The Lightning Room with Christine Gosnay

–Interview by Diana Clarke

Christine Gosnay’s poem “The Pleasures of the Gut” appeared in [PANK] back in January, we sent her questions about it in June, and she answered them in October. Fortunately, good poems don’t get old, just wiser—or, in reading them, we do.

1. Early in “The Pleasures of the Gut,” the speaker is fixated with hunger, but by the closing section she throws untouched food into the trash, while her bowl of oatmeal “leaves four bends of a circle on my two legs/proof of the butter, and the grain, outside my body.” Can you speak to the long cycle you depict here, food moving through the body and also outside it, the speaker’s body participating in some bigger turn of consumption and digestion?

I think about food constantly. Hunger trains the mind and the body; food rewards. Real hungers, hungers you remember, individually, as physical and emotional experiences, shape consciousness and behavior as much as anything from love to abandonment to art. A market thrills me, any place to see piles of food lain out piece by piece, food waiting to be touched and seen; I love to watch people and animals eating, to see a person choosing a meal, to watch plates being cleared of bones, gristle, greens, crusts. Because consumption is a choice and digestion is automatic, there seems a lot to say about what happens to the mind after the body has eaten. Guilt, confusion, sometimes disgust, and sometimes pleasure, if everything was done right. I find it difficult to look at the world after I have eaten and impossible to look away from it when I have not.

2. I loved the moments in which you played with French translation. French is historically associated with decadence and sensual/gustatory pleasures, while translation is its own kind of digestion. What is your relationship with languages like?

For many years I’ve spoken French poorly but read it relatively well, making it a guarded affair, much the same way I see eating. Language is guarded, the horizon of thought and speech—there are words I can’t or won’t say. But the French interest me because of the clear understanding of delayed gratification vs. gluttony that their language and literature demonstrate. When I wrote parts of this poem I had just read Zola’s The Belly Of Paris, with its incomparable and maddening descriptions of the food in Les Halles and the bloody concoctions in Quenu’s charcuterie, and Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and other short books from the Human Comedy. I then stumbled onto a book called Balzac’s Omelette, by Anka Muhlstein and translated by Adriana Hunter. It lends itself to anyone interested in the role of gorging and deprivation in Balzac’s life and writing and in the time of his contemporaries in France. If I could eat like anyone, I’d eat like Balzac, and love it, and regret it.

3. Maybe especially because this was a poem about eating, but I often felt the need to read lines from this poem—”I longed to taste a mousse,” “I hummed the harmless idioms under my breath, behind”—out loud, to feel and taste them. What’s your relationship to sound when writing a poem? What sounds influence you?

Because I don’t like to hear myself speak I’ve started to force the last part of writing a poem to involve, in some way, recording my voice (even if it’s just one word, or a whisper), and as this grows more routine I see the effects of composing aloud reflected on the page. I tap a pencil when I write. The sound of two or three clocks ticking has always been a most friendly noise, the sound of waves from a few streets away. The sound of the heart, palpitations and all, affects some of the process, the drive of syntax and lines.

4. Over the course of the poem you accumulate so much imagery relating to women and food—”to share fruit-/such a precious betrayal of my own body,/and who would merit the seeds?”—and I especially loved “You eat fish as if sewing, sneaking the bones out,/Hysterically.” Was there a particular question about that relationship that you wanted to explore when you started writing?

I guess it could be argued that the relationship between women and food, between females and fruiting, is something to which we attach tacitly, and that we share buried expectations—but why? Biological? Jungian—arrived in our psyches? The father bringing, the mother preparing—an archetype. A woman consoling with food is benign, but a woman eating alone is fraught. Why? Why is it easy to watch a man eat with his hands but difficult to see a woman or a girl do the same? Because it is difficult, is it easier to make beautiful? Is this our task these days?

5. I really liked how this poem zoomed in and out between details—eating cake in home videos, the Indian food the speaker ordered by webcam, “a spoon of blue sky.” How do you choose which details to include? How does writing poetry influence the way you observe and experience small ordinary things?

Making a wide sweep, these were the colors and pictures and hungers I saw “sticking up” out of everything everything else, following the Impressionist style. I wrote in a notebook some time ago that ‘before I knew describing everything in sight as writing, I called it a life.’ I think this is true, that if you describe what you are observing, whether thing or force or event, you are or are going to be writing.

6. What did you have for dinner last night?

A sandwich. Not the perfect sandwich but a sandwich, my favorite thing.