After many years, poet Danika Stegeman is grateful to reconnect with her former teacher and mentor Karen Rigby to talk about Rigby’s latest poetry collection, Fabulosa (Jackleg Press, June 2024). The first creating writing class that Rigby taught as a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota was the first creative writing class Stegeman took as an undergraduate. They discuss the feminine as familiar and cinematic, the allure of a masquerade, possibilities for transformation and disclosure in a poetics, twilight, Rigby’s quicksilver line breaks, and the space between a first and a second book. The interview illuminates Rigby’s depth and precision as a poet. It’s warmed by a sense of kinship between two women writers who shared beginning points and are offered the gift of rediscovering one another via filaments that link and expand outward.
Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012), which won the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024). A National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, her poems have been published in Australian Book Review, Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, The London Magazine and other journals. She lives in Arizona. www.karenrigby.com
Danika Stegeman (DS): The first line of the first poem in Fabulosa,“Why My Poems Arrive Wearing Black Gloves” ends with: “enter the female / assassin.” I’m interested in the ways you define and give agency to the feminine in these poems. Could you talk about your approach to ideas of the feminine and the feminine voice in the book?
Karen Rigby (KR): Now and then the word “feminist” is applied to my poems, but that seems to be a publishing or marketing description. It’s not how I interpret my work. It seems too monumental. I can scarcely speak for or to everyone, let alone a movement. “Feminine,” though, is a description that I do see. That’s more intimate. So I’m grateful that you’ve spotted that.
My “I” is always personal, even if my poems appear to be about wider topics. Yet I still hope that the work will transcend the personal, such that other women might see something of themselves being reflected, too.
As for the poem “Why My Poems Arrive Wearing Black Gloves?” I was thinking about the occasions for wearing them, and their manifestations. An opera-length glove conjures vintage glamour. Picture Rita Hayworth in Gilda, singing, and removing that one glove. But there’s also crime television. In that staged context, putting on a pair of gloves signals something to the audience: malevolence is coming. We understand that shorthand. That’s eerie. That’s fascinating. What do we conceal, and what happens, when the gloves come off?
Gloves can be luxe, but they can also be unnerving. So why do my poems arrive wearing black gloves? That choice had to do with self-awareness.
How often, after Chinoiserie, did I hear variations of the same thing, mostly to do with my poems being “dark” or “strange?” It was even objectionable to some. That surprised me. I couldn’t imagine an untroubled life, where darkness could still arrive as a provocation. As though it weren’t a grim aspect of many lives, every day.
Now that I’m older, I’ll concede that’s unfair. I can’t assume too much about what a reviewer or anyone else might have been thinking. It’s never my aim to make anyone recoil, but it is my aim to strive for accuracy. Still, it always interests me when people land on those descriptions (dark, strange). Don’t I have a few love poems? Yet nobody seems to mention those!
What does it say about me, or Fabulosa, that my notion of the feminine is both familiar, cinematic, spectacular and particular?
I’m winking.
I’m showing you that I know a reader is going to come along, and think that a work by “Karen Rigby” must be glittering, sharp, and—here we are once again—dark. So why not just deliver that, and start with a bang? “Enter the female assassin.”
But it’s not only an assassin. There’s also “the screwball debutante.” And a villainess driving around the hairpin curve. I’m going to make you, the reader, complicit. In this movie, you didn’t vanish on that plane in the first act. You’re in the backseat. We’ve got the diamonds, let’s go!
There must be a kind of jubilance and joy in the making of any work.
DS: I love what you say here, “I still hope that the work will transcend the personal, such that other women might see something of themselves being reflected too.” And also “There must be a kind of jubilance and joy in the making of any work.” Part of the joy I took in reading the book is experiencing it as spoken from a feminine voice that is expansive, not trapped in a particular mode or box typically labeled as feminine. A woman should be able to be strange and dark, joyful and defiant, villainous and stylish, etc. Part of what I admire about the book is my ability to see myself, in all my complexity, in it. Could you talk about some works by women writers who have offered you mirrors, who have inspired you to do the same for others?
KR: I admire feats that I may not ever (or yet) manage to produce in my own work. And I also enjoy reading poetry that takes different risks than I do. While writing Fabulosa, I read and re-read Diane Seuss, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl; also Emilia Phillips, Embouchure, which is a bodily and bold collection that made me wonder about what I resist saying within a poem. Now and then another writer blows the door open, giving me a borrowed bravery to try out a few experiments of my own.
I turn to Angie Estes’ work for a linguistic elegance that moves at speed, yet which ruffles that beautiful surface with other revelations, too. And one of the collections that struck me early on was Sandra McPherson’s Elegies for the Hot Season, which is dense with metaphor. She has a poem in that book, “Poppies,” which seems very apt if we’re talking about not staying in a feminine box: the flowers are likened to hens and frog legs. The verbs throughout are so strong. Suddenly the bouquet is energized with startling vision and is anything but flowery.
