Fig Tree and Owl, Part 2: Gillian Cummings Interviews Anne Graue
Anne Graue’s Fig Tree in Winter, a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press (2017), is a book of found poetry that takes Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as source and creates a new work that envisions poems Plath could have written had her imagination not shaped her college years into a roman à clef. But while the language is all Plath’s, the poems, in their rearrangement of striking, spare, often surreal language, read not only as the fractured voice of Sylvia Plath, but also as the uniquely graceful linguistic innovations of the poet Anne Graue. Here I ask Anne questions about how she came to write this book and how she accomplished it. (You can read Part 1 of this interview, in which Anne Graue interviews me about my book The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, here.)
Q: Anne, Fig Tree in Winter is a remarkable achievement! What drew you to write in the voice of Sylvia Plath, who is such an iconic figure in the world of American letters? How did you decide that your poems would be completely comprised of lines taken from The Bell Jar? Have The Bell Jar or Plath’s poetry long been influences on your own writing?
The book began as a project for a National Poetry Month challenge where participants were charged with writing 30 found poems in 30 days from any source. I had read The Bell Jar a couple of times in my life, and it was near at hand on the bookshelf. I thought that it was the best choice of source because Plath was a poet who wrote a novel, and there was poetry in it. I decided that the poems should only be made up of words and phrases from the book without additions or changes in form; I felt that the poems were there for me to find. Plath has always been important to me as a poet. Her words are iconic but also personal, and they dig deep into experience and emotion like few other poets have been able to achieve. As a woman poet, I wanted to honor her words by rearranging them into poems that mattered to me and hopefully to others. I didn’t think that she would mind.
Q: In writing this book, were you at all influenced by other writers who took Plath as the subject for their own creative works? I am thinking of the novel Wintering by Kate Moses and the poetry collection The Plath Cabinet by Catherine Bowman.
I have not read those books, but I have added them to my list of must-reads! I only relied on my literary education and writing experience when constructing the poems. I read for sound and meaning in words and phrases that made the most sense to me as poems.
“I see the fig tree story as a central metaphor of The Bell Jar in that it delves into memory and results in Esther’s wanting to change memories and reinvent her past.”
Q: You chose to title your chapbook Fig Tree in Winter and to both begin and end the collection with language/imagery that stems from the narrator Esther Greenwood’s telling the story about the fig tree. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood both tells of finding this story in a copy of Ladies’ Day magazine and of imagining the quandary of her life as related to the fig tree: “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.” Your version of the fig tree story and its symbolism in the novel is much more nuanced than my simple quoting of Plath’s sentence above. Here is the final and title poem of your chapbook:
Fig Tree in Winter
I wanted to sleep
under the imaginary
fig tree, where we came
to pick ripe figs. Then
something awful happened.
The green fruit seemed
to be a lovely Russian
short story—the fig
tree in spring lonely
under the snow.
Can you talk about why this reference to the fig tree story-within-a-story is important to the shaping of your chapbook and how, maybe, you saw it as a central metaphor of The Bell Jar?
I see the fig tree story as a central metaphor of The Bell Jar in that it delves into memory and results in Esther’s wanting to change memories and reinvent her past. I think this is so she can deal with people and experiences in a more constructive way, as a poet instead of as a woman who listens to men and is a mother and nothing else. She also focuses on the beauty in the story and in her own imagination, both of which are interrupted by something awful happening. Her rumination after the fig tree story about what a poem is also speaks to her self-worth and what she knows to be true about art, especially poetry, and beauty, which she finds in “the fig tree in winter under the snow and then the fig tree in spring with all the green fruit.” Beauty beneath the cold earth waiting to re-emerge.
“I wanted to experiment with different forms so that the poems I ended up with would be dynamic as well as reflective of The Bell Jar.”
Q: The phrases that you borrowed and rearranged from The Bell Jar are always very powerful and strange—“The edge of the bed / overturned a star,” “Orange chrysanthemums / flew straight down from the sky,” “One / lilac-gloved hand bloomed / like a tiny heart.” Please discuss the process by which you chose the lines you would use. What drew you to some phrases and not others?
