Poetic Conversations: Velvet and Lace ~ A Conversation between Rae Gouirand and Margot Douaihy
Two queer poets who go way back talk about how textiles commanded their most recent projects in verse — Rae’s new book-length poem The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press, 2024) and Margot’s illustrated poetry collection Scranton Lace (Clemson University Press, 2020).
Margot Douaihy: Rawr. I want to impale myself on this book. It’s delicious. “Velvet pants open-mouthed, pained / and paining. / You feel it coming in headlong. / Its gleam bloom. / Are consumed. Finger velvet’s message — ” This collection is rapturous, intimate, and ravenous. Linguistically alive and alert. To what extent does the book engage with or complicate representations of “eroticism” in poetry and the expected attendant concerns of the erotic? “I fell for women because I could read / and the more I read the less I hurried.” How might the book contribute to a reimagining of the queer femme erotic within evolving literary and cultural contexts?
Rae Gouirand: Thank you for being one of its readers, Margot. It means heaps to me that it resonates with you on that level. The Velvet Book follows up on a number of the concerns I started circling in my second collection, Glass is Glass Water is Water, which had at its heart a particular interest in separating queer intimacies (and in particular queer femme intimacies) from the business of metaphor. The biggest leap forward the speaker of The Velvet Book makes away from those poems is away from the ‘plot’ of eros (the kinds of intimate and erotic narratives that texture submerged queer realities) and into (instead) some of its more (dare I call them philosophical?) problems — what is so thrilling, for example, about one’s inner life or imagination, especially in the context of intimacy; what to do, as a queer girl with a partner, with the vacillations of one’s understanding of things like autonomy and beauty and equality; what it means to make any relational promise slash commitment to anyone, especially in the wake of the Obergefell decision. It comes at the same tensions I’ve always lived inside, but from different angles.
MD: There is so much to plumb about intertextuality and slippage, both syntactically and thematically, as you navigate the fluid boundaries between desire, identity, place, and language (and its limits, sigh). There is a slow-burning, incantatory quality on every page, a great gathering of strength, a sustained storm. These are not questions at all. Or maybe they are preludes to questions I don’t know how to ask. Okay, here’s a question: What was the first spark of this book? Is there an origin story of this work, or a first recollected moment of consciously writing these verses? In a similar spirit of reflection, how did you determine the book’s final act?
RG: I started writing The Velvet Book to say goodbye to Lucie Brock-Broido, one of the poets whose voice brought me into poetry — I originally believed it was a long poem sparked by the many remembrances of her velvet salon in Cambridge that were shared on social media after her death in spring 2018, but the poem quickly absorbed and refracted back to me much more than elegy, and within a few weeks of starting to write it I found myself looking at it in terror, understanding I had accidentally begun writing not a long poem but a much longer one. At the time Lucie died I was in the process of closing on a fixer-upper in a new town with my then-partner (now wife), who lived some distance from me and to whom I was privately engaged following a rather sudden, simultaneous shift in feeling that each of us experienced in our respective attitudes towards marriage during a month we spent apart earlier that year. My bandwidth was completely full, and when I read the news that Lucie had died, I simply couldn’t believe she was dead — which by itself was telling to me. I’m never surprised enough to say that I can’t believe something. Her voice and its incomparable range felt to me like the earth itself in some ways. When poets grieve collectively it’s like nothing else, and witnessing so many outpourings after her death set off my response. I looked at velvet and it looked back at me harder than almost anything ever had, and we were off. When the original draft was finally done about two years later, it was over 400 pages. I spent the first year of the pandemic cutting it back into pieces, arranging and rearranging them on the walls and floor of my living room/dining room while my wife worked her job in the other half of our house. I knew when I set out to revise the poem — which was the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted as a poet — that I didn’t want it to build towards a wedding scene, though it contains some glimmers that in some ways add up to one. Through trial and error I simply kept constellating the parts of the whole until they helped me understand that where the poem wanted to land was somewhere in the vicinity of where the speaker ultimately finds her own sense of eternity.
