These questions and answers were faxed back and forth between London and California in the course of an interview for the Jewish Quarterly: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and Culture. The interview, in a different form, was published in autumn 1999.
Rachel Spence: In your most recent work, you are writing from, in your own words, “a theatre of voices.” Why have you chosen to work with and from these fragmented identities?
AR: I don’t think of the voices in my recent work as “fragmented identities” any more than I see the characters in a play or a novel as “fragmented identities.” Today, there’s a banalizing tendency to read all literature as autobiographical, to discount the real work of the imagination. I’ve been creating characters as the novelist or playwright might. The literature of the restricted “I” becomes too limiting after a while, too claustrophobic.
I have always been interested in characters and situations that are not my own, going back to very early work—my first book in fact. More recently I’ve listened to voices, imagined narratives, the white girl runaway in “Harpers Ferry,” (in Time’s Power) “Marghanita” and the characters in the opening section of the title poem in An Atlas of the Difficult World, the various speakers in “Inscriptions” or “Six Narratives” in Dark Fields of the Republic, and, of course, the voices in “A Long Conversation” in Midnight Salvage. I also include the presence or actual words of historical figures, including but not limited to writers. I think if you go back to Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, from the early 1960s, you will find such voices. So this is not a new occurrence in my work.
But I want to say again that poetry is work done from the imagination, in the medium of language, and I deplore the diminishment of that possibility, when poems are treated as personal biography or as paraphrasable narratives.
RS: Increasingly your poetry presents a vehement critique of capitalist North America, whilst paying tribute to individuals who have resisted, and finding value in private intimacies and natural beauty. Although your identity as a feminist and lesbian emerges seamlessly through the writing, gender and sexuality no longer take centre stage in the majority of your poems. How has this evolution come about?
AR: Gender and sexuality have been crucial to my work from the beginning: there are poems in my first book, published when I was twenty-one, that (more or less encodedly) wrestle with those questions. I first took them up head-on in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law when writing about such things from a critical or nontraditional perspective was pretty taboo. By the mid-1960s, there were political movements in the United States that were challenging the way things were, challenging many kinds of authority, and these cleared space for a women’s movement that made gender and sexuality central issues.
For a while, encouraged and sustained by a vigorous women’s print and arts movement (presses, newspapers, film collectives, literary/political journals), it was possible for the first time to explore these questions in poetry and prose, and feel resonance from other artists making similar explorations in painting, theater, film. That’s a tremendously liberating and nourishing condition in which to work.
With Reagan’s election in 1980 many things changed. Antifeminism was central to the right-wing “family” strategy, but so was the defamation of every past social justice movement. I recall in England Thatcher’s dictum “There Is No Alternative.” Here, too, particularly given our national history of anti-communism and anti-socialism, the possibility of an alternative has been rubbed out and discredited.
It’s not that I set out, in the 1980s, to write poetry that would “address” these conditions. Rather, I felt my inner and outer life threatened by the politics of arrogance and cruelty, and that sense of danger and disturbance began to enter my poetry. I thought often about the Weimar period in Germany, which led to the election of Hitler; “Then or Now,” the sequence in Dark Fields of the Republic, came out of that, trying to imagine the way fascism can work on consciousness—not trying to equate this time with 1930s Germany, but to use history as a way of looking at our own time and place, our own self-deceptions, our desire not to know what is going on.
What drives my poetry, always, is the need to see revealed what isn’t necessarily apparent or obvious—to uncover “lies, secrets, and silences.” For me it is always a question of language as a probe into the unknown or unfamiliar. In the 1950s and early 1960s gender and sexuality were a field of lies, secrets, and silences. I didn’t make poetry out of theories; I wrote from the need to make open and visible what was obscure and unspeakable.
It always surprises me when people write of my work as if I had taken up the cudgels for the “underprivileged” or the “oppressed,” as a kind of missionary work. I write from absolute inner necessity, responding to my location in time and place, trying to find a language equal to that.
RS: In Midnight Salvage, you constantly allude to and quote historical figures of resistance. Why are you drawn now more than ever to the art and voices of the revolutionary?
AR: I think I’ve brought figures of resistance into my poetry for quite a while—going back to the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (1960). History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive—not grand master narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions. In the 1970s we were rediscovering women whose lives had been dropped out of history or distorted, like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hannah Senesch, Ethel Rosenberg. In Midnight Salvage there’s the poem drawn from René Char’s resistance journals, and the one for Tina Modotti, but also the many characters, both historical and invented, male and female, who I listen in on in “A Long Conversation.” I’m not trying to iconize, but to lay an ear to what’s under the surface.
RS: In “An Atlas of the Difficult World” the last stanza speaks to various readers, all of whom are in some way in difficulty. In these lines, you seem acutely aware of your responsibilities as an artist. Has your sense of these responsibilities changed? Has your perception of your audience changed?
AR: In the last section of “Atlas” I was trying to imagine an invisible collectivity. These are not people in extraordinary difficulty; they are ordinary people trying to live their lives. “Atlas” evokes a United States in fracture, not only in the present but going back to the beginning of European contact. Throughout the poem I’m asking questions of the past, probing the dissonance between our national self-image and the historical reality. The next to last section is a love poem to a woman, and the last section tries to imagine all these lives into which, for a moment, a poem might fall—amid the necessities of everyday life those possible readers are facing.
