Tiff Dressen and Alexandra Mattraw
A string-and-cup phone to the night sky: a conversation on
Donna de la Perrière’s Works of Love & Terror
Tiff Dressen:
Reflecting on Gillian Conoley’s description of these poems: “Some books leave you speechless, and some books never leave you…..One senses how long and hard these words had to travel to form such spare, searing lyrics: clear-eyed, steadfast, unadorned missives from a body violated and exhausted, unforgiving of the unforgivable.” Conoley’s words, to my mind, absolutely capture the emergency of Donna de la Perrière’s Works of Love & Terror.
Specifically, I’m enthralled by the quality of “how long and hard these words had to travel” in these poems as though they had been etched into stone or scratched into concrete walls. I think about the inscriptions on the walls of detention barracks at the Angel Island immigration station, poems carved into the soft wooden walls by Chinese and Japanese persons waiting to be “processed” into or out of this country.
Perhaps it is these conditions of pain, patience and time that shape poems. In de la Perrière’s poems, there is the pain, patience and time given to bearing witness to a beloved parent in the process of dying. From the poem “Prayer”:
“….—in the darkened
room a mother repeats I love
you, I love you (that is all
she remembers, that is all
she can say)—the cross above
her bed: a string-and-cup
phone to the night sky, a shell to
the ear through which she hears
the largest ocean”
Alexandra Mattraw:
I’m fascinated by this image of etched walls that de la Perrière evokes for you. More than anything, I’m interested in *how* these poems consistently manifest some notion of walls. Whether it is in the emergency of a mother’s failing health, or of unfathomable date rape, or in the body’s “ticking” towards death, we traverse a poetics of edges. The poet speaks of that edge in the book’s closing title poem, “Works of Love & Terror”: “at the edge, ash tastes like memory . . . fields of love / and catastrophe.” The poems offer us their own walls as we navigate the ever thinning lines between beauty and suffering, agency and passivity. How to walk that edge? Is there any movement forward when these walls are not only those of the patriarchy and its heirs but also walls as the “roles” we internalize and expect ourselves to play? I think of the poem “Little Fable,” where the speaker admits “my job was to stay there: to remain invisible, taut, black bow against the flare line.” In this vast prose poem, de la Perrière appears to refer to that tense edge as a “taut” line, but elsewhere, and interestingly, the poems are also shaped as taut walls, paved down the page. In these cases, the poems thin us as well. Their terse, enjambed lines edge us towards all of the book’s tensions. These poems can feel like explosive, well-wrought annotations that hook us down the page. We witness the uncanny wrestling between the poet’s deft control over each etch and the characters’ uncertain agency.
And yet some of these tensions dissolve right as they tighten. In “For you who are being obliterated,” the opening poem of section 1, de la Perrière seems to evoke the muse as a means to dilute edges and embrace love in terror. Again, the lines are so tight that we hang about the words. Images flicker and stun as lyric becomes an exit:
lights are hung
on dark
cables-- they
glow or change
with color--
the walls are
mirrors
reflecting an exit
. . .
wouldn’t you love
to walk through this--
TD:
Indeed, I feel the explosiveness you speak of in these poems as though they’d been waiting a long time to come to us, under such pressures of a life distilled into words. The poem “Hereditament” caught me by surprise. I began to think of inheritance and heredity, too, as a kind of enclosure. Beginning with a more general sense of time, place and culture, “There are old cars and animals, stained linens and steeples” gradually homing in to greater clarity:
“There is cardiology, there are shock treatments, there is a very full basement.
There are scratched corneas and high arches, a great-uncle who drinks.”
Building to the apotheosis of what can be passed down, the unforgettable specificity of a memory:
“There is the beloved’s grave collapsing inward one fine June day in 1966.
Which brings the daughter home from a birthday party before the cake is served.”
