The poet, editor, and educator Adele Elise Williams brings a radical femininity and realness to the page that is uniquely hers. WAGER, her debut release selected by Patricia Smith for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Series, is steeped in a deep respect for tradition–both literary and familial, yet remakes formality with her distinct fingerprint while not degrading or attempting to revise centuries of tradition. Her ability to contemplate living in the complexity of all human parts that make a personhood—grit, defiance, kindness, boredom, fortitude, creativity, real language—is unique to this work. The balance of both respect and defiance is a marvel and a testament to the dichotomy of the human spirit. She joins me from Houston, where she is a doctoral candidate in literature and creative writing and serves as the Nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast at the University of Houston, for a conversation during the release of WAGER, and we talk about women, profanity, gender and working-class ecologies, growing up watching the legendary realness of Sissy Spacek, and continuing to ride our bikes well past childhood.
KATE SWEENEY (KS): ADELE! I love this book, thank you for ushering an outstanding collection into the world exactly as you want it to be. I think sometimes we bend (and break) to pressures of the poetry machine and produce work that is overwrought and tortured into a tradition that does not stay true to our own voice. That is not happening at all with this book. You have created an absolute stunner of real language and real experience and it is such a gift to the reader to encounter this poetry.
ADELE ELISE WILLIAMS (AEW): Oh hell. Thank you so much, Kate. Something that will certainly inform this interview is that I have no idea how to do it (poetry writing) any other way. Or, I am not interested in indulging lyric any other way. Actually, the former is more accurate. I legit don’t have the poetic chops to not be myself. And that (lacking poetic chops) is probably inaccurate as well, of course I have the chops! I think the best response is this: Although I have been in graduate school for seven consecutive years now, I was an untrained poet for the majority of my writing life. I still consider myself an untrained poet, and that specific writing life (as highly personal [sans audience], as cathartic, as a survival tool) will always be at the heart of my lyric. The MFA machine tried to kill it, but I’ve spent too much time “uneducated” for it to be undone in a few years of reading Paul Fussell and Helen Vendler (rest in power), whom I both adore!
KS: If anyone reading has ever been in a workshop, they’ve experienced the conflation of “the speaker of the poem,” with the “writer of the poem.” This concept that, instead of naming the writer directly as the speaker of the poem, we speak about the poem as an experience outside of the writer. One of the first things that really struck me about this collection is that you are the speaker of the poems–which can be both scary and liberating, and in these poems, incredibly powerful. Can you talk about how you came to own this stark confessionalism, the “It’s Me! I’m the speaker of the poem” attitude in your writing?
AEW: I’ll point back to my writing practice before graduate school—I didn’t even know of the idea of the “speaker” of the poem as separate from the writer until 2017, the first year of my MFA. This means I wrote poems for twenty years before possessing that knowledge, and in those poems, I was the speaker. I still am the speaker. It is simple for me: I am the writer of these poems; I am tethered to this abused and abusing body. Even when I play with other voices (I’ve been conflating myself with various admonished women of the bible in recent poems), I am still writing those poems from a lived experience and personhood that I cannot escape. Additionally, I feel desperate to write as myself (how I understand myself in this body) on the page. I feel wildly protective of who I am in my poems, which is me. Like, I’ll go to bat for me being me in my poems. I don’t know what that is about, I don’t really care to deconstruct it (for myself). It is a given for me, for right now.
Of course, I am only speaking for myself. I absolutely acknowledge that others cannot or must not write as themselves because they are not the self of that body, or they don’t have a choice in the matter, or they feel themselves as more accurately represented on the page in diminishment or erasure. This is the complex part. These are things I attempt to “study,” but all in all the speaker of the poem—fictional or not, New Critical, Experimental or Narrative, singular or plural, conflated or collapsed, excessive or erased—is highly personal. I believe this is why lyric theory struggles so much with these ideas. I am not sure the “lyric I” can be theorized.
