P O E T   I N T E R V I E W
One Poet's Paradox: Wanting to Believe
r a t i o n a l i s t   a t h e i s t   m a r y   e l i z a b e t h   p a r k e r
c o n s i d e r s   o u r   n e e d   f o r   " d e e p   m a g i c "

BY TAMARA KAYE SELLMAN

I REMEMBER going to a writers' workshop and encountering a story containing magical realist elements. One of the workshop members rolled her eyes and contested it verbally, then scribbled all over the manuscript pages in blazing red ink: "I don't believe a word of this! It could never happen! This is totally unbelievable!" Underscore, underscore. You could hear the pen tearing at the paper.

It reminded me of something I've noticed over the years, having attended a good number of writers' workshops, that anytime something comes across as unbelievable in a story or poem, the first question always seems to be: "How can the writer make this more credible?" It is nearly always assumed that the writer has made an error.

Realism, after all, dominates the American literary worldview. If it's magical, then it must be fantasy (that is, never meant to be believed in the first place) or science fiction (or, speculations about what might happen, as opposed to what is happening). If you write something that isn't assumed to be fantasy or sci fi from the outset, and then allow something magical or speculative to enter the picture, it's assumed you've somehow violated a contract with the reader.

Writers in workshops tend to cling to realism's anchor for stability whenever passages or ideas that challenge realism float to the surface. Not that it's their fault -- this is what is taught in beginning college writing courses all over the place, almost as if it were an unwritten dictate:

THOU SHALT BE REAL

Sometimes these "indiscretions" are taught as examples of deus ex machina, a literary device often referred to in the pejorative, assumed as a last resort for "lazy" writers who can't make reality work for them in their stories. (To be fair, this is true, sometimes, but not always. Deus ex machina is a legitimate and powerful device, when used appropriately.)

However, when such a slippage in believability occurs, it's rarely -- if ever -- assumed that the reader's inflexible need for realism might be at fault. Cultural realities vary widely in pluralistic societies. While writers are obligated to write "credibly," they can only do it from the perspective they understand -- their worldview. Their readers must be willing to accept that being intellectually or culturally "outside" one writer's reality is no reason to discharge them as fraudulent, incompetent or "unbelievable."

It's even less likely that writing students will recognize magical realist ideas as arising from a legitimate -- if mysterious or unspoken -- history unless they venture (with any luck) into courses on magical realism or postmodernism or surrealism, where the "irreal" is given academic legitimacy.

It's worth inserting here that writing the "improbable" takes a good deal of finesse, and newer writers, or writers who have not mastered the underpinnings of magical realism by reading the greats (Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Jorge Luis Borges, to start) probably aren't up to the significant challenges this kind of writing poses.

So it could very well be that the short story author so vehemently critiqued in the workshop simply failed to pull off whatever it was he had intended. (Interestingly, I don't remember the details of the story at all, only the woman's strong objections to it.)

Which leads me to Mary Elizabeth Parker. When I read her poetry collection, The Sex Girl, I found poems that stepped up to the challenge of bridging realism and magic. Hers is rich work borrowing material from across time and space, making frequent intersections with the natural and supernatural worlds. But it is neither science fiction nor fantasy.

When I put together some interview questions for Parker, I imagined responses from a poet who easily embraced the "unbelievable," a poet who, unlike the workshop critic, automatically accepted the challenge of suspending disbelief.

Little did I know that -- HA! -- Parker doesn't believe in any of that mumbo jumbo. Which is not to say that she doesn't want to believe in it -- from Parker's responses I have found, instead, a writer wrestling with what she understands both intellectually and intuitively. This, ultimately, explains for me the power in her poetry, the tension that arises from trying to reconcile one set of ideas with its opposite. It puts her, if uncomfortably, inside a world composed entirely of shades of gray, the only place where magical realism can, in fact, reside with any comfort.

In my opinion, that is also a place where only the most courageous and thoughtful writers can go. -- TKS, Editor
__________________

TKS: Most of our readers battle over the most basic definitions of magical realism. We respond by offering our readers individual definitions to consider. What is your personal definition of magical realism?

MEP: It's hard for me to define the genre, but for me traditional magical realism has strong roots in land and generations on the land, and in family cycles of events: family journeys and quests repeated generation to generation, and repetition of patterns of familiar magical attributes, generation to generation, so that the magic gives them powers of endurance against the depradations of time and political upheaval.

However, my own magical realism doesn't quite focus on family, rather on emotional states of the individual embodied in metaphor and magical occurrence -- often burrowing under the mundane achieved by calmly allowing miracle to wander into the everyday.

TKS: As a poet, how does your process lead to a magical realist poem? Is it something you intend from the beginning, or is it something that happens of its own volition?

