mundane, utilitarian purposes. Using language towards fine-art ends is kind of disturbing and bizarre. We don’t do a modern interpretive dance to buy a bus ticket. We don’t paint bread to ask someone to pass the bread, we don’t sing an aria to argue with our partner. We could, and I bet it’d be a lot more interesting.

We don’t use the other fine arts mediums to go about our daily lives, but we do use language, so we have all these ideas about how language should be used, so when we see it used in a poem, we feel uncomfortable.

I heard someone once say that poetry is solitude. True or false?

False. I feel like there’s nothing to write poems about unless you live in the world, and I guess Emily Dickinson could argue with me. It’s difficult to write poems without being out there with other beings having ideas, caring about issues. All of those things make for interesting literature.

How do you collaborate as a poet?

I’ve edited an umber of anthologies, and they’re all collaborations. It’s hard to imagine taking on an anthology on my own. I’ve done collaborative creative projects less often, which is mostly a function of logistics, because everyone is so busy.

When I was at the MacDowell Colony, I collaborated with a composer and wrote a short poem to the music that he’d written. I love to collaborate. If I ever meet an artist who is willing to collaborate, I jump for it. Everything I do in my life is about trying to have authentic and meaningful connections with other beings. That is absolutely true for my art.

Maile Chapman and I did a collaboration in graduate school [at Syracuse University], a performance piece called “Performing Loss” about a Victorian-era woman who goes to visit a medium to talk to her dead daughter. Your employment options as a woman at the time were teacher, factory worker, sex worker, or medium. And if you wanted to work on your own terms, medium was the only job.

Spiritualism was kind of a precursor to feminism, because “women’s intuition” is what allowed them to act as mediums. The mother who comes to see the medium, she doesn’t know that her daughter died at birth because her husband got syphilis from a sex worker. A lot of babies died or were compromised because of venereal diseases that men brought home. And of course no one talked about it at the time.

And what was that collaboration like for you?

It was gothic, fun, scary, spooky! I wrote these lyric bookends for the more traditional play that Maile wrote. We read all the same texts and wrote our pieces without showing them to each other. It turns out that we had these crazy weird supernatural connections in our work. It was so much fun, and we both had a really good time. We had similar tastes and aesthetics.

I also have a book, Home/Birth that I wrote with my friend Rachel Zucker, it was our first creative collaboration We sent a manuscript back and forth and literally wrote between each others lines.

What role does ego play in your work, and how does it effect your collaborative process?

I’d say my work is pretty ego driven in the sense that I mostly write in first person and my work is post-confessional. I’m interested in my own life and own experiences, which is kind of ego driven. I’m so glad to challenge my ego and my sense of authorship in a collaboration, I really like that.

I think it’s a gendered choice or taste, being really interested in losing a sense of who is speaking and having a voice that feels collective. In Home/Birth, Rachel and I couldn't remember by the end who wrote what, who said what, and we really delighted in that. We thought it was a really feminist way to go about that project.

I’m so glad to give over what I do for the sake of a collaboration. It’s a pleasure to take myself away from my normal habits and voices and see what else could happen.

Your poem “Honey” is about being pregnant and eating cheesy goldfish crackers. Defend yourself, madam. Can anything be a poem?

Hah! That poem is about a lot of other things too.

No, I don’t think anything can be a poem. That one has a lot of craft, and I was thinking carefully about form. It was a dream poem, a prayer poem. The idea that anything can be a poem takes away how much work it is to think in a poetic space. I like poems that feel spontaneous, casual, and easy. I like reading them, writing them, but it’s not to say that there’s anything easy about a poem.

There’s a lot of boring language use out there, cliched, heavy-handed words. I’m not even thinking of the world of poetry but of media, conversation, everywhere that language is used, and none of that is poetry.

So what next, hot stuff?

I’m putting together this series of pornographic pastorals, which are about the idea of what it means to be wholesome or dirty. They’re poems about how being married and a mother doesn’t mean that you stop thinking about things that married mothers aren’t supposed to think about.

I have a solid reputation as a writer and a teacher, but there’s also this the image of me as someone who dropped out to move to the country, which brings a whole other set of connotations. And while pastoral poems are idyllic, one of the uses of the pastoral poem was basically to seduce milkmaids. I’m thinking about gender there too because I’m not speaking from the masculine roles. I’m trying to write poems that scare me to put out in the world. That’s my goal. I’ve written not quite enough of them to make a book, I’ll have to see how brave I feel to get them out in the world.

I’ve started publishing a few of the individual poems in journals, and that itself is scary. I’ve read them at readings and people want to know when the book is coming out, and they say, “Surely you’ll find a publisher for that, it’s hot, it’s provocative, it’s got a gimmick,” but my intention is that it be anything but a gimmicky project.

I’m trying to write about the deepest, scariest stuff for me, and to honor that in a project. I want to find a publisher who understands my aim, which is to not just be a provocateur, but to get at some deep stuff. Gender, sexuality, non-monogamy, kink, erotic power exchange, mothering, love, libido, ecological concerns, political principles.

So light topics, huh?

Oh yeah, real light!

Is there a way to read any of these before you get the book together?

Interim has a new issue on feminism and sex, and a number of mine are in there. Black Clock out of CalArts has a new erotica issue, and I have poems from this series in there as well.