Elsewhere I picked up on this sense of inheritance via geography (cultural geography) especially in the poem “Reaping Wheel” where the
poet comes to reckoning with the chaotic, troubled (haunted) milieu which had to be navigated:
“...and it was my hometown, the year that everything went wrong: the blood pooled on the
sidewalk, the smoke and cinders from the burned theatre, the railroad depot
where the chateau once stood, the motorcycle overturned in the creek..”
The power of this remembering really hit me on the following page with the poem “When I Burn,” where it begins: “The fact that it never lets up/that there is no finish” then moves toward a scene of tragedy. In the context of these poems, I begin to think of inheritance as more than enclosure, but rather a cycle, a never ending loop we learn to live with or perhaps, live inside of.
On a more meta level, when reading these poems, I felt so acutely that we are somewhere between these “walls” as you so aptly describe them and oblivion, or on the edge of. I think about the beautifully (sublime) and spare ending of the poem “Invocation: I”:
“each of us born
with time clutched
and crashing in
our bodies — a riverbed,
a seam of ore, a placid lake
called never”
“Never” in this poem hits me like a gut punch and takes the top of my head off. I am captivated by how these poems are replete with such negation, negative space, for example, the instances of erasure, vast emptiness, “whistling/of time in the ears,” the old women from “Mère” tearing out the light of the stars to wear as cloaks, “a loose/blast from the deep empty/to nowhere,” from the poem “Crow” “her cluster/of atoms fissure/into a void” and “the margin beyond/which you cannot/travel—.” as if to remind us the universe is always there, haunting us, taunting us, now and oblivion.
This book has a beautiful arc, too. Think about the poem “Genesis” and the lines:
“We roamed the earth,
we encountered gravity,
always refracting and distorting;
we fell and bled upon the
black and purple skies”
And how we are carried through a “seam of ore” to the last lines of this collection:
“You feel a kind of concreteness, fields of love
and catastrophe: infinity flings a wide net
then pulls itself in —”
Overall, I’m left with a kind of simultaneous openness and completeness.
AM:
I resonate with your perception of inherited memories as cycles that reenact themselves. The longest poem in the book, “First Love,” comes to mind as the most narrative and complex example. Although this poem is about terror, and ostensibly date rape at a teen party, it can also be read as a microcosmic picture of misogyny and erasure that I think many women have felt under the macro tyranny of Trump’s unchecked reign. How to make sense of violating acts that recur in new guises? I found this poem so relatable as an extended metaphor of institutionalized misogyny. The narrator describes a female identifying victim who struggles to make sense of the event through repeated acts of composition. As you discern, de la Perrière uses negation and a notion of involuntary repetition as we imagine how “She can’t imagine how to impose narrative structure on this. She can begin it but always finds herself doubling back— to provide context or background, to try to make things cohere.” Here is a poem about the difficulty of writing a poem about trauma: How can one possibly feel and think about searing events? Is recovery possible?
In “First Love,” de la Perrière employs prose-block stanzas that render room-like, walling shapes: The top stanza becomes the ceiling, the bottom stanza the floor, and an uncomfortable white space between visually enacts the “empty den” in which a beating and a rape unfolds. The page becomes the room, or, the “enclosure,” a space of more than one kind of erasure. Like you, I am struck by the many versions of voids in this book. In this poem, erasure is not only that of the speaker’s physical agency and the blank space of the poem’s rooms, but also the girl’s sudden inability to express what “she has difficulty writing, even imagining . . . that girl’s body, her life, or what she might have been feeling.” Elsewhere in Works of Love & Terror, there exist other related voids: “the flat, blank burning” of “Sung on the Eve of the Body’s Destruction,” and in “Blind Graph,” the idea that “Y is empty & / Y is sorry & this will not make any difference.”
