SOMETHING ABOUT THE EYES: AN INTERVIEW WITH REBECCA WEE

On a particularly gossamer afternoon in November 2006, I sat down with poet Rebecca Wee, half-empty mugs of coffee in hand, at her home in Davenport, Iowa a few blocks from the Mississippi River. Wee is a professor at Augustana College in Illinois, a few miles across the river, where she teaches poetry, composition, and literature. While her work is rife with objects and creatures belonging to the natural world, Wee is relentless in her assertion that beauty can be found in even the most mundane artifacts, the most surreal moments. But perhaps one of the truly striking characteristics of Wee’s poems is their tenderness. Her first book, Uncertain Grace (Copper Canyon Press, 2001), won the 2000 Hayden Carruth Award, and she is now at work on a new manuscript, Instead (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming). [Two poems from the manuscript appear on pages 27-32 of this issue of Lyric.] Since first reading Uncertain Grace, I’d felt compelled to find out more about the source(s) from which Wee’s poems manifest themselves. And so our conversation began.

. . .

Erin Bertram: Something I’ve noticed in [your work] is that a lot of the poems seem to end with some sharp, harrowing image that the reader really hangs on to, almost like a photograph: a pair of hawks overhead, the scent of blood and rain, tracks in the snow, and—a very sharp one—the shirtless man rolling bare-chested over glass. Was that intentional? Have you noticed that about your work?

Rebecca Wee: Intentional? I don’t think intentional. I have a very hard time, like a lot of people do, I guess, ending and starting, because you’re self-conscious about starting a poem, and then what are you leaving people with? So I’ve never felt that I was very good at it. I think what I often end up doing—and it may be why the poems sort of end up that way—is I cut. I cut, often, my deliberate end and my beginning, and I’ll look somewhere for it, a line that was alive, that somehow seems to resonate with what the poem seems to be about and is more interesting than what I was deliberately trying to do. I think they end up that way because I’ve shaved off what else I was doing. Maybe that’s kind of cheating, but I often do have to pull the embedded poem out of the talk that framed it when I first draft something. It’s like warming up, I guess, and like cooling down at the end. Somewhere in the middle is where the interesting stuff is happening.
The one that actually comes to mind, because I just had a woman ask me about this at a reading, is a little short poem called “Betrayal.” I don’t even know if I’ve ever read it in public before, because it’s sort of an odd, weird little poem. It ends with the reader not knowing if what she sees is a glove or something drowned with its eyes open. And she brought that one up because she thought, oh my god, you gave us all chills with that last image. I thought, that one I remember writing. It was a poem that kind of came quickly at a point in my life when I was trying to articulate the phenomenon of duplicity, which interests me all the time, but intentional, and especially unintentional, people not being honest with themselves and the people they’re closest to, whether it’s a deliberate lie or just withholding something. I don’t know how that image came to me. I have some sort of vague memory. When I was a little kid, I had a kitten who disappeared and who I found the next spring sort of carcassed down at the bottom of a ditch, you know, not really recognizable any more as my cat, but the collar was on. I think that’s the image, and I don’t know why it came into that poem exactly, because losing that cat had nothing directly to do with any kind of duplicity. The shock factor of it maybe, and the hurt of it, and the coming across something you didn’t want to see.
Something about that became a nice and unintentional metaphor, I suppose, for the subject matter of that poem. You know, having to face something about yourself, or having to face something about somebody close to you that you had been working really hard—although maybe unconsciously—to not see. In a way, there it is. That one just kind of felt right, but I wasn’t conscious of doing it in the writing of it. I think it’s true, too, that I often want to start or end a poem in a more visual way. It’s the image of something more than the sound or the scent that gets me, so I often do start or make my way in writing a poem to some kind of image that haunts me. I think that’s what I like to read, too. I like, when I’m done with something, to have an image in my head rather than talk.

EB: The effect is that an image sticks with you longer.

RW: You carry it away, yep. So I think it’s kind of accidental, but I think there’s a method to it. An accidental method.

EB: To parallel what we’ve been discussing, the how of opening and closing a poem, another motif throughout your book, and through what I’ve read of your newer manuscript, is the idea of seeing and vision, what’s seen, what’s not seen. Related to that, there’s also what’s said and what’s not said about what has been witnessed.

RW: I’m not even sure how to talk about that, but it’s true.

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