Emma Bolden is the author of Maleficae, a book-length series of poems about the witch trials in early modern Europe (GenPop Books, 2013), and medi(t)ations, forthcoming from Noctuary Press. She’s also the author of four chapbooks of poetry — How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press); The Mariner’s Wife, (Finishing Line Press);The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press);This Is Our Hollywood (in The Chapbook) – and one nonfiction chapbook – Georgraphy V, forthcoming from Winged City Press. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, the Indiana Review, the Greensboro Review, Redivider, Verse, Feminist Studies, The Journal, Guernica, and Copper Nickel. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily’s Web Weekly feature. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University. You can find her online at A Century of Nerve. Earlier this week, I had a chance to ask Emma a few questions about her forthcoming book.
Q: Tell me about your new book, medi(t)ations, which is forthcoming from Noctuary Press. How is it different from your first book, Maleficae? How is it similar?
Formally, there are a lot of similarities between medi(t)ations and Maleficae. Both are book-length projects: in Maleficae, the poems link together to form a narrative about a woman was both worshipped and persecuted for being a witch; though not exactly narrative, the poems in medi(t)ations also build an arc that follows the out-of-body-like experience of severe illness. I see Maleficae more as a poetic sequence, while I see medi(t)ations more as a book-length poem composed of fragments that can also be read individually. The experience of writing both books felt very similar as well – in both cases, the process of writing felt, for lack of a better word, oracular. It felt as though the language just arrived, in these small little fragmented gifts, which was, I suppose, because the material had been living inside of me for so long. I crafted both books in pieces, allowing the fragments to live in draft formation until other fragments accreted around them. In both cases, it took me a long time to figure out how the poems should inhabit the printed page. I’ve always been a very couplets-and-structured-stanzas-with-no-funny-business-please kind of writer, so I felt very surprised when I found that in order for the poems to work, I had to allow more white space into the poems. I had to allow the white space around and inside the poem, as well as the non-couplets-and-structured-stanzas-funny-business-all-the-way placement of the words, to speak as loudly as the words themselves. At the center of both books lies the idea of silence: the silence of fear and the silencing of women in Maleficae, and the silence of illness, of an inability to articulate the ultimately inarticulable relationship between the bodies we inhabit and the selves that inhabit our bodies, in medi(t)ations.
Q: I find it fascinating that the title of the collection, medi(t)ations, lends itself to many possible readings. From the very beginning, the reader is asked to participate actively in the process of creating meaning from the text. Do you see the title as guiding the reader, establishing how he or she should engage with the collection? How do you envision a reader inhabiting medi(t)ations?
Though I’m not tech-savvy enough to create computer code myself, I’m absolutely and possibly obsessively fascinated by electronic literature. I first started reading Stephanie Strickland as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College, and I’ve been awed by the stunning shifts in her work, both in terms of language and the use of technology to create multivalent, amorphous texts that themselves shift with each readings. In her essay “Born Digital,” Strickland states that “[t]oread e-works is to operate or play them (more like an instrument than a game, though some e-works have gamelike elements).” The reader’s active involvement in reading is necessary to the piece, and each encounter with the text yields a new text. When I read this article, I was excited but at the same time terribly disappointed because, I’ll be honest, sometimes Gmail is too complicated for me. I definitely can’t write code, so I began thinking of ways that I could replicate the effects of e-literature on the page.
Technology did give me a helping hand when I started the project. I often used my Kindle, and the predictive text feature soon moved from an annoyance to an inspiration. The suggestions would spark new connections and images in the text, and they helped me to make leaps from idea to idea, word to word, stanza to stanza. As I started assembling the fragments into a manuscript, I started to realize that if I arranged things on the page in a certain way, if I used punctuation and spacing and white space in a certain way, I could allow for multiplicities of meaning within and between each fragment. The title is definitely meant to serve as a hint about the formal structure of the poems, which contain multiple meanings in terms of the fragments themselves and the ways in which the fragments relate to each other. The fragments are both independent meditations and pieces that act out the process of mediation, of working together to develop a thematic resolution. The title also indicates the layers of thematic meaning I build through the poem: they are both meditations on what it means to live inside of a human body and a series of mediations between the self and the body itself.
