ALINA STEFANESCU: At a time when the poetry of place and locale is popular, your work remains conversant with art and popular culture, with a vast commercial world rather than a single place. The first section of this book, "Living Dolls," centers women, girls, and gendered female bodies.
I loved your off-ode to Maria Callas in "Diva (After Maria Callas)", and the way it courts controversy by suggesting that marriage reduces a woman's status. The poem is composed of two long stanzas, and the second stanza begins with a conditional turn:
But if you've abdicated your power,
agreeing to be the lesser "wife,"
you don't have the only thing
a man obsessed with power wants.
It doesn't matter that you feel
like a woman--he will disappear for weeks,
forget to phone, call you
a cunt with a whistle in her throat.
I am so curious about the backstory to this, and whether this is a quotation--and if so, tell me everything.
SUSANA CASE: Maria Callas was a classic “living doll,” objectified and emotionally abused. The “Diva” poem references the triangle that existed between Callas, Aristotle Onassis, and Jackie Kennedy. Although Callas was married to someone else, she fell in love with Onassis and began an affair, expecting that they would marry as soon as Onassis got his divorce, which was what he had promised. Of course, this is an old story in terms of how affairs with married men often unfold. Onassis ended up marrying Jackie Kennedy (whom he also objectified) instead.
There continued to be an off-on relationship between Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis—making her in essence “the lesser wife,” though they did not marry—and it was not a kind relationship. He was emotionally abusive, denigrating her looks and her voice. He said the usual abusive things: she had a big nose, she had fat legs, she was stupid—the things that spoke to her vulnerabilities, to women’s vulnerabilities in general. But above all, he denigrated her voice, and so, yes, that is a quote, and an ironic one, considering that in the larger world outside of their relationship, she was considered the greatest female opera singer ever, with hoards of adoring fans. The full sentence he said to her, according to Callas’s autobiography was: “You are just a cunt with a whistle in her throat, who is only good for fucking.”
I don’t think marriage necessarily reduces a woman’s status, but I don’t think either Jackie Kennedy, who was the official wife, or Maria Callas, who was a sort of unofficial, lesser wife, gained in status by their association with Onassis, who seemed brutal and crude, enjoying humiliating Callas. I do think there is a type of man whom it is dangerous to be involved with for that reason, the type who does not view women as full human beings, the kind who want “Living Dolls." I do not feel that is true of all men, but entrenched power imbalances do make certain men dangerous.
“The Unpublished Poems of Marilyn Monroe” is another poem in the “Living Dolls” section that focuses on the discrepancy between a woman’s interior life and her public persona. Onassis never physically beat Callas, as far as I know, perhaps because this would have brought the private into the public sphere.
ALINA: This mixing of the public and private sphere seems central to voice in this section. I love how the first person voice is irreverent, iconoclastic, firmly femme, ready to roar or dance or wade through anything. There is the open eros of "Radiance" and the retrospective bemusement of "Skunk," which recounts a "tent-year" of cross-country travel with a fellow "wannabe hipster." And there is, as you mentioned, "The Unpublished Poems of Marilyn Monroe," and its poignant finale:
The public knew only the lines
of her cupid's bow,
but no silly woman would stand by Arthur Miller
as he refused to name Communists.
Marilyn, surrounded by 430 books
with penciled notes, writes to herself:
ah life they have cheated you.
And there is "Stress Test," a poem about the body and growing older, the worries of "congenital curse," which ends in that flirtatious thought about the young male doctor administering the test. How has time changed the way you inhabit your gender, both in the flesh and on the page? Have you noticed a change in your voice or in themes and subjects? What permissions--or retractions--did you find in this new collection?
SUSANA: Ah, a very perceptive question. This is my first collection in which I have two poems about doctor visits and the (my) body’s possible failings: “Stress Test,” which you mention, and “Metal.” I have always written about the body, it’s erotic potential, how that aligns or misaligns with love, as it does in “Radiance” when I say, “Lie with me, lie to me / until your tongue burns.” But I am aware of no longer being the very very young woman on the clothes-optional “Bonny Doon Beach.” So this dilemma exists, though I am aware of its social construction, of the way I’m affected by larger social views of gender and age.
