Like a Bird: An Interview with Ciona Rouse
Ciona Rouse is a poet and teaching artist. She’s the author of Vantablack, the first chapbook of Third Man Books (2017), and her poetry has also appeared in Oxford American, wildness, Booth, The Account, and other publications. She’s been featured on NPR’s Turning the Tables in a collaborative project with poets Adia Victoria and Caroline Randall Williams. Rouse is on the faculty of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference (2019–2021), in addition to serving as guest poetry instructor for The Porch Writers’ Collective, Tennessee Young Writers’ Workshop and Hindman Settlement School. A frequent collaborator with various artists, she served as a resident poet for the Nick Cave: FEAT art exhibit at the Frist Art Museum in 2017–2018, culminating in a poem called “We,” which was named 2018’s “Best Poetry Performance” by the Nashville Scene. Presently, Rouse is co-curator of the Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick exhibit at the Frist. She is poetry editor of Wordpeace Journal and a co-host, along with poet Kendra DeColo, of Re/VERB, a Third Man Books podcast where literature and pop culture meet. A graduate of Columbia College of South Carolina, Rouse currently lives in Nashville. Find Rouse’s work at www.cionarousepoetry.com.
What are you working on now?
Last year I was invited to co-curate an exhibition at the Frist. Part of that experience was to also write poetry in response to the art. It’s a Kara Walker exhibition of collected arts, and I got to spend the last year with Kara Walker’s work and her process. I’ve been driving while listening to music that she’s helped collaborate on. There’s the practice of ekphrasis in poetry, and the fast response of consuming art is wanting to make more art. I was very much in my element of responding to her work. However, I was a little bit out of my element when diving into the art world. I have never curated an exhibition before and I learned a lot, especially from the experience of creating things to put on the walls. The Cincinnati Art Museum has invited me to curate and shape this exhibition of Kara Walker’s work for their space. It’s been wonderful working with this, since poetry and art are kindred and connected. Having my poetry on museum walls is a new experience because poetry doesn’t always have a place that you go to experience it. You get a live reading of the poet at bookstores and universities sometimes, yes, but usually there’s no consistent and specific destination place to experience reading poetry like a museum for visual art, a theater for plays, an auditorium or arena for music, so it does feel special to think of people standing before my work like they stand before Walker’s art. It’s also been a beneficial experience because I’m very curatorial at heart. I like to help people have experience things authentically.
If you were to think of your body of work as having its own literary canon, where would your work in progress fit in? Is it breaking the mold or continuing a conversation you’ve already started?
I don’t really think of my work as having a literary canon, but I always try to think about what I’m creating and how it will be discussed in the future, if it will be discussed at all. I guess the dream of a writer is to create a hieroglyph that people will find in the future and make sense of now. I suppose you can’t think of it from a future perspective because we are writing for now. However, what I do love is reading things about literary salons or how Toni Morrison and James Baldwin interacted with each other. It was very interesting to read about how these people interacted with each other and how they created space for each other to work. Picasso was talking to poets, and I think he went through a phase where he wrote poetry for a year instead of painting. I think that, in a similar vein, Nashville is a literary city. I think a lot of the people I’ve been able to be alive with right now are phenomenal. We cry together, we go on walks together, we sit around fires and talk about our poetry. We read each other’s works; we enter into hard conversations. We’re in a city that’s in the middle of so much transition and growth — sometimes progressively and sometimes disturbingly. We get a lot of voices that come in and try to make sense of things. All that to say that I’m grateful to be part of the Nashville canon, if that becomes a thing. I think the Nashville canon has a lot of musicality to it, naturally, but I would also say that in that realm of the blues and folk music that pays attention to place and time and space and the urgency of now is what the Nashville canon is made of. I don’t know if my name will come up in the future, but I know I’m part of the legacy of Nashville and our poetry.
How is something you’re working on now creating itself? Is it breathing on its own, are you discovering it, or are you trying to resuscitate it?
I often talk about a poem being a body. The idea of a poem breathing on its own is a luscious question. It excites me to talk about poetry with poets because a few of my friends and I were talking about this earlier. Right now, when I think about my poetry on the page work, it is in a phase of walking ahead of me. I’m trying to follow it, but it’s doing its own breathing. After a project didn’t pan out, I started reflecting on other things and journaling and following something else other than that project. In one of my journal entries I wrote, “Have I ever felt at home anywhere besides my body?” From there, a whole world of this concept of finding home and figuring out what makes home and figuring out what a poem’s home could be started appearing. That has felt very natural, it is breathing, I’m not forcing it.
When creation becomes difficult what do you turn to? How do you continue to create when it’s hard to create?
