An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling

Leah Umansky: Reading Vow, is like peering into someone’s secret past. A woman is said to be married. Her fiancé dies. She is left, bereft and almost-helpless. It reminds me much of Jane Eyre (for what would Jane be without her Rochester?). On the other hand, it reminds me of Charlotte Bronte herself and the way the Bronte Parsonage was both her home and her fortress. She died soon after she was married, too. With this said, how does your poetry lend itself to allusions? Do you find these books and stories are intrinsic to your life as a writer, or do you seek out these connections?

Kristina Marie Darling: That’s a great question. Most of my poems arise out of my life as a reader. I’ve always been intrigued by Marianne Moore’s use of the term “conversity,” a word she coined to describe the dialogic nature of poetry. With that in mind, I envision my poems as a response to the work that came before my own. By that I don’t just mean poetry, but also fiction, visual art, and literary theory. I’ve always thought it was the writer’s job to not only revise and modify earlier texts, but to forge connections between different texts. With Vow, I definitely sought to explore the relevance of these nineteenth century women’s texts to contemporary debates about language, gender and received literary forms.

For me, Vow represents a corrective gesture. In much of nineteenth century literary culture, women’s writing occupied a marginal space. For example, the sketchbook – which consisted of songs, notes, poems, diary entries, and a mixture of many other types of writing — was considered a predominantly female literary form. More often than not, literary forms that were marked as female were relegated to a private space. When writing Vow, I was interested in taking this marginal space, which women’s writing so often occupied, and making it a focal point.

LU: I’m interested in the speaker of these poems. I know you just founded your own feminist press, Noctuary Press, so I know you have a clear relationship to gender in writing. What is her connection to the self? She’s strong, yet impressionable. She wants answers. She wants direction. She wants. What governs her? Is it desire? Is it loneliness? Is it the story inside being the bride? Women are expected to be so many different roles, besides being a woman.

For example: She “doesn’t know how” to use her wings.

                        She “doesn’t know how” to wear the dress.

                        She tries “ascending,” but says “it’s hard to know.”

                        She says,“a locked room, but what else?”

KMD: I’m very interested in the notion of the palimpsest, a text that is written, erased, and written over again and again. This is exactly how I envisioned the speaker of the poems in Vow.  She is inscribed and reinscribed with many different roles, expectations, and normative ideas about gender. These range from the complex culture surrounding weddings — the white dress, the ceremony, and the other accompanying rituals — to the myriad beliefs about what a wife should be, and what constitutes failure as a wife. The speaker of these poems definitely feels that she has failed as a wife, and as a result, she has been buried alive by the many normative ideas about marriage that have been inscribed onto her. She is motivated by the desire to erase this palimpsest, and find out what’s underneath the words and beliefs others have imposed upon her marriage and her identity. With that said, she is also interested in carefully documenting everything, for herself and for other women in her position.

LU: Also, why is the speaker so compelled to the “other” versions of herself. First, these versions are human: “I dream another me exists in the burning house, reading aloud from what I have written” (16). Then non-human and storied: “I am a broken mirror. Shattered glass. . . . But somehow in the dream I’ve grown wings. Tell me, does this change everything” (21)?

KMD: When writing Vow, I was very interested in the instability of the individual self. For me, this question is inextricable from the other concerns that the book addresses — questions about gender, identity, and marginal spaces. Throughout the collection, the speaker of the poems is haunted by other potential or possible versions of herself, that for one reason or another, were never fully realized. I was very interested in exploring why some of these possible selves remained mere possibilities, relegated in the end to marginal spaces. In the examples you cite, the speaker has been unable to actualize these truer versions of her identity, because they remain incongruous with the rhetoric surrounding marriage, womanhood, and femininity. 

LU: With that said, there is also a modern spin in this book, especially in how the speaker discusses film, which is clearly an anachronism.  Why does she focus on films?  Are films something you think about a lot as a writer. (Films are one of my favorite things next to books because they too are a story). She says, “In a film version of this story, I wandered a corridor filled with locked rooms:  endless foyers, a nursery, the master suite” (14).

KMD: Is it connected to the story we tell ourselves. The way we long for the movie version of life — the costumes, the soundtrack and love in its the purest, unadulterated love. What is your favorite movie? What do you imagine would be the speaker’s favorite movie?

You’re absolutely right that the films the speaker imagines in the book are “movie versions of life.” I thought of the films that the heroine imagined as a kind of daydream. I’m fascinated by dreams that function as projections — of emotions, of personal identity, relationships, or interior transformations that often go unnoticed by others.  I’m very interested in how individuals choose to represent purely interior events, often completely intangible and abstract in nature, through concrete visual means. More often than not, the laws of physics or time no longer hold, as this is what feels most true to the experience. In this respect, the work of dreams and film is much like the work of poetry.

With that in mind, I think the speaker’s favorite movie would likely be What Dreams May Come. My favorite, however, will always be The Royal Tenenbaums.

LU: I LOVE THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS!! Okay, let’s detour into literary theory, something I rarely say, but I feel Vow has a sort of voyeuristic element to it, in which the reader watches this woman deal with grief and loss. She sees herself. I see myself, and it makes me remember learning about Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory and her focus on “the male gaze.” Here, this speaker, this woman, is someone to feel sympathetic towards, but she can also be argued as being a spectacle, or an object of desire for the opposite sex.  Do you see a connection to Mulvey at all ?