DS: The speaker in Fabulosa wears many guises, from Johnny Weir to bougainvillea and beyond. We’re both writers who are attracted to ekphrasis, to personae and to images. What is appealing or generative about donning new skin or peering from or through a particular frame? What does perspective allow? As you ask in the poem “On Marion Cotillard’s 2008 Oscar Dress,” “What’s in a dress?”
KR: The allure is the masquerade, isn’t it? I’m looking at the world without being unveiled. But I’m also looking for the little angles that people might not notice right away. Also, I love the arts in their many forms. I don’t draw hard lines around that. Art does not have to live in a museum. To me a figure skater’s work can be athleticism and art. Forbrydelsen, a Danish police procedural starring Sofie Gråbøl, is hit TV and also art, and while one might get into debates about whether or not art must be redemptive, there’s little denying art in the tempo, atmosphere, and music. It’s a bleak vision of Copenhagen and politics, but isn’t it also (in its first series) a family tragedy? We can’t look away from Theis and Pernille, the parents of the victim. There is something to be gleaned everywhere.
Further, art is how many of us survive our own childhoods. Part of the appeal in the ekphrastic (or dare I say in writing anything) rests in living multiple lives, rewriting the endings, experiencing what we may not have ever experienced, or in subtly transforming our own memories into something we can bear.
DS: I’m so interested in what you say about transformation and what we can bear. I think a lot about the ways in which art—our experience and creation of it—is transformative. Our minds hold what we can bear. We make sense of what we’re given in what ways we can. What’s “real” is taken in, is changed, becomes another kind of “real” in its own right. I’m thinking about the ending lines of your poem “Tangelo”: “It’s not the shape of the world that counts. / It’s the scent in my closed palm.” Could you talk more about transformation in Fabulosa? And about the connections (or disconnections) between external reality and internal reality?
KR: In “Tangelo,” political violence, which took place during my childhood, is being considered from an adult vantage. And it still doesn’t make sense. The speaker in that poem (which is me) is left with only a trace of what can be held. In this instance the memory hasn’t transformed: what was hard to imagine or grasp back then remains just as hard to imagine now. There’s another line in the book that goes, “I once believed the mouth of a tiger: / province the lost inhabit.” That’s different from saying, “I have known harm.” It’s what poets do, isn’t it? We find another language to express something. Have I diminished that person’s power, or have I made them even larger and mythical by turning them into a tiger? The poem never explains what was said, nor what happened. Because that level of documentary detail is left out, the tiger might now stand in for quite a number of people or incidents.
When enough time has gone by, a hard memory can lose much of its sting. It can also become material that goes on to create its own effects. In this case, perhaps for some readers it might bring up a kind of recognition: “Haven’t I known that, too? Don’t I have my own tigers?”
And so this time, there is more room for transformation to happen. We cannot alter reality (what’s done is done) but we can look at events, and reshape them, and hand them back so that none of it is ever in vain, and it’s all put to good use. The use may be to say that none of us is alone.
DS: One of the blurbs for Fabulosa describes its backdrop as twilight, and near-darkness looms as a counter-shade beneath many of the poems. Behind Dior, the Doomsday Clock ticks away. Behind the noir’s solvable mystery, there’s an irretrievable girl locked in a mirror with a pair of scissors. As you say in “Why My Poems Refuse Daylight,” your poems “hunt shadow in the folds.” I admire how these shadows trouble the folds and draw out myriad shades of partial light, partial darkness–a chiaroscuro complexity. The acknowledgement and revelation of that complexity reminds me of something Jack Spicer wrote in After Lorca: “I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.” Could you talk about methods of disclosure? How is twilight also disclosure?
KR: I was born and raised in Panama City, Panama. It was a place where you could not evade the reality that life is made of both darkness and light, ruin and splendor. You could drive past a roadside encampment that reeked of sewage, and which was known by locals, with complete irony, as “Hollywood.” The next week you might be invited to attend a ballet where the printed programs were accompanied by a trio of tiny sample vials: Chanel No. 5, Cristalle, and Coco.
I once described to someone in a letter that it was a country of “riots and roses,” which is of course me being poetic. And yet honest. There could be intense greenery, but also ashes coming down the hillside from a grass fire at the height of dry season. You could go through an invasion (back in 1989) that ousted a dictator, and as a child, sit behind your couch, peeling the wrapper from a chocolate mint. Because what else were you going to do, other than wait it out?
Even before I turned to poetry, that contrast and complexity was imprinted in me: things are lovely, things are ugly, things are bittersweet, and all of this is part of it. Then, too, there is the grand Christian panorama: in the space between “It is finished” and the moment when “Behold all things are become new” arrives, there is a long twilight. We are living here, and not there, yet.
