Loading summary
Transcript75 lines
- [00:01]
Sponsor Announcer
This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Taxes was waiting to get your money back, which turned into worrying about getting your money back. Now taxes is matching with a TurboTax expert who can do your taxes today and help you get up to a $4,000 refund advance loan fast. Get an expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service refund has $0 loan fees and 0% APR refund advanced loans may be issued by a first century bank NA or we terms applies subject to credit approval. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [01:00]
Kevin Young
Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker Magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss. Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine today. My guest is Ray Armentrout, whose many books include Go Figure, Finalists, Conjure and Wobble. Her collection Versed, won a National Book Critics Circle award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Welcome, Ray. Thanks so much for being here.
- [01:34]
Ray Armentrout
Hi, Kevin. Nice to be here.
- [01:36]
Kevin Young
So the first poem you've chosen to read is Mother by Dorothea Laski. What drew you to this particular poem while you were perusing the archives?
- [01:44]
Ray Armentrout
It seems so simple in a way, but it's not. It's got very simple language, and yet it's a kind of riddle, so I wanted to come back to it.
- [01:56]
Kevin Young
Well, let's listen to the poem. This is Ray Armentrout reading Mother by Dorothea Laski.
- [02:04]
Ray Armentrout
Mother Mother, I went in the rose garden in the middle of the night to find the things I lost there. Mother, I searched for you for seven nights and could not find you. They left your perfume everywhere, a kind of toying aspect, and scratched your picture with their talons. I replaced it despite their anger and still got up in the morning to feed the babies their first meal. Mother, I wore a lilac dress and stepped through the thistle. The alligators had already overtaken the endless landscape. Your body was somewhere there and it was my job to bury it in my head. Your voice rang out with the strangest aroma. The gods had left you in the rose garden. Mother, I went in before dawn to find you. I didn't know they left so many noxious animals there to hurt me. Terrible fear upon fear, Mother, I was motherless, so I became myself. Finally I wandered in the endless garden to find something I had lost. When I finally gave up, Mother, the roses, they overtook me. I filled with vines and lead. I waited 200 years, Mother. I waited there forever searching and searching, Mother, until they let you in again.
- [03:32]
Kevin Young
That was Mother by Dorothea Laski, which was published in the October 21, 2024 issue of the New Yorker. I was struck hearing it from you, so well read about the world in which the poem takes place. Is it the world of dream for you? Is it the world of myth? Is it the world of grief? How did you approach it?
- [03:53]
Ray Armentrout
All three? That's exactly what I was going to say. It has one foot in the daily life of a woman who's got to get up and feed her babies. Although how many babies are there? That was a. Something that stopped me for a minute. And one foot. In fairy tale or myth, it's a kind of classic quest, I guess. The hero goes to find or to rescue someone, often a maiden or, you know, maybe his father. But in this case, a woman is going supposedly to rescue her mother. But it gets strange from there, right? It's strange because it's a dream or strange for some other reason. It's got the sort of almost generic standard language of myth and fairy tale. You know, she looks for seven nights, Mother, I searched for you for seven nights. And it's got the dangerous animals. And the roses are scratching her with their talons, though, which makes them sound like raptors. So she's encountering these dangers as she walks through the rose garden. All of the images are. I don't know, they're almost standard. And yet the poem is so unstandard. I think that's what really drew me to it, is, you know, if someone told me, okay, here's a poem about mothers and roses, I would think Hallmark card, but it's really anything but that. One thing that puzzles me in an interesting way, and you can give me your take on it, of course, is that everything is so plural. I mean, you know, except for perhaps the speaker herself. But everything else, you know, the babies and the they. I mean, the they is very mysterious. This they who somehow put the animals in the garden. And at one point it says gods, but, you know, that's only touched on once. Gods, too, of course, is plural, but there's a more mysterious they that are just dropping things here. And the animals, of course, are plural. And also the language is often quite repetitious. Searching and searching. And there's the place where it says, terrible fear upon fear. Mother, I was motherless. So I guess that's part of the way that she creates the sense of being lost. Is that there's all of this repetition and this doubling. So it's like a maze.
- [06:45]
Kevin Young
Oh, I love that. It's also kind of like an incantation in that way. It's repeating. Another way to hear it is as a kind of wish. Mother, I went to. And we haven't spoken of this address to the mother. Mother, I searched for you for seven nights and could not find you. This urgent kind of letter, missive, plea, even prayer to the mother who is kind of Mother Earth, Mother God, all these kind of things. The beloved more. And I think there's something really powerful about that. How do you think about this sort of waiting that happens at the end?