And yet in “First Love”, arguably the most straightforward poem of the book, memory does begin to “make things cohere”, as inherited and reenacted as that memory might be. Curiously, a kind of resolution happens through the poem’s evolving repetition. For the first eight pages of the piece, de la Perrière employs mini refrains: Frequently, the last line of the bottom stanza becomes the first line of the top stanza on the following page, but always with some slight diction or image modification. This pattern evolves with urgency as the poem unfolds, with more words changing each time. By the ninth page however, the poet entirely shifts the form. All repetition is dropped when these lines appear: “She’s begun writing this story quite a number of times— quite a number of drafts— none of which ever gets finished,” and then, “And the truth is she probably won’t finish this time either . . . [she] will come back to it later, do it right this time around.” It is as if the speaker breaks the pattern of trauma through the continued recasting of revolving, transforming lines. If not rewriting the narrative and counteracting the inherited cycles, and if not healing, then perhaps this evolution renders a visibility of truth: All voids now visualized.
Of course, the entire book hinges on repetition. Anaphora, motif, repeated diction: these are de la Perrière trademarks. What purpose do they serve, in your reading?
TD:
I couldn’t agree with you more. The idea of the poet creating a room, or perhaps set of rooms, in which to tell this story is powerful. And I also think of these open spaces as places to breathe, where a reader has the opportunity to catch one’s breath as we walk together with the poet through this heartbreaking passage. Also, (from this reader’s perspective), the “emptiness” on the page evokes awkward, uncomfortable silences; the not knowing what to say or how to respond immediately to the traumatic situation unfolding before me. I am compelled to sit, to be present with that discomfort. And there is no rushing through to the end.
Indeed the repetition in this whole book of poems, how I experience these poems, especially in “First Love” is so crucial. The “mini refrain” you refer to that renders what you mention as the “visibility of truth” as if to say “this is what I know/remember for certain” and also what the poet wants the reader to know. I feel these lines below, viscerally. I see them clearly, rising above the fray:
“She will know that the worst is probably over”
“Her goal by then: to let things play themselves out.”
“A desire for something she can’t quite articulate.”
“By then there will be no convincing anyone at the party.”
“Smiling, a little uneasily, ‘Is everything okay in there?’
“Stories anyone really listening might believe.”
“What’s going on right then: in the room, or her body.”
Together, these first lines tell a story. In my reading, the dramatic shift in this poem happens when “she” transforms:
“She has difficulty writing, even imagining, that girl —...” (emphasis mine).
(And I know what you’re thinking; she must connect with her
Somehow, but she doesn’t. Trust me. In this case, she doesn’t.)”
There is something mystical about this narration; at once very intimate yet distant.
It makes me think of the self as a set of Russian nesting dolls, “that girl” being the innermost presence; a part of the whole and yet unreachable.
AM:
Visceral does seem to be one of the best words to describe this book, and how these refrains speak to us of what is actually going on “right then”, or, right now: what is going on “in the room”, but also, in “her body.” In our bodies. As you discern, there is “no rushing through to the end” of de la Perrière’s raw sensory awareness of what it means to be alive in an unforgiving world that nonetheless offers itself to us. Words recur as if to tap out that imperative cadence. As if to say, as in my favorite line in “Little Fable”: “the thing was we had turned into a door that we then had to walk through—.”
And perhaps it is this intimacy of feeling that is enough--this intimacy with a “desire for something [we] can’t quite articulate.” In this book, feeling terrorizes in the way that “eros” must. Its viscerality becomes mystical in the way that knowing anything must be defined by loss. For me, then, the book’s beauty is inherent to images that know and embrace the physical world and its ugliness. The terror of that knowing transmutes into a love defined by its ability to turn itself inside out. The poem “Prayer” captures just that:
you, I love you (that is all
she remembers, that is all
she can say)-- the cross above
her bed: a string-and-cup
phone to the night sky, a shell to
the ear through which she hears
the largest ocean”
Despite the enormous “blast from the deep empty” this poem also sounds, the speaker immerses herself in a sensory world that is certain to communicate. The string, the cup, the shell, and the sky may be “all”, but they are an “all” that sings. Their sounds capture a language that speaks of what we can’t articulate. Despite the “festive display of everything that will not stand,” this is a tempo as familiar as those our heartwalls make. In “Night Calendar” that tempo appears as the ticking body designed to pulse music forward. Walls and voids persist, but time promises the “heart says / just this, just this, / just this, just this.”
