Rosalie Moffett is the author of June in Eden, winner of the 2016 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Discovery/Boston Review prize, the Ploughshares Emerging Writer prize, and fellowships from the Tin House and Bread Loaf writers workshops. Her poems and essays appear in Agni, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Tin House and elsewhere.


Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: I think I’ll start with the two poems “Nervous System,” that appear in the most recent issue of 32. Both circle around injury and loss of language and memory, and the speaker’s grappling with these. In the second, the poem ranges from the an insect solar system around a streetlight, to sodium-potassium cell channels where electricity takes “wrong turns tugging [a mother’s] body into its spasms,” to kitchen appliances coming on at dawn. So many of your pieces continually zoom in and out, often disorienting toward a fresh focus. Can you talk some about scale in your pieces? How do you train your gaze and begin to combine and layer various lenses? When in the writing of a piece does focal point become clear?

Rosalie Moffett: Those poems are some of the first sections out in the world from a long poem, “Nervous System.” In it, I’m seeking to understand my mother’s brain and life post severe concussion, and also grappling in a larger way with my fears and horror of having a mother, who, like all mothers, is mortal. Often, I’m casting around for a way look in—to the body, to the brain, to the “beyond”—but can only do it by trafficking in the seen world, in the world we all share. It ends up that there is a sort of desperation in all the pivoting, the poem asking over and over, Is this how I can see it? Is this? Or this? A testing out of possibilities. That grappling around for a way to understand, that movement, emerges as the focal point of the poem.

I grew up in a family of scientists; my childhood involved a lot of scenes of people hunched over microscopes. Too, my mother studied the nervous system, using the snail brain as a model. She was studying how a damaged brain can regenerate; she would make, say, a tiny cut in a very precise place, and then watch how the snail healed, how it was able to restore its abilities. In this environment, sense of scale collapses—there’s less primacy to what’s big, what looms for the naked eye. I think the way I look at things reflects that upbringing, that sense that there is a connection between the microscopic and the huge. I may have been drawn to poetry because it felt like it had more than met the eye, more than what was immediately apparent: some large implication, some music or magic.

CL: That reminds me of a chemistry professor I had who would begin every quarter by showing an image of nuclei and one of the solar system side by side, highlighting how, at a given resolution, the two looked identical. There was magic in that and yet, it does seem awfully hard to live in the middle distance. I think of the poem “The Observable Universe” in your collection, June in Eden, which begins “What a meager galaxy there is / in this vending machine cinnamon roll, / that metal spiral that turns to free it…and the universe is expanding wildly / —into what? I eat the center / and toss the rest.” So many of your pieces do try to make sense of the absurd knowing/not knowing scale at which we must operate, maybe as a way to keep us in a day. Yet it seems this is only one of the many functions your pieces enact. If you were to think of your poems as little machines, what sorts of effects do they make or enact?

RM: Ha! I like this question. I show my students that WCW quote about a poem as a machine made of words.

I think the machine of my poems has to do with time—with time travel. I read once, about how the brain can be said to go back in time. The example was something like “I grabbed the mouse,” (at this point, in the brain, a little rodent) “and clicked on the link.” At which point, the article explained, the mind goes back and replaces the animal with the gadget, and it’s as if the animal was never there at all. I read this and thought “That’s what I like to do.”

So my machine of lines wants to make the mind do that in a way that doesn’t erase the process—to have us contend with both the animal and the tech, to reckon with the multiplicity of realities that language can create for us. So I am, I think, rather obsessive about the way the line breaks are working to do that.

Alternatively, if June in Eden were a pair of goggles (not virtual reality, but reality-reality goggles), you’d put them on and look around and some aspects of the world would look as they normally do, and some things would be huge and neon lit-up so you couldn’t overlook their absurdity.

CL: I love the time-travel goggles! I think both fit well, in terms of the effects these poems have. Your line breaks do enact that sort of surprise; that gap in understanding, or duality in understanding, makes for one of my principle delights in poems. I think of “Why Is It the More” which bleeds into first lines “I see of the world—heavenish / periscope of technology—the less / I can imagine of God / intervening.” God is absent, and then not only not absent but willfully absent; a different thing entirely. Or later “That no / matter what you think / you see you never / grasp the scope of what we’re doing / to each other—” That final line break creates not just surprise, but surprising closeness. This happens again with “The Bathroom Wall Says Women” “were the first 3D printers.” where interaction between the technical and human makes intimate the act of creating, of innovating. If I said, however, that you wrote poems about 3D printers and cell towers, iPhones and fax machines, I don’t know readers would immediately associate this with a poetry of connection. So how does technology make its way into your poems, and not just as nouns but as rhetorical devices? What are challenges with its inclusion? Opportunities it affords?