- [07:27]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah, I love the end. It is when she's given up that there. Which is a sort of sad and frightening moment. But after she gives up Mother, they let you in again. I mean, so it's a mystery. I don't know whether actually the mother, as you were saying, the Mother God or the Mother Earth, is coming back now that she is herself part of the garden. I also thought, although this is probably an eccentric reading. I thought of Eve and the Garden of Eden and being thrown out and then maybe being able to come back in again.
- [08:04]
Kevin Young
Well, there's a kind of metaphor of that. Paradise Lost, of course, in the whole poem. And I think this letting the. They. It's somewhat. The gods. It's somewhat, you know, death and life. All the big things are there without having to name them in that same simple way. I think it wouldn't be, obviously as powerful as I was dreaming the other night, you know, or if it somehow didn't have this mystery, which I think is a great part of its power. And I think a lot about mystery. And I don't know how you approach it, but I think it's one of those things that, for me, I almost crave more and more of lately. I think that so much of our language is so assured, maybe wrongly even, but here we're able to have your perfume everywhere. A kind of toying aspect. You know, there's a kind of playfulness, which. Because it isn't all one tone. I feel like the tone shifts. And in that way it's both mysterious and kind of pleasurable. Even as it's describing pain.
- [09:17]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah. Toying, as in being toyed with. But also, you know, as in toys, which are something you can play with and something that you might have done with your mother when you were young. One thing, again, that interests me about it is how it goes against so many of the rules, if you will, that students are taught when they learn or when they supposedly learn how to write poetry. I mean, a teacher would perhaps say, well, what kind of animal?
- [09:51]
Kevin Young
You know?
- [09:51]
Ray Armentrout
Well, we do hear it's an alligator. But an alligator seems kind of off, right? And then so many noxious animals. Well, noxious is not something an animal is. The animals are venomous or they're dangerous. They're not noxious. So this is not a criticism. It's just that there's. It's a little askew from the narrative that it's telling. I mean, and all the time there's this estrangement or defamiliarization. You think that you're going to get maybe a version of a quest narrative, except with a female hero heroine, and you do. But I think maybe she's using these slightly off words like noxious or toying instead of maybe cloying or whatever words that you don't expect at all and that don't quite fit. I think she's using that so that we don't forget that we're in a poem. That we don't start thinking that we are actually in some kind of standard hero quest. We're in it, but we're not in it, if you know what I mean. It's kind of like a metanarrative or narrative, Right.
- [11:04]
Kevin Young
I think of it as that lyric urgency that isn't afraid of the unexpected, of the kind of slippages that I think are part of language, but which is to say, part of experience. Mother, I wore a lilac dress and stepped through the thistle. The alligators had already overtaken the endless landscape. Your body was somewhere there, and it was my job to bury it. That feels so urgent to me. And if they were, I don't know, something more expected, I don't think. The predatory urgent, that weird duty that one finds in grief. When my father died, I wrote about this. I had this compelling need to get all of his stuff from the dry cleaner. And it was a kind of way to try to make him whole, I think. And there's something here about that that isn't about biography, but is about the personal lyric self that in some ways we share and in some ways we don't. That's what I love about this poem, is that it's so particular in its grief, let's say. But also. So I feel it.
- [12:26]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah. Yeah. It's the rhythm, partly. I think the rhythm is very emphatic.
- [12:31]
Kevin Young
Yes.
- [12:32]
Ray Armentrout
I could hear that when you were reading it. And I just naturally did it when I was reading it, perhaps because of the repetitions.
- [12:39]
Kevin Young
Right. Do you hear it kind of breathless? It has no punctuation.
- [12:43]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah, I noticed that.
- [12:45]
Kevin Young
Yeah. And how do you hear that? Is that something you hear a particular way or is it different in every poem?
- [12:52]
Ray Armentrout
It helps you read through the line instead of pausing at the end of a line. I mean, I tend to give a little pause at the end of a line when I read. But since there's no punctuation, this just gets rolling and it rolls in a good way.
