Framed in the Right Kind of Light: An Interview with Poet Carrie Murphy

I’ve known Carrie Murphy since 2011, when my DIY feminist press Birds of Lace published her chapbook Meet the Lavenders. Through Twitter we became online pals who shot the shit on everything from television to poetry to fashion, and eventually ended up on a short poetry tour together in 2012. This fall marks the release of her second collection of poetry, Fat Daisies (Big Lucks 2015), a whipsmart collection that interrogates white privilege, late capitalist consumerism, waste, and the gaping void of modernity—with wry humor, non-didactic feminism, and firm sincerity, natch. You can read two poems from the collection here; you can also take a selfie with Fat Daisies and enter to win a massage, a box of beauty/self-care supplies, and a copy of her first book Pretty Tilt!

I interviewed Murphy about Fat Daisies and her poetry in general: how to be a feeling, living person in this world that seems to turn every living thing into a consumable commodity.

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Gina Abelkop: Where did Fat Daisies begin: did it begin to emerge during the writing/editing of your previous book, Pretty Tilt, or sometime else entirely?

Carrie Murphy: I started writing these poems during National Poetry Month in 2012. I was doing a poem-a-day to get myself writing again, living in a tiny apartment in Alexandria, VA, functionally unemployed, and basically miserable.

My first book Pretty Tilt  (Keyhole Press 2012) had just come out, which was awesome, but I felt eager to write different kinds of poems so I decided to do a NaPoWriMo. I don’t think the two books are totally divorced (I mean, I wrote them both!!), but FD certainly has a different set of concerns and different goals than PT (which was about teenage girlhood).  I think, though, that there’s probably only 4-5 poems from that month that actually survived to the final manuscript.

GA: What is your relationship to consumerism/capitalism/things? Like you (as I perceive via the book), I feel critical of the entire stuff-economy, and yet find myself always wanting, wanting wanting. I wonder if there are patterns to when and how you find yourself more/less entrenched in the culture of consumerism, and if you find your relationship to it evolving in a linear manner.

CM: I love buying things and having things. I tend to want to buy a new dress for anything that happens to me, ever.

It’s certainly difficult to break out of the idea that getting more things will somehow make you happy or fill your holes, isn’t it? But it’s something totally worth breaking out of for both emotional and financial freedom. But then, I don’t want to be some ascetic, either. Material things are a pleasure, and should be allowed to be such. I feel like there’s a big undercurrent of misogyny in a lot of the shopping-shaming we see in our culture, and I am 100% not here for that. It scares me, though, that I am literally in the 1% of richest, most privileged, most educated people WHO HAVE EVER LIVED ON EARTH.

I’m doing KonMari (the method in the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) right now, which is definitely making me have a different relationship to stuff. I’ve only done my clothes, but I gave away three GIANT trash bags of clothes, which is something I’ve never done before on that scale. It felt really good. I felt like I could feel psychic weight leaving me, too!

I don’t think I will ever stop wanting to buy clothes or makeup, or really nice sheets, or good quality cooking pots, or being invested in the way I present myself to the world through my material goods. But I am hoping to cultivate a relationship to my possessions that makes me feel joy—quality over quantity, honoring the usefulness of what I have and then letting the things go when they’ve served their purpose. It all sounds very GOOP-y, I know, but it’s a new perspective on consumerism for me. It feels like the right door to go through right now.

GA: Your book deals deftly and sincerely with examining whiteness: its pervasiveness, insidiousness, and boring strangeness. What was your experience of coming to understand your own complicity in it, and then moving forward to attempt to address and think beyond it? How do your practices as a poet, doula, and educator change and adjust to challenge white supremacy and racism?

Maternity care in the US is a patriarchal system that conspires to render birthing people mute and powerless at every turn–a hegemony we submit to from lack of resources, lack of options, misogyny, miseducation, misplaced trust, fallacy, an obsession with technology, and so SO SO much towering fear–this system literally injures people and takes their lives, and that’s happening much, much more to women of color and other marginalized people. I do, and will continue to, spend most of my anti-racist activist energy in the birth and breastfeeding sphere, because it feels incredibly urgent to me. Black babies die at almost three times the rate of white ones; black mothers are three to four times as likely to die than white mothers, I could go on and on about how maternity care fails people of color constantly in this country–systemic racism is indisputably taking lives, not only in our streets and in our jails, but in our hospitals.

I believe in speaking out when I see racism or appropriation. I believe in discussing race and whiteness with other white people. I believe in amplifying the voices of people of color and centering them as the experts on their own lives. I try as hard as I can to be intersectional in thought, word and in deed. I do not always succeed, but I try, above all, to listen and to learn–knowing when to shut up, when to say sorry. And then actually doing the shutting up and/or saying sorry.