I am not consistent with what I turn to, so I’ll just name a few. I love making music playlists, and I think it’s because I’m from a time when we would make tape decks or burn CDs. I would try to make playlists for people that represented our relationships or said what I wanted to say. I make a lot of playlists today, too, and it might have become slightly obsessive. I’m having a hard time approaching writing about water, so I make a playlist about water. Playlists are my go-to for creating energy for poetry. I pay attention to moon cycles as a way to acknowledge that I look to the moon for inspiration. Sometimes I go outside at night and stare at the moon to find inspiration. In some ways paying attention to moon cycles gives me a permission slip to realize that things wax and wane, that I’m not able to create all the time, and sometimes I have to sit in the darkness of a new moon and not create. My dream for a creation cycle is to be on the moon cycle. To go completely dark and give myself time to go into myself and not worry about anything at all. Maybe even not make anything but just to go completely dark. Always, always I turn to poetry. If I feel like I can’t write, then reading something will always make me create something eventually.
What do you say through your work that you feel has to be said or is necessary to be said?
I don’t know how to answer that question. I don’t think that I would say anything if I didn’t feel it needs to be said, but I also don’t want to take myself so seriously that I think I have to say something to everyone. I think, if I interpret this question as something I need to get out of my body, then it’s just everything. I grew up as a preacher’s daughter, and therefore there were things we weren’t supposed to say and so many silences. Now, everything feels like it needs to get out of my body. Just because it needs to get out of my body doesn’t mean it has to be published, but it is something I need to write. Everything I’m writing is coming out because it’s entered into me from somewhere in the world or from duende, like Lorca says. Whether I’m absorbing things from the world or interpreting things from inside of me it needs to come out. Some of those topics are thematic for me in many ways but I try not to necessarily tether myself to saying one specific thing.
If someone walked up to you and said they didn’t understand how poetry is supposed to be read, how would you explain it to them?
I have go-to ways that I explain it to them, but I also realize that I can talk about the body and be in the body that isn’t translatable for some people. I always start by talking about the body and the physical sense of the poem. When my sister, who is a visual artist, would often say, “I really love this, but I don’t know why and I don’t know what it’s saying,” I would ask her where are you loving it? Do you feel it in your shoulders, is it like a punch in the gut? Do you suddenly want to fall on the ground? I pay attention to why it’s pulling me to the ground or punching me in the gut, or I even just thank it for allowing me to have a visceral response. Another way of approaching poetry is as a clock. I think it is important to move away from what the clock is, what time it’s telling, and pay closer attention to the components that make up the clock. Sometimes I will have a strong emotional reaction but will not react strongly cognitively. I’ll pay attention to the repetition of a word or a certain phrase, not to make sense of it, but to delight in it. We all have access to different languages, but we all have ways to communicate with each other. The delight in the language and components of a poem, the brilliance of a word or line break, creates something stronger than I found when I was reading it for the first time. I think that’s more important than trying to make sense of what the poem is about. It’s a very individual process. We come up with formulas to read poetry but it’s a very personal experience.
What’s your relationship with poetry?
I love this question. I might even write a poem about it. My relationship with poetry is a conjoined twin, because I love my sister’s relationship that feels like the most magic relationship. And yet poetry feels like we’re sharing more organs than I could share with my sister. I think all of the complexities of a conjoined relationship brings up the feelings of wanting to sever it or feeling the burden of it on top of you. But also, how wonderful to have something that does breathe with you in this world that can feel very isolating.
What do you hope other people take away from the things you write? What is the gift you are trying to give people through your writing?
I stare a lot at birds, which is a pandemic thing. I obsessively purchase bird feeders and put a fountain in the yard. I sit by my window and watch the chickadees and cardinals and a mockingbird named Lolita. What they do for me is wonderful, and what I love the most is that they don’t care what they do for me. I think I would like to be a bird with my poetry that survives and puts work out there, perhaps a permission slip or inspiration for someone to see it pointing towards something else, or to feel inspired or troubled. I want to flit by without even wondering, ultimately. I say that I want to be like a bird because I recognize I’m not there yet. The natural human inclination towards a desired response still sometimes remains. And I also don’t like when it’s interpreted so far from my intentions that the response is opposite of what the poem does within me. But that probably just means I released the poem too early. All this to say, I ultimately just want to be in my work, let it do work within me. But because my inclination is often ekphrastic, I love hearing that my poetry inspired another poem or a painting. I wonder if the cardinal would like to hear it inspired me, but regardless I want to breathe and move and fly however I want to and not worry about what people are thinking. I recently got an email from a friend who wrote a poem inspired by something I wrote. I do believe the best response to poetry is more poetry, or the response to art is more art. My friend told me that she’d shared the poem to her whole class, and they had all written pieces based on that poem. I think it’s great that we can all be in conversation with each other as artists, that there is the possibility of allowing a new voice to emerge because of something I’ve created. In the moment, though, I don’t even want to think about it.