Q: Your book resists genre in ways that are altogether new and exciting. The collection reads at times as lyric essay, poetry, and flash fiction. Along these lines, the work is at turns narrative and formally adventurous, using the page as a visual field. What are the advantages of moving through genres, rather than committing to only one of them?
Thank you for this very kind comment about my work! I think that it’s essential for a writer to practice their craft in multiple genres – and, perhaps even more essentially, to explore the spaces between genres. While studying for my comps in graduate school, I read Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. It is no exaggeration to say that Ostriker’s book changed my life. Every sentence felt miraculous, as if someone had finally articulated something I thought no one could articulate, especially myself, though I’d been trying all of my life as a writer to do just that. Early on, Ostriker writes that “women writers have been imprisoned in an ‘oppressor’s language’ which denies them access to authoritative expression.” I was particularly struck by Ostriker’s assertion that women writers are imprisoned not only by expectations of content but also of form – and, by extension, of genre. At the time, I admit that I felt too afraid to write creative nonfiction, so I practiced Ostriker’s theories in my poetry. As I grew less afraid as a writer, I found myself moving to other genres and, ultimately, into the liminal space between genres – and in that space, I found myself freed. There, I could create my own language, my own form, my own genre; by taking command of genre, I was able to take command of my words and come closer to the kind of authoritative expression Ostriker describes.
Q: When reading your collection, I was impressed by the way you so gracefully meld personal experience with literary theory. I was reminded of Freud's writings on the relationship between the mind and the body, as well as Kristeva's feminist epistemologies. I'm very interested in the way that medi(t)ations addresses these ambitious philosophical questions while remaining carefully grounded in the tangible details of lived experience. Would you describe medi(t)ations as an application of theory and philosophy to everyday life? Along these lines, what is possible for you in poetry that isn't possible in the realm of academic writing?
I was pleasantly surprised to hear this because this is very much what was happening in my head, but it’s often impossible to tell if one has transferred what happens in one’s head to one’s page. I spent much of my undergraduate career studying Freud and the relationship between the mind and the body. I first became fascinated with the idea of hysteria when I took a class on Ibsen at the University of East Anglia. I’d read The Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler time and time again, so much so that I’d memorized most of both plays, but once I’d heard my professor lecture on hysteria, the plays became completely new. It was a concept that fascinated me: the idea that social and psychological factors could manifest themselves in physical illness through a series of symptoms that expressed in a non-verbal way what women were unable to express verbally. I was also fascinated by what seemed to me a cruel corollary to this idea and a devastating counter-effect of Freud’s work as a whole: women were – and are — so often maligned by the medical community, so often told that their physical symptoms were the manifestations of psychological or emotional issues, that physical illnesses were – and are – often untreated. I remember being especially struck by Elaine Showalter’s exploration of these parallel ideas in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. While I understood and agreed, to some degree, with her analysis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as a nexus of physical symptoms with psychological and emotional roots, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy with this idea and with the fact that physical symptoms were denigrated as emotional issues. This perhaps came from personal experience: at the age of 12, I was diagnosed with a form of dysautonomia, a malfunction of the central nervous system that led to symptoms such as dizziness and fainting – symptoms also associated, in Freud’s time, with hysteria. It took over a year to receive this diagnosis, as doctors assumed these symptoms were psychological and not physical in cause. After I received this diagnosis, I learned very quickly to not tell doctors that I had dysautonomia, as they often waved it away as a psychological or emotional problem, much like Showalter described the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Seven years later, my father was diagnosed with the same condition (though it took only a few days for doctors to diagnose him). Then, everything changed: I was finally able to tell doctors that I had dysautonomia – as long as I mentioned that my father had the condition, too. I never experienced the same kind of doubt from my doctors again. Since I had several female relatives with the condition, it was clear that this changed because I now could say that my father – a male relative – had dysautonomia.
