Margaret Ross is the author of two books of poetry, A Timeshare and Saturday. Her poems and translations have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and POETRY. She currently lives in Saskatchewan.
The first Margaret Ross poem I encountered was “Socks,” and immediately had that very rare sensation of my hair blowing straight back (or as Emily Dickinson famously put it, “as if the top of my head were taken off.”) “The socks came in a pack of five. What is the most boring subject / possible?” the poem asks, almost daringly, before diving into an extremely unboring meditation on commercial consumption, desire, department store as liminal space, and a yearning for human connection. Under Ross’s eye, what might seem like a random or cheap ornamental detail (the socks are “translucent blue / with punctures pierced to shape / a star around the ankle”) is an entryway into deeper experience, charged with an almost unbearable intimacy (“Blue interrupted by the living points / of constellated skin.”). Ross’s poems encapsulate a line I often think of by essayist Charles D’Ambrosio, who said that “the best writers… are fascinated by the ordinary—it’s so shockingly alive with trouble.” There’s also something so strangely elusive about the ordinary, about what we see and encounter every day, and it’s this elusiveness that Ross’s poems capture and engineer so well, and which make me want to keep returning to her poems again and again, for the surprises I keep finding there.
Ross’s second book of poems, Saturday, came out from Song Cave this past October; she is also the author of 2015’s A Timeshare (Omnidawn). In the couple of months following Saturday’s publication we spoke over email about the relationship between fiction and poetry, what description can tell us about reality, and the week as a unit of time.
Lena Moses-Schmitt: So many of your poems read almost like short stories to me, and I was trying to think about why that is—perhaps because of the way they’re paced, or because the images hold so much narrative while also building crisp layers of description and scene. What for you is the relationship between fiction and poetry? Does fiction influence you at all when you’re writing poems (and what were your other influences when writing these poems)?
Margaret Ross: Yes, fiction has been a huge influence. These poems really emerged from reading short stories, starting with Isaac Babel. I’d just moved to California and got sick before I could find furniture, so I was lying in an empty studio apartment, playing stories I knew from my phone to try to sleep. Because the room was empty, every voice echoed and sounded capable of prophecy. Someone was about to read a Denis Johnson story and before they began they mentioned hearing Johnson say Jesus’ Son was a ripoff of Red Cavalry. I looked that book up and as soon as I started reading, I knew my work was going to change. I actually had a fever, but reading Babel felt like a truer fever. His velocity and ferocious beauty and humor. “The Life of Matvey Rodionovich Pavlichenko” put me in an altered state that I kept seeking out. I read short fiction obsessively for a couple years. Alice Munro and Yiyun Li in particular changed me. The brutal clarity of their stories, their honesty about cruelty and love and delusion. Li’s “All Will Be Well” for instance—everyone should read it.
Stories like that give me a sense of vertigo which I wanted to translate into poetry. It seemed like the way to do it might involve temporal distance. To try and make a poem that feels like years passing but retains the intensity of a charged lyric moment. That was the aspiration at least.
Lena Moses-Schmitt: You mention moving to California, and I wonder how your time living there may have influenced your poems? (I unabashedly ask this as someone who recently moved away from California and am only just now noticing the grip the Bay Area had on my poems and my internal landscape!)
Margaret Ross: I know what you mean. There are certain images I didn’t even realize were burned into me until I moved away. Those fire control goats chewing a dry hill.
Did living in the Bay change the speed of your poems? It slowed mine down. I think it had to do with the mist and latitude, whatever gives the sunlight that quality of ancient sadness. I started writing poems with more silence in them and shorter sentences.
Lena Moses-Schmitt: I’m not sure if California slowed my poems down so much as made them less formal and more conversational; maybe something of that West Coast casualness rubbed off on them; my lines became shorter, and more declarative. And I think the environment—“a quality of ancient sadness” is such a great way to put it—made me more attuned to how images could operate psychologically.
