An Interview with Brandel France de Bravo

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Accents Publishing: Throughout Mother, Loose, you are working with characters borrowed from nursery rhyme and fairy tale, as well as inventing characters within those worlds. And in doing so, you give what are often considered old children’s stories a more mature, modern context. Readers will encounter Mary and her lamb skipping school to go to the mall, and find that the dish and the spoon are only a small part of a larger utensil community full of fulfilled and spurned loves. What makes these “children’s” rhymes so compelling to you as an adult? In thinking about bringing children’s rhymes to an adult audience, how do you hope your poems will alter a reader’s view of these stories and characters? Is it elaboration? Subversion? Something else entirely?

Brandel France de Bravo: I am fascinated by Mother Goose rhymes—they way they stay with you, like a baby tooth that lingers into middle age (I have one of those that’s finally giving up the ghost). The simple rhymes bring bodily joy—to repeat them is to remember pumping your legs on a swing. While their forms are tight and unwavering—closed even—there is something Steinian and open-ended about their nonsense-wisdom. After all these years, I still find many of them mysterious, as though they were excerpts or fragments from a larger narrative. All those Jacks, each with his own story: the one who went up the hill, the one who sits in a corner, the thin one with the rotund wife. They beg for, if not completion, amplification.

While we may not have known it as children, nursery rhymes contain ghosts of history and custom. Surely, we felt those ghosts, just as we felt, and I still feel, the darkness behind the rhymes. It is there like the bird leg hidden beneath the skirt of the old woman said to be the source of these rhymes. You could say that nursery rhymes are a lot like our mothers: they are soothing as a washcloth on the forehead, but they have a “past.” This past is not spoken of so much as hinted at. As a young girl, I was frightened and seduced by the wickedness of Mother Goose rhymes: Peter who put his wife in a pumpkin shell, and Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie who kissed the girls and made them cry. How could I not want a kiss so powerful that it would make me cry?

In the midst of these reimagined fairy tales, there is a sequence of poems that revolve around the loss of a mother. How did that narrative inform your exploration of the fairy tales, and how did the fairy tales inform it?

The two thematic threads are related in a number of ways. Early on, the two sequences were part of a larger manuscript, but then I realized that I needed to pull out a bunch of poems—mainly the middle section—and distill the book until it was nothing but “mother.” In the chapbook, I’ve tried to braid the two types of poems so that they speak to each other, echo each other. The Mother Goose poems are tinged with death, and so, foreshadow the trajectory of the mother poems. There are two “movements” in the book: as the Mother Goose poems are corrupted, abducted into adulthood and towards death, the real mother is seen to regress and return to innocence.

When I began writing the nursery rhyme poems five years ago, my mother had not yet been diagnosed. Not surprisingly, I had some that didn’t fit thematically into the chapbook, like this one called “Hill and Dale (the San Fernando Valley)”:

What if “Miss Muffet” is a stage name,
like Maxi Mounds or Kayla Kleavage?
What if her tuffet is king size?
What if the spider’s bi(pedal) curious?
What if she plays a housewife
lying by the pool, browsing Better
Webs and Gardens and along comes
the jardinero, lithe and dark?
What if he’s all creep and no bite?

I heard the poet Roger Reeves say recently that he thinks every poet should try to write a tongue poem. Your poem “Mother, Tongue” might fit into the category of tongue poems, and you also invoke some Sylvia Plath lines at the beginning of this collection about being a tongue. I’m curious: What significance does the image of the tongue have for you as a poet, or as a person—or what significance do you think it might have for poets and people in general?

Yes, there are quite a few tongues in Mother, Loose, beginning with Plath’s “Mother, you are the one mouth/ I would be a tongue to,” followed by the “Old Woman in the Shoe,” who says, “Captain of my shoe/my tongue will take me where I want to go.” As a writer and speaker of several languages, I agree with the old woman: my tongue is my compass and my sword. It is emblem of my authority, my power to transform and transmit.

I used to collect sayings about the tongue, and what I loved about them is how contradictory they are. In Arabic, if you say something “with the bone of your tongue,” you’re saying it from the bottom of your heart, but when an Arabic speaker says “the tongue has no bone” (it’s just meat), she is talking about the emptiness of words. In Italian, Spanish and other languages, it’s said that “the tongue has no bones but it breaks bones.” So, you see, the tongue is a shape-shifter: slippery and supple. In “Mother, Tongue” the speaker gives birth to a bloody tongue which she at first mistakes for a liver. After her initial repulsion, she warms to her offspring, cradling it and cooing to it. I wasn’t thinking of it when I wrote it (after a very vivid dream), but the poem is a distant cousin to Stephen Crane’s—about seeing a man in the desert holding his heart in his hands and eating it. When asked about the taste, the man replies that he likes it

Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.

What do you hope readers will encounter in Mother, Loose?

Surprise and familiarity? I suspect I’m like every other poet in hoping that people will encounter something in the book that will cause them to see a familiar object, interaction, or life passage in a new light, from a slightly different angle. I would like readers to feel, after putting it down, askew.

Brandel France de Bravo is the author of Provenance, which won the 2008 Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize in poetry and was a ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her poems, which have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and essays have appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review,Gulf Coast, and Seneca Review. She is co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise your Child in a Complex World and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College with a master’s in public health, she works for a consumer health organization in Washington, D.C.

James Pfeiffer is a recent graduate of Centre College, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in English. He lives in Lexington, KY and is an intern for Accents Publishing.