Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo is a poet and multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of poetics, performance and decoloniality. She is the author of two books of poetry, Tender Machines (Tupelo Press, 2023) and The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books, 2015). She is a 2024 resident artist at Baryshnikov Arts Centre and an inaugural recipient of Opera America’s IDEA award, given to artists who have the potential to shape the future of opera. This season she premiered works at Long Beach Opera and the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. She is on the MFA faculty at The New School and lives in New York City.
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My first encounter with J. Mae Barizo was in Literary Hub. Her essay on John Cage and the lava fields of Iceland was lyrical and elegiac: “I had come to Iceland for a kind of purging, in hopes that a different time zone and continent would flush the longing from my skin,” she wrote. I remember her prose for its stark vulnerability, the way the words tumbled down the page and lured me onto the rocks with them. I too had traveled to Iceland, not in post-romantic breakup, but in a state of mourning. It was April 2002 and my first air travel post-9/11. Barizo’s essay reminds me what I had been trying to remember on that trip: how to believe in the world again—without making matters worse, as Cage would coin it. Here, Barizo cut to my core with this: “But my depression was wild; it had sprouted an appetite. When the memories flooded back, the desire came like a shock, an instant flowering. It was like a dormant volcano that could spew with no prior warning.” I thought, wow, here’s a writer who knows how to transform pain into beautiful text, while the rest of us just crave sleep.
Now, in her second poetry collection, Tender Machines (Tupelo, 2023), J. Mae Barizo brings memory, anguish, and desire again. This time with a heaving, sinking Manhattan skyline, staged between post-9/11 and a “virus named after a crown,” to the tune of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Her sonnets and small essays dramatize all that is disappearing. There are also fingers on ivory and fugues, motherhood both erotic and tender. In this collection we are lost in many darks. But sex, feeling, scar and song, as Barizo writes them, carry us through.
Carole Symer: Thank you for taking the time for this interview, J. Mae. When I received my copy of Tender Machines, I devoured it. I found it so instructive and an urgent balm. I’m eager to find out more about the making of this collection, the poet’s true heart, as well as learning about your muses and fixations and what spaces you find especially tender these days. As someone who also straddles multidisciplinary arts while keeping up with motherhood (I think we might have daughters the same age if my math and the 2015 NYT article is correct), girlfriends, and sociopolitical vexations as a private citizen, nothing feels private anymore, much less tender. Hence, the need for the piles of poetry books strewn throughout my house. Yet, yours are the poems that woo me to look inside myself, my relationships, as well as outside my window. Is there a reader you held in mind as you were writing these poems and, if so, how would you describe that reader?
J. Mae Barizo: In Obra Poetica, Jorge Luis Borges writes, “poetry lies in the meeting of the poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book.” I tell my students, Trust your reader. Don’t overexplain. Don’t try to pander to trends or popularity. When we write, we also have to accept that the work will be interpreted in different ways. That’s where the trust comes in. There are not just creative writers, there are creative readers. Seamus Heaney writes that this meeting between reader and writer is “the fluid, exhilarating moment which lies at the heart of any memorable reading, the undisappointed joy of finding that everything holds up and answers the desire that it awakens.” Some people say, “write for the reader, not for yourself,” but I think the opposite.
CS: The sequencing of your poems is exquisite. Each poem feels inextricably tied to the others and yet an intimate journey of its own. Surely, there’s a craft lesson for the aspiring poet working on her first full-length collection. Can you say something about your sequencing process?
JMB: This book, which I started as a student after 9/11, is two decades in the making. I had no idea that those little poems I was writing would someday become Tender Machines. It’s less a lesson in craft than in perseverance. The poems themselves, and then the manuscript as a whole, went through hundreds of revisions, reorderings and renamings. I’d be lying though if I didn’t say I had a feeling, the last time I sent it out, that this would be “it.” As soon as I felt ready to let this manuscript be out in the world, it was picked up by multiple presses. Isn’t that crazy that the poems know when they’re ready to be out in the world? I chose Tupelo Press because they really care about their authors and they make beautiful books.
