Rose Auslander is the author of Wild Water Child, chapbooks Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus, and poems in the Berkeley Poetry Review, RHINO, Rumble Fish, Tupelo Quarterly, and Tinderbox. Her MFA in Poetry is from Warren Wilson.

Author Photo Credit: Liz Hanellin

Rose’s poem “A body among bodies”, appears in the Winter 2021 issue of Carve. Order the print issue here.

What do you love most about writing poetry?

I love trying to spin the world into a web of words.  And I love those times when it feels like those words turn into a world of their own.

What subject matters are the toughest for you to tackle in your poetry? Which topics are you most drawn to?

I love living on the water, and my poetry is soaked in it.  For years, it was the ugly beautiful of the Gowanus Canal—the bright blue Carroll Street Bridge reflected in stinky, discolored waves.  These days, it’s Aunt Betty’s Pond on Cape Cod (I just typed “Cape Cold”) and its itinerant swans.

Hard as I try to find sanctuary, though, the political world seeps through. Writing that implicates politics is tough, but necessary—sadly unavoidable.  Honestly, though, it can be a struggle to avoid being didactic—essay, not poetry.  To get to anything real, I have to press where it hurts—into personal vulnerability and self implication.  When I back off and start feeling sorry for myself, I make myself come back to Seamus Heaney’s “Punishment,” studying how relentlessly he implicates himself and how he makes the reader feel complicit.  

Love is hard, too.  I don’t write many love poems—and the ones I do are more John Lennon than Paul McCartney.  There’s always a dark side.   

In terms of imagery, your poem a body among bodies, flits between beauty and darkness. There are these bits of lyricism, “look at the stars glowing in you,” but also lines that invoke underlying pain, “spitting on myself to polish my tarnished parts”. How were you able to find the balance between expressing both the beauty and the horror of inhabiting oneself, both in the context of being within a relationship and outside of one’s relationship to others, in such a short space? Or was there something else you were hoping to convey? 

My brilliant friend Colin McCarthy said he feels political pain in his body.  And I knew I needed to write how that pain lives in me, in this woman body, this place, this time.  So at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, when Cornelius Eady suggested writing a poem based on one word, I chose “body.”  On my drive home, I was caught in a traffic jam, stuck for hours behind the wheel, bumper to bumper with others stuck behind their wheels. All these trapped bodies, all this blood, bone, and stardust, sitting on this ugly road through one of the world’s most beautiful sea shores. And the whole time, I was ranting on “body,” going full Ginsberg “Howl,” unable to write anything down, reciting over and over so I wouldn’t forget.  As I slowly edged closer to home, I began to find the love part, the hard part, the part that mattered.  

Over the next year or so, I kept coming back to the poem, obsessively condensing—I love a good lyric flow, but like the rest of us, it has to earn its keep.  Workshopping it with Daisy Fried at FAWC, I cut as deep as I could stand, digging down to feel the balance of, as you say, “the beauty and the horror,” the intimate and the public, the glory and the terror.

How has your writing been holding up during the pandemic? What progress do you hope to make in 2021?

When the world shut down last March and my day job pretty much dissolved, I had this strange need to send poems out for publication—which I’m usually terrible about.  I’m really grateful now, because some of my work has been coming out, and it’s helping me feel part of the world.  

Being in a vulnerable population, I thought I’d write more, to live through these long days of fear and isolation.  But the muse seems to come and go as usual.  Spending so much time home and outdoors, I’ve written more love poems, quiet poems, and nature poems than I had before, but the shadow of the pandemic hangs over all of them.  They are very much poems of this time.  

We’ll see what happens in 2021, with the vaccine coming out, and maybe eventually some re-entry into the world.  I’m not sure how much I want to go back, though.

What advice do you have for aspiring poets? 

It’s a very personal journey, poetry.  In a perfect world, I might have started reading the canon, studying craft, and analyzing poems long before I did.  I have to say that study has given me invaluable tools (among other things, helping me condense a body among bodies), and I’m tremendously grateful to my teachers.  But who knows, maybe I’d never have ended up writing anything at all if I’d started into that earlier. 

I love how everyone creates their own path.  Me, I write whatever comes.  If I feel there’s some juice to it, then I experiment to find structure and form—and try to listen to what the work wants to say/how it wants to say it.  It can take me zillions of drafts, sometimes over years.  It only works when I’m fearless . . .

Say what you need to say.  About your body, or anything else.  I can’t wait to read it.