Mockingbird

Since the publication of her first collection almost 20 years ago, Erin Belieu has made a career of raising the stakes in the American literary scene by using a potent mix of dark humor and lyricism to challenge the social mores, conventions, and sexism often at work in this country. From her acclaimed first book, Infanta, which was selected by Hayden Carruth as a winner of the National Poetry Series competition in 1995, to her third collection, Black Box, in 2006, Belieu has distinguished herself as a poet who engages deeply with both the political and the polemical, with a devastatingly comic touch.

In 2009, Belieu took her activism off the page and, with co-founder Cate Marvin, created VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, an arts advocacy group for women in writing. Since its inception, VIDA has become a catalyst and game-changer with its annual VIDA count—a comparative tally of the number of women and men published in and reviewed by major literary journals and book reviews. The Poetry Foundation corresponded via email with Belieu, whose fourth book, Slant Six, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in November 2014. She spoke about how comedy can reach people in a way that lecturing them rarely does and why she has always been a mockingbird. An edited, condensed version of that correspondence follows.

Reading over your first three books, I’m struck by the arc of your development both as a writer and as an activist and advocate for women’s rights. In your early work, there are poems that definitely address the stereotypes and specific situations of women, but the new book, Slant Six, takes these issues to a deeper level. In “I Growed No Potatoes To Write About, Sir,” for example, you seem to be using the accoutrements of femininity to dismantle and deconstruct misogyny. Can you talk about these themes in your work and the ways in which you perceive their manifestations?

In my previous books, I was teaching myself what I actually believe about my politics—as well as refining craft. A lot of superficially political poems don’t appeal to me, as they privilege ideas over the long mysteries of language. Like we’re ultimately in charge of meaning, right? No. No, we’re not. And I don’t come to poetry to read position papers. I’m not interested in after-school-special poems that preach to the converted. They’re not truthful, and I find them unbearably boring.

“I Growed No Potatoes To Write About, Sir” hopefully demonstrates what I’m talking about. I hope a reader enters into the language play, music, and humor as fully as the poem’s subjects, one being a certain straight male identity mythology that, in the wrong hands, is sentimental and self-deceived. Contemporary women poets catch flack for poems relegated to the “bad Daddy/hubby” category. So I was interested in how sauce for the goose serves the gander, too. Satire seems to me a better way to approach political ideas in a poem. Or at least it’s often my way. I lead with a strong awareness of absurdity—my own and others’.

To make a hard segue by way of example, because I am an old-movie nerd, I remember that scene from The Way We Were where Streisand’s character, Katie, is a social outcast and Communist rabble-rouser. She’s giving an impassioned anti-war speech in front of her peers at some Ivy League college. She’s got the audience in the palm of her hand, but then some jerks in the audience hold up a sign that says “Any Peace but Katie’s Piece.” She’s so humiliated she storms off the stage. But later, the male lead (played by Robert Redford at the height of his Apollo-like beauty, so I forgive him the little bit of a mansplainy vibe that happens here)—he says to her, “You were good…. You had them. You could have kept them, if only you’d laughed.” Comedy—in the fullest sense of the word—reaches people in a way that lecturing them rarely does.

“I Growed No Potatoes” is also directly riffing on Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” If some women poets join the cult of Plath, then it’s worth pointing out that some male poets suffer from a bad case of Seamus envy. Also, I knew Seamus when I lived in Boston, and I like knowing that my poem would have cracked him up. Truthful comedy is a very powerful form of political speech.

The comedian Rick Reynolds says, “Only the truth is funny.” But there are truths that are decidedly un-funny. You and fellow poet Cate Marvin founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts to, among other things, draw attention to inequities in literature and culture. What are your ongoing goals for this organization, and in what ways do you see it as an extension of, or different from, your politics on the page?

VIDA is made up of a lot of different people, so we try to come to a consensus about how we’re going to approach various issues—which isn’t easy, as human beings are prone to think a lot of different things about any given subject. The big challenge is to make sure we’re collectively rowing in a direction that represents a multiplicity of responses. Again, my personal approach would be to take even more of the piss out of the egregious stuff we encounter as advocates for women writers. To extend my previous metaphor to ridiculous lengths, when Redford’s character tells Streisand’s she should have laughed at the men holding the ugly signs, she responds, “It wasn’t funny.” And Redford says, “That’s not the only reason to laugh.”

