Anne Marie Macari is a poet-guide who leads us into the complexities of the 21st century. The poems in Heaven Beneath, her most recent collection (Persea Books, December 2020), are at once phenomenally lyric and ardently probing, as Macari never fails to surprise and rattle us with themes both urgent and difficult to explore.
Also an essayist, Macari is the author of four earlier books of poetry: Ivory Cradle, the 2000 American Poetry Review/Honickman first book prize winner selected by Robert Creeley, Gloryland, She Heads Into the Wilderness, and Red Deer. She founded and directed the Drew University Low Residency MFA Program in Poetry and lives in New York City.
Anne Marie and I began the following conversation at the end of May, 2021. — Elizabeth Jacobson
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Elizabeth Jacobson:
Each of your collections is distinct with predominant themes concerning the natural world and the female body — and in a sense you create a new poetic language for each collection. Would you trace the themes in the individual books and discuss how they evolved, one into the next, through theme and language?
Anne Marie Macari:
In my first two books, Ivory Cradle and Gloryland, the poems were more narrative and autobiographical. I had personal stories I needed to tell. Though the themes of those first books have evolved and stayed with me, my poems became less autobiographical. I needed to change directions and take the focus off myself.
I usually have a lag and a fallow period between books where I begin to think I’ll never write anything that I like again. It’s happened between each book and each time I try to be patient but I do start to doubt that I’ll have something to say, or that I’ll be inspired again. I know people who keep writing no matter what is happening, but as much as I’ve tried to write more steadily, I’ve accepted that my way of working is different. I can work on prose, essays usually, in between poems.
When I’m in that limbo stage, I feel pretty strongly that I don’t want to do what I’ve already done, or at least not in the same way. I see now how much I’ve returned to my obsessions, but through form, through pushing myself with language, I’ve tried to take those themes deeper, to learn more, which for me meant that the language had to evolve. I grew less interested in my personal stories. So in my third book I was conscious of wanting to push through to a deeper lyric. To explain less, to let language, image and sound, do more.
EJ:
Considering your third book, She Heads Into the Wilderness, what forms may have encouraged this transition?
AM:
While I was still trying to focus on new poems for my third book, I casually wrote a sonnet, and then in a matter of a few more days I wrote six or seven more — sonnets come in bunches — and I brought them to my writing group and they said, in their generous way, “keep going” and from there I imagined a cycle of sonnets that became the bulk of that book. The sonnet form provided a container that paradoxically allowed me to do more, to take risks, to free up my imagination and to move more deeply into the lyric. Many poets have spoken about how the constriction of form can free up the imagination, or allow difficult material to emerge — I certainly have experienced that as well as the pleasure that comes from the puzzle that form offers, solving that puzzle while the writing itself is very satisfying. In these poems I began to take on subjects like climate change and violence against women.
EJ:
What outside the self/body has influenced your creative process? I’m curious how your “cave” poems evolved.
AM:
I like to take on something new, not as a project per se, but to explore and deepen my knowledge, and so I had the privilege — right after my youngest son left for college — to travel and explore Ice Age cave art in Spain and France. I became obsessed with prehistory and that underground world, with the idea that there’s this ancient human memory just below the surface — what an apt metaphor for the unconscious. So Red Deer, my fourth book, came out of that expanded understanding of human history. I had been taught to look back maybe as far as Egypt, or ancient Rome, but human culture is so much older. Some of the handprints I saw in Spain were later dated to be at least 40,000 years old and possibly made by Neanderthals. I didn’t know what I would do with all that material, but I was obsessed with it. Reading about our ancestors, seeing paintings that were tens of thousands of years old, helped me break out of the confinement of all I’d been taught. You can’t enter that world of cave paintings and not see how integral art is to human culture — not just visual art of course. For instance, they had musical instruments, and no doubt they were storytellers.
EJ:
Some of the poems in Heaven Beneath were influenced by Shaker Spirituals — how did this music find you? How has it influenced the themes and language in this collection?
AM:
My way of working is to let things grow in the dark, to let the unknown do its work, though that’s where all my doubt and impatience arise as well. But really I don’t have a choice — the material has to take on a certain amount of life before I can work with it. And then something triggers the poems to emerge, some sound, some word or memory.
