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.
