Taneum Bambrick

Interview by Mag Gabbert

Mag: Hi Taneum! Thank you for spending some time with Underblong! I’ve been thinking a lot about how your newest book, Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) differs from your first book, Vantage—which, for those who don’t know, was selected by Sharon Olds to win The American Poetry Review’s Honickman Prize in 2019(!). When I think of your work overall, I think of it as very careful and precise, perhaps similar to Chloe Honum’s or Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, like an intricate clock. But, something about Intimacies, Received feels just a little bit…looser? It feels sparse in a different way, and fragmented in a different way. The characteristic I’m trying to describe is hard to put my finger on, so I’m probably not doing a great job of articulating it, but does this sound accurate to you? What do you see in terms of the differences in tone and progression across these two books, and what might have led to those?

Taneum: Looser is a great way to describe that feeling, I think! I wrote Vantage thinking of a narrative arc—copying prose writers as much as I could! Intimacies, Received is much more fragmented as you say, and another word I like to use for it is “quiet.” I don’t mean that in a disempowered way about content, but about the form and the ways my editor and I worked to create breath, space, and balance in the book. In this collection I am writing about difficult and extremely personal experiences—surviving assault, queer erasure, illness related to sex—and how all of those events sort of tear through this speaker’s understanding of herself in any intimate or romantic setting. I am writing about a person trying to hold belief in a myriad of ways, so I wanted the form of the book to enact both how that is difficult for her, but also how she accomplishes/achieves balance.

Mag: Your latest book also inspires me to think more deeply about concepts like intimacy, domesticity, and affection. The glimpses into scene and narrative that we find in these poems reveal a complicated emotional landscape, not unlike the complicated dynamics depicted in Vantage. Here—in Intimacies, Received—the notion of “intimacy” seems to waver between attraction and mere proximity, between claustrophobia and connection. I would love to hear more about how you personally might define the realm of the intimate.

Taneum: I love this question and how hard it is to answer! I suppose I can answer it by thinking of work I’ve done since this book came out. For example, I recently taught a class on poetry and intimacy for Hugo House, and I challenged everyone in it to write down moments that they would describe as “intimate” every day for the entire month we worked together. We never shared those notes with each other, but the idea of all of us journaling towards our own ideas of intimacy felt very sincere, warm, and important.

When I think of intimacy I think of curiosity. A moment when a hidden facet of the self has space to reach out with a question or an interest.

Mag: You investigate perspective in some interesting ways in this new book, too. Poems throughout the collection flit between a direct address to “you,” a collective first-person “we,” and a more removed address to the beloved (if I may call him that) as “he,” which then almost gives us, as readers, a sense that we are being confided in, or addressed directly ourselves. The book’s title poem, “Intimacies, Received,” is especially compelling because it seems to speak back to the speaker we’ve come to know, capturing the cadences, phrasing, memories, and metaphors used by a man (or perhaps men) whom the speaker has been intimate with. Each section of the poem takes on a different shape, a different mood, and a different kind of voice, so that the effect is like a patchwork or collage. Can you talk a little bit about your process in exploring those various perspectives?

Taneum: Shifting between perspectives was something I didn’t intend to do, but yes I agree I do that so often! Sometimes, when I find myself in the middle of a tangled thought, particularly one dealing in some way with harm, I have to approach it differently to understand why it’s so bunched up in my head. My professor Eavan Boland once said something like “a poem begins when an experience is unresolved,” and I think of that every time I write. I think of the form the poem takes as an attempt to help the poem towards that idea of resolution.

Sometimes when I leave my own perspective, I am trying to understand something that my brain has settled in an unhealthy or unfair way. Then the exercise of writing also becomes a challenge of honesty, of really seeing and understanding some lived thing with more objectivity.

Mag: Another concept that’s woven both literally and figuratively throughout this book is translation, which often reads as an exchange of power. To translate for another is to be in a position of power. And yet, to (especially secretly?) understand—to see both the language and the translation for what they are—is perhaps an even more powerful situation. What kind of role has translation played for you in the imagining and writing of this collection? Might the act of writing a poem in some way be mapped onto the act of performing a kind of translation, too?