I teach a course on gender at the university where I work, so I can pull out theories and constructs. But in my poems, I am still very interested in writing about eros, and I am still writing in a decidedly femme voice. Yet, as I draw upon my own experience—not solely, but life does offer material for art and poetry—my own experience is changing. So I give myself now permission to write about the effect of time upon my body. On the other hand, I am the woman who doesn’t leave my apartment without her eyeliner/lipstick on, even under my pandemic face shield/mask, so it’s clear I’m not yet down for the count and not going down without the fight of my life. I have given myself permission to start to write about this.
On the other hand, in both “Stress Test” and “Metal,” there’s an underlying attempt at humor, as if I still can’t believe fully that this is the position I’m in, and so I’ll veer into thinking of the young male doctor as a possible, though clearly improbable, date, or shift from an MRI to thinking about a fashionable jacket. These are a defense mechanism turned into poems. I give myself permission to continue to be a disruptive force in my writing, despite the passage of time. I continue to be interested in the experiences of young girls on the threshold of becoming (hopefully) strong women, though, sadly, that doesn’t always happen.
One of Frances Glessner Lee’s “uncanny crime scene dioramas.” (Source)
ALINA: The "Crime Scenes" section focuses on the art of Frances Glessner Lee, who created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of small 3d crime scene dioramas used in the 1940's and 1950's as teaching tools for criminal investigation. As teaching tools, each Nutshell is what William L. Hamilton called a "a whodunit without a who" (in his 2018 NYT pieces), and each scene includes a cornucopia of possible evidentiary materials, motives, and suspects.
I was riveted by the speculative form of these poems and the way in which they expanded the ekphrastic form while interrogating traditional gender roles. I also loved the prose poem forms which complicate the crime scene interpretations inserting Glessner into the tableaus. For example, Glessner's "Three-Room Dwelling" is interpreted in the lineated poem, "No Sign of Activity," yet on the back of this page, there is a three-stanza prose poem that implicates Glessner, herself:
Examine the tableau. She's stuck in a time when a lady didn't go to school.
Glessner Lee is that lady. Instead of making lace, she makes miniature crime-scene models, dollhouses
full of bloodstains, grime, five- to six-inch corpses--female, mostly--stuffed, dressed, and painted.
Why did you decide to include these additional meditations on Glessner? Are they part of the poems on the previous page or something else? How did you decide on the formal contrasts in this section? Are there other writers who have inspired you in this mode? If so, who?
SUSANA: The prose poems on the life of Frances Glessner Lee are separate, but untitled on the page. They’re titled in the Table of Contents as Frances 1 to Frances 5. They are, indeed, meditations on the life of Glessner Lee, except for Frances 5, which contains a recipe for a cocktail named in her honor. If you like cocktails it’s a good one! The prose poems are on even-numbered pages more as a layout device than for any other reason, as this section also includes some images of the “Nutshells,” and those are also on even-numbered pages, designed to face the ekphrastic poems they inspired. I became intrigued with her dioramas after they went on exhibition a few years ago at the Renwick (Smithsonian American Art Museum). She created 20, but one has been lost. All but one of the rest are owned by Harvard and on loan to the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where they are still actively used as forensic training tools.
I became interested in the woman behind the art. Though she never intended them as artworks, they are meticulous, aesthetic constructions, created by what, then and now, are viewed as traditional female crafts, sewing, knitting, etc., i.e., something “lesser” than painting and sculpture. I see her as someone who turned a socially-defined weakness into a strength, and, as such, I became interested in the woman behind the works. I wanted to weave back and forth between the ekphrastic imagery and speculative looks at the life at Glessner Lee.
