From the Archive: Anne Boyer on her Pulitzer Prize Winning "The Undying"

For the month of May, Harriet will feature blog posts from the archive, along with a brief introduction. This week's post, "Undying and Reparative Magic: A Conversation with Anne Boyer," was originally published in September 2019.

What does it mean to survive trauma, disease, or catastrophe? In The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, which was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in the category of general nonfiction, the poet Anne Boyer reflects on her experience living with and through illness and recovery, though she resists the term "survivor." As she told Harriet in an interview published last fall, rather than a survivor, Boyer considers herself "to be among the undying, not just someone in its process," which is "to recognize all that remains is a mix of death and life, and some live and some die but parts of all of us remain as other parts are lost. The dead are always with us, and the living aren't all entirely here." How prescient these words seem to us now, as a global pandemic compels us to take stock of the many lives lost, and of what remains.

—Harriet Editor

 

A poet and essayist, Anne Boyer has been garnering critical attention since the release in 2015 of her award-winning Garments Against Women, a collection of prose poems that pushes back on the known categories of our world, reinventing language and reimagining the world as we know it. In 2014, Boyer was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Her latest work, The Undying, is a genre-defying meditation on illness that draws on her own harrowing experience to ask fundamental questions about what it means to exist as a human being in our broken world.

Boyer was an inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2018, and recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and Poetry. She lives in Kansas City, where she is a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute. This interview was conducted via email in August 2019.

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SHOSHANA OLIDORT: Can you talk about how you chose your title, The Undying?

ANNE BOYER: The book is a book about the process of undying—that is, of both being subjected to a catastrophic, medically-induced process of mass cell death via chemotherapy yet not entirely dying along with the death of my cells, and not entirely losing myself as I lost the parts of me I associated with me—my memories, my looks, my capacity to think as I once did, my body parts, even the certainty of my own existence. As I say in the book, for a long time after treatment, I suspected I was actually dead and being tricked by some semi-interesting afterworld. I'm not the only cancer survivor I know who has had the same doubts. For others, they live, but with trauma, depression, disability, and negative social consequences so heightened that they sometimes wish they hadn't, so that they, too, feel trapped in that hallway between death and life, not knowing which door to open.

Beyond this, I had and have an ambivalent relationship to the term "survivor," but to be among the undying, not just someone in its process, is to recognize all that remains is a mix of death and life, and some live and some die but parts of all of us remain as other parts are lost. The dead are always with us, and the living aren't all entirely here. The Undying seems, also, to fit the world right now, which we are always being told is ending, but which we wake up to each day, the no-future future that is always unfurling right before our eyes, in which we have to go to work, wash dishes, and otherwise endure when we are told that the conditions that support life on the planet are becoming quickly inhospitable. Undying is also a term usually associated with immortal love or immortal literature, and I wanted to rip it out of those sentimental contexts a bit, to ironize it, too, in that if creating a book is supposed to be a bid for a kind of immortality, a book about losing yourself is a suspect terrain in which to try to live forever.

OLIDORT: There is a hesitancy throughout this book, what seems to be your own hesitancy about writing a book about cancer. At one point you make some confession—about yourself pre-illness, that you were "so unphilosophical as to search in a mirror for a wrinkle" among other things, and you note that you are now ashamed of all this, that this, which you have just put into print "is not anything I want anyone to know about me." Elsewhere you point out that books about people with cancer are books about "dying women with a bald head. . . none of them with a voice or much else to distinguish them in particular except they were surely once people and by the time they made it into the books, weren't." It's as if books, or stories, rob people of their personhood—or is it cancer that does that, or both? Your own book aims to do something different, as you say, you want it to be a "minor form of reparative magic. . . to expropriate the force of literature away from literature." This last line in particular reminded me of your poetry collection, Garments Against Women, which seems also intent on expropriating the force of literature (and of language) away from literature, and language. This is a two-pronged question: a) How did you decide to write, and more so to publish this book, and to what degree—if at all—do you still feel torn about this decision (or did you not feel torn to begin with)? b) What does it mean to expropriate literature away from literature, and how do you do that differently in a book about cancer, and in a collection of poems about, among other things, being a woman in America? How, in other words, does your poetry inform your prose—or is this genre distinction utterly artificial?