But no, the issues we deal with at VIDA—the stories we hear frequently, still today, in 2014—aren’t inherently funny. We are trying to drag to the surface complicated issues that affect women’s livelihoods, families, their most basic senses of self. When I see what my young women students go through just trying to figure out how to even be a “literary” writer at this point in history—well, I know there’s a lot of work yet to do. The writing world really isn’t much different than when I was a teenager going to my first AWP in the late ’80s—similar prejudices and gender anxieties still at work. And that’s a problem for the world, as we need women’s intellectual and artistic leadership. We need both the yin and the yang for our future health as a planet. I mean, the yang-inclined have had a nearly complete run of the shop for forever, basically, and look at how swimmingly that’s going. We have to actively find ways to value both our similar and different gifts and not be so threatened by what the other brings to the table.

It also dismays me to realize that my analogy here is loaded with gender bias since the yin principle was conceived not just as the female half of the binary, but also as the original destructive force in nature. I mean, damn. The world’s most fundamental philosophical systems are loaded with this kind of garbage. There’s a lot of work to do, and sometimes the bigotry feels so unconscious as to be insurmountable. But you gotta start somewhere, right?

VIDA’s goal is to just keep talking about the issues, just keep presenting our numbers to the public, and hopefully normalize the conversation around this so we can get past reactiveness into reasonable problem solving.

The poems in Slant Six traverse from the furrowed fields of Ohio to noisy New Jersey diners to the sultry swamps of Florida, your current home. In what ways do geographical context and landscape influence and inform your writing, your sense of identity, and your cultural understanding of a country that differs so greatly from region to region?

I’ve always been a mockingbird and enjoy trying on other people’s songs. I love the huge variety of ways Americans talk, our different customs and regional slang, individual neighborhoods, the very specific things we eat (e.g., the sinker dumplings at the Bohemian Cafe in Omaha; gooey butter topping in St. Louis; that weird spaghetti chili they have in Columbus and Cleveland). I want the surface texture that a very clear, true sense of place brings to poems. Frequently, a poem needs to actually happen somewhere, and that somewhere usually benefits from a strong sense of mise en scène.

But I was born and raised in Nebraska and think of myself as Nebraskan to the bone. Though I’m not sure how much Nebraska claims me anymore. I was joking about this with my friend Dan Chaon recently, another writer from Nebraska, and he said, “Erin, they don’t want to claim you. You left. You don’t count anymore.” So in that regard I’m like the horrible girlfriend who won’t let Nebraska break up with me.

Living in the South for the last decade has been eye-opening. It’s an easy whipping boy for the rest of the United States, because there are about five million souths in the South. The class warrior and champion of the underdog in me feel very protective of this region I’ve come to love, both despite and because of its deep weirdnesses. When I see how some northerners treat anyone with a southern accent—well, it’s a particularly ignorant bigotry. Like everyone here is some kind of Foghorn Leghorn cartoon. So issues of class, race, voting rights, the racism of the death penalty in America—those come up in Slant Six, as the poems were mostly written in Tallahassee, a city that is uncomfortably distinguished by having mounted the last significant Confederate campaign during the Civil War. That disturbing legacy is something people deal with here actively, daily. It’s not an issue that people have the luxury of segregating away, as you see done in some of our northern cities.

Earlier, you mentioned the struggles that young women face as they try to figure out what it means to be—and how to become—a writer at this point in history. What would your advice to young women writers be as they navigate these politically charged, often disheartening waters? And how would that advice differ from what you would say to a young male writer?

Both the male and female poets I mentor are coming of age in an especially anxious moment for contemporary poetry. Poetry presses—all of them—are struggling in the cannibalistic age of Amazon. And we know funding and jobs for poets have dried up significantly in recent years. This makes for an especially brutal climate for emerging poets. Pundits have pointed to a confidence gap for young women professionally; and anecdotally, generally, I do see some of that when mentoring women—though, if they are sometimes underconfident about their work, there can be an overconfidence in some male writers I work with that equally challenges their growth. I have real sympathy for both responses. But not sending your work out vs. sending out undistinguished work before it’s ready to make a significant impact—both approaches are less than ideal. This possible tendency toward underconfidence shouldn’t surprise anyone given the messages girls continue to be sent about the necessity of downplaying one’s abilities in order to fit in socially. That is—and there’s plenty of data to support this—girls are most often trained to “equalize,” not to distinguish themselves. Boys are trained, generally speaking, to assert authority and mastery, whether they feel such confidence or not. In my experience, being stuffed into either box sucks. And neither gets you where you want to go as an artist.

But I think the greater underlying issue is that pretty much anything that can be monetized in America has been identified and exploited—I mean, they haven’t found a way to project ads inside our eyelids yet, but I feel certain it’s coming. So we now live in a cultural climate where emerging poets are “professionalized” into thinking that social media platforms and full-contact schmoozing at conferences are the things that give you a long life in poetry. But really, the only thing poets have any direct control over is the poems themselves.