Fig Tree and Owl, Part 1: Anne Graue Interviews Gillian Cummings
The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter by Gillian Cummings, which won the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, is a collection of profoundly emotive and intricately layered poems that are infused with philosophy, spirituality, and allusion. Its four sections contain prose and lineated poems that balance a unique use of syntax and language with poetic forms and structure. Nature imagery plays a vital role in poems that challenge assumptions of existence and physical being alongside those of belief and sacred symbols. I have asked Gillian about her collection and her process. (In Part 2, Gillian interviews me about my book Fig Tree in Winter.)
Q: Congratulations on the huge success of this collection! The poems are carefully interrelated and entwined around threads of meaning emanating from the allusions and imagery within them. In numerous poems, and in particular in “Of Water and Echo,” there are references to Plathian symbols. In other poems, references to Ophelia appear. Throughout your process, do allusive symbols emerge organically or do you begin with them as first thoughts?
That’s a good question. I think the answer is both. Sometimes allusive symbols and phrases are part of a poem’s scaffolding from the start, and other times the references appear almost as a surprise to me. The entire book was conceived as having the character of Ophelia as its central preoccupation and voice, while additional poems support and comment on that voice through meditations on depression, suicide, and healing. I know that both of our books engage Plath’s voice in our own ways, so I’ll use the poem “Of Water and Echo” and another poem, “Unwriting the Sentence,” to illustrate the different ways allusions happen in my poems. In “Of Water and Echo,” as you noticed, Plathian symbols are present. These happened—the bees, the dark honey, the axe’s edge, the moon and its emergency—unconsciously as I was writing the poem. That poem came to me from meditating inside a hollow sycamore that is a sacred tree to me. Inside was a wasp’s nest, way up high, that I was afraid of. The sense of an emergency and my thoughts about bees preceded from the wasp’s nest, and I wasn’t conscious when the poem was coming to me that I was borrowing symbols from Plath, though I was. With the poem “Unwriting the Sentence,” I began with a quote from Plath’s “Elm”: “Nightly, it flaps out.” The poem from the start was to be a meditation on “Elm” combined with an expression of what I was going through as a person who herself felt suicidal. I needed the help of Plath as a springboard to my own conclusions. So, you see, the allusions come to me both ways, unconsciously and as a conscious choice at the start. I try my best to weave them in so that they don’t become intrusive.
“I live between the little graces of dailiness that surprise me with their tenderness and the terrible pull toward a nothingness that would be the end of everything for me.”
Q: Nature imagery, especially of birds, layers the extended metaphors in many of the poems. How did you choose which birds, flowers, or animals for each poem? How do the natural symbols work in each poem to make connections to human behavior and spiritual beliefs?
I live in suburbia but spend a lot of time walking in parks, so I feel like I live a life that is in some ways very close to nature. When including plants and animals in poems, I have different ways of choosing them. Sometimes the choice is based on something that I actually experience, and the plants or animals come from my thoughts about that experience. An example is the chipmunk in the poem “A Respite from the Ice.” In my mind, the chipmunk in that poem is the poem: if I hadn’t seen it and felt a deep connection with it, nothing would have been written. But I saw it. And in exactly this way: “where a chipmunk/skitters up trunk, all eye on you. All eye./ Everything is looking. Through you./Because there is nothing in this moment/else…” What follows is a mediation on the experience of being looked through so closely and carefully that not even your bones remain, not even the ash of your bones. In this way, a chipmunk makes possible a meditation on emptiness, a spiritual concept from Buddhism that I interpret in my own way. In other poems, I sometimes choose plants and animals simply because I love the sound of their names and think that the sounds suit what I am trying to do rhythmically in a poem. And yes, there are a lot of birds in my poems. I’m a little obsessed with birds as someone who has formed an inordinately close bond with her African grey parrot.
Q: How do the questions in the first poem of section II, “A toy in blood,” open up space and possibility for answers? How is questioning at work throughout the collection and to what purpose?
“A toy in blood” is a prose poem made almost completely of questions. Whether the speaker, here Ophelia, is asking “Do I grow liltingly in moist places or should I seek the low tomb of unmown grasses?” or “but what if I drop this doll and her skull doesn’t break, the flower never droops on its stem?” the questions she is asking/I am asking seem always to be the title of Anne Sexton’s Live or Die or Shakespeare’s own famous quote from Hamlet “To be or not to be…” In this book and all of my life, I have been obsessed with this question. I made my first suicide attempt at age sixteen and have had four more since then. I don’t always want to survive them, but it seems I always do. The Owl is a book in which I look at both sides, including the side of no longer being, which is probably best exemplified in the poem “Death’s Secrets like a Box,” in which the subject of the poem has already drowned, and “Moon-Girls of the Medicine,” a poem that describes a vision of two girls carrying a nest full of birds that appears when the “you” of the poem is between life and death and offers that “you” the realization: “how alone, we break; / how we’re saved by one another.” As a person and as a poet, I live between the little graces of dailiness that surprise me with their tenderness and the terrible pull toward a nothingness that would be the end of everything for me. And I have tried to embrace a Zen practice in which the dropping of the ego-self is something seen as good, something of letting go and surrender that does noes not mean nihilism. But I am not very far along on that path and that path, too, poses question after question.
