Genes, Grief, Poetic Form, and Love: A Conversation with Charlotte Pence
Alina Stefanescu: Since this is a collection which hinges on grief and grapples human mortality in the context of determinism, I want to begin in absence, namely the poet whose voice mingles with your own in this collection. She is so present, so palpable, so distinct and yet blurred by the activity of mothering; there is a sort of universalism in the mother’s ravenous hope-love that forced me to put the book down and catch my breath at times. Tell us about Shira Shaiman.
Charlotte Pence: Shira was one of the kindest persons I’ve ever met. I met her on the first day of orientation at Emerson College at one of those events where everyone is uncomfortable. Shira just walked right over to me, stuck out her hand, said hi and started giggling. And that was that. We were tight all through the MFA program where she proved herself to be a strong writer in both the literature and creative writing classes. Always trying to help others, be a good steward of the Earth, and eat healthy, she was that friend who made you a better person. We went to the Dodge Poetry Festival together and her role was to bring the food. I booked the hotel room. She arrived with only her favorite navel oranges, some seaweed and nuts. I had a headache within 12 hours, but she just laughed and was like: “What do you normally eat?” as if everyone was as health-conscious as she was.
She found out she had cancer on her 39th birthday, the same week she gave birth to her youngest son Leo.
Alina: The poem “Cell” by Shira is addressed to a cancer cell in her “mother’s marrow” — the poet accuses it of “having an identity crisis,” a theme which returns in the randomness of cellular division and cancer. The poem is both humbling and haunted by a sense of foreboding for the reader:
Cell, you seem
to have forgotten
your name, your address,
mission in life.
The weight on the word “life” there continues in your own poems, in the polyphony of medical reports, news articles, museums, Shira’s voice, your own, scraps of genetic code — it feels like a continuous interrogation. As poets, we often wrestle with permissions, and whether a poem is ours to write or publish or inhabit. Were you conflicted about whether to include Shira’s poems in this collection? How did you think about this, and how did you make those formal decisions? For example, how did you decide which section of “Breathing Lessons” to include?
Charlotte: Shira’s background in writing — and our time together that revolved around writing — guided me. She published a blog about her experience with cancer and detailed it with such positivity and openness. She also co-authored If the Buddha Came to Dinner: How to Nourish Your Body to Awaken Your Spirit. So, she was very much in this space of the published word.
Ultimately, the decision was not mine but her husband’s. I reached out to him, shared what I had written, and discussed with him the poems from Shira I was thinking about including. We both felt as if this was a way to honor her that she would have appreciated. And I just have to say, the fact that her lines echoed some of my own made me feel as if she were guiding me from afar.
I didn’t find her MFA thesis until after I thought my book was finished. And then I found all these chilling echoes. For example, she had written in “Tender Break,” from her mother’s point of view: “Don’t become like me.” And I had written in one of poems: “My mother told me not to be like her, sickly.” Plus the emphasis we both placed on the cell as the center of life and also the demise of it – that was eerie. I felt her presence so strongly in the book that it only felt right to include her actual poems as a way to fully let her speak for herself.
Alina: There’s something extraordinary in the way it came together, in the invisible seams between poems and the repetitions, that kept reminding me of the ode — or the ode’s role in celebrating a life — maybe because ode nestles inside “code”? Or maybe because the ode, itself, is a form that resembles the eulogy in resolute focus on one thing or person, in its effort to animate that thing or person or place. I feel like this is more complex than an ode to one thing, but it still felt near somehow.
Charlotte: Oh, that is such a great point. I could make an argument that this whole book is an ode. One feature of the ode is repeating lines, which I find so fitting because grief is never a process that ends, but one that repeats. There’s almost a cycle to it where you feel as if you are breaking but you don’t. And then you start to breathe normally again. You might even feel some sort of peace and one-ness with the dead. And then a scent or a memory or a song takes you right back to that intense sense of loss.
Alina: Given the hybridity of this collection, were there any forms that you relied upon? Are there any particular poems which relied on form, and if so, which ones and why? If not, has your relationship to poetic form been changed by writing this manuscript?
