The first poem of Katherine Osborne’s I ever read went like this: “I can’t talk you out of / the woods, or I can / talk you a little out of / the woods, my mouth / on every plastic cup in / this room.” The poem is from her new book, FIRE SIGN (Electric Cereal 2015). The more I thought about this poem, the more it became a kind of ghost: invisible but influential, like it licked every utensil in a kitchen drawer. Osborne’s poems are like this: they are intimate and distant at the same time. They are full of blood and body, but capable of making observations of a surgical keenness. This conversation took place over email around December 2015, around the publication of FIRE SIGN.
Niina:
There are many containers in your text: a field that contains another, or deer with smaller and smaller deer inside, or trees that contain younger trees. A thought I kept returning to was that although these containers are natural materials, it’s unsettling to think of a large thing containing all of its previous iterations within it at all times. What do containers do in this book?
Katherine:
I really wanted to illustrate a world where you have to pay attention because nothing is what it seems. I like poetry where you are caught off guard or have to pay attention, are made to pay attention. I think because that’s closest to how you might feel in a dream or in a daydream — your subconscious is telling you that something isn’t quite right, or maybe that something is right, and to keep going. Trees, deer, and fields, seemingly innocent because they are natural or usually in a kind of stasis, make really good signposts in a poem, dream, or film. I wanted most of the materials presented to contain their own message. When I was writing the poems there was this feeling of: You’re awake, good, look at this, look what’s inside, look what has happened.
Niina:
That reminds me of these Melissa Broder lines, from her poem “Multicursal” in which the speaker is walking through a forest that’s freakily alive: “I stop / for 21 seconds / each time. I am only / allowed 21 seconds / or the trees will kill me.” It feels dreamlike and threatening, but the speaker knows how to make it through. Do you often recall your dreams, and if so, are you the narrator in them?
Katherine:
Oh, I really love Melissa Broder’s poem, “Multicursal.” Those lines are very haunting and feel like a lucid dream, where you have some control and understanding of what happens next and how to navigate or solve it. I remember most of my dreams. They are very vivid but they might be a little less surreal than my poetry. I’m in mundane situations with very easy symbolism to decipher: no shoes, late for a bus, running away, my brakes don’t work. But I think the one thing in dreams that does influence me is how liquid they are: one person can change into another, one room changes into another room. The laws and physics of dreams operate in my poetry. I do let my subconscious have free reign so that I can get to the place that feels the most true. I think I’m always trying for that.
Niina:
Music also seeps into this book — there’s Madonna, there’s the Cat Power quote from “Living Proof.” And are there also two references to Tori Amos lines? Please let me not be wrong. Tori at her best feels very much like that same dream illogic.
Katherine:
Yes! Tori Amos does appear in my writing. I remember first listening to her in my late teens, I think? And I thought, Yes. I was listening to her song “Cooling” and thought: God, god, who hasn’t been “driven by the snow?” I really like the term dream illogic, that’s exactly it. She is such a big influence on my work. Music is all the rooms I’m in. It’s always on. When I was younger and having a hard day at school, I remember listening to Madonna and just thinking, “Someday!” I don’t even know what that meant, but I had the lipstick to match that feeling, even if I was alone putting it on. That’s the poem. Music is like caffeine to me, it’s the energy or vibration I need to translate what I’m seeing and feeling into a poem, it unlocks the door. I listened to a lot of Cat Power while putting together Fire Sign. And a lot of Stevie Nicks, too. Oh, and Missy Elliot. I needed everyone, all the coffee, all the energy to keep myself moving forward. In all the ways that you move forward.
Niina:
The speakers of your poems are made with a peculiar sharpness and pattern — they are confident and self-assured, and like to repeat things in threes like an incantation, and, most startlingly, they ask for intense things with very physical consequences: “I want to be murdered, […] / I don’t want just some dark / forgiveness, or a little note.” They leave their mouth prints on every cup. When you were putting this book together, how were you thinking about bodies?
Katherine:
I was grieving. And if my grief had a psychological body, she was acting out, she was going out all night, she was daring someone to kill her, she was making things up, she was trying to love and be loved and be touched. She was all action, telling everyone what she would and wouldn’t do. What she wanted. But she was not speaking about herself, because she could never fully manifest as a full person, as a full body. I think that’s the tension I was feeling when I was writing the poems, and in my life: the speaker is self-assured maybe because she doesn’t believe her real self can be seen or touched. I think of this line from Louise Glück: “In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous…” Is there a spell or a code to feel, finally, inside the physical world when someone you love dies, because it feels like you’ve died? I was building a physical reality and asking to be seen, to make sure I could be seen.
Niina:
In the light of a grief-body acting out, your line “Nothing I say is ever a metaphor” stops feeling like a writer’s warning and starts feeling like truth. When someone you love dies, you become different, but you are still alive and you have to re-learn your own bloodiness. That is the other thing I feel in this book: a drive to make attempts, a bull-headed perseverance (characteristic of fire signs in the astrological sense.) Tell me about the book’s title and about your stubbornness.
Katherine:
I think my stubbornness manifests as optimism. Optimism is not popular at all, especially right now, and it gets me in trouble. I think you have to fight hard for hope and light; to keep from going under the water, or fight hard to not let darkness do what darkness does best. I fight hard, it feels like, and maybe it shouldn’t feel like fighting? But it works for me. I’m a Sagittarius. The archer. I aim. Jane Gregory writes,“Somewhere between unshakable and still shaking, I aim.” That’s what I think when I make poems, make attempts. Fire Sign felt like the right title, and I think as time goes on I’m understanding more and more why I chose it. It might be one of those things where the reader understands something about the writer, that the writer didn’t see at first.
Niina Pollari is a poet and translator in Brooklyn. Her first book, DEAD HORSE, came out from Birds, LLC in 2015.