There’s an undercurrent of “pretend” inside a lot of your poems—of acting, of performances and surfaces and imitations. Some of the poems touch on the ways history or nature are cordoned off from our present-day modern life, essentially made into theater (in “Historic District,” the speaker watches as “girls in rayon imitations / of Qing gowns zipped over jeans / are posing”); in others, the speaker grapples with how pretending or performance infiltrates her personal relationships. The big question your poems seem to be circling is: what and where is the real? How can we know another person, how can we know the world? What do you think your poems are saying about where reality is, where authenticity is?
Margaret Ross: That’s definitely the big question—I don’t know if I have an answer.
I think the poems record attempts to keep asking the question, which involved for me an attention to surfaces premised on a very deep, almost mystical belief in description. I thought, I still think, that perceiving exactly what’s available to the senses will help a poem infer what isn’t. Description is more than exposition. It can be a kind of inquiry. Sometimes the inquiry is explicit, to try to articulate what’s really going on. Sometimes it’s oblique, to try to access through image a wordless intimation about what’s underneath a scene, what’s tacit in a relationship.
I don’t think history or nature are ever actually cordoned off from the present but people, myself included, do sometimes act like they are, to try to protect an idea about themselves or their families, their surroundings. And, as you say, the theater of that is endlessly interesting to me.
Lena Moses-Schmitt: Yes! I love that—a “mystical belief in description” and also “accessing through image a wordless intimation about what’s underneath a scene.” I think your poems do that so effectively—they made me think more deeply about the intention behind an image, and also, since image has to be comprised of language, how can that language be used not just to describe but to approach the place beyond the language (“to touch / the myth beneath the fiction,” as you write in “Orange Tree”).
Speaking of images which might hold a particular charge, I noticed that clothing plays a big role in these poems—there’s the speaker contemplating purchasing the titular blue socks in the poem “Socks,” the list of shoes in “Account,” the blouse, which holds an entire landscape within it, in “Big Purple Peonies.” Why do you think you or these poems might be drawn to clothing?
Margaret Ross: Thank you! That’s very generous. I love your idea about the language used “to approach the place beyond the language.”
Probably the truest reason for all the clothing is that I like clothes and spend a lot of time looking at them…but there’s a phantom quality to clothing that also appeals to me. When it’s not being worn, a shirt still silhouettes a torso and expresses some opinion about how the absent body should be decorated. A stray garment is a half-presence that resembles a negated image in a poem, the kind of phrase I love reading where you’re given something simultaneously there and not there. One that stuck in my head early on is Wordsworth seeing fields from far away: “these hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines…”
Lena Moses-Schmitt: There are a handful of poems in the collection from the perspective of a child, or at least about childhood (I’m thinking of “Optimism,” “Greenish Picture,” and “New York,” to name a few). What were the challenges—if any!—in writing from this perspective, and what do you feel like the perspective allowed you to accomplish or investigate?
Margaret Ross: For better and for worse, I still feel close to who I was as a kid so I don’t find it hard to write from a child’s perspective. I’m drawn to that view because of its bewilderment. It isn’t schooled yet in adult rationalizations. That psychic position can be a useful vantage from which to think through ethical questions, questions about decorum, to try and see more clearly what etiquette pads or evades.
Lena Moses-Schmitt: I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the poem “Saturday” and what went into the decision to make it the title of your book?
Margaret Ross: The book was nameless for a long time after all the poems were written. I went through a couple bad titles before a friend read the manuscript, suggested Saturday, and that was it. (He also suggested Hi, which if I was a funnier person I would have gone with.) The poem “Saturday” doesn’t feel more representative of the book than others around it, but the word Saturday and what it conjures seemed right. Poems named for days start appearing in the last stretch of the book—Saturday, Birthday, Thursday—but from the beginning, the book is immersed in that intimate small-scale sense of time, the week. What happens on what day, the stuck routine, school or work days vs. off days, the strata of time on which you can barely perceive your life changing because for that you’d have to zoom out and look at years. And of course within the week, Saturday is special—recurring prospect of pleasure and freedom.
Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer, artist, and the author of the poetry collection True Mistakes. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Believer, Narrative, The Rumpus, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.