Camille talks to Mark Lynch on 90.5 WICN Public Radio for the Inquiry show
Mark Lynch, the host of Inquiry, interviewed Camille about DIAMONDS for his podcast on 90.5 WICN.
Camille interviewed for the Manchester Journal by Telly Halkias
Telly Halkias talked to Camille about DIAMONDS for the Manchester Journal and Bennington Banner:
Q: Finally, tell us something about yourself you would really like everyone to know.
A: Living in Vermont changed me. When I moved here, I thought that I was uninterested in writing what I called “nature poetry.” But, the landscape can’t be ignored here. When I first moved, we lived on a top of a hill that overlooked farms, which sprawled upward into more hills, then to the mountains. Possibly because I was often at home by myself with a baby, I began to pay attention to clouds, birds, flowers. When there was a full moon, it was an event! When I heard that someone spotted a catamount, I asked my local friends for advice. One person said, “Don’t act like food.” These moments began to enter my poems in unexpected ways.
DIAMONDS reviewed in the Harvard Review
In the Harvard Review, Adam Scheffler wrote: “Despite starting in hell, and despite its commitment to clear-eyed description of disappointments and trials, Diamonds demonstrates how poetry can be a partial antidote to life’s bitterness—for both writer and reader. This works best when Guthrie’s zany bravura and imaginative listing, her playfulness and wit, are brought to bear on the issues most troubling to her, which include—in addition to the challenges of being a financially insecure single parent—society’s “brute indifference” towards poetry; romantic love’s delights and letdowns; horrific current events (“sea level rises” and “ruthless ideologies”); the impossibility of transcendence; and gender trouble (the book is delightfully feminist through and through).”
DIAMONDS reviewed in The Boston Globe
Nina MacLaughlin reviewed DIAMONDS in The Boston Globe: “In her heated new collection ‘Diamonds’ (BOA Editions), Vermont-based poet Camille Guthrie offers John Keats a fleece jacket and a scarf from Etsy. “Keats, what are you doing / Siting in a moss’d tree—having thoughts?” she asks. The book is an open-chested look at the latter-half of life, at divorce, at the various severings, indignities, and weirdo joys of living. She calls out to various figures, to King Louis XV, to Björk, to H. D. (“I need your flowered vision, lady”), as well as the wise woman of the forest, asking her “How to keep owls out of my hair, to stack wood … to seal the cracks / In my heart to keep the ice out,” asking, ultimately, “What’s the song I have to sing to myself?” There’s humor amid the “degrading heartbreak.” Hieronymus Bosch’s dating profile shows him to be the “the kind of guy who will hoist a human-sized jackrabbit onto my back and crash my neighbor’s varicose-veined egg house party” on a Friday night. These are wry poems, ones that move with heated blood and blistering vitality, wanting and alive.”
Lisa Olstein talks to Camille about DIAMONDS in Tupelo Quarterly
From “Pour Forth into that Vessel: A Conversation with Camille Guthrie,” Lisa Olstein talks to Camille about her new book:
Lisa Olstein: What questions or obsessions urged this particular work into being or revealed themselves in it?
Camille Guthrie: Who am I, and what the hell am I going to do with my life? When I moved to rural Vermont from Brooklyn almost thirteen years ago, I was pregnant with my second child. I had thought that a midlife crisis was a cliché of masculinity, but I was very wrong. I began writing these poems out of a painful time—a separation and divorce, and the consequences: moving houses and needing a new job. A time of loneliness, anxiety, change. I also fell in love—that was a real surprise! When I began the poems in Diamonds, I decided to write from that raw place—to take some risks and expose what felt vulnerable. I felt cracked open. Like a lonely lady lost in the middle of nowhere—and there were bears outside. But I wasn’t alone. I was surrounded by my girlfriends, old friends and new ones, and so the book is for them. When the title poem went viral—twice—the response was another big surprise, and people wrote to me about their experiences with divorce, parenting, dating. (I want to add that this is poetry-level viral, not kittycat-level viral.) The poems engage with the hyperbolic drama of the lyric poem, and, in revision, I wanted to keep the sense of thinking-and-feeling-in-the-moment. There are other obsessions, too, such as art, love poetry, history, country life. I guess the ultimate question is always Can I write a good poem?
Camille talks to Joely Fitch about poetry for Fugue Journal
In “Questions, Diamonds, Artifice: An Interview with Camille Guthrie,” Joely Fitch asked Camille about the writing of her new book:
JF: I want to start with a question about questions, which I'm doing here by stealing a question (thinking/hoping that this is some kind of feminist-poetics-of-citation in action). There’s a 2013 group interview in Boston Review in which B.K. Fischer frames a set of questions I think are really wonderful and useful: "What do you think is the right question to be asking, right now, about feminism and poetry? What are you asking yourself? What are you asking of poetry, and of yourself?"
I love all of that, especially the last double-question, and I want to ask you a set of questions jumping off of those questions—what kind of questions do you think Diamonds is asking, as a collection? What kind of questions were you trying to write into in these poems? Are there questions you would hope the book inspires a reader to ask? Maybe my real question here, which I don't necessarily expect you to answer but will throw out here anyway, is: what is a question?
