Her Portrait in the Poem:
An Interview with Arden Levine
by Karin Cecile Davidson
Arden Levine’s debut poetry collection, Ladies’ Abecedary (Small Harbor Publishing, 2021), reveals a stunning and surprising alphabet of women. From A to Z, these are women and girls who walk with wide steps through the world; who descend and ascend mountains thick with snow, stepping-stones and stories in each stride; who sit alone in rooms, reading, ready to be transformed; who swim through a slipstream of unforgettable language. This chapbook may appear a slim volume, its cover curious, beautiful, unsettling, but the pages within reveal a population that is as feminine as it is fierce. To read these poems is to be unearthed from the typical landscapes where women have been placed, to be spun around and sent toward “unruly asphalt gardens” and into the sleep of “a chrysalis curve.”
Levine’s writings appear in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Sixth Finch, Sycamore Review, and other literary journals, as well as the anthology Dead of Winter (Milk & Cake Press, 2021). Her poems have also been featured in AGNI Online and in Missouri Review’s Poem-of-the-Week, and syndicated via American Life in Poetry (selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser). Currently acting as a Foundation Board Member for Beloit Poetry Journal, Levine previously served as an Associate Editor for Epiphany Magazine and has guest edited for Bodega Magazine. In 2019, she collaborated with poet and graphic designer Rico Frederick to create the visual poem series “guarding/Life” as part of Underwater New York’s 10th Anniversary edition on human labor in NYC’s waterways.
A resident of New York City, Levine’s daily work focuses on sustainable social policy and nonprofit leadership. She holds a MPA from New York University’s Graduate School of Public Service and has directed initiatives supporting housing affordability, homelessness prevention, equitable community development, environmental justice, women’s wellness, and behavioral health awareness.
B
, little she, was told she could be whoever she wished
in the school pageant. So she chose God.—Arden Levine, “B”
KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: What called you to infuse the power of language into the women and girls of Ladies’ Abecedary?
ARDEN LEVINE: Curiosity, fascination, and affection for the topic. I can draw a line from this book back to my experiences coming of age in the heady ’90s-to-’00s of [Washington] DC and NYC, and the art forms of female identity-assertion in that specific moment. Any number of examples come to mind, but two pole stars glint: In my CD player was Tori Amos’ “Strange Little Girls” (her project to record and reclaim songs written by men about women), and on my shelf was Annie Leibovitz’s photography collection “Women” (its numerous images of common and celebrity on adjacent pages). In both, I noted the particular type and degree of sensitivity that the women-creators applied to their women-subjects. But I also clocked that (branding aside) neither was attempting to document a definitive version of womanhood; rather, they were recording glimpses of it in briefly-standing-still or quickly-going-by moments.
Over the intervening years, as I’ve steeped in observation and conversation with women in my work in social service and public policy, I’m often left quietly gobsmacked by a statement, a gesture, some tiny moment that becomes a sort of synecdoche for an expression of female identity. And I considered how those earlier-encountered songs and photos of women and girls told their stories in a small number of deft moves, and how that breath-length brevity made them poetry. From there, it was an easy jump: The tightest economy of text is the alphabet itself, and an abecedary (or alphabet book) is a primary tool of teaching and learning. If I could create a collection where each letter was a tiny poem-story of a woman, perhaps I could place those poem-ladies in conversation (with each other and with the reader) and reveal something about how visibility begins with the fundaments of language.
C & D
walk by, smell
like they’ve been
up
to
down
to
every-
thing
they’re into.—Arden Levine, “C & D”
DAVIDSON: Pacing, rhythm, breath, pattern. How is form revealed, or do you begin with poetic form?
LEVINE: Definitely revelation over prescription. I love structure (as both a project manager and a writer!), but I also aim to be the kind of writer that lets the poem tell me what kind of structure it wants. So, the process usually went something like this: I’d word-sketch enough of the story to see and hear the woman clearly, and at that point, if I’d done it right and was paying the right kind of attention, she’d provide me with pretty useful directions on how and where to draw the lines and curves (as it were). “C&D” is actually a good example; I knew those women were hitting the sidewalk with their hot burlesque swing, and I had to decide how to move those legs down the street. It took shuffling the syllables into staccato lines that collectively stepped along all the way to the bottom of the page. (There is a poem by Juan Felipe Herrera titled “You Can’t Put Muhammad Ali in a Poem” in which the individual words bob and weave against the ropes of the margins. I aspire to that.)
Likewise with “K,” I definitely didn’t enter that poem with the goal of writing a sestina. (All power to those who wake up in the morning and decide that today is sestina-writing day … I regard them as I do those who mix in kettle bell routines.) But managing the cadence of ten girls marching across a treacherous mountainside edge meant enveloping the line breaks with repeated words, micro-mantras to keep them safe inside the poem. E, of course, was the hardest to design (and is probably the hardest for the reader as well); the clinical, anodyne context that becomes a site of bodily invasion evolved into a pantoum over several drafts, and the disturbing drone of recycled lines is a core set piece. (Likewise the use of soft consonants … with the intentional exception of the X’s in “textured” and “extracted.”) I wanted the reader to hear the hum of fluorescent lights and the wind chime clatter and for that tonality and timbre to create an unsettling contrast to the scene being described.
