THE LYRIC SURREALISM OF CARRIE ST. GEORGE COMER

A conversation with the poet | By Liza Neustaetter and Rachel Retrum

During Carrie St. George Comer’s visit to Kenyon College in November 2004, she sat down to discuss her first collection of poems, The Unrequited ( Sarabande Books , 2003), before participating in a reading with poets Sarah Gorham (also president of Sarabande Books) and Jeffrey Skinner. Comer, an alumna of Kenyon College, received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts. She currently lives in Miami, Florida and teaches English at the University of Miami.

Although The Unrequited is Comer’s first published collection, she writes with an assertive and original voice—one that also caught the attention of the judges of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry who selected Comer as the 2002 award recipient. In the introduction to the collection, Stephen Dunn discusses Comer’s unusually refined command of language: “Comer's rhythms authenticate what she asserts. Even when moments in her poems elude me, the authority of her voice keeps me in and with their drift.” Her poetry plays with language, giving precedence to the sensual value of words. Despite Comer’s admitted preoccupation with butterflies, roses, plums, and meat, she presents a variety of distinct images which dare the reader to comprehend the interworkings of her mind.

Kenyon Review: How did you settle on the title The Unrequited for your collection? What feeling do you intend to evoke in the reader by giving it this title?

Carrie St. George Comer: I guess I had about probably twenty-five titles before I actually settled on one, and that’s the one title that just kept sort of rising up to the surface and kept recurring over and over. The title of my manuscript in grad school was The Accurate Kiss, and the people in my committee hated it, so they made me feel very self-conscious about it, and I knew it couldn’t be that. In terms of what kind of tone the title has, I guess it’s not necessarily a feeling I want to evoke, but more like an image. And the image that I see when I think of The Unrequited is probably not the way we’ve come to know it in terms of feeling unreturned love, but I see something similar to a garbage heap with people kind of combing through the scraps or the remnants, looking for the things that they’ve lost. So that’s kind of the image I’m thinking of. That probably doesn’t occur to the reader at any point, but probably if it were a feeling it would be a feeling of loss. Not that I want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

KR: In the epigraph to your collection you quote the poet Yehuda Amichai’s question: “Who’s shaking us? Who?” The Jewish Agency for Israel says of Amichai:

Amichai’s poetry spans a range of emotions, from laughter to sadness to self-mockery. His work emphasizes the individual, who, although conscious and integrally part of the collective experience, ultimately views the world through his personal lens. The individual perspective evinces a candid, honest approach to the outside world.

Your poetry seems to achieve a similar end. How do you see Amichai’s writing as informing your poetry?

CC: Oh, wow. Gosh, that’s funny—I haven’t thought about that in a while, because I haven’t actually read him in a while. I was reading tons of him when I was writing, but really mostly when I was finishing that collection after graduate school. Probably the answer here is similar to the one I just gave you: Amachai’s sense of loss in his poetry, particularly in the poem [“Elegy on an Abandoned Village”] that that epigraph actually comes from . . . I think because of reading him I started to write much more dense verse, much more relentless, I hope at least, because before I started reading him and of course other poets as well, I think my work was a little sparse, maybe, and almost felt to me too young, already. So every time I wrote a poem and looked back it seemed like the voice of a much younger person, which was not what I wanted at all. And Amachai’s voice seems to be much older than he, it sounds much more like a 300-year-old person than a 50- or 60-year-old person. And so I think probably I was at least interested in that in his work and how ancient he sounds, and so I was looking to sound not necessarily ancient, but older than I felt like I sounded at the time. That was around the time I just got out of grad school, that kind of thing where I felt like a youngster trying to write poems rather than a poet.

KR: What other poets do you feel influenced your development?

CC: Tons. I hate to say the moderns, but I am very influenced through reading a lot of Marianne Moore, and more so H.D. Pound, actually. No one ever thinks I sound like Pound, but I like to think that I am influenced by Pound. And William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, definitely. Stevens probably more so. But then in terms of more contemporary poets, probably Jane Miller. I was reading a lot of her in grad school, when I was trying to figure out what I was doing, trying to find my voice, like they say. Jane Miller and Richard Hugo, actually. I don’t think I’m anything like him, but I adore Richard Hugo’s work. And then actually toward the end, around the time I was finishing that manuscript, I was reading a lot of contemporary—I mean ultra-contemporary—poets around my age. Heather Ramsdale and, well mostly Heather Ramsdale, to tell you the truth.

KR: You have been described as a lyric surrealist. What does this label mean to you? Did you intentionally foster a particular poetic style to become a “lyric surrealist,” or does this label just happen to describe your natural style?

CC: That actually was what Nickole Brown (poet and director of marketing) at Sarabande said. She described it that way and I was very happy with that. So no, it’s not a cultivated thing at all. I would like to think that it’s true. I guess, I mean ultimately what it means right, when you put those two together is something like a song in the middle of a disenfranchised landscape. To use disenfranchised…I can’t help it, it’s in my lingo right now. Or sort of a timeless place or a time in which things are not necessarily in cahoots with each other. So I guess that’s what Nicole meant by it.