RM: My own question is more along the lines of “How would a poet writing today keep technology out of a poem?” It’s already in our most intimate and personal and emotional moments—I think I was so taken with that joke I was told was written on the wall above the urinal: Why are you looking up here? The joke is in your hands! (which is in “The Bathroom Wall Says Women”) because, surely, a shocking number of men reading it are holding their phones as they pee. How strange it is, even in a public restroom stall—which was once a peculiarly vulnerable near-other-people-but-alone moment where one is forced spend a minute looking at her bare thighs and being reminded of her body—but which now is spent thumbing through Facebook or reading work emails. Please forgive me for bringing up the unsanitary here, but I’m pretty sure that’s what people are doing in the bathroom—and aren’t we interested in how those moments/minutes/hours of our life are transformed?

But to go to the idea of these as poems of connection, I hope that they are poems that resist the seamless integration of technology in our lives. If the poems spotlight the machine or the computer with us as we wake up, travel through landscape, fall in love, it is because I have the urge to remind us that it is there, doing something or other all the time. Some venerable writer is quoted as saying “good prose is like a clean window pane—you forget it’s there,” but I think that is the goal of technology today, to be looked through and pass out of awareness. [Perhaps, though, we can manage to have our technology and also manage to connect in a real way if we don’t forget, as we are looking at the face we love, that we are looking through a screen.]

Perhaps when I am 113 and we no longer have screens, but images projected directly into our brain, I will regret having so many phones and fax machines in my poems, muddying the timelessness of my work. (Just today, I had to explain Michael Robbins’ line “by Kinkos early light,” to my poetry students who did not know what a Kinkos was.) But I don’t think so—I think to leave technology out would be to make a risky fiction of our lives.

CL: Right, and yet I think people do think they can! Or rather don’t allow technology to exist where it does—acknowledge that there is friction with our devices, that they do not provide this seamless mediation with the world and one another. And if we had this clear window, wouldn’t it require some fundamental dissolution of body or self? I know we’re not there yet—do we want to get there? Many of your poems explicitly engage with bodies of all types: tomato plants too happy to fruit; the robot who says Hello child, hello miniature human; a speaker who absorbs her twin sibling in the womb; her mother who has finally lost her words after trying to replace them with similar ones.

I’m so much interested in the tether between body and spirit, and ways poems address this and can highlight frailty or illness without being about it, but of it, or within it. How do you think about writing dis-ability?

RM: For the poems that are about my mother, the neurology of her situation—and how that affects her use of language—is largely what I’m focused on and I’m fascinated by. (A moment of exposition: my mother’s neurological situation is mysterious and without a clear diagnosis; it may or may not stem from her concussion, but her memory and her speech are impacted.) Because that concern is so central to poetry and to the medium through which I process the world, I think it almost automatically becomes “of” the poem. Every word on the page is weighted in contrast to her possibility of not having a word, not having a way to express in language.

Too, the fact of a lineated poem creates a sense of this coming up against the absence of language; with each line, we’re faced with white space and press on to cross it and cross it. There’s the momentary tension of wanting words and not having them. In a sense, there’s an enactment of the glitches and blank spots that can take over the brain. But, perhaps more importantly, there’s a kind of faith embedded in the poetic form: a trust that, from pieces, the mind can make a whole.

So that distinction, of how poetry manages to be “of” rather than “about,” is really an apt one for the way that I think about the function of the poem.

CL: Your poems do embody that faith, in the cliffs and catches of lineation, where one possibility loped off comes round as something we could not fathom. And this is apparent in one of my favorite pieces, “A Certain Eden” which starts “I believe the landscaping / truck full of tree limbs / with the bumper sticker that says Trees don’t bleed / because I believe in limblessness— // in the painless beauty of that / move toward cordless…” but then there is a sense of pain, inherent isolation as our birthright when the piece ends “they made the garden into a perfect line // of small pruned box-bushes. On every / cut, there are little yellow-sap topazes / like my birthstone earrings.”

I so much felt that amputation, and I think it’s the conflation between speaker and world here as well—she peeps out of it, she is ears as the bushes, listening. How do you position a speaker in your poems, and when does she hide or reveal herself? Does this come naturally, or is it something you consider, in terms of craft?

RM: I think it’s fairly simple; I actively avoid persona—or, perhaps persona avoids me. More and more, my poems are in a voice that very much feels like me, with an I that is, recognizable as the me that other people see and talk to. Though perhaps this is not true; perhaps friends and acquaintances will read this and shake their heads. A couple of years ago, I was workshopped at Bread Loaf and everyone concurred that the poems were highly controlled, restrained. I remember thinking What? Restrained? I think, now, that this is true—and it seems strange that I didn’t see it before.

And I’ve been wrong about other things, too—I’ve been known to say, of a poem of mine, “I just think this is so funny,” and the other person will hesitate and say, “But isn’t it a sad poem?” I forget that, for me, humor and sadness go together—and, so it’s possible that I am operating under the feeling that my speaker is exposing herself, when, in fact, she is hiding herself. Is there a way that those two things can needfully coexist? I could understand the feeling that the restraint—my obsessiveness with linebreaks, line lengths, sound—results in a kind of mask, but one that is very… me.