MD: Is velvet a place? Q: Did you in fact slip out “of the Rust Belt” or does some element of you remain in Pittsburgh? Or read the story of Pittsburgh in a new way? Q: Is rust the opposite of velvet? A remedy? Q: Have you rolled around on these pages as if they were velvet? Q: Are you velvet now?
RG: Oh, Margot. It’s possible rust and velvet are opposites in some ways, but if one of the big questions that the speaker of this poem is working through is whether it’s actually possible for anyone queer (who is me?) to marry, I might suggest that they could be something closer to confidantes. Or mutual mentors. Maybe they read each others’ books from positions of deep receptivity.
As it turns out, Lucie and I both grew up in Pittsburgh— but if I’m aiming for complete honesty I’m not sure I’d say that I entirely lived there when I lived there. I learned early on that the best place to stash myself was inside my head most of the time —especially inside of reading and intensive musical study. If in The Velvet Book velvet is a continually unfolding wavelength — almost something like a kind of receptivity that the speaker is leaning into — then maybe that is a place. Not a city, but a place. The speaker talks a bit in the poem about seats. Maybe it is a seat inside of one’s vast experience and even vaster questions about what is possible. Maybe I have always been it, but it wasn’t until I created this container called a ‘long poem,’ that I recognized this station where it might be possible to linger.
MD: The Velvet Book is a love letter to velvet and the couplet form itself. Like velvet, your couplets add units of structural meaning, lyric impulses, temporality, subtextual treasures, parallel playgrounds for subversive enjambment, risk, and beats for suspenseful, lush pacing. Have you always loved couplets? Did this sensual book insist on a similarly sensual form?
RG: I have always loved couplets, yes. The couplets of The Velvet Book are variant in their lengths but consistent in their behavior: the first line approaches the second in length while the second reaches further towards the right margin. This felt to me like an organic match for the visual effects of velvet: there is a first color (or depth of color) and then there is a second, and just beyond it often an almost prismatic effect that’s the result of the way that velvet’s pile rises from the surface of the fabric. That ‘just beyond’-ness is the thing that held me to velvet, and to the couplet, and to the long poem here. Couplets to me are about the relationship between the lines — the pairing pressurizes our attention on their chemistry and their combination. They’ve always made deep sense to me, so much so that unless I find myself writing a prose poem, nearly all of my poems come out in couplets.
MD: Do you have a favorite moment, turn, couplet, or white space in the book? Why?
RG: I chuckle every time I reread a few moments in the poem where the speaker is reading-slash-quoting (with citations) the single history of velvet that’s been published in English, like it’s some kind of holy book she’s turning to. What a dork. And: there’s a lot of color language throughout the poem, but there’s this one part towards the end where the speaker goes on kind of a tear trying to name a particular shade she’s chasing — it keeps shifting and dodging her ability to name it. The speaker ends up eliminating a hundred names instead of coming up with the right one, and then the whole issue shifts away from colornames and lands in “Not tonality but // center. Not center / but bottom. But wellshaft, // but voice. / Shooting up. // I long to go / having destroyed the white granule, // an antler / commanding a tine split. // Velvet over bone, over thought. / Velvet conducting fog, conducting texture. // Fine rain touches, changes / my temperature. The velvet book unwrites // the touching. I am inside.” Slippage and displacement as emotional logic.
MD: “We all need some edge/ with our tenderness.” Considering the exploration of dialectics and simultaneity in the collection, how do you negotiate tension — between the we and I, between edge and center, between empowerment and raw vulnerability? Are there particular methods you used to (re)calibrate tension within the flow of these verses?
