Holding Spaces
A conversation between Suzannah V Evans and Madeleine Kruhly
Suzannah V Evans, Madeleine Kruhly
Suzannah V Evans: I want to start by asking you about titles – the title of your collection as well as how individual poem titles function in the book. To my father, now dead in room 318 is a striking – almost shocking – title. The comma (and the way the title is laid out on the book cover) cleaves the title in two so that we really feel the gulf between those two statements. You’re also expert in running a title into the body of a poem, as in ‘I SHOULD STOP SLAPPING MY THIGHS’ (which runs on to ‘or maybe everyone should start’) and ‘YOUR FATHER KEEPS TALKING ABOUT DYING’ (which continues ‘in a room he’s rented’). Could you talk a little bit about your process for titles? Do these appear before the poem or afterwards? How do you feel your titles interact with the text of the poems? And do you – can you – edit a title in the way that you might edit a poem?
Madeleine Kruhly: I love sharing little secrets, which probably means no one should tell me anything after this. But for the title of the collection – it was actually the title of a poem. My publisher read that poem, and he, very gently, said, ‘I think this is a poem you had to write.’ I took that to mean, ‘This poem is not the one.’ He suggested that we take the title for the collection itself, which I thought was brilliant.
That title, I hope, has a duality that I wanted the collection to have: there’s a tenderness for sure, but it’s turned on its head. It’s undercut, sharply. I added ‘now’ to the title because I started writing this collection two or three days after my father died. It was so immediate for me, that loss, and I wanted it to feel immediate to readers too. I know we’ll get to rooms later (thank God!), but ‘room 318’ is also meant to ground the expression of death in specificity. Death is a real place that has a door with three numbers on it. But usually I don’t think of a title first. I rarely know where I’m going when I start a poem, and having a title, for me, makes the space to travel a little less open, a little more certain. The exceptions are poems like the ones you’ve quoted, where the title sentence bleeds out.
For my part, I’d love to ask you about the cover of your book, as a way into its visual art. Why did you choose to have this painting on the cover? What does it promise, signify? The title, Under the Blue, and Howard Hodgkin’s painting, with its broad blue brushstrokes, have an obvious connection. What does the colour blue hold for you?
SVE: I love what you say about titles; that sense of the title ‘bleed[ing] out’ reminds me of the decision process for titling my poem ‘Red Crab’, where the title feels almost ekphrastic to me. At the end of that poem, one of the people in it has a toe that’s cut from a rock. As I was writing it I was picturing blood, even though that’s not written into the poem, and so there’s a kind of visual loop where the colour red begins and ends the poem.
As for Hodgkin’s Water, I’m extremely drawn to the way that it both is and isn’t representational. It’s not a smooth or typically beautiful image of water, and without the title you maybe wouldn’t even think of it as water – it might just look like paint strokes or movement. Those strokes might put the viewer in mind of swimming, but they also draw attention to themselves as paint: that emphasis on form and process is interesting to me. I’m also inspired by the energy and messiness of the work. I love how the paint joyously and defiantly spills across the wooden frame, almost in imitation of how water doesn’t recognise boundaries or demarcations. That overspill and dynamism feel true in caregiving: how care might shift or defy boundaries such as those between day and night. Hodgkin’s brushstrokes are free and slightly chaotic, but they also feel completely alive – you can sense the movement of the hand and the body that made them. Caregiving is also extremely physical, and I wanted the poems in the book to be alert to the body and motion in that way.
The colour blue has always held a strong resonance for me, perhaps because I’m so drawn to water. I remember seeing one of Yves Klein’s monochrome paintings for the first time and being utterly, unexpectedly blown away by the sheer joy and intensity of the colour, and then noticing all the ways the deep blue interacted with the surface of the canvas. For Under the Blue, it pleases me that the title of the book appears under Hodgkin’s wonderful blue, and it also feels like a nod to the postcard form that some of the poems take, in the way that a postcard combines text and image.
But thinking about ideas of overspill and containment, perhaps we could talk more about how form works in your collection. You intersperse line-broken poems with shorter prose poems in your book. What was it about your subject matter that made prose poetry feel like a fitting form? Is there anything about overspill here – a sense of grief pushing beyond usual limits? Also, you have a real kinship with tercets. Is that an element of form you reach for?
MK: I didn’t realise writing tercets was my thing! Not until you said it. But it makes sense: I have obsessive compulsive disorder, and three is a number I repeat often in my compulsions. Writing with OCD is like showing off the weirdest bag of tricks.
In terms of form, prose poetry is pretty new to me. When I first started writing, I only ever used one form – very thin columns on the page with very short, sharp line breaks. Maybe I tried that approach because it felt the most poetic to me, maybe I loved the harshness of it and how the blank space overwhelmed. It’s likely OCD came into play, too.
