Monica Ferrell’s latest poetry collection, You Darling Thing (2018, Four Way Books), was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and for The Believer Book Award. Cathy Park Hong says of this collection, “each poem is as precise and deadly as a pearl-handled pistol, as (Ferrell) takes fantasies imposed on women and aims the gun back at us with devastating wit.” The collection is a follow-up to Ferrell’s brilliant debut, Beasts for the Chase (2008, Sarabande Books), which won the Sarabande Kathryn Morton Prize and was a finalist for the Asian American Writers Workshop Poetry Prize, and her debut novel The Answer is Always Yes (2008, Dial Press).
Ferrell has been a creative writing teacher at the Bennington Writing Seminars, the Columbia MFA program, and SUNY-Purchase (where she is the Doris and Carl Kempner Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing). At Bennington, she parents two kids with her husband, poet Michael Dumanis (Creature, 2023, Sarabande Books).
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Chaya Bhuvaneswar: Thank you for doing this interview, Monica. I really enjoyed reading poems from You Darling Thing as well as your first collection, and of course your poem “Infancy” in The New Yorker. We want to ask you about all of these!
Monica Ferrell: Thanks for all the questions!
CB: Can you talk about the process by which you develop a new poetry collection or know that you have a group of poems that speak directly to one another? Were there collections that inspired you or that you felt You Darling Thing to be in dialogue with?
MF: I generally start by just writing and then step back to see if patterns are emerging. Like a Rorschach image, the poems that were made without any plan might reveal to me what I’ve been dwelling on. Then I can fill in gaps or choose new perspectives on the material. I can’t really enter into a collection with a set idea in mind—that always feels forced to me—though I admire people who do. They seem so lucky! Hmm, I don’t think there were any particular collections that informed my view of the book as it was developing. Single poems by various authors, though, of course: probably my single biggest influence is Rainer Maria Rilke.
CB: The pull toward emotion after looking at something steadily—that’s how I imagine the connection between Rilke’s work and yours. In your poem “Poetry,” which you did such a beautiful reading of at Manhattanville College in 2019, I was struck by the lines, “I am not afraid of mirrors or the future / Or even you, lovers,”, especially for how you prefaced your reading with a discussion of how the poem relates to the very act of writing poetry.
Can you talk more about how conceptions of beauty and time in a human life relate to the beauty expressed in a poem? Reading this poem for myself, I’m struck immediately by the possibility that the fearlessness of a poet, an artist, transfers into a kind of fearlessness about “the aging process” as a woman, as a feminist, and I am thrilled by that idea.
MF: Thank you. I’m glad the idea of aging was coming through in those lines.
I wrote that poem one July when it was scorching in Brooklyn. I was trying very hard to generate new work, waking up early, sitting down at my desk, observing certain rituals (such as drinking a liter of ice-cold mineral water—my day’s splurge), and staying there for hours. In the early evening I’d take a long walk just to get rid of the cabin fever and stretch my legs. I remember one such walk in particular, looping up from Cobble Hill where I lived for many years, to Fulton Avenue in Fort Greene. It was so hot and hazy the sky was a kind of pink and orange, throbbing, swirling, a little bit toxic. I sat down on one of the benches at a tiny green triangle of park, which serves as a kind of crossroads there, and looked around me at all the people in their twenties and thirties, bright and well-dressed and filled with life, zipping out of the subway station or out of taxis and dashing off to meet someone. That was the evening when “Poetry” began.
My practice—staying in solitary work-mode all day, and then, when I couldn’t take it anymore, dragging my body around through a landscape grown newly unfamiliar—probably contributed to a very oppositional sense. There was the world out there, where couples were meeting up for drinks and dinner dates, looking hip and polished and full of romantic energy, and the silent and ascetic world back in my apartment. Wow, how silly of me—I only now just realized, in writing this, that I had recently gone on a date with someone at a restaurant opposite that very park. It hadn’t left me with a great taste. That experience probably influenced my whole cast of mind—the speaker more or less throwing off any expectation for future romantic love—not to mention the whole unconscious drift of my movements, as I took what I’d thought of as a random walk! Nothing’s really random when we leave things up to the unconscious, I guess.
The poem’s opening line arises out of the speaker’s frustration with her inability to make poems. In thinking of spinning and weaving, I know I had the Odyssey’s Penelope and Rumpelstiltskin’s miller-girl in mind. The fairytale of Rumpelstiltskin, in particular, is something that I often have in the back of my mind as an analogue of the relationship between experience (the straw) and art (the gold it gets spun into). Yet as inept as she might be at her art, she still feels she belongs to the artist’s path.
