An Interview with Kim Garcia
Sean Keck
Epicenters editor Sean Keck caught up with contributing poet Kim Garcia to discuss her new book, Madonna Magdalene, and the importance of finding poetry in the silent spaces between words and in life’s seams.About Kim Garcia’s Madonna Magdalene:
Madonna Magdalene is a meditation on love expressed in the figures of both the Madonna and the Magdalene. The book begins with a quote from Hildegard of Bingen: “when the virgin’s mind was illuminated in God’s mystic mysteries, then wonderfully, a bright flower came out of her.” Madonna Magdalene considers what it means for the mind to be illuminated and what bright flowers arise from desire and consent. Madonna Magdalene was published by Turning Point Books in October of 2006.
SK: Describe the importance of silence to your personal development as a writer.
KG: When I teach poetry, I always emphasize that language comes out of silence and returns to silence. I don’t mind sounding a little mystical for poetry’s sake (laughs). I think students like to hear something strange and mysterious every once in a while. We’re such rationalists. That statement has many levels of meaning, but I’d simply say that sound changes the silence all around it, and that silence also changes the way language is heard. One of the things I love about poetry is that it’s very conscious about incorporating silence, and what I’d call tasting the air around those series of sounds we call language. This is what I’d call the musical side of poetry. There’s a tension between meaning and music. Music without silence is noise. This is also true of language, and poets try to be very conscious about how they are touching and drawing from the silence so that the language is both fit (in the sense of meaning) and beautiful.
In my own life, I’ve always had this incredible longing for silence, and that only increased when I had toddlers (laughs). So I used to go away whenever my husband could take care of the kids to Mt. Angel Abbey, which is off in the countryside in Oregon. The guest master used to give me a room with a desk and a bed and a little bathroom. He might as well have written “writer’s paradise” over the doorway. I could go to services, that is, listen to the monks chant the psalms, but mostly there was this great silence.
I used to sit with one of the monks in contemplative prayer and while most of what I experienced was my own chatty little mind, there was also this stillness that did its own work. It felt like pebbles being overturned in my psyche at a level deeper than thought.
There are moments in great poems or maybe even lesser poems that can do that kind of work. I think it’s because of the combined force of music and meaning opening up a silence you can hear in-between the words. Look at a poem on the page, look at all that white space. What happens at a line break? What happens at a stanza break? Taste how different the silence is after you’ve finished reading the poem. It’s like ringing a bell.
Sometimes when I’m talking with students about poems they are so focused on meaning and content, as though it were a list of instructions or a lecture, that the poem’s silence and music are unable to work on them. So they feel they can’t understand the poem. It always helps if they can go to a quiet place and get as still as they possibly can, and then read the poem aloud. Sing it in a way, feeling the silences all the way through, the specific music of each line.
SK: How do you translate what you have learned from your experiences with silence into the classroom when you teach creative writing?
KG: Mostly I try not to talk too much (laughs). The students need silence to absorb what’s being said to them; they need silence to hear the lines they are reading off the page and the lines that are formulating in their minds. Sometimes I actually bring in a bell and have them listen to the last audible vibration. It invites all of us to a kind of attentive stillness.
SK: Describe the “stereoscopic effect” of poetry.
KG: When I was researching Juliana of Norwich for a poem I thought I might write I ran into a quote by GK Chesterton about mystics: “he has permitted the twilight...he has always cared more for truth than for consistency... his spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight; he sees two different pictures at once, yet sees all the better for it.” And it chimed with something that I’d been talking about with my poetry students, which was the way in which poetry adds depth through the tension between the line as a unit (making sense of things from the beginning of the line to the line break) and the sentence as a unit (that is, from the first capital to the period). There is a pause at the line break, that silence we spoke about, where for a split second there’s nothing more, just white space, and the mind makes something of that fragment which might well be overturned before the thought is completed in the sentence. Some poems are only one sentence but several lines, so there is this little difference, like the world we see through our right eye and the world we see through our left eye. Together, they make depth perception, and as Chesterton says, we see all the better for that.
Since I’ve already raised Juliana of Norwich, let me steal a term from her, which is "one- ing," to talk further about the stereoscopic. She is speaking of God and the soul, but metaphor for me shares this mystical property of one-ing. A simile says “the leaves of bamboo are like knife blades.” Metaphor says “blades of bamboo.” For a moment the mind receives them as both true and one. The power of the provenance of knives—danger, sharpness, accuracy, edge—and that of leaves—new life, green, shoots, tenderness—are both present but they are felt as one. The skill of the poet is in making associations between images, seeing that this image relates to that one, that they could be even more intimate and become metaphor. It is this “one-ing” of metaphor that is the poet’s stereoscopic vision.
