Staff reader Carolyn Orosz talks with NER 46.2 poet Bridget Lowe about the reflexive nature of meaning-making, brokering the relationship between form and content, and radical wonder.
Carolyn Orosz: Your poem “Ars Poetica” offers an arresting image of the act of writing: not as a noble blood-letting, but as something more feral, almost unglamorous. As if you were head down in the dirt rooting toward something essential. Could you elaborate on where that image comes from and how you think of the act of writing? What does that rooting around suggest in terms of trust, instinct, or process?
Bridget Lowe: As a writer I do often feel myopic, with my head down in the dirt rooting toward something, as you say. It’s as if everything is this close to my face while I obsessively push garbage around. Sometimes while writing I feel like I’m distinctly under the ground—a mole burrowing a long dark tunnel for which there is no visible end. Just two hands in front of my face, clawing dirt out of the way, making sense of it inch by inch, foot by foot. It’s visceral, painful, active, and requires muscle. It’s exhausting.
There is a noble ideal to the process, as you identify, that conflates writing with a spiritual act that has some kind of distinct resolution (a poem’s end, for example, or a prayer being answered). That presents this kind of “closed loop” system of discourse, in which one asks and then one receives, and perhaps a conclusion is drawn. But that’s not what interests me, definitely not in poetry, anyway. Trust in the process never happens for me. I am antagonistic toward the process—angry with it, suspicious, and doubtful it will lead to anything or anywhere. It’s its own entire relationship. We are like a toxic couple; we’re madly in love but fight all the time.
The image of the pig came from a long linked set of poems I have been working on that feature a character who is an embodied form of evil, an actual devil (who has a name and everything), which I am conversing with as I move through the world, searching for something good, something with meaning. I had a very clear image of this figure and still do in my mind. It’s a figure that can change shape and in this particular poem, it’s a cross-eyed pig rooting in its own filth. All I can say is the image aligns with an exact feeling I have that is impossible to describe in any way other than this particular pig and the exact way it is rendered here.
That yearning, however, that dark night of the soul, is the pie tin. The dish waiting to be filled. So, the pig wasn’t representative of me as the writer but more of a figure that I had to admit existed regarding the potential of the world and of poetry. Poetry can make meaning while admitting the effort, the striving to do so, always falls short and leaves us wanting. Only art is capable of describing the grief that comes from the impossibility of making meaning while making meaning.
CO: Both of these poems strike me as being deeply concerned with form. “Ars Poetica” is composed of tight lines in couplets and “Undelivered Lecture on Wonder” unspools in long enjambments. What work do the shapes of these poems do?
BL: It wasn’t until both poems were chosen for this issue (NER 46.2) that I realized that they were both concerned with the same thing, just approaching it from two different angles. For me, the more troubled the content the more desire I have for a strict form, for a container to hold the threat of the poem’s ideas.
“Ars Poetica” has a much darker context and it scares me, so I think the form, the sonnet specifically, is an expression of containment, of keeping that devil in his farmyard pen. This poem is also part of a series of grotesques, which is informed in all ways by my reading and research into the grotesque and by extension the abject as explored by Julia Kristeva and the scholar Frances Connelly. Connelly describes the grotesque as uniquely capable of collapsing “the boundaries between subject and object” and disturbing “identity, system, [and] order.”
So, one poem is working on containment and one is working on permitting life to splatter all over us or merge with us (the deeply generative, positive, life-giving side of the grotesque). Kristeva identifies literature as the privileged space for both the sublime and the abject to be together, sharing space. She describes it as seeming like “the fragile border where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.”
I think both poems are engaging in the blurring of those boundaries. In “Ars Poetica,” it’s a confrontation of the threatening material, and in “Undelivered Lecture” it’s a celebratory recognition of creation—the two heads, mother and child, able to see one another while still part of the same body during childbirth. For me it’s a beautiful moment of utter metamorphosis and transformation, but it has its own notes of bewildering strangeness that we associate more with seeing something monstrous.
CO: I’m also curious about the progressions of thought, especially in “Undelivered Lecture on Wonder.” I love how the act of thinking in the poem doubles language back onto itself, tangles up the ideas, and through that process reveals their true shape. What drew you to these particular formal choices?
