Courtesy Image
In her poem “Autobiography of a Vulture,” writer Jenny George assumes the stance of that death-adjacent creature, who owns its macabre reputation and declares itself a “tenant of the partition.”
That partition, the liminal space between life and death, provides the geography for George’s new collection After Image (Copper Canyon Press), in which the real-life death of her long-term partner vivifies the everyday landscape with beauty, grief and yearning. “I use poems to ask the questions that I’m preoccupied by,” she says. “So when this really significant experience happened, which was that my partner of many years died, and I saw her through her death, that experience was—whatever else it was—quite confounding, and it left me with a lot of big questions: What does death ask us to be? What does the proximity of death make us alive to? What kinds of knowing does it ask us into?”
George’s second collection frequently limns nature for its exquisite and evocative imagery, along with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the death of the latter prompts a grief-stricken Orpheus to attempt a rescue from Hades. In order to lead Eurydice out of the underworld, Orpheus must walk ahead and not look back (Spoiler alert: He looks back).
George, whose work has appeared in The Kenyan Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares and elsewhere, will read from After Image at an event also featuring poets Catherine Barnett (Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space) and Anne Haven McDonnell (Breath on a Coal) at 6 pm, Thursday, Oct. 10 at Collected Works Bookstore (202 Galisteo St., (505) 988-4226). The following interview has been edited for concision and clarity. (Julia Goldberg)
Did you draw on any particular source material in your invocation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth?
I was thinking of it basically as the -archetypal template: the lover separated by death and someone’s left behind and someone is swallowed by mortality. And then I also could feel that both of those archetypes were alive in me at once. So it wasn’t as simple as, ‘she’s gone and I’m here.’ It was also like a part of me is gone, or a part of me is in the underworld; a part of me is still alive and lamenting. And so those poems in the collection, which are persona poems, they’re written from the voices of those characters [and] they felt like a constellation of internal voices, like living characters mapped onto those ancient archetypes.
Regarding the persona poems, you also have three ‘Jenny George’ poems, written from the persona of a narrator named Jenny George. In the second one, you write that Jenny George is not to be trusted. I took that poem to be sort of grappling with the challenge of the living writing about the dead when the living hasn’t experienced death, and also about the limits of language.
I’m right there with you. I felt…supercharged [with] both the power and burden of being the one who could speak to that experience. My beloved can’t tell that story, and I’m the one left with access to telling, with access to language, and yet I didn’t go go through it directly. So, it’s the sense of responsibility that the living have to tell the story, and yet I also felt kind of like a fraud, like, ‘where do I get off being the one who can speak to this?’ And, yeah, definitely the sense that once we’re using language, we’re already in the territory of not getting it quite right.
Can you discuss some of the other formal choices in this collection?
There are some loose sonnets in the book and, certainly, there’s a formal choice toward containment—which, of course, sonnets are one of the all-time great containers. And there’s another formal choice that was very active for me when I was working on the book. I don’t know how much it comes through, but there’s a lot of pairs of words in the book. Oftentimes, when I was writing, if I wrote a word that I just liked, liked the sound of, liked the feeling of in the line, I would use the word again in a subsequent poem. And so the book has dozens and dozens of pairs of words that are not necessarily in the same poem, but two of them in the book. That felt like a way to formally enact this quality of missing or reaching…a kind of divided pair. And so that was like a little formal exercise that was exciting me when I was working on these poems. It might be buried structurally in the book, but I do think it has a kind of undercurrent of presence.