MEP: I have to admit something right off -- I never intend magical realism -- have never studied it, nor considered myself a magical realist in either my poetry or my prose -- in fact, never had a term to explain a good deal of my work until a reviewer of The Sex Girl called my poems 'surreal' and I thought, 'hmmmm....yeah,' and then there was gratitude and relief that I could finally fit myself somewhere, since I knew my work didn't follow or appeal to those whose work was realistic narrative. So, my deep magic poems just happen, aren't planned, grow out of impulse, or some half-waking, half-dreaming image, or a kind of numinous mood I call a poetry attack. I think they happen almost as a response to my own need to reconcile the contradictions in myself.

I'm a rational empiricist who doesn't believe in God, heaven or hell, any kind of afterlife or any divine intervention in this one. I'm a cynic who thinks the current culture of ever-present loving angels is fluffy wishful thinking, who simply tolerates a few of my friends who consult crystals, believe in bodily energy fields and embrace the belief that we each have a 'spirit animal' and should run with wolves, eagles, bears. I don't believe that we can commune with past lives or depend upon angels thought to be coursing through this life. I don't believe that current Native Americans channel the earth spirits of their ancestors (no more than we former Europeans can channel the spirits of ours).

And I'm not a proponent of the Greens or any back-to-nature impulse. I like the dirt, noise, and frenetic energy of big cities, am awed by technological progress, find beauty of a tough kind in New Jersey industrial parks -- and as for nature, although biology was my favorite science in school, on a day-to-day basis I prefer my nature behind glass or on the Nature Channel: I am absolutely thrilled, for instance, to learn that the web of the orb spider is tougher than steel and is being considered as a model for human armor -- so I would carefully (from a distance) watch a web being spun in the garden, but if the spider strayed into my house, I'd get the Raid because the thought that a spider might touch me is insupportable. And yet...

My poems evoke something beyond the physical, something -- yes -- spiritual, in the natural world...and I believe in ghosts, both the ones (inexplicably scary to me) that live in my house (see my poem "Footings") and the ones of magical realism, though as a religious friend has explained to me, it's impossible for an atheist to believe in ghosts...

While my intellectual self scoffs when ghosts and spirits appear in other people's -- and even my own -- poems and stories, my emotional self is relieved to accept them as a buffer for the horrors of the surface world, whose story is a linear narrative controlled by politics and social forces, and its characters are powerless -- but their lives become bearable and they become infused with power when they are embraced by the spirit world -- with its subtext that this life has been lived before, generation after generation, that these cycles have happened before, will be lived through, and will happen again, outside of and more powerful than human control and understanding. So I say yes to spirit intervention...

And then a part of me says no again, it's just clumsy deus ex machina when the author can't rely on a rational plot solution -- and then I distance myself as I read Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Borges, García Lorca, and Miguel Angel Asturias, and of course Neruda (whom some may call a realist, but his poems are so infused with otherworld/underworld and animism that I swoon into his surrealism).

These are just a few I've read, randomly, not in any planned way. And I admire the quirky, ugly, yet brazenly lovely world of the new magical realist, Jeanette Winterson, who wrote Sexing the Cherry, among others.

Still, the power of magical realism infects me, even as I deny it. Maybe I was destined to it, though I don't believe in destiny -- the first week I was in college, I ventured to the huge library and wandered the stacks and the first book that caught my eye (so I checked it out, knowing nothing of the author), was Asturias' Mulatta.

I'm the only atheist I know who would love to turn some sort of intellectual corner and embrace Catholicism, even in all its bloodiness. I'm the only atheist I know who felt power at the Temple Wall (the Wailing Wall) in Jerusalem and in the streets of Assisi, where St. Francis seemed very present to me. I'm an atheist who sat reverently in a tiny chapel in Mijas, Spain, feeling the strength of the talismans for healing that surrounded the altar (there was a tiny copper foot for foot problems, a heart for bad hearts), an atheist who was terrified in Madrid at the sight of the rich Spanish women in high heels and fur coats, with shining helmet-wedges of dark hair -- because I felt their natural allegiance with the fierce females of García Lorca's work, that relationship (even in the streets of a modern city) to the spirit world of both Catholicism and an animism even older.

So I'm a rational cynic who easily gets emotionally overwrought -- or, put less cynically, who often enters a sensibility beyond the rational. I have to rest myself outside/beneath/above/beyond this surface world occasionally, or my own atheist fears would weigh too hard on me: fear of dying and then being just dead, being dust with nothing after, losing my amazingly privileged place in this amazing sensory/sensual world I (we all) live in.

TKS: Who are the most inspiring magical realists, for you (in both poetry and prose)?

MEP: Miguel Angel Asturias' Mulatta, as I've mentioned above, was the first I remember consciously, as a next developmental plane after a childhood in which I read much Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, along with lots of gritty realism.