You’re right that the poem meditates on beauty in art versus life; it pits art against life, seeing art as a devotional practice that’s solitary and unworldly, as opposed to the hedonism of bodily experience and sexuality (the lovers are “rutting in the gardens of this earthly verge”). The speaker seems to have a lot of judgment for those lovers, who represent the life of the flesh, but I hope it’s clear that she’s something of an unreliable narrator. There’s a lot of bravado in that moment you quote, and even some bitterness. Yet she’s conflicted. In the final line, where she allies herself with the natural world (kin to the trees, the bees, the color green), I hope the color green has a few different resonances. Green’s the color of growth in nature, yes, but it also signifies naïveté (You speak like a green girl, Polonius snaps at Ophelia in Hamlet), as well as envy.
I’m laughing as I write all this because, now that I’m married and have two small children, the idea of getting to sit down at my desk first thing in the morning and stay there all day seems like a fantasy!
CB: Can you talk about the poem “Savage Bride” from the new collection? I’m really interested in the contrast between the “savage” (the visceral, the tasting, the need) and her knowledge. How does the speaker know what things were like (in the cosmos) before the person to whom the poem is addressed was born?
MF: Yes, I think I was trying to write a poem that eschewed pretty descriptions of romantic and sexual love and instead presented comparisons that were, or at least could be, ugly. In high school I was struck by the idea of a noble gas, which, despite the fancy-sounding name, is a gas that won’t combine with any other element into a molecule. That seemed incredibly lonely and sad to me: being a bit of cosmic material that was, no matter the circumstance, destined to be alone with itself. Another key concept for the poem is Aristotle’s notion of the prime mover, his theory about all motion being the product of a desire for something, which for him explained even the orbits of planets.
CB: With so few lines you convey a visceral sense of machines and gears subtly operating—we can see it!
Okay, then in “Coin of Your Country,” you explore themes of romantic love, partnership, maybe even marriage? This theme, of marriage and union, is more generally threaded through your most recent collection You Darling Thing. Can you speak about how you approach this as a theme?
MF: Someone has written that my first book is really concerned with inventing the myth of the self, and I think there is truth to that assessment; it explores what it’s like to be a discrete person in the world. This second book is more about being-with, the possibility of merging with another person and the meaning of marital or sexual union. This didn’t become apparent to me until I had written about half the poems in the collection, and then it became a guiding impulse for the second half.
CB: Related to that idea, of discovery and uncovering, I’m really interested in this quotation from an interview you gave for Sarabande Books: “I’m trying to let something that wants to come into being do so—poetry as uncovering, rather than invention or rhetoric, and a form of devotion and service.”
How does “uncovering”(revelation?) play into devotion? I’m interested in this not only in terms of poetry, but for the meaning of these interrelated concepts in Hinduism. Shruti/Smrti—what is “heard” (revealed) vs. what is “remembered” (i.e. human law and custom). Both of these comprise devotional practices. But I’m wondering what these two ideas—uncovering and devotion—mean to you as a poet, in your work.
MF: With this idea of uncovering, I am thinking of two things. One is the idea of aletheia in Greek philosophy and as taken up by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (unconcealedness)—aletheia basically means truth, but unlike in English, truth is constellated as the negative of something. The word is a + letheia, like Lethe, so truth comes about as a kind of un + forgetting. The other thing is the Hindu concept of darshan. I believe Rilke’s “thing poems,” his Dinggedichte, come out of a kind of darshan, though not with the image of a God, rather with objects and animals; during the composing of them, he spoke in his letters of a new vision, a new way of seeing objects in the world, and his so-called New Poems (about a panther, a swan, a photograph) reflect that devotional attention.
CB: How wonderful to hear about writing as discovering. Another question, about one of my favorite of your poems. In “Geburt des Monicakinds” you contemplate the sight of you as a newborn, as I understand this poem. Can you talk about the genesis of this work?
MF: That poem arose out of looking at a number of early Renaissance paintings of the birth of the Virgin Mary. I suddenly started to think about what my own birth would have been like. I was born in India and so received a smallpox shot at a time when Western countries had stopped using it. I started thinking about how bizarre it is that we give babies diseases as soon as they emerge into the world, particularly a disease that I associate with the history of imperialism.
CB: That reminds me of your poem, “Infancy,” where a great dialectical meditation plays out in questions that aren’t really answered in the poem, but gestured at in such a moving way. Can you think of poems you’ve written where you did come to “answers”? Which poets do you think arrive at answers in their work—I think of Adrienne Rich and Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, for example. Boland’s poem “Lace” for example does arrive at an answer that shames capitalist machinery, an answer that advocates for people she considers forgotten by history.
