Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative chapbook The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP, 2016). She is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. She lives in San Francisco.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: In your most recent—often playful, sometimes dire, always unflinching—collection, the poems trouble our relationships with family, beloveds, language, the world around us. While all good poems portray the world in a way that alters our seeing of it, a double portrait seems to indicate something different. Can you start by sharing how you see these poems as ‘double portraits’? How did you realize you were writing them?

BP: Thanks so much, Cate. The question of the double portrait is certainly at the center of this project. The term ‘double portrait’ is familiar in visual art in a way that it isn’t in writing. And this collection was influenced by the work and writing of visual artists. I always think of Degas’ infamous double portrait Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, which I love. Degas captured the drama between the two figures—such drama that Manet slashed the painting with a knife. I love Hockney’s double portraits, especially American Collectors and My Parents. And Picasso’s Suite Vollard. What each of these works has in common is the centrality of a relationship, which the artist dramatizes or translates. Which brings us back to the artist—the hazy figure sitting outside the square of the canvas doing the business of translating.

I was thinking about how the representative double portraits I love are actually triple portraits: in the process of looking at the subjects, the artist becomes a subject. Why did Degas paint Manet and his wife as he did? He saw something in the relationship that Manet didn’t. And what we see is Degas’ particular way of seeing—a way that must be influenced by Degas’ feelings about Manet, his own ambitions, his own formal concerns as a painter. When Degas sees Manet and his wife, we see Degas. That’s what interests us.

So then I began thinking about how the term ‘double portrait’ could be applied more broadly to work that isn’t explicitly treating two people as subject matter—I’m thinking for example of Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits or Clyfford Still’s replicas. The Double Portrait poems make an analog for this kind of visual art in poetry. Each poem visualizes the relationship between a speaker and an other (who may or may not be a person) in language, then dramatizes the tension that exists when they stand in relation. I hope the poems look deeply at many kinds of relationships and trouble them, as you say, in part by making space for the triangulations that occur between object and subject, subject and maker. As far as writing the poems, every day I put the words Double Portrait on the top of the paper and started there.

CL: You’re right, there’s always the intra-poem relationships, and then the poet’s own lens for the world, and then the reader, as almost a fourth dimension that makes the poem live across time and another sort of distance. It’s curious though, when I think of the reader reading the poet writing a speaker who engages with a world, I can’t help think of a mirror reflecting a mirror, how the image gets smaller and smaller, farther and farther until you can’t make it out. The opposite happens with these poems though—they feel incredibly close. The pantoum that begins “There’s no use putting on perfume / for a Skype conversation. / It’s easy to be clear about / which parts of me you’ll see” continues through earrings, pajamas, room-service wine, (in)fidelity and ends:

…Whether or not either of us is lying,
everything is true on-screen.

Sometimes with someone else
I wake up to coffee and the paper.
Everything is true on-screen,
some things off-screen too.

I’ll wake up to coffee and the paper
without you in the morning.
It’s easy to be clear about
which parts of me you’ll see.

Many of these double portraits use repetitive forms, so what are the possibilities of form? How does form create a unique type of intimacy?

BP: Doublings, mirrorings, refrains—yes. These structures are as much the subject of the book as the characters or situations, I think. The musical patterning—be it a rhyme or a repeated word or a rhythmic signature—is usually how I find out what I want to say. The music is the bearer of the form. I always feel that if the music isn’t right, the thought isn’t right. Which is helpful—it helps to know when I haven’t found out what I need to find out. Which is either because I haven’t worked hard enough or because there’s something I don’t want to know. When the music finally works, I’m often surprised by what’s on the page. And relieved. Because something that was inside is now outside.

I talk a lot about the impulse toward form, and how much of a human impulse I think it is. We’re used to pattern—we speak in patterns, we build in patterns, we exist in a highly patterned world. And we study those patterns, anything from song to syntax, from snowflake schematics to city plans, from brain anatomy to galaxy structure. Pattern (and its replication) is what these things have in common. And the patterns are visible, perceivable, even on display. So maybe this is why I’ve never believed that a formal poem—which is just what we call a poem with a discernable pattern—is somehow less natural. Our brains are built for learning and replicating existing patterns, and for creating and perceiving new patterns.

