–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. Continue reading →