E
held, in her beautiful unadorned hands,
a hardcover book.
She read it, regarded the room,
reflected. Patient.—Arden Levine, “E”
DAVIDSON: Many of these poems examine facets of narrative: women opened up, bled, and then revealed as “conditional object[s]”; girls who play God in school pageants; sisters as stepping-stones, as storytellers. Tell of the process of deciding on the details of narrative in your poetry.
LEVINE: I’ve said and maintain that none of the poems are pure biographies (though some are clearly inspired by women I know or that the world knows). So, actually, the challenge for me was less about what details to include than it was about how many to leave out. I needed to honor that concept of anonymity that the project implied, women whose images are so universal that they are actual letters of the alphabet. But to cut them too rough would make the story overly spare, and storytelling is the point of these poems. So as I sought the form, style, and sound (per the previous question), I played around quite a lot with how much I could remove. “M”, “O”, and “U” (among the scientists/explorers in the collection) are examples of how far I’d go; 50 words or fewer, six lines or fewer. And in each I feel the story is still there, still fully audible.
It’s hard to define, but I’d know I was done with a poem when I’d read it and say to myself, “that’s her, that’s the woman I’m envisioning … but also, that could be any one of thousands of women.” I feel confirmed in my success with this approach when a reader or listener asks me “Is [so-and-so] poem about [so-and-so] woman?” and I think, I definitely did not have that woman in mind when I wrote the poem, but re-reading it I can absolutely see her portrait in the poem. It’s like cutting a black paper silhouette: the facial features are obscured, but a scissor-contoured wisp of hair could reveal a life. My intent in each poem to uncover that detail, or set of details, that captures a woman’s dignified profile, and makes a statement about the source of that dignity in women’s experiences writ larger.
S
sees cake, but nothing she wants to eat will fit in her mouth.
There’s a pretty dress, but her mouth is a frayed hemline.
There’s a durable pair of wings, but she won’t wear them.—Arden Levine, “S”
DAVIDSON: Metaphor and simile wing beautifully through “Ladies’ Abecedary” like Luna moths on fire. “W & X,” “E,” “K” and her nine sisters, the woman Q who lived in a well-worn shoe, and sweet S, so filled with trepidation and tremor—all of these lovelies are created out of or cloaked in metaphor. What inspires your use of metaphor, and metaphorical presence, in your poetry?
LEVINE: Speaking of similes, can I steal that Luna moth one? I’ll totally give you credit! This is a great question, and it brings to the front of my mind Georgia O’Keeffe’s quote: “I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.” (Being a busy New Yorker among busy New Yorkers, I really feel this motivation.) In a way, what O’Keeffe was doing with unusual scale I am attempting with unusual juxtapositions, forcing an inversion of thinking that necessarily slows the reader down. And the more unexpected the comparison (or size in Georgia’s case), the more deliberation it demands; you can look at the ladies (or the flowers) upright, or standing on your head, and get a different take.
In “S,” for example, when I say that “her mouth is a frayed hemline,” I set up a lot of angles from which the reader can see the subject: a frayed hemline is a damaged thing, so maybe there’s violence at hand, or maybe a condition of simply being worn-out or uncared-for (by self or by another in either case). Add in the sound play of “a frayed” (afraid) and the reader really has room to run. And yet I do want the stories to be accessible as well, so I try to strike a balance between well-intentioned opacity and flexible exposition. When, for example I refer to the voice of J in simile as “like sliding the armband up the mourner’s sleeve” and later as being “like the cemetery drive in Cadillac hearses,” I’m leaving much less up to interpretation about J, but I’m still demanding a low-tempo read because the comparisons are so what-the-heck? Metaphors and similes are a great way to complicate things toward exactitude, and that’s what I wanted for the poem-ladies.
W & X
thirst for each other. They drink
tenderly from seashell eyelids,
deeply from hollows between ribs.—Arden Levine, “W & X”
DAVIDSON: In your work in community concerns in New York to your creative focus in poetry, what is it you thirst for in the future?
LEVINE: I really appreciate your asking this, and I’d probably need the length of an entire interview to answer it properly. But, briefly and honestly: As a sociology/gender studies undergrad (around the same time that I was taking in all of that Tori Amos and Annie Leibovitz), I first read the work of Ruth Behar, a Cuban-born author/poet and cultural anthropologist who I admire beyond measure. In her book The Vulnerable Observer, she expresses the critical need to see the subjects of our research, and to use our own stories in the service of that seeing. She makes these proposals as a social scientist who is also a human being and encourages readers to absorb them intellectually and with a broken-open heart.
These many years later, in both my poetry-making and policy-making lives, I’m still following Behar’s guidance and encouraging other to do likewise: I try to gather my information from true human interaction; I earnestly resist presupposition and judgment of what I do not understand; I regard synthesized data with intrigued skepticism; I do my best to walk the path through myself to a comprehension of the other; I attempt, paraphrasing her words, to write vulnerably so that others will respond vulnerably. And so to your question: In this moment in history (in New York, America, further afield), I thirst for broader participation in the radical act of paying close and empathic attention. If anything in Ladies’ Abecedary promotes this participation, the book has done its work.
Karin Cecile Davidson, Interviews Editor