MF: Eavan was actually my teacher for a time when I was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford; nice to see her name here. And I love Seamus Heaney, though I think of him less in terms of answers than questions. Actually, I guess he does both: he has a passage in his The Fire and the Flint where he talks about two modes of poetry, the masculine (which is muscular and oratorial) versus the feminine (which is parthenogenetic, numinous, and beckoning). I believe I’m aligned very definitely with the latter category, the questions rather than answers. I think of Keats’s notion of negative capability.
CB: It’s interesting to me, as well, that you became an acclaimed debut novelist even before your first poetry collection came out, with the publication of The Answer is Always Yes (2008, Dial Press), which received a starred rave review from Booklist and was called a “pyrotechnic debut” by Kirkus Reviews. As Booklist describes, your novel’s protagonist, “teenager Matthew Acciaccatura, from Teaneck, New Jersey,” is desperate to become one of the cool kids. He finally gets his chance when—now an academically promising freshman at NYU—he’s hired as a promoter for Cinema, one of the hottest clubs in 1990s New York. A true naïf, Matt is as astonished as the reader by his subsequent transformation from social outcast to “Magic Matt, King of Club Kids.” Ferrell’s cautionary account of Matt’s descent into the dark world of disco, drugs, desire, and self-delusion is gorgeously written, beautifully imagined, and wonderfully spot-on in its analysis of Matt’s insecurities, resentments, and puppy-like longings. A slyly Nabokovian touch is the author’s inclusion of footnotes on Matt’s transformation, ostensibly offered by another outsider, a humorless German sociologist named Dr. Hans Mannheim, who will become, in surprising ways, more than a clinical observer of Matt’s sadly predictable fate. Irresistibly readable, Ferrell’s first novel is a triumph not only of setting but also of voice, tone, and attitude.”
Just logistically (in terms of how you feel, how you prepare for the project, steps you take to “get into it”)—can you describe any key differences in your process in terms of writing a poem vs. writing a novel or short story (prose)? Do you read differently before the writing? Do you construct your days differently during the revision process? The phenomenon of poet-novelist is one dear to me, including as practiced by Morgan Parker, Destiny Birdsong, and is all the more fascinating because of how many more poets move between poetry and non-fiction—like Saeed Jones, Safiya Sinclair, and Nick Flynn.
MF: Of these genres, writing a novel is the most fun for me, because it allows me to dwell in the same world for days/months/years at a time. I think toward the next morning’s work when I go to sleep at night, which is both exciting and restful for me. Conversely, writing a poem is more like reinventing the wheel each time. Some poet, perhaps it was W.H. Auden, said something like, I don’t know how to write a poem, I only know how to write the poem I’ve just written, which is of no use for writing the next one. I agree with that sentiment. Writing a novel is like building a house, whereas writing a poem is more like improvisatory jazz. Writing a story resembles a novel but, obviously, on a smaller scale—more like building an annex, I suppose!
You’re right to mention reading. Reading the work of other people is really central for me. Actually, I’m so impressionable that I have to be careful not to read the work of someone who sounds totally tonally different from the voice I’m going for. I’m not sure if I construct my days differently, other than, as might be expected, requiring bigger chunks of private time for revising fiction as opposed to poetry. The lucky thing about revising lyric poetry is you’re able to keep the whole thing in your head, so you can be fiddling with a line while doing something else, like buying groceries at the supermarket.
CB: What was it like to start your novel off by plunging the reader so acutely into the painfully self-conscious POV of Matt? Were you consciously aware of how being a poet empowered you potentially to step so deeply into the character’s subjectivity?
MF: Thank you. I really struggle with beginnings, with whatever kind of fiction. There actually used to be a chapter prior to that one, but it was way too still and static, too prologue-y. My wonderful editor—the late great Susan Kamil—suggested cutting it, which meant I had to make changes to what is now the first chapter. When I was doing a big draft of the novel I went to the library and read the first fifty pages of twenty different books to see what they did or didn’t do, and that helped a lot.
CB: The vividness of the enormous pressure Matt puts on himself (as if every moment, he’s trying to live out Rilke’s dictum You must change your life)—creates a startling degree of tension that moves those first chapters forward. Did you consciously think about how you would sustain that tension, in terms of choosing a structure?
MF: People change so quickly starting college! I remember in my freshman fall there were these two guys who became famous the first week of school by dyeing their hair green and being inseparable (they had only just met at orientation). By mid-October they were mortal enemies! The green dye, which they hadn’t arrived with, had defined them indelibly in the campus imagination, and then just as abruptly it no longer fit. So I think I was going for something like that momentum, how during those early weeks it seems like anything is possible in terms of radical personal change, how everyone is breathlessly and microscopically observing each other.