CL: But I think the dualities you mention might get at the heart of poetry as paradox with its affected reflection of reality, clarity amidst chaos, particulars speaking to the universal, word play turned dire, songs that turn to keening, etc. So the ‘true’ mask seems entirely logical. Don’t we put on mask after mask every day, just to keep on living? I think of your poem “Long Division” which begins “It’s almost autumn. It’s almost human / the way everything changes into Ghosts / -and-Candy from Back-to-School…” Focusing on childhood, or on something we think we know, makes new or eerie resonances possible. Can you talk more about how levity functions in your work? What it means to be writing from “June” in Eden?

RM: I think humor disarms us—opens us up to things we might have otherwise built defenses against. It’s hard to say exactly how it works for my poems in particular. I know, though, that the poems that have jokes just don’t work without them—the joke seems to be the little bead inside the hairspray can without which it would clog, choke. I was told the muffin joke,* which appears in “Delayed Flight,” in high school and it has stuck with me since. It crams, into such a small space, the ridiculous and contradictory and funny and horrifying—I am tempted to call it a poem. There are other ways that humor is working, to vary tone, to swerve, and to give me something to read aloud when I have to stand in front of people and read. I struggle to face even a small audience in a bookstore and hold forth as if I take myself entirely seriously. It’s, perhaps, a character flaw, but one that is ultimately disarmed by humor.

Re: June—My mother wanted to live in paradise. June is a wonderful month in the canyon I come from: flowers and strawberries and green. Of course, to say June means there’s a July and a December, and this is all fine for a regular garden, but not for paradise. The title of the book became the title when I began to think about the naming that took place in the Garden of Eden, how language came into being there—from where? And where can it go? These are questions—along with time and its effects—that occupy the poems in the book.

*Two muffins are in an oven, one says, “It’s getting hot in here,” and the other says, “Holy shit! A talking muffin!”

CL: ‘From where’ and ‘where from here’ encompass so much of my own thinking and writing these days. That your mother wanted to live in paradise hits me hard, especially since the speaker disproves that “Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven” as her mother’s brain became “like a city//at night with small, black power outages.” There is nothing we cannot lose, it seems, so what can poems offer us in July—when we cannot recover June, nor imagine December? Is this unique to poetry?

RM: A quick, ultimately relevant tangent: I recently did a reading with a couple of people and during the Q&A someone asked us to describe our “writing processes.” One of the other poets said something nice about “dipping into your thoughts” and “writing everyday,” and I, with slight shock, sputtered something out like, “But, you make it sound so pleasant!” Perhaps, next, I projected onto the audience a variety of incredulous looks.

I think, if I were to revise what I said about my “writing process” I would say it involves removing as many distractions as possible to be able to sit still and ill at ease with the things that trouble me. I wouldn’t usually describe it as pleasant.*

So, to the question, there’s that. Which is to say, I think poems can offer us the thing someone made in order to deal with the fact of July, of irrecoverable or un-face-able time—or whatever else rose up to trouble and disturb them, whatever meant they couldn’t just sit there pleasantly. Perhaps it sounds meager. Perhaps it is. But what else? Poems are an artifact of dealing with the world—and they happen to have some beauty because that’s the only way to do it.

*I mean, sure, joy exists too and there are joyful, ecstatic poems, and I have even written one or two, but I think we can all agree that those are fairly hard to come by.

CL: Oh yes—evidence of that hard world-work. And maybe some of the pleasure is not necessarily in the content itself but in that fact we (when writing) found a way to turn the coping to creation and (when reading) that we are not alone in this. The joyful poem is doubly precious because it is so hard won—if you met someone who had never encountered a poem before, ever. What one would you give him or her?

RM: That is a tough question. Most of the time what I want to do is radically broaden someone’s idea of poetry, and the task of starting someone is quite different. There is a poem that I’ll admit to first reading on a bus-placard and then re-reading on something like a thousand rainy Portland bus rides, as part of their “Poetry in Motion” initiative—an initiative through which commuters, though they may have never once in their life sought out poetry, could grow sick of a poem, which is what happened to me with this one, though many years later, it managed to renew itself. It is “Separation” by W.S. Merwin:

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

My thought would be to give them something small, take-able, but which broadens. If not this, then probably just one line of a poem or a couplet—but, now, struggling to name which one, I find there are too many I love to settle on just one. In general, I am the kind of person who, when asked, “Who is your favorite author?” will struggle to call to mind even a single author. I think if someone said they’d never encountered a poem before and asked me for one, whichever poem happened to skitter out of the hold would be the one they would get—and I hope that in that instance, it would, like pulling a tarot card, be exactly the thing that person needed.