Patty Paine on Grief & Other Animals

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Accents has just released your second full-length collection. Can you describe the growth or changes you’ve experienced as a writer between Grief & Other Animals (Accents Publishing, 2015) and The Sounding Machine (2012)?

After The Sounding Machine there was a great deal of upheaval in my life. I lost someone close to me from a drug overdose in 2013, and everything previous about my life was ransacked. I suppose the blessing of having one’s life excavated is the opportunity to examine what was unearthed. This close looking occurred in therapy and with the support of friends, and was a recursive process that reticulated across the connection between the who and the what of me—which is to say, I grew as a person and a writer. I think living with addiction is itself a form of addiction in that it isolates, it requires corrosive compartmentalization, and it thrives in denial. Once I learned how to live differently, I wrote differently. I now live and write more authentically, more securely, more confidently, and with more self-awareness.

I think about it this way: I’ve lived in the Arabian desert for eleven years, and when you live in the desert long enough you come to forget what you miss. And so I learned while visiting Beijing several years ago. I was walking through a botanical garden, when I was struck by a sound I didn’t recognize. It was a papery, soft rustling that slowly rose in my awareness and revealed itself as the sound of the breeze lifting leaves into song. The sound stilled me, filled me with a sudden expansive joy, and I was moved, both by how easily something sublime could be lost, and by how simply it could be restored. For me, the changes that occurred in my life were (are) much like this—amidst great loss, there was (is) a reawakening into simple and elemental joys and experiences.

Grief, like writing, has a process, or so the book suggests with its many dated and location specific titles. How did the two coalesce or resist coalescing when writing the poems for this book?

Grief is a process, and like writing it isn’t linear, it doesn’t occur in stages, and though it hopes to connect to the universal, it takes place in isolation. For me, like writing, the initial scope of it, the blank-page largeness of it, was overwhelming, but day-by-day, word-by-word, it became more manageable. Some days my hopes for it prevailed, some days it was despair that won, but the more I sat to it the more the senseless gave way to meaning. I’m not sure if I’m speaking of writing or grief at this point, which is to say that grief and writing coalesced, and that grief and writing resisted coalescing. Sometimes writing was a way to report from the inside of grief in real time. These poems enabled me to express the raw pain of loss. Sometimes writing created a distance from grief that allowed me to believe that from loss could come grace and beauty. These poems helped me move through the raw pain of loss.

While textured with figurative language, there is no obfuscation of details in the book, so a simple question to ask here would be: was it difficult to write these poems, to let readers gaze upon what feels like a personal journey through grief?

I am incapable of abstraction, obfuscation, and am cursed with a clear eye, and a plain voice. Though I am a private person, I am a wholly personal poet, as much as I wish I were some other kind of poet. So in that sense, the poems weren’t difficult to write. My hope is that I’ve honored the line between the personal and the indulgent, between emotion and sentimentality, and that through the personal some universal chord has been struck. I suppose it goes back to a previous question—We all write, (grieve) in isolation, but I think we all hope (write) to connect.

One of the motifs of the book, permanence and impermanence, reminds me of the conversation we had about memory in The Sounding Machine. You said: “I wanted the poems to explore the blessings and tyranny of memory…” Would it be wrong to assume that these poems are their own blessing and tyranny?

These poems are a blessing and a tyranny. However, I now believe we have much more agency in whether we chose blessing or tyranny than I did when I made that comment.

Throughout your collections, animals have a prominent, metaphoric role in shaping meaning, in particular, clawed animals—animals likely to become or be feral. We also talked about your obsessions last time, and I wonder how they’ve expanded, or maybe in this case deepened?

I don’t know why animals figure in my metaphors, and in the way I make meaning. The title came from a comment I made to a friend. I likened grief to a wild animal in that you never know when it’ll pounce. This led to an interest in how other animals grieve, and that in turn informed many of the poems.

Diode and Diode Editions appear to be thriving. What’s the secret to your success? Any exciting news to share?

Diode is coming up on its 9th year, and we’re preparing for a new look, and new features, particularly in terms of offering a variety of media. Diode Editions was sidelined for almost 2 years, but it’s back with a vengeance. DE’s return has been fueled by my personal and professional partnership with Law Alsobrook. Law is a poet, graphic designer and visual artist, and his role as co-editor and art director of Diode Editions has breathed life into the press. We recently launched a chapbook contest, and are looking forward to adding to our small, but remarkable catalog. We’re also hoping to move into full-length collections soon.

What’s next for you and your writing?

I’m working on my next book, and am about half way in. I’m gladdened to see that so far it’s less personal than my previous collections. The personal impulse is alive and well though, but it seems to be channeling itself into a memoir.

I’m still in Qatar, now in my 11th year at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, a school of arts and design. I just started a new position as Interim Director of Liberal Arts & Sciences. I had a moment of horror the other day when I realized that I have become the kind of person who has a copy of the NASAD accreditation handbook on my desk. And worse, that I’ve read it…. I fear this might disqualify me from being a poet. I kid, sort of.

Patty Paine is the author of The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse(Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, The Louisville Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor ofDiode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is interim director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.