In keeping with my contradictory nature, I've always read mostly prose while writing mostly poetry (except for 1992-98, when I wrote lots of prose along with my poetry), so it's hard to name a poet other than Neruda -- who I read none of until a few years ago -- but realized I'd found a new darkness (yet infused with much more light) to take up with after García Lorca (whose influence I'd largely forgotten until my visceral reaction to the ladies of Spain).

Nabokov's Ada, though not strictly magical realism, has always had that same effect upon me because of the heightened sensuality and the historical inevitability of loss in the White Russian world he depicts -- a world where mortals nearly were gods.

And when I considered this question, Faulkner came immediately to mind, which made no sense since I was thinking specifically of his Absalom, Absalom, which is Greek tragedy, but not magical -- and then much later, I realized that Vardaman Bundren's understanding that "my mother is a fish" is deep magic (As I Lay Dying) and that Faulkner's novel, The Hamlet, contains its own Queen Bee/Earth mother/Willendorf Venus in the character of Eula Varner Snopes, so bathed in the sufficiency of her own body that she deigns not even to walk.

During the 80s I read much of the Canadian author Robertson Davies. Just recently, I've been enjoying the short stories of Gina Ochsner, whose name is showing up more and more as winner of literary competitions.

TKS: You frequently intersect a kind of primitive knowledge from the past with the intellectual knowledge of the present in your poems, and sometimes weave in a third, spiritual knowledge as well (which I find especially interesting, now that I know you are an atheist). I am thinking of "Skinny Girl" specifically, where the subject of the poem is "disremembering how to breathe in water" and later "wills herself to skim across like Christ," though knowledge of a shark attack in the past has been implied in the poem as well. I like the notion in your poems of reaching back to what we know in our core, what is not intellectual, but intuitive. That seems to be the essence of magical realism, this seeing of the world through what some call a "third eye." Is this a personal response to the current culture of information (a seemingly American phenomenon)?

MEP: I love the new culture of information and, rather than denigrating it, think it's tremendously exciting, as magical as anything could be (instantaneous messaging of all kinds through the air, for instance, or even being brought into the bunker of a terrorist via a camera on the nose of a seeking missile). I don't believe in the 'old wisdom' of shamans or even of grandmothers (unless they can give me physical proof they've traveled out of this body and back), and actually believe the 'old wisdom' was the previous cultures' necessary 'tricks' to assert some control (via belief in a spiritual affinity with it) over a universe which was too deadly. The old life, the old way, was nasty, brutish and short (although I will concede that the loveliness of large tracts of open country was probably prettier than today's concrete jungles).

Yet, as I've said, I agree there is something that wells up even in us modern cynics.

Re: "Skinny Girl," I still beat myself up over the Christ reference because it was too easy (and not exactly accurate -- I wanted her to be more uninformed, more tentative and confused than a Christ). I dislike using the conventional imagery of the numinous world (spirits, angels, clouds of unknowing, saint's relics, Christ's acts, miracles) when we have the everyday miracles of the sun reappearing each morning and the wonderful complexities of our bodies continuing to allow us to live and breathe. I like to find a new language for magic, and quirkier, more personal imagery. Many poems involve my two big sloppy hounds, whose connection to the subterranean world of roots, mud, grubs, voles, moles, and mice becomes magical as I watch them sniff and root under the night sky.

My poems go again and again to water because it terrifies me and I guess I'm working that fear with characters who meld with it ("Lake Woman") or explore their fear of it by devolving into creatures young and pre-verbal and maybe even pre-human (with gills, who could breathe in water), yet somehow knowing ("Skinny Girl" and "Not to Leap In"). I grew up on Lake Michigan, yet never learned to swim, love to stay at the ocean but not to go in the water (I now live in North Carolina, four hours from the Atlantic) and am married to a man (my husband Michael) who was still working on restoring a wooden sailboat the morning of our wedding and who insists on taking me on cruise ships although every time I remember I'm on top of miles of water I want to be airlifted to land now -- yet I swallow the fear and keep leaning out over the rail. There've also been two drownings in my family (the shark attack in "Skinny Girl" isn't sharks, it's the water itself) although when I try to understand that in my poems, I enter a spirit place (I have to) where the dead are alive, just asleep, swathed in water like a caul or shroud, drifting in a watery cave/underworld.

TKS: It's no wonder that 'your' magical realism just happens. You balance your internal opposites well, paralleling a signature characteristic of magical realism: the peaceful cohabitation of dualities.

MEP: I'd say that I live uncomfortably with my dualities -- but it keeps life interesting -- it brings me up short and forces me to think every time I realize I've contradicted myself.

TKS: On the subject of ghosts: You manage to subtly incorporate them in your poems in a way that gives your spectres real substance. They never come off as conventions. What's your attraction to the world of ghosts?