KMD: Yes, absolutely. But I was also heavily influenced by feminist models of psychoanalysis, particularly those that seek to create a more egalitarian model of psychoanalysis. I think that, in addition to being seen as an object of desire by others, the woman in the poems is experiencing herself as another. And for her, this ability to see herself from another’s perspective becomes a tremendous source of insight and personal transformation. Sigmund Freud described the mind as a text, and for him, the process of analyzing the patient was like literary interpretation. The speaker of the poems in Vowseeks to take power from the hands of others who seek to interpret her grief, her femininity, and her trauma, and become both analyst and analysand.

LU: Every story is based on another story. This is a vow us writers secretly take. We may not be aware but in every story lies archetypes of another. In Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, a fantastical story about love, loss and myth, she discusses fate: “perhaps I could’ve changed our fate, for fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed. I should have killed her and found us a different story” (7). Would your speaker have changed her fate if she could? Would she lived a different story? So much of our life as women is dictated, but the power we have is in choosing. Every decision opens a door, or room. In every decision, we take a vow.

KMD: I love this question. In spite of the book’s feminist stance, and my interest in received literary forms, language, and gender, I don’t think that a different narrative arc would solve the speaker’s problems. I say this because the traditional roles of wife, mother, and bride are so inscribed into the culture, that women are still haunted by them. Even if the speaker had taken a path of resistance, she would have still been plagued by other possible selves. What if she had acquiesced to the demands of culture? Would she be happier? There’s only so much an individual can do. At some point the culture needs to change as well.

On the Surface, Written On the Body Is a Love Story for the Repentant Commitmentphobe; For Me, It Is a Shelter from Adolescent Heartache

I first read Jeanette Winterson in college, for a course on the philosophy of art. We were assigned to read several essays from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. The title essay has stuck with me in the years since that course mostly because it offered the most understandable foundation for a class I typically felt lost in, but also because reading Jeanette Winterson felt like slipping into something eccentric and luxurious. Her storytelling style in this essay is straightforward, nearly confrontational for those who do not care about engaging in art. Simply put, art is a full-contact sport.

It turns out, love is too. I was 19 — hurt and confused by a spectacularly failed romance — when I bought Written on the Body. On the surface, it is a love story for the repentant commitmentphobe; for me, it is a shelter from adolescent heartache. An initially unsympathetic narrator gives us someone to hate, someone who is not the person we loved until we couldn’t. Watching the narrator reform gives us hope that people have the capacity to change.

It is by no means a perfect book. While it may be cathartic to project all of our hatred onto the narrator, having an unlikeable narrator makes for a frustrating reading experience. To Winterson’s credit, the narrator’s ambiguous identity allows us to hold a mirror up to not only the person we want to hate, but to ourselves, our flaws. Our discomfort with this narrator is part dredged-up memory and part recognition of something we don’t like about who we are or how we act.

A brief summary: Our nameless and genderless narrator has a history of abandoning relationships once the novelty wears off. Along comes Louise, vivacious and sexy and . . . married. To a man. Who works long hours, leaving his wife home alone most of the week. With the house to themselves, Louise and the narrator have their fair share of romps, narrowly avoiding being caught by Louise’s husband. Shortly after leaving him, Louise finds out she has cancer and she leaves the narrator as well.

To cope with Louise’s departure, the narrator moves into a tiny cottage and devotes every waking hour to the medical reference section of the local library:

“If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would recognise her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognise her even when her body had long since fallen away.”

Thus concludes the first part of the book. The second part, the reward for making it through the sometimes uncomfortable, unenjoyable first, is the catalog of the narrator’s newly acquired knowledge of human anatomy married with memories of Louise’s now failing body. Winterson plays with the concept of what it means to know a person inside and out, something we typically consider synonymous with intimacy. The second half of the book is divided into five sections, the first four of which relate to the hours dedicated to anatomical study; the last section is a return to the more straightforward narrative of the first half. Each of the four anatomical sections — one each for the cells, the skin, the skeleton, and the special senses — is written in a stream of consciousness that is at once tender and epic, occasionally dipping into the Bible and other mythologies. From any other writer, this approach might seem hyperbolic, but Winterson is able to make it urgently loving (and maybe a little bit sexy).

Here, the narrator literally learns about Louise, and every other previous lover, from the inside out. It’s the only possible way to compensate and / or atone for being, frankly, a shitty partner. Only through these self-imposed anatomy lessons does the narrator learn how to properly love Louise for everything she is.

Winterson’s style in the second half of Written on the Body is such a departure from the take-no-crap criticism that knocked my socks off in philosophy class. Instead, I was greeted with unanticipated tenderness, particularly in the latter half of the book. I was prepared to hate the narrator as much as I hated the boy who wronged me during winter break; but as the narrator’s steeliness was worn down during the exploration of Louise — her body, her disease, her mythology — I found myself coming around to the boy. I saw him as a human, deeply flawed and hurting from problems of his own.

I still have mixed feelings about this experience — was I in fact the frosty unlikable narrator who needed to learn how to love without putting up insurmountable walls? — but I am thankful for having lived through it. I am reminded of a concept introduced in Art Objects, Winterson’s theory that our negative responses to art have more to do with us and our lack of understanding than with the art itself. My recoiling from the narrator of Written on the Body is a mirror showing me something I didn’t like about myself. The narrator’s capacity to learn, appreciate, forgive, showed that I have the capacity to do the same and that the boy has the capacity to heal.

The narrator may not have been able to fully love Louise. I may not have been able to fully love this boy, nor he could he fully love me. But I can say that I am able to fully love myself, flaws and all.