I still return to that form, but the prose poetry really came into play after my dad died. When the grief hit, I needed it because – and I think this connects back to your concept of ‘overspill’ – the prose poem felt more like a contained unit. It almost feels like I have more control over prose poems than I do line-broken poems. The latter sometimes move in ways I don’t fully understand.
What about poetic form and prose(ish) poetry for you? I say ‘ish’ because I’m not sure I know how to define a prose poem. I’d love to hear how you might describe one. And then – how do paintings or photographs relate to your chosen forms, particularly the postcard poems? They are a series of poems, titled Postcards from Jasper Street, which describe the day-to-day life of the speaker and examine the relationships around them.
SVE: I’m fascinated by what you say about the prose poem as containment, as to me it feels the opposite – very unruly! Although I suppose the margins of the page are a container, and then prose poems look like little rooms on the page (the word ‘stanza’ from the Italian for a stopping place or room) and rooms contain things. Prose poetry is often defined in terms of lack, in that if you strip everything back, what a prose poem doesn’t have is line breaks. My poem ‘Coffee’ plays with this. There’s a physical turn and return in the poem which gestures to the fact that there aren’t those turns at the line end in a prose poem (the word ‘verse’ meaning ‘to turn’). In the poem, a waiter arrives with two coffees, stumbles with the tray, throws the coffee into the air, turns around to leave, and then returns with a replacement coffee. The turns are bodily rather than within the lines of the poem. There’s also ‘Postcard with a Turn’, which features a ‘wrong’ kind of turn – a medical ‘turn’ rather than a poetic one. So there’s a sense of poetry itself not acting as expected, in the way that a body can also judder or stumble or fall. And yet there’s momentum there. Where the emphasis in line-broken poetry is on the line, prose poetry shifts the unit of attention to the sentence. There’s a forward momentum through the sentence.
Postcards usually have an image on the front, and when you flip the postcard over, there’s a square block of text addressed to someone. The prose form of the poems imitates that square block. And then again in the sense that it contains both text and artwork. For example, ‘Postcard with L’ conjures Odilon Redon’s Madame Arthur Fontaine (1901); if the poem were a physical postcard instead of a literary one, it would have that artwork on the reverse side of the text. The ekphrastic moments in the collection also gesture to how life and art fit together. There are my own memories interwoven there, like coming home from school to clay on the table, because my mum taught art in a primary school. And I feel like visual art saves me all the time: to know the work of artists who’ve been so creative for their whole lives. But it’s also about bringing the attention that you might give to an artwork and putting that on your life, so that you can look at very ordinary moments with the kind of reverence you might reserve for a work of art.
Moving from visual art back to words, I want to ask you about the epigraph to your collection, which is an Anne Carson quotation: ‘You remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. // Why hold onto all that? And I said, / Where can I put it down?’ I felt a resonance with the Annie Ernaux quotation that opens the second part of Under the Blue – about memory being a form of knowledge. So I wanted to ask you about the role of memory in your book. Could you consider the poems to be ‘holding spaces’, allowing the speaker to set down or explore memories that can’t otherwise be put down?
MK: I’m obsessed with memory. Everything about it. I’m particularly interested in the memories shared by family, for family. At the core of almost every poem in my collection is a memory. It could be small, like the chicken salad my aunt bought. Or it could be immense, like the way my brother’s chin moved when he got the call that our father had died. But one thing I remind myself and my family is that these memories are not ‘perfect’, intentionally or unintentionally. They’re faulty; they’ve been stretched and abstracted and embellished. And I think even just saying this now, maybe that’s a way to protect myself and the people I love from the harder parts of the book. Because if I say that memory is faulty, if I say it’s imperfect, or that I’ve done something to change the meaning of the memory – or maybe not the meaning, but the details – that saves readers from being too close to what happened in those memories. That metaphorical distance is a ‘holding space’.
The body is a ‘holding space’ too. I think people think I’m in love with the body – there are hearts and arms and legs everywhere in this book. But actually, I fear it. I find it an enormously sharp thing. That’s why I write so much about it, because I feel the tension it holds. And I think I feel this tension because there was a physicality to my father that I’m still coming to terms with: to a child, a father can be enormous. Just from that small body’s perspective, which is the perspective the speaker in my book remembers. My father was larger, his temper was larger, than I was – or will be.
Let’s move on to names. I’m interested in how you name people in your poems. You often use an initial, or the more general ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘sister’ – except for ‘Laura’. I’m thinking specifically of ‘Letter to Laura’: ‘I cast your name tonight’. What’s the importance of a name? Are names ‘holding spaces’ for you, Suzannah?
