From the Print Archives: “Eat the Peach! A Conversation With Kathryn Nuernberger”
Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two poetry collections: The End of Pink and Rag & Bon. A collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, is forthcoming from OSU Press is Fall 2017. Recent work appears in 32 Poems, Crazyhorse, Field, The Journal, West Branch, and Willow Springs. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke’s work has recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fugue and Nimrod. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida where she is a visiting faculty member at Florida State University teaching creative writing and critical theory. She is also Reviews Editor for Pleiades and a reader for Emrys.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke: Your latest collection, The End of Pink, just out from BOA Edition’s American Poets Continuum series was originally called Strange Cases and relies heavily on images and stories from the history of science. Do you feel any kinship with 18th century poets, such as Erasmus Darwin, who often used poetry to communicate and popularize complex scientific notions?
Kathryn Nuernberger: To be honest, I have a hard time getting into those poets whose aim seems to primarily have to do with edification of their readers. I like old science because I like doubt and uncertainty, and by its nature the history of science is a history of very confident people getting things wrong. I mean, even when they’re on the right track (go Galvani!) they all still end up on a tangential path to what the future will think of as “Truth” sooner or later. Also the language of the science itself is so strange and beautiful — enough time will render almost anything strange and beautiful. Electricity was called the “ethereal fire,” and we were all thought to be breathing not carbon dioxide but luminescent aether. Frankly, it’s all just a bit more poetic than the “science poetry” of the time, so I prefer the primary sources to the literary interpretations. I’m all for exuberance in the face of wonder, but I do prefer my literature to be as un-edifying as possible.
JSK: This collection won the prestigious James Loughlin Award, and your 2011 collection, Rag and Bone, won the Antivenom Poetry Award from Elixir; do you feel any pressure for your third collection? Did your writing process differ between the two collections, and do you have a sense for what process is emerging for the third one?
KN: I think it’s a jinx to say with any certainty that there will be a third collection. Just because Galvani could make the decapitated heads of two recently executed dead men open their eyes by passing an electric current through their ears didn’t mean (he discovered with no small amount of disappointment) that he could bring them back to life. Also, his nonchalant use of the bodies of the impoverished victims of a despotic regime doesn’t look so great in hindsight, either. There is a process of sorts underway, but I’m not prepared to vouch for it yet.
JSK: The style in The End of Pink leans more toward rambling associative links than Rag and Bone did, but it keeps its macabre lyricism, which forms sort of a creepy UltraTalk style, or Uncanny Talk. A great example of this is in “More Experiments with the Mysterious Properties of Animal Magnetism (1769),” which bounces seamlessly from Benjamin Franklin to teaching high school students to directions on how to make static electricity. Knowing that you studied with Mark Halliday, who originated the term Ultra-Talk, I can’t help but think about what Harold Bloom says in Anxiety of Influence about the Oedipal struggle between strong poets and their precursors. Who would you consider to be your aesthetic precursors, and do you believe Bloom about great art coming from an Oedipal struggle, or does that sound like bunk to you?
KN: I dig Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, especially the part where we are given tacit permission to misread, misinterpret, and misappropriate our forebears in the name of egocentric insecurity. (I’m looking at you Erasmus Darwin, who clearly deserves better.) I do this sort of careless dismissal or zealous but still somehow half-assed embrace all the time, and, per Bloom’s Freudian analysis of the lot of us poet-types, I’m probably not the person best positioned to say who I’m assassinating and who I’m inappropriately fornicating. But I will say that in so far as one can know thyself, I owe a great debt to Marianne Moore, who created those ingenious lyric collages of so many different kinds of academic discourse into a poetic sensibility. Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” was one of the first poems I read that successfully wove fragments of enigmatic archival materials into a tremendously resonant and evocative whole. Among the living, Anne Carson, Frank X. Walker, and Sarah Lindsay are important models for me of how one can combine academic curiosity with lyrical intensity.
Mark Halliday did once point out to me, gently and with great kindness, that my poems tend to dwell in states of wonder and awe, which are states that lack tension and so can be very boring. I admonish myself with great anxiety (possibly in deep conversation with a tiny Halliday homunculus I keep in my brain) not to be boring in this particular way when I am deciding how to revise new things. But I also have a little Nance Van Winckel homunculus in there — she was also a very influential teacher of mine — and that voice chirps notes of encouragement like, “Oooh…that’s a little sexy, dearie.”
