Betsy Fagin on the Undivided Self, Mystical Verse, and Reimagining Hemingway and Kerouac

Betsy Fagin is the author of Self-driving, chosen by Kazim Ali as winner of the 2024 Autumn House Poetry Prize, Fires Seen From Space (Winter Editions), All is Not Yet Lost (Belladonna), and Names Disguised (Make Now Books). Her work has received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Provincetown Community Compact, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

*

Peter Mishler: What is the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?

Betsy Fagin: The strangest thing is a wordless thing that I can’t put into language. (I’m not sure how this interview is going to work.) There’s a way that poetry, all art and music, has the capacity to impact people bypassing the cognitive mind. I love poetry especially because it offers a beautiful opportunity to use the intellect to bypass the intellect.

Certain combinations of sounds or images, the music of a line or new arrangement of concepts, layered meanings, all of this can help transform seeing, understanding. Expand views, create new pathways in the brain.

I haven’t seen any studies connecting poetry to neuroplasticity, but I don’t doubt the connection. Capacity to sit with difficulty, with incongruity, ambiguity helps us get more free. The strangest thing I know about art, about poetry is that it’s a portal, one of many paths to freedom.

PM: Upfront, I’d like to ask you the other question I ask everyone in this series. Is there a moment from your childhood that in some way seems to presage that you would become an artist?

BF: Great question, and I don’t really want to answer it (do we get to include emojis?—I don’t want to fall into self-mythologizing or deception, and I think that’s part of what makes me a poet. Isolating an incident and creating a narrative, to me, is inflicting story: telling it like it is when there are always infinite possibilities.

What feels more honest is to locate myself within a series of lineages and traditions, trajectories. I could talk about all the artists and frustrated artists in my family of origin, about how I only found out that my grandmother wanted to be a poet after her death. I could list out everything I ever read that inspired me or changed me. If I’m an artist now, a poet, it’s because I’m a vector of creativity, there’s a river of influences that flows in and through me.

And, I do have a journal on my shelf from 1977 when I was five years old. In kindergarten, every kid received a notebook and we had a daily assignment of writing or drawing—whatever was interesting on that day. I had wonderful teachers who responded to every drawing I made with comments like “experiments” and “This looks like a Rothko painting.” I absolutely loved it.

When school ended for the summer, I kept going. I didn’t stop writing and drawing. That was probably the first hint of what was to come.

PM: Could you tell me about some other ways that you see your poems, your writing, as perhaps intentionally avoiding deceptions of self-mythology?

BF: Did I say something about avoiding deception? That doesn’t sound like me. jk. I would love to start a conversation here about the Buddhist concept of anatta, not-self. I can talk about that all day. Drop some Dōgen or something. (From Dōgen’s Genjo-koan, “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.“)

What is the self I’d be self-mythologizing? That’s another book called Self-driving–nominally about cars, but it’s not about cars at all, it’s about the self (a vehicle).

I don’t think avoiding deception or self-mythologizing is my intention, rather that I take issue with the idea of a self as the center of anything. Or maybe it’s that this particular self that I inhabit–this combination of historically marginalized social locations–has rarely been centered so those narratives that get inflicted on me, that I spend my life contending with, aren’t my narrative.

When I first started sharing my writing, I often felt incredibly frustrated that it was interpreted as some kind of true confession about my personal life or commentary on the people around me when there’s almost nothing personal about it at all. It’s entirely personal and not personal.

Whatever self there is, is an impression of this living: one aspect of a many-faceted gem, an expression of one of the myriad things. There’s nothing to mythologize in it, it’s empty. Maybe if the artist isn’t present then all that’s left is art? What could I possibly be saying if none of the language is my own?

PM: I’m with you on that.

BF: I do want to answer your question properly, so I went back into the text to count up how many times I use I-statements. (Sometimes I love pronouns. I use she/they). I didn’t make it all the way through the book, but there are way more “we” “you” and “us”es than “I”s. What if my self-concept, the mythology I’m subscribing to/inscribing is more collective than individual?

