A Poet, Not a Murderer

Transcript of episode

Episode transcripts are provided to make this podcast accessible to a wider audience. Please note that interviews featured in this episode have been edited for concision and clarity.

SPEAKERS
Camille Rankine and Rachel McKibbens

Rachel McKibbens
I think that I have to be willing to give just enough to show the reader not just my vulnerability, but the ferocity of motherhood. Like, you can have regret and no shame. And so I had to talk about how unsafe I can be: as just a human in the world but, even more viciously, as a mother.

MUSIC STARTS

Camille Rankine
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

Poet Rachel McKibbens is fierce. She’s an essayist, an activist, an advocate, a mother of five, and an author of three books, Into the Dark & Emptying Field, Pink Elephant, and her latest, blud. Rachel is also a renowned Poetry Slam Champion, appearing on the National Slam team nine times. She’s our guest today on The Glimpse.

Camille Rankine
Rachel McKibbens’ poetry may ask forgiveness, but it never asks permission. Her poems are bold and honest and tender, unflinching and open-hearted. Her latest book, blud, examines mental illness, abuse, inheritance, and legacy with a gaze that stares shame down and in a voice that, even as it quavers, holds its ground with elegant intensity, carving a path forward with a razor-sharp, incantatory lyricism that cuts deep, inhabiting its reader body and soul. Welcome, Rachel.

Rachel McKibbens
Ah, thank you. Thank you, Camille. Thank you.

Camille
So I want to just start off by asking you a question just about your writing in general. I mean, one thing I was thinking about reading your work was, there's this intense physicality to the way the poems are built and the way that they move. And I wonder, do you feel like the body is a big part of how you make your poems?

Rachel
I love that question. Because absolutely, first and foremost. I think not many people know I was a deeply trained gymnast.

Camille
Oh!

Rachel
And I actually trained for the ‘92 Olympics and I was hit by a car.

Camille
Oh my god.

Rachel
Yeah, a year before Olympic trials. So then I went into theater, and I had so much pent-up energy and I had no outlet, right? Because if you think about it, my body was literally pounding the mat. And every dismount you're landing, it's such a huge, obvious, physical sort of, like, explosion of self. And so I feel like the poems are meant to sort of do similar kind of, like, acrobatics and be explosive and can potentially break my own neck. Right? So thank you for that.

Camille
I mean, I love the idea of the impact of like, you know, doing a routine and that landing. And how that that kind of—I feel like that does reverberate so much in the work. That feeling like there's a sort of…there's something physically at stake in the work, you know.

Rachel
What a gift of witness you're providing me right now. Thank you for that. I think that too, violence is considered, you know, it's so gendered. But like, no. Women, we can…like when we commit violence, it is shocking. And to me, I'm always like, “Well, yup. And?” Like, “Of course, that's what happened. That's what she did. That's what the world pulled from her.” And I'm just unafraid to really dissect that, and to do a lot of interior examination. Because a lot of that was not just inside me but was all around me growing up just based on how, you know, the background I have, which was completely tumultuous and violent. I have had to really push myself to be a poet instead of a murderer.

Camille
Hmm. Good choice.

Rachel
Agreed. I would rather be around to raise my five kids.

Camille
Alright, let's talk about your poem. Can you tell us what poem you're going to share with us today?

Rachel
Sure, I'm going to share with you “glutton,” which is deeper in the book called blud. It's essentially sort of about the lineage of mental illness within the family as well as how that sort of drives the decisions that we make, and…as well as the fear of abandonment. I did not grow up with my mother. And then also being that I was a young mother—I was a mother at seventeen. I've been a mother longer than I've not been a mother by now.

Camille
Wow.

Rachel
And yeah. So my firstborn son lives with schizophrenia. And we are often…I mean, we go long stretches of not speaking. And I was really interested to, in sort of naming what that kind of struggle is like, and what it's like to have to protect your other children from one of your own, and how to protect that child from your sorrow, from your legacy of neglect and rage. And so yeah, that's, that's what this poem is about. Do I just get into it now?

Camille
Yeah, absolutely. Please do.

Rachel

Glutton.