JSK: Reading this collection made me want to be a better poet, especially the series of poems about the Saint Girl. She’s like a modern, female Prufrock struggling with the anxieties not just of social appropriateness and what our missteps may do to ourselves, but to others as well. My favorite line is in “The Saint Girl’s Sweetest Tortures,”: “To peel a peach is a violence she grieves in a small devil-whipped silence.” It’s not Prufrock daring to eat a peach because it might get all messy, it’s an anxiety about the damage to the peach, the damage to the world from her own actions. It’s just amazing. So what things inspire you and your poetry to be at its best?
KN: Thank you for being so nice about these poems! And especially for being so generous to the poor Saint Girl, who is so attentive to her missteps she can hardly step at all.
I was thinking of the Saint Girl’s anxiety about eating that peach as a pretty sad state of repression, one which I recognize in myself sometimes and often try to resist or dispel. When writing those Saint Girl poems I was thinking about whether it’s ethical to opt out of the sensory or sensual world or to pass up joy. Saint Girl helped me decide it’s not. Eat the peach, Jen, devour it!
I was raised in a Catholic community with a lot of great messages about social justice and liberation theology and also some very depressing messages about rejecting the material world. When I want to be a good person, I think about Lyn Cooper, who was a dear family friend who left a convent, came out as gay, and started Doorways, an organization in St. Louis that began providing hospice for people with AIDS in the 1980s. I think about my great-aunt, a nun who had a knack for taking vulnerable children under her wing and becoming like a mother to them (and who also used to sit in lawn chairs on the roof of the convent with her best friend, also a nun and my biology teacher, drinking Bush beer and “getting some sun.”) But when I write poems, I mostly think, “Fuck it!” and try to enjoy the material world in all its sensual, juicy, vulgar, pissy, gossipy, dramatic ecstasies. I’m thinking of Blake here, who observed all poets are of the Devil’s party, and thank God for that.
JSK: I recently did a residency out at Firefly Farms and got to spend some time feeding farm animals. I have to say, the chickens were my least favorite. They were boring and pushy and really easy to trick. But you’ve raised chickens in the past, invited these little dinosaurs into your life, so sell me on chickens. What’s your favorite breed and why?
KN: I don’t know that I have anything particularly nice to say about chickens. The Araucana is this heirloom breed that lay these very beautiful pale pink, blue, or green eggs that are such nice little presents to find in the nest every morning. But honestly, aside from that, it can be pretty grim business. Nobody at our house is super-excited about butchering, so we let the roosters run amok, which created a really violent and disturbing atmosphere out in the chicken yard as the cocks relentlessly pursued their one true urge. But the solution to that problem was another sort of grim confrontation with one’s own darkest capacities.
I do kind of enjoy the way they run around like mini T-Rexes. It makes me think of that Facebook meme about Donald Trump’s useless little hands.
How about if we talk about raccoons instead? We got a live trap to catch the ones who would make a habit of breaking into the coop for egg-theft, slaughter, and general mayhem. Before we relocated the little critters, we’d feed them grapes and persimmons and watch them clean their food with those adorable little opposable thumbs. It’s too bad they don’t lay eggs.
JSK: I fully expect a poem about an egg laying raccoon in your next collection. But in the current collection, “pink” represents far more serious and weighty matters than we typically associate with the color. Do you think the color pink has gotten a bad rap lately? What’s your favorite shade of pink? What’s your favorite pink thing?
KN: I recently relented on one of my second-wave feminist ideals and allowed my kindergarten daughter to buy a bunch of plastic Disney princess figurines with her own money because she said she wanted to start a warrior boot camp and teach them to fight for themselves. And I wanted to reward a clever rhetorical gambit and an entrepreneurial spirit.
I still haven’t let her watch the movies, but I do read her the original Grimm’s tales when I’m feeling Freudian. So I have come around to appreciating Aurora’s pink dress, because of how deftly she uses it to whack the evil fairy right in the kisser. It is not lost on me that this is super-problematic, since the evil fairy is likely guilty of nothing more than wielding her post-menopausal power without apology or regret. So let’s christen this particular shade of pink “Later-you’ll-look-back-on-this-ageist-patriarchal-propaganda-and-be-so-sorry.”
JSK: Who do you recommend everyone read right now?
KN: I don’t think I can recommend Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude enough. I don’t usually appreciate being uplifted, but his way of finding small moments of human redemption via the sensuality of food and community gardening is really gratifying in its hopeful, nuanced complexity.
JSK: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview and for putting these poems out into the world.
KN: Thank YOU!
Pieces from Emrys Journal v. 34 were recognized in both Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Buy the issue here.