MEP: To say attraction is inaccurate -- it's repulsion. I'm terrified of them, imagine them everywhere, and not as benevolent angels or guides or spirits of my dearly departed, but as brooding, unhappy strangers, willing to cause me harm because I can't give them whatever comfort they might want. Which might explain my actual attraction to the family spirits who are essentially stabilizing and nurturing in the work of established magical realists.

Why I fear ghosts I can't tell you -- since according to my theologically-smart friend, an atheist can't believe in them. Maybe it's just an extension of my guilt that I never understood the deep selves of people who were in my life but are now dead (but whose ghosts never visit me so I might make reparation). Or maybe fearing ghosts is a symptom of my knowing that my connection with the spiritual is not a comfortable one -- I'm a fraudulent hanger-on. Though I've written dozens of poems, handfuls of short stories, and even two novels where I've descended into the deep world of magical realism (because there was no way to stay above ground and say what I needed to say), that world still is one I enter gingerly, tortuously. I've studied psychology and am still more comfortable with basic Skinnerian tenets of stimulus and response than with the layer-upon-layer-upon-layer and interpretation-upon-interpretation-upon interpretation of, say, Jung.

I read the books in which fairy tales are plumbed for their deep meanings and I understand none of it -- think 'hunh, I thought a witch in the woods was a witch in the woods and that having no hands was having no hands.' That's really scary on a literal level, and I can't get my brain to the place where it means something else, more benign and natural and developmental. And yet...I write my own fairy tales and interpretations. I have early poems based on "The Little Mermaid" (a story I hold in such esteem that when I saw the statue in Copenhagen's harbor last year I thought the milling tourists should genuflect). "Selling Light" grew out of a waking dream years ago in which I suddenly saw and understood a more sinister Match Girl.

And though I've never thought I had language to describe my unspoken relationship with my father, who's now been dead twenty years, my poem "Prayer Riding Out of Detroit" describes it accurately -- he, silent in a secret room preparing arcane things I'd need to make my way in the world (even a reference in there to the witch Baba Yaga of Russian fairy tales, who I learned about through Highlights magazine, which my great-aunt brought me from the dentist's office where she worked).

My most recent book of poems (unpublished), Sarah's Lovely Body, uses fairy tale and myth in a surrealistic exploration of illness and the body.

TKS: Magical realism, whether by that label or some other, has grown in its appeal to the typical American reader, marking a turning away from a certain gritty realism that has marked American letters for some time now. Any theories about this?

MEP: I myself read tons of gritty realism -- I like it -- I like true crime -- I'm a kind of voyeur of the grubbiness in the world. Yet we all need something at a subterranean level that folds a richness and a meaning and a spiritual context around the grubbiness of daily life -- a grubbiness which is very much 'in our faces' because of constant media play of the Skinnerian bad-rat behavior that shows up again and again.

Magical realism is a soothing escape -- to believe in protective spirits, ghosts, and the continuity of the spirit/nature world for a few hours and somehow nestle in that comfort, so that the ugliness back out on the street won't strike so deep. I can't remember who said words to the effect that 'if God did not exist, we would be forced to invent Him' (which cleverly says that the author does believe both: that God exists and that it's necessary to believe it). I don't think God exists and yet my non-rational self plunges into magical realism. I need magic, even though I don't believe in it. The need must be true for all who read magical realism.

TKS: Do you think the current wartime climate will reinforce a desire for more or less magical realism?

MEP: Probably a desire for more -- since war is harsh and needs to be escaped. Yet the Gulf War and this war against terrorists, though we call it our war, is probably only real to those in the theater of action -- we sit at home and hear of bullets snaking their way into caves, of infrareds that make the night into day -- sounds more like magic to me than war. Maybe the terrorists and the Afghani and Pakistani civilians, right now, are the ones who need magical realism.

Although I never mean to make light of war -- any enterprise where destruction is involved requires some acknowledgment of what happens at a spiritual level to both destroyers and destroyed, even though our technologies make it seem less bloody and visceral than war always is.

I've seen no nod whatever toward understanding the spiritual in any of this. It's simply protection of our people and interests (and maybe tangentially, protection of those subjugated by Taliban and such regimes). And revenge. The stories of the gods and spirit-animals have protection and revenge as their themes, too. But they also have something to bind psychological wounds for all involved.

So reading more magical realism could be, in that way, a way of knowing ourselves in war, as well as escape from war -- whether we understand the spiritual complexities at an inchoate level, as I seem to, or at a level where we're comfortable with admitting the 'old wisdom' of the warrior chiefs and chieftesses who came before us, comfortable with animal spirits walking the land and angels hovering over our shoulders. I'm not comfortable with those ideas but maybe would like to be. It might make my poems come easier.

READ six poems by Mary Elizabeth Parker

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