Carpe Noctem Book Interview With Lesléa Newman

Headmistress Press, 2015 ​Let’s start with the book’s title, I Carry My Mother, and your cover--a painted image of a pair of red pumps. How did you choose each? 
The title comes from the last poem in the book, a rhyming pantoum which expresses all the ways I carry my mother in my body (I physically resemble her in many ways) and heart. “I Carry My Mother” is what the book is about: how I carry her with me now that she is gone. The cover image was chosen by my publisher. Both my mother and I love shoes. She had lovely, delicate size 6 ½ feet with elegant high arches. Alas, I have large, flat, wide peasant feet (inherited from my grandmother). I used to joke with my mother that I could wear her shoes as earrings. I showed my publisher a photo of a baby trying on her mother’s red high heels. That got my publisher thinking, and she found the beautiful, original painting titled Work Shoes by Carol Marine. I knew it was perfect right away because I cried upon seeing it. I love how one shoe is pointing backwards to the past and the other is pointing forward to the future.

And, if I asked you to describe or sum up your book, what three words immediately spring to mind?
The three words to describe my book that come to mind are: heartbreaking/breathtaking/earthshattering (if I may be so bold).
 
This collection is a beautiful elegy to your mother, Florence Newman, and also traces your grieving process--grieving for the loss of the mother whose so-similar face stares back at you in the mirror. Despite the book being about your mother’s death, there’s also a sort of lightness/joy in the poems as you celebrate her life and your relationship with her. How do you simultaneously grieve, but also find joy in the relationship that continues to grow and change after a death?
I’m so glad that you see the joy as well as the sadness. Grief is a complicated thing. Sometimes the sorrow slays me. Other times, I find myself chuckling at a memory of something my mom said. And then there are the times I hear her voice in my head and I know exactly what she would say in any given circumstance. This makes me happy and sad at the same time. And yes, my relationship with her has changed since she’s died, and continues to change. I appreciate her more. I admire her more: her beauty, her humor, her “smarts” and now that she’s gone, I realize what she gave up to make my life possible.
 
In the poem, “A Daughter’s a Daughter,” which appears early in the book, you set up a framework for the rest of the narrative: “My mother declares …/That my fate was decided deep in her womb.//As she’s borne unto death, I will be her midwife.” Many women probably experience this moment as you did. What other realizations do you think women have as they age, and as they watch their mothers age?
I can only speak for myself. When my mother got ill, I realized that no one gets out of this alive. We all die. When my mother was told about her cancer, she said, “Everyone dies of something. This is my something.” I learned that while my mother was tough—very, very tough—even she could not beat Death. And I won’t be able to, either. My mother always encouraged me to enjoy life because it’s very short. And I understand that now in a different way than I did before she died. The sad parts of life are guaranteed. We have to make the happy times. I now try to celebrate joyful occasions, large and small, as much as possible.
 
One of the (many) things I love about this collection is how so many of the poems are written from the body--and then also the conflating of the mother’s and daughter’s bodies. For example, in “My Mother Has My Heart,” “My mother has my heart and I have hers,/We traded on the day that she gave birth” and in “Looking at Her,” “Yes, I had lived inside of her/Yes, I had lived outside of her.” Did you consciously write from the body, or how did this theme grow and spread within these poems? Did this consciousness of how your bodies were/are intertwined aid in the grieving process?
My mother’s body was my first home. My mother taught me in words, attitude, and action; what it was like to live in a woman’s body. I was very aware of her body as I was growing up, as she was the only other female in the house (I have two brothers). And I was very aware of how my body resembled her body: We are both short and short-waisted, and “pear-shaped.” Our bodies are not the ideal beauty standard of our society. My mother lost a lot of weight when she became ill and I became hyper aware of her body then. Not only what it looked like but how it was—and was not—functioning. What special care it needed. How my mother related to all the changes her body was going through. I also caught a glimpse of my future body if I’m lucky enough to live to be in my eighties. All grist for the poetry mill.
 