What does it mean for my poems? Well, I’m seldom writing about much of what I’ve just said at all, am I? Not in a direct sense. And yet every thought and experience must also shimmer in the deep background.
You’re entirely right about the chiaroscuro. A poem interests me when it isn’t only looking at the leaves, but gesturing at the light and shadow between those leaves. The key for me is that it is a gesture, that “pointing of a finger,” which you mention from Spicer, and not a full turning over of the leaves. I know that might generate a frustrating elusiveness, but I’m okay with that.
DS: Like their speaker, the poems take many forms. In any vessel, as ever, your line breaks are exquisite and unimpeachable. “I never write / without measuring, each line / hooking a quicksilver hunger” you say in “Why My Poems Turn Forensic,” and I say, exactly. How do you decide where to break a line?
KR: I love line breaks, so I’m glad that you asked. At the same time, I want to resist speaking about “how.” If I could explain my decisions, then it would seem like their results could be replicated. Don’t we want something handy for the craft toolbox?
By mid-life, I’m not thinking about line breaks anymore. I’m just writing. I’m operating with a series of lightning instincts. Muscle memory. I trust myself to know. That’s the advantage to time and practice. But that won’t be too illustrative or helpful for anyone else, so let’s try this in a way that is maybe more fun than talking about breath or syntax or anything like that.
Good room design involves a sense for proportion, lighting, color, environment, materials, texture, function, and traffic flow, amid other details. Likewise, a poem contains many elements. Including line breaks. Most of us have felt bad ergonomics. Most of us have walked into a space and felt that something was missing, off, or not making sense. Many of us have seen, too, pictures of ill-planned interior designs that border on the cringeworthy and hilarious. Like shag-carpeted bathrooms. In contrast, when a room does have a thoughtful design, and the layout makes sense, and every element is in place, you’re not likely to think about it. After any initial admiration, the details will recede. We’ve (hopefully) all had the chance to walk into a home that felt alive and good to be in. And this has far less to do with decor, means, or architecture than it has to do with the more basic details. Like whether or not you can actually move around easily. What’s on the stove. How did the people who live in that home combine everything in such a way that makes it feel entirely, recognizably theirs, and yet also inviting to you.
I want my line breaks to have that kind of simultaneous, striking quality and an invisibility, too. I want a poem where absolutely everything is working. Where my reader isn’t going to bruise their shins, while thinking, “You should have moved that line (or table) a little further over there, instead.” Trust me to arrange the furniture and the pathways, so that you can read my poem.
DS: Your first full-length book, Chinoiserie, came out in 2012 from Ahsahta Press. How is your second book different from the first? How are they kindred? What happens in the space between them? What might the next book look like?
KR: I like to think of poetry books as self-portraits. A record of a writer, at a particular time, leaving room for mistakes. Books always reveal something of their writer, even if the work itself is not necessarily “about” the writer.
I don’t expect a portrait of me to look the same at 15, 25, 35, 45. Likewise, my books will not look the same as each other—and yet there’s still a resemblance. A continuity. You should get the sense that it’s still the same person who wrote everything, even amid the changes.
Chinoiserie had a certain density. It was more ornate, to echo its title. I made a deliberate decision with Fabulosa, to try to give it its own particular world, its own images. I don’t necessarily want to repeat myself. So while you might find red and white transferware or a desert xeriscape in Chinoiserie, here you’re going to find a tube of Bésame lipstick. Nirvana’s Nevermind. It’s another constellation of references. Alice Fulton said, “I like to use different registers of diction in poems as a means of creating various emotional shades,” in a short interview about her poem “Claustrophilia.” That’s something I think about. I want my books to each have their own vocabulary and texture.
I’m as likely to throw in a word in Spanish or a slangy “slo-mo” invitation as I am to bring up a grimoire. I want to know what happens, when there is more of a mix happening within the framework of a book, and in its very language. And yet, I am going to repeat myself, too, without apology. Maybe I’m always going to include a poem with roses, in every book, from here on out. Maybe I’m always going to be fascinated by the light in Netherlandish art.
The next book will, I hope, reflect whatever insight or wisdom arrives in the interval that it takes to write it. And writing it will involve choosing another palette, thinking about what world of objects or histories it will contain. Finding a “new” vocabulary, yet again. That’s where I find the most fun.
Danika Stegeman’s second book, Ablation, was released by 11:11 Press November 1st, 2023. Her book Pilot (2020) was published by Spork Press. She’s a 2023 recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She’s an assistant editor for Conduit and does light bookkeeping for Fonograf Editions. Along with Jace Brittain, she co-curates the virtual collaborative reading series It’s Copperhead Season. Her website is www.danikastegeman.com.