For me it’s less about the responsibilities of the artist than about the need for art in many kinds of lives, a need shared with others we may never know. In What Is Found There, I talk about poetry as “a wick of desire” that helps keep alive in us the capacity to resist, to imagine, to change.
RS: Historically, much of your poetry has emerged out of the different strands of your identity—in your own words, “split at the root.” Do you still feel that split as acutely as ever, and if not, can you say what has helped to heal it?
AR: Back in the early 1960s I wrote the poem (“Readings of History”) in which the lines occur: “Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew, / Yankee nor Rebel, born / in the face of two ancient cults.” But the next line is, “I’m a good reader of histories.” That poem is very interesting to me now because it’s asking the question, Why does history matter? Why know it? And the poem suggests that the present seems too deranged, too fragmented, too incoherent, unless you have a sense of the past. Now, that is a very Jewish perception, it seems to me.
RS: Could you elaborate a little?
AR: I don’t mean to imply that Jews have a unique need for, or consciousness about, history—but that for us, history has been a way of living with the often-chaotic present and holding on to a longer and larger view. Kadya Molodowsky, the Yiddish poet, writes:
Pack up my chaos with its gold-encrusted buttons
Since chaos will always be in fashion . . .
But about history, its contours are always changing, the way a landscape changes in snow or fog or sunlight, as new explorations uncover new truths—or untruths. That doesn’t invalidate it, though.
RS: What has being Jewish meant to you? And has this meaning changed as you’ve grown older?
AR: Being Jewish has meant being a question, not only as in “the Jewish Question,” but as a woman, a lesbian, a patrilineal Jew, a non-Zionist, within the whole argument and contestation about “being Jewish.” Being Jewish meant that at sixteen, an American girl in Baltimore, I took the streetcar downtown and watched the first newsreels of the death camps and had to store that inside myself for a long time—my parents did not talk about it. For a long time the Holocaust was almost a taboo subject among American Jews—as among other Americans. The historical event was pushed under the rug in the late 1940s and the 1950s. At the same time, in that period, the McCarthy period, “Jew” was linked with “Communist”—hence un-American.
I’m an American Jew. I could lay claim both to a history of accommodation and attempted assimilation and a history of internationalist radicalism. I’m not a Jew from Eritrea, Łódź Rhodes, Argentina, Montreal, Melbourne, India, Israel, Britain, Chile, though I know we’re all connected.
The way I think we are connected is through a paradigm that Jews have shared with other peoples, including of course Arabs—a paradigm of the pariah, suspect, marginalized, easily scapegoated, dispossessed. Like other such peoples, we also have a culture that has enriched the world.
When Jews turn others into scapegoats, dispossess or dehumanize them, destroy their homes and communities, I have to say, yes, we Jews do this. And I’m passionately opposed to it.
At the same time I feel very connected to organizations like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York City, or Jews Against Genocide, which carry on a consciously Jewish tradition of activism, very much derived from the wave of Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century who brought along their socialist, secular bundles of vision.
I’m not a religious Jew. I’m a secular person. I have friends who are rabbis, and I admire their learning, their standing up to claim the religion as women and as gay men. But my passions lie with activism and with a desire for greater solidarity among peoples of the paradigm, as you might call us.
Being Jewish took me into specifically Jewish political work in the 1980s. I joined a national organization of progressive Jews, New Jewish Agenda. It lasted about a decade and was a focus for political action for Jewish activists in many areas: racial and economic justice, feminism, Central America solidarity, the Middle East. We were working for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine long before the Oslo Accords. Most American Jewish organizations saw us as pariahs for taking this position. We were constantly under attack for even suggesting the necessity of a Palestinian state. That organization dispersed—for lack of funds, uncertain leadership, virulent opposition—but many of us who were part of it still keep in touch, and out of it came the Jewish feminist magazine Bridges, which I helped cofound.
RS: In which directions is your work now moving?
AR: I don’t know, if in that question you mean a planned trajectory. I have no such thing. I have thought recently that my poetry exposes the scarring of the human psyche under the conditions of a runaway; racist capitalism. But that’s because my psyche is also scarred by these conditions. One of the things that most attracts me to Marx is his sense that exploitative relations of production end by affecting all human relationships, the most private and intimate included. It’s seemed to me that if I could show that, in art, I would be making a kind of sense for our time.
But at the same time I want never to let go of the other—the humanly possible.
RS: Could you say more about what that phrase means to you?
AR: There’s a colloquial American expression, “I’ll do anything humanly possible,” to help you get a job, be at your sickbed, get to that meeting, etc., etc. I’m leaning on that phrase, asking, What is humanly possible if we require something beyond the horrible culture of production for profit? Human beings aren’t merely determined by capitalist production—Marx never said that. These are conditions “not of our choosing” in which we can make history. What’s “humanly possible” might be what we bring to the refusal to let our humanity be stolen from us.
It may seem aggrandizing to say that poetry can have a hand in this, but I believe it can, in its own way and on its own terms.
1999