RG: What I understand as a language artist is that I had to create a way of speaking, and a container into which that speech could be pointed, in order to sound out slash feel out something that to me felt like a much bigger unknown than I could solve with logical thinking. And I needed to sound it out both as a poet and as a person. Both parts needed me to find a speaker who could bear the weight of my own questions in a dramatized fashion, who could hold and be the questions, and who could then be the understandings arriving in a more sustained, gradated way. That speaker is someone who is sounding out her difficulties with language and logic as much as she is getting to the bottom of what commitment means for her, when she is exquisitely aware of the spectrum of exceptions, variations, half-tones, inflections, shadows, inheritances, and ghosts that swim through any word she could possibly commit. This work has the wildest lexical reach of any of my published titles so far, and is the first of my published works in verse that absolutely came through my felt body rather than through the stillpoint in the center of my head. At least in terms of the voice. In order to negotiate all the wildly competing sensitivities, I had to find a voice that could tip back and forth onto either edge of the blade that’s cutting through it all.
MD: In an increasingly digital, horizontal, avatary, hologrammy, disseminated, ephemeral world, why fabric?
RG: I have my own deeply emotional relationships to some fabrics, and to certain textile items that have been with me for different moments of my life. Not just because of my sex and gender and particular conditioning around wardrobe, but also because I’m located close to the bone as a person — introverted, sensitive. I feel my clothes, my notebooks, my ink.
A good friend of mine whose family lost multiple family homes in the Camp Fire that decimated Paradise, California in 2018 told me recently that of all of the material objects from her youth that she lost to that fire, it was only the textile items that she truly couldn’t get over. I really understand this. I think while it would be devastating to lose, say, a work of art or a family heirloom or something of high monetary value, I imagine it’d be much more painful to have to let go of what comes back to us through the skin when we put on a familiar corduroy coat, or nestle under a cotton quilt we’ve slept beneath for decades. We live with these things almost the way we live with pets — we choose them for how they align and fit with our subconscious aspects. The way the first line of a couplet chooses its second, one could say. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep I find myself thinking about individual pairs of jeans, or jackets, or scarves I don’t have anymore — things that have gotten given away, donated, or lost over time, or that have simply become their own ruin through use. Perhaps garments become ghosts too. The velvet of The Velvet Book imagines slash hallucinates how the inside of forever might feel.
RG: Can you tell me how (or why) envisioning, imagining, dramatizing the manufacture of lace came to occupy you so deeply? Was it primarily the situation of the old lace factory in your hometown, or were there other particular aspects of lace that got their hooks into you? Also, would you say you had a relationship with lace before these poems took root, or was your relationship to it forged while writing?
MD: I grew up in Scranton, surrounded by lace: seeing it, seeing through it, thinking about it, hearing stories from people with some connection to the factory. I’m not sure when the obsession was truly minted, but I imagine it was after I started to break into the abandoned lace factory, after I spent time with the spectral lacemakers. It was thrilling, sad, and strange in the old factory. But there was such intimacy too. The physical intricacy of lace astounded me. I have a semi-pathological crush on nostalgia, ghosts, and the past. In the book, I wanted to not just explore the interstices but become them. If we could touch the unseen threads that tie (sometimes leash) presence and absence, what would they feel like? Decades later, when I sat down to finally write this collection, Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space was hugely informative for my thinking. I tried to (re)enter the invisible factory — a real place, a lost place, a place alive in my imagination.
As I wrote, the lace became a queer and liturgical object. It’s an extended metaphor for the hidden and the revealed. The seen and unseen. The factory, with its dilapidated elegance, is a liminal zone that defies the X/Y axis and conventional boundaries. In my poetry, I try to write lace with its own urgent point of view but as a text that insists on being read in multiple ways. The poem “Book of Lace” scaffolds emotional origin stories of the needle, the stitch, the loom, and so on. The fabric is like a fable, with indelible images and definite aesthetic, but also with twists, turns, and room for inference. A queer reading of lace lets it live as a decorative object, a symbol, a commodity to be sold and used (and stained) and adored, a product, a result of hard work, an artifact, a relic, proof of industrial grandeur and industrial decay. It’s nothing. It’s everything.
RG: How much did you find yourself thinking about the traditional (bridal, baptismal, domestic etc) uses of lace as you wrote these poems?
