The World We Think We See Is Only Our Best Guess: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood

Perhaps best known for her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, on which the award-winning television series of the same name was based, the Canadian author Margaret Atwood has produced an impressive body of work across multiple genres. Among the many themes that recur throughout her oeuvre are power, politics, and the representation of female bodies. But it’s in Atwood’s poetry in particular that one detects a singular focus on the search for identity, reinforced by the inevitable transformations age forces on one’s body and mind. Dearly: New Poems (Ecco, 2020) is Atwood’s first collection of poetry since 2007’s The Door. What is most striking in these poems is Atwood’s consideration of the aging process and the sense of personal loss that accompanies it more often than not. There’s an intimacy here, in the way the poet engages with this most natural process of all, through acceptance rather than pointless struggle. As she puts it, “We are a dying symphony.”  

The collection includes five main sections, each following its own line of poetic inquiry into physical and emotional sceneries, from domestic spaces to dreamlike sequences. But Atwood also keeps an eye on the invisible, on the “remains of a god that melted / too near the moon.” Whether she’s writing portraits of famous women (Cassandra, Frida Kahlo), or mapping absences and privations only to reimagine them as hidden beginnings (“After we’re gone / the work of our knives will survive us.”), Atwood is both playful and contemplative. In “The Tin Woodwoman Gets a Massage,” we encounter a kind of self-deprecating introspection:

Me, it’s the heart
that’s the part lacking.
I used to want one:
a dainty cushion of red silk
dangling from a blood ribbon,
fit for sticking pins in.
But I’ve changed my mind.
Hearts hurt.

Atwood’s verse makes room for nonhuman subjects: “You want to see the wolf / or demand your money back, / but the wolf doesn’t want to see you,” while urging us not to lose sight of the disenchanted corpses that have lost their sparkle: “Inert. Emptied of prayer, / limp to all conjures. / A figment, a fragment. / Lifeless. Less.” Poetry, as Atwood shows, can also be a space to imagine a future: “Oh children, will you grow up in a world without ice? / Without mice, without lichens? / Oh children, will you grow up?” A conversation with Atwood, conducted over email and lightly edited, follows:

Dearly: New Poems begins rather unexpectedly with you asserting that these are also late poems. As you put it in one poem, “If there were no emptiness, there would be no life. / Therefore I praise vacancy." What does it mean to write such poems without fearing vacancy and loss? 

Poems do not assert. They explore. One of the things they explore is language. In a legal contract, you want all the words to have one meaning and one meaning only. In a poem, words often have several meanings. “Late” is the word most explored in “Late Poems.” “Late poems” is often said of a poet’s work once they’ve passed the age of, say, seventy or eighty, and right before they—may I use the “D” word here, or shall I say “transport to another plane of existence”?  But “late” is also used in “too late,” or in “late to the party,” and so forth. So “Late Poems” explores “late,” while being a late poem itself. (“And now, for my 45th Farewell Tour…”). “If there were no emptiness, there would be no life” is literally true of the universe, but figuratively true of psychic states. We know the positive by the negative. We know fullness by emptiness. We know day by night, and vice versa.

You do not shy away from a sensitive topic: the process of aging which you approach humorously, even playfully. One may get used to perceiving their body as an acquiescent device but, sooner or later, “The body, once your accomplice, / is now your trap,” a trap prone to fossilization in spite of any makeover culture. Could poetry be deployed in the care of an aging self/body without losing its political potential?

Not all poems are political, though some are, and some of mine are. But you can’t be prescriptive towards poets about their poetry without echoes of dictatorships past and present. And there have been so many attempts to make poetry into something socially useful, going all the way back to Plato, but continuing into our own day. Once prescription starts, denunciation and censorship are never far behind. Lyric poems (as opposed to epic or dramatic or narrative ballads) are meditative.

But to your question about “the body”: yes, at least one third of the DEARLY poems are meditations about death (death = no more body, or not a functioning one), or the workup to death. I’m at that time of life. My older relatives dropped off the Tree of Life a while ago. A year ago, and after DEARLY was written, my partner—an event we both knew was coming soon. Now my friends, one by one. It’s like the last act of Dialogues of the Carmelites. But that said, the natural death of an old person is not a tragedy. The death of a young person is.

Is there any particular history behind the poem cycle “Songs for Murdered Sisters”?

This set of poems is actually a song cycle written for Joshua Hopkins, a well-known opera singer (baritone), who met with me a few years ago, told me the story about his sister being murdered (on the same day the same man killed two other women). He wanted a commemoration song cycle. The music is by Jake Heggie. The cycle was supposed to debut live in September but Covid prevented that.

In your poem “At the Translation Conference,” you posit a table, on one side of which, “women do not say No.” As you put it, “There is a word for No, but women do not say it. / It would be too abrupt.” Could you tell me more about this risk posed by gendered translation?

It came from a Japanese translator who told me the word for “No” was too abrupt in Japanese for women to say—it sounded rude—but there were ways of saying “No” without using the actual word, and they were understood. We experienced this while in Japan: if “No” was the real answer, it was not pronounced, but the result was a “No” result. (She said she could say “No” in English, however.) Clear communication…so desirable, so hard to achieve. Speak softly but carry a big schtick? (Sorry. But what is poetic ambiguity but Advanced Punning 101?).

Section IV of your book works as a meditative bestiary pinning down the ingenuity and variety of life: polar bears, jellyfishes, wolves, whales, and birds, all roaming and refusing to accommodate touchscreens and zoo-like gazes. But, in the end, it also comes to one of the most fragile and endangered cubs: the human kind. As a writer of cautionary reminders and uncomfortable futures, do you think that the future has already been written?

There isn’t any “the future.” There are only multiple possible futures. If we want to be a species, we must first acknowledge that we are one. As a species, we’ve been in Threatland before, and here we still are. But… no guarantees. We’ll have to earn our continued existence on this planet.