Melissa Broder, August 2011

An Interview with Poet Melissa Broder
Photo by Beth Levendis

Melissa Broder is the author of two books of poems, Meat Heart forthcoming in 2012 from Publishing Genius and When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother. She edits La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series in NYC. Poems appear or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Redivider, The Collagist, Opium Magazine, et al.

Redivider: If you could be any poem, which one would you be and why?

Melissa Broder: Right now I’m reading “Burnt Norton” by T.S. Eliot and I’d love to live in “the still point of the turning world,” you know, the “white light still and moving.” But I’m a super-desirous human living in a body (that’s where I write from) and Eliot can be a little scary at times, so probably anything by the mystic Sufi poet Hafiz, who seems to make daily peace with his fleshiness while still channeling something higher.

R: Those are some great lines. Burnt Norton is great, and scary. How much and what kind of influence does Eliot have on your work?

MB: Ha! No influence on work past, but perhaps he will influence poems present and future. The line “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” is a theme throughout my poems past and present – even though I just read it this morning. Of course, when I say human kind I mean me. Me cannot bear very much reality.

R: Tell us a little more about bearing so much reality, especially since you live in NYC. What’s it like being a poet, publicist, and editor, not to mention a reading series curator, there in the city? What are the pros and cons of being so heavily involved in the publishing industry?

MB: Well, like most of us with an imagination, I live in multiple realities. There’s the ego reality where I operate throughout much of the day: the reality, or disreality, of approval, attention, appearance. I can often be found hiding in that reality – concerned with whether a journal is going to publish a poem, what a stranger thinks – in order to avoid another reality that time is passing and life in this particular body is finite and what do I really value? Most of the day I’m moving and moving in the ego-reality and I can write some decent poems, usually on my Blackberry on the subway. Physical stillness doesn’t come naturally to me. It has to be an active choice, time set aside for meditation. But when I force myself to slow down, to tap into another – I’d say, sometimes more frightening and sometimes insanely loving, but ultimately deeper – version of reality, that’s when the poems just land. That’s when the sky falls down and the wrong plants grow in my houseplants and the good words just come.

R: It seems like the poems must be coming often. Your first book, When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother, came out in early 2010, and your second book, Meat Heart, will be released next year. What kind of poems can we expect to see in the new collection? How has your writing/voice/persona/etc. changed since your first book? What were you conscious of this time around that you might not have been aware of before?

MB: I’m in the process of edits on Meat Heart right now and having a ball working with the very talented Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius. Like a lot of writers, I think I tell infinite forms of one story and I’ll probably be telling that story forever – namely, the discomfort of living in a body and the desire to transcend limitations imposed by flesh and brain. In Mother, the poems – often in third-person – explored various concrete modes of escape: namely drugs, sex and rock & roll, flecked with American retro pop kitsch and the occasional guru. I relied heavily on syllabics.

In Meat Heart, the poems are less syllabic, more surreal and perhaps a little wiser. They’ve already expended a number of earthly escape routes. They know the concrete “outs” are not sustainable. But they still want to bail. So the question becomes, how to hitch the body to a higher power and stay there? How to be okay with not staying there? How to keep faith in that power when the body just feels like a shitty body and the brain like a bad brain.

R: You bring up an interesting idea: a lot of writers tell infinite forms of one story. It could probably be argued, then, that all writers have been telling the same story, that it’s just language and “the architecture of consciousness” – to borrow a term from Gary Snyder – and our relationship to them, that changes, shifts, and transforms as a result of reading and studying what came before us. Since there is so much history and tradition for younger poets to draw from, what’s the state of poetry as you see it? And where the hell are we headed?

MB: I like that idea – that we’re all telling the one story in infinite forms. I don’t feel particularly equipped to address the state of poetry as a whole or where we are headed, so to answer your questions I’ll just quote some more Gary Snyder:

“stay together
learn the flowers
go light”

That sounds good, right? Though darkness is excellent too.

R: Earlier you mentioned drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Pretty interesting stuff to find in poetry. Which of the three is your favorite to write about? Have you ever had to hold back? You know, say to yourself, “Hold on Melissa, you’re going too far”? Or do you tend to confront these topics with an accidental, uncontrollable energy?

MB: Right now my poems are more concerned with the itch than the objects of desire. I’m interested in longing as its own entity, regardless of where it chooses to hang its hat. But one exciting thing about poetry is that you get to do whatever you want with whoever you want in any dimension. You can go buck wild and there are no repercussions–depending on who you show the work to, of course. Today I am not a poet who romanticizes self-destruction in the name of art. If I tried to play out my every desire on this plane, I’d lose the tension that serves as such a fine catalyst for the work. That tension is gold.