Taneum: I love the last line of this question, thinking about poetry and translation as connected forms. I see this book as an attempt to describe the feeling of being missed or unseen by the structures of partnership and the structures of medicine/healthcare, of working to translate pain in order to receive care and love. The speaker is always questioning what role she plays in disempowering herself, or questioning whether or not she has been made to feel untranslatable by forces like sexism, homophobia, and ableism. The poem “Saying I am a Survivor in Another Language” deals particularly with having PTSD and not knowing how to explain it, literally, in Spanish to the speaker’s beloved before they sleep together for the first time. The poem ends on a note of hopefulness, I think, because she realizes she’s been explaining this experience to every partner she has ever had as an adult. This process of explaining has privileged, through language, her experience as a survivor over other parts of her, which ultimately limits her narrative of her own intimacy. In this poem, not being able to explain empowers her.

This answer is getting long: what I am trying to say is I think the idea of translation in this book is sometimes super literal and sometimes it is the opposite. Whenever it appears, this idea hinges on connection and disconnection. On danger, but also on attachment and possibility.

Mag: Previous interviewers have asked you about the essay in your first book, titled “Sturgeon.” I especially appreciate part of the response you gave to Aileen Keown Vaux, who interviewed you for The Rumpus in 2019, in which you said, “When I think of form in poetry, I think of how it mirrors different kinds of power structures that are imposed on us, and I hope by making hybrid or experimental work I can work to call systemic violence into question.”

In Intimacies, Received, you’ve replicated the prose form of “Sturgeon” in “Alligators: An Essay.” Here, though, the piece seems a little more interested exploring the complexities of the speaker’s feelings about herself in light of her experiences—rather than, perhaps, exploring the complexities of the experiences themselves. It reminds me of the epigraph to Anne Sexton’s Bestiary, U.S.A. (a work I love and deeply connect to), in which she writes: “I look at the strangeness in them, and the naturalness they cannot help, in order to find some virtue in the beast in me.” On page 51, for example, you write, “I wasn’t sure if feeling that way had protected me or justified my erratic behavior, allowing me to become less of a person.” My own work is also very interested in exploring animals in relation (or close proximity) to femininity, sexuality, and womanhood, so I wonder whether you could talk a little about how those topics might—or might not—connect in your mind as well.

Taneum: Yes and I am so excited about your book, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS! An unforgettable title that has always resonated with me! “Alligators” is an essay about ideas of monstrosity and where they cultivate. By the end of the essay, the speaker is the monster because she has cheated on someone for the first time, but also because of how she justifies that behavior to herself temporarily by reducing her partner because of his sexist behaviors towards her in the past. The symbol of monstrosity in the essay attempts to encompass methods towards survival that are quick, uncalculated, and too easy, like lying.

 This essay is also a kind of apology for moments when this speaker (or here, narrator) behaved cowardly, imagining threats, blaming her tendency to imagine threats on PTSD. The alligator in this essay is not necessarily metaphorized—which was important to me—but appears more as an innocent bystander who slides in occasionally like a reminder of hope, of overcoming mindsets of scarcity and doom.  

Mag: Finally, I can’t help but notice (via Instagram) that you’ve become quite an accomplished ceramic artist (or, “potter”??) these days. I love ceramics, too(!!), and I enjoy watching The Great Pottery Throw Down on HBO—have you seen it? If not, one of the climactic challenges on this show usually involves constructing an entire, working toilet with some kind of thematic motif. For example, I’ve seen a sea turtle toilet, a knight’s helmet urinal, and a mushroom toilet all presented on this show. So, I’m curious: if you were given the same challenge, what kind of design would you want to incorporate, and why?

Taneum: I had no idea what this show was until I met the incredible poet Chen Chen and he told me I needed to watch it! I quickly finished it and loved it so much. I see myself as a pretty mediocre potter, but I love throwing. Sometimes I think about what glaze I want to use on a new piece during class (I am currently in a PhD) and I get completely distracted from whatever we’re discussing. Working on the wheel has helped me to connect my brain to my body, especially during stressful times. Also I think the whole process of making is extremely sexy, so that helps me just in general by making me enjoy life more. Right now, I mostly make mugs and sometimes I theme those mugs based on a poetry collections I love, like Jenny Molberg’s Refusal, Joy Preist’s Horsepower, and Dorothy Chan’s BABE.

Are you asking what kind of toilet I would make out of clay? I love this question. I think I would want to hand build / carve a toilet into the shape of something that doesn’t mind shit, like a fly. It makes me sad when they make toilets into turtles or coffee cups, because I don’t think either thing would enjoy being a toilet. I think a fly would love being a toilet.