SVE: Names hold an immense power for me, so much so that I often use nicknames for people that I love rather than their actual name. There’s a quotation from Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray that I hold playfully in the back of my mind:
Oh, I can’t explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
It’s tongue-in-cheek, but there’s something about the power of a name and a desire to be protective of that – the shielding of the privacy of the name. (And now I’m thinking about T S Eliot’s ‘The Naming of Cats’ where he insists that ‘a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES’, one of which is known only to the cat.) On the flip side, there can be real joy in flinging a name into the world (like Dylan Thomas picturing birds ‘flying my name’ in his ‘Poem in October’). In the poem for Laura, one of the things that makes it intense is the very strong, shining resonance of repeating that name, so that it’s like an incantation or charm. And then there are different name games across the poems – bringing in the artist Laura Knight, or playing with initials in ‘Postcard with Textiles’ – which are influenced by my reading of French writers such as Francis Ponge and Jules Laforgue.
I would like to turn more explicitly now to rooms, which have their own kind of privacy. One thing I noticed as I was reading To my father, now dead in room 318 is how many rooms feature in the collection, including in the title. At one point, the speaker wishes to ‘make one thing of my body – a room’ [‘BURYING YOURSELF IS NEVER PERFECT’]. The next poem ‘EVERY MINUTE’S CRUCIAL IN A FIRE’ wishes the room goodnight (which I love!) – ‘Goodnight / good room.’ Poems unfold in bathrooms and kitchens. What is the importance of rooms in your collection?
MK: I love this question, and I think I’ll tie it back to our chat about memory, because place is so integral to memory for me. If I remember a feeling or an experience, I remember exactly where I was, I remember the setting. I have to be in that setting. There are clear roots to this, I think. My parents divorced when I was very young, so I grew up in two different homes. My dad was an architect, and he built the house we lived in after the divorce. It was modelled after a lofted barn. There was essentially one big room, one communal space. There was nowhere to hide, from both the joy and the anger. It’s probably why rooms are so important to me now – because they mean privacy, they mean peace. They never used to. But now I’ll say something truly terrifying: I don’t know what happens if I go outside. I don’t know where my poetry goes if it’s not in a room.
I’d like to ask about the different spaces in your collection. For the first set of poems, I felt like I was being rocked in and out of the scene from different angles. And it feels like time is out of order, but you always have a sense of the sea. The sea is your rock. The second set of poems are more interior. They’re postcards, but they could almost read like diary entries with the time/date stamp. What is the relationship between these spaces? Why is it important for the speaker to record and preserve these scenes?
SVE: There are lots of doublings in Under the Blue. I was writing about the aesthetics of clowning in the poetry of Jules Laforgue at the time, and thinking about the image of a clown who might frown through a painted smile. The ecstasy and horror of the opening Baudelaire epigraph is another kind of doubling. And then the two main spaces in the book, in a way, are ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The inside poems tend to be the ones which are more obviously focused on care, whilst the outside poems contain what I think of as two of the main characters in the book, a field and the sea. The writing took place in the early stages of the pandemic, and whilst I didn’t write explicitly about the effects of COVID-19 there are undercurrents in that division between inside and outside.
As for diaries, that’s a form that is very lightly present in the book, in the sense that it’s referencing this private way of writing which has been neglected through its association with women and domesticity. So the Baudelaire epigraph is actually from his journal entries rather than his poetry. And: ‘The sea is your rock’. That’s brilliantly poetic! I don’t think I can express it better than that. As for preserving certain scenes, poetry can let you hold on to moments and save them from the slippage or wreckage of time.
Thinking about time being out of order in poetry collections, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about your process for collating and ordering your collection. Do you have a sense of how you would like the reader to move through this work? Is it important to you that it’s read in the order that the poems are presented, or can the reader get as much from dipping in and selecting poems by flicking through the pages?
MK: I’m thinking now about the sense of time during care. When my father was really sick at the end of his life, it felt like there was no time at all, and yet we were watching every minute of the clock. I wish I could ask him what he thinks of that.
You asked me how the collection is ordered. Like you, I didn’t want a chronological order. I wanted readers to be able to go in and out – because you know what’s going to happen, right? There’s no plot twist. You’ll be reading about grief and death and loss. You’ll be reading about a father, in the immediate. And you’ll be reading about him in one room (or many, many rooms).
I wonder, Suzannah, if we could close by talking about the repetitive processes of care. How do those processes relate to language for you?
SVE: Going back to the idea of waves, it’s like how each one is the same but each one is different. You might know how to get through this one, but this one has more surf, or the next one has a kind of spin to it, or you haven’t caught your breath between waves. And care can be extraordinarily repetitive, with routines that might involve multiple people working together. Everyone has to be attuned to each other and ready to enact certain motions at the same time. So language structures and holds that situation, cueing you to action with repetitive phrases. And then there are moments when language and meaning seem to become untied. There’s a lot of repetitive talk in the book for that reason (as in ‘Postcard with a Fuck-Up’), and to me the book is absolutely about talking and not talking: how we do or don’t talk about care, and how it’s hard to talk about care, and how you have to talk about care in the moment of doing it.
Madeleine Kruhly is a poet and editor from Radnor, Pennsylvania. To my father, now dead in room 318, published by Out-Spoken Press, is her debut collection.
