By Annie Guthrie

Annie Guthrie: Reading across your essays, your readers gain immediately the sense of intensity as your intent—the drive is to scrutinize, it seems. Is this a function of the form, would you say, or some more particularity of your vision or of your temperament, even…? How do you see the way you see, as it functions in relationship to how you write?

Lia Purpura: The sense of “intensity as intent” as you call it, is a reflection of both an aesthetic drive and a deeply held belief in the moral/spiritual importance of paying attention.  More simply, it’s just the way I make my way through the world – character trait or flaw, depending on how it’s going . . . .  The form of the essay, as I practice it, allows for refractions and multiple approaches, for attempts (essais) and re-collections—in other words, the essay is a form that can indulge the process of interrogation and curiosity itself, fold the search-as-process into the body of the work. I write to figure out the subject I’m circling, to refine the inkling into extended perception, to coax myself into a place without words or towards states of being that are lucid as initial perceptions, but that to be fully lit, need language.

Annie: In your essay “On Aesthetics,” your write about a young mother’s disturbing story, and a feeling of responsibility for crafting a correct response to it.   “I believe a mother should answer, as best she can, the questions put to her,” you write.  When I read these words, I can easily take them out of context of “the story” of this essay, and think about it as a directive to writer-mothers.  Can you talk about how you have negotiated these roles, and what you might say to parents trying to understand how to balance them?

Lia: Being honest with your children is a daily practice. Both my husband and I have tried to be open about not-knowing, about our own regrets and bad choices (and not just the big things, but those ever-present small moments of delay and impatience and insensitivity) in ways that are not alarming or overly weird, but that show we’re all constantly evolving, and that living consciously takes thinking about, reviewing and reconnecting with beliefs all the time.  

Annie: The lyric essay as a form provides ample, sprawling territory for us to comfortably (or uncomfortably, as the case may be) think things through.  How much of your job as an essayist is to make others think things through, or think again, as it were?

Lia: I’m interested in the micro-moments we fly right by, the small, interstitial moments in a day, in a relationship, in decisions made. Much of how I move through an essay requires a great slowing down—both for me and on the part of a reader. I know this is demanding – the lack of memoirish narrative, the sewing together of various parts that requires a reader to hold stuff in the air while a point is being stitched up. Often one’s aesthetic or way of moving is not only a natural expression, a kind of shadow self in words, but a corrective, a sought state, an ideal. In many ways, I’m terribly impatient, so as counterbalance, I want to come up against states of being that require an intensity of focus, a belief in the fragile-overlooked, and take lots of time to unfurl.

Annie: I have found in many other interviews a mention of “depth” and of an idea of “working deeply.”   What does that phrase mean to you, more specifically? What does it look like in practical terms, and/or what does it feel like in a more ambiguous sense?

Lia: I like small, close work, and I like length and density, too. As A.R. Ammons writes:

One can’t
have it

both ways
and both

ways is
the only

way I
want it.

 

Working with both poems and essays means I can do “depth” in different ways—by way of concentrations of time and emotion, syntax and line (poemwise); by way of extensions of image and illustration, and complexity of idea (essaywise).

Annie: In many of your poems, you seem to tick on words, savor them, stutter them into a starting point…how would you say your bodily experience of words functions as your muse? In other words, is your relationship to language actually responsible for your subject matter, and if so, how do you get yourself into fresh territory of vocabulary?

Lia: Our relationship to language is always responsible for our subject matter. Writers intent in getting to the point sacrifice the opportunity for an intimacy with words; so do, on the other hand, writers who endlessly fuss over language and arrange—they lose out on spontaneous, fortuitous mistakes and the generative pressures of urgency. Practically? I’m a collector, and I hoard words, jot, steal, look for opportunities to use, to resurrect, try out, define, alter. . .I am very often driven towards “ideas” by language, that is, by rhythm, the lightness or weight of words, by pairings and refrains—which as a poet, is a completely natural way to work.  

Annie: How is motherhood the same as writing?

Lia: May I answer in  fortune cookie form? Do not overshine raw treasure.

 

Lia Purpura read in the Hybrid Writing Series 2013 at the Poetry Center. Listen to Lia Purpura's reading here.