I had some feedback from an older white guy poet once that I used too much we and us and he asked me why do Black writers do that, why don’t I just speak for myself. This loops back to questioning the nature of self again – I’m gently suggesting that it may be collective. If the self is expansive and inclusive, involving the seen and unseen, above, below and all around I wouldn’t avoid a mythology like that, I’d encourage it. It wouldn’t feel deceptive, to me that would be true. Maybe if you ask me yes/no questions I won’t ramble like this. I think the concept of a separate, isolated self is a delusion or deception. Maybe I do wind up answering the question in the end despite myself. (My “self.”)

PM: Okay, here’s a yes or no question. Do you have a spiritual practice?

BF: YES, absolutely. I don’t know how I would still be functioning without it.

PM: Could you maybe share a little bit about how and where you work?

BF: How and where do I work? All the time, everywhere: if I’m awake I’m listening, if I’m asleep I’m dreaming, it all flows into the writing.

PM: I wonder if you’re an artist who works on multiple projects at once? Can you tell me what that experience is like for you?

BF: Yes, I’m always working on lots of different things, but calling it projects makes it sound more deliberate and organized than it is. I’m always writing, but what the writing wants to become isn’t always clear to me and I don’t presume to be the boss of it. I’m much more the passenger than the driver. It’s like cooking or magic—writing needs to sit and ferment, stew, it’s a very slow process for me.

I follow my own energy and interest and when it’s not there, I put the work away until I discover it later and feel excitement again. If something doesn’t interest me over time, it doesn’t interest me. Felt cute might delete later isn’t the vibe for me with writing.

The experience is akin to surrender, so it’s very frustrating for me, I’d love to just get to done, but there isn’t any done. If a manuscript has to be rejected eighty million times and take twenty years to get published, that’s the time it takes.

PM: To what extent does your writing practice demonstrate a disbelief in the separate, isolated self?

BF: Great question! I feel so seen or caught in the act maybe—you’ve hit the nail on the head. I think I might have said something about an early frustration at personalization being projected at the work, like everything is my true confession.

In a totally bratty, reactive move early on I started working with found texts and that’s still a part of my writing practice now. How can it be personal, about “me” if none of the words are mine?

It’s a constant experiment with political and spiritual implications—is it possible to communicate an experience, a feeling through language that isn’t my own? I mean this at different levels: using found texts and recasting the words into new poems (spells), is what any tarot Magician does, working with the elements at the level of the mundane.

Esoterically, I resonate deeply with an example a friend just shared with me of a mycelium network where we, little mushroom selves, appear as separate, but are actually emerging from a much larger, unseen consciousness—not separate at all. Dharma teacher Ruth King sums up our condition succinctly: nothing in life is personal, permanent or perfect.

I try to reflect that truth through language: “We didn’t come into this world, / we came out of it.”

Could I take a story like On The Road or The Sun Also Rises, any story that doesn’t allow for the existence of realities that are othered: sick, mad, poor, queer, Black, nonbinary, any social locations that aren’t straight cis het white etc.? Does the language become my own as I make use of it? Eventually, the questions dissolve, the separation (that’s just an idea anyway) melts away and what remains?

Maybe what I’m writing with isn’t a disbelief in separate isolated selves, that’s objective physical reality, but a belief—sometimes it’s confidence, other times just curiosity—in whatever it is that flows through us all.

PM: Can you tell me more about making use of a Kerouac or Hemingway novel?

BF: One morning I heard on the radio that The Sun Also Rises had fallen out of copyright and I knew instantly that I wanted to dig up my copy and rewrite it. It’s an exercise I’ve done a few times now with different novels that I had a visceral reaction to. Initially, I was writing a novel, but whatever I write eventually morphs into poems. Originally the chapters correlated to chapters in the book, they’re a practical organizational tool.

I was talking about this earlier, it relates to not-self. The Sun Also Rises is one of those books that was inflicted on me when I was younger—”classic literature.” Where are the Black people, the women, poor people, sick people, children, the aged, plants, animals, neighbors, kin? What happens to them/us in the story? We’re not the center of that story, not even included most of the time, ignored.

