Hannah Gamble, interviewed by Blake Wallin
One of my favorite things about Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast is how conceptually rich the poems are yet how the reader is forced to find contexts for them at the same time. What were your influences while writing your first book?
In the case of first books, I think it’s fair to say that anything that happened to me from age 2 to age 28 had a lot to do with whatever content surfaced. And this includes anything I read in all that time. So I read a lot of the Bible when I was young, then I came to understand a bit of what poetry had to offer when I was a freshman in college (reading Mark Strand and John Berryman and Tomas Salamon), and then I totally committed myself to the study of poetry in grad school, where my colleagues exposed me to a greater variety of writers including Russel Edson, Catullus, Mary Ruefle, Catie Rosemurgey, Wallace Stevens, Matthew Zapruder, and George Meredith. My fellow writers at the University of Houston were so talented and smart and helpful to me, I’m sure that they also were influences of mine in that time.
Invitation strikes such a fine line between the normal and the eerie, and shows the bad taste lurking under good taste. How did you do it, and what caused you to be so gloriously subversive?
I think the way that you’ve described the book would also be a fitting way to describe me, so I think that I produced those poems just by being who I am. For example: when I was growing up I thinking I looked normalish (when I was 11 and 12 I wore a couple rings on every finger and several large necklaces at a time, and I think I always dressed a little strangely but I didn’t stand out in the way that some people might think I do now [I have pastel hair with parts of my head shaved and dress much more strangely-er] ) but was definitely a weird kid who was fascinated with violence and sex (particularly the representations of BDSM that I saw on tv, not really understanding anything besides that one person seemed to be under duress and the other person seemed to be enjoying the control that they had over that constricted person) and psychotic killers and demonic possessions and anything having to do with life’s (and death’s) great mysteries (I found out this past year that my moon sign is scorpio, so that makes sense).
You studied poetry under Edward Albee. What was it like studying under him, and how did you develop as a poet through this experience?
Well, with Albee I was just a resident fellow at his barn house, which was a building on some land that he bought with some of the money he made with the “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” movie. It did used to be all barn, but Albee had about 2/3 of it made into a house with a kitchen and library and several bedrooms and common areas. Each month in the summer, 3 writers and 2 visual artists stay in the bedrooms, and the 2 visual artists each get to use part of the unconverted barn as studio space.
I was excited to meet Albee because he was one of my 2 favorite playwrights (Harold Pinter being the other) and I had used some excerpts of his plays in my honors undergrad thesis. I also was old enough to know that it’s a bad idea to idealize any brilliant artist, so I kept my expectations for our particular interactions low—which was a good idea to do! I had heard that once during our month- long stay, Albee would meet with each of us independently. I don’t seem to recall that that ever happened for me—I think he was most interested in talking to the playwright from England and the visual artist from Brooklyn. There was one day, though, where Albee brought us our mail (I think he did that a lot, actually) and saw that I had a big and very heavy package. It turned out to be a very beautiful old typewriter from my sister, and Albee stuck around to poke at it.
From my time spent at Albee’s barn, I did learn something important about myself as a writer: It’simportant for me to be with people, out in the world, having conversations, eavesdropping, watching TV, wandering around on the internet and reacting to the amazing and terrible things there, driving around and seeing stuff. In Montauk (where the barn was) I had nothing to do but read and write. I didn’t have any social activity, and I missed my friends horribly. I read so many books, and I wrote pages every day, but ZERO of those pages ended up in my first book. None of them were very good.
Poetry Magazine and The Poetry Foundation were early supporters of your work, from featuring some of the Invitation poems (I believe), through to 2014 poems, and to today via events and such. Describe for our readers your relationship to this organization and how it has developed over time.
Actually, Poetry mag didn’t feature any of my poems from Invitation. I think Chris Wyman was still the editor at that time, and I did send him poems once while in grad school, but nothing got picked up. Everything changed, though, when Don Share took over. I remember him tweeting at me like“would love to see some of your work soon!” and I was like “Hot DOG!!!” and of course did send poems. Don took a couple of them, and then a while later I applied for the Lily/Rosenberg prize and got it (in the very last year that I was young enough to apply). This prize allowed me to pay off my student loans (which I had been paying for a couple years already, but they had still grown to be almost twice the size of the original amount I borrowed) and for that I cannot express enough gratitude.
Being local, I’ve had the chance to do a lot of things through the Poetry Foundation: I got to do an artist residency at the Museum of Science and Industry (and develop/ teach a poetry workshop for them there), read at the Museum of Contemporary Art, do an on-stage Q&A with Amber Tamblyn when she came through town, and be on a few podcasts through the foundation, including the podcast Mortified! which I think featured some of my bad teenage poetry.
I lived in Chicago for a few years, and the poetry scene there is pretty vibrant. How have other aspects of the city influenced your own life and poetry?
I think my work has become more politically/ socially engaged since moving here. My long commutes to tutor in the suburbs give me the chance to listen to a lot of news radio, and so I hear things about how Chicago Public Schools are so under(non)funded that some schools asked students’ parents to provide the school with toilet paper. When the parents were unable to do that, the schools had a fundraiser (for. toilet paper.). I’ve also heard CPS teachers on-air saying that theydon’t have any PAPER or PENCILS, the most basic (and, we’d think, inexpensive) classroom tools. I also remember hearing a story on the radio about a woman on the south side whose basement had been flooded with sewage for years every time it rained heavily, and she would go to the store and see other people buying bleach and rubber wading pants, and she would know that they were having the same problem. No one ever talked about it, though, until this woman heard that in Avondale (a less-disadvantaged neighborhood further north), money is budgeted by the city to prevent flooding to those homes. So the woman started a neighborhood petition to get similar funding. Anyway. Lots of injustice—treating people like their basic human rights to education, healthy food (south side food deserts are real and real bad), and safe housing don't matter. I haven’t actually written about any of that in my poems, but maybe one day I will write something about it (I’m finding myself writing a lot more essays these days).
I first met you and heard you read at the Chicago Cultural Center fall 2014. Several of the poems were literary takedowns of alpha male misogyny and sexism. What inspired these reactions in your writing, did you find your previous methods of subversion insufficient, and can we expect an intense second collection?
Those poems you heard will be in my second book. My influences while writing it were online dating (I was doing a lot of it), female sketch-comedians like Cheri Oteri, Molly Shannon and Kristen Wiig/ female standup comedians like Maria Bamford, and reading the Tao te Ching.
I don’t know when this second book will come out, but it will.
I did find my previous methods of subversion insufficient. I feel like they were coded and coy in my first book. Coded and coy is fine, I guess (especially with a first book where you need to get your foot in the door a little bit), but I definitely have gotten angry enough in the last few years (re: misogyny/ sexism) that I am not spending as much time trying to make my feelings and opinions (often present in my poems) palatable for others, or I guess I should say all the others.
Blake Wallin is the author of the chapbooks Otherwise Jesus (Ghost City Press, 2015) and No Sign on the Island (Bottlecap Press, 2016) as well as the microchap The Lucidity of Giving Up (Ghost City Press, 2016). He is the Reviews/Interviews Editor for Ghost City Review.