KR: Do you write to achieve a particular style, or is that a title that has been given to you as a result of what you’ve produced?

CC: In this first collection, I had no idea what I wanted anything to look like; I was mostly just kind of grappling in the dark, and I think that’s probably the way it should be. I don’t think that anyone trying to achieve a particular style is going to do anything very exciting. I never have any kind of vision of what the poem is supposed to look like, well I do, that’s disingenuous, I do, but it never turns out to look that way. It always looks like something completely different than what I had envisioned in the beginning. I think that’s what’s most exciting probably, when it turns into something else even if you’re disappointed that you couldn’t quite get there, get to what you were trying to do. It’s better ultimately—it’s more satisfying, it’s more surprising.

KR: Your poetry is filled with specific and often obscure biological terms. In the first poem in your collection, for example, you describe a “blue morpho” with “irides throbbing like plums” whose “slow proboscis” touches your skin. Do you have a background in the sciences?

CC: That’s probably more than anything me dabbling around in words. I’d like to think I’m a scientist, but I’m not at all. I love to use those terms. It’s probably more than anything a bad habit. A lot of poets do that; they go and search around for words and then they just start working with the words, which is fun. But, there’s no real knowledge behind it, to me it’s just language.

KR: Is it more the sound of the words than what they mean?

CC: Absolutely, it’s always about the sound. It’s really nothing more than that. And then if there’s a sound, of course, there’s always a meaning. The sound is what brings about the meaning. Then the meaning starts to divide into two meanings, and then into four, and so on.

KR: There are several repeated images that appear throughout the poems that comprise The Unrequited—roses, meat, butterflies, etc. Why do these and other images appear multiple times throughout the collection? Do these images simply resonate with you or do they serve a greater function for the reader as well?

CC: I think it’s probably more than anything a product of being obsessed with certain objects and certain images. I’m totally obsessed with meat. Not roses so much anymore, this book’s kind of old to me now. Butterflies are probably a bad habit too. I mean, you probably shouldn’t put butterflies in your poems. They’re a bit cliché at this point. I never see any butterflies anymore; I don’t know what I was talking about. They’re kind of reliable—roses and butterflies, and meat is too. I don’t know where this meat is coming from. I feel like I never read the book. I think more than anything they’re the images that I have swimming around in my head all the time while I’m writing, and certain things that keep recurring, and so I just keep trying to push them out. Plums come up a lot in the book, and I just need to get that out of my poetry. A rose is a rose is a rose, but you can always transform the rose and make it into something else, and that’s exciting. But, I just don’t want to rely on that. I want to work harder than that.

KR: As Stephen Dunn explains in the introduction to The Unrequited, your poetry allows its reader to become privy to the thoughts, speech, and memory which comprise “the activity of [your] mind.” Yet, at the same time your poems are composed of fragments of disparate images that can leave the reader feeling isolated, as it is often hard to follow your thought process. How do you view your relationship to the reader? To what extent do you keep your reader in mind when you write your poems?

CC: Now I keep my reader in mind a lot, actually, but I have to remember who the reader is, and that’s tricky because I’m not sure where the reader and myself divide. It’s such a small audience, it sounds almost crazy to even think about the reader. But I always hear my poems aloud when I’m writing them, and that’s how I self-edit all the time. But if I imagine myself reading something aloud to an audience, which is small, of course, this is poetry, and it makes me cringe then that’s it, it’s out. I have to be able to hear myself speaking to someone. I used to not be like that at all. I used to be very much in my head when I was writing, but actually when I started to take the reader into account more I think my writing got a lot better. It probably started to sound less, at least to me, less like poems for workshop, and more like poetry. So yeah, I do think about my readers and what they want to hear

KR: So do you think that you did not have the reader in mind for this collection?

CC: Eventually I did. The book changed a lot; it is very eclectic. It’s a mixture of poems from around six years ago and then poems that were written even after the book had been accepted, so for me it’s very eclectic. It’s a mixture of mirroring poems and smaller poems and then it started to break into fragments in that which I think of as my later work, but you can’t necessarily tell that from reading the book. Probably in those more fragmented poems, oddly enough which doesn’t really make sense now that I think about it, I think of the narrative poems as the ones that are more geared towards the reader, but they’re not as much. I think of the reader as someone who is listening to song. How could I best entertain this person somehow with language? How can I make it sound like music, more like a concert than a little story?

KR: You received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry in 2002. What has this award meant to you? How has this distinction affected your life and career as a poet?

