The Self That Can Render the World: An Interview With Patricia Hampl

I had the pleasure of interviewing Patricia Hampl at the end of June 2006 during the biennial Kraków Poetry Seminar. Our conversation began with a discussion of her new book, Blue Arabesque (due out in November), which meditates on leisure, travel, and the life of the mind through an exploration of the odalisque in visual art. In the book, she focuses on Matisse’s painting Woman Before An Aquarium, which had captivated her many years earlier and led her to publish her first poetry collection under the same title. Her other books include the memoirs Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life and A Romantic Education, which chronicles her personal journey into the past of her Czech grandmother, as well as the essay collection I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. Our conversation naturally touched on some of the seminar panels and their participants and was punctuated every hour by the trumpeter playing the hejna from the tower of St. Mary’s church in the old town square nearby.

Mira Rosenthal: In your new book Blue Arabesque you return to a theme that you first treated in poetry, to an exploration of Matisse’s painting Woman Before An Aquarium. What prompted this return? And why prose? 

Patricia Hampl: I’ve actually done that before. My first book has in it, in addition to the title poem “Woman Before An Aquarium,” a poem titled “Wooden Steamer Case,” which is the only poem in the book that dates from my graduate school experience. I think it was actually the only poem from my thesis, and when I wrote it, I hesitated. I can remember that I thought, oh, nobody cares about immigrants and all that. Imagine how early this was when I was writing this, and my grandmother was still alive . . . So I wrote it, and I sort of thought, okay, now I’ve taken care of that subject, as if that would be the end of it. As time went on, of course, I discovered that this was an enduring subject. I hadn’t finished the subject; I had located it.

It’s a different story, in a way, with “Woman Before an Aquarium.” This is a poem written by a young woman trying to figure out how to be a woman and a poet. I chose as a model a figure that was the opposite of an odalisque. She’s very studious looking, you don’t see any of her body, you just see her head. She’s all mind, no body. As I got older, I started thinking that there was something a little poignant about that choice as an icon. 

MR: Do you feel like the picture chose you, in a sense? 

PH: Oh, yes. Why that painting? Why not some other painting? It isn’t even a very beautiful painting. It doesn’t have those beautiful Matisse colors. It’s kind of muddy. I hope you get a chance to see it at the Chicago Art Institute. I bet there are lots of people who walk by it and never even notice it. Who knows why I did. As Adam [Zagajewski] said today, we have thousands and thousands of memories. Why this one?

I think I felt a little . . . I don’t know if sad is too strong a word, but a little poignant about that choice. And I thought, not too late to get the babe in there before it’s all over with, so I was drawn to thinking about the opposite female figure. I wasn’t interested in the nude; I was interested in the whole idea of leisure, the woman this time not as contemplative thinker but as an at-ease body, which, yes, can be erotic, but can also be relaxed. It can just be ease in the body, just the pleasure of the body. And then, of course, I had always liked Matisse, so I could return to Matisse and think about him. He ends up being sort of the hero figure in the book.

I also portrayed my ignorance of art—that is not phony; that is absolutely the case—and so I read a lot over time. But mostly I didn’t read anything until I started writing this book, so most of my relationship with that painting or with Matisse, including my first book, Woman Before an Aquarium, was really just from looking. It wasn’t from reading anything. I collected my picture postcards from museums I visited, but I didn’t study the artists formally.

MR: In Blue Arabesque you say, “Collecting is not a simple matter of possessing. It’s a way of looking: a looking that is itself a kind of craving. To look this way is to be possessed, lost.”

PH: That’s certainly true of Matisse as I have presented him, and how he is usually presented.

MR: In so many of the figures you write about, that sense of being lost seems to be very important. For example, Edith Stein and her sense that “a kind of blessed anonymity attends the most genuine self,” which is also what happens when you travel. You are no longer the “I,” the identified person. You are anonymous.

PH: And it doesn’t matter if you speak English. That’s going to get you nowhere. Or that you’re funny or intelligent or that you’ve got a good job or that you’re important in your city, or whatever. All of the references of individuality are stripped away.

MR: How does that allow you, specifically as a writer, to glimpse the world in a different way?

PH: I really think that a lot of what has to happen for a writer every day is the absenting of the autobiographical self, the self that is aware of itself, to have that self stripped away in order to be the self that can render the world. That’s the thing you’re after. It isn’t about dying. It isn’t a suicidal thing. It’s about wanting to be useful . . . 

To read the rest of the interview, subscribe to Lyric now!