GA: What did your day-to-day life look like during the writing of this book? Did you have routines that encouraged/challenged your writing time/space? How long did this book take to write, and what were the most challenging and/or exciting parts of building a new collection?

CM: I’m not really a routine-based writer. I’d like to be (and have been in certain writing situations that involve me getting paid), but I’m mostly a when the mood strikes kind of poet. Like I have to have a certain FEELING to write and if I don’t have that feeling anything I write will be cringe-worthy. So my process is sort of organic in that way. Maybe one day I’ll be a “work on poems every day for 30 minutes” person but I don’t know when that day will come.

The book took, all in all, about three years, more or less. It felt very challenging to me to write a manuscript outside of the bubble of the MFA—Pretty Tilt was essentially my MFA thesis, worked on for years in workshop and with my MFA professors, so I very often felt like “What the fuck am I doing? I can’t do this without other people or “experts.” ” Also in terms of subject matter, the stakes are quite a bit higher, because I am attempting a lot more social commentary in this book than I was in my previous poetry, and doing it in a tone that is a lot more risky. So there was definitely a lot of anxiety about that.I think another thing is even like, the idea of thinking you are legit enough to write a whole damn book. I mean, I had already written a whole damn book, because I had to if I wanted a graduate degree–and this time around felt a lot more like, “Who the fuck cares what I have to say?” And maybe people won’t, you know? Classic imposter syndrome!!

I REALLY had a lot of help in building this collection from Mark Cugini, my friend and editor. The book definitely would not exist if it weren’t for him—not just him wanting to publish it, but because he bolstered me throughout—pushing me, encouraging me, taking me down more than a few pegs. I also want to shout out other friends/mentors who looked at it: Robert Alan Wendeborn, Melanie Sweeney Bowen, Kristen Stone, Connie Voisine, Sandra Simonds, Carmen Giménez Smith and you!

GA: What are some of your favorite books, films, music, blogs, or performance from the past few years? Did they have any bearing on your writing practice, and if so, how/why?

CM: I will forever worship Gloria Anzaldúa. Ditto for Rachel Zucker, Anne Carson, Richard Siken. I almost always write to The Be Good Tanyas, specifically the song “Human Thing” which I play on repeat over and over. It just gets me into the canyon inside myself I have to go into to make a poem. I am super inspired by Young Women United, which is a nonprofit community organizing organization by and for women of color that operates out of Albuquerque, NM (where I live). They advocate for and create real, lasting change for all kinds of issues: repro justice (including birth justice), young parents, mental health, LGBTQ rights, and more. I stand in awe of their work!!

I love The Feminist Midwife. DeRay McKesson’s Twitter feed is vital. I love Nicole Belanger’s Girl Gang TinyLetter, and Alicia Kennedy’s TinyLetter. I love Call The Midwife, Jane The Virgin, Empire, Kath & Kim, Switched At Birth, Nashville. 

I just read Rufi Thorpe’s The Girls From Corona Del Mar and it made me cry. I NEVER CRY AT BOOKS so this was a big deal. The birth in it was searing and so fucking real, as is the depiction of both motherhood and friendship. Elisa Albert’s After Birth is everything to me in a novel.

One Direction, and the incredibly smart, feminist, and passionate fandom that surround them, are a huge part of what keeps me happy and sane on a day-to-day basis. I have a Harry lockscreen and a Zayn wallpaper on my phone and I’m listening to “One Thing” at this literal moment. I’m pretty crushed that I didn’t figure out a way to work a reference to them into Fat Daisies. I had one about Harry Styles but it was in a bad poem that got cut!

GA: Do you consider yourself to have a poetry community? If so, who makes up this community? What are the systems of support around your writing life like?

CM: My poetry community exists almost totally online, and basically has since I finished my MFA in 2011. Well, that’s not true–I knew a lot of great poets when I lived in the DC area–Mark, Tony Mancus, Maureen Thorson, Dan Brady, and more. And since I moved to Albuquerque, I’ve joined a local writer’s collective called Dirt City. It’s really nice to be able to meet in person again and talk about writing with other writers. We have readings and support each other’s work, as well, so it’s something I’m really honored to be a part of.

But back to online—I LOVE LOVE LOVE the community of writers I’ve participated in for the last five or six years, on Twitter and even going back to Google Reader. I mean to some extent everyone knows each other or knows “of” each other via social media, but I feel like I’ve created real and lasting relationships with people online. Like, you (who came to my wedding!!!!), many other Birds of Lace poets, Caroline Crew (my pressmate!!!), Nicole Steinberg, JD Scott, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and so many others. It’s a joy to know them.

GA: You did your MFA in New Mexico and then had to leave for several years; now you’re back in NM. The southwest is a great love of yours: what makes it so? Does it feel like “home” to you? How does loving your land-of-residence affect your creative life (as opposed to when you were in a landscape you didn’t like)?

