POETICS OF UNCERTAINTY: A CONVERSATION WITH NIINA POLLARI AND KATE DURBIN
*Originally published in the print edition of the May/June 2022 The American Poetry Review
Kate: A poem I keep returning to in your book [Path of Totality] is Urine Season. It ends with the lines: “Some will say this is not a poem for them. But I say it’s a poem for anyone who ever expected anything.” Urine Season is about the loss of your child, and takes place in the hospital. It gutted me with its grief, but also its generosity, bringing the reader into the speaker’s suffering. There is this quality throughout the book, the speaker’s grief spilling out so that it encompasses everything, including the reader. I am not sure this is a question, only that I wanted you to know this before we talk about anything else.
Niina: Thank you for telling me that, and also for pointing to this poem in particular, which has felt like a keystone poem since I wrote it. It was difficult to work on this book, and when I started thinking of it as a book (itself a mental hurdle given the topic), I knew only one thing for certain: that I did not want there to be a resolution to the grief, as there is no resolution to the things that devastate us, and as there shouldn’t have to be.
The lack of resolution is a quality in Hoarders that I admire too. Your raw material is a show with a clear, formulaic narrative arc -- there’s a crisis that predicates a resolution in that a hoarder’s situation finally becomes untenable or even physically dangerous and requires intervention. But you leave the show’s built-in resolution mechanism out of the poems and just let the reader observe the material crisis. In this way, by leaving out the empathy porn, the work becomes a genuine look at the individuals in their situations in the context of our messed-up world. I found it very moving. What is the role of empathy in your work, if that’s not too big of a question?
Kate: The structure of the reality TV show Hoarders is kind of sneaky. Like, we can get away with othering this person on the show as long as we usher the viewer into a happy ending where we “fix” the individual. In my Hoarders poems, I didn’t want to judge the show on the page, necessarily, but I did want to do something different than the show--to linger on the crisis of the present to consider why this person is in trouble in the first place, and what are the larger systemic failures that leave so many people isolated with no support in this country. I believe that empathy can arise naturally through a process of understanding, but it takes a lot of time to really understand something. As someone who comes from a family with hoarding and substance use, I find loving my family involves embracing discomfort, and uncertainty, in an ongoing way.
This brings me to something else I love in your work-- breaking taboos. You write about googling to see if other women also felt embarrassed who had gone through the same situation, because you didn’t know what to do with that feeling as it arose in you. Did you feel like you had to work through feelings of shame, or taboo, when writing this book?
Niina: I like the way you put it -- embracing discomfort as a way of loving. I never got the impression that you were judging the show; I think your work has an understanding of the exploitativeness of the medium without having a need to focus on it.
I didn't set out to break taboos specifically, but I wanted to be very honest as a way of honoring what happened, and my daughter, and the enormity of her emotional impact on me. I have a great sense of privacy--one of my personal sicknesses is my deep reluctance to ask for help--so even wanting to write about her felt very hard. In Dead Horse I wrote about personal preoccupations, but they were mostly not anchored by that much identifiable information. But this was different, and so I cried a lot, not just about the experience but about putting it to words too. I had to contend with my desire to not share what I felt were moments of weakness. But at the same time I have always made it a point to hone in on specificity and clarity in my writing. It turns out that being specific often comes with having to face difficult or embarrassing things.
Clarity is important to you too, I know. You’ve talked about how you wanted to write something that wasn’t hard to read. There is tension between this linguistic clarity and the maximalism of the cataloging aspect of the work. How do you choose what threads to follow?
Kate: I like books that slip down easily while also holding a lot to unpack for a willing reader. Each object in Hoarders has meaning beyond the personal, beyond the individual the poem is centered on. Each object has a haunted relationship to the USA that can be excavated if the reader wants to go there. The individual arrangements of objects in each line are that way too--they have a relationship to each other that can be meditated upon. The book is like a big Bosch painting in a way, with small scenes throughout that you can look at up close, or at a distance, and see different things. But it’s also perfectly acceptable to read the poems quickly, experiencing their moods without lingering.
As for how I chose which threads to follow in the book, it might sound strange, but it was really through meditating on the objects themselves. The deeper I went into the invisible threads between the person and the objects, the more I found. The choosing process was intuitive, but at the same time, each image and object has layers of meaning and association, and therefore none are arbitrary.
Also, I threw a lot out. There is a ghost book of Hoarders somewhere, all the discarded objects that didn’t make it in. There’s even an entire ghost section–originally, I had planned to write the book as a diptych, and was going to include a section on the show Storage Wars.
Your work is also accessible, even as you deal with such specific feelings. I’d love to hear about how you think about form, as you move between two forms in Path of Totality.
Niina: I love the idea of the ghost book. Maybe there is always one, in some way. Your respect of the objects and the people who chose them comes through in a really empathetic (that word again) way. Things never disappear. I’ve been thinking a lot about trash lately, and about the future of the planet, so this is really interesting to me.