- [13:09]
Kevin Young
Yeah. You know, and as you were talking about students earlier, I find that sometimes people end up using. What they want is a kind of rhythm like this, which I think is so natural, but also, as you said, unexpected. And sometimes they end up in a kind of sameness or a not useful oddness maybe. I don't know.
- [13:29]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah.
- [13:30]
Kevin Young
They could learn a lot from looking at a poem that gives us that kind of breath, but also breathlessness. It gives us a sense of time, but also kind of timelessness for me. And some of that's the imagery you mentioned. A rose is a rose is a rose. But then also it has alligators and noxious animals, as you said. And I think that moment toward the end, mother of the roses, they overtook me. I filled with vines and lead. I waited 200 years. It says something about the sorrows that can come for all of us that I think is really powerful. I really admire how it manages to evoke and not describe. It's in the garden and we're in the garden with the speaker.
- [14:22]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah. That's a really good way to put it. I was trying to get to that. I think when I was talking about the simplicity of the language, that it really doesn't describe to a sort of surprising degree. It doesn't describe. It just kind of puts you right there. And it has this forward pressure.
- [14:41]
Kevin Young
Yeah. Well, one of the things I wonder about the poem is this address question. Do you think of it as a love poem?
- [14:50]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like she does miss her mother, but it's also interesting that she makes it very clear that she, too, is a mother. So I get this feeling of generations of mothers, maybe all the way back to Eve or Lucy in some kind of endless search for the mother. I think that's One thing that really stuck with me is that she creates a kind of sense of. Of timelessness, you know, of time, of huge time. She searched forever, right? She says 200 years. So that's this attempt to be specific. But then Mother, I waited there forever, searching and searching. I think it's interesting that she's waiting and searching at the same time.
- [15:41]
Kevin Young
Sure.
- [15:42]
Ray Armentrout
So perhaps unlike the standard male hero who would be, you know, hitting those rose bushes with a sword and knocking them out of the way, she is overtaken and waiting. But in the end, perhaps her waiting is what allows Mother to come back in again, to be, you know, permitted back. And I don't know whether that is her mother, her memory of her mother, or whether now she is the mother because she finds herself. Right? She said that she found herself and then mother, they let you in again. So maybe she's the mother now.
- [16:21]
Kevin Young
I love that idea. That's well said. And she not only finds herself, she became myself finally.
- [16:28]
Ray Armentrout
Oh, yeah.
- [16:28]
Kevin Young
And there's a kind of sense of this search for the mother. And it isn't about the finding, it's about the search that lets one become oneself. And I love that idea. And you put it so well.
- [16:43]
Ray Armentrout
Thank you.
- [16:48]
Kevin Young
More from my conversation with Ray Armentrout after the break.
- [17:05]
David Remnick
I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters in print or here on the podcast. The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [17:32]
eBay Announcer
When your love for sneakers has you chasing limited editions, classics and rare finds, go to ebay, score your Once in a Blue Moon pair and check off your wish list for those fresh kicks. Get authentic streetwear and expert verified accessories. Think timeless watches, vintage designer bags, and more jewelry than you can wear. Ebay the new place for new pre loved vintage and rare fashion. Yeah, ebay Things people love.
- [18:03]
Kevin Young
Now. In our October 24, 2022 issue, the new Yorker published your poem finally, which we'll hear you read momentarily. Did you want to tell us anything about the poem first before you read it?
- [18:16]
Ray Armentrout
Well, the reason that I chose it, and I want to say first of all that I chose these poems very quickly. I was asked to choose two poems and I just looked at the first page of poems and I went, oh, Mother, definitely. And finally those two are going to go Together. And it was kind of instinctive. But then when I really sat down and thought about it, I realized that finally and Mother have things in common. They both are about an intimate, maybe family, relationship, and they both are narratives that are sort of aligned with a kind of standard genre. But then a half note off from it too. And finally it suggests it makes gestures as if it were perhaps a kind of castaway shipwreck story in the beginning, at least, or these people are stranded perhaps in a floodplain and there's this debris around of various objects, or they're disaster survivors. So it seems like it might be that kind of narrative, but I'm always kind of backing away from that at the same time by putting it all in the negative. Not afterglow, not the last word, not really a floodplain and not quite water. So it's all put kind of under erasure or in the negative, while at the same time it's telling a story. So it's trying to develop the story while saying not quite this. And there's something about that that reminded me of the way Dorothy Elaski in Mother is giving us a kind of quest narrative, but it's not the usual one. She's a half, like I said, a sort of quarter turn off from the standard fairy tale quest narrative. And this is at least a quarter turn off from the narrative and the metaphor, if you will, that it's presenting.