KS: In a recent Ross Gay essay, he tells the story of a threshold conversation he had with his father about having sex in his childhood home. It’s such a specific relatable moment where the veil is not just lifted, but torn through to suddenly land nakedly outside of childhood on the other side of innocent, to be suddenly othered: the moment of before-ness we can never again return to, but never realized it was there to begin with in some cases. Why this struck me so fully is also that I think, in a way, it’s something we chase far into adulthood. The moment before that moment of knowledge becomes an invisible threshold–where even if it was a lie you were telling with the adult caretaker–the lie was comforting, and suddenly or even tragically, in place of the comfort is a propulsion of awareness, of self, of expectation; or maybe just the instant awareness of the gravity of being alive. The poems in WAGER often present this precipice–rushing headlong into experience only to pull out to the 10,000 ft vantage point, to a wisdom that doesn’t feel overconfident but also seems to be exploring the possibility of being whole, the sum. The speaker is simultaneously experiencing and aware of the experience.
AEW: YOU ARE A BRILLIANT BADDIE, I ADORE YOU!!!! This is such a smart and attentive read of the book. I’ve been re-reading Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s essays in The Pink Guitar and find myself most attracted, right now at least, to the questioning, curiosity, and doubt central to the feminist aesthetic. I am never “sure” (we all should never be “sure”!), and I’m thinking that this hesitancy to resolution and conclusion is one reason I stew in awareness, why I indulge the experience to no end. People may read this book and understand the past as past and that I, the speaker! would want it that way (with all the loss and difficulty of the experiences engaged), but a truth is that I grieve for all that grief. I feel most alive in inclemency and obstacles and labor, or perhaps just most present. I am not a very present person and pain requires attention. Look. I am one of those gals who knows the road is a dead end but runs headfirst anyway. I will always be that gal because more than once I ran straight through to another road. That’s a specific type of awareness that only comes with failure, and then success.
KS: The internal awareness that comes from having seen so much or experienced so much at a young age, the onslaught of actual lived experience versus the way people live now in a curated media experience—is all here in these poems. There’s a way you capture reality, that is rooted in the literal pavement, but there is also this surreal quality to it, almost cinematic, because our brains are so unaccustomed to this lived reality anymore. Our phones curate a bubble that behaves as a sort of shield where we don’t have the ability to simply encounter life—or it has changed so much, this engagement. The poems smash through that distance. The cinematic image you wrangle is both distant, like a picture show, but also intimate.
AEW: I feel like this comment makes space for me to talk about how important self-objectification is to my work. I keep making this claim to people, and I won’t stop now, that objectification runs parallel to adoration. It’s like adoration, darkly. Additionally, I’m self-obsessed as all get out. I’m obsessed. Period. What does this have to do with curation and social media presence and the cinematic? I am performing for you, and it is the kind of show that can only happen having lived some rendition of the performance in real life and time; ultimately, I hope to evoke a spectacle of self-maximalism, of self-parody (all as innovative forms of the confessional).
I mean that this book is autobiographical and mine. I control the narrative, and I’m trying damn hard to control, or certainly impact, the reader’s reactions and experience. At the very least, I control the presentation of myself in this book which matters to me as someone who forwent (forwent?) control for many years.
KS: I know that you said Eileen Myles has had a huge influence on your work, but who else can you point to that has been important for you as guiding spirits.
ADELE: I don’t care how predictable it is that I adore Eileen Myles. They are the fucking GOAT and everyone knows it. Eileen has a quote from their poem “A Poem” where they say, “There is an argument / for poetry being deep but I am not that argument,” and obviously I agree; I am against preciousness when it comes to artmaking: as though there is a muse outside of myself or the poem is some sort of gift I receive and offer. Get out of here with that. That’s panopticon shit. That sort of approach kills art.
That said, Eileen is one of countless women who inspire me to live and make art. I’ll rattle off a few names of women who are on my mind lately: poets Danielle Pafunda, Jo Harvey Allen, Anastacia-Reneé, Wanda Coleman, Leslie Scalapino, Laura Jensen, and Anne Sexton; thinkers Amy Elkins, Susan Stewart, Lauren Berlant, Sarah Ahmed, and Kathleen Stewart; artists Julie Speed (artist of WAGER book cover!), Kara Walker, Judith Scott, and Niki de Saint Phalle; actresses Shelly Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Grace Jones, and Meryl Streep; historical figures Joan of Arc and every single Mary in the bible (there are at least six by my count); myself; my mother.