In Heaven Beneath I wanted more music in my poems, especially after writing about the tactile and visual world of the painted caves. I also wanted to be back in my own country. I listened to a lot of American music — blues, folk, jazz. At the same time my father had a stroke and I began to write poems about his decline. But I was still waiting for some kind of fire to be lit. Then one day I saw a photo of the actress Frances McDormand in the NYTimes — she was going to play a part in a small production of Shaker spirituals. It was a lightning-strikes moment and I immediately ordered tickets. More than anything I was transfixed by the spareness, the lack of pretense, a whole theater production comprised of a few women singing Shaker spirituals from an old LP record, just the way the music had been recorded decades earlier. There was no actual drama, no plot. The singing was purposefully plain and unpolished. I saw the production three times, and each time I was transported. The morning after I first saw the first performance, I started using the titles of the spirituals as jumping off places. I didn’t look back at the lyrics, I wasn’t trying to write “Shaker” poems, I just wanted the simplicity of the music to lead me somewhere and for the titles to trigger some response, a musical response in language. The Shaker sensibility influenced these poems, of course, but I didn’t study the Shakers the way I studied cave art. I was experimenting, I didn’t know if anything would come from it. My agreement with myself was not to force anything, and to try to be led by sound. It can be so useful to have some kind of parameter to work with, as when I wrote the sonnets earlier. It’s important, especially in the early stages of something, not to try to figure it out, to let it be messy. Maybe it’s not yet very good, but I don’t want to force something to life, to impose my ego on the work, that’s how I try to work though it’s an ongoing struggle.
EJ:
Myth is also an essential element and theme in your work — please tell us something about that.
AM:
Our mythologies — personal, religious, historical — are deeply embedded in us. We hardly know the hold they have on us, but in fact they are the air we breathe. From my first book I’ve explored the female body, the feminine divine, and the natural world. I would say that I’ve been trying to break open, to break free of my inherited myths, to the extent that it’s possible. It’s the artist’s work to question everything, to break it all open, to rewrite the myths. I’m pretty obsessed by the way women live out the myths we’ve been told, returning often in my work to the way that the female body is denigrated and female authority is demonized — all of which comes directly out of Genesis, our Judeo-Christian founding myth. There are myriad ways women are separated from power, made to defer to men, and trapped in the domestic. Even with the gains of the women’s movement there’s so much that hasn’t essentially changed, and every gain we make is always under threat by some form of religious or political fundamentalism. But what do these myths really tell us? Why can’t we see the story of Eve and Eden as a story that comes out of historical events? There’s archaeological proof that during the Neolithic we were mostly matristic, we worshipped goddesses. There seems to have been little hierarchy. The rise of city states, of kings and armies, began the long destruction of that Neolithic world and the fall of the goddess.
EJ:
How do you see the female divine as a theme in your work?
AM:
Women have been unable to discover their own spiritual lives. Our truths are subordinate to the archaic, learned truths we live under. What would it mean to again make room for the feminine divine? What if spirituality wasn’t defined by men, written and overseen by men? What if all of us had access to that side of ourselves without having to guard ourselves from or define ourselves by the punishing eyes the institutions that raised us? In the portable art of the Ice Age, the female statues embody female power and fecundity — their breasts, bellies, and thighs are large, bursting with energy. In our Christian myths the female figure, the Virgin Mary, is subordinate to the son on her lap, her power is now externalized and transferred to the male child she looks down at with love and humility. We’ve come to see that as the female ideal, but it’s also a displacement, an erasure of our power, even our very ability to conceive and give birth is minimized, usurped, by the male god and his son.
EJ:
You have a nuanced way of writing about the greater wild world, or what is mostly referred to as the natural world. I admire how you don’t simply restate the facts from recent science articles concerning the ongoing decimation of wilderness and the loss of so many species, but rather dig to uncover the realities of what our species has done to the earth. How do you navigate a path to get under the depth of grief, trauma and confusion that many of us feel, and in a sense, find a place to be at home?
AM:
I’ve been haunted by the destruction of wilderness, by the fact that we are killing everything then making zoos, containers of nature, for our pleasure, making little theaters of the natural world to “preserve it,” while we continue to put profit first. This destruction, this sense of ownership is connected to how we treat women and anyone we consider “other.” It’s political, it pertains to class and race, to hierarchy, and it again comes quite directly out of our founding religious myth, when god gives man dominion over all the creatures of the world. This story is the patriarch’s handbook! Demonize women and make all nature something we need to dominate.