So this brings me to the part of your question that I think is so interesting: does form create intimacy? Absolutely yes. There is an intimacy created between the poem and the reader, between me and you, that happens through form. We are both participatory: the poem creates and sustains a pattern; you intuit that pattern (whether you recognize it or learn it as you go,) then you anticipate it and perceive where it changes. The poem’s job is to build a structure you can enter. Your job is to enter. To be willing. To allow for an experience that is activated by your particular mind in its particular moment. To use the obvious metaphor, we can imagine the structure as a house. Once you recognize it to be a house, you can recognize if the house has a stairway, and because you can recognize the stairway you can perceive if that stairway is in fact turning into a waterfall that will carry you through the ceiling. If this sort of perception isn’t possible—if you can’t move around unencumbered and in ways that interest you—then I haven’t invited you into a house that has been built with you in mind. It isn’t a house you’ll want to stay in or return to. When Whitman said he considered long and seriously of me before I was born, I believe him. I know he was holding me in mind because I can get into to those poems. He built a space I can enter. When I write, I hold you in mind. And maybe when you read, you hold something of me in mind. Those are extreme acts of intimacy. Which, best of all, cross time and place.

CL: For the music to bear the form though, one must either know a form and recognize it, or invent one (listen for one?) to fit. It seems as though there is an element of both preparation, like you mention with keeping the reader in mind, and then also discovery, with participating together in this pattern making and breaking. The third series’ fill-in-the-blank poem especially highlights this; a section of it reads:

generalization about _____ people is a risky matter

generalization by _____ people is an especially risky matter

there are consequences for _____ people yes for _____ people!

to talk about this is a risky matter not to talk about this is an especially risky matter

are ______ people aware of this?

for _____ people being aware is especially complicated yes especially risky

______ people must consider their relationship to grammar for _____ people certain grammatical constructions lead to certain sentences

_____ people give their children certain grammatical constructions that lead to certain sentences

certain sentences last a lifetime

It’s easy to see how a reader must co-write or co-make the poem, and will, differently. And so my question is two-fold: what sort of reader do you hold in mind, when you’re building that house and inviting her in? And second, since pattern is participatory, what sort of participation do these poems, or poems in general require?

BP: Yes, poems, in general, invite a reader to be active. The reader’s mind interacts with the writer’s mind through the medium of language. That’s the way the poem lives. A poem is completely dependent on the reader’s breath and voice, on her body, and also on her understanding, her imagination, her sympathy. The way each reader interacts with the poem depends on the constellation of experience she brings to it. So, if you and I were to read the same poem and discuss it, we would (assuming the writer knows what she’s up to) share some impressions or ideas, some category of thought or feeling, but that unquantifiable something we come away with might be very different. This difference would have to do with the choices we each make as we read the poem aloud, the way we breathe into the poem. It would also have to do with the way the images (to give just one example) become suggestive to each of us. The writer is both giving us some solid ground (where you and I stand together) and a vehicle for our departure (where you and I begin to have our private experiences). And this holds true for a reader who returns to the same poem at different times in her life: that reader will have a different experience on the second (or third or hundredth) read because she is a different self. If the poem is a good one, a poem that we love, it invites that sort of change, or it changes with us. It is both solid and plastic, both familiar and new each time we encounter it. That’s the poem’s paradox and magic trick. And why we like to come back to the poems we love.

To the first part of your question, I’d just say that I’d like my poems to invite in any reader at any time. That is to say, I hope the poems carry with them all the things a reader needs to get inside and have her own (changing, changeable) experience, now and over time. Most readers won’t be located in the same contexts as I am, which is true now and will only be truer in the future. I hope the poem is a kind of capsule built in the current moment but not dependent on it for existence. It’s a tall order.

CL: That is a tall order! But no one said we were tweeting or dashing off USA Today. And the true test is continuing to mean, newly. It’s new because we’re new. And yet we’re not—we seem to get stuck on the same things, so can you address how these poems shake off, or maybe live with, obsession? What role does sound play? And in terms of invitation, how does the second person ‘you’ function?

BP: Oh yes, obsession. Are all poems built out of obsession? I don’t know, but these are. An obsession in thought, relationship, language, anxiety. If I didn’t have these obsessions, why would I build a poem? Would I have to do it or would the poem become a decorative art? –which is the death of the poem. I’ve talked elsewhere about crafting these poems as a way to formalize obsession—how does the obsessing brain work, sound, feel? Well, it feels very claustrophobic—one’s thinking is repetitive, inescapable, loud. So how to represent that in language? I listen to the repetitions and see if I can hear a pattern, if I can catch the music of the brain-spin. So, as you say, sound has everything to do with this. Sound is what allows me to find the form to hold that feeling. And then I hope that the poem feels both true and pleasurable—please let it be pleasurable—to someone else.

