An Interview with Elizabeth A. I. Powell [by Nin Andrews]

I met Elizabeth A. I. Powell years ago when we were both students in the MFA program at Vermont College. A young mother with three small children and another one in her future, she was studying fiction back then. I lost touch with her until years later when I saw she had won the 2015 Robert Dana-Anhinga prize for her fabulous collection, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully under Imaginary Circumstances. I thought, Wait. Is that the same Liz?  I was reminded of Nickole Brown, another Vermont college graduate, who studied fiction and who also became a prize-winning poet. 

NA: How/why did you transition from fiction to poetry? Can you say a few words about your evolution as a writer? 

EP: My evolution as a writer follows the trajectory of my evolution as a woman. I had to learn to listen to my own voice, not the voice and criticisms of others, and it took a long time deciphering what was valid criticism and what was someone holding forth opinions in the moment. I had to learn to trust myself.  I gave up on my first love, poetry, in my senior year when told it wasn’t very good at all by my classic nemesis---my stepmonster-- when I returned from the Bennington College July program. 

So, I changed to fiction. When we were in grad school I had a prof there say,” Oh no, not another damn women’s story!” It was a lyric essay, really, about childbirth. From then on I tried to turn every story into some other kind of form. Writing fiction in third person was too much like moving heavy furniture around a room.  There was no discussion of hybridity, especially at VC. Here’s the deal, I had to make it matter only for myself.  I was buying whatever anyone wanted to sell me. Then one day I realized the truth in the Dylan song, “Everything passes, everything changes, just do what you think you should do.”

NA: You are a master of the lyric essay as well. I love the poem (or is it an essay?), “Summer Undid Me: Guerlain Imperiale (Bedroom), 1853.” 

EP: Oh, Nin, thank you! It is a kind of detoxification from too much summer sun, reading books about Napoleon and Baudelaire, spritzing too much Guerlain, and a narcissist lover gaslighting me into another dimension! It is an argument about how we use our senses and how easily we can be fooled by history, marketing, artifice. Ultimately, it’s how can we tell the dancer from the dance. It’s creative inquiry, which belongs to essay and poetry and becoming. It is a kind of poetic journalism, which is to say, a sister to documentary poetics. 

NA: I am a fan of all your books, but I especially love Atomizer. I admire its humor, intensity, and lush sensuality. I'd love to hear you talk about the experience of writing this collection. Maybe say a few words about the difference between writing the personal and the persona poem? 

EP: I don’t think we can write something until we have really lived it and leaned into the question of it. When I’m stuck on a poem it is usually because I haven’t lived the needed experience to finish the poem. With a persona poem the same is true for the writer. One can try on masks, but ultimately one must have the empathy of understanding the narrative arc of the poetic problem. I love what method acting’s Sanford Meisner has to say (about taking on personas), that we must behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

I started “Atomizer”  with my concerns about the intersections of technology and biology, and capitalism’s influence on how we find love and attachment. I was heavily influenced by French philosopher Alain Badiou’s work, In Praise of Love, which depicts contemporary love as a mutual truth refinement, one that can’t be calculated through marketing and technology, but by saying YES at every turn. I, in turn, turned to my own five senses as a way to interpret romantic love (as well as agape love) and how it all plays out.  

NA: Who are your influences? And what are your guilty pleasures?  

EP: Always, Paul Celan. Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton. Sam Shepard, Don DeLillio, and Raymond Carver. Reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets  gave me a freedom back I didn’t know I’d lost. For the sounds of sense and the sounds of a rural life, Frost has meant a lot. Comedy and comedic timing, voice and satire has kept me good company, especially through Jewish humor. I learned so much from my mentor at UNH, Charlie Simic. But it all started sitting in my room as a seven year old listening to JFK’s famous speeches album on my little record player. Listening to Joni Mitchell has been important, speaking of records. My guilty pleasure is to engage with pleasure without guilt, and when that is not possible, to eat as much high quality chocolate as possible in my most comfortable pajamas. 

NA: What are you working on now?

EP:  I’m working on a manuscript of poems and lyric essays called, Into the Mistake, about reproductive trauma as an epigenetic and environmental conversation through time and texts; how our lives live in us and grow like rings in a tree. It also features growing up in NYC in the 80s and the idea that maybe mistakes are more mystical than we sometimes think. The book pretty much believes in process theology.

NA: Could we have a poem from the book? Maybe "The Ordinary Odor of Reality"? And some commentary along the lines of how the poem came about? 

This poem came about when I visited OVR (Olfactory Virtual Reality) in Burlington, VT where they are doing critical work on using olfactory technology to treat veterans and trauma survivors with PTSD. When I was there they had bottles and bottles of scents like: gas fire, baby powder, coolant, match strike, hot sand.

THE ORDINARY ODOR OF REALITY 

Is as strong as our bones
steeped in our bodies
like Red Rose Tea.
Outer space smells like rum,
so says spectral analysis, 
but all my trauma reeks of
baby powder and chlorine.
We breathe 86,400 times a day.
We ingest each other through 
our nostrils straight into 
our amygdala like 80s cocaine or salt
water over our heads. I have inhaled 
my worldview from the sterility 
of Brutalist architecture, schoolrooms 
I have sat in. I am having a smell dialogue 
with mold and wet earth and sand 
that resides in the woods and playground 
inside my memory. What are 
your odor threat cues? Coolant? Match 
strike? Summer day? All arranged
in form, a story? I put on 
the Olfactory Virtual Reality
Headset that looks like space goggles
with a scent-o-graph that changes 
with each virtual image, in order
to confront the Aqua Velva, polyester 
bedspread, peppermint schnapps, 
urine and semen and tobacco,
the capture and pillage 
of my seventh year. Now 
in warrior headdress I combat
the reality of the moment
that launched my career
in PTSD. Cyber psychological
treatment, imaginal exposure
therapy to locate the past
so, I can crash back through,
on a treadmill with my space goggles 
and therapist, and relive it
to master it, and take a shovel 
to rebury it in that wet earth, 
but without me. 

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently “Atomizer” (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a Small Press Bestseller and named a “Books We Love 2016” byThe New Yorker.  Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K.  Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Stand (UK), and American Poetry Review. Find her at www.elizabethaipowell.com

Comments

[Ursula Levin]

Thanks you for this wonderful interview and introduction to so gifted and smart a poet.