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.
