It feels a little cheesy to say this, but Erin O’Luanaigh is a Renaissance woman. Not the kind one finds reclining nude, holding the infant Jesus, or posing, decoratively, in profile in an oil painting, but the kind with an array of talents. Or, in the (slightly modified) words of fifteenth century Italian architect and author Leon Battista Alberti, a woman “who can do all things if [s]he will.” A jazz singer and podcaster as well as an accomplished poet, an aficionado of classic film and opera as well as literature, O’Luanaigh’s cultural world is wide as well as deep. Even more impressive, perhaps, are the ways she brings this cultural landscape to bear so gracefully in poems that balance formal acumen, pathos, and vivid, atmospheric description.

I hope you enjoy reading my conversation with Erin O’Luanaigh even half as much as I enjoyed having it. In it, we discuss Erin’s relationship with allusion, magical bendings of time and scale, Andrew Marvell, transubstantiation, Maria Callas, childhood illness, and the magic of the VHS tape. You’ll also learn more about what Erin is up to in her writing, and what you can expect from her next. To accompany her poem “At Sea” from Issue No. 41, she’s agreed to share three additional poems with us. Step into her mouth, dear reader, and let her singing, for a while, fill your room.

—Sarah Rose Nordgren

Erin O’Luanaigh worked as a jazz singer before receiving her MFA in poetry from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in Yale Review, Bad Lilies, AGNI, Southern Review, and Subtropics, among other journals. Originally from Connecticut, she currently lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah and co-host of the film and literature podcast, (sub)Text.

Poems:

“At Sea” (from 32 Poems #41)
“Snow” (featured below)
“Cover Girl” (featured below)
“Bel Canto” (featured below)

Interview:

SRN: Erin, one of the things that first drew me into your poem “At Sea” and which I’ve been marveling at while spending more time with your poetry, is your relationship with allusion. These other works you bring into your poems—of literature, music, film—are always integral to the emotional and intellectual gesture. They never feel like an afterthought or a decoration, nor are the poems ekphrastic. How does this material arise in your composition process? I’m interested to learn more about how you think of allusion in your poems.

EO: What a wonderful compliment, thank you! I came to poetry relatively late; it wasn’t until my senior year of college that I cultivated a real interest in writing poems, and not till my MFA three years later that I gave it my full attention. By that point, I’d accumulated lots of artistic obsessions—jazz and musical theatre, opera and art history, classic films and baggy 19th century novels. When I first entered the MFA, I felt a bit boxed-in, convinced that I had to put my other interests on hold to focus solely on poetry. Eventually, I came to understand my poems as vessels that could accommodate everything I wanted to carry with me, everything I wanted to keep talking and thinking about. Conversely, when I set about writing a poem whose subject wasn’t explicitly related to literature or film or music, I found myself habitually reaching into my little compendium of artistic references to evoke a mood, to generate surprise…

It took a while to find my footing, though. You mentioned ekphrasis—early on in my MFA, I went through a phase of writing terrible ekphrastic poems as I tried to figure out that allusive (and elusive) balance. For a couple months, all I did was painstakingly describe paintings I loved. That was it—just pure description, dressed up in form. Finally, a dear professor told me that I wasn’t doing the paintings or my poems any favors. I had to offer my reader something more, put some skin in the game. It was a turning point for me. Instead of being, say, a disembodied eye roaming over an artwork, I learned to fall headlong into it, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, or to place it beside a scene from my own life and allow the two to talk to one another.