You write poems to understand what you cannot understand. Finally, name the snapping beast you've tried to outrun your entire life. Stop avoiding stop the scorched fog of language that redirects the I say what you mean? Quit saying better. When you mean eviscerated. lunacy is in your blood. It's a fact. So you do your best to live alongside it. snarl, push and push until you find room in that frantic brain to plant some kind of hope. Your daughter upstairs practicing the clarinet. This morning is toast. It's butter spread all the way to the edge. Small mercies to help empty the beast. So why is it every time you write about your son, the boy who hears voices and voices and voices, he responds, sends a message out of the blue. It makes you worry. Maybe you're on the same frequency. Worry. Tomorrow, you'll wake up like him. Like the woman who birthed you. Tiny ghost pulled from a bigger ghost. You know better language is a conjuring lineage. the cruelest coven. Your boy feels you writing him from 3000 miles away. Perhaps he lives in your head, the way your mother lives in your head. Even now, after all these years, you say her name aloud and her hair grows another three inches. It's a fact. Your boy starts each message off okay? Hey, Mom. I love and miss you so much. The relief is alive. coherent. will last a few seconds, a minute tops before he starts spilling out a jarring sequence of words that demand you go a little more crazy to understand them. But you refuse. You want to stay here. You don't want to be what he inherited from you. And isn't that the worst thing you've ever written? Boy have your flesh and modeled blood threatened you and his siblings promised to kill you and wrote exactly how. And these were bottomless devastating moments. Yes. But nothing in the world readies you For today's gutting when you ask if he's okay, is he warm? Does he have anyone to talk to? When you make yourself ask him? Do you have any friends? All the swirl and dodge collapses? And he says, simply, no. I don't have any friends. And you want to jump off the bridge. Upon learning this, you want to chop off your hands. He's small again. First grade, waiting in the office with his head down. The principal is telling you a kid from class was picking on him. She doesn't have to tell you who it was. You know the one. Brad, the big Husky prick who regularly punches your boy in the back of the head and calls him fagot. Oh, if only madness walked home down Newport Avenue like Brad did that day. If only you could grab madness by the face and hold it against a chain link fence a few yards from where a group of teenagers are playing kickball. If only you could look it in the eye and hiss, you touch my kid again. I will stomp your fucking life out.

"Glutton" by Rachel McKibbens from blud (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)


Camille
Thank you so much for sharing that poem. You know, I was thinking about, hearing you read this and reading your work, about its generosity and how much it offers of you. And I wonder how do you decide, like, what you're offering, what intimacy you're offering or readers and what to hold back? Like how do you sort of skirt that line or, you know, make those kinds of choices?

Rachel
I think that I have to be willing to give just enough to show the reader, not just my vulnerability, but the ferocity of motherhood. And I struggled a long time with, do I admit on paper when I held this little boy against a fence and threatened his life? And then I realized, for one, I'm not ashamed of having done it. I'm just not! I felt bad. Like you can have regret and no shame.
And so I had to talk about how unsafe I can be as just a human in the world but, even more viciously, as a mother. For the most part, I'm willing to give as much as I think is necessary to let the honesty of a thing push forward. But I'm not going to overspend my own self.

Camille
Right. I see that and I feel like that, you know, hearing you talk about this, what you offer and what you hold back, and the idea of offering that honesty, I also feel like it develops a sense of trust, I think, in the reader to see when you are willing to say, “Hey, there is ugliness here.” And I love the idea that poetry can be that for people who've never even met, that someone can pick up your work and feel a kinship and feel like “Oh, okay, there's other people out here that I can have a connection to, in a way, as a human being, even if we don't know each other, and I can feel like there's more people like me in the world,” you know?

Rachel
Absolutely. And recognition begets, I think, a level of liberation that a lot of people sleep on.

Camille
Let's take a little break. Okay. Let's take a little break. And then we'll come back and we'll talk about another poem.

Rachel
Oh man. Oh man.

Camille
We’re gonna get into it.

Rachel
Here we go.

Camille
Here we go!

Rachel
Alright.

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We hope you're enjoying The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We are the founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead. Our goal is to make poetry more accessible to everyone. And we do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thanks for listening.

