Agape Editions

Fox Henry Frazier: Hi, Jess! Thanks for agreeing to let me flip the script and put you in the Agape Blog interviewee’s chair for once!

I just love the new broadside that’s just come out from Glass Lyre Press of your poem, “When My Daughter Tells Me I Was Never Punk,” and I thought it would be a nice moment to talk about something that’s been important to us both — rage, and particularly the essence of femme rage, in poetry.

Jessica Walsh: Thank you for this chance to talk about the poem and rage poetry. Femme rage in poetry is so vital to me because of its embrace of all the labels we’re supposed to scorn. It’s abrasive, loud, aggressive. Rage poetics are about taking the mic and insisting on finishing an entire fucking thought without interruption, having power over our own words. It also demands a forthright diction that some would perceive as lacking in craft, though of course I would dispute that. Angrily!

FHF: Tell me a little bit about the genesis of this poem. Did this poem come out finished in one sitting, or were there a few drafts? What, if any, revisions did you make that seemed key to getting it to its final form?

JW: I have my demons, much of which comes out in my poetry, but that doesn’t mean I like to go into detail about it otherwise. I’d wonder, when I looked at my own life, what the value was of existing at all. Why does the world need someone like me? Wouldn’t everyone be better without another suburban sell-out ?

Against that backdrop: A few months into the pandemic, my friend of 30 years, Amy, broke it to me that someone she loved committed suicide. In the aftermath, Amy made me promise her in writing that I would stay alive. That promise — such a simple act — has saved me over and over again. I think of it when I’m most inclined to bow out and head out to see my dad in the beyond.

So I was sitting in the garage, in my winter coat, huddled near a space heater, trying to write in the only space I had to myself. And I thought about that promise. What I wanted to do when I started writing was convince myself that staying alive was not a passive thing but a defiance. If life is “enemy territory,” as Stevie Smith said, then could I construct survival as evidence of profound rebellion?

When I was younger and I’d get too close to despair, my mom would tell me, Get angry — anger gets you moving. And that deliberate use of anger as an alternative to the abyss is key to this poem as well as much of my life. Pushing through it is a fuck-you to every institution, person, system, whatever, that doesn’t value me.

Truth be told, my envisioned audience was just Amy. I didn’t think about this reaching anyone, let alone the many thousands of people who read and shared it. That’s probably my favorite aspect of this—it was deeply personal and individual, but it connected with people who needed it.

I did revise it, but mostly to adjust the pace. It felt too quick in its original form, and I wanted it to take a minute. I wanted it to take up space, I guess. I’d change things about it if I could, of course, but that’s true for every writer, right?

FHF: What do you think about the potential for femme or feminine rage as a  kind of bonding agent? I ask this thinking of books like Pauline Harmange’s Moi les hommes, je les déteste, poems you’ve written, poems I’ve written, Alanis Morrisette alterna-pop songs from the 1990s. I don’t hate men (at least, #NotAllMen, imagine wink emoji here) but the argument Pauline Harmange makes, on some level, is: if it helps women cope with trauma, and bond with each other, and resist the patriarchy together — then why not hate men?

I think that’s similar to what I’m asking about now — do you think that can rage be something that productively unites us as women, femmes, artists? Can it facilitate different works of art engaging insightfully with one another?

JW: Remember Wordsworth and his “language really used by men”? That was radical at the time, his sense that poetry need not belong to the elite. (I’m not here to assess how well he did that, though if anyone has a few hours…)

I mention it because I think that, in the embrace of femme rage, we’re moving into the internal language really used by many women and femmes if we take poetry away from the patriarchal elite. When we seek what unites us, when we dig and expose, what do we find? I can tell you it’s nothing lovely. But it is something that allows for connection and embodiment in a shared space. There is an inherent intertextuality in poems informed by anger because the work taps into the material reality of our lives. None of this is gender essentialist, of course — it’s about lived experience, which I know is why you and I insist on saying “femme” when talking about this
subject.

So is it useful? I think to the extent that we find each other and see ourselves as connected. Does it result in change, either in Poetry writ large or society beyond? That’s a question I’m inclined to be much more cynical about. I’m extremely lucky to have a decent education under my belt when it comes to literature and history, but if I apply that — if I ask myself whether what I write matters in the larger context — I won’t write a fucking word.