Plath was a master of the image, and I wanted to isolate some of the ones that stood out for me and put them into poems that might create new meaning. On any given page, images shout their existence. On one page, for example, I find “the soprano screak of carriage wheels” and “the smell of coffee and bacon.” I would underline the sensory images that seemed to want to be noticed (and I felt that Plath would want them to be noticed) and rearrange the images into poems that made sense to me. They did not always honor her original intention in writing them, I don’t think, but I thought that maybe she wanted more for them. After a while, it became an experience in trying to listen to what Plath might have wanted, that something more for herself that might have helped her cope with people in a society she didn’t always react to in the ways that she thought she should.
Q: Found poetry presents its own difficulties to start. But in Fig Tree in Winter you further complicate the writing of poems by choosing to structure some of them in even stricter forms. “Banquet Table” is a concrete or visual poem that uses names of foods to form the shape of a table. “The Summer they Executed the Rosenbergs” is a list poem in which the word that starts every line (except one) begins with the letter “s,” creating profound and obsessive sibilance. What drew you to experiment with these forms within the context of a book that already has formal constraints?
After writing a few poems, I wanted to experiment with different forms so that the poems I ended up with would be dynamic as well as reflective of The Bell Jar. I felt that the form of “Banquet Table” was the best way to show what Esther saw in the abundance of food that would horribly end with a bout of food poisoning. The table displayed opulence and a bit of gluttony to Esther, who was fixated on eating and weight and eating out at restaurants in New York. In other poems, I focused on the sounds of words and the reason why Plath brought attention to different events. The book begins with a reference to the Rosenbergs and Esther’s feelings about executions and New York, almost as if they were a comparison that anyone could make. The first two paragraphs are image-packed and contain so many words beginning with S that it just made sense to isolate them in a poem. A second poem, “The Worst Thing in the World,” also comes from that first page of the novel. In another poem in the book, “Her Lips,” the lines appear as they do on a page of the novel with erasures. I think the different forms change the pace of the book for readers as it did for me in writing the poems.
“I didn’t want to re-tell Esther’s story but to distill emotion, imagery, and metaphor into poems that lift off the pages of Plath’s work and become something else.”
Q: The Bell Jar starts with Esther Rosenberg’s summer as a magazine intern in New York and describes how she descends into madness and suicidality, later going for treatment at a private psychiatric hospital where she seems to partially recover. In Fig Tree in Winter, you break up this sequencing of events, focusing at first on poems that contemplate various means of suicide, then turning toward some of the events of Esther’s life in New York, then opening the lens wider to consider asylum life and Esther’s relationships with men. Why did you choose to subvert the novel’s progression? What was most important for you to get across in the way you let the story unfold?
I didn’t want to re-tell Esther’s story but to distill emotion, imagery, and metaphor into poems that lift off the pages of Plath’s work and become something else. To me, it would be too predictable to follow the plot and would result in a very different book. I was conscious of creating new art out of an important work that is so well known in the writing community and in the world.
Q: You have a full-length book of poetry, Full and Plum-colored Velvet, forthcoming from Woodley Press. Congratulations! Can you say a little about that collection? When will readers be lucky enough to purchase and read it? (It has a gorgeous title, by the way.)
Thank you! This collection has been a long time in its creation. It is supposed to be out in the world in 2020 at the end of summer or early fall. Woodley Press is an independent publisher that highlights writers with a Kansas connection. I grew up in Kansas, and many of my poems speak to my experiences there. I’m currently in the editing stage of the process in preparing the manuscript. It’s such a great experience!
Read Part 1 of this interview, in which Anne Graue speaks with Gillian Cummings about her collection The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter.
Gillian Cummings is the author of My Dim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize, as well as the chapbooks Ophelia, Petals as an Offering in Darkness, and Spirits of the Humid Cloud. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, the Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, the Laurel Review, the Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Verse Daily, and others. A graduate of Stony Brook University and of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, she was awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund Poetry Prize in 2008. Cummings lives in Westchester County, New York.
Anne Graue is the author of Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press), and her book Full and Plum-Colored Velvet is forthcoming from Woodley Press. She has poetry in SWWIM Every Day, the Plath Poetry Project, Rivet Journal, Mom Egg Review, Into the Void, and in numerous print anthologies. Her reviews have been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Rupture, Whale Road Review, and The Rumpus. She is a staff reviewer for Glass and a poetry reader for The Westchester Review.