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| Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher |
Michael T. Young: Thank you, Cynthia,
for agreeing to an interview.
Many
have pointed out that your new collection, In
the Event of Full Disclosure, is about a family dealing with mental illness.
I was struck by the number of ways the collection connects those familial
struggles with larger societal issues as, for instance, the way our tabloid
culture wants the dirt on everyone and the idea that completely confessing our
mental dysfunctions will somehow lead to a cure. Did you intend such
connections and could you comment on them in the larger arc of the collection?
Cynthia Atkins: I guess I see larger
societal issues as the threshold I wanted the arc of the book to straddle—that
fine line between public and private, the interiors and exteriors. These things
interest me and they inevitably lead to a discussion on how we exist in the
world as individuals, families and societies, and yet we exist in the world for
the most part, alone. We are still
seriously stalled in knowing how to deal with the elusive and complex problems
that arise when a family member is afflicted with a serious mental derailment. In
my case, both my father and my sister had debilitating mental health issues
that threatened the health of all of our relationships. Also, the whole mental
health system is very broken. I am hoping that my book can help continue the
conversation, and help allow some air in the room of stigmas and taboos. I hope the narratives and personas allow the reader
to experience from different tones, vantage points, and personas. In our life
time, most of us will know someone who is afflicted, or
we, ourselves will be dealing with instabilities of our own. Daily life is
stressful and complex, which is of course one of the reasons we go to Art, to help us disentangle the morass
of life.
Michael T. Young: The opening poem, “Liturgy,” concludes by
saying of the unsayable thing it talks around that “It is the greed inside your
prayer.” The complications of desire surface in the collection in various
places. What do you see as the issue around desire and greed as it evolves in
the collection?
Cynthia Atkins: “Liturgy” was
a key poem for me in the book, which is why it is the first poem, and it
addresses the first layer—the individual. For me poetry is the place I go to
ask the questions. This poem was speaking to the place between carnal and
spiritual life—our wants, our needs and our desires. I think being human and
growing up is realizing that these dualities are so closely tied together, and sometimes
it is hard to separate them out. The
last line in the poem was for me a kind of revelation and it was a shock to me when
it came—the truth being that much of what we do in our lives starts from a
place of greed, pure human greed. Again,
I think art and literature help us find redemption for this failing.
Michael T. Young: The poem “Vessels” says, “All I learned and
forgot, tallied/and catalogued in the room beyond/the room of knowledge.” And
the poem “Birth Right” says, “Born to know that we’ll never settle our
accounts.” How much of the cure to anguish these poems seek is in accepting
that there is no cure, only a kind of reconciliation to the given? What
constitutes that?
Cynthia Atkins: Interesting that you make the connection
between these two poems. I think there is a thread that connects these poems for me in the idea of knowledge—and how
much of our knowledge is instinctual, rather than learned. While writing “Born
to Know” I was in the throws of watching my son learn how to read and write, and
thinking about the things he comprehended while I was reading to him. For
instance, when reading him the legendary bedtime book, “Goodnight Moon”
(Margaret Wise, Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd 1947), I was always
amazed that he understood that symbol of the moon—crescent, full, waning,
gibbous, waxing—he understood that they were all the moon. That seemed to me instinctual knowledge, rather than
learned, and I thought a lot about this concept while writing that poem. The
way in which we take in, learn and process the world around us, as well as the
knowledge that we learn to catalog and compartmentalize. “I know trees are
meant/to hold the rain.” That image is made from the point where all these
things fuse and come together.
I
am curious about how much luggage we come in with and how much is acquired
along the way. Of course the ultimate question we ask and wonder—do we come
into the world knowing we will die? I
will never forget when my 3 yr. old Eli asked me that, the hardest thing to
have to tell your child. I paused and realized that I had to answer and pop the
bubble at three, “Yes, you will die.”
But at that moment when he asked, I realized that he already knew the answer
for himself. I think we all come into the world with the crib-notes on that
score: “We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.” ―
Djuna Barnes
Michael T. Young: In “God as a
Character in the Room,” it says, “where everything is dated,/nothing is
sacred.” The limits of knowledge and of
confession are probed throughout the collection. Could you talk about those
limits in the context of the collection? How do you see them in relation to the
anguish and trying to get at the truth?
