Images courtesy of Copper Canyon Press
In Winter 2022, I was lucky enough to be part of Leila Chatti’s Tin House workshop for poetry. At the end of our one-on-one session, she told me she wasn’t sure if she could conceive of a book for herself that was not a “project book,” a poetry collection with a tight motif, a throughline or an obviously unifying feature. This conversation was just two years after the publication of Deluge, her brilliant debut full-length collection that details a devastating health scare through the stories of Mary as she appears in the Bible and Qur’an. Deluge is a collection populated by angels and blood; it is rife with repetitions that build an all-consuming momentum. Chatti later published two chapbooks: a collaboration with Dorianne Laux titled The Mothers with that tight throughline present once again as indicated by the title; and Figment, an experimental abecedarian about the grief of miscarriage. If Chatti’s past projects are easy to summarize, that does not mean the works themselves are easy; her lines are always vibrant and call for re-reading.
Her sophomore full-length work, Wildness Before Something Sublime, published in the 23rd month of the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Each day I encounter an abundance of distractions from the fact that the genocide is ongoing. What keeps us from focusing on what is true? Instead of facing the discomfort of a world that commits reality-bending horrors, we retreat into worlds with easier answers. In the jumble of these distractions, I find myself more interested in art that engages with its own duality—to avoid the self, perhaps, but also to become a braver self. Over the course of a few weeks, Chatti and I exchanged e-mails about the making of Wildness, which I have come to see as a practice of avoidance that works toward clarity.
The collection questions capitalistic productivity in ways that are gendered, racialized, and at the whim of ableist institutional standards. What subjects are worthy, and what is it that we do that counts as real work? Wildness Before Something Sublime transforms the anxiety of not having an answer to that question. The book is divided into sections named for the invented forms: “Oracle,” (described as a “shadow-side” and “call-and-answer” to the work of women who inspire Chatti); “Divine” (poems written by opening a collection to a random page and using that poem as a word bank); “Night Poems” (poems written on the brink of sleep), and others. Chatti writes of living with chronic illness, dealing with miscarriage, suicidality, and what it means for those experiences and other violences to be monetized. These poems seek to write the self out of distraction into something freer, braver. As she puts it in the closing line of “I Went Out to Hear:”
My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.
Summer Farah (SF): The book begins with a disclaimer: “This book was written when I wasn’t writing.” I’m interested in your relationship to productivity. Has your relationship to what counts changed in the process of putting together Wildness Before Something Sublime?
Leila Chatti (LC): My relationship to writing changed drastically when it became the sole basis of my income. I don’t think we talk enough about the financial reality of writers and artists. For over a decade now, I’ve made a living not simply by writing, but also by defending what I am writing, positioning it as something important, of worth. Fellowships, jobs, grants, academic programs—these all require proposals, statements of intent and artistic merit. Each year, to pay my rent and receive health care, I had to explain what I was working on and hope some new authority believed it was valuable. So, it wasn’t so much what I viewed as productivity, or at least not originally; it was what I was trained to view as work that counted.
When the writing of [my first book] Deluge was finished, I was terrified, because there was nothing waiting for me after. I remember distinctly this sense of a plunge—a physical feeling of dropping. I lived alone, and at the time I really did not see a way for me to make a living without proving I was writing, writing, writing something important, all the time. And what was most important to me, the most pressing subjects, I could not bear to look at myself and certainly could not share with others. So there was this struggle—needing to write, but not to write that. Have you ever tried not to think about something that is urgently present, very painfully so? It is difficult, if not impossible.
But some of my ability to feel more comfortable in the unknown, in working in ways that don’t always look like traditional “work,” comes from no longer navigating life alone—my husband is able to help provide financial stability so that I do not need to continually prove myself as productive to an external authority in order to survive. There’s new freedom for me, creatively, now that I am less vulnerable to the ruthlessness of capitalism.
SF: So much of this book is an experiment! How much is your practice informed by these different forms of play?
LC: Play is so important to my process, even if I only recently felt confident in admitting this. For a long time, I believed that to be seen as a “serious” writer of “serious” work, I had to hide this play. As a woman, a woman of color, I was not—am not—always taken seriously. There’s always someone in the room who thinks I don’t deserve to be there; sometimes that someone is me. I internalized a lot of toxicity that has taken years to process, to release.
But play is what brought me to poetry; in a poem, there are no rules. Or there are rules so extreme, so overt, the poem becomes a game, a puzzle, a maze. The tension between order and disorder works for me; I think like a surrealist engineer. Initially, as a student, I avoided what I understood as “form” because rules sounded like a drag, but then I discovered the constraints of form led me to greater surprise. Structure unlocks, in me, imagination. Making and breaking of structures, inventing rules and discovering ways around, through, beyond them—this is at the heart of how I work.