Most of what we do goes into the chipper of forgotten poetry. That’s no reason to stop, not when we have shit to say.

FHF: Other than this poem, what’s the angriest thing you’ve written?

JW: Ever? Probably letters to this one fucking guy.

But for publication, or at least with the intent of craft? I think it’s a poem called “Self-Portrait with Bile and Glass.” In it, I’m the object of my own anger, and disgust. It’s written about my problems with alcohol, and it remembers a moment at the end of a mostly-blackout when I actually saw myself in a mirror through trails of vodka I’d vomited.

I know I’d made decisions that night, and other nights, that hurt other people. It’s an ugly poem, a horrible one to write. It went deep into shame. And I don’t think it’s very good as a poem because it’s so furiously unlikeable. I hate it. I hated writing it, because it was something I’d never told a soul, never written down.

But someday I’ll probably revise it, because it’s necessary for me to confront.

FHF: What are some of your favorite rageful poems by others, and why?

JW: Yours, without a doubt — especially the one with your fist in the dog’s mouth? THAT ONE leaps to mind, though I can’t remember the title, and my books are all locked in my office on campus for the summer [so I can’t look it up].

I love Avery M. Guess’ “The Patient Decides She Wants to Live.” Guess’ book The Truth Is is an underrated work of brilliance, exploring abuse and survival. This poem is much more about leaning into the pain of being alive, but there’s a current to it that simmers with defiance and anger: “living will be like hugging barbed wire. First the steel bite and surge of blood. Then the scab.”

Audre Lorde’s “Power” is a rationale for rage poetry as an alternative to the rhetoric of rage, which leads to violence. There’s a line in it that gets me every time: “I have not been able to touch the destruction / within me.”

Emily Dickinson’s “Mine Enemy is growing old”— it’s just a burning piece about revenge. The speaker is ready to let age itself dispense of her enemy, but she urges any enemies to take their chance. The end reads “Anger as soon as fed—is dead— / ‘Tis Starving makes it fat—”. I don’t see a condemnation of anger there at all, but rather an observation about how it works.

Finally, it’s not poetry, but I recommend Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Luc Améry and the Refusal to Forgive, by Thomas Brudholm. It changed me, rid me of my sense that anger was something I had to give up in order to be a decent person.

FHF: What new projects are you working on now?

JW: I’m into the manuscript for my next book, which is titled Bone Road. It’s an investigation into origin, a way of understanding the path from the past to the present. I think the big question I’m asking is, “Why am I like this?”

I say that with no affection or sense of accomplishment but rather the cold gaze of an outsider. I’m doing archival research to learn about my own family for this, building connections to what might be inherited or where I can find myself in these facts.

The poems are image-driven and spare. I want them to feel like the landscapes much of my family history takes place in: harsh, unforgiving, often brutal. Their lives were hard in ways that didn’t allow for shit like, God forbid, the dreaded pursuit of fulfillment. And I want to honor that feeling of being someone hard-working because there’s no other choice.

FHF: Thanks for a great conversation and congratulations on the gorgeous broadside! I know there are plenty of folks who’ll be excited about it, and again — they can order it here.

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Jessica L. Walsh is the author of the poetry collection Book of Gods and Grudges (Glass Lyre, 2022), as well as two previous collections. She is Blog Mistress at Agape Editions and she teaches English at Harper, a community college in the Chicago suburbs. Her poetry has appeared in RHINO, Tinderbox, Whale Road Review, and many other journals. She writes and shoots arrows at targets, mostly missing the mark in both but enjoying the effort.

Fox Henry Frazier is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who lives in the bright-leafed, haunted hills of upstate NY. She’s the author of several books including Raven King (Yes Poetry, 2021) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015). She MFA’d at Columbia University and PhD’d at University of Southern California, where she was also a Provost’s Fellow. Fox has been variously described as a high proof in a pretty bottle, Lady Macbeth, and a purebred Persian housecat. Richard Howard told her she was “a very difficult person, but just a phenomenal writer.” (It’s probably true.) She hates a lot of things, but she really loves art.