CS: I hear writers talk about how each novel, each collection of poems or essays teaches them something new about the craft of writing. I’m wondering how that might be true for you.
JMB: I learned that the poems will take on forms in the retelling and revising that you may not have intended. I started many of the poems in Tender Machines in free-verse, and they ended up as sonnets. The sonnet is the first poetic form I fell in love with as a child. I memorized and imitated them. Even though I hadn’t written sonnets for many years, the poems felt comfortable in that formal container. The poems had minds of their own.
CS: Sarah Ruhl calls you “a poet of uncommon grace.” How does that resonate and compare to the sort of grace and poetic reaches you were envisioning with this collection?
JMB: I’m very honored that Sarah wrote that about my work. Sarah and I met when we were both working on our first opera librettos. What linked us at the beginning was a love for music and the possibilities of the poetic and operatic form. So part of this grace, for me, has to do with the poem’s interior music, how that translates onto the page and the stage.
CS: Thank you for making the speaker so real, so vulnerable, and the world so omnipresent—gaudy avenues and delicate scars shaped like pink flowers—yet set to music that makes it almost operatic. In the small essays section, there’s an address to a small child, a daughter, telling her who this woman is—her mother. Is there a particular poem in this collection you hope will most speak to your daughter as she enters her twenties and maybe even carry her through her thirties and beyond?
JMB: I hope that she will cherish the poem “The Women” and “Small Essays on Disappearance,” much of which I wrote sitting in Sakura Park playground watching my daughter and her friends tumble through the grass.
CS: I took a workshop with Sarah Sentilles, author of Draw Your Weapons. Last week, she sent a writing prompt that featured your poem, “The Women,” hailing your use of repetition and your brilliant metaphors/similes to describe the weather, and how that comparative language supports the mood and content of the poem (e.g., “clouds lifted their skirts” and “Their voices swept over us like bees hovering over lilacs”). She suggested we write into the prompt “Those days….”). I wonder if you might use that prompt now and tell us something you didn’t say in that poem about “those days.”
JMB: Thank you for that question, Carole. As you speak, I realize that memories of writing the book return. In response to your prompt: Those days I moved through the world like an automaton, as if my body was a mechanical device made in the imitation of a human being. There was the kind of numbness that comes from being overwhelmed by grief and desire. How is it that two seeming incongruent emotions can exist simultaneously?
The night I wrote “The Women” I was at a dinner party at the house of the poet Sarah Gambito. I knew most of the people but still I stood awkwardly at the table, placing sweets in my mouth, one by one. I looked around at the artists buzzing around me and felt so separate, as if the entire world was revolving and only I was immobile, like a lonely, intractable planet. Then I went home and wrote that poem.
CS: I read somewhere that most mornings you go to the piano before your writing desk. What is it about the intersection of poetry and music that feeds you?
JMB: For me, music and poetry share two qualities that I’ve utilized in my creative practice: discipline and form. The work ethic and rigor I needed to train as a classical musician translated into the way I approach the poetic work and the discipline involved in the writing life. I’m drawn to the formal constraints and possibilities of poetry because of the deep engagement with structure I learned in playing fugues and sonatas as a child. I was a shy, introverted child of immigrants, always frustrated with the limits of language. Music and poetry always co-existed for me; as I grew up, they became ways in which I felt comfortable communicating my world.
CS: I’m wondering about tutelary spirits. Who were the ones that kept you company—crouching, tumbling, swooping in when you needed them to—as you were writing these poems?
JMB: There were spirits both imagined and real. I have wonderful friends who first read, revised and nurtured these poems. Writers and artists like Timothy Liu, Cathy Lin Che, Kyle Dacuyan, Leslie Maslow and Sarah Ruhl. And then there were my two grandmothers, who both passed away during the pandemic and the writing of this book. Their spirits are in these poems. My literary ancestors and mentors are many: Jean Valentine, Frank Bidart, Etel Adnan.
CS: I feel like poetry finds you. How did you come to poetry?