CG: B.K. Fischer is indeed a brilliant poet, scholar, and literary critic! Well, I don’t quite know what questions are essentially! The human condition perhaps. Poems are a kind of questions, that’s for sure. Ideas for poems often come to me in a question. In Diamonds in its final form, I see many questions. Why are poets competitive about their affection for Keats? What kind of dating profile would Hieronymus Bosch write? What would a to-do list be for a Pict woman in Scotland of Late Antiquity? Is there a special circle of hell for tired parents? What if a sleigh shaped like a dragon was the ride of Madame du Barry? Will anyone love me when I’m old and very crabby? Can I write a good sonnet? Why is Rembrandt unbelievably awesome? Is Sylvia Plath’s prom dress a magical object? Why do people always say that poems are “beautiful” and not other adjectives? A question I learned from reading Ann Lauterbach’s The Night Sky. How do I keep owls out of my hair? I could go on.
Honestly, I don’t think about what a reader would ask or think. It’s better for me, at least, not to worry about what a reader wants or might ask as it makes me nervous being a natural pleaser. I get an idea from somewhere, such as a visit to the Clark Art Institute with a friend, and a long stare at a Rembrandt and a John Singer Sargent, then follow a train of thoughts and connections that led to the poem “Family Collection.” I’m preoccupied with the genre of ekphrasis, so I’m often asking myself how to write about paintings, which I approach in an indirect, yet narrative, and only sometimes descriptive way. I am asking how to describe what I’ve seen and experienced in a way that is exploratory—not realistic. I’m curious about what meaning I can discover as I write the poem. When I’m revising, I’m asking myself whether I can make it a good poem or not.
When I read the poems in this book to others, people often come up and talk to me about their marriages, divorces, or children, which I find moving and generous. When I read poetry, my ideal reaction is to ask, Can poetry do or say that? Wow, yes, it can. I felt that recently when reading Friederike Mayröcker’s études (Seagull Books, 2020), which was translated by the poet Donna Stonecipher. Those prose poems blew me away; I am swooning when I read them; and the whole time, I am asking, How was this written? How was it translated? In awe.
Makenna Goodman interviews Camille for Literary North
Novelist Makenna Goodman talked to Camille about DIAMONDS for Literary North:
Makenna Goodman: Your poems are so funny; to be honest, I don't always associate poetry with humor and I was laughing the whole way through Diamonds. Tell me about humor in your work.
Camille Guthrie: I’m glad you were laughing! It was wonderful to meet you at my reading for Literary North, then become your friend and read your brilliant novel, The Shame. I think you’re right: most people think of poetry as serious and earnest. When I read from the book, I often tell the audience that the poems are intended to be funny so that they don’t feel obligated to be quiet and polite.
One of my intentions for Diamonds was to write in many tones; I find it a bit dull when poets have a book all in the same tone. In “My Boyfriend, John Keats,” a poem about feeling possessive about my love for Keats, I went for it, and like stand-up, timing is everything. For me, the most fun image is the Terracotta Bucket, next to which the speaker makes out with Keats in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Modernist poets Dorothy Parker and Mina Loy showed me how to inflate and deflate poetic rhetoric, and that technique can be humorous and subversive. A bucket from antiquity was just what I wanted—the humble cousin of Keats’s Grecian Urn.
I have a habit of mind to think that things could always be worse when they are bad. It may come from a children’s book by James Stevenson called “Could Be Worse!” that I read when I was a kid. That’s where the poem “During the Middle Ages” came from, but I wrote it long before the global pandemic. (Yet, again, we have vaccines, and in medieval times, they did not.) Humor is one personal and poetic strategy—an affect, a tone—that provides another perspective. It’s relief from pain, “those little Anodynes / That deaden suffering,” to quote Emily Dickinson. I also love and admire Shirley Jackson’s books about her young family and writing life: Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages. Hilarious writing with an acerbic and tender tone.
Sonia’s Poem of the Week
Poet Sonia Feldman featured “During the Middle Ages” on her series and interviewed me about writing that poem. I loved her ideas and questions about how humor works in poetic punctuation and syntax:
What I think I'm saying is that the absence of punctuation permits the poem to joyfully and wildly associate across ideas that would otherwise be bound within their own sentences. Plus, every thought running unimpeded into the next allows the poem to read as an ongoing moan. Did these types of considerations occur to you as you were writing the poem? How do you think about punctuation and syntax as components of humor?
CG: What a generous and insightful close reading: thank you! Yes, I meant for the lack of punctuation to enact the restless, emotional thoughts spinning out from each other—the way the mind thinks when upset and variously insulting or consoling oneself with ideas, digressions, fantasies. I am reluctant to punctuate in most of my new poems, especially with medial commas and end stops; it’s a way of representing the dramatic way I hear the poems. The interrupted syntax and mirroring (the so and so lines) are a way of resisting and creating structure: the kind of glue you need to stick in somewhere to make the poem cohere if you’re not writing in a form. Form and content should work together, so I wanted the onrushing lines to mimic the unhappy, reaching, amusing tone of the poem. A tension between comfort, misery, and humor.
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Diamonds is reviewed in Publishers Weekly
Diamonds (BOA Editions, Oct. 5 2021) has been reviewed in Publishers Weekly. To find the full review, follow this link. Read an excerpt from the review below:
In Guthrie's introspective fourth collection, she explores with humor and honesty the loneliness of being divorced at middle age. Literary and historical references abound as Guthrie muses on the potentially magical qualities of Sylvia Plath's prom dress, or imagines she is dating John Keats. Perhaps the funniest entry in the collection imagines a potential dating profile for 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. In response to the prompt "What I like," Bosch declares, "I like flanged mermaids who flirt with anonymous knights, visors down, both terminating piscinely."