DD: In his introduction to the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present,David Lehman notes: “Writing a prose poem can therefore seem like accepting a dare to be unconventional. It is a form that invites the practitioner to reinvent it.” Using Lehman’s words as a jumping-off point, could you talk about your experience of writing such lovely, brilliant, challenging prose poetry over the years? Why is the prose poem your preferred medium?
NA: When I began writing, I wanted to write short stories. I wanted to be the next Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor. I wanted to tell the story of Miss August, even back then, of a transgender boy, growing up in the 1950s and 60s. The title scene of the book: a young girl and boy looking at a Playboy Magazine, flipping open the centerfold of Miss August—was already written in some version or another. In that scene, the girl cringes, just as I did when I was eight or nine years old, and announces, Whatever that is, whatever made that lady into Miss August—that is never, ever, ever happening to me. (I didn’t have too much to worry about, but Miss August gave me nightmares for years.) The boy, gazing at the same centerfold, said one day he’d be Miss August, adding, Just you wait and see.
But in my last of year of college, I took a creative writing class with David Lehman in which he taught us the wonders of the prose poem. We read poets like Gertrude Stein, Russell Edson, Henri Michaux, Julio Cortázar, Günter Eich, Tomas Tranströmer, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, Max Jacob, Octavio Paz, and so many others. I was smitten. My whole world changed. And I knew I would never be a fiction writer.
The prose poem was and is the form I have always felt most at ease with, the form in which I could wear jeans to the literary ball. No more pretenses, no more dressing up in outfits that didn’t fit me. I like to write in smaller units, stanzas or paragraphs, and I have always been enchanted by the magic and music and mystery of poetry. I also love humor and surrealism, as do many of the masters of prose poetry. And I love how prose poetry can mimic other forms and mock one’s expectations and assumptions. Even when lean towards fiction, as I did with Miss August, I want to write each page as a prose poem. I never want to give up that tightness that poetry offers, that jewel-like quality, even if I am writing a novel.
DD: In your latest book, Miss August, you draw on your childhood experiences growing up in the south, outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, an area to which you’ve recently moved back. What insights did you gain about yourself and your writing from the imaginative return you made in Miss August, and the actual return you made moving back in real life? What can the South of the 1950s and 1960s tell us about America today?
NA: When I wrote Miss August, I thought I was writing about the past. And that we, as a culture, were finally moving towards a less racist, less sexist and less oppressive future. I thought I was writing about a time and place mostly visible in the rear view mirror. My insight—I was living in a bubble.
I should have known, I suppose, what the character, Gil, points out in the beginning of the book—the past has not really passed.
After the events this summer in Charlottesville, none of what I have to say about that is new or surprising. And I am not a journalist or a historian or a political scientist so I don’t have much to say about the state of America today.
But I grew up in a time and place where people spoke out against integration. Their logic or justification, like the logic of the Southern Manifesto, was that people are happier mixing only with their own kind. I remember one man telling me how sorry he felt for Arthur Ashe. The poor fellow, he said, he has only white tennis players to play with.
People believed in dividing lines then.
DD: Miss August is startling and beautiful. It reads like a novella, in many respects. The finely crafted characters of Sarah Jane Lee, Gill Simmons, and May Dee have stayed with me quite vividly in the months since I first read this book. Can you talk a bit about creating, and living with, these remarkable characters?
NA: Thanks Dante. You are too nice!
Sarah Jane and Gil and May Dee lived easily in my mind for years, chattering on about this and that. They are based on people I loved as a child, on a woman and friends who had inside them a kind of music I associate with the South and with a southern accent and sensibility.
I don’t know what it is, but there is something about the South, something about its character and characters that casts a spell over me. I love the landscape, the warmth, the people, and the stories people tell. And how people talk and take their time talking . . .
Some days I think I could listen to people talk all day, especially if they have a good accent going. It’s the lilt, the twang, the slow dance in the telling. And the descriptions, the similes and metaphors, and the expressions like: You don’t want just a pig in a poke, or, Put a pinch of salt on his tail for me, won’t you?
Just the other day, I was eavesdropping, listening to a guy who was describing a pretty woman he disliked. His words: She’s got the legs of a filly and the soul of an old nag. And no, you can’t steal that.
DD: As you discuss in your writer’s note at the end of the book, it took you years to engage the legacies of racism and inequality that contextualized your childhood in the south. White middle class writers seem particularly hesitant to write about issues of race and class; nobody wants to be another Vachel Lindsay—that is, to be unintentionally, inexcusably, and naively racist. Obviously, you’ve avoided those pitfalls here, by creating a layered, unflinching, and delicately nuanced portrait of the Jim Crow South. What did writing Miss August teach you about your own history, about race and class in America, about writing race and class in America?