So much of early twentieth century women’s lives has not been well-documented, and this is true of Glessner-Lee’s life as well, but there is some material in the record. That her family nicknamed her “Tarantula,” because she wore all black intrigued me. What kind of family does that? As someone who lives in New York City, I’d say 90% of my wardrobe is black, but I can’t imagine anyone in my own family nicknaming me “Tarantula” for that reason. I feel for her words, “This has been a lonely and rather terrifying life I have lived." I felt she needed to be a part of the series on the dioramas, though I bring her into the ekphrastic poems only a couple of times, there to shift perspective, and otherwise keep details about her life in the interwoven prose poems.
Carol Guess wrote a series of prose pieces inspired by the dioramas, and she’s quoted at the beginning of this section of my book. We interpret the personae in the crime scenes differently and invent stories about the works in variant ways, which is interesting. I have more that’s explicitly about Glessner Lee and the interweaving of the two forms is my own invention, as far as I know.
In terms of other poets who have inspired me here, I don’t mean to compare myself to Wislawa Szymborska, a superlative poet, one of my favorites, but my mind goes to a poem of hers, “Two Monkeys by Bruegel.”
Two Monkeys by Brueghel
(by Wislawa Szymborska, trans. from the Polish by Magnus Kryski)
I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing--
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.
She’s writing about the painting, but she’s also writing about the human condition. For me, the crime scene are objective correlatives of human relationships, tragic as they may be, and Glessner Lee’s life tells us something as well about gender and human relationships. Of course, all ekphrastic work needs to go beyond the art that inspires it.
Frances Glessner Lee, making dioramas.
ALINA: In "Laundry Line" (which interprets Glessner's "Attic" scene), we see how the tools of homemaking are used to end lives.
Is this what happens when you go to grey?
Wrapped in her shawl, she's roped
to a rafter with white laundry line.
And then, the prose meditation seems to implicate Glessner in a similar masculinist gaze:
Glessner Lee notes the correct amount of bloating among those in her
down-at-heel homes and rooms, victims led astray by desire and vice. The
inherent vice of materials: degradation over time.
There are multiple layers of objectification in this sequence, and they seem to pivot on aging and degradation, as contrasted with youth and, somehow, purity. How do traditional constructions of gender indict women for aging? And how has this changed, if at all, since Glessner's time? And what does objectification mean when a gender-identifying woman, like Glessner, is involved? Is victimhood, itself, a form of objectification when it comes to violent crimes? I'm interested in your thoughts on this, including the questions that inspire you.
SUSANA: I meant to play with the notion of degradation (noun) and degrading (adjective and verb) with respect to vice in the prose component. Does women’s invisibility as they age leads to a body among various household objects—spinning wheel, old lamp, abandoned childhood doll, etc.—as if she is just another object in the attic, one expected to go away quietly (suicide)? Or was this an act of murder made to look like a suicide, taking advantage of our expectations of the undesirability of an older women?
I don’t think women are as severely constricted as they were in Glessner’s Lee’s time. We are hopefully going to have a female vice president, and she may very well be an older woman. But already, the media is talking about ambition, as if it’s a bad thing. Glessner was bright, wealthy enough to attend college in that period, but her brother got sent off to Harvard, while she stayed home (not her choice). There are more choices now. Yet, age continues to lead to invisibility.
Remember Yann Moix, the French author, a fifty-year-old man who said last year in a Marie-Claire interview that women over fifty were too old to love? Maybe it was for publicity, but there was quite a reaction. He was called an imbecile and worse—by women. Where were the men speaking up in defense of older women? Of course, there have been some, but then somehow the men end up sounding fetishistic, so once again, the woman is objectified.
Victimhood as a form of objectification in violent crime is an interesting concept. The victim meets the criteria: inert, lacking autonomy, treated as owned, subjectivity denied, silenced, etc.) Now how about the women who uses those objectified bodies to construct dioramas and how about the writer (the poet) who uses those objectified bodies to make poems? Glessner Lee uses the objectification to aid in the investigation of violent crimes, often against women. And the poet, too, may be guilty of using these objectified bodies, except that she gives voice to the silenced victim, attempts to infer each one's experiences and feelings. I think that might be the difference.