Charlotte: I love exploring received forms, learning their history, and then making them my own. When I was at Emerson, I studied form with Bill Knott, who was known for his experimental work. But he knew it all. In my own classes, I preach that form follows content, borrowing from the architect Louis Sullivan’s quote “form follows function.” In other words, the form should reflect the poem’s subject somehow.
There are some received forms in the book such as the sonnets (“While Reading About Semiotics” and the poems about caves), the pantoum (“Headline: Y-Chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve Never Met”), and accentual poems (“Zwerp” and “Among the Yellows”). But usually the poems have a form that is informed by what they are doing.
(Left: Charlotte Pence) For example, in the long narrative series, I gave each character a different form. The father’s poems are in quatrains because he wants his wife to survive and to have that dream of the family of four. The mother’s poems are only strophes. She wants to survive, to go on and on, not have her story truncated, so that is why I wanted poems with no stanza breaks for her. As she becomes sicker, the strophe becomes jagged like her movements and breath. Her poems move from coherent logic to more associative logic to represent her physical and neurological breakdown.
Whenever DNA speaks, she speaks in tercets because “3” is such an important number regarding the body and how life is formed. DNA replication is a three-step process. Also, all living organisms are dependent on three molecules: DNA, RNA, and proteins. And to create an amino acid, the nucleotides are “read” in sets of three.
Alina: The poems seem to work at several levels of knowledge. While the science of the code seeks to make sense or meaning of what feels so random, the poems also acknowledge the uncertainty. It mirrors the current state of genomics, where we can have our genes sequenced — we can discover, for example, that we carry the genes for what ended our mother’s life — but we can’t predict which epigenetic event will or won’t activate those genes, or what interacts with them to protect us. How did Siddharta Mukherjee’s writing influence your understanding and treatment of genetics in these poems.
Charlotte: To be able to write poetry about genetics and gene editing tools like CRISPR, I’ve had to immerse myself in the research so that the material can come out organically. So, Mukerjee’s book The Gene: An Intimate History, was just one of many that I studied. What I appreciated about his book is he explains genetics through a more lyrical and metaphorical style. He delights in looking at the abundance of metaphors we use for genetics that relate to reading such as using the term “translating” to depict how DNA codes or the fact that we signify nucleotides in terms of letters. Even the word “code” itself has its roots in one of the first materials we used for writing, the codex.
Alina: The description of Mukherjee’s writing on genes as lyrical and metaphorical is so true. There’s a sense in which the poems grapple with this need to “make sense” by subverting it. For example, in “DNA Offers Some Palindromes on the Patent of CRISPR”, the tools for understanding are the tools of the poet applied to science:
Was it a cat I saw?
Perhaps not a cat but a trap.
Was it a bat I saw?
A trap is equal parts lure, pleasure, snap.
The result is humorous, wry, and heart-breaking. There is no decoding. There is no answer. There is no justice — only the effort to find meaning.
And there are also the poems and essays about your own experiences with motherhood, with being a wife, with trying to be a self in addition to the new roles. “Helen of Troy” ends so beautifully:
Without motive or need,
we sleep, eat, read, breathe together,
you running a hand under my shirt
whenever you want. But I was talking
about Helen, and how she loved
as she wished at least once, willing
to witness the loss of a world for it.
I wondered about the loss here — and how the weight of loss shifts and broadens in the poems about marriage and family.
Charlotte: Oh, that’s a good question. I didn’t realize the book focused on motherhood and marriage so much until Jane Satterfield, who blurbed the book, wrote about how I had created a new type of domestic tableau. But once she said that, I realized it. After all, motherhood is a vehicle for inheritance. Of course it would be featured prominently, especially given that I wrote this book within my daughter’s first years.
For me, motherhood is also a type of grief for a past life, a loss. Granted, there are gains, but those are smeared all over popular media and social media. So, I don’t need to go into them.
I felt a loss of independence that I was unprepared for. And we see it so clearly now with Covid-19 and how the new responsibilities have shifted predominantly more toward women if they have young children at home. I have to say that my husband is an exception to this trend, but there are still a lot of hurdles.