MD: Constantly. I was drawn to the contrast between conventional associations of lace and the contoured realities they mask. Like poetry itself, lace has associative and elective affinities. In its traditional use (bridal veils, dresses, baptismal robes, domestic signatures), lace represents finery and purity. It’s invested with the weight of rituals and traditions, constraints and conformity, comfort and consistency. But what happens when you dye it or pull at it? The facade rips. The quotidian use of lace, in tablecloths and curtains, is a cipher for hidden labor and erasure. All the people who worked at the factory, who toiled and hurt themselves… they were artists too. I imagined them and all the hands that crafted the lace, the days and weeks and years woven (stuck) in its patterns, and the silent stories absorbed in the threads. There is a softness of lace, too. A softness that can smother.
RG: If my quick-and-dirty etymological research is accurate, ‘lace’ as a noun comes into English from the old French laz, “cord made of braided or interwoven strands of silk,” “a net, noose, string, cord, tie, ribbon, or snare” via Vulgar Latin lacium, from Latin laqueum “a noose, a snare” (source also of Italian laccio, Spanish lazo, English lasso), a trapping and hunting term, probably from Italic base laq- “to ensnare.” There’s another old sense of the word having to do with cords used to draw together edges of slits or openings (this sense lives on in ‘shoelace’). In Middle English, lace was about tying, binding — fishing lines, gallows ropes, crossbeams in architecture, the net Vulcan uses to catch Venus. It’s not until about the 1540s that the meaning we understand now — “ornamental cord or braid” — becomes dominant. What does lace catch that a net, a noose, a trap cannot? In what ways do you think the realities of nets, nooses, or traps inform your poems?
MD: Ah, great question. A net(work) lives inside lace. Lace is a pretty trap the way a femme fatale is a pretty killer. I think lace catches what a maze catches. There is an allure, an enticement, an engagement that is crucial to the causal experience of lace. Lace says, I dare you. It’s a symbol of patterned conformity, defiance, and subversion. It’s an invitation. The cartography of ornamental pleasure and a journey towards liberation. In Scranton Lace, I hope to craft lexica of the traps and mazes that we create for ourselves. In the yes/and, I strive to build a structure for spaciousness. Each verse should be a riddle to feel viscerally as you puzzle through it. Where do emotions (the “I feel” touchpoints) meet the intellect and logic (“I think”)?
RG: Do you think that the aesthetic values of lace in some way(s) became the aesthetic values of the poems as you wrote? In writing, did you become a lacemaker? Are you able to describe how you dreamed the reader would respond to your lace?
MD: In my practice, lace is a leitmotif, a queer episteme that codifies as much as it questions. In that way, the aesthetic values of lace mirror the tension between patterns and divergence. I wanted to center the pliable materiality of text, so it was crucial to weave then tear syntactical fields, and invite various structures and forms, including multimedia and multimodality. I hope the wild formal diversity of the collection — poem to poem, punctum to punctum — gives it the “made” quality of assemblage and bricolage.
I dreamed the reader would feel the honeyed edge of vertigo and fever-rush of ache. I hope the reader feels the mercurial relationship between a transparent text and myriad subtexts, codes, and nested stories. These are a few of my goals because I value art that nearly topples in on itself as it collapses binaries and communicates something that feels true about the human condition. I strive to write verse (and noir) that push boundaries and vivify gritty elegance, carnality, broken opulence, and the strange rhythms of (hard)lived realities.
RG: My absolute favorite poem in the book — ‘We Are Greater’ — (70) opens “we are greater than the sum of our parts / but how can I be greater than all the parts / inside me when I don’t know / where I begin or end” and then opens out into a meditation on the factory: “a factory cannot grind / without its smallest gears / I know I am nothing special / but I want to be great / or at least good” — I can’t get through that poem without bursting into tears! I’ve probably read it a dozen times since I first got my hands on this book. I don’t even really have a question about this poem; I just want to tell you how much I love it. Maybe you have something you’d like to tell me about it.
