Interview: Bridget Lowe

Bridget Lowe's poem "The Forgotten Actress as Isadora Duncan in Russia" appeared in the August issue. She is from Kansas City, where she is currently residing for a brief while. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2011, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received a Discovery/Boston Review prize, and was recently the Rona Jaffe Fellow at The MacDowell Colony. 

Can you talk about the inspiration for "The Forgotten Actress as Isadora Duncan in Russia"? What was on your mind while you were writing this poem?

I woke up one day and wrote a series of poems about Sean Young, the American actress from Blade Runner and Dune, who was expected to have a long Hollywood career at the top but fell from grace early on. I have been very drawn to her for a while now, which makes sense when I think about the other people I tend to write about—particularly those who are rejected by the same social groups for which they’re expected to perform (Vaslav Nijinsky, The Wild Boy of Aveyron). At the height of her rejection from Hollywood, Sean, a classically trained ballerina, danced to great acclaim as Isadora Duncan in Russia. I loved the idea of a woman and a country falling in love, particularly Russia, which seems to be the opposite of Hollywood in terms of sensibility.

After reading about Isadora Duncan, it’s evident you’ve done your research about the dancer. How did the writing process for this poem include research, and how do you view research as part of the writing process?

I don’t think of what I do as research, necessarily, because I rarely have an end result or goal in mind. This poem is mostly an imagined story using the famous untimely end of Isadora Duncan (the scarf incident) to talk about someone else, the “Forgotten Actress.”

But I do often write about actual persons, using actual details from their lives. In this case, I was reading a lot about Sean Young and her famous Hollywood “antics,” which I just found really intriguing and authentic in a way. Then I found her personal youtube page and watched her homemade videos from the sets of Blade Runner and Dune. They were really touching to me, and well-done too—at that young age she was this insanely beautiful, charismatic combination of wide-eyed gamine and world-weary sage. I had a week or so of being very absorbed in her world, and then I woke up one day and wrote all the poems.

For a series of poems about Nijinsky that I wrote, my research was his Diary that I bought at a yard sale in San Francisco. I wrote a series about The Wild Boy of Aveyron after buying a translation of Dr. Itard’s 1802 case study at the thrift store. I also love writing that is really flat and overly clear, like children’s encyclopedias or Time Life books from the thrift store—I feel like it’s an invitation for me to make up my own version of the facts. I like to read about anything I don’t understand, especially science, and then filter it through my own set of associations. I guess that’s research of a sort. I think anything that gets you going is research for a writer. I read tabloids.

Dancing is certainly an artform that lends itself to strong poetic images, the shapes and bends of the body, the flow in the movement. The lines, “Each rib bowed in graciousness, each fingertip/stretched toward the ceiling of paper stars/cut by children to light your way across/the stage,” are some of the most gorgeous descriptions I’ve read in a long while. How did these come into shape for you?

Well first, thank you for that. I don’t know, honestly, where these images came from, but I write from association and this is one of those poems that came really fast, and I felt surprised at the end. I know that I had, and still have, a very clear picture of a woman bending forward from the waist, slowly, and her dark black hair falling forward.

I remember in grade school we would make these garlands for Advent. I went to Catholic school, and the whole waiting and yearning period was really intense before Christmas. I took it super seriously—the child was coming, and we, also children, were trying to prepare for him by cutting up paper. We used the garlands to decorate the school and also nursing homes and things like that. 

So I feel like I made some garlands for Sean Young and hung them in her room. I imagined a woman ravaged by rejection finding her audience, bending slowly on a stage for her crowd, triumphant and loved. The stage is also this great place of yearning and waiting, especially before the curtain is raised or after it’s dropped. I noticed recently that I write about dancers a lot—I really, really wanted to be a dancer growing up, but never took lessons. I still envy dancers. But it’s probably more the element of performance that continues to interest me—it comes up a lot.

You were recently the Rona Jaffe Fellow at The MacDowell Colony.  Can you tell us more about your time there?

I think the most lasting thing about my visit was being allowed to exist as a writer for two months. When you’re working jobs to get by financially so that you can go home and work at your secret job, the job you truly love and think about all day long—the chance to do that job full-time is an incredible gift in itself.

Also, people don’t ask you to apologize for what you do when you’re at an artist colony. People just assume you’re doing something important. This is the often the opposite of growing up in the Midwest, where most people assume I must be doing something really unimportant, because I don’t make any money. Being surrounded by the assumption that what you’re doing is important results in confidence, something that every creative person needs in droves if they want to do anything at all worthwhile.

It was one of those life-changing experiences I don’t really know how to talk about without sounding trite. I ate wonderful food, met wonderful people, and felt completely cared for in every way, which allowed me to focus on my thoughts. While there, I realized how many times during the course of an average day at home, I have the beginning of a poem but no time to follow through. At MacDowell I was able to follow through.

Honestly, it’s the kind of gratitude I can’t figure out how to adequately express. My whole life has changed for the better since my residency, in ways that really surprised me, and I have no doubt that the MacDowell Colony and the Rona Jaffe Foundation are responsible for that.

What other writing projects are you currently working on?

Right now I’m writing a lot of poems with a background image in mind—the Wizard of Oz being revealed, the moment the curtain is pulled back and a sad little man is found to be working a machine that makes the magic, and the faces of the fooled who had hoped so hard. Just that split second of the revelation, not the before or after of it.  There’s also a masculine vanity at play in these new poems, paired with a dangerous impotence. The idea of ineffectuality is really interesting to me right now, like a horizon that just moves back ten feet every time you get close to it. There are people like that. So I have about twenty poems in this new series so far, which I’m thinking will be a chapbook called “In My Study of Hysteria.” I like the idea of a chapbook for these poems because they’re more unified in tone than the full-length manuscript I just finished. I am also in the beginning stages of editing an epistolary collaboration between myself and another writer with whom I have corresponded for over ten years.

What great books have you read recently?

Songs of Kabir, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was a highlight of the summer. Mariana Marin’s Paper Children is beautiful and I’ve returned to it all month long—it’s been out from Ugly Duckling Presse for a bit of time but I’m new to it. The same goes for Matthew Rohrer’s A Plate of Chicken. My friend Virginia Konchan is one of my favorite poets, and her manuscript sits by my bed for ease of access. I read The Epic of Gilgamesh recently and swooned—it has a wild man in it.

I’m usually broke so I can’t buy books very often. This means I read a lot of poems individually or in clusters, as my primary access to current poetry is online. I was teaching at a university last year but I moved away, and I really miss their library in terms of contemporary poetry. So my reading includes a lot of online journals—I love Guernica, Boston Review, and Little Star. A poem by Zbigniew Herbert completely changed my life this summer: Achilles. Penthesilea—you can read the Joseph Brodsky translation here. I’ve read it about two million times in two months.