BOYER: I had to write the book for two reasons. The first one was gratitude for all that kept me alive and made life worth living, and the second was vengeance against all that diminishes life, the arrangement of a racist, misogynist, capitalist world that sickens people, profits from their illnesses, and then blames them for their own deaths. I'm probably better at writing than I am at anything else, and so it is that writing a book was some of what I could do in return for my life, or at least it is what I could do toward the most good. I am, however, not very skilled at being happy about publishing or publicity, and I've never quite understood why—life-long shyness, maybe; a standard-issue egalitarian impulse; a consistently affirmed hypothesis, too, that public success is a precinct of haters and sycophants that should be visited as little as possible in a well-lived life.

Yet I knew I needed this book to find its readers outside of small and insular literary corners, to get the book into public libraries and in magazines, newspapers, and so on. This meant not being shy or afraid or at least not letting those reluctant parts of myself win out. The struggle of the book is also the struggle around strategically accessing those cultural processes and forms which are, of course, part of the same capitalist arrangement of the world that creates the material and ideological conditions of cancer which harm us. I want other people who have been through these struggles to find the book in case it might be of use to them, but I also had to be clear that I was operating inside of "literature" as is, that my very tool was not something apart from the conditions I was describing, but its intimate, and that I could make no promise that I alone was going to either undo the conditions of capitalism with a book nor undo literature via literature. It's not a thing any one person could ever do, nor can anything be achieved in the realm of mere ideology. A book is not nothing. It is also not everything. The changes have to come collectively and materially.

I think The Undying and Garments Against Women are really a piece, or a continuation both conceptually and formally. I'd meant for The Undying to be much more straightforward, but it kept swaying and bending toward poetry.  Ultimately, I just let it bend and sway. Poetry made, and continues to make, all prose possible.

OLIDORT: In this book you refer to other works of literature by women who were living with and/or dying from cancer. These include Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, Audre Lorde, among others. You also reference paintings that depict illness, though as you note these are often problematic, they rarely show the true face of illness—lonely, eviscerating, gory. Finally, you point to YouTube videos posted by the sick and dying. Your own work is highly poetic, but also essayistic, philosophical, and confessional all at once. Can you talk about the form you chose for this book?

BOYER: All forms are social, but some take on a fatalistic quality, such as social media comment boxes or medical forms, which repeat and repeat and which we never, no matter how we fill them out, seem to be able to break or alter. What we do on Facebook, for example, is to fill out the forms provided to us by billionaires, and no matter what we put in the box, the outcome seems to always be the same. The rich continue to grow rich. The rest of us continue to fill their forms for free and increase our own alienation in the process. What a poet can do is try to counter the formal fatalism that can feel crushing at times, creating something generous and portable for others that might have within the affordance of new possibilities for life. Because the book looks at social media, medical forms, illness literature, dreams, art, film and TV, it is naturally also about what forms already exist and finding form appropriate to experience, and attempting to find a way to tell that does not adhere to form's potential fatalism. Formal innovation often makes literature more accessible, not less, and of course I hope I have made something others can access. Our species seems to have a genius at adaptive responses to form.

OLIDORT: To follow up on the subject of discrete genres, or forms, which your work consistently challenges—there's quite a bit about dreams in this book. You note in particular that "our century is excellent at the production of nightmares and terrible at the interpretation of dreams," and talk about some of your own cancer-induced dreams and nightmares. I'm wondering what the dream form offers you as a writer.

BOYER: I'm attempting to describe what it is like to be ill inside of "data's dream"—that is, the way it feels when our bodies are imagined inside the network of information that constitutes competing version of our lives, one to which we have an alien and partial relation—and  how data's dream differs from the dreams of the incubants in the ancient world who got their prognoses and prescriptions from dreams inspired by the gods. My dreams in the book are meant to fit between the dream of data and the dreams of the ancients—to be a dreaming person in a dream/nightmare-like experience half-trapped inside the dream of machines which happen inside the legacy of all known dreams, too. I wanted to retain some of the enchantment of dreams, even in the conditions of aggressive disenchantment which is contemporary life.

OLIDORT: You write that this book is not "for the well and intact," and insist that even those who are not sick now, have once been or will soon become sick. In other words, this really is a book for everyone, with relevance to anyone. If I understand you correctly, one "objective" or goal of this work may be to heighten awareness of the fragility of (human) life, health and wellness. Is this so, and can you elaborate—what in particular do you hope your readers take from this book, and how do you think heightened awareness of our own vulnerability can somehow make this world, and life, more bearable for all of us?

BOYER: I suppose I want those who have been through something similar to feel less alone, and for those who have not yet had these experiences but might soon to be able to think about some of these things in advance, to have a touchpoint or shared vocabulary for what we all our together and what they might someday face. I think our violability and fragility are not aberrant or totally horrible, but fundamental and sometimes positive aspects of all living things, and that is, I hope, a thread through everything I write. We are not sovereign: we are not princes: we are not even, most of the time, what we think of when we think of a "self." We contain all sorts of life within us, and death, too, and sometimes we fail to contain it, as we fail to contain even ourselves.

OLIDORT: To piggyback on something you said earlier—about "not entirely losing myself as I lost the parts of me I associated with me"—lostness is a recurrent theme in this work. The process of healing—or undying—is also a process of loss, for you. As you put it in the book, "It's like the condition of lostness is, when it comes to being a person, what finally makes us real." I loved that line so much, and yet I'm not sure I really understand it. At the risk of being pedantic, can I ask what this means?

BOYER: I am not so certain of what I meant, either, but I do know that I seem to have learned more through the condition of extreme uncertainty that I ever thought I knew when I felt certain and competent, and more than that, when stripped of much I thought was myself, I learned that there was something else to me beyond those superficial or socially valued qualities. My losses aren't the same as those of others, or at least not entirely, but what we all do share are these experiences of loss, of pain, of disruption and devastation, and somewhere in the loss we can develop and become more deeply connected. Wounds are also like pores, in that what we once thought of as closed becomes opened, and our connection to everything else heightened, both what we give and receive.

OLIDORT: There are a couple of instances in this book when you note how birth and death coincide—for example, in the medical world that uses sonograms to detect a fetus, and also a tumor; in cultures that have consigned both the pregnant and the dying to the margins of society. I noticed an old tweet of yours from 2014, when you were ill, I gather, in which you posed the question "If cancer is a demonic pregnancy why aren't there cancer doulas?" I'm wondering how much of this is particular to your experience of cancer as a woman—and what it means to live in a body that can play host to the potential for life, and also to life-threatening illness.

BOYER: I don't think the experience of being a "woman" is defined by reproduction, or it is only one possible aspect of it, because plenty of other people who are women can't or don’t want to reproduce. I'm not even sure I understand what my experience of life itself as a woman means. It has never been an easy fit for me, as I suspect it isn't for most people assigned female at birth. The only thing I can know for certain is how angry I am at injustice that has its foundation in gender, and the violence, poverty, and extracted labor, often racialized, that comes with it, and the way that reproduction, which could be so joyous and complex, is the site of social control and abuse. I think the way that cancers experienced mostly by women are treated and understood is related to the way women are treated, too, when they aren't ill, and this includes what happens to pregnant people. Similar traumatic experiences to those around disease occur in the realm of reproductive medicine, around birth, abortion, and miscarriage. It was like that for me, and I hate that the trauma around medicine (reproductive and otherwise) can have such an obscuring effect on meaningful experience, so much so that I feel incapable of finding the meaning of gestation (of a fetus or a demonic cancer) because of the fortress of institution and ideology that has been erected around it.

OLIDORT: Following up on the last question, you point repeatedly to the intersections of gender, race, and class among other social factors that determine, to no small degree, who has access to adequate healthcare in America, or, to put it more bluntly, who is more likely to live, and who to die, of cancer, or any other number of diseases, in our late-capitalist world. As a single mother of limited financial means, you somehow beat the odds and survived—does this give you hope? Or do you think of it as a fluke? How do you explain it—or is it something you'd rather not try to explain?

BOYER: Death from disease is always going to be with us, but it is grim and unabideable as a form of social infliction, doled out by race, gender, and class, which is what our current arrangement of the world has made it. Even under these conditions, however, on the individual level there is a way that variation inside these known categories is inexplicable, and looking for a "why" can drive a person out of her mind or force her into fictions of exceptionalism. Others had the same cancer and same treatment and died, and any stories I tell myself about why I lived will always be wrong. I'd like to say I lived because of my friends and because of poetry, but other people die who are also loved and also have good reasons to live. I try to write about them, too. All we can know is that it seems to be that the harder things are for us in general the harder the cancer falls on us, and the multiple stressors and inadequate means to survive that are unfairly proximate because of race and class and other factors combine with cancer, too, to make any additional difficulty in life even more difficult.

OLIDORT: Finally, what's your next project?

BOYER: Two novels, one which takes place yesterday and one which takes place tomorrow.  I can't wait to get back to them and as far away from cancer as I can get.