The third aspect of the stereoscopic that I find nourishing in poetry, and I’m afraid this is also going to sound a bit mystical (laughs), is something that I read just today in Gaston Bachelard. “Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge. This is the price that must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at all times, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creation an exercise in freedom.” I think this is true not only of the tradition and the discipline of poetry, but also of what people might call its message. One of the criticisms of a weak poem is often that it has nothing to say. But on the other hand, poetry is not really about messages, which are communicated much more effectively on bumpers tickers, billboards and certain kinds of essays, or maybe sermons. Poetry is an experience, and so the poet has to discover what the poem wants to say by this same strange mix of knowing and not knowing. This is what gives poetry its particular freshness. No one is lecturing to you or luring you as in an advertisement. Something has happened to you, just as it happened to the poet as the poem developed on the page. If we are being lulled by its beauty to listen, in a good poem we are also waking up. This is why I think that instead of asking “what does this poem mean?” or “what is this poet trying to say?” a more interesting question is “what just happened?” And in a good poem there will be tensions and paradoxes and contradictory sensations which create the unique depth of that stereoscopic vision. We have always needed and will always need poets to speak to us in this unique way.
SK: Prostitution is viewed by many as a degrading profession. How does the “Magdalene” element of your new work re-examine the role of the prostitute?
KG: When I speak of magdalenes in the context of this book I’m speaking of a particular type of suffering, which I see in all of us. There is this tendency to negotiate with love, to say I’ll give you this if you give me that because we don’t want to risk loving with our whole hearts.
The Madonna in my book is a figure for that part of ourselves that says yes to love, that says let it be done unto me in whatever way life wills. There’s great power in this. That’s what you hear in the Magnificat. The Madonna doesn’t say “Oh really, it was nothing, I didn’t really want to, He made me.” She says “Through me, and the power of my freely given consent, there’s going to be a revolution.”
I see these two ways of being as two responses to love that are constantly oscillating within us. One part of us says, “Yes, let the changes come,” and another part of us tries to hold life back and say, “Well, on these terms.”
SK: So then your interest in prostitution doesn’t have to do with sensuality or sex per se?
KG: No, the magdalenes haven’t cornered the market on that one (laughs). For me, sensuality and sexuality have to do with simply being awake in a body in a material world with sensual qualities in, as the Buddhists say, responding to life with life. If you ever want to see a beautifully erotic book, check out the Song of Solomon, which is traditionally read as poetry about the relationship between the soul and God. You’ll see these same issues in that book as well—the struggle to give one’s self when every fear says it would be safer to make some kind of transaction.
That all said, I don’t want to minimize some of the social pressures that create an atmosphere of negotiation between men and women and give rise to some of the social conditions which we can see being acted out daily around the globe. In the first section of my book I use a mixture of dramatic monologues and lyric poems to explore how difficult it is for two people to each make a gift of themselves to the other when their power is unequal.
Because of women’s gains in equality, some men are having the experience of being freely chosen, which is a wonderful, fragile opportunity. It’s something that is impossible under patriarchy, so it’s something that men and women have to fight for together, this miracle of giving ourselves freely and experiencing what its like to be freely chosen.
SK: I think you've already suggested how your take on the Madonna persona also breaks with popular perceptions and deals with the issue of negotiation, but could you say a bit more about the relationship between the maternal and the carnal?
KG: Well, I see having a child as a particularly joyful consequence of being in a body. When you see words like carnal and incarnation you are hearing flesh, meat, carne. For people who are more Gnostic minded than I am, this is the same as saying junk or trash but I don’t experience it that way. For me the material world is sacred. When I am at my best, I feel that. I had a chance to have one of my children at home, no drugs, no hospital, no distractions, and I wish I could say I was beatific throughout but the truth is I screamed like hell (laughs). But even though I felt like I was being run over by a tank, something profound came through me. I’m still taught by that experience. The physical intensity and the spiritual intensity were one, and the chattering mind got very quiet. Everything hurt but I was so far into the pain that I’d stopped even having concepts like hurt or pain or mind and there was this incredible stillness even inside the contractions, which is probably as close as I’ll ever come to rapture or enlightenment.
SK: A great deal of your new book was inspired by the solitude you encountered in monasteries. Following its release, you plan to give readings and hold workshops in monasteries. How closely do you see poetry being tied to isolation? Can our culture at large still sustain a poetic identity, or must this identity now be sought—as some might contend spirituality is now sought—on an increasingly individualized basis?
KG: I’d make a distinction between solitude and isolation. Neither poetry nor spirituality—if we mean by spirituality some of the old traditions like prayer and chanting—have any truck with isolation. The need for them arises out of the world and their natural flow is back to the world. It’s not a private enlightenment poetry is hoping for, it’s an intimate one. The most inward poem hopes that, to paraphrase Emerson, what is true in its innermost being is true for every soul. That said, it’s also true that one of the conditions of making poetry or pursuing certain spiritual disciplines on behalf of the world, is that you need a certain amount of solitude. There are all sorts of reasons for this given throughout the tradition. Some might say we need a certain distance from our experience; it needs to be recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth would say. I think it’s true that we need distance, but I think it’s distance from the ideas we have about what’s happened or what we’re feeling. I’d like to say that we invite solitude to set aside ideas or distractions that we try to use to soothe away our deepest passions and the claims of the world on us. It may be recollection, but it’s by no means tranquil. You have to welcome experience, let things happen to you on the page, going to the places that we as human beings tend to avoid, either because they’re too painful or because they’re too lovely.