CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Gabrielle Bates and Abigail Raley

May 22, 2023

Writer Abigail Raley talked with Gabrielle Bates about her debut poetry collection, Judas Goat, which was published earlier this year by Tin House.

Abigail Raley: I notice that in an interview you did with the Oxonian Review, you said, “I’m really fascinated by people who crave the experience of getting pregnant, having a child, and mothering because I don’t share it,” which immediately calls to mind Plath and her writings around children and her own motherhood. I also recall that, in a Poet Salon episode, you mentioned inheriting Plath’s school of thought on the end-stopped line. How do you see yourself arriving to/appearing in a poetic lineage, specifically one concerned with girlhood/motherhood, both in content and form?

Gabrielle Bates: Girlhood is a menaced terrain in Judas Goat, charged by the high alertness of prey animals at dusk or dawn, under threat, trying to stay alive. And in tension with that vigilance is an ache for what feel like largely incompatible desires—for freedom, abandon, connection, etc. I keep a quote by Audre Lorde by my desk that says, “I am listening to what fear teaches,” and that quote was probably the foremost guiding principle for me as I worked on this book, particularly in regards to topics of girlhood and motherhood. I’ve aspired to belong to a lineage of poets who venture deeply and courageously into what haunts them, in whatever forms feel most alive and true to that endeavor. For an audacity and vulnerability of vision, I return to the work and teachings of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Linda Gregg, Aracelis Girmay, Jorie Graham, C.D. Wright, Carl Phillips, and Vievee Francis, among others. It’s true that Sylvia Plath was enlivening and instructive for me early on. Her pairing of surprising, grotesque imagery with visually neat, even-lined stanzas showed me a way forward.

Stephanie Burt recently noted in a review that Judas Goat is indebted to “earlier poets of primal experience,” and I felt seen by that phrasing—I am increasingly fascinated by the primal: the ways our earliest experiences affect us, and also the possibility of a kind of deep, original psychic core, which might speak through us and connect meaningfully, across barriers—of space, of time—with that depth in others. I feel a little embarrassed to admit that, but it’s true. It feels exciting to me, and rewarding, to write in pursuit of that deeply connective possibility, whether or not it exists. My poetic lineage, as I understand it, grows as I encounter and re-encounter poets whose work touches something in me that feels primal in that way.

AR: The first poem I ever read of yours (and the poem that made me fall in love with your work) was your poem “The Dog,” originally published in The Offing. The poem acts as a sort of prologue to Judas Goat and casts its devastating pall over the collection. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the choice of ordering it before the epigraph, as well as your system for organizing the book throughout.  

GB: “The Dog” is such an intense and harrowing poem—it asks for some silence and space afterward, I think, to reverberate—so I first tried placing it at the end of various sections in the book, but eventually it became clear that the poem needed to be at the very beginning, set off by itself, as a kind of prologue. The reader encounters the epigraph about obedience and enters the rest of the book, I hope, with a wary alertness, wanting to see and yet afraid to see.

At first, in working on Judas Goat, I was just writing a bunch of poems. I wasn’t writing towards a particular theme or book-length project. Themes and images started to emerge, as did a recurring eerie tone. I wrote a lot of poems that didn’t ultimately make it into the book, many poems that engaged with Alabama histories more explicitly, a lot of poems that didn’t feel alive enough, ultimately, or that I couldn’t find the right placement for in the book’s arc. I kept adding and cutting poems, gradually honing towards the collection you see now. My approach to organizing the book was a lot of trial and error over many years, enlisting the feedback of brilliant poet friends here and there, and then working, at the end, with my incredibly thoughtful and astute editor Alyssa Ogi at Tin House. Organizing the book was a collective effort.

AR: This is quite silly, and consider this a bonus question, but I was wondering if you could draw a visual representation of your experience of the writing of Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Specifically, even, your experience of “Song,” as I know you’ve spoken in other interviews about that poem’s particular influence on Judas Goat. (If you’re still interested in this one, but not in the time commitment of drawing something out, I’d just be interested to talk about what thrills you in the work of other writers.)

GB: I love this invitation! It reminds me of how Brigit Pegeen Kelly herself used to create a piece of abstract visual art to accompany all her poems. I don’t know if she ever showed these paintings to anyone, but she mentions their existence in a short piece of prose—the only piece of her prose I’ve ever encountered—on the back jacket copy of her first book, To the Place of Trumpets.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the difference between the kind of image visual artists can make—using ink, paint, cameras, clay, etc.—and the kind of images a poet can conjure, using language. I am very interested in trying to understand and articulate that difference, to the extent it exists. My experience of reading Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poems is extraordinarily visual and yet also inextricable from language and the theater of my own body, in such a way that, I keep trying to draw in response to “Song” and I can’t! My hand freezes and won’t move the pen!

AR: I noticed, in a post you made recently, a copy of Rachel Zucker’s The Poetics of Wrongness on your desk. In the beginning, Zucker says, “Beauty is a manipulation of a thing, a bettering, an idealization of the ordinary.” I know that you are a poet that is inherently interested in/engaged with the image. I’m curious as to how you consider beauty in the construction of your images, as well as your relationship with beauty and revision.

GB: Beauty, ugliness—I don’t think one will ever resonate for me without the other being, somehow, incorporated, or at least nearby. For anyone socialized as a girl or woman, particularly within a conservative context, beauty often becomes a stifling, oppressive, flattening concept, and so it can feel liberating, transgressive, even life-saving to actively pursue ugly images in one’s writing instead. But the kind of beauty Zucker describes and takes to task in The Poetics of Wrongness is an artificial beauty, it seems, at odds with the ordinary and the truthful. I’m interested in a kind of primal, alive beauty, images that allure and frighten simultaneously, which activate awe in me. I sense this beauty within the ordinary all the time.

When it comes to beauty and ugliness, I’m a bit Tarkovskian, I guess, in that I find this quote (from Sculpting in Time) compelling:

“When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the 'dirt' of the world. On the contrary! The artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another… To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite.”

AR: I just completed a wonderful webinar with the poet Nicky Beer on the poetics of the weird, leaning into the weird of writing. I’m curious about how weirdness factors into your “excavation,” as you so wonderfully put it, of your own writing, or if there are any aesthetic practices that you wanted to hold taut throughout your revisions of Judas Goat.

GB: What is the difference between weird and strange, I wonder? I think so much about strangeness, so little about weirdness, when it comes to my own work. I do love that “weird” originally implied “the power to control destiny.” There’s something very powerful—and feminine—in that word’s early contexts, but for some reason, when I think of the word “weird” now, I feel less of that power. I feel a bit shut-out by the weird, if I’m honest, while the strange—marked by being unfamiliar, journeying from elsewhere—carries with it a potential for transportation. A portal. It reminds me of an essay I adore by Elisa Gonzalez called “How Alienation Became My Superpower.” 

Now that the container of Judas Goat is closed, I’m back in a generating phase of the creative process again, indulging a lot of what could be called “weird” whims, following my curiosities, trying not to over-edit or censor myself, and many of the poems are becoming grotesque in a particular, surreal, obsessive way, a bit cryptic and otherworldly. I’m diving deep into imagery from my dreams and using poetry as a way to explore an ongoing relationship with the dead, while also continuing to work out a kind of thesis for what I believe a “poetic image” is, swimming through philosophical and aesthetic ideas from Bachelard, among many others. It’s intoxicating to be back in this stage of privacy and possibility.