An invitation for many lives

An Interview with Gabrielle Bates

“I have so many lives!,” Ingmar Bergmann justified his infidelities, and Gabrielle Bates quotes him now to describe the variegated landscape of her artistic career. Author of Judas Goat (forthcoming from Tin House 2023), Bates is also a host of The Poet Salon podcast and creator of bewitching poet-comics. Mixed-media, she tells us, is her way to balance the interdependent limitations of both image and words—where one medium fails, perhaps another can lend new magic. In pressing back against prescriptions, she also shows us how we, too, can create space for “more of [our] self/selves to come to the table” as we explore our powers (and end points) of expression. 

We can’t wait for your debut collection, Judas Goat (forthcoming from Tin House 2023). What insights can you share about this book, from its themes to your writing journey?

I’m talking to you at a unique stage, where the book is becoming more and more “real” (galleys are headed to the printer, conversations about cover art are happening), and yet, the book still does not exist for the public except as an idea—glimpsed, scattered across the years, in slightly warped fragments, like ruins. Except these are ruins in reverse: pieces gesturing towards a whole that doesn’t exist yet, rather than a whole that once existed.

I started writing poems in the direction of what has become Judas Goat in 2013, when I graduated from college and began admitting to myself that poetry wasn’t just something I did on the side, toward my dream of writing novels and nonfiction, but something I’d like to pursue more fully. Poetry as a world—of books, of people—was really new to me then. I’d never lived anywhere besides Alabama, and the landscape and history of that place, along with my own personal history there, were very much in me, alchemizing and pressurizing and beginning, for the first time, to find a way out, in art.

I look forward to hearing, when the book comes out, what themes other people detect in Judas Goat. Literature is a living collaboration with readers, which is endlessly frightening and beautiful to me. I personally experience the book as an excavation of hauntings around privacy, connection, vulnerability, ignorance, desire, goodness, domestication, violence, sexuality, and God, among other things. The poems honor, I hope, the terrifying and gorgeous complexity of intimate human relationships and the role the imagination plays in the making of a self (and, by extension, the making of worlds).

As we interview you, we’d like to ask you about your own process interviewing poets on The Poet Salon podcast. How do you develop questions that might resonate with your guests and reveal something new about their work?

I looooove coming up with questions for our Poet Salon guests! I’m always trying to balance two desires, primarily, in that process: the desire to orient listeners in a stabilizing way—particularly listeners who might not know anything about our guest going in—and the desire to ask the guest questions they haven’t already been asked. When authors go on book tours, they often receive the same questions over and over; you can see their eyes glaze over with boredom, and this pains me. I always want to deepen or diverge from what a writer has shared in other places, if possible, to contribute something new to the living archive. Other than that, it’s mostly about just being honest about where my curiosities lie! I’m so lucky to get to work with Luther Hughes and Dujie Tahat—two of the most brilliant and wonderful people on the planet—on this podcast. We haven’t put out a new episode in a while, but our gears are turning behind the scenes. Definitely some goodness coming everyone’s way this spring (2022)!

You often talk about poetry as a conversation—with ourselves, with our loved ones, with places in time. Of your poem “Dear Birmingham,” you write “ Love—for another person, a place, the self—requires that we wrestle with limitations. I often go to poetry for that sort of wrestling.” How have you used poetry as a forum or medium to reconcile such conflicts? Should total resolution be our aim?

I have no evidence or intuition that resolution is possible, when it comes to desire.

Should an impossibility be our aim? Sometimes. Should this particular impossibility—of resolving the conflict between love and limitation—be our aim? Probably not. Without tension, there would be no poetry. My own aim when I write is certainly more in the direction of articulation than resolution. (Though now I’m wondering: is articulation a kind of resolution? It does feel, now that I really think about it, like a step in the direction…)

In poetry, the primary inherent limitations are language, imagination, and mortality. And it’s a pleasurable challenge for me to stretch towards the bounds of these entities, when I feel them pressing in. When I write, I am trying to articulate something about what it means to me to be alive and dying, here and now; that’s really it, I think.

Continuing with the idea of conflicts, you’ve spoken of dualities especially in regards to your exquisite poetry comics. How do you understand mixed-media art as a way to explore our many selves?

Recently I found a box of notebooks from when I was a college student, and it was interesting to see how many Judas Goat obsessions regarding imagery and domesticated animals in particular were already there. On the first page of one notebook—in which I went on to, with deranged fastidiousness, describe every single second of Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1990), a documentary about workers trying to unionize in a meatpacking plant—I wrote “Image succeeds where language fails,” drew a heart beside it, and then added two check marks. Ha! I was clearly very taken with the idea. Of course, there’s truth in the inverse too (language can succeed, sometimes, where image fails). Much of my creative process involves trying to balance those interdependent failures.

Ingmar Bergman used to argue to his wives that his infidelities were justified by saying, “I have so many lives!” I’ve claimed a similar justification when it comes to my mixed-media experiments and dabblings in other genres outside of poetry (why do I feel the need to justify them? I don’t know). I think different facets of a self seek expression in different ways at different times.

About your poetry comics, you write, “I wonder if there is a poetry that would allow more of your self/selves to come to the table...I wonder if there’s a form on the page (or off the page entirely) that echoes more truthfully the ways in which you process your thoughts, your memories, your life.“ What “forms” have you used to process your life and those around you? What are some tools we can use to translate off-page poetries like how we love, eat, speak, lead, and learn into art that expresses our identities?

It alarms me when people take genre distinctions as a give-in, choose one, and never waiver from that strict lane. I think it’s important to at least ask yourself, for your own art-making, what you might have the unique skill or desire to combine.

I’ve sought expression in language, obviously, and poetry comics, which incorporate collages of my drawings as well as words, but I’ve also dabbled in figurative sculpture, painting, film, acting, photography, singing, fiction writing. It’s not just about combining genres; it’s about doing the self-reflective work to figure out what interests, experiences, and mediums you have access to that you might be keeping off the page (or the canvas, or the screen…) simply because you haven’t seen it done before.

I love that, in your question, you’ve framed the journey from lived experience to art as a translation. I’ve never done translating work myself, but I’ve been chatting with a translator about one of my poems recently, and it’s been really fascinating to watch my English pour into the vessel of his Spanish, and vice versa. In translation there is never an exact match, and that’s part of the magic.

Screenwriter John Ridley has said, "There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are—at their best—an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.” What new access points do you feel audiences can gain from visual interpretations of poetry?

I like the idea that poetry comics or other visual forms of poetry can be welcoming, inviting to people for whom more traditional, text-based poetry feels intimidating. Adam Ellis’s illustration of Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-Headed Calf” feels like an example of that; the visuals illustrate the action of the poem, underscoring—rather than complicating—what’s going on in terms of narrative. I hope that people who teach literature in schools know about poetry comics like this because they can definitely provide new ways of entry.

Many poetry comics (my own included) are often more invested in further complication than they are in illustration, however, which can make them less accessible than text-based poems, by challenging the brain to integrate disparate information in text and visuals semi-simultaneously. On the other hand, by virtue of the visual element, one is allowing more visually inclined people a point of entry they wouldn’t have otherwise, so I suppose there’s always some way it’s opening a door to a different kind of reader.

Surprise, delight, bemusement, intrigue, disturbance—any emotion can be an access point. The quicker a piece of art activates something in the audience, which compels them to linger and attend, the more chance there is for connection. Visual art has a leg-up on written text in this regard, I think, because, for seeing audiences at least, the visual can snag attention and convey information the second it splashes on the retina—the seduction can be almost instantaneous.