KS: I’m also thinking about the grappling of the expectations on women. The hundred ways you demystify the female. Where the woman is not just a vessel, child, mother, baby, woman but human child, genderless friend, lover, laborer, person. The way the poem softens with respect for the mother. There is a deep bow to the female, with the full-throated roar of the individual that will not be compartmentalized.
AEW: This is very important to me and so well said. Thank you. I was raised by tremendous women; they were not incredible because of profession or expertise or accomplishments—the typical ways we may qualify an influential and impactful person—but because they were wildly ordinary, and the ordinary is where all the magic happens. I think of Judy Grahn’s The Common Woman poems where she says in the opening about the series “Their origin was completely practical: I wanted … to read something which described regular, everyday women without making us look either superhuman or pathetic.”
I watch/ed these women transcend being “woman” every day. It matters to me that we are “women” only because of how we defy, expand, combust, and subvert that gender performance. While the women in my family, myself included, are deeply maternal, we are also self-preserving and self-centered, aggressive, competitive, controlling, and driven— driven like nothing I have witnessed before. We drive ourselves into wonderful things and difficult things alike. We never stop.
Finally, you point out my respect for my mother. I am not being dramatic when I say that I cannot believe my mother is real. The fact that everyone in this world does not have my mother as a mother is tragic. I could go on and on about this, and I do in an essay I’m shopping around titled “The Mother Load.” If anyone out there want’s to publish it, it’s fucking great. Hit me up.
KATE: Which lead me to the tenderness in these poems! It’s not saccharine. It’s difficult to enumerate pain–to lay out loss the way these poems lay out loss and still retain the vital edge of realism instead of a descent into the cloying and sloshy preposition of reconciliation. I mean as humans we all want reconciliation, we do, we strive for it, I think—or desire it, or lay awake at night wondering after it, but do we ever really reconcile loss?
ADELE: I am so glad you noticed the constellation of tenderness and inevitable failure. This book is not a triumph over troubles. I am not “healed” or “happy” or “better.” But I am healing and happying and bettering. I refuse to believe that anyone alive has arrived at reconciliation. Though I want it, ya know? Like anyone, I want to be OK, to be content and secure. Maybe that’s where the softness comes from. It’s easy to label addicts and degenerates as monsters with a limited conscience, while the saddest part of that existence is how badly we want to assimilate—there is a gentleness there that persists but perhaps never materializes enough to become cloy or insincere; it’s practical—survival, hope.
KATE: I know that your PhD work is focusing on low-class and no-class writing and outsider art. One of the things we discussed was the necessity of the use of profanity in these poems. Usually, profanity it takes me out of the poem or distracts me or feels like a copout and I want to know what exactly the writer wants to distract me or themselves from. In WAGER, the profanity, specifically how you use “fuck” (and wow, the first three lines of “Essay on Causation” are so fucking funny and amazing) never takes me out of the poem. As we discussed, part of the impetus for this “real life language” instead of the “capital P poetry language” is to honor where you came from, who you are as a person, and make these poems even more rooted in the realism of the self.
ADELE: Like I mentioned, I wrote outside of any established writing community or training for the majority of my writing career, and a tension in my work now is that I am steeped in academia (and LOVE it) but was also alienated from intellectual structures for so long. A goal of both my creative and scholarly work is to situate and defend the low-class, low-brow, and low-down as critical knowledge and art.
You know me, so you know I talk in my poems like I talk in real life. I live my practice: I want to be a damn poem, honestly. I worked service and labor jobs for nearly twenty years; these are masculine spaces, and the result is that I am crude with my humor and nasty with my mouth. My mother would say that I talk “ugly,” and I do. Everyone (not my mother though!) should just grow the fuck up and surrender to the fact that language is fake (but powerful!). I’m super interested in that, the same way that I am interested in false idols, or idols for that matter—the ways we give our power away, and language is certainly one of them.
Kate Sweeney is a poet. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and serves as Managing Editor for Pleiades Magazine. Kate’s poems and interviews have appeared or forthcoming from Poet Lore, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest. She is author of the chapbook, The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us (Ethel) Kate lives just north of New York City.