Donna de la Perrière’s Works of Love & Terror
Tiff Dressen:
Reflecting on Gillian Conoley’s description of these poems: “Some books leave you speechless, and some books never leave you…..One senses how long and hard these words had to travel to form such spare, searing lyrics: clear-eyed, steadfast, unadorned missives from a body violated and exhausted, unforgiving of the unforgivable.” Conoley’s words, to my mind, absolutely capture the emergency of Donna de la Perrière’s Works of Love & Terror.
Specifically, I’m enthralled by the quality of “how long and hard these words had to travel” in these poems as though they had been etched into stone or scratched into concrete walls. I think about the inscriptions on the walls of detention barracks at the Angel Island immigration station, poems carved into the soft wooden walls by Chinese and Japanese persons waiting to be “processed” into or out of this country.
Perhaps it is these conditions of pain, patience and time that shape poems. In de la Perrière’s poems, there is the pain, patience and time given to bearing witness to a beloved parent in the process of dying. From the poem “Prayer”:
“….—in the darkened
room a mother repeats I love
you, I love you (that is all
she remembers, that is all
she can say)—the cross above
her bed: a string-and-cup
phone to the night sky, a shell to
the ear through which she hears
the largest ocean”
Alexandra Mattraw:
I’m fascinated by this image of etched walls that de la Perrière evokes for you. More than anything, I’m interested in *how* these poems consistently manifest some notion of walls. Whether it is in the emergency of a mother’s failing health, or of unfathomable date rape, or in the body’s “ticking” towards death, we traverse a poetics of edges. The poet speaks of that edge in the book’s closing title poem, “Works of Love & Terror”: “at the edge, ash tastes like memory . . . fields of love / and catastrophe.” The poems offer us their own walls as we navigate the ever thinning lines between beauty and suffering, agency and passivity. How to walk that edge? Is there any movement forward when these walls are not only those of the patriarchy and its heirs but also walls as the “roles” we internalize and expect ourselves to play? I think of the poem “Little Fable,” where the speaker admits “my job was to stay there: to remain invisible, taut, black bow against the flare line.” In this vast prose poem, de la Perrière appears to refer to that tense edge as a “taut” line, but elsewhere, and interestingly, the poems are also shaped as taut walls, paved down the page. In these cases, the poems thin us as well. Their terse, enjambed lines edge us towards all of the book’s tensions. These poems can feel like explosive, well-wrought annotations that hook us down the page. We witness the uncanny wrestling between the poet’s deft control over each etch and the characters’ uncertain agency.
And yet some of these tensions dissolve right as they tighten. In “For you who are being obliterated,” the opening poem of section 1, de la Perrière seems to evoke the muse as a means to dilute edges and embrace love in terror. Again, the lines are so tight that we hang about the words. Images flicker and stun as lyric becomes an exit:
lights are hung
on dark
cables-- they
glow or change
with color--
the walls are
mirrors
reflecting an exit
. . .
wouldn’t you love
to walk through this--
TD:
Indeed, I feel the explosiveness you speak of in these poems as though they’d been waiting a long time to come to us, under such pressures of a life distilled into words. The poem “Hereditament” caught me by surprise. I began to think of inheritance and heredity, too, as a kind of enclosure. Beginning with a more general sense of time, place and culture, “There are old cars and animals, stained linens and steeples” gradually homing in to greater clarity:
“There is cardiology, there are shock treatments, there is a very full basement.
There are scratched corneas and high arches, a great-uncle who drinks.”
Building to the apotheosis of what can be passed down, the unforgettable specificity of a memory:
“There is the beloved’s grave collapsing inward one fine June day in 1966.
Which brings the daughter home from a birthday party before the cake is served.”
Elsewhere I picked up on this sense of inheritance via geography (cultural geography) especially in the poem “Reaping Wheel” where the
poet comes to reckoning with the chaotic, troubled (haunted) milieu which had to be navigated:
“...and it was my hometown, the year that everything went wrong: the blood pooled on the
sidewalk, the smoke and cinders from the burned theatre, the railroad depot
where the chateau once stood, the motorcycle overturned in the creek..”
