Ruin, Repair, and Keeping On: An Interview with Rebecca Lindenberg https://ift.tt/Kqw720A
Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible offers readers a lyrical reflection on how to survive past and future apocalypses. One that, in the present moment, feels desperately needed. Like Charon in Greek mythology, the figure who guides new souls to the underworld, the speaker brings us on a journey through liminal spaces somewhere between life and death. Between tragedy and healing. Between hauntings and hope. In this collection, the narrator explores their experiences with Type 1 diabetes from many different lenses. Lindenberg reckons with the body both as a place of pleasure and a source of pain. Chronic illness is explored through different lenses. In “Blood Magic,” for instance, we see how Type 1 diabetes might have been explained through folklore, though the narrator challenges these superstitions.
Readers are given a delightful tour through different sites of decay in history, from the imaginary prisons of Berlin, to Silgo Abbey, the Beelitz Heilstatten, (to quote Lindenberg, “an abandoned hospital complex in what was formerly East Germany”) to the Sacsayhuaman (which, as I learned from Britainnica, is an Inca fortress overlooking Cuzco, Peru) at the Teufelsberg hill in Germany (a listening station during the Cold War) the Palatine Hill, into gardens, a TV show with Anthony Bourdain, San Telmo Flea Market, an Andean Pastoral where “a little godfooted mouse emerges,” and “the world holds itself somehow unimaginably together.” I enjoyed discovering these hidden histories of places I’ve never been through Lindenberg’s work. Although failure is in her collection’s title, Rebecca Lindenberg no doubt succeeds in doing the impossible. In her splendid hand, “the seeds of words” bloom out of ruins.
Rebecca Lindenberg is the author of three poetry collections, Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible (BOA Editions, 2024), The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series, 2014), winner of the Utah Book Award, and Love, an Index (McSweeney’s 2012). She’s the recipient of an Amy Lowell Scholarship for Traveling Poets, a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the MacDowell Arts Colony. Poems from the most recent collection appear or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets (ed. Ada Limón), Missouri Review, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for the Cincinnati Review.
Do you remember the moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer/poet?
I mean, the short answer is no. And I doubt there was a single moment. But the longer answer is this: As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been a person fascinated with, troubled by, and also comforted by language. I got turns-of-phrase stuck in my head like a catchy tune, memorized quotes and poems without realizing it – along with all the song lyrics from my childhood and coming-of-age in the 80s and 90s. I never felt quite okay with an emotion or experience until I found the right language to describe it to myself in a way that felt apt. And I absolutely loved to read. When I kind of found myself falling for poetry (it was Frederico Garcia Lorca who first took the top of my head off, the poem “When the Moon Rises,” specifically) I remember having this overwhelming response to the rationally irrational – or perhaps irrationally rational? — language and syntax and energy of his poems. I felt awe and thrill and I recall thinking: I didn’t know you could do it like that! And then, rather quickly: I want to know how to do that.
How did Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible get its title?
During the pandemic, I was working on poems (especially the poems about living with diabetes) for this book, and trying to read widely on the subject of failure. How have humans thought about the idea of failure (personal, artistic, social, cultural, political, psychological, architectural or structural, etc., etc.) throughout different times, and in different ways. I came upon a William Faulkner interview with TheParis Review that speaks of artistic failure specifically, and serves as the epigraph to the title poem of this book, but felt so resonant and meaningful to me. I suppose I recognized my own thinking in the words, and felt a deep kinship with the whole idea of striving, failing, failing better, being somehow both fallen far short of a dream of “getting it right” in writing and in life, and yet, somehow, still doing something splendid. Sometimes just keeping going is the most splendid thing of all. When I was searching for a title for the book, the phrase “our splendid failure to do the impossible” from that Faulkner interview and epigraph just felt like such an organizing principle for all of the poems, and it helped me so much to see how they all fit together – eventually I just couldn’t imagine the title being anything else.
You write in the acknowledgements of Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible that “This project began many years ago. I found myself in Berlin thanks to the Amy Lowell award, surrounded by different forms of ruin and repair resulting from multiple wars and the city’s in-some-ways-ongoing reunification. I found myself fixating on the idea of these ruins.” What was your most surprising discovery while in Berlin? How did you decide which forms of ruin and repair would make their way into the collection? Did these different sites also inform the forms these poems took? Were there any places you visited in Berlin that you didn’t include?
I suppose the answer really depends upon the ruin under consideration. Sometimes, ruins are remnants and revenants, sometimes they’re monuments, sometimes they’re an unfinished idea. I think the main thing I realized was that I felt profoundly torn between an inclination to romanticize and an equally intense intuition to read and reveal the darker truths evident in the kind of architectural and topographical archive I was wandering around in. I came to understand ruin not as something glamorous, but as evidence of imperialisms that build and subsequent imperialisms that hermit-crab inside that ancient shell.