CB: I Loved the inventiveness of the “Excursos” by the Hans (noting I’m also someone who loved the intercessory chapters in Moby Dick). Tell us how that evolved.
MF: I worked on this novel for a number of years, and Hans wasn’t part of it at first. At a certain stage I was very dissatisfied with the manuscript and told myself, “Let’s give it two more weeks and if you can’t turn it around, you’re abandoning it.” During those two weeks Hans appeared and completely altered the way I looked at the story. That was about the third draft in (though nowhere near the end—I was still working on it for another three years).
CB: More on the general treatment of mental health services, including on college campuses, in the book. Was it intentional to make us aware of the enormous power mental health “authorities” really do have over college students’ lives?
MF: Wow, yes. It’s so tremendously sad. While I was at college, more than one person committed suicide at my college; for example, the tragic Dunster House murder-suicide (extensively covered by the press) took place then. One year I lived next door to a girl who I was very afraid was on the verge of harming herself; once or twice I had to listen very carefully through the fire door separating us in case I needed to call emergency services. People at college are often so very far away from home, from their families and the worlds they have known—particularly international students. My mother was one (she came from India to study here in the early 1960s, an era in which there were very few South Asians in the country). I have a special concern for international students, and also a special respect for their bravery and fortitude.
CB: When you were drafting the book, were there moments where you consciously thought about including poetic statements, i.e. like these I really loved:
He recognized this kind of desolation, the pure blackviolet bloom opening to enclose you with its Venus flytrap mouth.
The next day slid out between their fingers like silty water.
The sun revolved on its wire. The moon too.
MF: I think that’s just how my brain works. My favorite authors write what I would call non-transactional prose, prose where the point is not to express an idea clearly but, at least in part, to revel in the joys of language and imagery and sound. If I try to avoid that sort of language, the product becomes joyless and flat.
CB: Another lovely feature of this novel: the endnotes! Can you talk more about this literary impulse to make the text, the book, the story Speak beyond what an individual narrator or close third perspective can “say”?
MF: In the print version, they are footnotes rather than endnotes, which is how I originally formatted everything. Particularly the long footnote toward the end, I planned out exactly what would appear as a kind of parallel track below the main narrative (which made editing extremely complicated!). Some readers hated that aspect of the text; it’s the primary element complained of in reviews. I understand this position, though it would have been a totally different book without them, one I personally would be less interested in as a reader. Probably one’s opinion has something to do with how one feels about footnotes in general. Personally, I’m actually always excited to see a footnote in someone’s work, whether fiction or non-fiction; inevitably, there’s a refreshing change in tone and angle, and often footnotes are wonderfully, entertainingly tendentious and argumentative.
CB: When you think about being a novelist, who are your main influences?
MF: The one that I think of as being a very clear influence is Pale Fire by Nabokov (also, to a lesser degree, Nabokov’s Pnin), as well as The Great Gatsby. Another would be Hunger by Knut Hamsun, particularly in terms of the interiority and the protagonist’s isolation and obsessive desire portrayed as he moves through an inhospitable urban environment.
CB: The descriptions of parties are really gorgeous and particular. (I.e. “in gilt lamplit couches, a maze of velvet couches,” etc). Was it important to show the allure of this world independent of the ways in which it cannot satisfy? Did you “research” this or were you part of a club scene that you’re drawing upon?
MF: I came of age during one of the golden eras of New York City nightclubs—the so-called “Club Kid” era. A close friend was dating someone who ran a number of the big ones, such as the Limelight, Club USA, and the Tunnel. During college I was around these places quite a bit and later, for a short period before grad school, I worked in one, where most nights of the week I crossed paths with people like Leonardo di Caprio, Eminem, Keith Richards, Donald Trump, and Puff Daddy (as he was then known). There I worked with the star promoters of that day like Scott Sartiano and Richie Akiva, as well as DJs and performers like Lady Bunny and Amanda Lepore. I didn’t take on this job as research, but of course I couldn’t have written the book without such an immersion in the world of NYC nightclubs.
CB: I can’t think of a more glamorous and beguiling note to end on than that! Thank you so much for speaking with me, Monica!
MF: My pleasure!
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Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician, writer, and 2019 PEN /American Robert W. Bingham Debut Fiction award finalist for her story collection WHITE DANCING ELEPHANTS: STORIES, which was also selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction and Best Short Story Collection and appeared on “best of” lists for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue India, and Entertainment Weekly. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Community of Writers and Sewanee Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions (2019) and Peach Pit: sixteen stories of unsavory women (2023). She is at work on a novel.