- [20:26]
Kevin Young
Here's Ray Armentrout reading her poem Finally.
- [20:32]
Ray Armentrout
Finally, not afterglow, not the last word. Still, they were able to more or less enjoy the feeling of being washed up together on what was not really a floodplain from which the not quite water had receded, leaving a large number of more or less interesting artifacts which they had learned appeared to them differently. So that what she saw as a large wooden radio he saw as a fireplace mantel, and what she saw as self sufficiency, he saw as strangulation. In past times they had fought bitterly about what things were, what they should or should not be. Now they tried to guess what the other would call any object they spotted. They had come to find failure hilarious and even faked it on some occasions.
- [21:36]
Kevin Young
That was Rae Amentrout reading her poem finally. Great to hear it in your voice. And I'm not sure I would have taken it the way you said with a sort of shipwreck. It felt for me at least a little like a marriage. Maybe it's the same thing.
- [21:55]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's what I'm saying. The shipwreck frame is just a frame. I mean, really, really, it is about a marriage. But it starts out with this metaphor, right?
- [22:04]
Kevin Young
Yes.
- [22:05]
Ray Armentrout
And then how much is it gonna commit to the metaphor? And I start, of course, being me, to be a little uncomfortable with the narrative and with the metaphor and try to have my cake and eat it, too. Have my metaphor and step away from it at the same time. But the stepping away lessens, I'd say, in the second half of the poem. And then it's more clear that this really is about a couple who have a long relationship and see things very differently. And like many couples, they've worked through this. I mean, when I say it this way, it sounds completely ordinary. Right. They've worked through this to the point where they even find their differences funny. I guess what I've done in the poem is exaggerated to such a degree that it does sound funny.
- [22:58]
Kevin Young
Well, I think the title helps us. You know, we start with finally, which is both a kind of giving up, almost like finally when someone says something like that, almost sarcastically. But then at the same time, it's also at the end. And it starts with the end, not afterglow, not the last word. These are final things, or after things that I think you manage to evoke right away, which I think is really great. It manages to talk about the pleasures, I would say, of a long relationship and the ways that it isn't about afterglow or winning, the last words say. But it's still. They were able to more or less enjoy the feeling of being washed up together.
- [23:48]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I guess I had written that pretty directly about a relationship until I got to washed up.
- [23:57]
Kevin Young
Well, and I love that phrase, washed up because it means something different in different contexts.
- [24:01]
Ray Armentrout
Exactly.
- [24:01]
Kevin Young
You know, here it is washed up at the end. Well, we're all washed up. And then. Yet it's also this idea, as you know, of being stranded.
- [24:10]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah. And then once I had washed, that was the suggestion of water. And from there I went to floodplain, and I went to not quite water. And yet, even though it's only not quite water, it still does what water does. It recedes and it leaves objects behind after it's receded. So it sounds a little bit like perhaps a tidal wave or something like that. When I started writing the poem, I had not intended that at all. I mean, I just started thinking about my marriage, actually, of course, and writing these words. And then when I got to washed, I just, you know, went into this metaphor. But at the same time that I go into the metaphor. I'm kind of hinting all the time that the metaphor is to be taken seriously and yet at the same time, not taken too seriously.
- [25:03]
Kevin Young
Sure. At the same time, it has a sense of humor that I think a lot of your work has. And I wonder how aware you are of that. And how do you approach humor? Is it something that comes up? Is it fight it as you might? You can't help but find failure hilarious and even fake it on some occasions. How do you approach it?
- [25:23]
Ray Armentrout
I mean, of course that ending is somewhat exaggerated, but I think that's what makes it funny. And of course, the fact that faking it within a marriage usually has to do with sex. Right. So when I say they had come to find failure hilarious and even faked it on some occasions, I think probably when you think of a couple and perhaps faking it, one thing you might think is faking orgasm, One thing you might think is faking that they are happy or that they're having a good time.
- [25:58]
Kevin Young
Sure.
- [25:58]
Ray Armentrout
And those are the kinds of things that you normally would not find hilarious. But this couple has been together so long, it's kind of like Dorothy Elaski's 200 years. They've been together so long that even these things that are usually very serious things, could be seen with humor.