I’m not sure I can fully articulately talk about what NM means to me. I have been percolating an essay about it in my head for a long time, but haven’t ever really sat down to parse/write it out in a way that does it justice—I just know that it feels right to me in a way that’s really, really hard to describe to other people. I think my friends and family back in Maryland genuinely think I am super weird (and certainly overzealous) when I talk about it, what kind of crackles it creates for me to exist here among this sky, these mountains. It’s just the “it” for me. The click I didn’t know was going to click–like the focusing of a camera, finally, after being just a tiny bit off.

When I lived in the DC area I would take the metro a lot and just write like terribly mean poems in my head about the government and “pinstriped people” and all of these overly stereotypical ideas about that area (I mean, they’re stereotypes FOR A REASON, but I won’t get into all that 😉 ). After living in the southwest, moving back to a heavily populated, super expensive area with WILDLY different cultural values felt like utter and complete claustrophobia. I am pretty adaptable, so I dealt with it, but anyone who followed me on Twitter at that time knows how much I complained (more than was appropriate, FOR SURE. SORRY FRIENDS). I was born and raised in Baltimore and I definitely love my hometown, but I always feel weird when I go “home.” The East Coast just doesn’t seem to fit me anymore. Like when I’m around places with a lot of trees/green or tall buildings now I’m like…this is just too much. I’ve been to NYC twice since I first moved in NM in 2008 and it makes me feel I’m in that 90s computer game Jezzball–like I’m a bouncing ball who can’t get out.

I think moving back here freed me a bit from my bad attitude–but NM is certainly not a perfect place–it has a myriad of issues that are totally different from those in the DMV. I will say I would 100% rather deal with “Land of Manana” problems like a plumber not calling you back for two days than sitting in traffic for hours and hours and having to spend 85% of your income on rent, but that’s just me, I think. I won’t be able to live in NM forever so I’m happy to be here for now, doing my work.

GA: Do you have anxieties around issues of self-awareness, which appear throughout your book? Do you find self-awareness to be productive, belly-button gazing, or some combo of both? Youth culture is often criticized for spending too much time thinking about themselves (“narcissists”), but I wonder if a certain amount of self-awareness is both important and necessary to seeing our own complicity in the various evils of the world. I wonder how you walk the line in your own life, and how you see it playing out online or IRL more generally.

CM: What a question!!! My book is navel-gazing as fuck. It is, as I say in it, “too meta in its movements.” I won’t lie about that, and I don’t think I want to fully apologize for it, either–because I respond to what you say about examining your own complicityl–see a bit below for more on that.

I’m a Millennial and I think that our generation has a lot of pressure to be performatively self-aware. I mean, we have a lot of pressure to be performatively EVERYTHING–performatively married, performatively a mother, performatively a good solid Democrat, performatively non-racist, performatively beautiful and cultured and sane and good, concerned about the right things, buying the right things, framing ourselves in the right kind of light for our selfies. I’m not sure this always a bad thing, but it can be. As much as the internet is my home, it’s also a place that’s incredibly toxic as a woman and as a creative person (as my friend the poet and essayist Alice Bolin said about the internet, and I paraphrase, “I live here, and I hate it desperately but I can’t and won’t leave”) Being as active online as I am makes me feel like shit pretty often, I will say–hugely jealous, hugely grasping in an ugly way . So the performativity AND the self-awareness can become this creeping gross blob that literally comes from your own self, and the fact that you create it with your own insecurity and your own self-magnifying glass in comparison to other people’s bullshit magnifying glasses makes it even worse.

But that’s not the self-awareness that’s going to make change–at least not for me (unless it’s the kind that’s going to force me to stop scrolling and go like, make myself a decent dinner). I think in terms of being a white person who is morally and ethically invested in helping to dismantle systemic racism and white supremacy, it’s vital to be self-aware. And that’s not only “performing” what it’s like to be an ally by sharing stuff on Facebook or RT-ing people of color–but actually holding yourself accountable, inside your own head AND outside of it, interrogating your own white fragility and complicity in all of the systems that continue to oppress people. That means being self-aware not only of your past or some past where racism is worse and more overt, but in the present, too–THIS present. And it sucks, and it’s hard, and it’s uncomfortable AS HELL and it feels so insurmountable, often. But it’s work worth doing, every day, always, forever. So if that kind of self-awareness, that kind of work by white people can be a catalyst to actually like, get the fuck off Twitter and find a way to make concrete change in the world, it’s valuable.

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Gina Abelkop is the author of the poetry collections I Eat Cannibals (co.im.press 2014) and Darling Beastlettes (Apostrophe Books 2012). She lives in Athens, GA, where she runs the feminist press Birds of Lace.