JMB: When I was a child, we lived near Chiefwood, the home of Mohawk-English poet Emily Johnson. She was also known by her Mohawk name, Tekahionwake, which literally means “Double Life.” I came to believe that poetry could convey the fractured self I inhabited as a child. That it could create a relationship with doubleness and multiplicity, transposing the self into other selves and other times.
CS: I can’t help but think about how divided we are right now in this country and world. Or maybe we have always been, but now it’s all out there in the glaring public eye. Yet, ‘divided’ is often the state women and mothers feel perpetually and historically. Cut or torn in half. It makes me think of cities you’ve written about, like Berlin, or even post 9-11 New York City. What is your attraction to fractured landscapes?
JMB: It’s true that much of my work deals with the landscapes you mentioned, as well as disappearing ice fields (Iceland, Northern Canada) and construct of borders both natural and man-made. I’ve always loved writers who write about space with a poetic lens. I think of Lisa Robertson’s “Office for Soft Architecture,” “The Architectural Body” by Gins and Arakawa, or even John Ashbery, who wrote “These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing/ Into something forgetful, although angry with history.” When I write about the body, this often converges with landscape.Landscape has a spatial relationship to language and the body. Spaces that have been divided, colonized, scarred.
CS: Tender Machines also features a self divided between desires and familial worries. Yet, your speakers show up full-bodied, in the flesh, bleeding while still singing out. What are the remedies, art and life forms that stitch you back up and keep you drawn in, vertical and pulsating?
JMB: I grew up in the forests of Southern Ontario near the Niagara Peninsula. The trees there are very similar to the ones in Upstate New York, or in Bennington, VT, where I went to graduate school. Natural landscapes impart a kind of topological architecture to my thoughts and my writing. I love freshwater lakes, foraging for wild foods and memorizing the names of flowers or trees. I am sustained by the support of my friends and colleagues, artists like Ronald Maurice, Maxwell Neely-Cohen, Wolfram Koessel, Mira Jacob, Camonghne Felix, Maya Pindyck and John Reed.
CS: The title alone—Tender Machines—makes me think about late-stage capitalism, Empires and money, but ultimately, the body and relationships. In a world where we have become, and are expected to be, cyborgs, this idea of our bodies being tender machines is both radical and inevitable, is it not?
JMB: We live in an age when machines are emulating humans and humans aim to imitate machines. Our digital lives are full of fractal, transient bodies: pixelated images, statistics and data. But the body in writing is a vessel to feeling, to empathy. New technologies and machine-vision decoding can only aim to imitate our traditional spaces of art-making and culture-building. That is why we return to literature, music or centuries old tropes of wonder and magic. Will machines ever be able to be vessels of tenderness or empathy? Perhaps.
CS: What are your current projects, and what are you working on now, post-publication?
JMB: My poem sequence ISOLA was set to music by Alyssa Weinberg and had its world premiere at Long Beach Opera in 2024. It’s a feminist monodrama sung by Ariadne Greif, and was directed by visionary George R. Miller, who imagined an art-installation / performance piece featuring singer, chamber musicians, a dancer body double and surround sound electronics. Julio Cesar Delgado styled the costumes in collaboration with the legendary fashion house Issey Miyake! It’s amazing to me that these poems, which I wrote by hand while taking care of my mother in the Appalachians, transformed into this stunning visual and sonic panorama. It was also choreographed and danced by Julia Eichten, a founding member of LA Dance Project.
I have another world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in March 2024, and I’m looking forward to my artist residency at Baryshnikov Arts in April. I’m all about these transdisciplinary forays and re-imaginings of poetic forms.
CS: What spaces do you find tenderness readily available these days?
JMB: In my music room playing Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, in the poems of my students at The New School, foraging for wild foods upstate, putting my daughter to bed at night.
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Carole Symer is a practicing psychologist and teaches at New York University. Her essays, reviews and poems have appeared in Across the Margin, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Dunes Review, Laurel Review, Midway Journal, Mutha Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Tiny Wren Lit, Tupelo Quarterly, Wild Roof Journal, Under a Warm Green Linden, and elsewhere. She is the 2020 recipient of the Interlochen College of Creative Arts Scholarship Award, author of the chapbook, Glint, (Harbor Editions, 2021) and a student in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.