The Lightning Room with Rae Gouirand

Won’t you join us and make a murderous face with Rae Gouirand as she discusses the interesting blurriness of whether it’s better to be understood or to be loved (see her poem In Lieu of Questions in our Jan Issue).

1) Reading your poem makes me feel like I woke up much earlier than normal on a summer morning and it feels like I’m on vacation, but I know I have to go to work in a few hours. Why do I feel that way?

Because nothing happens, or has happened. Though it might at some point. But that doesn’t matter. The stakes have dissolved. There’s a private threshold. Because both late night and earlyearly morning are times of attention, and interesting blurriness, and privacy. The poem observes a passing moment. Time keeps passing, but not without recognition. It has a nonspecific quality to it not because it’s nonspecific, but because the aperture’s open.

2) What are the questions you can’t stop asking yourself?

There’s a poem in my first book called ‘Hearsay’ about a conversation I had with a close friend years ago on the subject of whether it’s better to be understood or to be loved. Though I know my answer to that question, and have for a long time, I find that lots of things in daily experience remind me that it’s there.

How many variations on the first Venn diagram that comes to mind exist for any of the many things I’m orbiting around each other in the ongoing three-dimensional drawing room of my head.

What is possible. How to do it. What matters. What fire is made of.

3) What’s the most misunderstood you’ve ever been? By someone or a group of people or in some other way.

Obvious Shaw citation here (‘the biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place’ etc), but you know, it’s probably mostly ‘poets’ who are going to read this, and ‘poets’ get the multitudinous nature of sense and the more interesting aspects of all the demands that any attempt at communication makes of us, so instead I’ll say this: I apparently sometimes make a face when I’m thinking pretty hard, and some who have observed it have qualified it as ‘murderous.’ And gotten convinced, based on their interpretations of my thinking hard face (which I’m sure does sometimes communicate disapproval, distaste, or disappointment: sane responses to many of the things I sometimes think about hard), that I’m pissed as hell. Generally at them.

Why do people think your face is about them? Or, furthermore, think they get to govern it? I’m thinking now of this time I accompanied an ex-partner to buy a car, and this one super-obnoxious dealer staff guy who had been sliming us both during the initial paperwork came over while she was off doing something, and I was just kind of staring at the floor in a corner seat (there were no interesting materials to read on the walls) and trying not to attract anyone’s gross sales-slime attention, and he straight up told me to smile, like he had the right to. And I’m sorry, but of course I’m not going to smile after that point. I don’t take directions from dudes in suits wearing that much cologne. It’s not even like there were other people around–we were the only people in the whole place. The whole thing was really grossy intrusive. So he pretended I was this sulky bitch with an attitude problem instead of this reasonably unamused individual who was just ready to get the hell out of there. Not a conflict of understanding. We understood each other perfectly.

I don’t know that I believe in mis/understanding so much anymore. A more recent tuning-in to some of the subtleties of acceptance/rejection/refusal dynamics has replaced that concept for me. People choose what they ‘understand’ and what they’ll acknowledge that you ‘understand.’ Lots of different kinds of aggression get mislabeled as lack of understanding.

4) What’s a food or drink you hate that most people love?

Sweets. With only occasional exceptions of very specific types. I am no sugar addict. On a whim (because a friend called and told me to, basically) I randomly applied earlier this winter for this weird little side gig at a sense lab that involves getting trained as a chocolate taster (and this is a funny tie-in, since there’s chocolate in the poem, though mostly as a word), and then doing a series of tastings over a period of some number of months. Apparently people who aren’t impressed by chocolate for chocolate’s sake, and who are much more interested in learning how to describe their experiences of dissatisfaction, are attractive to people who collect data. We’ll see what happens.

5) Type an embarrassing secret then randomly change the letters so no one can read it.

I think if you understand most of what there is to understand about yourself, no one around you really has any secrets to speak of, but here:

Nnte ikdal even thes ever tatote this doer of my parught morid pitew thoe a be, and hay I canree fet.

Middle English? Latin? O, little sandbox.

6) Write a question this poem could be a reply to.

How about an imperative?: Describe ambiguity as the available information it is.