There were many places in Berlin and elsewhere that I didn’t include. Mostly because as alluring or as weighty or as moving as they may be, I didn’t feel like I could really say anything new about them. Or anything complex about them. There’s a park in Berlin that preserves just one thing: the most infamous of train tracks. It’s mostly a kind of wilderness now. It’s a haunting and very still place. But what else besides that could I possibly say about it? I wanted and tried to get off my own beaten path, I think, both literally and figuratively.
I’m especially intrigued by the appearance of ghosts as a recurring motif. I’m curious what drew you to the image of ghosts, and if you were conscious of how they manifested thematically while writing?
I think ghosts, for me, are all about a kind of estrangement. They represent the soul, if you’re into that kind of thing, estranged from the body. They perhaps represent the soul estranged, if you’re into this kind of thing, from its properly restful afterlife. Having a chronic or disabled body, I think, can feel estranging. The world, whose demands and architectures and obstacles and concepts of time and how we ought to “manage” it can make us feel estranged from our bodies, as we strive to make them behave themselves in what feels like someone else’s home. Sometimes my own disease definitely makes me feel estranged from my body, even though it is absolutely OF my body, when it makes me dizzy or nauseated or panicked or pained. Sometimes it’s as simple as being “different” that can feel like an estrangement from others, including at times from loved ones, from intimacy. But perhaps “ghostless-ness” is different? That still feels like it’s thinking about estrangement but more an estrangement from one’s own expectations. Not a let-down, no, but a kind of observed absence of something – even if it’s just one’s own affective response to something.
The first epigraph quotes C.D. Wright from The Book That Jane Wrote: Midnights where she writes “Poetry is nothing if not equipped for crisis. . . . The goal is not to make sense but art of this story. The goal is not to make a story but to experience the whole mess.” How has poetry helped you navigate different crises, and how do you experience “the whole mess” while writing?
What I kind of want to say is this: When I can articulate the answer to this question, I will feel like I’ve been excused from the table and can stop writing poems altogether. But what I also feel I must say is: Poetry lets me echolocate, like a little bat, and when I can see the words my brain makes, I understand my own overwhelm better than I did before I wrote them down. And I experience that as a kind of relief. Just as I experience relief when I read words of others that give shape to my own chaos, or reveal something for me that I’ve deeply felt but not deeply known. I don’t necessarily think that’s the only or even the most important way poetry works, but I do know those potential movements of poetry are important to me, personally.
But I love the quote, especially, because it acknowledges the impossibility of actually realizing that aspiration to connect, to articulate, to order, to contain, too. The world is messy. Language, too, is very messy and the way we internalize it can be very self-harming and the way we use it can be very violent. So to return to the idea of complexity again, I think poetry is uniquely equipped for crisis because it can hold in few lines many contradictions that are all equally the case, many helixed emotions, without having to resolve them in any way other than to say: “Hey. Look. The world can hold all of this and somehow, however wildly unlikely as it may be, hold itself together. Is that not miraculous?”
In “Imaginary Prisons,” you write poignantly that “it’s somehow human nature to seek ourselves in many horrors, to test our sense of belonging against the story of another’s, be it myth or rumor, or reassembled fragments of history.” I’m interested in both the assembling of fragments of history and the assembling of these poems about them. Once they were written, how did you go about reassembling your poems into a book? Were you thinking of order in the drafting process? And how did you know which fragments of history would be a part of Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible?
Oh – thank you for another very astute and probing question. I absolutely did not think about order whatsoever as I was writing these poems and, in fact, it was really hard to order the book. I began the book thinking that I wanted to write about myself, my life, my imagination before the events of my first or second book, things that impacted who I was as a person even before those things came to be. I wanted it to move differently and feel different, perhaps more associative – like holding down the sustaining pedal on a piano as you play. As for what fragments of history, memory, show up in a poem – I think that’s mostly random. I try to put as much stuff, just general stuff, into the deep aquifer of my unconscious as I possibly can and then I kind of trust that it’ll just bubble up when it’s needed. I wish I could tell you that some of these aspects of making a poem or a book are much more intentional – and sometimes they are. But part of the pleasure of making poems and books of poems is, I think, experiencing the mysteriousness of language as it makes itself known to the writer, and trying to listen to what you’ve written and let it tell you what you don’t realize you’re saying, or singing, or sighing, or hoping, or learning, or letting go.
Thank you so much for this chance to talk about my book and my practices as a writer of poems, and thank you for the careful, deep time and attention you’ve given to my work. That is such an honor, and this is such a privilege.
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