Take What You Want: An Interview with Henrietta Goodman
Alice James Books: You’ve expressed interest in “the physical manifestation of the experience of the sublime, the transcendental moment that causes a little chill to go up your spine and makes you feel like your head is going to pop off, as Emily Dickinson said.” How does that interest manifest itself in your writing, and in your reading? Do you write as a result of experiencing the Dickinsonian chill, or do you write to inspire it in someone else? Or both?
Henrietta Goodman: I first became aware of the experience I described in the quote in the fifth grade, when I was watching my school talent show. One of the sixth grade girls sang some popular song from the seventies, I don’t remember which one, and she was incredible. Her voice was gigantic. I had never heard anyone sing like that. Nothing about her suggested that she had this huge gift, this thing inside her. So from the beginning my notion of the physical effect that art could have was very much linked to performance. I loved to sing, but I wasn’t talented. It took me a long time to give up the idea that one day I would be a singer and would make people feel the way she had made me feel. Later I realized that poetry could do the same thing, but poetry on the page doesn’t have the physical effect on me that I’m describing. What does it is the experience of seeing someone who’s good at what they’re doing, someone who is what they’re doing, fully taken over by and immersed in their own talent. And the other part is the intensity of emotion, the rawness and the trueness. It hurts, in a good way. It’s transcendental because of the way the art takes over its creator and the way it involves the audience, how it pares down your existence to only that moment. I was talking about this with a friend recently, and I when I asked what gave him that feeling he said sex and I said that’s not what I mean but maybe it’s similar in some ways. But it’s closer to a religious feeling than a sexual feeling, because sex doesn’t provide the same sense of awe. Awe in the face of power. It’s powerful to be able to cause a physical sensation in someone else without touching them, without even necessarily being close to them. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously set out in a poem to cause that feeling in anyone. The standard would be too high, and so much depends on the individual receptivity of whoever’s listening. But the biggest compliment I can give to another poet is to say you did the Emily Dickinson thing to me. I think I did start to write because there’s a certain power in getting something right in words, and because I knew that it was possible to get it so right that it could have that effect.
AJB: What drew you to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, and particularly to the character of Gretel?
HG: In a literary theory class I took in college, my professor used fairy tales as our primary texts, probably because they’re so seemingly simple and yet so rich in so many different types of meaning. I read some contemporary versions of fairy tales, became especially interested in the way female poets had used fairy tale personae in very adult ways. And then, long after that, when I was thirty years old, I fell in love for the first time, and I left my husband. Neither he nor I had been happy in our marriage, but we looked from the outside like a perfect little family, and since I was the one who left him, people thought I was awful. I thought I was awful too, but the love itself felt innocent because it was so intense, and so mutual, and so unexpected. So I was deliriously, ecstatically in love at the same time that I felt horribly guilty and confused. I wrote the first Gretel poem when I was trying to come to terms with those conflicting feelings of innocence and wrongness. Then the next summer I went to the Boyden Residency in Oregon, and lived in a little cabin surrounded by thousands of acres of BLM land. I had no electricity, no phone, no neighbors. The nearest town was a two-hour drive on mostly gravel roads. If I wanted to talk to somebody, I could climb a hill and call on the emergency satellite phone for $1.50 a minute, or drive forty-five minutes to the top of a ridge to get bad reception on my cell phone. When I went into town I had to take the chainsaw in case a tree fell across the road while I was gone. My older son, who was three then, lived with me for part of the summer, and the whole time I was terrified that something awful would happen to him, or to me. I’m making the experience sound miserable, but it wasn’t. It returned me to myself in a lot of important ways. I had been very dependent on my husband. He and I had originally applied for the residency together, and I had never planned on doing it alone. And then I had fallen in love, and that relationship had failed. I learned that I was brave, and that bravery in no way implies the absence of fear. I returned to the Gretel poems and wrote “Gretel Alone” and “Gretel and the Bat.” Was I Gretel or was I the witch? I wasn’t sure. I was both. I always had been.
AJB: You’ve called your children muses for the way they make you think about language and about “difficult questions,” and they appear in several poems as unwitting inspiration for inquiries into very serious subjects. Do you share any of your poetry with your children? How do they feel about appearing in your poems, if they’re conscious of it? Does your relationship with your children provide a lot of material—do they give you a lot to ‘steal’?
HG: When you’re going to have a baby, people tell you how much it’s going to change your life, and you can tell they’ve allowed parenthood to change them in ways they’re not entirely comfortable with, and they’re trying to convince themselves that it happens that way to everyone. It’s true that being a parent, especially a single parent, has limited my opportunities in some big ways. But what I’ve gotten from it (I don’t just mean love, but material!) is worth what I’ve have to give up. My children have given me a wider range of subjects than I ever could have anticipated. Some of my poems, of course, are about them, but more often they give me a trigger for a poem that ultimately has little to do with them. A couple of months ago I was driving home one night with my younger son, who’s two, and I said look, the moon is full and he said no, hungry moon. I had been reading a book by Adam Phillips and in the book he says that greed is the desire to eat up hunger and be done with it for good, or something like that, so I had been thinking of hunger, and it seemed to me that my son had named one of the basic human problems: how to be both full and hungry at the same time, how to maintain desire by remaining hungry for what fills us.
My older son, who’s seven, likes being in my poems. He’s proud of me. He especially likes one poem that I wrote when he was about four. His friend River came over to play, and the two of them were sitting at the kitchen table, and he said River, do you love me? and River said yes, I love you. Do you love me, Cole? and my son said yes and then they went back to eating their yogurt. The poem is cheesy, and he always asks when I’m going to read it and I tell him it’s not done. Right now I’m working on a poem that begins with my younger son thinking that all insects are bees and then my older son asks what would happen if we cut a bumblebee in two, and then he misunderstands the lyrics to a Gwen Stefani song and sings There ain’t no Holy Vector. That’s what you get from children.
I’ve been dreaming of starting a writing residency program just for single parents. There are so many residencies that I can’t apply for because of the impossibility of taking children with me, and I know other parents encounter the same problem. I’d set up a co-op daycare so that the parents could take turns keeping the children nearby and safe but OUT OF THE WAY, and everyone would have time to write.
