An Interview with Anne Marie Macari
by AJB intern Abby Austin.
Abby Austin: When and how did you become interested in poetry?
Anne Marie Macari: I was always a reader and lover of books but I became interested in poetry when as a sophomore in high school I had a substitute teacher, a practicing poet, who read Whitman aloud to us in class. Somehow I awoke, all at once, to a feeling, more than a feeling, that this was what I wanted to do with my life. From that time I began to write and read poetry on my own. I remember the joy of that class, hearing the music, the range of Whitman’s imagination.
AA: Could you talk about your influences in both your early work and in the writing of Gloryland?
AMM: I started with Whitman, a good place to start because he gave me the sense that poetry could go anywhere and be about everything and anything. I was also influenced by my study of the Bible and women mystics. And early on I was taken by Plath’s intensity of emotion, something that was both freeing and terrifying at the same time. And there are many moments of awakening, like the first time I read Diving Into the Wreck.
With Gloryland I was reading Dickinson very intensely, so moved by how she claimed her own power as a poet (I reckon – when I count at all –/ First – Poets – Then the Sun - / Then Summer – Then the Heaven of God - ), and her thumbing her nose at the church gave me great joy and hope. The women who write from the body—Sexton, Clifton, Olds—were also in the background when I wrote many of these poems.
AA: The speaker in this book is a woman who is physically and spiritually inspired, aware, and curious during pregnancy, labor, and motherhood. Can you discuss how your experience as a mother has shaped the creation of these poems?
AMM: These poems are about, not only pregnancy and birth, but the struggle to inhabit a female body, to find knowledge, even revelation in the body, rather than trying to deny or escape the physical. History, particularly religious history, is a long tirade against female sexuality. Women are told over and over that they are impure, weak, fragile, easily tempted. Meanwhile the power of women to birth and raise children is minimized, and in the case of Christianity, actually highjacked, denied. I began, without realizing it, to center my poems in the body, and in effect to reclaim my experiences of birthing and motherhood from the myths. My particular experience of being a single mother raising three sons, puts me in opposition to the myth of the passive figure of Mary who is the idealized, silent mother, always calm and loving, even when the State kills her son. My experience tells me that to birth and raise children a woman needs to gather all her strength and resources. Passivity, relying on the goodwill of the powers that be, is dangerous, for both the mother and her children. Of course it’s also risky to be a powerful, active woman. In poetry there’s still not a wide range of birth poems, of motherhood poems, it’s a subject women, myself included, have been at times ashamed of, as if it’s too minor an experience, too narrowly female, to write about. Of course that’s crazy, it’s a central experience, and not just for women.
AA: As a young woman anticipating having children in the future, I find Gloryland inspiring. This is an honest, deeply affecting portrayal of motherhood. “Night Feeding” in particular showed me the bond a mother has with her baby. What messages would you wish to convey to young women? What do you want your book to say to mothers and grandmothers—or to young fathers or grandfathers, and people who are not parents?
AMM: The first task of these poems was to get beyond the sentimental notions of motherhood, beyond the metaphors we’ve all been given, that have imprinted us. In the writing of these poems I began to feel how much I’d been at war with myself, on all levels, spiritually, physically. How the hatred and fear of the body, such a common experience for women, and men too, drives us away from ourselves and the people we love, causes us to deny the power of our experiences. Birthing is relentlessly physical, even erotic, so if we are taught that anything physical is unclean, and that female sexuality should be controlled and denied, where does that leave us? How do we then make sense of our experiences? In “Night Feeding” there’s physical joy in nursing. Isn’t it odd that women can walk around half naked, they can show their breasts in sex scenes on film, but nursing mothers are supposed to be kept out of sight? People are scandalized by mothers who nurse in public! Why is it that such an elemental thing as feeding one’s baby is more taboo than nudity on TV?
I can’t presume to have a message for young women. But I hope my poems tell more of the story than we usually get, I hope they change the angle with which we view our bodies and the work these bodies do. Motherhood isn’t the only experience for women, thankfully we now have more freedom not to be mothers, but it is an elemental experience, the embodiment of creative energy, and it’s lifelong, it’s power begins in the body and moves outward from there.