NA: Before writing Miss August, I thought a lot about the hesitance you are describing, about the silence of white middle-class Americans. And all of the reasons I shouldn’t write about these topics. And the potential pitfalls in any effort to write about race and class. There are many reasons to remain silent. After all, as you say, no one wants to be another Vachel Lindsay.
My father used to say that if you are a well-fed man in a room full of hungry people, you shouldn’t mention the nice meal you just ate. You should stay quiet.
A writing professor told me that I shouldn’t write about my racist ancestors or parents. He said it would be like the child of a Nazi writing about the Jews or World War Two.
A friend and poet once said that she thought of the white silence around these difficult topics as a curtain, a privacy screen, behind which one can safely undress. After all, who wants to be exposed?
It seems logical to avoid uncomfortable subjects even if that means disowning or denying one’s own part or place in history or society.
I simply felt that I wanted to talk about my formative years. But to write about my past, even in a fictional way, composing stories and prose poems based loosely on my childhood, was to write about race and gender and class. After all, I was raised by a black nanny who hated other African Americans, by a father who helped to start an all-white private school, by a father who was also a gay man and who was kicked out of the Navy for having an affair with an officer, by a mother was from Boston and not a typical woman and not a bit like Southern women, by farmhands who were illiterate and who were my playmates, by friends’ parents who called the Civil War –The War of Northern Aggression.
But my goal as a writer is not to explain, pontificate, or change what is or was, but simply to describe, to bear witness. I know that my particular vision and filter is tainted, colored not only by my class, race and gender, but also by my inevitable prejudices, fears, eccentricities, opinions, and blind spots. Nevertheless, it is liberating to write. Silence, for me, is suffocating.
DD: All of your work, but particularly your last three books, Why God Is a Woman, Our Lady of the Orgasm, and Miss August, speak powerfully to the misogyny that is pervasive in virtually all aspects of American life. You’ve spent your whole writing life, examining nuances of gender and sexuality. I wonder what your thoughts are for making the literary world more equitable and not just for women, especially in a country where Donald Trump is president?
NA: Gender roles have always seemed silly to me, as well as arbitrary. Maybe that’s why I’ve written so much about them.
After all, it was my father, not my mother, who played what would be considered a feminine role in my childhood. He took care of me when I was sick. And he helped pick out my dresses (he insisted they had to be short or long, no midis, as they were called back then) and lipstick (the redder the better), and he told me how to style my hair (like an upside down tulip). His own closet was filled with expensive Italian suits, silky soft shirts, and hats. My mother wore LL Bean boots, men’s socks and dirty brown skirts or jeans. She was dairy farmer and an activist. She was the one in the family who took up political causes.
But that doesn’t answer your question.
Really, I don’t know how to make an equitable world, literary or otherwise.
As to Donald Trump and this country . . . Do you think he’s an ugly reflection of what we don’t admit about ourselves. Some golem-like part of our national psyche that has been dwelling underground, wearing Bilbo’s ring and yet gaining power for years, waiting for his moment to emerge?
It still stuns me that white women voted for Trump. Clearly, misogyny and sexism are not limited to the male gender. Women of color, on the other hand, did not vote for him. Women of color consistently vote in favor of women’s rights and health. Women of color might be our best hope for the future.
DD: I’d like to end with a poem from Miss August. Could you introduce one of your favorites?
NA: I’ll choose this one which isn’t really a favorite, but I think it might help to introduce the book. In it Sarah Jane is speaking as an adult about her friend, Gil:
The Story of Gil Simmons
Sarah Jane
People still talk about Gil Simmons. They say, That boy was one strange bird. They say, He wasn’t right in the head. They say, His daddy ought to have taught him a thing or two. These are Lessington, Virginia folks, mind you. When I was a girl, they shot deer frozen in their headlights and stray dogs that howled at the moon. They flew Confederate flags in their front yards. They spoke to God and ghosts and called black folks niggers. And they closed the public schools. Don’t let the coloreds in our classrooms, they said. Restrooms neither. But Gil, they thought, was the strange one. Stranger than a faggot, they said. Still do. I smile, light up a cigarette, and say, Define normal, if you will.
Nin Andrews is the recipient of the 2016 Ohioana Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is Miss August (CavanKerry Press, 2017).
Dante Di Stefano is the co-editor, with María Isabel Alvarez, of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018)
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