“I wanted the poems to be disorienting in order to give a feeling of Ophelia’s madness.”
Q: Poems in sections II and IV are prose poems. How did this decision come about? Was it organic from the content or deliberate from the beginning of your process?
When I first wrote these poems, I wrote them as prose poems and I wrote them as one sequence. They are all poems in first person and they contrast the poems in section I that are in third person and those in section III that are in second person and that are all short, lineated poems.
Q: How did the different syntax and language come about in section II? I am thinking in particular of “I shall good lesson keep.” Is the speaker the same in every poem in the section or do the voices come from historical or literary characters?
The speaker in all of the prose poems in sections II and IV is supposed to be Ophelia. I never come out and say this directly, so it might seem confusing or disorienting—but I wanted the poems to be disorienting in order to give a feeling of Ophelia’s madness. The syntax is stranger and at times seems antiquated because I borrow heavily from Shakespeare’s language while trying at the same time to make it postmodern and my own. The titles of all of these poems are direct quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Almost all of the titles are taken from lines that Ophelia speaks, with the exception of “A toy in blood,” which is spoken by Laertes. The title “I shall good lesson keep” is something that Ophelia says in reply to Laertes when he is instructing her on how to act around Hamlet. The prose poems are supposed to follow the character Ophelia from her initial appearance in Hamlet through to the scene Gertrude describes where she drowns. Although I chose not to label section II “Ophelia,” the poems in this section and section IV were all published by Dancing Girl Press as a chapbook with that title prior to the release of The Owl.
“What I chose was to make her seem to choose life in the very moment when she knew she would not live, to try to express that kind of almost nonsensical inconsistency.”
Q: How did you decide on the title of the collection? Does the title “The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter” come from a literary or historical source? Do you see the title poem as an anchor for the collection or reinforcing a thematic thread?
This question is both hard and easy to answer. Because I can’t answer you exactly, as I didn’t choose the title of the book. My editor, Stephanie G’Schwind at the Center for Literary Publishing, didn’t like the title that I had submitted the manuscript under. That title was “Of rue and violets.” We both wanted a title that would place the Ophelia story at the center of the manuscript, but Stephanie wanted something stronger. She chose The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter, which is the title of one of my poems, and then I used as an epigraph the lines Ophelia speaks when she is first going mad, “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but we know not what we may be. God be at your table!” It is only in the epigraph that I hint that the source of the poems in The Owl is the story of Ophelia. So the reference is easy to miss. My hope is that even if people do not see the connection, they will be able to identify with other elements of the poems.
Q: How does the final poem, “All my joy,” as its own section, encapsulate the collection and serve as its denouement?
This poem is supposed to show Ophelia having thoughts about herself and her predicament while she is drowning. In that way, it is the end of her life and the end of all the life that is in the book. I didn’t want to show her as struggling with her fate, nor did I want her to seem like this was the end she had always envisioned. What I chose was to make her seem to choose life in the very moment when she knew she would not live, to try to express that kind of almost nonsensical inconsistency. That is why the book closes with the words, “See this bubble? Here and then not. Oh here, oh here—stay, bubble, stay bubble, stay bubble, stay—” And, of course, the reader knows that no bubble ever stays, even though the word “stay” lingers on the page and doesn’t break. The “bubble” also leads back to the first poem of the book, a poem in which there are bubbles in a stream and a woman who sinks beneath them.
Read Part 2 of this interview, in which Gillian Cummings interviews Anne Graue about her book Fig Tree in Winter.
Gillian Cummings is the author of My Dim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize, as well as the chapbooks Ophelia, Petals as an Offering in Darkness, and Spirits of the Humid Cloud. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, the Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, the Laurel Review, the Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Verse Daily, and others. A graduate of Stony Brook University and of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, she was awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund Poetry Prize in 2008. Cummings lives in Westchester County, New York.
Anne Graue is the author of Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press), and her book Full and Plum-Colored Velvet is forthcoming from Woodley Press. She has poetry in SWWIM Every Day, the Plath Poetry Project, Rivet Journal, Mom Egg Review, Into the Void, and in numerous print anthologies. Her reviews have been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Rupture, Whale Road Review, and The Rumpus. She is a staff reviewer for Glass and a poetry reader for The Westchester Review.