Christian Gullette on architecture in verse, the layers of grief and poems as threshold spaces ‹ Literary Hub

Lit Hub is pleased to present another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month they spoke with Christian Gullette. Christian Gullette is the author of Coachella Elegy (Trio House Press, 2024), winner of the Trio House Press Trio Award 2023. He is editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review and works as a lecturer and translator. Gullette lives in San Francisco.

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Poets.org: There is a feeling that the speaker in Coachella Elegy is the observation and retelling of scenes with a restrained tone, which is typical for a book with elegy in the title. What influenced your approach to voice for this collection?

Christian Gullette: Emotions like grief bring many conflicting feelings at once, a state I find very intimate and intense, precisely because the discomfort and the unsaid in grief are so strongly felt, but sometimes impossible to express. For my speakers, grief has multiple layers, often seething and angry and full of despair just beneath the surface.

Defying the expectation that a poem should convey a single feeling in a very direct way actually reinforces and heightens the tension. Grief can make me want to look away, or deny pleasure, or long for it. Sometimes all at once, with no real resolution. This resistance feels very personal and heartfelt to me; elegies, like the eponymous poem in the collection, can contain a harrowing mix of joy, beauty, terror, and quiet loneliness, tempered by ambivalences about how one is supposed to feel.

The speakers of these poems have experienced loss of many kinds – physical, emotional, environmental, and legal – and are suspicious of narratives or myths of redemption.

I often think of Thom Gunn’s poems in The man with the night sweatsand how elements like rhyme can seem so distant at first, given the intensity of death and despair, until I realize that the rhyme draws my attention to an anger building beneath the lines, making the whole thing even more potentially explosive.

Poets.org: The juxtaposition of joy and brevity speaks to a power dynamic simmering beneath the surface of many of these poems. “The Fish” feels like a sequel to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem of the same name, and has the same form and power. Only here, instead of speaking of the release of the fish at the end of her poem, Bishop is talking about the “bone-colored napkins” that hotel guests use to wipe their mouths.

To what extent is it true to feel pleasure when the world seems to be on the verge of collapse, and can you talk about the importance of power in this collection?

C-G: I love pools. I love pool parties. But I’ve also found that in a pool full of people partying to a DJ, you can suddenly feel unbearably lonely. It sounds so contradictory, but a landscape can be heartbreakingly beautiful but also potentially tormented by a man-made environmental disaster.

The body is so wonderful and erotic, and yet it can decay at any moment. My speakers are undoubtedly tempted to control experience so that they don’t experience pain or disappointment, especially in a world filled with destruction and loss. The speakers in these poems have experienced loss of many kinds – physical, emotional, environmental, legal – and they are suspicious of redemptive narratives or myths.

But the speakers also seem to understand that the realization of the coexistence of joy and pain, beauty and loss, is a tension that shapes them both. They are never far from each other.

The more I write about these tensions, the more space there is to recognize and challenge the destructive myths of America and California, and things like queer utopias, land displacement, and ecological insecurity. The more my speakers reflect on their own complicity in contributing to the drought by seeking poolside pleasure in the desert, for example.

Poets.org: Three prose poems entitled “In Transit” separate Coachella Elegy into its four sections. These interludes reflect the nature of transition, occupying a liminal space that serves as a transition from one section to the next rather than occupying a section of its own. What do you think of the idea of ​​the poem as its own liminal space – a place of transition, potential and in-between?

C-G: My brother Jeremy, who died in a car accident and is the subject of many of these elegies, loved to drive. One of the poems in “In Transit” is about times when he spent entire afternoons driving around the highway around our town, helping drivers change tires, but really, I suspect, he was searching. Looking for an escape from his own suffering and sadness.

But also looking for validation, connection and joy. Looking for the pleasure of selflessness, but also the pleasure of defying societal expectations, a middle finger to the way he was allegedly drive. But still in circles.

Architecture literally and figuratively represents the topography of many of my poems.

After my husband battled cancer, we moved west to San Francisco. That was also a kind of search. But I never quite got away from where I wanted to be. And even when I feel at home, I always feel like it’s still going to be the same or turn out not to be the way I wanted it to be.

Maybe I never really knew what I wanted. I am fascinated by the idea of ​​searching, and in-between and liminal spaces can make that search tangible, especially when you realize that the place you wanted to go or needed to go either doesn’t exist for you or never did.

But there is something else. That is the surprise.

Poets.org: Coachella Elegy is rich in imagery, even in your depictions of tattoos on waiters and lovers. When you began collecting these poems, how did you map the topographies – both that of California and that of the various male figures who enter the space and the speaker’s imagination?

C-G: I notice that there are a lot of cocktails in the poems, which is both funny and, on a more serious level, probably to do with seeking escape and pleasure and forgetting pain. There are a lot of celebratory toasts too, I notice.

And yes, lots of bodies, their eyes and skin. The purple arrow a surgeon draws next to my husband’s soon-to-be-removed eye is another kind of tattoo, and bodies are often marked in the poems in ways that ironically acknowledge their impermanence.

Some of the earliest poems in the collection feature a lot of bees. They serve as a reminder of environmental loss as well as renewal and blossoming. They are also a connection to the Beehive State, or Utah, where my brother went to school before he died. Most of the elegiac echoes in the book come from the Beehive State.

Water and pools are an essential part of my imaginative process, places of joy and eros, but also of loneliness and reflective surfaces and secrecy and danger. In one of my first poems about Palm Springs, “Mid-Century Modern,” the male figures are arranged in a triangle, their gazes so intent that these opposing emotions I associate with water are heightened.

The mother figure in “Interior Design” provides a counterpoint to this, with references to world building in the literal sense of creating blueprints, but also to a child’s topographical perspective on family and the world. Architecture, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, represents the topography of many of my poems.

Poets.org: What are you reading right now?

CG: Diane Seuss’ collection Modern Poetry and Cindy Juyoung Oks Ward towards are new books that I am still enjoying. I have just started two highly anticipated biographies: Michael Notts Thom Gunn: A cool queer life And Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

CG: This could be a very long list, as I am revisiting so many poems that I will only list the ones mentioned in the conversation: “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop and “The Man with Night Sweats” by Thom Gunn.

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“enjambments,” a monthly interview series from the Academy of American Poets, profiles an emerging or established poet who has recently published a collection of poetry. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book and a reading by the poet, is posted on Poets.org and published in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.