Structure unlocks, in me, imagination. Making and breaking of structures, inventing rules and discovering ways around, through, beyond them…
There’s this idea that for work to be work it must be hard. But play can be work—play can be productive and challenging, while also remaining fun and pleasurable to do. If I frame it as play, I let my guard down, which allows in more interesting thoughts.
The experiments in Wildness Before Something Sublime came about organically, by which I mean I didn’t set out to do something novel for the sake of doing something novel; I was just trying to find a way into the poem. I discovered after finishing Deluge, during that grueling subsequent period of creative “block,” that I could only write if I convinced myself I wasn’t really writing, but instead playing. I changed, too, from a focus on product to a focus on process.
I needed play in this collection because the content was too difficult for me to face alone. Allowing in other voices, unusual mediums, unexpected constraints—these things shook up the making up a bit, enough to make me more intrigued than exhausted by the thought of continuing down that path of thinking, feeling, exploration that is a poem. Without my having revealed the process behind them, I don’t know that anyone would think of them as playful. But they come from play—they are made of play and pain both.
SF: I love the idea of accessing difficult or heavy themes through playful craft. I am interested in the pursuit of “difficult” themes as it pertains to a moment in Wildness, as you write in “Grief-Farer”: “I come to see sadness / as unprofessional. And because my profession leads me / to be seen, I decide I am / done with sadness, like a habit / I’ve kicked.” Poetry can feel like a business of visible, profitable feelings—did you feel pressure to construct a persona in counter to the more “difficult” themes in your work, such as writing through chronic illness or depression? I wonder if, alongside the opportunities that both financial stability and the play of Wildness has opened up, it has altered how you move off the page, as well?
LC: The years of writing Wildness were years of great transformation for me—personally, professionally, and creatively. When I wrote Deluge, I had a great deal of idealism; I believed, because I was told I was brave, that bravery would protect me. Writers are often encouraged to write the true thing, to say the unsayable, and I do believe this leads to better art. But what I didn’t realize was that support of the writing does not necessarily mean support of the writer. My transparency in Deluge about the reality of living with chronic illness has closed doors for me as a professional, despite the book’s professional “success.” Put plainly, there are institutions that equate “illness” with “risk”—my body’s perceived “unreliability” has led some to assume I, too, must be unreliable, the “I” here being “working professional.” Never mind that I work very hard, have proven I do, because of/in spite of my illness. Our institutions—academic, literary—remain astoundingly ableist, despite the recent performative chatter. It was a great betrayal when I was confronted with this reality, and the realization deeply wounded me into a profound silence. How could I write when what I wrote would be used against me?
It was a visit to Smith College that began to heal this wound. As I share in the book, Sylvia Plath was my entry to poetry, true poetry, of real concerns of the heart and mind and body. I distinctly remember walking toward Smith’s gates for my reading and meeting with high school and college students, and being struck with sudden clarity, that this was why I had wanted to be a poet all those years ago, as a girl—I wanted to say something true, say it so truthfully that it was beautiful because it was true, and have it reach someone, anyone, and maybe change them, as Plath, and poetry, had reached and changed me. That was it. The rest is noise, I wrote in my notebook upon returning to my hotel room. I understood I would keep writing the true thing, could only write what was true, or else there would be no writing—and the business of poetry, of Poet as Professional, was a separate, lesser thing that I could opt out of. I was free! I wish I could bottle the feeling of that moment up and share it with those who need it. I felt it, physically, within me—something big shifting, then lightness.
I ended up teaching at Smith College following that visit, a metamorphic year in which I continued to shed the masks and mythologies I’d shielded—burdened—my self with, and emerged myself. It’s no coincidence that this was when I first began putting Wildness together as a manuscript, after years of hiding (and hiding from) the poems that comprise it. Before, I had felt I had to perform unrelenting optimism and strength, to make up for the “failures” of my body, of my self. You used the word “persona,” which comes from the Latin for “mask” and is, here, the perfect term. Jung—who had a pretty significant influence on this book—conceived of persona as the opposite of shadow. He described enantiodromia: the idea that when we perform outwardly an extreme public, conscious version of the self, and suppress our unconscious (or shadow) self, in time the suppressed opposite gains power and ultimately breaks through, overwhelms completely. There is a lot of thinking about opposites in the book. Heraclitus wrote [paraphrasing], It is the opposite which is good for us. And, you know, I became so interested in this idea of my shadow when my very name means night, the extremity of shadow. I was so afraid of the shadow: hopelessness, rage, vulnerability, and, yes, sadness. I thought it—I—was very bad. I thought I would not survive the shame of being seen. But it was the hiding that created more of the suffering I was trying to outrun.
