On Creativity: Anne Champion

Anne Champion

Anne Champion’s Reluctant Mistress makes you look at what you don’t want to see. There’s a couple in therapy, men and women hurting and sleeping with each other (sometimes simultaneously), dying deer, voodoo dolls and love spells, and above all else, the body. Bodies and body parts are everywhere in this unflinching collection. In one poem, “Ritual,” the speaker and her best friend drink a bottle or two of wine, and verbally “castrate” their former lovers; what interests me most in this poem, and the rest of the book, isn’t Champion’s wit or mockery. Rather, the speaker knows why they do this. “The tender aches laughed off,” she explains, “the lovers fully sacrificed/ to the narrative arc, our stories woven/ together to transform/ old pain into absurdity.”

That’s what I most enjoyed about Champion’s poems--their surprising insistence on transforming pain into wisdom and growth.


(NOTE: After the interview below, read “Daphne, Upon Transformation,” and “The Old Red Maple,” both of which appear with permission of the author. Pre-order Reluctant Mistress here...it will be released on April 1, 2013).

Q: So many of your poems (including “Daphne, Upon Transformation,” “Woman Folding Origami,” “The Red Maple,” and “Change,”) beautifully explore change and growth. Yes, these poems are about love, lust, and heartbreak, but more importantly, they are about how to live with brokenness and pain in you. For you, what is the relationship between transformation, healing, and poetry/art (including your own poems)? What poems/art do you turn to in times of pain?

A: I want to start answering this question with the last three stanzas of D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Tortoise Shout:”

The cross,
The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence
Tearing a cry from us.

Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the
complement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.

Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.

I recognize a profound truth in these lovely lines: the idea that we are broken into voice, that this voice is a way of reaching for another, that our voice can and will manifest itself in both cries and songs, that this brokenness is cyclical—a wheel that continually churns.  You see it in the word repetition within his lines: silence, voice, silence, cry, calling, answered, found, cry, torn, whole, torn, whole.  This back and forth of brokenness and healing, of desire and punishment, seems to exactly pinpoint the hefty emotional work of us all, and it seems to explain why we must give our brokenness words.  Our cries are innate: we have no choice in how they manifest.