The power of this remembering really hit me on the following page with the poem “When I Burn,” where it begins: “The fact that it never lets up/that there is no finish” then moves toward a scene of tragedy. In the context of these poems, I begin to think of inheritance as more than enclosure, but rather a cycle, a never ending loop we learn to live with or perhaps, live inside of.
On a more meta level, when reading these poems, I felt so acutely that we are somewhere between these “walls” as you so aptly describe them and oblivion, or on the edge of. I think about the beautifully (sublime) and spare ending of the poem “Invocation: I”:
“each of us born
with time clutched
and crashing in
our bodies — a riverbed,
a seam of ore, a placid lake
called never”
“Never” in this poem hits me like a gut punch and takes the top of my head off. I am captivated by how these poems are replete with such negation, negative space, for example, the instances of erasure, vast emptiness, “whistling/of time in the ears,” the old women from “Mère” tearing out the light of the stars to wear as cloaks, “a loose/blast from the deep empty/to nowhere,” from the poem “Crow” “her cluster/of atoms fissure/into a void” and “the margin beyond/which you cannot/travel—.” as if to remind us the universe is always there, haunting us, taunting us, now and oblivion.
This book has a beautiful arc, too. Think about the poem “Genesis” and the lines:
“We roamed the earth,
we encountered gravity,
always refracting and distorting;
we fell and bled upon the
black and purple skies”
And how we are carried through a “seam of ore” to the last lines of this collection:
“You feel a kind of concreteness, fields of love
and catastrophe: infinity flings a wide net
then pulls itself in —”
Overall, I’m left with a kind of simultaneous openness and completeness.
AM:
I resonate with your perception of inherited memories as cycles that reenact themselves. The longest poem in the book, “First Love,” comes to mind as the most narrative and complex example. Although this poem is about terror, and ostensibly date rape at a teen party, it can also be read as a microcosmic picture of misogyny and erasure that I think many women have felt under the macro tyranny of Trump’s unchecked reign. How to make sense of violating acts that recur in new guises? I found this poem so relatable as an extended metaphor of institutionalized misogyny. The narrator describes a female identifying victim who struggles to make sense of the event through repeated acts of composition. As you discern, de la Perrière uses negation and a notion of involuntary repetition as we imagine how “She can’t imagine how to impose narrative structure on this. She can begin it but always finds herself doubling back— to provide context or background, to try to make things cohere.” Here is a poem about the difficulty of writing a poem about trauma: How can one possibly feel and think about searing events? Is recovery possible?
In “First Love,” de la Perrière employs prose-block stanzas that render room-like, walling shapes: The top stanza becomes the ceiling, the bottom stanza the floor, and an uncomfortable white space between visually enacts the “empty den” in which a beating and a rape unfolds. The page becomes the room, or, the “enclosure,” a space of more than one kind of erasure. Like you, I am struck by the many versions of voids in this book. In this poem, erasure is not only that of the speaker’s physical agency and the blank space of the poem’s rooms, but also the girl’s sudden inability to express what “she has difficulty writing, even imagining . . . that girl’s body, her life, or what she might have been feeling.” Elsewhere in Works of Love & Terror, there exist other related voids: “the flat, blank burning” of “Sung on the Eve of the Body’s Destruction,” and in “Blind Graph,” the idea that “Y is empty & / Y is sorry & this will not make any difference.”
