There’s something commanding about Amanda Gunn’s poetry. When the poems speak, when their voice enters the room, all other sounds and distractions hush. Those opening lines of her prose poem, “Girl,” from Issue 19.2, for example – “A girl among boys is most ways alone. My brothers were mean, then sweet, then packed and gone” – makes me sit up straight, tilt my head forward, slightly, to hear better. I take a second to settle myself in my chair comfortably, for there is a storyteller in the house, and she is speaking. Something about the declarative mode, the directness, coupled with those rhythmic iambs coming in like a drumroll in that second sentence. Elements that add to, but do not fully constitute, that ineffable thing we call, in poetry, voice.

I’m happy to be able to share my conversation with Gunn about pleasure, perfume, gender performance, and reading, in addition to a larger selection of her poems. I think you’ll find, as I did, pleasure in the strands that hold the poems together as well as the range of Gunn’s interests and abilities. From food to love to racial injustice to gender to loss, Amanda Gunn’s poet’s eye traverses, her poet’s skin touches, her poet’s tongue tastes, her poet’s nose smells, her memory holds personal and collective history. As a reader of her poems, I meet not just another mind, but another body in the world, in all of its curious, earthy splendor.

—Sarah Rose Nordgren

Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is a poet, teacher, and doctoral candidate in English at Harvard where she works on poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, she worked as a medical copyeditor for 13 years. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and was the inaugural winner of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize honoring Jake Adam York. Her poems can be found in Poetry, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Baffler.

Poems:

“Girl” (from 32 Poems 19.2)
“The Last Day” (from 32 Poems 19.2)
“Look” (featured below)
“Household” (featured below)
“Elegy” (featured below)

Interview:

SRN: One of the aspects of your poems that I’m very drawn to is their interest in sensuality as a form of expression. In “Girl” I find this in the speaker’s exploration of the inherited nature of gender performance and the accoutrements of femininity. Elsewhere, the poems express sensuality through care for food. Can you speak a little about how you see sensuality showing up in your poetic life?

AG: In both my poetic work and my critical work I spend a lot of time thinking about pleasure. Often that pleasure is registered in the body and often it’s quick, ephemeral, and leaves a wake of longing. Sometimes it arises in my poems as the erotic, but there are other sensualities at play that also interest me. My personal obsessions tend to bubble up here–scent/perfume and food chief among them. It would be easy for me to riff on either of these subjects in a kind of porny way without context. But the sensuality of scent and food have an emotional reach that works backward, enlivened and complicated by things like family history. As an avid collector of perfume, I find myself attaching to fragrances that remind me of, say, of the clove scent on my grandmother’s sheets or maybe the particular smokiness of my Dad’s charcoal barbecue when I was a kid. And I can’t seem to write about food–Black southern delicacies or the Hungarian specialties of a dear friend–without writing about generations of women, their labors and creativity and the nourishment and pleasure they produced for everyone around them. In “Girl,” I wanted to access and celebrate the pleasures of femme self-expression but consider seriously the ways these pleasures butt up against a particular notion of respectability, reserve, and shame passed down generationally. In other words, to ask what or who gives us permission to take pleasure in things or acts?

SRN: I love that you’re a perfume collector, since smell is, I think, an underappreciated sense in American culture, and it’s also the sense that’s famously connected to memory. As you said, scent and food “have an emotional reach that works backward, enlivened and complicated by things like family history.” It also occurs to me that sensory pleasure is a basic glue of relationships with others as well as with the self. Could you talk a little about the relational aspect of pleasure in your work? I’m thinking particularly of your poem “Household,” how the “you” is ever present in the poem, but the speaker’s actions seem to be about building the self.

AG: Yes–perfume is high art in my opinion and deserves more respect for the craftsmanship that produces it, as well as its complexity and emotional power. In my last apartment I gave over my entire closet to house my collection–clothes be damned!

I love that you ask about the relational aspect of pleasure. I spend a lot of time thinking about pleasure that’s privately experienced, pleasure that comes to serve as a kind of refusal of the outside world. An individual can reclaim time, self, emotional clarity, etc, by taking pleasure in something no one else can access. I especially admire the way Toni Morrison explores this in the novel Beloved through, separately, Sethe and Denver (perfume comes up here, too). In my poems I bounce back and forth between the “I” experiencing pleasure in this state of refusal and pleasure shared–that is, pleasure as both a source and representation of affinity and love. In “Household,” I wanted to explore the moment after a household has been disbanded. This is a household built on affinity, love, and seemingly infinite shared meals, a place where generosity and sharing form the ethos. The “I” moves on to negotiate a new city and its pleasures for herself, really trying to make herself OK outside the world of the old household. But that household remains a kind of ghost.

SRN: Alongside the exploration of private vs. shared pleasure, I also see an interest in the privilege of pleasure vs. the lack of it, or perhaps also the relative effort required to find pleasure in certain times and places. I’m thinking of your poem “Look,” where the speaker compares Emmett Till to her own father who was born just the following year. I also think of “The Last Day,” and the value that simple pleasures acquire in dire circumstances. Both of these poems, in different ways, seem to point to pleasure (and perhaps safety and ease) as something to be appreciated in contrast with something else. Does this ring true?

AG: Oh, interesting! I hadn’t thought of “Look” in terms of pleasure but I think you’re right that pleasure is embedded in the poem. In this case, I think the speaker has an anxiety (or even terror) over the notion of her father’s youthful pleasures being policed. She envisions (and how can she not?) his enjoyment becoming suspect, becoming something to be controlled so long as the risk is death.

