{"id":116006,"date":"2017-10-05T11:00:17","date_gmt":"2017-10-05T15:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116006"},"modified":"2017-09-27T16:51:24","modified_gmt":"2017-09-27T20:51:24","slug":"mistaken-self-portraits-an-interview-with-meghan-orourke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/05\/mistaken-self-portraits-an-interview-with-meghan-orourke\/","title":{"rendered":"Mistaken Self-Portraits: An Interview with Meghan O\u2019Rourke"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Sarah Shatz<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Meghan O\u2019Rourke is a poet,\u00a0an essayist, the author of the acclaimed memoir\u00a0<\/em>The Long Goodbye, a teacher, and an editor; she served as the poetry editor of\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Paris Review from 2005 to 2010. The Summer issue of the <\/em>Review\u00a0includes\u00a0O\u2019Rourke\u2019s \u201cPoem for My Stranger<\/a>,\u201d and her third collection,\u00a0<\/em>Sun in Days<\/a>, was published last\u00a0month. <\/em>Sun in Days\u00a0differs from her other books: it is less lyric, with longer poems that are almost essayistic, and it includes a\u00a0series of \u201cMistaken Self-Portrait\u201d poems, which find the poet\u00a0taking on the voices of Demeter, Persephone, Meriwether Lewis, and\u2014to borrow a phrase from\u00a0O\u2019Rourke\u2014a mother of an unmade daughter. It\u2019s a book about illness, moving past grief, wanting a child, and getting older. I spoke with O\u2019Rourke when she had a few spare hours, while\u00a0someone looked after\u00a0her son.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your poetry collections all seem to be about different stages of your life. Halflife<\/em> was a young person\u2019s book, Once<\/em> was in conversation with your memoir and shared its concerns about grief, with the loss of your mother, and this new book of yours, Sun in Days<\/em>, feels not post-grief, but \u2026 I\u2019ve been trying to find the right word.<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

I know exactly what you mean. When I was working on Sun in Days<\/em> early on, it was clear to me the poems were constellating around whatever that is\u2014not quite post-grief. It\u2019s actually hard to articulate, which is in some ways what interested me.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When did you start writing these poems?<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

I wrote them while I had, as I describe in the book, a mysterious illness that no one could identify. Eventually, they diagnosed it as late-stage Lyme disease that had gotten into my nervous system. I mention this because while I was trying to write this book, I had this sensation that I was no longer myself. I could tell my brain had changed, but it happened so slowly that it took a while to realize. I had a very difficult time recalling and using language, which is a problem if you\u2019re a writer. I also had this bizarre fatigue. We lack the language to describe illness, as Virginia Woolf talks about in her book On Being Ill<\/em>. When you think of fatigue, you think of times you\u2019ve been tired, but it wasn\u2019t like that. I felt drained. I was trying to write, but I was unable to. The poems I was writing were so bad. They weren\u2019t making sense, and I found it so depressing. \u201cUnnatural Essay\u201d and \u201cA Note on Process\u201d started because I gave myself the assignment of writing a line a day. I felt like I had to put all of my energy into making some kind of sense out of one thing. Sometimes I would write three lines, but there was this impulse toward aphorism or compression in a way that\u2019s not quite how we think of the line in poetry working, in non-prose poems, at least. So those lines ended up more like prose.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Some of your poems feel like they could have been turned into essays.<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

Yes. The first poems that felt a bit to me like essays were a few\u00a0of the \u201cMistaken Self-Portrait\u201d poems. \u201cMistaken Self-Portrait as Demeter in Paris,\u201d for example. A lot of those lines almost operate as independent entities, though they do build to something. It was that building that was really difficult for me. I couldn\u2019t do it, and so I had all these floating lines. As I started to get better, I tried to put them together and build an argument around them. It\u2019s perverse because I couldn\u2019t make sense of what those pieces were about, so I pushed them into this more essayistic form, where you\u2019re pressed to make sense of things. The slippage and the places where the lines contradict each other in certain ways, to me that\u2019s the heart of those pieces and why they had to have a more of a hybrid form as opposed to a lyric-poem form.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Each \u201cMistaken Self-Portrait\u201d poem is very different. What connects them?<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

Those poems began out of a desperate need to write something. Too much of a writer\u2019s ego depends on the dubious accomplishment of putting words on a white page. So even though I wasn\u2019t sure I was going to survive, I had to write. Writing gave me some sense of being able to push back against the uncertainty I felt about whether I was or wasn\u2019t sick. Doctors were telling me they couldn\u2019t find anything wrong, so I was thrust back upon this question, a poetic question, really, Are my perceptions real? What does \u201creal\u201d mean? If I don\u2019t feel like myself anymore, who is the \u201cI\u201d that doesn\u2019t feel like myself anymore?<\/p>\n

Those poems came out of that push to put one thought down. I think the first one was \u201cMistaken Self-Portrait as Demeter in Paris.\u201d That poem in particular came to me very clearly. It was a mother speaking about regret. I was trying to voice a persona that was not one I thought I would ever have. I was going to play the role of a mother figure even though I didn\u2019t have a mother and was not yet a mother myself. I started thinking about the mistaken self-portrait because I was really interested in the idea that we have all of these selves the world doesn\u2019t acknowledge. This idea about selfhood being an unstable thing is something we all grew up thinking about and reading, especially in lyric poetry, but it had taken on this very visceral reality for me. My sense of self was totally unstable, and yet there was some part of me that was stable because I had this sense of disruption\u2014this sense of not being myself\u2014which is a kind of paradox.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The connections between Demeter and Persephone are easy to see, but how are the other two, \u201cMistaken Self-Portrait as\u00a0Meriwether Lewis\u201d and \u201cMistaken Self-Portrait as the\u00a0Unmade Daughter,\u201d linked to these themes?<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