In the cave poems from Red Deer, I was drawn to the feeling of descent rather than transcendence. So often we think we need to escape this body, this planet. I was taught that cultures that had more than one god, that saw the divine in the natural world, in the trees, in the earth itself, were primitive. But it is the belief that divinity is up there, far off, looking down, separate from us, male, hierarchical, judgmental, that is incredibly destructive and unimaginative, and has caused us to separate ourselves from the other beings we share the planet with. How insane to think we should have dominion over the rest of the world. Better to give that to the bees, or elephants, or to no one species, but certainly not to our human greed and ravaging.
Sometimes I write about the natural world as something strange to me. I’m not a fan of making nature into a fetish. I don’t pretend to always be at home in that world, after all I’ve lived in cities and towns all my life. I can feel like an intruder, I realize my own ignorance. Of course I feel the incredible beauty and sacredness of that world, I particularly love the Everglades, and I’m a different person from having kayaked and hiked in Alaska, but rightfully so I am also intimidated and sometimes frightened. The natural world is not monolithic, it’s neither benign or malevolent, but if we see it as something that is always there to refresh us or teach us, we again reduce it to something we can partake of. We are nature too. We are a brutal and sometimes beautiful part of that world. The same laws bind me, the same elements make up my body. If we destroy things to the point that human life is in question, if we disappear, as most species do over time, then the planet will go on, and the natural world will rebound as something new, as it has in other eras. We are not essential to this world. But this world is essential to us.
EJ:
Thank you for this poignant response, Anne Marie. In line with what we’ve been discussing, the poem “Narrow Tunnel,” from Heaven Beneath, in the third stanza the speaker asks: What could I do? referring to a bird dying on the hot cement. Would you say that this line is an extended metaphor for the collection, that it’s a rhetorical comment on how our species responds to climate disaster?
AM:
Climate disaster appears in many of these poems in some form, but this poem was also written about the unspeakable deaths of children in America from gun violence, from Sandy Hook to Tamir Rice. We are a sick country that looks on and says “What I can I do?” — not as a helpful question, but more like we’re shrugging our shoulders. We look on as children, the innocents, are casually murdered. The speaker of the poem creates a distance between herself and the dying bird and that question/statement is a self-indictment. The speaker just watches. I worked on the poem a long time and never felt the tone was quite right till I changed the word “bird” to “the children” at the end of the poem. It is not easy to know how to respond to all the information coming at us, so much of it is frightening, debilitating. How can I respond to even a fraction of it? And yet how do I not respond? Can I at least admit my grief and complicity? This is a great concern and difficulty for me. I want to write about my helplessness in the face of the terrors around us, from racism to climate catastrophe, but I don’t want to pretend to have answers, or to show myself in some heroic light. I want to remain vulnerable, nonpolemical, but not above it all. My dear friend and teacher, Jean Valentine, who died recently, was able to write a political poem without drawing attention to herself and without self-righteousness. She was our great lyric poet — she could go anywhere in her poems — what fluidity she had! We are in an historical time when it is morally repellent to look away. We’re literally at a turning point that will determine the survival of our species and yet we can’t even agree that climate change is real — we can’t agree to regulate the guns that are killing thousands of us every year. As an artist I don’t want to rest on the work I did in the past. I want to try, and maybe fail, to pierce through my resistance, to find the terrible grief that I think is unacknowledged and beneath so many of our conflicts.
EJ:
This is beautifully articulated, Anne Marie, thank you. And it has been a pleasure to converse with you. I just have a few more questions before we close. What did you enjoy reading during the pandemic and what are you reading now?
AM:
There were times during the pandemic when I had a hard time reading, so in the early months I reread books that were important to me, as well as books by poets who were facing great historical changes and horrors. I read a lot of Akhmatova especially, also Mandelstam — their work had new meaning for me in the middle of Covid and the Trump presidency. There are many new books I’ve loved, such as Alessandra Lynch’s Pretty Tripwire, she’s such an inventive lyric poet. Also The Blues of Heaven by Barbara Ras, Carey Salerno’s Tributary, and frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss, among others. One nonfiction book that has been important to me is To Speak for the Trees, by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. It’s both a memoir and a book about trees. She’s a brilliant scientist who also was chosen by her Irish elders to receive ancient Druid wisdom passed down for many generations.
EJ:
If you wish, please share with us what you’re working on now.
AM:
Although I haven’t written much poetry in the last 18 months, I did write a novel that I’m now revising. The mind is a strange thing: I will tell you in the same sentence that I didn’t get a lot done during the pandemic, and then say, but I wrote a novel. There you have my ease and difficulty in a nutshell.