- [26:22]
Kevin Young
Yeah. I was gonna ask you, is this a love poem? Well, yeah, of course. Maybe the first answer, I guess what makes it to me is that the best love poems, like the best love songs, they have a little sadness in them, or they admit fault, or they're not like all roses, to use a metaphor.
- [26:42]
Ray Armentrout
Right. Well, no long relationship is all roses. And that's what I meant was that I might as well, I guess, in the poem exaggerate their differences. I mean, it's, you know, one thing to think a fireplace mantle is a radio. That's pretty strange. But thinking that self sufficiency is strangulation, well, that's even weirder. So their differences are blown up in the poem, and then even those differences they have come to accept and laugh about.
- [27:15]
Kevin Young
Well, one question I had is about poetry itself. Is this describing poetry as well? Is it a kind of ars poetica, which is to say a poem about poetry?
- [27:28]
Ray Armentrout
Partly. I didn't set out to write an ars poetica, but then, you know, you often do things that you didn't set out to do.
- [27:35]
Kevin Young
I mean, thank goodness. And also, how strange, you know, but.
- [27:39]
Ray Armentrout
It'S true, with all its teasing about metaphor and whether the speaker is going to commit to the metaphor or not keeps the device foregrounded keeps the fact that this is a poem and the writer is speaking to you keeps that in mind and that I could decide to say anything next. The poem could go anywhere and sometimes does. I. E goes to strangulation or, you know, and then passed it into laughing. And so it keeps the fact that you're listening to someone making things up front and center.
- [28:16]
Kevin Young
Well, and also, to my mind, has this idea of guessing what the other would call any object they spotted and making a kind of attempt to recognize a name which is at the heart of poetry. And we were talking about Eve earlier, and in a way, this couple is a kind of primal, paradisical couple who are washed up together in a kind of Eden of artifacts and a modern Eden that is a little rough around the edges. And I think there's something beautiful about that that I also would say might speak to poetry and certainly your poetry and its ability to find these things either hilarious or meaningful, but also to. To let things be what they were.
- [29:03]
Ray Armentrout
Yeah, I think that instead of a paradise at the beginning, a sort of Adam and Eve couple, maybe this is after something we don't really know after what? I mean, after a long and perhaps difficult relationship. After, if you follow the metaphor, after some kind of disaster. After they've collected a whole lot of objects that are now strewn around on the ground, apparently.
- [29:29]
Sponsor Announcer
Right.
- [29:30]
Ray Armentrout
So they are still together. But they are. Well, it says not afterglow, not the last words. So we're in that, I guess, realm where you might want to say last words. They're an end of the line sort of couple. They're the other end of history. Maybe not at the beginning in the first paradise.
- [29:50]
Kevin Young
So well said and so well done in this poem. Well, Ray, thank you so much for talking with me today.
- [29:56]
Ray Armentrout
It was fun.
- [29:57]
Kevin Young
It's been a real pleasure. Finally by Ray Armentrout as well as Dorothea Laski's mother, can be found on newyorker.com Dorothea Laski Most recently published the poetry collection the Shining. Ray Armentrout's latest book is Go Figure.
- [30:16]
Chloe Prosinos
You may subscribe to this podcast, the fiction podcast, the Writer's Voice podcast, and the Politics and More podcast by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast podcast app, you can hear more poetry read by the authors on new yorker.com and the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is the Corner by Chief Zion Otunde Ajua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope a Dope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Chloe Prosinos, with help from Hannah Eisenman.
- [30:58]
Deborah Treisman
Hi, I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of the New Yorker. Each week on the Writer's Voice podcast, New Yorker fiction writers read their newly published stories from the magazine. You can hear from authors like Colson Whitehead.
- [31:11]
David Remnick
Turner nudged Elwood, who had a look.
- [31:13]
Kevin Young
Of horror on his face. They saw it. Griff wasn't going down. He was going to go for it. No matter what happened after.
- [31:23]
Deborah Treisman
Or Joy Williams, her father, was silent. Slowly, he passed his hand over his hair. This usually meant that he was traveling to a place immune to her presence, a place that indeed contradicted her presence. She might as well go to lunch, listen to news stories, or dive into our archive of great fiction. You can find the work of your favorite fiction writers and discover new ones. Listen and follow the Writer's Voice wherever you get your podcasts.
- [32:01]
David Remnick
From PRX.