Interview with Gabrielle Bates
Author of the upcoming poetry collection ‘Judas Goat’, out with TIN HOUSE in 2023
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), listed by Vulture as one of the most anticipated books of winter. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, Bates’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, the Best American Experimental Writing anthology, and elsewhere. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and—with Luther Hughes and Dujie Tahat—co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. On Twitter (@GabrielleBates) and Instagram (@gabrielle_bates_).
C: How did poetry find its way into your life?
When I was a teenager, I used to spend hours and hours reading song lyrics and searching for quotes by famous authors online. I think I was searching for contemporary poetry, and some form of literary mentorship, without really knowing it. There were a few E. E. Cummings lines I fell in love with early on (from “[anyone lived in a pretty how town]”), a Whitman poem (“To a Stranger”), some Dickinson, some Neruda. When I graduated high school, one of my dad’s friends gifted me selected poems of Szymborska, Clifton, and Brooks. But it wasn’t until I was at Auburn University and started reading contemporary collections of poetry (Richard Siken, Natalie Diaz, Keetje Kuipers) that poetry really flooded into my life as a practice, became a way of living.
C: Out of all the traditional forms of poetry, what is your favourite and why?
With many traditional forms, if I’m honest, I find that the form itself (not always, of course, but often) steals the show in a way that leaves me impressed, but largely unmoved by the poem. For that reason, I suppose I’m drawn to the subtlety and range that’s possible in a sonnet. Or the reverberating smallness of haiku. I also enjoy when I’m reading a book and come across a poem in a form I wasn’t familiar with before, such as the Ecuadorian Decimas in Paul Hlava Ceballos’s recently published [banana].
C: I first discovered your work through your poem ‘Salmon’ which was published by American Poetry Review. How did that poem come to be?
That was a poem, if I remember correctly, that came out fairly fully-formed in the initial draft. I’d had the chance to work with the brilliant, fearsomely astute poet Vievee Francis at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference one summer, and she charged me to risk more clarity in my work, so I wrote ‘Salmon’ with that charge chiming in my skull. I tried to eschew flourish and speak clearly, while also honoring my intuitions around sound and image.
C: I am aware that you are someone who constantly changes a poem, and that shakes my bones a little as someone who is a staunch non-reviser. Do you think you will ever exercise more artistic freedom in your work?
When I intuit, there is a more resonant, surprising, or necessary piece hiding somewhere within a poem I’ve drafted, I feel compelled to cut and tweak and add until I can get as close to that more powerful version as possible. Sometimes it feels like a sculpture hiding inside a rough block of stone. Sometimes it takes years. Often I never get to see its face—though I hope, in this case, that I will write a new poem that gets to it, or close to it, one day. A continual hone can be frustrating, but there is pleasure for me—and a kind of freedom, even—in returning, and the rewards, when they come, feel worth the labor! That said, I have experimented with giving myself less time to futz; for example, in the series of epistolary experiments I’m doing with other writers (here is a link to an excerpt of the one I did with Jennifer S. Cheng), time constraints are built in: I have to write an epistle a day for a set number of days, among the busyness of life, and while I do let myself edit a little afterward, I try very hard in these experiments to honor how the pieces emerged in real time, since time is a crucial collaborator. “Artistic freedom” is such a fascinating concept to place in opposition to “revision”—I feel revision to be, at its best, the act of freeing art.
Website: www.gabriellebat.es
Link to preorder Judas Goat from Open Books: https://open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com/products/01-24-2023-bates-gabrielle-judas-goat?_pos=1&_sid=eeafc8621&_ss=r
Link to the Tin House listing that includes ebook preorder options: https://tinhouse.com/book/judas-goat-ebk/
Follow me on Twitter: @courtenaywrites
Nice interview. I bought a pre-order of her book. Thanks.