AA: To me, “Mary’s Blood” is about the physicality of motherhood among other things. Neither the birth separation between mother and child nor the emotional bond between father and child can interrupt the bond between a mother and her baby. I see the Virgin Mary vividly birth the son of God—she creates His physical being, and He depends on her to grow—not the traditional focus to which we are accustomed. The poem seems to be a feminist version of the Biblical story. Can you tell us about the genesis of this poem, and how your spirituality has shaped the poetry in your book—or vice versa?
AMM: Yes, “Mary’s Blood” is about the utter physicality of birth and motherhood and it’s an attempt to take back the metaphor of Mary as helpless vessel and to see her as a real physical being who birthed another real physical being. The church has even taken her motherhood away from her! She remains a virgin, immaculate, she supposedly feels no pain, Jesus is God’s son, not her son, she’s just there as a vehicle (clearly the inability for a man to know his own child, always a source of anxiety, is one of the elements behind this myth). This was the first of the birth and Mary poems that I wrote. It almost wrote itself and I felt right away that I’d said something that had remained largely unsaid, despite being, to me, very obvious. Mary was a woman. She gave birth like other women, conceived like other women. In the male telling of this story the power of the mother is taken away, she is passive, waiting, always willing to do what’s required even when it means the death of her child. She has no sexuality. After all, how could God come through the unclean flesh of a woman? Why do we keep telling this same lie? I can’t say I set out to write this. This subject grabbed hold of me, it felt revelatory because even though I knew intellectually that these myths were false, they still had a hold on me. What woman isn’t haunted by the ideal mother? Writing these poems gave me back my own experience as a mother, allowed me to get past the myths and sink into the physical beauty and the suffering of birth. It’s both terrifying and revelatory to carry a child and give birth. Why should that be taken from us? Yes, it’s joyful and, yes, there’s an undeniable bond, but it’s also grief-laden, tremendously difficult, and that bond is both lifeline and burden. The myth tells us that a woman’s only role is to be this silent, passive, all-giving mother, as if there’s no complexity to it, and also as if there’s no other kind of fulfillment, nothing for women beyond motherhood.
My own spiritual journey has taken me all over the place. It’s led me, finally, to dismiss everything I was taught, not just to dismiss it, but to see it as dangerous. To completely disempower the feminine is to make a lopsided, virulent world, a world in which much energy must be spent on repressing that which is feared. Clearly much religion is about keeping the sexual urges under lock and key, particularly the feminine. It’s about telling women that the great role of motherhood is really nothing of importance, while at the same time telling us it’s all we’ve got. Religion is simply dangerous. Still, I am a religious person, I cannot deny that part of myself. Like many of us I am having to find my own way. I need a religion that speaks to my experience of being a physical being, grounded in the joy of living, who also knows there’s much more, there’s the great Unknown, within everything. My religion is the Unknown. Others have gone there, still, it’s uncharted because that’s the nature of the spirit, when you try to pin it down you lose it. I am not a person without faith, I am a person without dogma, at least that’s what I’m trying to be. To exorcise ourselves of thousands of years of imprinting is no simple task. And the world is erupting now against those who would empower themselves to know the body as good and know the spirit as mystery.
AA: Gloryland is written in free verse and received forms. How does form contribute to meaning in the poems? What makes you prefer one form over another for a particular poem?
AMM: Mostly these are free verse poems. There are a handful of forays into the sonnet, they were written mostly when I was caring for someone who was ill and had little time to write. So I wanted a brief but intense form, I wanted an urgent lyric. The sonnets presented themselves to me at that time, they saved me when there was little time for my more natural ruminating, my wandering, which is the way many of these poems are written, as wanderings into the unknown.
AA: How has your work evolved from the publication of Ivory Cradle, your first book of poetry? And where do you think your writing will venture next?
AMM: The evolution of my poems isn’t anything I could have predicted, and yet I can see that it’s been an organic process in which I’ve written from the circumstances of my life toward the more elemental struggles of reconciling the physical and the spiritual. The poems are at best explorations. They ask questions. What I’ve found is that the work that means the most to me is work that questions the things I’ve always taken for granted, work that struggles with itself and with the world at the same time. I don’t like to say too much about where I’m going, mostly I have no idea. I do know that there’s tremendous upheaval in the world right now, on every level, political, spiritual, environmental, and for me the challenge is to write about my place within that upheaval, to write poems that are lyric and personal, and yet making contact, wrestling with the larger issues. But if I talk about it I’m sure I’ll jinx it! So I’ll leave it at: to be continued….