SRN: I love this metaphor of Alice falling down the rabbit hole (I’m a big Alice in Wonderland fan myself) because it gets at another technique you use in your poetry that I’m interested to discuss. Namely, I noticed that in both “At Sea” and also in your marvelous poem, “Bel Canto,” you use dramatic contrasts/ruptures in scale to create both strangeness and intimacy between the speaker and her environment, like Alice having to repeatedly relearn how to interact with her environment at wildly different sizes. Interestingly, in both poems that I mentioned, the speaker transforms her environment to imagine that she’s inside of a mouth—in the first poem the landscape becomes the mouth of Moby Dick, and in the second poem La Scala becomes the mouth of opera singer Maria Callas. We could just have a long conversation just about these poems/mouths, I think! But the sense of disorientation and mirroring between scales reminded me immediately of Andrew Marvell’s poem, “Upon Appleton House.” When I first encountered that poem as an undergraduate, I became enraptured by the way he overlaid structures/shapes. In the first stanza, in describing the design of Appleton House, he writes “Who of his great design in pain / Did for a model vault his brain, / Whose columns should so high be raised, / To arch the brows that on them gazed.” In the final (97th!) stanza, he does a similar layering of boats (carried atop the fisherman’s heads), shoes (of people on the other side of the world), and the vaulted night sky. It’s breathtaking!

Additionally, I feel that in both of your poems the sense of being inside these mouths also conveys a sense of closeness with these particular artists—Melville and Callas, and maybe even a little danger. What can you tell us about these “mouths” and these shifts in scale?

EO: I love the connection you draw to “Upon Appleton House.” Marvell is a favorite—he must’ve been lingering in the back of my mind when I wrote “Bel Canto.” And “Appleton” splendidly takes this idea of scale in both directions, insofar as the house is both a symbol of Fairfax’s person writ large and, as an architectural palimpsest, a swath of England’s history in miniature.

Appleton’s palimpsest—that is, the fact of the house having first been a convent—makes me consider the operation of scale in my Catholic faith, which has almost certainly had an influence on my poetic imagination. There are its immense churches, serving to dramatize something of the vast difference in scale between humans and the divine. There’s the Mass, which disrupts the “temporal scale,” if you will, by enacting a mystical time travel in which the distant moment of Christ’s crucifixion punctures the present moment of transubstantiation, bringing things far away in space and time suddenly near. And of course, there’s the Eucharist, another profound rupture of scale in which bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ—making the mouth of the communicant the immediate site of contact with the divine. (I knew I’d work my way to the mouth eventually!)

The mouth leads me to singing, which, much like the Eucharist, treads that mysterious line between “strangeness and intimacy,” a phrase from your question that I adore. In vocal training, you work very hard on the one hand to control the muscles in your throat, bend the voice to your will, master a piece of music; on the other, there’s a point at which muscle memory is generated and songs, phrases, and intervals take up a kind of residence in your throat such that the music seems to be operating you. The experience of performing can sometimes feel like a “channeling,” inducing the quasi-religious sense that the music you’re singing is much bigger and grander than you are (as indeed it is). And the more you study, the more you’re filled with a reverence for your musical forbears that is humbling, often dizzying. We are all of us smaller than Callas!

The last thing your question calls up for me (and please forgive the loose, associative nature of my answer!) is a memory of listening to my Italian maternal grandparents’ stories when I was very young and developing the strange misconception that every building in Italy was incredibly, preternaturally huge. I even remember thinking that “Colosseum” was the same word as “colossal” (not that I was far off in that particular instance). I developed a similar idea about the past from the way my grandparents spoke of it—not quite that things were bigger, but that they had more weight and consequence somehow, as if the past was governed by a different physics.

It occurs to me now that these misconceptions were accurate in their way; Italy and the past loomed enormous in my family’s consciousness, as did tradition, religion, music—and food! (It all comes back to the mouth!) One could even argue that grandparents themselves, or any preceding or subsequent generation, provide a kind of scale for the self, no?

SRN: It’s interesting that you bring up Catholicism, transubstantiation, and time travel, because I just happened to spend this past weekend at a Franciscan retreat center in order to work on final edits for a book deadline. I’m not Catholic myself (I was raised Episcopalian, so there are commonalities in the aesthetics and rituals there), but as I followed their Stations of the Cross that ranged alongside a stream on the peaceful, forested grounds, I became quite moved. There’s something there, in the walking, the enacting, that does evoke time travel, and an inhabiting of other bodies in another place and time. It’s the magic the Catholics can be so good at, where, as you say, time and space bends around you.

