GABRIELLE BATES INTERVIEW

Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), recommended by the New York Times Book Review and named by the Chicago Review of Books as a must-read book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon.

Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, The Slowdown show, and elsewhere, and she has served as visiting faculty for a variety of universities, arts organizations, and museums, including the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. You can find her on Twitter (@GabrielleBates) and Instagram (@gabrielle_bates_).

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

Judas Goat is dedicated to “the image.” That is an apt dedication since you use them to such a powerful effect. As a visual artist and poet, what do you think an image does or can do differently in a poem than in visual art?

I’ve been thinking about this question for many years now, and yet I still feel like I’m only roaming the epidermis of it. I definitely don’t think images conjured through writing are categorically more meaningful or profound than the images delivered via photo, painting, or film, but I do find myself curious about the particular possibilities of an image transmitted through language alone. I have a feeling—a hunch really—that there’s a kind of image only language can make, in concert with a reader’s imagination, which has the potential to reverberate and mean differently than images in other art forms. What this linguistic image may lack, comparatively, in terms of concrete visual transmission, it gains, perhaps, in a kind of interior complexity and depth. Does an image that forms inside the dark vessel of a reader’s mind, via language, tunnel into the soul and reverberate differently than an image that forms in the eye, via light? I think it does, or at least can. Darkness plays a crucial role in the difference. And maybe that’s why I often conceive of the poetic image’s impact as a tunnel. A reverberating tunnel.

In the poem “The Dog,” one figure recounts a harrowing scene that he had hoped to “keep secret” from the speaker. How do you navigate writing about suffering and violence? When is it necessary or helpful, and when should it be avoided?

I’m less interested in offering spectacles of violence than I am in investigating what it feels like to live and love in a world where violence and suffering are unavoidable aspects. In “The Dog,” and in many other poems, I don’t describe the most violent or gruesome moments graphically. I try to let silence do as much work as possible. My focus is typically on what’s happening around violence, moving toward or away from it. Often what I was trying to write into in Judas Goat was fear—a kind of hypervigilant, anticipatory dread of violence—rather than violences themselves. My advice is to write what you need to write to get free. Write towards the heat, wherever it goes. Many of the poems I’m most grateful for (“Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “There She Is” by Linda Gregg, “Taking It” by Vievee Francis, “Reverse Suicide” by Matt Rasmussen…) incorporate and grapple with explicit violence. I don’t abide by many “shoulds” when it comes to writing, but in general I hope to avoid incorporating violence as a kind of cheap trick to achieve emotional impact on readers, without risking any real vulnerability or engaging in a genuine inquiry.

Many of the poems in Judas Goat seem inspired by fairy tales and mythology. What drew you to these forms of literature? Were you reading this kind of material when you wrote these poems?

Throughout my twenties I found certain fairy tale motifs (children navigating menacing woods alone, dead or otherwise absent mothers, evil stepmothers, animals that convey moral lessons) felt emotionally true to aspects of my childhood and adolescence, which I needed to process in my writing. While the motifs flatten and simplify the narrative of my autobiography in some ways, in other ways, they freed me to get deeper, more honest. I’m really interested in how we are taught, trained, and shaped by stories, especially the ones we encounter when we’re young. I was definitely reading fairy tales here and there while I wrote Judas Goat, but I mostly tried to rely on what I’d already absorbed.

Several of your poems take up the notion of (women’s) desire—at times, as nonsensical, magical, mysterious, and mundane. Do you see Judas Goat as part of a lineage of feminist art? Who are your influences—writers or otherwise?

I think often about that Muriel Rukeyser quote: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” Any book a woman writes that tries to convey something true about what it’s like to be alive exists in a lineage of feminist art, probably.

One random, early, unintended influence on Judas Goat that I’ve never talked about before, which I didn’t identify until recently, is The Gift of Fear, a bestselling nonfiction book from the 90s that I read when I was a teenager. I don’t remember much about it except that it’s written by a retired bodyguard, and it’s basically about how to intuit when you’re in danger of getting raped or killed. Reading that book at a formative age (a parental figure assigned the text to me) intensified my already-intense search for danger in intimate moments, and I can see the influence of this increased watchfulness in the characters who speak in Judas Goat, for sure.

In “Ownership,” the speaker muses, “Bent close, I described it until it was strange, then familiar, then stranger—a character.” The “character” in this instance is a dead deer, but in the speaker’s imagination, it takes on a new role. In your poems, when do you find yourself favoring an emotionally resonant image or truth over a factual truth? Are there ever exceptions?

In poetry I’m way more interested in emotional resonance than I am in facts. I want to see what my imagination might reveal. My poems draw, often, from “factual” experiences, sure, but I depart, change, transform, conflate, and exaggerate whenever my curiosity feels tugged. I feel like magic happens between the real and the unreal, when lived and imagined images overlap. Those are the poems that feel most true and alive to me.

In the poem “Mothers,” the speaker reflects, “Outside of poems, our tones rarely match / the core of what we are saying.” Could you please tell us about your approach to revision—to finding the core of what your poem is saying?

The process of revising toward the essential core of a poem is mysterious, often frustrating. It forces me to slow down and humble myself. I can’t rush it; all I can do is show up and try to listen to what the poem wants to say and be. I’ve relied a lot on mumbling aloud and cutting back as a revision technique. I’ve looked at drafts sentence by sentence, or line by line, or even word by word, and asked myself: “What happens if this language goes away—Does energy flare or die? Does the heart of the poem feel more or less clear?” In general if I felt the heart of the poem could survive without it, I cut it. The poems in Judas Goat often have, I think, a kind of spiritual minimalism for this reason.

In the same poem, the speaker remembers, “The way I understood it, if the ending was good / it casts goodness back over the whole.” What do you think a good ending should do at the poem and book levels?

My obsession with endings in poems is probably related to my obsession with death, and my need to grapple with mortality as a concept. When I first started studying poetry, I used to read the endings of poems first; it was like a compulsion. I was in some kind of rush for the epiphanies, the jolts, the especially poignant or surprising phrases that I noticed tended to come at the end of poems, like deathbed wisdom. I’m interested in the energetic clarity people often experience in the wake of a near-death experience, and I’m interested in literature as a space where we can ignite a similar energy, by evoking truths we normally ignore, by confronting a series of “ends.” I’m also interested in the silence that comes after a poem or book’s ending, which allows that final line, sentence, or image to echo longer, potentially, than anything else in the poem. The longest, most-resonant echo—I think that’s what I’m striving for, always.

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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.