I wrote “The Last Day” for my former partner, a Hungarian from Transylvania who lived under Ceaușescu. I wanted to capture not just her experience of pleasure in contrast with, or animated by, suffering, but the way she reconceptualized suffering for her own spiritual survival. This was something she seemed to enact with every memory she conveyed to me. Even with the oppressive conditions she and her family lived under during those years, she refused to relinquish the surprisingly passable taste of chicken feet soup or the pleasure of riding her bike when petrol was so difficult to get. As an American who had grown up in comfort, with an almost completely unchallenged sense of deserving, I found her absolutely baffling. I loved her and I think I wanted her to be more angry for what I felt she was owed. But her understanding of these matters was so much more complex than mine, so much more nuanced. I don’t think the word owed was in her vocabulary.

SRN: How has your academic work at Harvard influenced or informed your poetry? What are you excited about in the work you’re creating now? What’s next for you, artistically?

AG: I think the influence has mostly been in the opposite direction. Poetry (writing) is a place I certainly feel more at ease, not just functionally but also in a way that feels bound with identity. Finding myself in the critical work has been harder. But once I figured out that the same obsessions that shape my poetry could find a home in my prose writing, then conceptualizing the dissertation became much easier. It was about giving myself permission to be a poet first and to say it’s OK to initiate the encounter with the text through craft. I’ve been very lucky to find advisors who understand and support this.

I will say that my academic work has made me more ambitious as a reader. It’s not revolutionary to say that to write well, you have to read, and that your poetry is only as emotionally and formally complex as the work you’re taking in. When I’m stuck recycling the same old formal choices to frame new kinds of material, nothing rescues me like other poetry. That’s the fix. That feeling of having to put the book down so you can hurry to the blank page–it’s joyful and it’s well known to many poets. I first experienced it when I read Natasha Trethewey’s work. She’s always taking me to school. Looking back at the MFA, my path through the work of other poets was very associative, and I stayed mostly in the contemporary. The meandering felt comfortable and my program (at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars) did such a good job of protecting our time and making it possible to self-guide. As a doctoral student, I have much less time but I’ve somehow gotten more ambitious. Partly it’s having worked my way through a received (and distressingly long!) exam reading list in the early years. That was such a tough process but in many ways it showed me what more I could let into my work that I hadn’t considered before.

Lately, in the poetry, I feel as if I’m pushing the boundaries of my own sense of vulgarity. The initial drafting of a poem usually takes me, say, 6 hours, and I’ll spend 5.75 hours saying: “You can’t write this, it’s too personal, it’s distasteful, you can’t put your business in the street.” Maybe it’s just me daring myself, I don’t know. But when the work doesn’t make me say these things, then it feels drained of something vital. Not enough risk.

Featured Poems:

LOOK

Knowing Emmett Till had been born
in ’41 and my father in ’42,

knowing Mississippi made a wound of his only body
while my father’s slept tender in Alabama,

knowing how quick my father was to whistle,
to hum, to quip back, to be smart—while Black—

I turned my head in the classroom,
turned my head from the film-lit photograph,

from the misshapen yield of that river,
toward the gentle vacancies of the baseball field.

Child. It’s 1992.
Your father will be beside you at the dinner table.

There is a mother whose son was lost to Mississippi.
She’s telling you: Look.

HOUSEHOLD

Ate a sweet fig
we didn’t grow,
wanted it
New England
greener,
sliced the eggplant
thinner than
you taught me,
grilled it myself
until it burned.
Walked a mile
to the spice shop
on my bum knee.
Didn’t complain.
Tripped my trick
hip, stopped
halfway for soup
and three
Tylenol.
Did you proud:
skipped the Thai
iced tea, sugar
addict luxury,
bent, you said,
on worming
my joints.
Bought organic
chicken, fried it
the way you like
but won’t, anymore,
let me make,
skipped
the butter biscuits
you always do.
Met an old friend
over pasta, met
a new one over
injera. Invited.
Was accepted.
Was refused.
Was OK, actually.
Told the fresh,
shockingly cold,
Berkeley air
in your place:
I manage to leave
my bedroom
most days now.
Most days, I’ve
learned to do
a thing.
Like trying
Leila’s, like visiting
fat botanical
microclimates
without saying
“gross” or even
thinking it.
Liked, in fact,
the darkest,
thickest one.
Found a proper
queer barber
for your foxy
frosty hair, found
a schnitzel spot
to take you to,
scouted the best
neighborhood
taqueria, tried some
dishes on
the spicy side.
Stocked hot red
pepper, eleven ways.

ELEGY

          Drug-softened, sweet
as a tooth
          in decay,
child I won’t,
          didn’t have—
babyboy grown
          older than me
and dead now.
          Oil-slicked,
furred-warm soul,
          creature created low,
boxed out of the light
          of God.
          Like so many of us
from our fathers.
          A prayer for you:
          find Kati,
your pagan patron
          gourmand saint,
our just-lost
          too-long love,
something couldn’t
          let me replace, nor
(while she lived), let go of.
          She will see
you roughrubbed, see
          you proper
fed, fed
          fine. Kismet:
her hand, open,
          outstretched
toward mine.
          That first
voluptuous
          petalled bouquet.
          And you,
your fresh wet
          nose, still young,
not yet febrile,
          leading you inexorably out
from self-exile,
          straight to the hem
of her garment.
          Me too.
She led me out
          too.