Of Borders and Breaks: An Interview with Julie Carr

by Hannah Eason

Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House Press, 2010), written by Julie Carr, examines what it means to be open. The National Poetry Series-winning collection moves seamlessly from the topic of watching an elderly parent in decline to that of pregnancy—and the waiting, reconsideration and constant prediction which both states can entail. Arising from these tethered explorations is the question of what it means to be an individual when facing circumstances which seem to have the power to blend one’s borders.

Carr, who is also author of Mead: An Epithalamion, Equivocal and 100 Notes on Violence, answered the following questions concerning her latest collection for Her Circle Ezine.

Hannah Eason: In the collection’s first poem, “Landlocked Lines”, there are two references to things surrendered. The poem’s final line: “Then she gave up her spirit but couldn’t get out”; and an earlier line: “I was writing a poem in the alley, a woman came, hovered near, asked for my pen, I gave it up”. A willingness to sacrifice something personal seems automatic. What insights are included in Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines concerning the act of surrendering and its ability to become habit?

Julie Carr: The first line you mention (which is the last line of the poem) refers not to the giving or sacrificing of one’s own time or efforts to serve another, but instead to the giving up of one’s spirit that occurs in death. The line is referencing my own mother who is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. It seemed to me that because of the disease, she had given up her spirit, her selfhood, but had not yet been able to escape her own body. The other line is taken from a dream. I suppose I am aware that the writing of poems is a privilege and a gift, and it is one I hope and desire to share with others. The image struck me because it seemed a moment of altruism (which is probably rare in dreams) in which I was compelled to give up my writing implement so another could make use of it. Maybe this was a dream about teaching, maybe about mothering, I’m not really sure.

H.E.: Do you think women who are accustomed to surrendering seek to find virtue in the habit of giving as sort of self-defense?

J.C.: I don’t think of “giving” as a virtue—it is a necessity. It is simply what being with others is often about. One gives and receives all the time in families, and I don’t count my own generosities, such as they are, as virtues, but rather as responses to the simple fact of love. The book is most definitely an exploration of love—of love for my mother, for my daughter (at that time unborn), and of writing as a way to approach such loves.

H.E.: In your poem “Daylight Abstracts”, the narrator is alone, pleading in the end “Day, don’t say things, don’t order, don’t bend me, don’t mold”. Solitude seems to offer not only rejuvenation but a kind of fragile safety. Are these legitimate forces in the poem? Against what is the safety of solitude offered? How do attachments formed to solitude relate to an idea expressed in a later poem: “Lost him to death, but lost him before that to death-in-life: his father’s refusal to live among others”?

J.C.: Interestingly, the bit about the father refers to Paul Auster’s book, The Invention of Solitude. I was struck by the loss he chronicles in that book— the loss of his father—because his father had, in a sense, departed from others before he had actually died. The same seemed true about my mother; as anyone who loses someone to Alzheimer’s will tell you, you lose that person not just once, but many times over. As far as the other side of solitude, the protections it might offer, I don’t actually think this book is about that. There is no solitude in pregnancy. In many ways, there is no solitude in family life. One is simply among others. Perhaps the real solitude is in writing itself—and while there is no safety there, there is a kind of escape, not only from the pressures of others, but from the actual (known) world.

H.E.: In one poem you describe a memory of bottle-feeding a lamb. You write “To position myself between such need and its fulfillment seemed then the most honorable of seats. But now I find I cannot, with any steadiness, sit there.” What are some of the key observations in Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines about this seat-of-honor?

J.C.: When I was a kid and a teenager, I was very drawn to babies and little children. I felt myself destined to be a mother. I often put myself into situations in which I could care for others, and I got a lot of satisfaction out of knowing that I did that pretty well. Now it is simply more complicated. I know I can’t be someone’s everything, can’t make anyone safe, can’t provide anyone (child or parent or spouse) with all that they need. The fantasy of being someone’s sole source of love and protection is over. So, perhaps there is some sadness in that, but mostly, I prefer the more nuanced understanding of my own powers.

H.E.: You write in “Inward Abstracts”: “Now given as food. Which is an honor. To be eaten. To expect, at the table, a reprisal. Of myself.” We see here a repetition of the honorable position, but now it equates to being rather than offering the food. What can you tell us about this movement toward becoming the source of nourishment?

J.C.: Well, it’s sort of joke, but not entirely. I was talking about the fact that when one is pregnant, and later, when one is breast-feeding, the baby is literally eating of and not just from your body. This is very strange, almost as strange as producing another person out of one’s own body. It is also humbling. One realizes that one is useful to another because of one’s actual substance, because of one’s hormones, one’s matter. This is a very different kind of “giving” than the one I fantasized about as a child—in which I would be the perfect caretaker, needed and beloved. The giving that one does when one is, quite literally, eaten, is impersonal—it has nothing to do with one’s great qualities as a person. It has just to do with the fact that one IS a person, or a female person.

