Ask The Author: Lisa Marie Basile

In December, we published Four Poems by Lisa Marie Basile from “Andalucia”. You can read the four poems here and buy the book here.

1. How does no one mean to carry their burdens to good places?

The first time I left the country I experienced the self-damaging nature of my psyche.  I realized we are responsible for the prolonging of our own suffering, and that is hard for me, as I was born a then-Catholic, blood-lusting, grudge-holding Italian.

I have had suffered from ‘fear’ for all of my life — fear of my own desires, fear to get onto a plane, fear of failure, fear of not being able to navigate life fully in another language, fear of exploration.

One day I bought a ticket to Mexico. I would be there for about a month. I sat on the steps of a Cathedral at noon. There were perfect trees and stray dogs sitting beside me, and the whole place was conducive to some perceived-holiness that is, whether you are religious or not, purifying. Here were people whose money bought them almost nothing. They managed to remain happy enough in many ways.

But I still was sad.  I felt as though I recreated the location as a funnel for my pain rather than letting the place’s beauty exist on its own. So, we do burden some ‘good places’ with what we carry there. I think it is important to learn to separate the outside world from our inside worlds.

In the case of Andalucia, I thought a lot about how we (‘we’ used generally) burden an inherently beautiful world with what feels like never-ending sexism and self-degradation and repetitive negative behaviors.  I wanted to show Andalucia as a sort of surreal makeup of limbo, utopia and the underworld (it is what we make of it) populated with our own human forms of evil — the injustices we place on others and allow to be placed upon ourselves.

In short, stop shitting where you eat.

2. If white people’s skin is their jewelry, what kind of jewelry? What would be the black market value?

What about the value of the human heart? They are all the same color and they’re like oversized pocket watches. If “the rapture” collected the souls of everyone who saw their skin as some valued accessory rather than one aspect of their identity, sadly there’d be a lot of people left here on earth.  I hate the idea of punishment, but if the “devil” didn’t support ignorance and racism, they would all probably be be skinned alive.

3. Would you rather conquer or be conquered?

Last night I embodied ‘Wrath’ at a 7 Deadly Sins poetry reading. I carried around a faux vintage musket and I loved it. I’d rather conquer, but I think being conquered makes for better writing.

4. Why do bad girls go to Andalucia?

Because Andalucia is gorgeous and us girls deserve to get totally naked and get sand in our hair or wherever we want it and sit by the sea and drink warm red wine and kindly ogle one another for the rest of eternity……right?

5. Where do these poems come from?

Like the movie Inception, I liked being able to reconstruct and deconstruct a real location.

Andalucia is a limbo of sorts, where you’re left to confront all that you are and all that you want to be. In Spain, on the beach, I spent a lot of time looking at the Mediterranean, and thinking about my identity and heritage and my nature. This will sound silly, but I read some texts that dated back to a 17th-century Spanish theologian named Martin del Rio who wrote on hydromancy, or water scrying. I liked the idea that what we divine from water could mean something.  In the water, I thought about how responsible we are for our own experiences and the way we perceive them, and about what keeps us in our own prisons.

The voice within the poem who says ‘Bad girls go to Andalucia’ is a moron. This sets the stage for the book: women are still constantly condemned by stigmas, blamed for actions otherwise blameless and punished for their choices personally and professionally — by society at large, including men and other women. How responsible are we for changing what we don’t like about society?

Andalucia, in the case of the book, represents some beautiful place where we are faced with our own ghosts. What Andalucia comes from is knowing that that it takes strength and momentum to escape the pains of our past and that sometimes we just fail. We fail, we try and we fail. So, what is a bad girl? What is bad? What does it mean to be a female? Where is Andalucia? Is it a new Atlantis? That is for the reader to determine.

6. What would be the erotic and marketing value of bone on bone action?

Hot. Did you know it’s totally legal to possess and sell human bones in this country? I’ll set-up a conference call with the Brothers Quay and get on that. Maceration masturbation…..