As to the first part of your question: for me, writing both exorcises obsession and does not exorcise anything. After we write, we still have to deal with our shit. But maybe our relationship to the shit has changed. Somewhere Maggie Nelson talks about this—about her book Bluets exorcising or shifting her obsession with the color blue? I can’t remember exactly what she says in the interview, but I do remember that Bluets thinks through the question of whether writing changes things or leaves everything as it is. And that it, perhaps, does both things.

I’m really interested in the question of the ‘you,’ and Double Portrait treats this question directly. First, I’m interested because this word is one of the two foundational pronouns of lyric poems: ‘I’ and ‘you’. This structural set up is so familiar and yet it never loses its power. So I wanted to think about this lyric impulse, which has become a convention, and to see how it works. Second, the self is continuously considering itself (judging itself, placing itself, knowing itself) in relationship to an other (whether human or concept). Martin Buber’s I And Thou talks about this idea of “standing in relation” and this idea is psychologically important for the collection. Finally, a ‘you’ implies an address—that there is someone on the receiving end of the poem. The address is, as you say, an invitation.

One kind of invitation is to be addressed directly. To go back to Whitman: when we read Song of Myself, we are invited to become the ‘you.’ That becoming can be very pleasurable. And then there is that other kind of invitation—the invitation to watch. In Millay’s sonnets, for example, the ‘you’ stays particular. When she writes, “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” we know the ‘you’ is a someone, the speaker’s someone. There is a wicked pleasure in that, too, that little thrill. To be the voyeur. Probably Double Portrait leans more toward this second kind of invitation but of course there are all kinds of slippages, choreographed and otherwise, between the two. What Claudia Rankine does with this pronoun in Citizen: An American Lyric is fascinating: the ‘you’ as self and other, both extending its invitation for us to enter and revealing itself as an “I” with a particular experience that is not for us to enter. The distance between “I” and “you” is both collapsible and unbridgeable. Poems are built to hold this sort of paradox, to reveal incongruity and nuance in a way that we can feel. And that’s a kind of pleasure too.

CL: But a generic ‘you’ doesn’t work, nor does a ‘you’ so different that the reader can’t slip into ‘you’s’ skin, so—how does particularity come into play? And how do you differentiate between “you” and “Thou”?

BP: This is an interesting question, Cate. I go back to Martin Buber on this one. His I and Thou thinks through the ways we connect to and address someone or something else. Buber is concerned with the ways we “stand in relation”—to each other, to the world, to God. He makes a distinction between an I-It relationship and an I-You (or I-Thou) relationship. When we relate to the other as an “it,” we only see that person or thing as it relates to us—we don’t come into contact with its essential self. At this point, the other is only an object to us, and our vision is limited, profane. When we are able to perceive the other as a “You” we have an experience that transcends that limited vision. We come into contact with something of the other’s self, which is (for once) not completely dependent on its relationship to us. The other is no longer an object. It is a moment of seeing that both relates to the divine and is the divine.

Buber is primarily concerned with the ways we relate to God at various points in our experience and what that means. I think about his ideas in a more secular way. The ways we are (and are not) capable of coming into a contact with another’s self. And the way that the vision of the other expands and recedes. Most of the time, I am trapped inside my own limited vision. But then there are those brief glimpses of someone or something else, where a different kind of seeing is allowed. And though I don’t believe in God, at least not in the way Buber does, I do believe that those moments are the divine part of our human experience.

Some of the Double Portrait poems begin in those moments of expanded vision. Maybe they are trying to sustain that divine way of seeing someone else, to make it last. And, on the other side of that, the poems are equally interested in the human, everyday ways we fail to see each other—the ways we are selfish and self-centered, the way we experience other people as objects. When we don’t recognize the other as a You—someone who is whole in and of themselves, who is sacred—we no longer address the other as thou. And that difference of address changes everything in the relationship.

CL: This separation moment reminds me of my favorite poem in Double Portrait: the one where two lovers fight about washing a bowl left in the sink, which then descends to debate about wasting water and buying new dishracks, revives for a celebratory night but dips into jealousy over jobs with insurance…The poem ends “You say sorry all morning / I say sorry all morning / hungover I’m older / than last night / you go to Safeway / to buy chocolate ice cream / my favorite in sundaes / I eat the whole pint / with sprinkles & cherries / leave my bowl in the sink / till you wash it you do it”

The last two lines mirror the first and so our vicious cycle of self seems both inevitable and newly regrettable. In your pieces, a lack of punctuation seems to facilitate the slippage of “I/it/Thou” and so I’m wondering if you can speak to your punctuation or lack thereof? What role does a fluid line play in the way you think about relationships?