And yet in “First Love”, arguably the most straightforward poem of the book, memory does begin to “make things cohere”, as inherited and reenacted as that memory might be. Curiously, a kind of resolution happens through the poem’s evolving repetition. For the first eight pages of the piece, de la Perrière employs mini refrains: Frequently, the last line of the bottom stanza becomes the first line of the top stanza on the following page, but always with some slight diction or image modification. This pattern evolves with urgency as the poem unfolds, with more words changing each time. By the ninth page however, the poet entirely shifts the form. All repetition is dropped when these lines appear: “She’s begun writing this story quite a number of times— quite a number of drafts— none of which ever gets finished,” and then, “And the truth is she probably won’t finish this time either . . . [she] will come back to it later, do it right this time around.” It is as if the speaker breaks the pattern of trauma through the continued recasting of revolving, transforming lines. If not rewriting the narrative and counteracting the inherited cycles, and if not healing, then perhaps this evolution renders a visibility of truth: All voids now visualized.
Of course, the entire book hinges on repetition. Anaphora, motif, repeated diction: these are de la Perrière trademarks. What purpose do they serve, in your reading?
TD:
I couldn’t agree with you more. The idea of the poet creating a room, or perhaps set of rooms, in which to tell this story is powerful. And I also think of these open spaces as places to breathe, where a reader has the opportunity to catch one’s breath as we walk together with the poet through this heartbreaking passage. Also, (from this reader’s perspective), the “emptiness” on the page evokes awkward, uncomfortable silences; the not knowing what to say or how to respond immediately to the traumatic situation unfolding before me. I am compelled to sit, to be present with that discomfort. And there is no rushing through to the end.
Indeed the repetition in this whole book of poems, how I experience these poems, especially in “First Love” is so crucial. The “mini refrain” you refer to that renders what you mention as the “visibility of truth” as if to say “this is what I know/remember for certain” and also what the poet wants the reader to know. I feel these lines below, viscerally. I see them clearly, rising above the fray:
“She will know that the worst is probably over”
“Her goal by then: to let things play themselves out.”
“A desire for something she can’t quite articulate.”
“By then there will be no convincing anyone at the party.”
“Smiling, a little uneasily, ‘Is everything okay in there?’
“Stories anyone really listening might believe.”
“What’s going on right then: in the room, or her body.”
Together, these first lines tell a story. In my reading, the dramatic shift in this poem happens when “she” transforms:
“She has difficulty writing, even imagining, that girl —...” (emphasis mine).
(And I know what you’re thinking; she must connect with her
Somehow, but she doesn’t. Trust me. In this case, she doesn’t.)”
There is something mystical about this narration; at once very intimate yet distant.
It makes me think of the self as a set of Russian nesting dolls, “that girl” being the innermost presence; a part of the whole and yet unreachable.
AM:
Visceral does seem to be one of the best words to describe this book, and how these refrains speak to us of what is actually going on “right then”, or, right now: what is going on “in the room”, but also, in “her body.” In our bodies. As you discern, there is “no rushing through to the end” of de la Perrière’s raw sensory awareness of what it means to be alive in an unforgiving world that nonetheless offers itself to us. Words recur as if to tap out that imperative cadence. As if to say, as in my favorite line in “Little Fable”: “the thing was we had turned into a door that we then had to walk through—.”
And perhaps it is this intimacy of feeling that is enough--this intimacy with a “desire for something [we] can’t quite articulate.” In this book, feeling terrorizes in the way that “eros” must. Its viscerality becomes mystical in the way that knowing anything must be defined by loss. For me, then, the book’s beauty is inherent to images that know and embrace the physical world and its ugliness. The terror of that knowing transmutes into a love defined by its ability to turn itself inside out. The poem “Prayer” captures just that:
you, I love you (that is all
she remembers, that is all
she can say)-- the cross above
her bed: a string-and-cup
phone to the night sky, a shell to
the ear through which she hears
the largest ocean”
Despite the enormous “blast from the deep empty” this poem also sounds, the speaker immerses herself in a sensory world that is certain to communicate. The string, the cup, the shell, and the sky may be “all”, but they are an “all” that sings. Their sounds capture a language that speaks of what we can’t articulate. Despite the “festive display of everything that will not stand,” this is a tempo as familiar as those our heartwalls make. In “Night Calendar” that tempo appears as the ticking body designed to pulse music forward. Walls and voids persist, but time promises the “heart says / just this, just this, / just this, just this.”