BL: The relationship between form and content is the real dialogue I have when I’m writing. The content changes through thinking, which then demands a new form, and then the new form reveals something in the content that needs to be addressed. Then the new content is meditated upon and worked with (rooted around with) and the form has to change again.
Where a poem lands, for me, is when the two have informed each other endlessly enough that both are satisfied. I’m like a broker between the two, and I’m a good and sensitive listener to both sides. I advocate for them until all three of us reach an agreement, which is the poem. So I didn’t necessarily make formal choices, but I sat long enough with everything to hear all sides and then helped guide both parties to a mutually agreed upon conclusion.
The visual presentation of the poem is also very important to me. The way a poem looks on the page as a mini feat of architecture—that matters to me and does influence content quite a bit. Sometimes I can see the shape of the poem before I know exactly where it will land. I did have to allow myself to tolerate some untidiness with “Undelivered Lecture,” which again is related to the content.
Motherhood in my experience is untidy, it’s just a very sprawling, big, overwhelming experience, and I felt like this poem really wanted to be big and take up space. I loved that for it and wanted to honor it even when it presented challenges. I absolutely loved the way my pregnant body took up space when I was carrying my children.
CO: “Undelivered Lecture on Wonder” reads as a catalogue of brief astonishments that span domestic, maternal, and philosophical spaces. But it also contains real ambivalence: “I submitted myself to childbirth. I am a mother lost in wonder and in this way I shove my small cog in the wheel.” There’s a particular type of non-performance here, a refusal of dramatic climax. It feels very honest. Could you talk about that choice?
BL: Oh, that’s interesting. I think motherhood is both a very quiet and a very loud space. I adore being a mother and don’t feel ambivalent about it in the least. I do feel actively astonished by it, and the submission to childbirth was intended less as a passive position and more as an active choice to lose control, which mirrors my personal experience.
The loss of that control is not in my experience a loss of agency, but more like submitting oneself to an experience that words may not ever properly capture. This poem is admitting that. I think I primarily write to try to articulate the things I experience internally which don’t have proper language, because fundamentally I believe there is a full range of experiences that truly don’t have any language to match. I think the end of “Undelivered Lecture” is the most climatic thing that could ever happen—not knowing what you are because you are something new. Maybe the sense of non-performance comes from the lack of a more tidy conclusion, both in the poem and in me.
CO: “Wonder is not knowledge . . . Wonder is the enemy of capitalism,” you write. The tension between wonder and productivity, motherhood and intellectual life, recurs throughout “Undelivered Lecture on Wonder.” How do you understand your creative life within those opposing frameworks?
BL: There is a private interior life that we all have that I regard as sacred, in part because it cannot be commodified or made into product. As someone constantly lost in thought, I think wondering is important to me as an act of resistance. Wondering for the sake of it and not as a precursor to something useful or conclusive is radical. Wonder is a state of suspension. I can see wonder in my mind as a form of labor but not one that has enough value in capitalism to be permitted. It takes too long. It is inconclusive. Productivity and efficiency are concepts that demean a multiplicity of contributions to the world, even if never made explicit.
Of course I complicate that by writing poems, which externalize the interior. I often struggle to reconcile the kind of hush that I believe so many sacred things deserve and the rushed obsession toward production, conclusion, and within the writing world, recognition. Self-branding, or attempting to make oneself into a brand, is simply a way for writers to take on the labor of shortening the sales cycle for a business entity.
I don’t think there’s a tension between motherhood and intellectual life for me, but I do believe there is a tension between motherhood and the performance of success that is demanded by capitalism. Time is a big part of that. And time is how capitalism determines efficiency, productivity, and profitability, which this poem is resisting, hard.
Bridget Lowe is the author of the poetry collections My Second Work (2020) and At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky (2013), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her work has appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry series.
Carolyn Orosz lives and writes in Vermont. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she served as managing editor for Devil’s Lake. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, Southeast Review, Nashville Review, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from The Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and MacDowell. She reads poetry for New England Review.