The Persephone poem came very shortly thereafter. Those were written as a pair. I was trying to write a kind of response poem. I actually wrote a whole series of Demeter and Persephone mistaken self-portraits that I ended up cutting from the book. Then I tried to write this series of poems about wanting a daughter. They were first called \u201cA Letter to My Unborn Daughter.\u201d Then as I worked on them more and more, they started to take the shape of the mistaken self-portraits. That emerged as a discovery, not a top down, this-is-what-I\u2019m-going-to-write decision. The Meriwether Lewis one is odd. You could make the argument that it shouldn\u2019t really be in the series because it\u2019s so different from the rest of them. It was already written as a monologue in the voice of Meriwether Lewis, but it\u2019s another way of talking about illness. I have very few ways of talking about my illness that I feel has the kind of urgency I\u2019m experiencing, and it doesn\u2019t seem conveyable to other people when I write as a more autobiographical \u201cI.\u201d That\u2019s what I felt unified them. There\u2019s the bookend of \u201cDemeter in Paris\u201d and \u201cPersephone in the Desert,\u201d and then these two other poems that gesture out to the other themes of the book, one about longing for a child and the other about illness and what it does to your identity.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You treat wanting a baby as both an existential question and a physical impulse.<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

Wanting a child is a strange feeling. It\u2019s wanting as a sense of lacking as well as desiring. That lack becomes a kind of ellipses that presses against your experience of the days and distorts them because you want to move into a different stage in life. Once we hit our twenties, we don\u2019t really have any other stages except perhaps becoming parents or becoming sick. I had become sick but not a parent. I thought, You can\u2019t go through this period without thinking about what it means to you to bring a child into the world. I thought it very strange how one could be so full of ambivalence about the world and yet want so desperately to bring someone who has really no choice in the matter into it.<\/p>\n

The way we describe wanting a child\u2014or even being pregnant\u2014is either very sentimental or very raw. But I found the whole experience really weird, and I\u2019ve never heard anybody talk about this because it\u2019s a very strange longing. It\u2019s a longing with no real specification. It\u2019s like wanting to be in love, which is a longing we have as teenagers, but not in the same way that we long for a child. That interested me as a poet.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In your memoir, you write about watching your mother deteriorate. She struggled with language, as well. Did you think about that when you were struggling with language and memory in your illness?<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

I never really connected to that particular aspect of her deterioration. I think that might have almost been too painful to think about. Watching my mother be sick created a paradox for me with my own illness. On the one hand, I understood where things could end, but my illness was so different from hers\u2014hers was so well understood and terrifying, meanwhile I was trying to get anyone to recognize mine. I began to wonder if I was sick, and I experienced it as a kind of intellectual and poetic failure at first, rather than a physical one, because I couldn\u2019t write\u2014that was the first symptom. It took a long time before I understood that it wasn\u2019t a personal failure but a biological one.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

\u201cPoem for My Son\u201d is toward the end of the book.<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

I started it when I was pregnant, and I finished it after he was born. At first, I didn\u2019t necessarily want the book to come to this tidy place of the fruition of one\u2019s desire. On the other hand, it felt false to withhold it. The experience of having a child in some ways only underscored a lot of the uncertainty and mystery that I was feeling before. You\u2019re confronted with the otherness of this being that you\u2019ve been carrying. I had read so many descriptions of pregnancy that made it into this mythical sense of connection. My experience was that I was carrying another being inside me, which was obvious to me and very strange. That felt very in keeping with the rest of the book\u2019s obsession.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You close the book with the poem \u201cHow To Be,\u201d which fades out at the end.<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a little self-puncturing. Can I really write a poem called \u201cHow To Be\u201d and end the book with it? I was troubled by the fact that that poem, with its imperative title and certainty, seemed to be the end of the book. I kept trying to write another poem, but I couldn\u2019t write one that felt like the end. I owe a debt to Alice Oswald. In one of her books she ends with a fading out and I just saw it and thought, That\u2019s how this poem is.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The final line is \u201cand what if we do\u2014?\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019ROURKE<\/p>\n

To me, the book is about how we make the selves, make the children, and make our lives. Writing the book was\u00a0a stay against terror and pain and chaos\u2014which the world is so full of. But a sense of uncertainty is central to everything.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alex Dueben has written for <\/em>The Believer, <\/em>The Rumpus, <\/em>The Comics Journal, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Meghan O\u2019Rourke is a poet,\u00a0an essayist, the author of the acclaimed memoir\u00a0The Long Goodbye, a teacher, and an editor; she served as the poetry editor of\u00a0The\u00a0Paris Review from 2005 to 2010. The Summer issue of the Review\u00a0includes\u00a0O\u2019Rourke\u2019s \u201cPoem for My Stranger,\u201d and her third collection,\u00a0Sun in Days, was published last\u00a0month. Sun in Days\u00a0differs from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":595,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[13276,30751,2019,8281,1132,687,30752,279,30750,8126,30749,7221,165,11597,30748,2183,426,969],"class_list":["post-116006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-alex-dueben","tag-demeter","tag-grief","tag-illness","tag-interviews","tag-language","tag-lyme-disease","tag-meghan-orourke","tag-meriwether-lewis","tag-persephone","tag-poem-for-my-stranger","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-pregnancy","tag-sun-in-days","tag-the-long-goodbye","tag-the-paris-review","tag-virginia-woolf"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMistaken Self-Portraits: An Interview with Meghan O\u2019Rourke by Alex Dueben<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The author of the poetry collection \u2018Sun in Days\u2019 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