BP: Yes, I thought a lot about punctuation or, more accurately, about syntax and phrasing. In the poem you mention, the lines are both units of meaning—each phrase is at once distinct from, connected to, and changed by the other phrases around it—and units of rhythm. Rhythmically, most of the lines have two strong stresses (though there is some variation, such as the addition of a third (lesser) stress). I hope this will help the reader hear the poem as I speak it—that the choreography, in terms of the breath and the body, is perceivable. And I hope the rhythmic choices allow the “what” of the poem—the idea—to likewise be perceivable. And the idea, as you say, certainly has to do with the way we repeat certain habits, both literally (doing the dishes) and figuratively (the quality of our arguments, the tones we take when we argue, etc.).

This is a poem that moves quickly—as many poems in the collection do—and I think this again has to do with both the idea of the obsessing brain and the idea of how we operate in relationships. In DP.b.02 there are bits of imbedded conversation—the reader overhears the way the speaker talks to herself, the way the speaker talks to the beloved, and sometimes even the ways the speaker and beloved speak as a unit, as a “we”. The reader might also sense that there are bits of the beloved’s voice in the poem—which are sometimes picked up by the speaker in a sarcastic sort of way. All of this, I hope, helps the poem feel particular to the two characters in both voice and situation, while also making it somehow familiar.

CL: It does, and I’m particularly interested in the ways the speaker talks to herself, or also internalizes the speech of the beloved. Earlier, a number of voice-driven poems beginning with and repeating, pervasively: “I want to kiss you,” “I miss you,” I want to kill you,” and “I want to keep you” paint an unquenchable, illogical, unapologetic desire, which I’m drawn to, for its boldness. So often women do apologize, and also allow a male gaze to define even self-expression. And so I must ask how you see gender operating in these poems, and how it further complicates the idea of a double portrait?

BP: Of course you’re right about the tradition—the male gaze on the female body, the blazon. I was certainly aware of that and also aware of the many writers who, in many different ways, have conversed with that convention. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jean Toomer, Marilyn Hacker, Sharon Olds, to name just a scant few. I’ve thought a lot about this over time. But my ideas about how the Double Portraits can be seen through this lens—in terms of continuing that conversation and exploring the relationship between gender, desire, and power—came later, after the poems were written. I never know what I’m writing about or what the bigger picture is until later.

To answer the second part of your question, about the relationship between gender and the double portrait. Well, the speakers in the book are all female. –Is that right? Many of the poems—like the one you mention—expressly want to capture a speaker’s voice, to build a character, and those speakers are female. There are a few poems that are voiced from a place of remove, where the speaker is not expressly gendered. But regardless, yes: the book is concerned with women speaking. Enraged women, ill women, self-pitying women, women in love, in sex, women on a mission. Some of the stories come directly out of my own experience, some are fictionalized, some are other women’s stories that I’ve been told or that I’ve witnessed. When the speakers are taken together, I hope there is a kind of choral effect—all these voices. Which is one of the reasons why I didn’t want a reader to be tied to a particular sequence, to feel as though she must read the poems in one order or with one narrative or character in mind. Instead I hoped each voice would speak to the others. And maybe at some points, for some readers, the voices would cohere into a single voice, the voice of one woman, or maybe the voices would remain discrete. And maybe both of these things would happen, maybe even simultaneously. I like the idea of blending the singular and the choral, the one voice and the many. Both kinds of speaking—the speaking we do collectively and the speaking we do alone—have power.

I imagine different readers have different experiences with the Double Portraits and their speakers, and I’m glad for that. Each reader’s mind becomes the other consciousness in the book—the consciousness that makes meaning in and between the poems. And that connection—between reader and book and, by extension, between reader and me—feels important. Maybe it’s especially important now, when we look at where we are in this particular moment, and maybe it’s just always important. This connection, which exists as long as art exists, makes a person feel hopeful.

CL: Yes, what a good and important reminder. I have one final question—if you encountered a person with no concept of poetry, or someone who had no idea of what a poem is or can do, which one would share with him or her?

BP: DP.b.15—the hickey sonnet. Because we’ve all been there. And because I’d want the person to laugh.