Speaking further of time travel, of ancestors, and of singing, you also have a deep interest in classic film, seen in the poems “Snow,” in which the speaker watches a well-loved and disintegrating VHS tape of a Barbara Stanwyck movie, and “Cover Girl,” in which the speaker remembers going as a child to see the famous Rita Hayworth film during a time of illness. Can you talk a little about your interest in classic films, and the way they come into these poems? Are old films another type of time travel?

EO: ​​Sounds like a lovely weekend! That Franciscan reverence for the natural world makes their friaries and convents such beautiful, meditative places. They do seem to exist outside of time.

Yes, old films are certainly a type of time travel. My interest in them is tied up with my relationship with my maternal grandfather, who was the closest, dearest person to me until his passing in 2016. Watching old movies with him was, more than anything, a visit to his past, and every film seemed to spark a memory. We loved Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, W.C. Fields, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne… My all-time favorite was Judy Garland. If indulged, I could watch The Wizard of Oz or The Harvey Girls or Summer Stock twice in one day.

Up until age twelve, my love for these films was intense but not quite all-consuming and, as it was so heavily associated with my grandfather, not quite my own. Then I got sick. As I hint at in “Snow” and “Cover Girl” (poems which form part of a central narrative thread in my poetry manuscript-in-progress), I was diagnosed with a blood disease in the summer before seventh grade and was very ill for about two years. Other than the sudden and surreal nature of this diagnosis, perhaps the oddest part of the experience was the fact that the medications I took to treat the disease—and then to treat those medications’ side effects—made me virtually nocturnal. I was nearly always groggy and disoriented (I spent the better part of those two years in bed) but I’d sleep heaviest during the day and start to come around just as everyone was going to sleep. My family couldn’t stay up all night with me, of course, so a small TV and VHS player were set up beside my bed and my grandfather would supply stacks of movies he’d taped for me that day off TCM.

Suddenly, classic films composed the whole texture of my world. Other than family, I saw no one in those years as often as I did, say, Barbara Stanwyck. All those great Old Hollywood actors became my closest companions, and their films were more real to me than any hazy interaction I had in the hospital or doctors’ offices. The escapism they provided was both comforting and exciting. As movies from that era were almost exclusively filmed on studio sets or backlots (a fact I wasn’t fully aware of at the time, but which produced a certain emotional effect), the staged, closed quality of many scenes was almost cozy, as if the film took place in a room just across the hall. At the same time, I was transported out of my rather bleak circumstances into a past that was foreign and deeply glamorous—glossy, smoky, highly shadowed. Full of romantic scenarios and marvelous-looking people.

And then there was the time-warp that the VHS player allowed. I loved watching films in the hypnotic high-speed reverse of the VHS rewind. I loved rewatching them over and over again (an experience home video enabled that isn’t discussed nearly as much as it should be!). For me, the repetition was reassuring and not dissimilar to ritual. And I truly did watch many tapes until they were all but destroyed!

SRN: That’s quite a vivid and, dare I say haunting, image of you up all night, groggily watching these classic films over and over while your family slept! No wonder these films became significant parts of your subconscious, emotional, and thus, poetic life.

My final question is more general. I’d love to hear you talk a little about your current projects. What are you up to, and what might you have, creatively, on the horizon? Would you tell us a little about your manuscript-in-process? I’d also love to learn more about your literature and film podcast, (sub)Text, which you host with Wes Alwan. How did that come to be, and how do you see your different creative pursuits— poetry, singing, podcasting, etc.—interacting or complimenting each other?

EO: (sub)Text began as a spin-off of Wes’s podcast, The Partially Examined Life, and is now three years old. It’s a bit like a two-person study group—a fun, informal way to exercise our critical muscles and spend time with the classics. At the moment, we’re recording a six-part series on The Winter’s Tale.