I was so afraid of the shadow: hopelessness, rage, vulnerability, and, yes, sadness…But it was the hiding that created more of the suffering I was trying to outrun.
The writing of the poems and the emergence of my (true) self were simultaneous and necessarily dependent on each other. It was through writing that I came to understand my self, and the more I understood my self, the more I understood the poems, what they were doing—and I could only see the book clearly once I was able to see myself clearly. Yes, I do move differently because of this book. I am less afraid. Not because I am safe—to say the true thing carries the same consequences—but because my illusions had to be shattered in order for me to dream fully. The shadow is not only pain—it is also potential. I am unlearning an existence of incessant apology simply for existing. And what I’ve learned of freedom is that it can set others free, too.
SF: Thank you for highlighting the reality that writing about being unwell can make those who would employ us decide what we are capable of, instead of letting us—who experience those various states of unwellness—decide for ourselves. I’m glad you’ve invoked the title of the final section “Shadow/Self”! I’m compelled by the titles of two of your sections, “Oracle” and “Divine,”—they feel like expansions of the religious glossary that built Deluge, distinct from the Abrahamic scriptures but not counter to them. I am attuned, too, to the abundance of angel imagery. How did spirituality inform Wildness?
LC: Wildness is, I think, interested in the leap (or fall) into the unknown that requires faith—the freedom, even, in the idea of the unknown itself. Faith as craft: trusting something other, powers beyond the self, to guide. The original title of this book was actually Divine. Divine can mean “of God,” a descriptor, but it is also an action, a verb of discovery. To divine is to seek. Sacredness in the act of seeking, of seeing. I was very interested in how my creative practices are not dissimilar from the ways people have for centuries used specific, sometimes ornate, rituals to understand something elusive. As for oracles, unlike the prophets of the Abrahamic faiths, these prophets were women. Frenzied women from whose lips the God speaks, in the words of [religious scholar] Walter Burkert. The frenzy interested me as much as the seeing that engendered it, and the speaking that followed. That madness—including rage—of women especially—might be a gift.
The frenzy interested me as much as the seeing that engendered it, and the speaking that followed. That madness—including rage—of women especially—might be a gift.
While the creative practices of the “Divine” and “Oracle” sections involved my awareness and intention, the angels came as a surprise! In Deluge, I have a poem called “Angel” that was the first “night poem” I ever wrote, though I didn’t have a name for that process at the time. The poem begins: “After a month of asking, suddenly, a voice.” There’s been this need in me for many years now, as long as I can remember, for something beyond to speak to me, and I am listening for it all the time. I remember feeling very silly as a child, standing next to the ocean waiting for some sign, a single word. To tell me what? I didn’t know. I don’t know. But I knew to hear it would change me. And so I kept returning to the places that felt, to me, sacred—the sea, the night, the page. That desire for a voice to tell me something is at the core of this book. And angels are messengers—that’s the root of the word, in most of the languages that speak of them. My original notions of a voice visiting me came from my faith, in the form of angels.
In Islam, angels are a bit more present, more commonplace, than in Christianity; I mean, we believe there are angels assigned to always be with us. And they’re important—it’s one of the six pillars of faith, belief in angels, second only to belief in God! In Islam, angels are not so antiquated. You might encounter one going about your day, and you wouldn’t be considered crazy. I’m sure their presence in the poems comes from these concurrent associations in my subconscious mind: angels as symbols of faith, of writing, of messages, and of madness. Angels are also made of light, and this is a book interested in shadow, and in opposites. They are figures of reason and the mind. They can only ever follow rules. All this to say—even though I don’t directly mention my religion anywhere in this book, it is part of how I think. Islam means submission. A lifetime of submission prepared me to write these poems—to be one who follows rules and rituals, who trusts what can’t be known. I’m comfortable with mystery; it is a necessity of faith. My spiritual faith has led to creative faith, at the heart of my practice and poetics. I believe the poem will always lead me where I need to go.
SF: You speak of the “desire for a voice to tell me something is at the core of this book;” what “something” is it you hoped to hear? What “something” do you hope others take from this book?
LC: I believe a poem is finished only when I stumble onto something I didn’t know before writing it. Selfishly perhaps, I am always looking to learn more about myself. Is that a universal experience? Maybe some people don’t want to look inward. I can imagine that. I like the seeking, but not always what I see. I think whatever discomfort I experience from knowing myself better is likely good for me. And by that new knowing, I want to be changed. I want epiphany. I want a flash of Rilkean clarity. To be startled by the luminous truths of my life, of my self, so much that it is as if I am awake for the first time. That might be a lot of pressure to put on this book, but I do hope that readers might leave it with their own selves illuminated just a little.