King Baby: An Interview with Lia Purpura
Alice James Books: How and why did you decide to write an entire manuscript based on this object you found in the river? Are you typically a "project" poet, preferring to focus on something
specific in the creation of a manuscript, or was this book a complete surprise to you?
Lia Purpura: It really wasn't my decision at all. I don't work on "projects" that I'm aware of (I prefer to stay as unconscious as possible about my path or direction) though of course I'm aware of lingering in a certain place of interest and following trails that I find alive and beckoning. The book was, in fact, a complete surprise.
AJB: How long did you work on the book?
LP: It happened—that's the best way I can say it—over the course of four months, from January to April and then, as forcefully as it announced its arrival, it announced its
completion. I was so rattled that I just let this pile of poems sit for months after the final one was written. Then, for a few months more, I'd just read them over and put them aside on my desk. I realized I had a cycle on my hands—since nothing came forth with a title, and the whole was clearly an ongoing kind of story. I had no intention of writing a cycle. But here it is.
AJB: Does King Baby have a gender? My instinct is to call it "him," but I'm not sure that's right. On the other hand, it feels wrong to say "it"!
LP: "Occasion," "Companion," "Object of desire" are the words that came to me (see the poem "Yesterday I heard a guy say his first film. . . .") when I found myself trying to describe King Baby. King Baby, as a force, a being, kind of obliterated any issues of specificity—or rather, transcended those issues. I was not at all aware of this stance toward King Baby while writing. It's an odd form of address, I know. It was odd for me, too, to receive it as such. There's something about the intersection of forces represented by King and Baby that located itself very clearly for me, that made a site at which I could work, and that felt responsive—and it had nothing to do with gender.
AJB: Have you done any research to see if you can find where King Baby might have come from? Do its origins interest you?
LP: : Attempting to find out about King Baby's origin felt not so important to me, not really a drive at all. I have some ideas, but a truer set of thoughts had to do with one "elsewhere" (King Baby's) meeting another "elsewhere" (mine) and the kind of traction and charge that set up. The focus that meeting made possible, the rescue and repair, the writing, the thinking—
that’s what really feels "original" to me—I mean, most like a
locatable "origin." What felt crucial was the finding of—and the being found by—this being.
AJB: You mention different birds in many of your poems—jays,
sparrows, hawks, and buntings. What made you choose birds as symbols in these poems?
LP: You're right, many birds appear—one of those observations that's utterly clear, now that you mention it, but takes a reader to point out! The birds are just birds that quite literally flew into view as I was working, listening, paying whatever kind of attention King Baby required at the moment. Just birds being birds and moving into my frame. Not symbols, or sidelongs, suggestions of something . . . just birds.
AJB: Why is it that the two "body parts" of King Baby’s that come up the most are its spine and mouth?
LP: Similarly, King Baby has a prominent spine, and a dramatically wide open mouth. Both mouth and spine, in their own formal ways, were intensely expressive—in that they seemed communicative. I lingered there in order to listen and see better, I guess. Beyond that, I don't know and don't want to know.
AJB: There are many poems in the book that are grounded in nature. How do you feel about the divide between the part of the natural world in which you discovered King Baby and the interior world it now inhabits?
LP: King Baby is a kind of dual soul—small and child-like in features, and yet a being to whom I talk, who serves as a reason to form questions, a force that clarifies. That King Baby is from an "elsewhere" is deeply important to me. Where, exactly that "elsewhere" is, is less so.
AJB: There's often a sense of deep concentration, quiet and stillness in this book. Do you write in a meditative fashion? Where do you write? Is ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write? Do you write the majority of your poems in one sitting?
LP: The experience of what came to be this book was marked, for me, by a sense of concentration wholly different than other forms of concentration I've known. Most of the poems did come as whole forms—in other words, they retain now most of the form in which they arrived, as well as the order in which they were set down. Creating a "book" meant mostly taking out a few poems and shaping up others—I meant to be alert to retaining a sense of their spontaneous arrival; I certainly didn't want to "clean them up" or slim them or slick them or, God help us, polish them. Whatever is still kind of rough or unfinished in the poems, I hope feels as organic and necessary and immediate to a reader as it did to me in the writing.