The forms of the book found me. I’d never written poems that consisted of prose blocks in the past, but I felt like my existing poetic structures were not going to work with what I was doing. Making decisions about line breaks was messing me up; they were making me feel like I was being too writerly, instead of just saying what I wanted to say. I didn’t want to feel like I was doing exercises. So I began to write things out in prose, and the first time that it actually resulted in something that worked was shocking to me. That became the first poem in the book. The other form in the book, the long poems with spaced lines (or maybe they’re single-line stanzas) came later. I think of the forms as having different personalities. The prose blocks make more intuitive leaps, and the poem-format ones read more continuously. The prose blocks are also heavier in mood even though they’re all heavy. The poems dictated their own form.
Speaking about forms, I want to ask you about the multidisciplinary nature of your work. You are an artist, capital A -- your work is visual, and it’s on the page, and it’s performance, but it all somehow feels like the same body of work. I find this kind of continuity so compelling--I’ve done some performance, and some work in other genres, but it feels so secondary to poetry, which is my main art. Everything else, I’m a clown or dilettante. I guess what I want to ask is do you feel like you have a main art? Or does the form you select produce the work?
KD: It’s hard for me to imagine you as a dilettante at anything, although the spirit of the dilettante also seems freeing! I always say I’m an artist and a writer, and neither takes precedence over the other. Usually I come to a form through an idea, or to be more precise, it’s like the two things come as a part of a whole. Hoarders had to be poetry because it is all about creating these forms with language: dialogue and the language of objects, woven together. The form became a way for me to explore the relationship between people and objects without one overtaking or dominating the other. Instead of the world being divided up into distinct and hard categories (animal, plant, object), the form allowed me to explore the ways in which we are a part of our environment, and it is a part of us.
I also didn't want the objects to only be representational, to only carry that person's traumatic history or American history...I also wanted them to be fundamentally unknowable in a way. I wanted there to be a kind of objectness that was de-centering the human a little bit. Part of why it's important the the people and the objects share each line equally is to show these objects not just as "background" or environment.
I wanted to ask you if there was anything you were reading or watching or listening to while working on Path of Totality. At certain moments, when the poems comment on themselves, I thought of Chelsey Minnis.
Niina: Chelsey Minnis is a legend to me and I’ve definitely absorbed her work into my understanding of what poetry can be and do, even if I wasn’t consciously thinking of it during this book. I read and listened to a lot after Lumi (that’s her name) died, because I felt so freakish. I think some people’s tendency after trauma is to want to escape, and avoid the things that would trigger them, but I went in deep. I wanted to dwell on the ocean floor. I asked people to tell me the saddest novels and memoirs that they could think of, and then I read their recommendations. The books often made me angry, because they had too many resolutions and narrative arcs. But music allowed me to linger in the excruciating space. I listened to the Mt. Eerie album that Phil Elverum wrote about the death of his wife a lot. I listened to the album that Nick Cave wrote for his son Arthur, Ghosteen. For atmosphere’s sake, Chelsea Wolfe’s album The Birth of Violence was on heavy rotation. And I listened to an old favorite, Hole’s Live Through This, which as a work has a very painful relationship with motherhood. I stole a poem title from one of the songs on that album.
Could I extend a similar question to you? I’d love to know what research looked like for you during Hoarders, since I know you were immersed in the topic for a long time. Was any of it emotionally driven? And are you an immersive person when it comes to creating?
KD: It makes sense you wanted less resolution, and I’m glad that music gave you that.. I’m definitely an immersive person with anything that I make, but especially with writing about reality TV. My friend, the poet Emily Skillings, told me I “inhabit” the shows I write about, and I love that way of putting it. So initially I watched and re-watched the show, generating pages and pages of notes, although the actual poem-writing process was intuitive and not obedient to the notes. It was all emotional; both the watching and the writing.
Beyond that, my thinking in Hoarders is catalyzed by a lot of reading I’d done on trauma. Pete Walker’s book Complex PTSD, which considers the link between trauma and mental illness. Also the work of Mark Fisher, his idea of the privatization of distress in the US. Writing against the pathologizing of individuals in a country that has such a long wounded history (colonization, genocide, various wars, even consumerism itself) was important to me. Which leads me to David Smail, whose book The Origins of Unhappiness, really radicalized my thinking around mental illness. He was a proponent of the social materialist view of distress, which basically boils down to the idea that individuals cannot be separated from their environments. We are deeply affected by society. And so, if it is sick, society can contribute to a state of distress in individuals that can be genuinely too powerful to overcome alone. But while these thinkers catalyzed me, these ideas are also just how I see the world now, so the writing process for the poems was instinctive, fluid...not like trying to prove a theory of anything.
I love how visceral and invasive and threatening the natural world is in your poems, while also being alive in a kind of existential way. Nature is such an long-standing theme in poetry, I like when someone is willing to make it a little gross.
Niina: The precarity of our environment is a constant passive thought in my mind, and it influences everything I write. I’m always aware of the destructive relationship humans have with nature, and as a result of this decades-long preoccupation, I can’t think of nature as something benign anymore. It’s reacting to everything we do, and slowly making itself less hospitable to us, and in response we’re just adding plastics and carbon dioxide and increasing our various egotistical consumptions. Isn’t human hubris awful? Nature is threatening to me because it’s responding to us. It will always be here, but we humans are writing ourselves out of it. Maybe that’s a good note to end on.