An Interview with poet Constance Stadler

 Femicide
 Henna tattooed
 Kohl rimmed
 Sun burnished
 It was permitted.
               The goat hide slid
                        Whisking in
                        fluent chador
                                     so
                        impeccably cloaked
                        For the black place.

 In fresh slaughter stench
 and swelling ululations
       I tasted blood intensity
                        hovering at the cusp
                        of Berberophone womanhood.

 The phalanx of the gnarled Mother ones
 Swirling like gnats in a dust swollen myth
	 Billowing in sunless effusion
 as leaden-black snowflakes
             Settling throughout the gut-hewn hut
 of scorched dust
 and yogurt billage.
        Anointed by fresh vomit.

   In breath-stippled syncopation
                      We moved to the scream strewn straw. 

                                        … three scorpions scampered …
 Over frozen hemp sandals
 on crucified soles and
                        Western obtundent eyes.
 Benumbed blankness
 Feigning understanding
 While obsidian cataracts
                        damned.

                         Oh, the screaming had never abated.
                                        For her mother
                                        For the fervid hands that bound her
                                        For the storm of black snowflakes
                                                 That pried her innocent labia
                                                  While the Ancient One
                                                      Flicked bone skewer
                                                      Criss-cross, Criss-cross
                                                                   The sacred whet stone.
                     I thought it would be quick
                     Like some cutting room castoff bit
                                  of documentarian vagaries.
 But no.
 It was not.
                                …such a tiny clitoris…

 And with each deft puncture of
 That
 Pearlescent
 Infant Vagina
               New shrieks were born.

 	              From what can neither be forgiven
                                         Nor forgotten.

  				 Witness
                                    ‘Scholar’
   				      Field researching
                                   Accomplice.

 Agonistes mistress
 Tortured unto death.

David Blaine: Your poem (Femicide) is powered by extreme urgency, but it doesn’t feel like something you’ve written after  watching an expose on Sixty Minutes. Can you tell our audience how you are personally involved in this struggle?

Constance Stadler: There are many poems where the “I” does not refer to the poet, and it is, as we all know, a mistake to presume that it does. In this poem, I was a doctoral student in political anthropology, living in Morocco, completing my dissertation. Well, being young and cocky in my linguistic fluency and ‘superb’ command of Quranic nuances, I was quite a bit full of myself. One day a colleague asked if I’d like to see a Berber tribal practice of antiquity. Well, this was right up my field of study so of course I said: “Yes!’ She didn’t tell me details, but I am certain she wanted to take me down a notch or two. Of course, I realized as soon as I entered the hut in the Atlas Mountains, what was going on. I just froze, horror-stricken. but believing my ‘duty’ as a scholar was to stay. It remains one of my most horrific nightmares. I know if I lurched out then, dozens of women would have stopped me, killed me if need be. I have never stopped feeling “survivor’s guilt”, and I have given years of activism against the practice of FGM. It is also a poem that decries passivity in the face of any human barbarity.

DB: So it sounds as if you were in peril just by being there, yet at the end of your poem, you obviously feel complicit. What do you feel is causing the survivor’s guilt you mention?

CS: I did not feel peril, I felt hatred as a white non-Muslim American who would “judge”, an unwelcome stranger (I spoke Arabic and French NOT Berberophone), I had no idea, but the looks on their faces told me much. If anyone were to witness a horrible murder and do nothing (even though I realize I could do nothing), it remains. I spoke to my father (a highly decorated Korean veteran) about why his medals were on the closet floor. He always intoned a litany of the horrors he saw and took part in. When he was in a VA hospice dying, I arranged for every living soldier in his battalion to come with their wives and children. Most all did and everyone said: “These people would not be here, if not for you.” Finally, he had some peace.

DB: Did writing this poem have any cathartic effect for you, or did it serve to push salt in the wound?

CS: It had a cathartic affect in two ways. I could finally seize the memory, and in writing about it, gain control over its grasp on my subconscious. Also, wherever it has been seen, I have gotten tremendously positive feedback, in terms of it as a work that is explicitly and fervently political. People really responded as much if not more to the message as they did to the work as art. In that sense, I knew what I could DO as a poet-activist more deeply than I had ever felt before.

Saying that, yes it brought back some flashbacks and images, some bad nights, but I was in control and very much determined to write it out and get it to as many as possible.

DB: So, this poem, Femicide, is very much a narrative piece. I’ve seen you describe your work as mostly metaphysical existentialism, but you don’t really seem to write in only one style. Would you say you are still searching for your voice, or do you believe in that?

CS: Yes, I am rooted in existential metaphysics certainly evident in ‘Tinted Steam,’ but that does not encompass my voices. I firmly believe every poet has radically different voices. Some allow only one of their voices out, and that is a tragedy, They fear they will alienate their audience, and they might.

New readers will come. I think my hiatus gave me much insight. In some works like Femicide and Sublunary Curse, the “I” is unmistakably the author. (Sublunary Curse was about the death of my husband). I have powerful mnemonic connection, I realize can make can make events of long past alive, and seemingly experiential for the reader. This in an intimacy I crave, with my reader, enormously gratifying.  I can also write existentially in the classic sense with emotion subdued, more philosophic. Which is more me? A foolish question; we are all complexities. I am inspired by brave contemporaries. Antony Hitchin is writing brilliant new poetry, really taking chances. Felino Soriano is writing, I think, his best series ever, And Petra Whiteley’s first book of excellent poetry (The Nomad’s Trail) differs wildly in the magnificent Gothic work she is doing now. I take much inspiration there.

DB: I really enjoyed Evening Walk because the minimalist nature allowed me to pause and drink in the image you painted there. And in Welsh Flecked Romance you spin an unusual verbal concoction into some very vivid imagery: “plum dappled peach trickling meadow.” Are there particular poets or mentors, who influence these different styles of your work?

CS: Indeed. The first book of poetry I ever read was Dylan Thomas’ collected works. I was eight, and I did not understand all, probably even most, but I was spellbound ~ still am. I read Spanish so was introduced to Neruda via the poem: “Tonight I can write.” I read it a thousand times and it still slays me. I lived near Poe Cottage (where he wrote Ulalume and The Bells) and the caretaker took me down stairs where there were snippets of paper with his hand-written corrections!

I feel he is trivialized today, but no one as yet has read “The Raven” that I hear in my mind. John Donne is revered, the sonnets and, of course “Valediction.” Women? Plath and Sexton were not formative, but Akhmatova, and many black female poets surely made a deep impression. Gwendolyn Brooks was my tutor for a sacred short while, and did I learn! The Mother can still make me weep. (BTW Evening Walk was my final exam with her). How I worked on meter, cascade, the ‘ou’ diphthong! I did readings with Olds and Kinnell in my first ‘incarnation’, loved Olds until her last book where “all was forgiven” with her dying father whom she had eviscerated in book after book. I wrote a poem about that betrayal and read it to her in a public reading.

I felt duped. Your life long torturer is now ‘perfection’ because he is dying. Can we not hold two opposing views in our heads? Parker, Hooks, Lorde, Giovanni, and many more of the warrior women sharpened MY stiletto. I could so go on; I am infused and grow from great poetry every day.

_____________________________________________________________

Biographical Note: Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the ‘prehistoric’ epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was a former editor of South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. Her most recent work appears in such ‘zines as ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. Some of her work as well as most recent publication links can be found at conniestadler.blogspot.com. She has a total of over 250 poems published and two chaps scheduled for 2009.   The first, Tinted Steam, is available from Shadow Archer Press.

David Blaine

is just another bush league poet, pressing the virtual flesh and hoping to become internationally famous one day.

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