The poetry chapbook Savage Machinery is due to be released in September 2008 by Finishing Line Press. Author Karen Rigby sent me an advance copy to read because several poems are ekphrastic (Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Leonardo da Vinci, Boucicaut Master, and others).
Ms. Rigby’s poetry is quite accomplished. Already appearing on her website are several complimentary blurbs and reviews. Here’s a conversation about the chapbook which Ms. Rigby and I conducted by email. (This conversation will also remain through September as a “Page” in the upper left sidebar of this blog.)
THERESE: I think that the poems in your chapbook Savage Machinery are “savage” only insomuch as they bring the reader face-to-face with the fierceness of some of life’s circumstances. But I don’t think your poems are wild or ferocious in style. On the contrary, I think that your poems orderly “salvage” the solidity of things with textured words, short direct sentences, and gripping images. Your poems collect small but significant details, which, once assembled, rub against one another, generating heat and friction, igniting or taking flight. What would you like to say about the title of your chapbook? By choosing this title, are you paying homage to William Carlos Williams’s notion that a poem is a machine of words?
KAREN: I hadn’t thought of Williams before, so I find that an interesting observation, and like that suggestion of poetry generating energy, reverberating, posessing all the intricacy of a machine.
In actuality the title of the chapbook comes from the phrase “savage machinery” in the poem “The Story of Adam and Eve”. Read in that context, it refers to a world after Eden.
The savagery appears in small moments—-a reference to Babi Yar in “Borscht”, the wreckage of a plane in “Design for a Flying Machine”, the plane as a “red thorn” in “Flyover Country”, the wreck in “Cebolla Church”, the suggestion of violence towards women in “Sleeping on Buses” in the line about stairwells, or in more indirect ways, as in “Norma Desmond Descending the Staircase as Salome”—-Norma’s madness leading to the shooting of Joe Gillis.
The image of a plane is one that came about post-9/11. It wasn’t intentional to write about that—I think some historical subjects are too large to capture adequately, that one has to approach these subjects by telling it “slant” or by just hinting at them—in this case through the lens of a painting, such that the poem, hopefully, becomes more than a document of a particular moment. So perhaps the machinery of the title is, tangentially at least, related to this notion of wreckage.
THERESE: A few of the poems in your chapbook focus on foodstuffs–an onion, a plum, borscht, and breads. As an ekphrastic poet, I engage with these poems not only as object poems about fruits, vegetables, and loaves, but also as painterly still-lifes. What is the dynamic in your poetry between word and image, between how you observe someone or something, and how you later verbalize what you have observed?
KAREN: Words often come before images for me—-none of the food poems were based on physical objects that I’d studied. Instead, they were born out of an interest in the way words sound and the way they connote so many meanings. In “Plums” I was drawn to the names for varieties—-friars, red beauties, elephant hearts–how peculiar and evocative the names we choose for things can so often be. In “Song for the Onion” it was the repetitive structure—“Let”-that guided the poem. “Borscht” and “Bread” were likely out having read Neruda’s elementary odes and other food poems.
THERESE: Talk about the poems in your chapbook which are more traditionally ekphrastic: poems about specific paintings by Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe; a poem about a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci; and a long, segmented poem about a illuminated manuscript from Boucicaut Master and Workshop.
KAREN: Inspiration comes from anywhere—-I have a poster of Hopper’s Chop Suey, which I’m drawn to for the vibrant colors and for the clothing the women are wearing—cloche hats, v-necks—there’s something both vintage and surprisingly contemporary about it, so that is how I ended up writing a Hopper poem. The poems on Georgia O’Keeffe and the Da Vinci drawing were the results of writing exercises. When I find it hard to think of a subject I sometimes turn to art. Art offers an entrance to the poem, as the images are already there—-the difficulty is to move beyond description and turn the poem into more. The poem on Boucicaut Master came about because I’m intrigued by illuminated manuscripts—their intricacy and beauty.
THERESE: On your website, you have hot-linked only two poems from the chapbook: “Flyover Country” and “Borscht.” Why did you elect those two poems to represent the entire collection?
KAREN: Part of it is a matter of ease—-these two poems are already online—
and part of it is by necessity and out of respect. Given that chapbooks contain relatively few pages, to link to every poem that has ever appeared in journals or interview features online might run counter to the publisher’s needs, which is to sell enough copies of the chapbook to keep promoting poetry.
This might become more difficult if the poems were freely available. Contractually the publisher has “first rights” to present this particular group of poems together as a whole, though individually they may appear elsewhere.
Authors are paid in copies of the chapbook (which is a fairly common practice amongst chapbook publishers) rather than royalties, so every purchase helps the press continue in its work. One is, in part, helping other authors to put their chapbooks out there, too, and I think it’s important to support smaller presses that are willing to take chances on new writers.
Rather than viewing these two poems as representing the entire chapbook, I seem them as (hopefully) a sampling of what my style is like, along with other poems on the site, like “Poppies”, a poem from Festival Bone, or “Desideratum”.
THERESE: Savage Machinery is your second chapbook. How does putting together a second chapbook differ from putting together a first chapbook? What did you learn from compiling the first that helped you to compile the second?
KAREN: The first chapbook, Festival Bone, contained poems I’d written as part of my undergraduate and graduate theses. They were a selection of poems I’d written up to that point that felt finished, so in retrospect the connections are probably a little looser. The second chapbook is an excerpt of a longer book manuscript, so the poems included here come from all chapters of the book—-the challenge was to make them work together without the poems that were left out, to find some linkages between them.
THERESE: Talk about the dramatic arc of your chapbook, the sequence of individual poems. How did you decide upon the relative positions of individual poems within the chapbook?
KAREN: The ordering in chapbooks or books is sometimes up to the person designing the layout—-for example, it is always nice when a longer, two-page poem is presented on facing pages, rather than making a reader turn the page (as sometimes one can read to the end of a page and not even realize more of the poem is yet to come).
But apart from minor details like that, it’s usually up to the author to determine the sequence. I don’t often think in terms of arcs, of what story is being told, or in terms of linear progression, so much as I think in terms of images—groups of images, repetitions.
“Petrol” mentions Hopper, so when I was choosing which poems to include from the larger book manuscript, it seemed natural to include “Edward Hopper’s Women”. “Plums” ties in with the food poems, but also with the Biblical references in other poems. “Santa Rosas” are a variety of plum, but also lended itself to the line right after that about the “fruit of the spirit”—-which, in turn, leads to other poems—-Mary’s image at the end of “Bathing in the Burned House”, “The Story of Adam and Eve”, “Shroud of Turin.” When I gather poems for a collection I’m usually thinking on the micro-level like this—-it often takes an outside reader to point out the larger picture.
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