MD: Thank you. Thank you. That means a lot to me. I guess I could say this… when I read poetry or see art (or see poetry and read art), I love feeling the artist’s vulnerability piercing the membrane. It might be a bit controversial to say, but in this book, the I is not “the speaker.” The I is me. For better or worse. Craft is crucial; it’s a fastidious process of metacognitive creation and revision. But in this book, the I is still me, a wrecked person feeling her way through unknowns, fighting for beauty in a vicious world. Ada Limón’s poetry completely changed the way I thought about an “I” in poetry.
RG: How did you embrace lace while writing? Did you wear it, keep it near, simply hold it in your mind? Were you enrobed in it in your mind for the duration of your writing?
MD: Yes, yes, yes. Lace was tangible and consequential as I wrote. Always more than a concept or, dare I say, a muse. I surrounded myself with pieces of lace that were manufactured at the factory in the 1920s. An old lace curtain. Lace-trimmed handkerchief. Veils. I wore the lace. I cut it. I asked it questions. My partner, Bri, dipped lace in ink and made relief prints with it for the book’s illustrations and illustrated verse. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think textures and patterns are meant to be observed only; I need to feel them all, let the complexity imprint on me so it might seep into my consciousness and merge with me or open new pathways. (Which it did.) I was draped in metaphorical fabric too. Even beyond the act of writing — pen to paper, hands dancing over keys, kilowatts and keystrokes — my thoughts braid lace-like structures. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, and my normal state-of-mind is having three thoughts at once. (Imagine having a base thought, a mid thought, and a top note of thought.) It can get rather busy and chatty in my head. When I write books, my many thoughts and atypical asymmetries come into complete attunement and focus. Writing creatively is a sweet relief and the deepest immersion.
RG: I kind of have the same question about Scranton: do you feel like writing into this history as a creative practitioner allowed your place of origin to appear to you in a new way?
MD: Writing into Scranton’s complexity and ghostscape gave me the runway to perceive my hometown in a more nuanced light. Scranton is emblematic of the Rust Belt and Coal Region’s narrative: a scrappy little sister to NYC or Philly. A graveyard of industrial triumphs and struggles. A place where the ethos of the “working class” is deeply ingrained. Gritty mythopoeia. I wanted to examine and trouble Scranton’s history of labor, marginalized queerness, and identity in these poems. It’s a place stained by its history of environmental devastation (coal mining), innovation (electricity and railroads), and resilience. Industries shaped not only the physical landscape of the city but also the cultural and social fabric (pun intended). Writing this poetry required me to rethink the city and its hauntology. I appreciate Scranton’s realness, its “keep calm and carry on” resilient spirit which is often overshadowed by the dominant narrative of decline, loss, and decay. My friends who live there are some of the most innovative artists I’ve ever met or ever will meet. I’m not interested in “derelictioncore” or romanticizing hardships. I’m more interested in writing into Scranton’s paradoxes, contemporaneity, continual fight for beauty, and the ongoingness of its ongoing story.
Rae Gouirand is the author of the book-length poem The Velvet Book (Cornerstone Press, 2024); two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (Spork Press, 2018) and Open Winter (Bellday Books, 2011); the chapbooks Rough Sequence (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023), Little Hour (Swan Scythe Press, 2022), Jinx (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and Must Apple (Educe Press, 2018); and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art (The Atlas Review, 2019). She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including her cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at UC-Davis. / raegouirand.com
Margot Douaihy is the author of Scorched Grace (named a Best Crime Novel of the Year by The New York Times, The Guardian, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Novel Suspects, CrimeReads, and Marie Claire), the poetry collections Scranton Lace and Girls Like You, and the true-crime poetry project Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, S (Clemson University Press). Originally from Scranton, now living in Northampton, Massachusetts, she received her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Lancaster and her BA in English from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a founding member of the Creative Writing Studies Organization, an active member of Sisters in Crime and the Radius of Arab American Writers, and an Assistant Professor at Emerson College. / margotdouaihy.com
