Part instruction manual for living, part mourning song and meditation on America, Rennie Ament’s aptly titled chapbook, “French Braid,” weaves stories of being both at home and not at home in the world. The 2018 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize finalist braids lived experiences with the absurd, painting strikingly vivid, arresting scenes that rouse readers’ emotions and intellect. As she writes, “you have to be the explosion you wish to see,” and her poetry is precisely that: an explosion that we all need to see.
Rennie Ament’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, Redivider, Yalobusha Review, minnesota review, The Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2018 Yellowwood Prize in Poetry from Yalobusha Review and a nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She’s also received fellowships from the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in New York City.
Jamie Wagman: I would love to hear a bit about your writing life and your process. What’s influenced your writing? When did you first know you were a writer, and what has your journey as a writer been like? What delights and what scares you most as a writer?
Rennie Ament: Poem-wise, I don’t pay attention to semantics at first. I’ll give myself some kind of formal constraint (a sonnet, “e” the only vowel allowed, words can only come from a specific source text), but mostly I want to play in language and surprise myself. It’s fun to scribble gibberish until something sounds both strange and true.
Nonfiction is great for flipping through if your thoughts rut. Hildegard von Bingen’s “Physica” has been near me for a year now. Mostly a 12th Century catalog of herbal remedies, she also gives advice like: A mouse is hot and has insidious habits and devilish skills. Since it always flees, its flesh is harmful to humans and not much use as medicine. But, if someone having epilepsy falls on the ground, after he gets up, place a mouse in a vessel of water. Give that water to the person to drink, and wash his forehead and feet in that water. This should be done each time he falls and he will be cured.
—I love that book.
I’m always researching alongside the scribbling, but no one will ever know how long I spent reading about mouse water or whatever when I’m done. Most of “the facts” I collect invisibly buttress poems.
Growing up, my mom was singing unless in conversation or asleep. I knew dozens of folk songs before I could read. I liked the songs with nonsense choruses best. Maybe because of those songs and when they happened to me developmentally, my syntax leans musical?
Sort of related—since I can remember, when falling asleep sometimes I see a word floating above the bed in neon. DILATE or BUNKER or CORAL. The word changes, but the sensation is always the same: eventually, the word compresses, comes down into my mouth, and weighs my jaw down. I feel blissed out and pass out.
I started writing around when I learned to read. I liked the typewriter clacking and got steady attention for my stories in school. I wrote mostly fiction and nonfiction until college. Got lucky with my first poetry teacher. She was a human rights activist who could convince you a higher level of consciousness was attainable only through the reading and writing of poems (poetry is a cult).
In one class, I remember being asked to describe, plot-wise, what was happening in an Emily Dickinson poem. Had no clue. And that was embarrassing—to admit I didn’t explicitly get it. But I could taste how dense the poem was. CF bedtime word snacks.
What scares me? Describing beauty. I don’t run from flowers in life so why in poems? It must be connected to gender performance anxiety and not wanting to be a woman who writes about gardens. Wild—to be afraid of saying hyacinth. I have one garden in my book and that garden is a succulent patch.
What else? Inauthenticity, though I don’t know what it means to write an “authentic” poem.
What do I love: Cognitive dissonance. Oxymorons. Absurdity. Research. Learning through writing poems. Discovery in general. Trying to create my own shorthand.
I have my obsessions and they pop up in all the poems like a gopher infestation. Gophers hold things together. Or horses—Horses are forward motion.
— Rennie Ament
Wagman: Some of your work here has appeared in Hysterical, Bone Bouquet, cream city review, and Yalobusha Review. Can you speak to the creation of this chapbook? The title is “French Braid.” Why did you choose this title? Can you speak to the repetition of home and references to horses throughout your work?
Ament: Initially I thought, “You need to do your book’s hair.” Then I culled the chapbook from the full-length first collection I’ve been working on. There were ten sections in that manuscript at the time. “French Braid” is three of those sections braided together: short, skinny little poems about home interwoven with prose poems that respond to lines taken André Breton’s “Ode to Charles Fourier” plus a group of poems I think of as cascading poems—quatrains and tercets that break down across the page.
I wanted to see if the poems did better together. They did. I have my obsessions and they pop up in all the poems like a gopher infestation. So. Gophers hold things together. Or horses—
The horses! Horses are forward motion. My thoughts are, at their best, horses. The underlying word driving most of my poems is Go. My thoughts are, at their worst, also horses. Dumb and snuffling. I don’t know. Sometimes you gotta climb into a horse.
I write about home because I don’t understand what or who home is and I’m always trying to root while galloping.
Wagman: So many lines from “French Braid,” stay with me–from the line about sitting shiva for Pangea in “My People The Horse Thieves” to “I stopped reading men” in “Under the Never Failing Anesthesia of Banners.” How does gender function in your work?
Ament: I hate this question. It’s an important question. I wish this question on all male-identified writers.
A few women-identifying poets I admire say their consciousness is genderless on the page. Being a floating eyeball sounds freeing. But there’s something in me that also wants to slam the door on that option. I’m not a confessional poet (or a writer of apparently personal poetry—a better descriptor from Sharon Olds); I use vaguely conceptual, Language-oriented techniques to generate writing. But I still feel entitled to pillage my own life at will. Without access to subjectivity, I would feel rootless, ahistorical.
I’m not on a mission to write polemical poems about misogyny. But it’s useful to write with an enemy in mind. Who am I quoting?
Anyway, if you write about women you write about men you write about desire for men (if you lean that way) you write about power you write about powerlessness you write about systems of power you write about abuse of power and all the -isms enter the picture, hopefully.
Read Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets. Read piano tuning guides. Read an outdated copy of the DSM. Buy random, cheap used books. Stock up your language pantry.
— Rennie Ament
Wagman: What advice do you have for aspiring poets?
Ament: Read interviews with living poets you like and they’ll lead you to books and writers you’ll like.
Read as many poems in translation as possible!
Read Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets. Read piano tuning guides. Read an outdated copy of the DSM. Buy random, cheap used books. Stock up your language pantry.
People can’t help but rub their own taste all over your work. Don’t let one person’s hot take crush you. I’m floating in an Olympic-sized pool of accumulated rejections as I write this.
Wagman: What is the function of poetry today, do you think?
Ament: Poems should complexify, add nuance to, interrogate the status quo re?
Jamie Wagman is an Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana.
Fab interview.