Balancing the narrative and the lyric

Contributor Spotlight on Caitlyn Alario

Caitlyn Alario poems “I want to tell you my abuser’s name”, “Curse”, and “For Your Thoughts” are featured in Arkana’s Issue 17.

Arkana: What was your inspiration for these pieces?

I wrote these poems as part of my dissertation, and now that I think of it, they each came later in the dissertation process. They’re certainly not the final poems I wrote, but they’re later ones that came after I’d already done a lot of thinking about what this manuscript is, what it’s asking of me, what I’m trying to do, etc. So, in some ways, these poems were inspired by the narrative demands of the manuscript itself, one of the threads of which follows an abusive relationship I had with a teacher for most of my childhood and adolescence (she was a part of my life from ages 9 to 21). One of the challenges of writing about abuse that lasts that long (one of the challenges of my manuscript) has been trying to balance a narrative impulse (this is what happened) and a lyric one (this is what it felt like to me), and I think these poems are good examples of how I’ve come to negotiate those two impulses.

“Curse” and “For Your Thoughts,” for example, are a bit more rooted in narrative, or at least are doing some important narrative work in the manuscript. “I Want to Tell You My Abuser’s Name,” on the other hand, certainly has narrative elements, but is a bit more of a lyrical meditation that was spurred by a feeling I had during a reading last year. That was the original title: “At the Reading, I Want to Tell the Audience My Abuser’s Name,” but eventually, I scrapped it because the setting of the impulse that inspired the poem wasn’t actually relevant to what the poem was doing. I wanted to grapple with the idea of disclosure when writing and talking about abuse—how, for as much as I write about it and talk about it and read it publicly, there are always things I do not or cannot say about this abusive relationship.

Arkana: How do you feel your poems published in the magazine interact with the concept of docupoetry, or poetry of witness?

The questions of record, memory, and witness were concepts I struggled with immensely while writing these poems; the nature of the kind of trauma I’m engaging resists a clear and linear account of “what happened,” and so the idea of my poems needing to document something or bear witness to something was incredibly stressful to me, and frankly, kept me from writing poems at all for some time. The memories I have of my abuse are different from the memories I have of, say, what I ate for breakfast this morning. They’re more like feelings, impressions, intuitions, senses of knowing that are very difficult to verify outside of my own brain. I spent many years obsessed with finding any kind of physical or virtual evidence I could of the things I felt I remembered—I spent a lot of time scouring old email accounts, yearbooks, Facebook pages, photo albums, etc. I even rediscovered an old cell phone from high school and bought a battery on eBay to try to get it to work again. It did, and I found many old text messages, but phones then are different from phones now, so it was difficult and laborious to try to piece the threads together, and the battery only lasted for a few hours in total before the phone was once again inoperable.

What I’ve learned in writing these poems is that witnessing means something different when it comes to writing about surviving abuse. It’s been more valuable to me to witness myself in the act of trying to remember than it has been to try to recount the events I’m describing “exactly as they happened”—which isn’t really possible anyway.

Arkana: One of the things you do very artfully in this set of poems is break the line in incredibly intentional places. Do you have a line break or enjambment you're particularly proud of?

This is so kind, thank you. Line breaks became very important in “Curse,” partially because it’s written in sapphic stanzas. Those little half lines at the end of each stanza carry so much weight in sapphics, so I tried to attend to where the lines fell as much as possible, while also allowing for whatever might happen naturally to unfold. “Mostly I remember” at the end of the first stanza happened naturally with the form, and that’s when I felt that sapphics were actually the right container for what this poem was doing (I’m not afraid to pour a poem into a few different forms until it feels right). The fourth stanza of “Curse” also felt exciting to me when it came to line breaks—leaving “let me” in the previous stanza blurs the line between plea and demand in the statements of the fourth stanza, making them all the more emphatic and desperate: “hold him here at the threshold. suspend us” and “only end one way” especially.

Arkana: Other than the obvious answer of subject matter- how do you feel these three poems interact and create a conversation with one another? How did your approach change with each poem?

Formally, I think these three poems occupy different psychic spaces that help to illustrate and enact various nuances of the experience of abuse. “For Your Thoughts” is a more cramped and tense poem with its shorter lines, mimicking the cramped, trapped feeling of not being able to escape an abusive relationship, whereas the expanding lines in “I Want to Tell You My Abuser’s Name” embody a more reflective and distant relationship to the abuse being described—this is a speaker who’s further away from it and thus is able to be a bit more meditative about what they’re remembering. That’s something I thought about a lot while writing these poems: who each speaker is in relation to the others, and how their relationship to the subject matter varies slightly in ways that create new layers of understanding and insight into this kind of trauma in particular.

Arkana: What are you working on now?

I’m working on a chapbook of sapphic stanzas that’s been really fun! They’re sapphics both in terms of form and subject matter, and I’m enjoying spending some time in a tonally lighter place these days.

Arkana: We’re all MFA students at various points on our journey. Any advice for emerging writers?

As artists and writers, I think the most valuable thing we can do is to commit to ourselves fully and completely. Yes, read widely and listen carefully, of course, and also—figure out what actually feels right to you, what it is you actually want, and what it is you’re actually trying to do. It can be easy to romanticize the image of the struggling artist when you’re starting out—it’s easy to think that your pain is the greatest source of inspiration for your art. But that’s not actually true. It’s your healing—your acceptance of your pain and ultimately, your joy—that allows you to write those painful parts in a way that does not harm you further and actually provides a way through to something else. Audre Lorde talks about this in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (which I also think all emerging writers should read in full): “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

Take your joys, your obsessions, your quirks, your fully embodied experience of yourself seriously! This is where your most transformative and powerful work lies.