Camille
We're back. So we are going to talk now about a poem that has inspired you. Can you tell us what you've chosen to read with us?

Rachel
Oh, yes, it's “Song,” and it's by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, or is it Bri-zheet?

Camille
I think it's Brigit.

Rachel
I think it's Brigit too, it’s just spelled so, like, fancy.

Camille
It is spelled fancy. I think it is spelled fancy. (Laughs)

Rachel
This poem. When… the first time I read it, I was like, “Oh, this is mine. This belongs to me. This poem is the wife of my brain.” And I think that upon having listened to “glutton,” and then having this chase it, you'll understand why it made sense to me to speak on both of these poems. For one, “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly is unlike anything I've ever read before or since.

Camille
Yes.

Rachel
One. There's that. Two, I'll be honest, I thought it was so strange because I bought the book based on this poem. And none of the other poems are like this! (Laughs) Like, a lot of nature and like, I don't know, sweet happy la-la. And then this whole thing.

Camille
That is wild.

Rachel
All right, I'm gonna dive into it.

Camille
Okay. Awesome,

Rachel
“Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then
They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head
Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly
The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away
Beside which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys
Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.
The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they
Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school
And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.
The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.
The head called to the body. The body to the head.
They missed each other. The missing grew large between them,
Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until
The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies
Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills.
Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,
Sang long and low until the morning light came up over
The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped....
The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named
The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after
The night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair
Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit.
The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night
She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn
Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke
To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang
Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats.
She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily
That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming
Made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn,
And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat
Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm
Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain
Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone
Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called
To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called
And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling
Like the feeling of the stones gouging the soft undersides
Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body
By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bodies
At the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head
Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take
These things away so that the girl would not see them.
They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.
They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear
Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke....
But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have
Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they
Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,
Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.
What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already
Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know
Was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them,
Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,
Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.
Copyright © 1995 by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Reproduced from Song, poems by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.


Camille
I gotta give you snaps for that reading. That was incredible.

Rachel
I haven't read that in years.

Camille
That poem. May I just say, what the fuck?

Rachel
It's like a buffet of so many emotional exorcisms.

Camille
Yes.

Rachel
I mean, you find something new in it every single time. Yeah, every single time. What a dream. What a, what a terror, all of it. I mean, it's almost biblical. It's incredible. I love this damn poem. Yeah. And then as a Capricorn, as a goat. I'm like, “You could kill me, but you ain't gonna kill my song.”

Camille
I was gonna ask you if you could tag yourself, like, what would you be: the girl, the boys, the goat, the town? Clearly the goat!

Rachel
I'm the goat, wide-eyed, yeah, gouged out. I don't know. But isn't that weird too, like, different parts of your life? Like there was a time where I was like, “I'm the song. I am the haunting. I'm the fear.” Like when you do something so big like that, when you allow yourself to be that cruel, it should haunt you. It should. Because it should shape everything you do after that, or when you choose not to do after that.

Camille
Yeah. The only hope is that it does haunt you.

Rachel
Yeah. It has to. It's your salvation and damnation all at once.

Camille
Yeah, one of the things I—when I was reading this poem, I was thinking about the joke, “What is the joke?”

Rachel
That.

Camille
You know, it's in the poem. And it just sort of lingers there. And I kind of find myself pausing on that for a moment. And just thinking about the brutality of that word in this context, especially given how she talks about how it, it takes effort, like, it takes a muscle, to do this thing.

Rachel
Yeah. Iit was harder than they thought.” Oh!

Camille
That part!

Rachel
That's so upsetting And like, my neck gets stiff, like just…

Camille
Oh my gosh, yeah,.

Rachel
The visceral… Yeah, what is required of the reader to be pulled into that journey is something I'm trying to match so often, when I'm willing to just throw the gloves off and be like, “Here's what I've done.” Or “Here's what I've seen.” And so it's why “glutton” is shaped similarly.

Camille
I was thinking about that. Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel
I'm not writing to harm. I am writing to maybe awaken, right, a moment that names a harm. But at the end of it, I wasn't writing it to harm the reader. And so for “Song,” I'm like, “What was the reason? How could you do this to me?” When I first heard it, I was a very brand-new writer at the time, right? I was like, 26, or something. I just had been writing for maybe 18 months when it was gifted to me. And probably it's, like, the litmus for so much of my writing. Not even necessarily the poem itself. But what it asked of me and what it gave me. It's a very generous poem. And it's, again, like you're coming into the aftermath of a thing. You don't know what built up to that moment.