I think that this propelled my interest in studying hysteria and Freud’s theories from a feminist lens: I saw that the ideas had very real and very long-range consequences. As a senior at Sarah Lawrence, I focused on these ideas in all of my classes: I took a class on talking cures, developed a visual arts project based on Muybridge’s photographs and Charcot’s often-exploitative work at the Salpêtrière, and explored these ideas in a chapbook of poems. Through these projects, I studied verbal and visual representations of the female body, tracing the history of the seemingly ubiquitous idea that illness in the female body is a symptom of weakness or psychological trauma. I noticed one pervasive theme: the idea of impersonalization. It felt very often as though these theories about women were about their bodies, and not their selves. I found that in case studies and in the theories they supported, women’s personal lives, experiences, thoughts, and physical symptoms were summarily ignored in privilege to the theory; the theory was primary, the person secondary at best. The poems in medi(t)ation are an extension of this study and an exploration of how those ideas have manifested themselves in my life. I chose to explore these ideas in creative writing as a way to resist the impersonalization of theory in academic writing. It felt vital to explore theory in this very intimate way, to see how theory plays out in real human experience, and poetry/hybridity gave me a way to replicate the experience, a structure that individualizes the experience.
Q: What else should readers know about your forthcoming book?
I’d like readers to know that their presence, their practice in reading and thinking and feeling, is, in a lot of ways, the most important component of this book. Their involvement – in terms of assembling and re-assembling stanzas, sections, and sequences — is necessary to the work, so I thank them in advance for that.
An Excerpt from medi(t)ations:
the purpose of pain is
good record keeping
then pain is given
purpose a pulse
tran- slated
into mean -ing (&
when she is I
am lying I am my
own line & my
spine makes a
center of it
divides &) divides
a skyline stark & bloom
-ing & all
(through the summer I
felt her a buzz the blur of our voices winging through wires the blur of power skating/escaping (our language) (our lines) suffering
is pain inflicted until meaning for this body there is no give & receive there is no actor & action is a pulse translated to meaning a pulse is a wound transmogrified (see: we
are always defining) (see: away & / or decay)
there is no love in re- mains
pain isn't what's haloed
or hailed pain is an in-
stead a white locus of
light &/or of focus
she said that she was
resolute she took e-
very morning a blue
pill of sky & what was (it
was then that
the darkness re-
vealed itself as
sparkle a remark
-able pattern we
were both look
-ing &) longing
she put
the key in my palm (I
was driving) this
all (& when I was an
other) who could
have another this (when
my eyes worked
because) pain is its own
wordless language there
are no words & pain
being its own vocabulary
she (lost her faith
in speech & tongue) to
say what
she lacked was
a word for symptom so she
used symphony she lacked
a word for symphony so
she used certainly
here is a lacuna of light a stellar set-
up for a self- portrait here
is the spot of light I sit to paint myself
&/into portrait & pain is
the picture in which I am not I
(there is here) (light but no
light that is) I (there is
no eye &) there is no I there (is
no use nor) you see (here her
free- dom ringed
round with posies
see teeth & squirrel
as song) (see
the lacuna of lac-
king) the mathematics
of being tattooed to
each cell as/if proof
of her bones
the eye without seeing has its own me-
aning the eye without seeing trans-
formed to un-
meaning (I lacked the
word for
bitter & –ness
so I used mean
) (she had a
mouth as
arbitrary as any
number /or face
/or) in fact
did she give our truth to
that car & what did
its windows say un-
derwater what green
threaded hairs were hers
(/or mind /or
mine /or) dreamed
(subliminal as in behind the lid as if
any question isn’t its own asking
as if)
the spine is a straight line of forgiving
which is implied even in forget (usage:
here in the halo we breathe water here in this
halo we breathe water) as
belief is the work
the mind begins
because the body
began its workings