Cynthia Atkins: Our culture is at a strange impasse between commercialism and fast-food religion, in trying to sustain any kind of spiritual life in this climate of superficial hype a la reality TV and the branding of our own images. It is a strange time to be living in the vortex of science, politics and religion.
Finding the balance between the material and spiritual realm is a challenge. We have so many millions of pieces of
information coming at us all day long. Not to mention, the cadre of selves we
also have to keep up with on social media. In the old days, you were interrupted by a chance phone call, or the UPS truck, maybe a car alarm. Otherwise,
one felt truly alone. There is a place of complete solitude that I need to feel
to get to mechanisms that allow me to write. Sometimes it is several layers to
get to the bone, like the fat of the day that needs to be skimmed off. I feel
it is more and more difficult to feel this sense of self and isolation. We are
plugged into so many orifices, everything we say is held before a jury and
court, and our self-worth is measured by how many ‘likes’ we receive in a day.
We are bound to be taking a psychological beating and it is exhausting. Paul
Bowles said, “The soul is the weariest part of the body.”
Michael T. Young: A number of
poems indicate that language and writing are profoundly important. For
instance, “As Seen From Above,” says, “words/were considered monuments.” What
is the significance of writing and language in the context of mental illness?
How does it help or hurt? Can this be related to the larger societal issues
suggested by the collection?
Cynthia Atkins: In working
with the subject of family and mental health, I was very interested in looking
from completely different aesthetic angles and conceits. For me as a poet,
language is my way in—images and words that allow us to perceive an object,
let’s say an iron, or a bowl from so many places, depending on the context.
Sometimes, I like to jettison narrative and let the language just play itself
out. I let myself off the hook, sometimes just wanting to be on the playground
with words, getting dirty, taking risks, failing, just having some fun with
words.
Michael T. Young: The poem “In a
Parallel Universe,” says, “On the other side of the mirror, we will be
stalked/by the lies we told.” The poem “Order/Disorder/Order” says, “Disclose
my unbearable/junkyard of mental debris?—No dice.” How do you see balance
struck between the need for limits on disclosure and the equally important need
for honesty?
Cynthia Atkins: It interests me that no matter how close or
intimate we are with another human being—no one can really know our minds. It
might be the last vestige of our privacy. Our lovers, spouses, kids, parents,
siblings—as close as we are tied by blood, semen, history and roots—we are not
kept privy to the real thoughts of another human psyche. In the end, it makes
me wonder what
we disclose to each other, and finally, what we really disclose to ourselves.
Honesty is a very guarded enterprise and it comes at many costs. Not long ago,
I read with my students the essay by Stephanie Ericsson, “The Ways We Lie” and I
found it truly fascinating to see how she disentangled the various ways we lie
to each other and ourselves. Striking the balance with my own writing has been
a high-wire act. In writing about family or those we know, we have to be
careful with the privacies of others in what we disclose. This is why I often
write through a persona. Readers may want to see the speaker and writer as one,
but this is not always the case.
Michael T. Young: Questions of
identity, of course, play out in many of the poems. The most obvious is “Google
Me,” where the knowledge at our fingertips suggests that we are changing
ourselves with every search and with a right to claim any of those identities.
What do you see as the nature of identity in this collection? How does it relate to the other themes of
desire, disclosure, and the need to negotiate some way to handle the
anguish?
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| Click the image to go to Amazon and purchase In the Event of Full Disclosure |
Cynthia Atkins: Id and ego are such close siblings. I teach a
class called “The Ties That Bind” which deals with the roles of family in our
lives—the quest of course is to consider all the things that go into the
composition of our own identities. For instance, I think it is endlessly
fascinating to think about the fact that in a single family, sisters and
brothers may be made from the same DNA, yet all turn out so differently, even
with similar histories, memories, and experience. Gratuitously, much of the material
from class readings, discussions and reflections on these matters has landed in
In The Event of Full Disclosure.