It’s not about the selves that are centered or marginalized, the story or mythology is just a matter of perspective. That was the game for me, to take the language and create something from it that reflected a different view, told a different story.

Maybe it was also a kind of a frustrated response to seeing that beloved quotation from Audre Lorde everywhere I look, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I have no interest in dismantling anyone’s house, I want to build my own and I’m happy to use every useful tool I can find to do it.

This returns to your earlier question about the strangest thing I know about poetry. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I hope it included something about how ways of seeing are numberless, at least in poetry. That language and stories can change the world and that poetry is a technology that can bypass the cognitive mind and rewire thought processes.

If I didn’t say that earlier, I meant to. Chapters help, I think, people like structure, at least I do—they’re like sign posts, wayfinding tools.

PM: Did you find yourself conversing with Hemingway to some degree?

BF: Lol, no. He’s not the kind of guy I’d like to have a conversation with. I’m happy to just take all the words he left laying around and try to see if I can make something that’s beautiful and true for me out of them.

PM: Was this also how the “resistance is beautiful” section of Fires Seen From Space came about? Or something else?

BF: I wrote these poems after Occupy Wall Street (thirteen years ago now) when people were busy giving those of us involved a hard time about how ineffective it was and how nothing changed because of it. It seems really sweet to me now, looking back. So much death and terror has unfolded since then, it all feels more like an elegy. I don’t think I imagined it elegiac before, that’s just occurring to me now, but it kind of is.

It was an exploration of what resistance can look like and why it’s necessary for continued growth and change. Resistance is adaptive, can be wholesome and should be honored. It gets a bad rap, but again I think it’s a matter of perspective. Who or what’s being resisted?

I absolutely loved and hated having my authority challenged as a parent—on the one hand I wanted my kid to do what I say, but deep down I absolutely did not. Follow your own authority. What better gift could I give my child than courage and confidence?

Resistance, the way I’m thinking of it, is operating within some kind of oppressive power dynamic that needs transforming. Using sidewalk chalk isn’t vandalism. Subway fare evasion isn’t a reason to be shot by police.

We’re uniquely positioned within the heart of a crumbling empire right now to examine our own positionality and our power. As horrific as life is right now amidst unfolding genocides and ever-increasing oppression, we still have opportunities to resist. That’s worth celebrating.

PM: Does a shorter line come to you more naturally, or represent some kind of musical notation that sounds right to you or you like the look of it? Wondering what your relationship is to the shorter line?

BF: The way writing actually moves through me is more in paragraph form, like bubbles or clouds. I cringe at the density of it on the page though. I crave space for breath and room for contemplation.

If lines are short it really is the result of an extreme editing process. It’s what happens when I work on a novel for ten years—poems with very short lines. The shorter lines are also due to sound, I hear breaks and appreciate the ambiguity a break can contribute to a line.

PM: So are you saying that your initial impulse is storytelling, since you mentioned writing a novel and you end up returning to poetry? Is that accurate? Regardless, why do you suppose you move toward poems?

BF: There’s something in the idea of “author” or “writer” that assumes a kind of authority. I’m absolutely being deliberate and making choices, but the outcome and impact of those choices isn’t up to me at all, I have to surrender my intentions and allow the work to be received however it will be received: praise, blame, being ignored, it’s all out there. (As in life.)

I don’t think my impulse is storytelling, I think I’m just doing what I love—exploring and playing in language fields with sound and image, finding resonances, throwing rocks, poking holes into narratives that try to silence, exclude or dominate.

In that way, poetry is much more aligned with what I’m doing than a novel ever could be. Poetry allows both simplicity and complexity, nuance, ambiguity without the this is how it is vibe that tends to accompany narrative.

I don’t want readers to believe me or trust what I’m saying, I want them to trust themselves. No one can enforce a particular reading of poetry – it means whatever it means to the reader. That possibility is a kind of freedom, that’s what moves me to poetry.