Talking With Caroline Bergvall About Her Newest Book, Alisoun Sings

Caroline Bergvall has a new book out: Alisoun Sings (Nightboat Books, 2019). Written in a "signature palimpsest of contemporary and Middle English, Bergvall turns Alisoun (that much-debated pilgrim from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) into a composite for centuries of women, artists, and activists speaking truth to power." Greg Nissan talked with Bergvall about the book for BOMB. From their conversation:

GN Virtuosity and collective speaking are often, I think foolishly— 

CB Separated. I agree. 

GN On that note, there was something almost delightfully embarrassing about hearing you perform at the Poetry Project. Every connection that can be made, every pun, you always go there. You said, “There’s an excess of reference in order to free things up.” 

CB This idea of not being scared of the banal pun, that we allow the familiar, is central to Alisoun as a medieval Chaucerian character. She is not well-educated. She will, in a very open way, make use of what she has to have, and she’s often been ridiculed for lack of knowledge. But that lack of knowledge is socially organized. It gives me permission to just go straight in and make the bad jokes. The complication of the book’s spelling and all that can actually be made more familiar by the notion of the cliché or the familiar phrase. That’s balancing, I think.

The tradition that Chaucer works in is also based on humor. Tales would be read out and people would recognize characters and laugh at the monk and laugh at the greedy priest or the taxman. It was always important to me that this voice can be spoken. I can speak it, anybody can speak it; you just need to do a little bit of work on how you might want to pronounce it. But it will always be pronounceable, therefore performable. I’m not going to ask people to sit and think for an hour; I’m going to entertain them. There’s something about the value of entertainment in the voice. I do it in all my Chaucer work. You might get lost narratively, but you can follow through.

Read on at BOMB.