Camille
Yeah.

Rachel
And when it's dismissed as “Well, it was like a joke.” And you're like, “No, no, absolutely not.” When you get walloped with graphic details or something in a way that it just seems more like for the sake of just again, like, “Oh, this is the violence of it.” And instead it's less about how violent those boys were to the goat, but how sort of everything still goes on, except for there's a hole in that girl, that girl is changed. But then the boys are changed, too, and how that all sort of unfolds, but the way we betray ourselves when we become machinations of violence and harm in that way. Like, it's, it's a betrayal.

Camille
Yeah, yeah.

Rachel
And they have betrayed themselves, and the song is just gonna keep on going. And they're gonna toss and turn for who knows how long. and, and just the strategizing, too, of people wanting to protect the girl. “Just give her a new goat!,” the way we do. Like, we don't want to talk about death, we just replace the goldfish like our kid don't know anything. It’s one of those things where…death to me is, you know, it's so…it's such a constant. And it's such an important thing that we should be talking about at all times. And so like, I mean, just again, the complexities of that particular piece are incredible. And there was a lot of work. And as a writer, like, I recognize its heavy lifting, and how simple it made it seem.

Camille
Yeah, absolutely.

Rachel
It made it seem like “Oh, this was a…this must have just flowed so easily out of Brigit's body.” It's like “Yeah, no way.”

Camille
No way. I mean, it reads that way. It's incredibly intricate and complex.

Rachel
And even though it's huge, the economy of language is so visible.

Camille
Oh, yeah.

Rachel
It wasn't a flex in terms of like, “These are all the, you know, wild words I know.” It was like, listen, it was quite simple, like short sentences, and all of that. Just the whole structure of it is exquisite.

Camille
It really is. This poem definitely feels like “It had to be said, you used all the words you needed. And where did it come from? I do not know. But thank you. And also I'm still a little bit mad about it.” (They laugh.)

Rachel
Very, extremely. Like that was a lot. Heavy.

Camille
So what are you working on these days?

Rachel
Well, I'm working on another book of poems, which I didn't mean to be doing.

Camille
Accidental poems. Okay.

Rachel
Absolutely. But I'm gathering, I'm hunting and gathering. And you know, I myself I had to, I had to endure a pretty huge grief event two years ago. And It made demands of me. I was like, “You have to write right now if you're going to survive anything ever again.” So I started doing that. And I was writing about the deaths of my dad and my brother who both died of COVID 17 days apart. And that was brutal, and unexpected and shocking and all of the words, but then I got asked to write an unconventional romance novel. So I'm working on that. And I'm just also like, sort of really liberated. I came out of a 16 year relationship that was not good for me. And I finally. like, am free and my writing is better. My sex is better. My cooking is better. Like all of it. All of it benefits.

Camille
Everything tastes better.

Rachel
That part! So I'm here for that. And like, I have to, I have to get back on the poetry train for a minute, just because I'm like, I can't…unless it ends up just being a chapbook. But right now, I have 20 poems. And I'm just trying to figure out what to do with them. But I'm just gonna take my time. I'm in no rush, whatsoever.

Camille
Well, I'm glad you're taking your time. And I'm excited to read both of those projects.

Rachel
Oh, thank you. I hope we see each other in real life somewhere soon.

Camille
Me too. Me too

Rachel
Bye my dear.






CAMILLE TRACKS PERMISSIONS


Rachel’s poem "Glutton" from her book blud, published in 2017, was used with permission from Copper Canyon Press.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem "Song" is from her book of the same name. It was published in 1995 and aired with permission from BOA Editions.

Coming up next week, poet Solmaz Sharif delves into the power of silence in poetry, and its possibilities and limitations in our current political moment.

Make sure to like and subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our episodes on our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us an email at theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com.

The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I’m your host, Camille Rankine. Our senior producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive Director, and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening!