Gabrielle Calvocoressi Discusses Her Newest, Rocket Fantastic

Interviews abound! Critic Jonathan Farmer talks with his friend Gabrielle Calvocoressi, editor-at-large of Los Angeles Review of Books (where, naturally, this interview has a nice home) and author, most recently, of Rocket Fantastic (Persea Books, 2017). "[T]here are other kinds of violence that are meant to destroy you, but if you can breathe through it, if you can, they will not," says Calvocoressi. More from this lovely read:

Going back a step, being looked at is so prominent in here, too. The characters think a lot about looking at others — and being looked at. There are moments when someone gets to see a person or an animal when they don’t think they’re being seen. And then sometimes those characters just go on to inhabit that state even after they know they’re being seen. That ability to be seen and unseen at the same time seems really fundamental to a lot of these creatures.

The beauty of seeing people and animals in moments when they don’t need you, when they think nobody is looking … I’m really interested in that moment, and I think it’s because it’s a moment that, more and more, we are deprived of because of things like social media and the ways in which we’re constantly taking photos. We’re deprived of our deepest privacies.

A lot of these poems feel, to me, like another place to be. Another place to be private and public at the same time. And going back to what you said a while ago about not feeling like you were in the right body: we talk about poems embodying things, and, hopefully without stretching the metaphor too far, poems are kind of alternate bodies. It feels like an attempt to create a body in which you can be more available, where your breath can be held and where someone else can hold your breath.

Yeah, like a democracy. If people at the end of this, whether or not they like the book, thought it was a democratic book, that would be really interesting to me. A book in which all voices can be heard.

That’s always been something in my work. When you’re younger — I’m 42 — there can sometimes be a moment when you say, “I’m going to write this persona, this really horrible person.” And then you can’t really understand why it isn’t “Herbert White.” It’s because it’s not a trick when Frank Bidart does it. What’s most horrifying about that poem is when you find out about the violence this person has suffered at the hands of their father. It’s not: “When I hit her on the head, it was good,” the first line. That’s not actually the worst part of all.

That’s a democratic poem, you know.

And I think that living here in the South has been going back to a small town, after growing up in a small town. Even though this is a small college town, there are towns very close by that are very much like how I grew up. Being in the South where we, you and I, are sitting politically right now. And in this country where we’re at right now. I would like to think that I make a kind of democratic poem in which everyone can be heard.

Brighten your wits with more of this interview at LARB.