There are dualities of how the mother exists within this book: for example, the mother’s body when she was younger (her tiny feet, red-painted toenails), her body before death (feet swollen like mounds of clay) and then her body in death (eyelids sewn shut); what she did before (drinking tea and smoking cigarettes late at night) and her in the hospital/hospice (urine bag breaking). When reading these poems, the mother is both alive and dead, and there’s also a sense of celebrating her life/mourning her passing at the same time. What does this reflect about your experience caring for your mother, and how you coped after her death?
When I took care of my mother, I grew closer to her and more distant from her at the same time. Close in that I spent an enormous amount of time with her, doing very intimate daily tasks that had to do with her body. Plus we talked a lot about her life and about her death. More distant in that I had to prepare myself for losing her. So at times, I withdrew. Toward the end, things grew very surreal. My mother was alive and her personality, which was larger than life, was completely intact. And yet we were talking about what she wished for at the end of her life: the kind of care she requested, what she wanted to be done, what she wanted not to be done. I had to detach somewhat in order to bear those conversations. I mean, this was my mother we were talking about! Afterward I was very grateful that she was so lucid and clear and matter-of-fact about it all. Somehow that helped me cope. I knew that she was in charge right up to the end. That lifted a great burden off me. That’s a mom: taking care of her daughter to the very end.
 
You take inspiration from other poets like Wallace Stevens (his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” becomes “Thirteen Ways of Looking at My Mother.”), William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop and even Dr. Seuss (“My Mother Is” and “Pills”) – and make their poems/poetic forms new in these homage poems to your mother. What attracts you to doing this, and how did you choose which poets/poems to honor this way?
My mother wanted to be a writer and for various reasons did not pursue this (though ironically, she did have one short story which was about her rocky relationship with her own mother, published in her high school literary magazine). I did not discover this story until shortly before she died and it had a such huge impact on me I wrote an essay about it.

My mother loved poetry and to honor her, I chose to use poems by some of her favorite authors as models for the poems in the collection. I think she would have been very pleased. Also, my emotions over her illness and death were so unwieldy, it helped to have a ready-made container to pour my feelings into. Some of her favorite poets are my favorite poets as well.
 
Many of your poems are written in rhymed stanzas, with some in more traditional formats like the troilet and rondeau. Please talk about your prosody—what draws you to these forms specifically?
I have always loved formal poetry and have written in form for most of my life. Writing in form is like solving a puzzle (my mother was, and I am an avid crossword puzzle solver). Writing in form stretches me as a poet. Every word on the page has to count and has to be the perfect word choice. Writing in form develops my ear, helps my musicality, makes me reach for the perfect metaphor. I don’t understand why more poets don’t write in form. As I tell my students, “If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for me.” I also love the aha! moments that occur along the way, such as a double-entendre resulting from enjambment. And forms such as the triolet or rondeau set up a pattern, so there is an expectation. Yet there are variations in the pattern which come as a surprise. So the push and pull between the expected and the unexpected create a feeling of tension in the poem which can be very powerful.
 
There are several poems that navigate the minute moments as your mother approaches her death and then dies (“How to Watch Your Mother Die,” “How to Watch Your Father Watch Your Mother Die” and “How to Bury Your Mother”). There are also very familiar, poignant moments of grief within poems, especially in Part Three: Quiet as a Grave, as in the poems “Looking at Her”: “Yes, I knew her very well/Yes, I had lived inside of her/Yes, I had lived outside of her”; and “Sitting Shiva: “My aunt stands to leave.’/‘Call if you need anything.’/I need my mother.” Did you see this book as a way to aid others who’ve lost a mother (biological or non) through the process?
I wrote the book, quite frankly, to help me survive the loss of my mother. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have poetry to turn to. The fact that others have found the book comforting means a great deal to me. After I gave a reading from it, a woman bought seven copies (one for herself and each of her sisters). Another woman told me that after hearing the title poem, “I Carry My Mother” she felt differently about her mother’s death which had occurred more than a decade ago, than she ever had before. She realized that she, too, carries her mother in her body, and she felt the weight of her grief lessen just a bit. That meant everything in the world to me.
 
How did you order the poems in the collection? Do you have a specific method for arranging your poems or is it sort of haphazard, like you lay the pages out on the floor and see what order you pick them back up in?
The ordering of the poems came very naturally. Part One is a series of triolets that I actually wrote when my mother was still alive and I was taking care of her. I had moved back in with my parents during this final stage of her illness. Every night after I tucked her into the hospital bed we’d set up in the living room, I’d go upstairs to my childhood bedroom, sit at the desk where I’d written angst-ridden teenage poems many decades earlier, and write a triolet. Part Two is concerned with her illness and death. Part Three focuses on my grief after losing her. And it’s all bookended with a prologue and an epilogue. I feel like the poems ordered themselves.
 
What do you love to find in a poem you read, or love to craft into a poem you’re writing?
I love language, and sound. I especially love simile and metaphor. I love reading—or better yet writing—a phrase or line that makes me see something I’ve seen a thousand times before in a new and interesting way.
 
Can you share an excerpt from your book? And tell us why you chose this poem for us to read – did it galvanize the writing of the rest of the collection? Is it your book’s heart? Is it the first or last poem you wrote for the book?
Since I’ve mentioned the title poem so many times, I will share that one. I think it is the book’s heart, as it shows how I am carrying on with and without my mother at the same time.
 
I CARRY MY MOTHER
 
I carry my mother wherever I go
Her belly, her thighs, her plentiful hips
Her milky white skin she called this side of snow
The crease of her brow and the plump of her lips
 
Her belly, her thighs, her plentiful hips
The curl of her hair and her sharp widow’s peak
The crease of her brow and the plump of her lips
The hook of her nose and the curve of her cheek
 
The curl of her hair and her sharp widow’s peak
The dark beauty mark to the left of her chin
The hook of her nose and the curve of her cheek
Her delicate wrist so impossibly thin
 
The dark beauty mark to the left of her chin
Her deep set brown eyes that at times appeared black
Her delicate wrist so impossibly thin
I stare at the mirror, my mother stares back
 
Her deep set brown eyes that at times appeared black
Her milky white skin she called this side of snow
I stare at the mirror, my mother stares back
I carry my mother wherever I go
 
Can you describe your writing practice or process for this collection, especially because it moves through the stages of grief? Do you have a favorite revision strategy? And how did you revise and rework this book?
Once I start a project, once it “takes” inside of me, the writing tumbles out as though it has a life of its own. My job is to show up to the page (I write every first draft in long hand) and put in my time. I wrote the poems one at a time, rewriting over and over and over until I had a finished version, before I moved on to the next one. I absolutely love to rewrite and can pester a poem for hours, days, weeks, months, even years on end. First I rewrite in major ways going deeper and deeper into the poem. Whole stanzas are rewritten or created or thrown out. Then when the poem finds its shape more or less, I focus on individual word choice and punctuation. Then there comes a time when I know I am making the poem worse, not better. That’s the time to let go. Then I put it away for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes. Often there are a few more changes at that point, though usually not something major. Each poem goes through at least 20 drafts—sometimes more!
 
You’ve had such a prolific writing career, and have written in so many genres, which as you know, is hard for many writers to do. Looking at your body of work, what advice do you give to writers who are working on their first or second manuscript? And what are you working on now?
I always encourage writers to think of themselves in an expansive way. At first I thought of myself as a poet exclusively. Then I wrote a novel. Then I wrote a book of short stories. Then I wrote some children’s books. Then I wrote a novel-in-verse. Lately I’ve been writing personal essays. As T.S. Eliot said, “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” Don’t be afraid to take risks in your writing. As Annie Lamott advises, write “Shitty first drafts.” That’s the only way to grow. Also put your writing first. Develop an unshakeable writing habit. Write every day. Read every day. For more advice, see my blog post: “In It For the Long Haul.”

Right now I am working on new poems in hopes of putting together a new (unthemed) collection. Plus I am putting the final touches on a few children’s books, including a book called Sparkle Boy, which is being published by Lee and Low Books in 2017.
 
Without stopping to think, write a list of five poets/writers whose work you’d tattoo on your body, or at least write in permanent marker on your clothing, to take with you at all times.
Here are some lines I carry with me in my head at all times. I don’t know about getting tattoos, as I am a big baby when it comes to pain. Maybe I will embroider them on a piece of clothing. Great idea!
 
“America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” –Allen Ginsberg
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”–Mary Oliver
“The common woman is as common as the best of bread and will rise.”–Judy Grahn
“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” –A.A. Milne
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart.”–Anne Frank

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Purchase I Carry My Mother from Headmistress Press.

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​  ​Lesléa Newman is the author of 70 books for readers of all ages including the poetry collections, Still Life with Buddy, Nobody’s Mother, and Signs of Love, and the novel-in-verse, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard. Newman has received many literary awards including poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and a Stonewall Honor from the American Library Association. Her poetry has been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Evergreen Chronicles, Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Lilith Magazine, Kalliope, The Sun, Bark Magazine, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Seventeen Magazine and others. Nine of her books have been Lambda Literary Award Finalists. From 2008-2010 she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, MA. Currently she lives in Holyoke, MA and is a faculty member of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA in Writing program. Visit her online at ​http://www.lesleanewman.com.