H.E.: The concept of ‘openness’ is a powerful unifying theme in your collection, attached by turns to the womb, pregnancy itself, the ground in which we bury the body. It seems that there are two interpretations of the word ‘open’ you explore—open in terms of being almost endlessly permeable, and being broken ‘open’ to reveal more. Your poem “Lines for What is Broken” is a strong example. I’d love to hear any comments on the relationship between these concepts, your focus on them, any friction observed between them and so on.

J.C.: That is a great question! I think you’ve already said it—the book explores the way in which our bodies or spirits are broken open by creating another person —we have to open to allow the other into the world (physically, but also emotionally), but the book also explores the way we have to break open to allow another to leave the world, we have to let that person go, allow ourselves to become separated from her, and this is kind of breaking that is painful, but ultimately also a kind of giving (over).

H.E.: Speaking of “Lines for What is Broken”, your formatting in this poem and others that have ‘lines’ in their title seems to encourage an eagle-eyed hunt for the true connectivity of pieces within. What can you share about the information being provided about your subject through this form? Also, how might the sum of forms you chose for this collection speak about the narrator’s position?

J.C.: The poems called “lines” were an exploration in the line as a unit of meaning, thought, or music, which might be read independently from what comes before or after. Of course, thoughts or images often do carry over from one line to the next, but I was interested in exploring this strange thing in poetry that we call “the line” in order to create broken, rather than continuous, narratives. In the poems I call “abstracts,” I was drawing connections between words mostly through sound associations, especially assonance. I was interested in what gets created (what kinds of sentences, what kind of meanings) when one foregrounds sound instead of sense. In this way, those poems push more toward abstraction. But I was still working thematically, so there is a tension between the sound play and the “topics” or themes of the poems. The fragments are simply fragments—I wanted to feel free to allow bits of language to live as broken wholes—I liked their lightness, their incompleteness. It made sense to me, given the content of the book, to let some of the moments feel unfinished. That said, I wasn’t that interested in sentence fragments. The poems mostly speak in whole sentences.

H.E.: ‘Spoon’ is used as a beautiful and apt metaphor in “Birthday Fragments for Alice” in the line:
“the girl … is the spoon’s bowl for the way she holds herself open, but not flatly so, not unfolded.”
I’m curious about the repeated imagery of the spoon in “Of Sarah Again”: “Looked for your face in the face of a spoon and found yourself sadly reversed and elongated.”

J.C.: Thank you! I think I was drawn to the spoon as an image of something that holds, but lets go at the same time. Like a mother, I suppose.

H.E.: Juxtaposition of pending new life and pending death runs, of course, through the body of this collection, with many subtle, interwoven comparisons. The pregnant woman is said to be “doubled”, “two”. In “Of Sarah”, we read (in relation to the mother): “I see your entrapment as a fault of my own, my failure to house you in my face.” What are your thoughts on the act of “housing” another as salvation?

J.C.: Well, we “house” another when pregnant. But it is a paradox. We provide a space for another to exist, but that other has its own “home” in its own body. The feeling I had when my mother was going into a nursing home (and thus becoming even less a part of me, of my life, even less available) was that I had failed her. The feeling I had was that I had not protected her, “housed” her, and so now she was going into this kind of permanent jail. It’s really not as bad as that. She lives there and is taken care of by wonderful people. But she does never leave and she will die there, that is certain. All the places she’d loved, the beaches, forests, cities, are now no longer part of her life. Instead, she lives in two rooms and a hall. This is very sad, but it is much less sad than her loss of language and memory.

I don’t think that “housing” another, or holding another body in one’s own (whether we mean that literally or metaphorically) provides “salvation,” because I don’t believe in salvation. I wouldn’t know what salvation means – what are we being saved from? What for? Instead I see this as a natural consequence or fact of being human, of being a mammal. The body is simply not singular. Even the male body, which certainly seems more singular, has within it the experience of being “housed” within another body. And certainly men and women both are always finding ways to metaphorically house others, if by that we mean protect and care for. I don’t think of this as an attribute only of women or only of mothers and certainly not only of heterosexuals or people in families. I see this “housing” (again, in the metaphorical sense) as simply a part of what it means to be a human being forging close bonds with others.

Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, published by Coffee House Press, is available now.

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Julie Carr‘s poems have been featured in Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Nation and A Public Space, among other publications. She currently teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and she is co-publisher of Counterpath Press.

In addition to writing UpClose interviews and book reviews for Her Circle Ezine, Hannah Eason writes fiction under the name Jane Eisenhart. Links to her short stories and additional writing can be found on her website: http://hometowngrotesque.squarespace.com/.

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