Christine Larusso: You recently mentioned to me that the lectures have changed your thinking, particularly with regards to feminism and the social function of poetry. Can you elaborate?
Rachel Zucker: Well, as usual, I have a twofold (multifold?) response to this question. I didn’t know, beforehand, what giving these lectures would feel like. One thing that became clear was “the lectures” is not one thing. Writing them and delivering them were two very different experiences. Both were rewarding and challenging but in vastly different ways.
Let me talk here about delivering the lectures—which was more fun and less difficult than writing them—and which had a rich but complicated social outcome for me in a very personal way.
Delivering these lectures has been thrilling, stressful, and gratifying. I had a clump of lectures—five lectures in five states in three weeks—which was way more intensive traveling than I’ve done and definitely more than I’ve done since having children. Before this lectureship I had a pretty solitary life except for teaching and the connectedness of my family life. Traveling to give these lectures allowed me the opportunity to have long, uninterrupted conversations with friends and acquaintances, mostly women in their 40s, mostly people with whom I’d corresponded online but not spent much time with in person. These conversations were deeply inspiring and thought-provoking, and I will be thinking about these interactions for a long, long time.
Coming home from the lectures was difficult. I consider myself an outspoken feminist, a powerful, self-actualized woman. And yet. Something new happened for me when traveling to give these lectures. I experienced a kind of appreciation, audience, ambition, connection and feeling of focus that was new for me. I was relieved, when the flurry of lecture travel was over. I was relieved not be under so much pressure, but it was also hard to re-enter my family life. Not having the outside-the-family obligation, the focus, the commitment to a kind of thinking and producing and performing that I don’t feel entitled to without a project like this—losing that (or finishing that) has been painful. I am not sure what to make of this part of the experience. Perhaps it will lead me to a new project. I have been so lucky to have been able to be a part-time teacher, a writer and a mother. I think, though, that perhaps I am ready to prioritize my life outside the family in a new way. This coincides, of course, with being married a long time and with my kids getting older. But, I’m trying to envision a new kind of ambition, outspokenness and productivity that I can inhabit while still being a good wife and mother and not being insane. I think, especially after having spoken to so many women in their 40s, that much of this restlessness, this desire to work more and to be taken seriously and be somehow more in the public and less in the domestic space—I think this is developmental. Coming home felt a bit like emotional whiplash. Let’s just say that shifting from a space/time where I did not have to make anyone any meals, where/when my time was mostly my own and other adults were interested in what I had to say, where/when reading and writing meant I was doing my job (as a writer/lecturer) rather than failing to do my job (as a wife/mother) to—to my “regular” life which is full of joy and chaos and mess and two teenagers and an 8 year old whose needs seem to come before mine every time and in every way, everything is a negotiation, and appreciation is not so much on the menu. Traveling for the lectures made me realize there are a lot of ways to live a life and made me look at the way I’m living mine. I’m not sure what else to say about it at this point.
So, that’s more about the people I met while traveling and the experience of being away from my family and then returning. But, in a way that is the experience of the lectures; I can’t separate that from the lectures themselves. In each of the places I went, I felt that the lectures were a conversation—with particular poets and readers I knew would be in attendance, with poets in my community who were not able to attend but who I hope will read or listen to the lectures eventually. It has been more and more important to me to view and experience these lectures as conversations rather than performances. At each location I’ve valued, above all, the questions and answers after each lecture, the reading recommendations given to me by the audience members, the ideas and suggestions offered by the people I met in various locations and the poets who have helped me during the compositional phase. As you can see from my acknowledgments, I did not write these lectures alone. In a way these lectures are a record of these relationships as much or more than an argument or elaboration of my thinking.
CL: Now that you’ve given three different lectures in several cities at a variety of venues – Library of Congress, universities, poetry centers at universities, the creative writing department where you work (NYU) – what has been different about each of these venues? Do you have a preference, now having the experience of lecturing in different spaces? Did the crowds vary much? Which group was the rowdiest? The chattiest? The most poet-filled?
RZ: I have learned something and felt truly honored by and grateful for each audience and every venue. I am not sure what is causal, correlative or coincidental, but the venues that have been the most transformative for me were the ones in which I spent the most time (as opposed to a quick trip in and out) and the places where I also gave a poetry reading and met a lot of people or spent a lot of time with a few people. Again, whenever the lectures felt like conversations rather than performances was gratifying and wonderful.
Another thing I learned is that it is impossible to write for a general audience. Who is a general audience? And I had to think about who I was really trying to talk to. My hope, of course, is that anyone interested in poetry would find something of interest of value in my lectures. But I think the truth is (or at least what I noticed from comparing venues and audiences) is that my lectures are aimed at poets and readers more than PhD students or scholars. On the other hand, what a thrill—what a gift—to get a chance to speak to people who are not the people I usually speak to! Those opportunities were the most challenging and enlightening.
CL: Have you been writing poems during this lecture tour? If so, what has sparked the new poems? I guess I am also asking if you feel distance from poetry in the traditional sense, now that you’re buried in lecture work.
RZ: Yes, I have been writing—are they poems? I don’t know. I’ve been writing these very long (sometimes in lines and sometimes not) poems that take up many of the questions I was exploring in my lectures: confessionality, ethics, disobedience. Also, sex, race, gender, power, and death. You know, light and funny! Haha. The poems are a bit lecture-like but hopefully not pedantic. They scare me and embarrass me so maybe that’s good. Or maybe that’s bad. I really don’t know. In this way writing the lectures has brought me back to poetry because I wasn’t writing poems when I started writing the lectures. On the other hand, yes, I feel somewhat distant from poetry. It has been increasingly important to me to feel that I am writing something that matters, that has a social effect, that is useful. I’m not sure, even after reading, writing and thinking about this for years, whether poetry is useful for not, whether poetry can affect significant social change or not.
CL: If BWLS asked you to do it all over again next year, with totally new lectures, what stones would you want to overturn and explore? Where would you start?
RZ: I would like to write more lectures or essays (I think that despite my efforts to not write essays that three of my four lectures are really essays). I don’t know if I ever will. I’d like to think that doing these lectures has taught me how to write a certain kind of lecture-essay-poetics-criticism and that I can keep doing it even without this kind of organized structure, but I’m not sure I can. I can’t believe I didn’t write about motherhood more explicitly. I want to write about motherhood as a poetics not just motherhood as a subject for poems. I want to write any lecture that provides me with the opportunity to talk about my favorite poems and poets (I never did that explicitly). I want to write a lecture about trying to write lectures that are anti-authoritarian in form and content and nature. I want to write a lecture about various conceptions of the role of the poet. I want to write a lecture about the role of teaching in my life—not the same old “are MFA programs good or bad” conversation but the profound connection for me between teaching (which is to say learning while teaching) and writing. I want to write more directly about poetry and feminism. I can’t believe I didn’t write about collaboration! And, how is it that I never wrote a whole lecture about the long poem as a form?! Ugh, this list is making me feel sad. I guess it should be enlivening. I think I’m realizing I’m sad this is over. I am shocked to hear myself say that.
–This interview was conducted between Rachel Zucker and Christine Larusso in the spring of 2015. Part 1 of this interview is here.
To see a partial list of Rachel Zucker’s sources for these lectures, go here.
To read Rachel Zucker’s acknowledgements for these lectures, go here.