As
I say in another poem, “anguish is harmful to live with” and “I’m wanting a
text book/on the matter.” These things I
say with some dry cynicism, but at the bottom, I feel full of heart about
trying to find the balance. Pain is painful, but it is the thing that makes us
appreciate happiness and pleasure. I am a strong believer in yin/yang—we can’t
know one without the other. Our identities are shaped by the good, bad and ugly
of life experiences. I know I am a composite of all of these fragments.
Michael T. Young: What is your
favorite poem in the collection? Which is it and why is it significant for you?
Cynthia Atkins: “Family Therapy IV” is a poem that for me
has resonance on a few levels. First crafting this poem was a significant turn
for me. Having the boundary of the couplets made me reign in and say what I had
to say in a more compressed and compact fashion. I felt an affinity for the
voice in the poem. I think of it as the
voice of ‘the doctor,’ someone who knows us intimately and
impersonally—detached indifference. I felt I had achieved what I was after with
the poem in music, conceit and subject matter. I still get a faint chill when I
read the poem, so it has held up to me in my own readings. I guess I have a few
favorite children here.
Michael T. Young: Are there any
prose works that have noticeably influenced your work as a poet? What are they?
Can you say in what way you feel this work or works influenced your
poetry?
Cynthia Atkins: In terms of
fiction writers that have lit the poetic fuse, I would have to say some of the
post-modernists—Luis Borges’ stories, Italo Calvino, Djuna Barnes were writers I
was reading while writing In The Event of
Full Disclosure (five years!), as well as poets like Amy
Gerstler, Sylvia Plath, Kenneth Koch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gertrude
Stein—many voices and bats in the belfry no doubt are lurking around. They’ve
all taught me something about language and meaning. The best writers make you
want to write. Rambling around in the attic of everything we write are these
archival ghosts, they leave us such resonant contrails.
Michael T. Young: What do you
like to do that has nothing to do with poetry or writing?
Cynthia Atkins: I guess I‘d
have to say visual art is my other passion—but maybe that has too much to do
with poetry and writing, as it is a great source for me. I think poetry and
visual art are much more related than poetry and fiction. There is an immediacy
and sense of time that happens when looking at art or reading a poem—a kind of
synesthesia that happens as all the elements come together. So I guess this doesn’t really answer your
question, but on the other hand, not much has nothing to do with poetry or writing:
“The writer should never be ashamed of starring, there is nothing that doesn’t
require her attention,” said Flannery O’Connor. I guess the answer to your
question is watching my son Eli play soccer—he plays with such vim and vigor. I
have never been anything remotely athletic, so I really enjoy the way he uses
his mind and body together to accommodate the mission. It gives me a lot of joy
to watch him connect to his passion. But then, I just used a ‘goal post’ as an
image in a poem, so nothing escapes a writer’s wrath.
Thank
you for your close and passionate reading, Michael—these questions were seriously
penetrating, and they made me do some serious and heartfelt digging!
Michael T. Young: Thanks for your time, Cynthia. Let’s close with your favorite poem from In the Event of Full Disclosure.
Family
Therapy (IV)
It
is the thing we always fail
to
mention on all the forms—
the
despotic voices dancing off
the
charts, and on the trail
of
our acrid ancestors, haphazard
and
lorn, sniffing us out like cadaver dogs.
Our
chromosomes flirting
on
the cordless phone—Deceases of the heart
and
kidney are just the body’s bric-a-brac.
Incorporeal
or obscene? We are the doctor’s worst
unexplained
nightmare. And we never speak
of
the Endocrine glands—Unsavory
secretions
passed down like the heirloom
nobody
even wants. We are a Rogue nation.
No
country or comfort zone. Inhospitable
bedrooms,
where
our parents detonated bombs, blamed
the
groping in-laws. Our family trait is to remember
only
the good times, like a last blown kiss
at
the door—But more like a breath
blown
over a bottle, forever haunting
the
offspring. Hush, we’ll never tell,
yet
deep down we know, the mind’s pain
is
the last inconsolable and extra gene.
Rabid
dog in the school yard—
Mean
and mad and frothing.
Cynthia
Atkins
First
appeared Harpur Palate