As for my manuscript, I’ll try to provide a teaser without giving too much away! The first of its three sections is a bildungsroman in miniature, containing scenes from my illness, my early career as a jazz singer, and a romantic misadventure in young adulthood. The middle section comprises a long lyric essay or prose-poem sequence that examines my family history and my illness through one evolving metaphor. And in the last, I’m more or less my present-day self, traveling and living in various locations across the United States and Europe. As that outline suggests, the manuscript is nearly finished, and I’m now starting to shift my attention to a second. Of that project, all I can say with certainty (in a reveal that will surprise no one!) is that film will be a prominent theme.

Meanwhile, I’m in the third year of my PhD in poetry at the University of Utah, finishing up coursework and reading for my qualifying exams. (Appropriately, my special topic of study is ekphrasis.) I see everything I’m reading and watching and listening to—be it for the PhD, the podcast, or for pleasure—as grist for the poetic mill, whether a film or novel or aria shows up in my work in direct allusion or just provides a pinch of soil (to mix my metaphors) from which an idea might someday spring up and flower.

Featured Poems:

SNOW

It drifts and it drifts
as the finished VHS
respools its tinsel,

white bands flurrying
across the glossy hilltop
of the TV screen.

A modern weather
(like the swirl of asbestos
in Dorothy Gale’s

ear, the Ivory Soap
flakes strewn over Bedford Falls,
the sprayable foam),

it mocks the snap-pop
of a stand of trees buckling
under a blanket,

or a bucket’s ice-
shell cracking above the heat
of the tape’s firelog.

Its storm will kick up
when I replay the movie—
a grocery aisle

now edged with blizzards,
anklets coated in hoarfrost,
summers forecasting

a pixelated
ice age, Stanwyck snowing tears
even as she smiles,

and me, rewinding
the melting tape to the point
of dissolution,

whiting out each scene
with a love that, like all love,
distorts its object,

glazes it with ice,
swallows it like a mailbox
in a mounting heap,

until the tape stops
and only my face, bloodless,
winters the blank screen.

COVER GIRL

It was a hospital season, a grainy black-and-white reel—
exam rooms, waiting rooms, offices, hallways,
my northwest-facing bedroom, my closed eyes—
until the day you took me to the movies, a Friday morning,
and I, the only child in a throng of gray (“Why aren’t you
in school?”), sat by you, holding tightly to your arm,
and watched the whole bright world come roaring in, alive.

“So red, so red,” I sighed in the ice-cream parlor afterward
over her glorious Technicolor hair, her lips, her piked fingernails,
as we savored our usuals—pistachio (yours)
and black raspberry (mine)—at our blue window-booth,
while outside, the pumpkins smiled back at me,
and the sunburnt leaves died floridly on the vine.

BEL CANTO

“Is it raining, is it snowing outside La Scala? Who cares.” —Stendhal

It was the mouth of Callas,
          la grande bouche nestled below
a Greek-pediment nose,

and I was there inside it:
          the stalls comprising the mass
of a shifting tongue,

the boxes a triple set of square
          and gritted teeth (the loggionisti
clamoring like toothaches),

the proscenium’s red folds
          a pharynx, portal to the arias
throbbing in her throat—

Anna Bolena mourning for her
          faded star, a masked stranger
revealing her Borgia name

on the terrace of a palazzo,
          Amina crying in her sleep
as she crosses the high mill bridge…

And the dome of the ceiling,
          with its white plasterwork ridges,
was the roof of her mouth

(though Legge reported its shape
          was a Gothic arch, bowed as
a wishbone, sharp as the Duomo’s,

tunneling its point down
          to the soft palate’s transept, thus
accounting for its “veiled” sound),

from which a chandelier-
          uvula dangles like a grace note,
shimmering in the void,

above the crowd, the stage,
          the singers who are not she
and never could be, but

move within her, like worshippers
          in a nave or words to a melody,
formed of thought and air.