I also think that female victims are often looked at as having triggered their own destruction. Victim-precipitated homicide is the technical term, and it can be used to reduce the offense. Notions of lost innocence, impurity, impact interpretations of violence. As I write in “Body in the Closet,” another of the poems based upon Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas, “Female sexuality / begets violence; the hooker / always gets it in the end." On the other hand, the virginal teenager in “Bite Marks” is violated as well.
ALINA: Growing up, for me, involves feeling grateful for the words of female-identifying persons who have stumbled these streets before me. It's hard to get outside the present context—to interrogate the lines between the past and present without feeling somehow complicit in replicating them—and I suspect that remains an issue and a challenge for many poets writing trauma and sexual violence, whether personal or social, so it's helpful to hear how other poets navigate that complexity.
You have been a vibrant presence in Zoom readings lately--how do you feel about the ways pandemic has changed the literary landscape? Are you working on any current projects? And who should we be reading right now?
SUSANA: My interests in gender and power imbalances are long-standing, though I don’t mean to suggest that all power imbalances are gender-based. The world changes so rapidly, and yet we are witness to a kind of repetition of events, the smaller and larger incursions upon the self that result from human relationships, even, and maybe even especially human relationships grounded in love.
People can have the best of intentions and still mess things up. But because not everyone has the same humanity, and because, particularly in the United States, we are an ahistorical culture, we have negotiated the same power imbalances over and over again. It’s a challenge to avoid repetition, and yet, witness is inevitably repetitive in these circumstances.
There’s some support in the research for the idea that trauma leaves a chemical trace on a person’s genes, making it inheritable, an epigenetic alteration of the expression of one's genes. Although it’s not yet clear if this is plausible, the idea of it—and maybe the idea of it is a kind of poetry more than it is a science—is that how stress from trauma is handled passes down through generations in this way. So maybe replication of past inequities, and their resultant stressors, in the present is inevitable as we all replicate our traumatized selves.
I know that many poets hunger for the time when we are back in small rooms with our audiences. Poets do spend a lot of time in small rooms. For me, Zoom, and the various other vehicles for virtual readings I have done events on—Crowdcast, Facebook Live, Gotomeeting, and Streamyard—have enlarged my reach geographically. Within six months of Dead Shark on the N Train’s release, I’m slated to do the number of events that took place over a two year period after my book, Drugstore Blue was released in 2017, and that’s without leaving my apartment. I’ve also had access to readings I would otherwise not have the opportunity to attend because of lack of proximity. So I rather like it. I do, however, miss seeing some of my poet friends in person. I wonder if hug-greetings will ever return?
In terms of what I’m working on now, I continue to write poems about girlhood, and I have been writing poems as well about the sixties, through which Charles Manson, and rock music from that period are threaded. Until recently, I thought these were separate projects, but I’ve come to realize that the two themes converge and that really what I am writing about is a loss of innocence. I have been reading Alexis Rhone Fancher, who writes with the kind of assertiveness as a woman I relate to—Junkie Wife and also The Dead Kid Poems. Jennifer Franklin is one of the strongest women I know and I would read her book No Small Gift, if you haven’t already. And I’d strongly recommend the male poet, Mervyn Taylor, a friend and fellow press-mate, who has News of the Living forthcoming soon from Broadstone Books, and also has just had his book Country of Warm Snow released by Shearsman Books. He is the best writer of narrative poetry of his generation.
Also, I’ve co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, forthcoming in 2022 from Milk and Cake Press.
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SUSANA H. CASE is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train in 2020 from Broadstone Books. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an IPPY Award in 2019. She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Poems by Case have appeared in Calyx, Catamaran, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, RHINO and many other journals. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City. She can be reached at www.susanahcase.com. Dead Shark on the N Train can be purchased directly from the publisher here.
Susana H. Case. Dead Shark on the N Train. Frankfurt, KY: Broadstone Books, 2020. 85 pages.