CC: I used to live in a really small house and now I live in a mansion by the ocean…. The prize has been everything. It’s huge for a poet to get published. Before I sent my stuff out to these contests, I thought, OK, I’m going to give myself a goal. I was out of graduate school, I was teaching at Andover, Massachusetts and I thought, OK, I’m going to give it five years, I’m going to keep writing for five years, keep turning my manuscript in and when five years is up, that’s it, I’m done, I’m not going to do this, I’m not going to toil like this, I had set a date. When I got the news I was pretty psyched and that didn’t give me the choice: now I have to keep writing. Which is great, it’s awesome. But yeah, it’s a big deal. I read in public now, which is great. It legitimizes what I’ve been doing for years. It’s hard. I have friends who don’t have books out and who are awesome poets, and absolutely should have books, but they don’t, and that’s all there is to it. There’s not much you can do about it. It’s frustrating. So you just keep writing, and working, and hoping for the best. And they still do, but it’s frustrating, I don’t know how they do it. I guess it’s romantic. It’s a good life in many ways, but in a lot of ways it’s really not. It’s just terrible—you’re just in darkness and insecurity and nobody’s listening to you. The audience for poetry is so small. I mean it’s small for me, and I at least have one book. And it’s pretty small for Robert Pinsky too. If you don’t have a book, it’s just you, and that’s it. It’s just you and your art. And it’s hard, it’s depressing.

KR: How do you see poetry as an art form and something people read for enjoyment changing in the future? Do you think people are going to read poetry less and less? Or do you think it’s going to revive?

CC: I hate to say this, but I don’t think it’s going to revive. I think it’s going to be read less and less. Which is too bad, but I think it’s probably true. But I’m also in a very bad mood after Tuesday [the U.S. presidential election, November 2, 2004], so you should probably take everything I say with a grain of salt. I don’t have much trust in people anymore. I have no idea what your politics are, but I’m just spurting on. No, really, I don’t think people are going to be reading much poetry. I do think, though, there’s a lot of spoken-word stuff going on. This has a life, I think. I think there’s a possibility that spoken-word poetry might get to people. But then there’s the Internet. And the Internet is a pretty great thing. I mean there’s poetry all over the Internet. The medium is changing a lot. Has it increased its audience? I don’t think so. I think it’s all just still one enclave. But I think that’s OK too if it’s just an enclave. Stephen [Dunn] said that this is an elitist art, it’s for the elitists, it’s the art of the scholars. It’s not going to be a mass-produced thing. People are not going to eat it up like reality TV, they’re just not. So it will probably always be enclaves, always. And that’s good, that’s where art exists. If you don’t have the enclaves, it’s going to be really terrible. I don’t think it needs to spread. The world wants you to be there, but they don’t necessarily want to read you. The world wants its poets, it wants its artists, and its dancers, it wants the symphony, it just doesn’t want to bother with it. We want a poet laureate, but we’re not listening to anything he has to say. Because if he says something we don’t like, we’ll fire him. So, we have to stay. I was being cynical when I said I would quit after five years, but what was I going to do? Go work at a bank, probably not. So we will be here. And it’s worth it, I mean, it’s a great life.

KR: What are you currently working on?

CC: I don’t write much anymore. I teach four classes, and that’s a lot. I’m still writing, just not as much. I don’t have any time for writing, and that has to change. It has to be a little more on the fly; it has to be a little more when I have time. I have to write a lot faster. In grad school I would sit at my desk ten hours a day, and I loved it. It’s completely different now.

KR: Do you see your poetry as moving in a new direction? Are the poems you’re writing now in the same vein as those in The Unrequited?

CC: They’re probably in the same vein as the older poems in The Unrequited, the longer, more fragmented ones. If you see any of those little stars in them, that’s closer to what I’m doing now. But I’m trying not to write the same book all over again, and that is hard, I’ve found. Basically what I always try to do instinctively is just write the same book over again, which is pointless. So I’m trying to move in some direction. I don’t really know what that is yet. I’m just trying to get out of what I was doing. Like little poems even. Like little eight-line poems. I try to write in different voices, about different subjects. So I’m really just at the point of poking around strategically, and it’s a scary thing. I didn’t know writing the second book would be so much harder than writing the first. In the first, you’re trying to find your own voice and figure out what you’re doing, and in the second you’re trying to get away from the voice you’ve already established for yourself. And it gets trying because you start to sound like you’re a parody of yourself from the first book or you start to sound insane because you’re trying so hard to be something different, and then you just start writing crap. So yeah, I’m still just kind of messing around, writing poems.

This interview was conducted at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio by Kenyon Review Associates Liza Neustaetter and Rachel Retrum. The KR Associates program offers hands-on experience to Kenyon students in magazine writing, marketing and production, as well as teaching through the Wiggin St. Elementary School Writing Project.

A sophmore English major from Durham, Connecticut, Liza Neustaetter plans on pursuing a career in writing, editing or teaching after college.

Rachel Retrum is a senior English major from southern Indiana planning to pursue a career in education or publishing.