CURRENT ISSUE

Precarity of Life:
Ambrose Albert interviews Jade Wallace

After reading “Grape,” I could not get the line “Fruit is high cost, high risk” out of my head. Of all the fruit notorious for spoiling quickly (and costing a fortune), did you choose grapes for a particular reason or did a bunch of them furring with mould on a counter demand to appear in a poem?

Funnily enough, I don’t like grapes all that much. I was actually thinking about how “grape” has become a stand-in word for sexual assault on social media, as a way of trying to avoid censorship by online platforms. I don’t know if it’s the poet in me, or the critic, but those cutesy evasions really get under my skin. Still, I began to wonder: could one use grapes to speak of sexual assault in a way that didn’t feel quite so, you know, cringe? That isn’t so arbitrarily homophonic, but that really speaks to the realities of sexual assault? And then I started thinking about the close relationship between eating disorders and gendered violence, and how both of those things interact with socioeconomic class. That’s how “Grape” was born.

The line lengths in the third stanza of “Grape” diminish as the poem nears its end, echoing the line “like lanugo blooms on your own diminishing frame.” Was this an intentional choice while shaping the poem?

Absolutely! I wanted the poem to wither, like the grapes wither on the counter, like the body withers when not properly fed, and the way discourse, maybe, withers when we stifle the real names for things. At the same time, ironically, I hope that the sparseness, the dwindling of the poem, opens up larger spaces for thought, like a door dissolving to reveal a room.

The title “Desert Fauna” characterizes the poem as almost pastoral, a first impression immediately in contrast to the warning at the start of the poem: “Anybody stalking this dead-end road / wants something—it’s either your horses / or you.” In terms of your writing process, do you put a lot of thought into titling poems or do titles come naturally to you?

It’s a real toss-up. Sometimes a poem will be nothing but a title I really like until I finally decide what to follow it up with. Other times, like with “Desert Fauna,” I vacillate for ages about what to call it. I considered “Scrubland”; I considered “Xerocole.” I still might change the title by the time it appears in a collection!

But I have settled, for now, on “Desert Fauna,” because I enjoy the lack of clarity in the referent. Are the domesticated horses the fauna in question? Or the two people, equally domesticated? Or some wild creatures existing nearby just beyond the frame of the poem? For me, it’s all of these, bound together in their fragile desert ecosystem. And you’re absolutely right, there is a sort of thin pastoral mirage in the poem that is quite an unconvincing cover for the obvious precarity of life.

The second to last stanza of “Desert Fauna” reads “I’m not afraid of dying / you understand, I’m just / not made to be green-broke.” What is it about losing our freedom, our autonomy, that terrifies us more than death?

“Desert Fauna” is from my third poetry manuscript, currently in-progress, that deals with several themes and questions related to suicide, some of them aesthetic, some of them personal. And that for me is an eternally relevant question: what are the conditions of suffering, what are the convictions and beliefs regarding our own lives, that give us the impression that death may be a reasonable alternative? This issue of agency seems crucial to me. When we feel we cannot control the circumstances of our lives, we might turn our attention instead to controlling the circumstances of our deaths. The speaker in “Desert Fauna” isn’t suicidal per se, but they are keenly aware of what they stand to lose when their freedom is threatened. At the same time, to return to this idea of a fragile desert ecosystem, our speaker is also keenly aware that their existence is interdependent with other people, other animals, and they have an unavoidable responsibility to attend to the flux of those relationships in order to survive. On this issue, the speaker reaches only a wary sense of resolution.

“Desert Fauna” ends on an em dash instead of a period, the punctuation an open paddock door instead of a closed one. Do you think that poems, like horses, do not belong to anyone?

Oh I love that imagery—em dash as paddock gate. An em dash really does look like a little door ready to open doesn’t it? Honestly, I have to thank [The Malahat Review’s Editor] Iain Higgins for suggesting the em dash that closes out “Desert Fauna”; it wasn’t my idea but I’m now very attached to it. Haha.

As it happens, this poem had its start when someone said to me, quite casually, “Oh he’s not really interested in your poems, he just wants to fuck you.” Infuriating, obviously, though also banal. Hasn’t everyone who’s a woman—and everyone who’s been mistaken for a woman—heard versions of that before? So that ire was simmering in the back of my mind. At the same time, I was reading Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” because I spent the better part of ages eight to eighteen on a horse farm, and I miss the horses all the time, and they show up in my reading choices, and my poems, rather a lot. So naturally I constructed this scenario in which caring for horses is an allegory for writing poetry, at least on one level of interpretation.

Which brings us full circle, lassos us back to the hesitancy of that closing em dash. I don’t know who poems belong to. I suspect they wander, looking for hospitable habitats, and sometimes they stay with their writers, and others they reside with their readers, and still others they end up dead.

 

 

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