A couple has to negotiate roles anew when children become part of the household. Long dates, lazy rainy afternoons, uninterrupted work schedules, energy for self-care: all of that changes once kids enter the scene — or at least it did for us. I found myself missing being able to come home from work and just retreat. There’s none of that with young children. And so the relationship must find new ways to support independence, passion, and a sense of well-being.
Alina: Yes, the partnered parenting relationship must find ways to support and sustain the challenges of raising children, not least among them, the unfairness of systemic racism and the privilege our children expose and reveal, as you write so powerfully in “Mourning Chicago”:
I remove the fairytale
for my daughter, say they are
another “dispenser of violence in this world,”
and my husband says, Stop, and I say, I will when
it stops; he says it’ll never stop, so we fumble for the volume
as the radio mumbles
our daughter now equally confused
by the two: Why they killed kids and why they
will not kill her, so she asks again, Why won’t they shoot me?
The pressure put on the fairytale here is powerful. I wanted to know more about the role of violence and its relationship to fairytale childhoods in the US.
Charlotte: That quote in the poem is from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. He refers to the police as another “dispenser of violence in the world,” as a group that has been given permission, legally, to do physical harm to others. Some people grow up feeling as if violence is rare and far away, that it happens in other people’s states or neighborhoods. But I’ve seen it occur too often to believe that. And I think BIPOC and LGBTQ communities, to name just a few, know all too well that violence is a daily possibility. Simply put, violence is a fundamental part of the United States’ history and one of its reasons for economic success. This summer has highlighted these facts. And we are all the better for being made more aware. My poems do sometimes address violence because that is a part of our world; and until we admit it, the mindful change cannot occur.
Alina: Finally, you live in the South and exist as someone who is invested in Mobile and Southern literary community, but Code feels dispersed or “unplaced” somehow — it travels through Spanish caves, doctor’s offices, books, national headlines, creeks, playgrounds, and doesn’t quite settle anywhere. I wonder what it means to “write the South,” or even to be “a Southern writer,” and whether this can include the displacements as well as the kudzu. Do you identify as a “Southern writer”?
Charlotte: Yes, yes! That sense of being “unplaced” was intentional — although I didn’t want the book to be vague. I grew up moving to a new place almost every year until I was six. And after that, we moved to Rome, Georgia — then Tallahassee, Florida — then Charleston, West Virginia — and finally “settled” in Knoxville, Tennessee when I was 13. All of those places are considered southern, but they differ. So I never have felt a sense of “home” except the one I create in my mind and within the structure of my physical house.
At the same time, I suspect that our definitions of home are too rigid, something we reserve for people whose families are from the same area where they now live. While that sounds wonderful in some ways, it’s just not the reality for many people. And it can feel exclusive, even discriminatory. It also compounds pain for those who were forced from their home because of war, climate events, violence, eminent domain, slavery, religious or political oppression, poverty . Staying in one’s homeland, however defined, is not a choice for so many.
In truth, I feel like an outsider no matter where I go even though I’m well aware my whiteness allows access to many spaces. One thing that I was subtly trying to communicate with the focus on genetics in Code is that we carry “home” within us through our ancestors’ DNA. And that goes for those whom we love as well – they’re always with us, even when they’re not. These systems we construct of who is in and who is out, what is southern and what is not. I’m not sure how helpful, or how healing, that is.
* * * * *
“DNA Offers Some Palindromes on the Patent of CRISPR”
Tumut, Akka, Catac, Hamamah:
all cities report the same news.
Tattarrattat
on my doors.
Did Eve refer
these thieves who alter what is not theirs?
Redivider
will take but not own the mistakes.
Was it a cat I saw?
Perhaps not a cat, but a trap.
Was it a bat I saw?
A trap is equal parts lure, pleasure, snap.
Was it a rat I saw?
A trap is deadliest when no one knows how to clear the snare.
* * * * *
You can acquire a copy of Charlotte Pence’s Code for $17.95 via Bookshop.org by clicking here.