Is Acknowledgement a Kind of Mending?
An Interview with Jenny Irish
Jenny Irish’s newest poetry collection Tooth Box (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) has been hailed as a stunning work that “accurately captures the tender, but brutal relationships between girls.” Page after detailed page is rendered into an experience that captivates readers with daring lines and stunning lyricism as a “means to best express childhood discovery and trauma.” But in no way do Irish’s poems risk slipping into strict sentimentality; rather they reinforce the notion that through reflection and honesty, all memories can be turned into an opportunity for strength, growth, and most importantly happiness. We arrive at speakers who understand that nothing should be taken for granted, that when confronted with the callousness of the world, what and who we love can be ripped from our hands when we least expect it. Yet, it is through this harsh reality that hope surfaces, and what results in a collection that is equally as powerful as it is memorable.
I had the honor to speak with Jenny about Tooth Box, as well as her approach to writing, literary influences, and what language has to offer both readers and writers.
Esteban Rodriguez: Hello, Jenny. Thank you for your time. Before discussing Tooth Box, your newest poetry collection, I wanted to ask about your journey as an author. You’ve published two previous books , I Am Faithful (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Common Ancestor (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), as well as numerous short fiction. How did you begin and what has been your motivation to continue this literary endeavor?
Jenny Irish: Hi, Esteban. Thank you for this conversation! I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about Tooth Box and my other writing. I’ve always valued stories. I’ve always turned to them to better understand things that I didn’t, and I’ve always found different kinds of comfort in telling stories to myself. As a child, I was very free to roam. I was always adventuring across things that felt, to me, in desperate need of a story—which I think is an acknowledgment, a record, even when it is an invention. There was an abandoned farmhouse in the woods, and on a bench in one of the rooms, someone had laid out a green dress and a pair of leather shoes. They had laid these things out like they were about to put them on, or like they were preparing for something special the next day. And then something happened! For years, I was so worried about the family who left the farmhouse behind, and I must have told myself a hundred stories about the woman who never wore the green dress and leather shoes. Stories were—and are—often the closest I can come to understanding what I cannot know. When I write, I’m letting myself look, and when something I’ve written goes out into the world, it’s an invitation for anyone else who wants to look, to look and share what they see. How amazing is it that every piece of writing becomes a collaboration with every reader?—that’s my thought.
As a poet—which doesn’t feel like an entirely accurate self-description—I love to experiment with narrative compression. I’m not a tight writer at all, but I am truly in love with the intensity of the miniature. I want to see how much I can stuff into a little sack before the seams just bust.
ER: I couldn’t agree more that writing is the closest we can get to understanding that which we do not know. And with language as our vehicle to get there, I’m reminded of the beginning of your poem “Ribbon” from Tooth Box:
If it is helpful, we can think of words
Falling into one of three categories:
The spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable—
There are things that I want to say that I know
That I cannot say, that I know will be met by silence
What did Tooth Box allow you to say that your previous two collections didn’t?
JI: All of my writing has certain concerns, and questions, and ideas that are shared across it. In everything, it’s important for me to write toward complexity and nuance—away from what feels like false binaries and an overall reductivity. Violence fills a lot of space in my writing and that makes it necessary for me to also write about class in America, and cycles of addiction, and the pressures of gender roles, and to have an awareness on the page that these things are all part of a larger history that heavily influences the present.
Broadly, I think Tooth Box is about a lot of the same things as Common Ancestor and I Am Faithful, but the ways of telling in each are different. I know that things I write about—family violence, and addiction, and the ways that girls are physically commodified and shifted, so young, from being their mother’s children to their mother’s competitors—are uncomfortable, and that feels all the more reason to write about them. I think Tooth Box is direct in a way that other work hasn’t been? In Common Ancestor, half of the pieces follow the experience of a character named Red Wreck and the other half are in the voice of a group of cannibals who have developed their own language, so there are elements that create distance between me as the author and the book’s narrative. Tooth Box doesn’t have those, and doesn’t have the horror-genre or strong elegiac influences that allowed certain things to be very intentionally over-the-top.
When I was writing Tooth Box, I was thinking about how hybridity–drawing on elements of prose poetry, the lyric essay, and fiction in miniature–could help create the texture of memory, and its fallibility. I was interested in the gaps that exist in family histories, and the tension between memories of lived events and how those events are altered, reshaped for their retelling to people outside of the immediate experience.
ER: Your choice of form is quite amazing here. Personally, I enjoy collections with more robust stanzas (not that I don’t appreciate sparse lines or the contemplative mood of white space on a page), but Tooth Box is filled with elements of prose poetry and the lyric essay that you mentioned above. Can you speak further about your style and in what ways it helped texture memory and mend the gaps in history (familial, cultural, social, etc.)?
JI: Oh, thank you so much! That’s really kind to say! These are such good questions! In regards to the style of writing in Tooth Box as a whole, something that I was working with was the impact of modulating densities—densities of language, which in part comes from densities of lines. A block of text, I think, is a very different reading experience from something lineated. The shape of writing on the page directs how a reader moves through it, and for me, the block is really fascinating in how it can be used to create something very fast paced, frantic and charging forward, or something very consistent and measured, a steady stacking of weight. I was, and am, interested in the wild possibilities of movement and accumulation of meaning in different structures. The relationship between content and form can, I think, create a physical experience for readers that is a substantial part of the atmosphere, or mood of a piece, and ultimately the entire work.
Thinking about style and the textures of memory, I don’t know that Tooth Box is mending gaps so much as wanting to acknowledge them? Is acknowledgment a kind of mending? Memory is both individual and fallible. It’s also hugely affected, I think, by external factors. How an experience is lived versus how it is preserved—if there is an effort to preserve it—can be very curated. Drawing on a range of genre-influences helped me to illustrate how different sources of information control the level of confidence a person can have in the information they’re given. This is true in an individual history and in the history of the world. There will always be yawning gaps and they will always be the products of different intentions. Those spaces of absence created by what’s overlooked, what’s withheld, then activate the impulse to turn to storytelling for understanding. Or, that was my experience of writing Tooth Box and the hybrid nature of the work.
ER: How do you see your style developing in the future?
JI: I was stuck on this question and then I realized I was overthinking it! I know that I’m drawn to the elliptical because that’s what feels natural to me—associative over linear, always, and that my writing is narrative. Ultimately, the stylistically dominant elements are really determined by each project? I’ve never thought too much about what something is until it’s done, and I’ve needed to try to accurately describe it to someone else. I’m aware, project-to-project, that I’m pulling on various influences to various extents. What becomes a dominant stylistic element is, for me, based much more on feeling than intention. I can look at the projects I’m working on now, and they all have elements of hybridity, but are all very different and don’t really suggest that I have a stylistic trajectory. I think I initially trust the writing to guide itself into whatever it needs to be?
ER: You mentioned violence and the expectation of gender roles, and I couldn’t help but think of the poem “Heirlooms,” in which the speaker has a recurring nightmare about being laid out so that the women in her family can eat her. It’s quite haunting and surreal, but there are philosophical elements questioning death and its implications. What literary influences have helped shape a poem like “Heirlooms”?
JI: Oh, I love this question! Thank you for asking it! Amy Hempel’s “Tom Rock Through the Eels.” Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Khadija Anderson’s Cul-de-sac: An American Childhood. One Love Affair by Jenny Boully. Ai. Allison Benis White’s Self Portrait with Crayon.
I think all of us, in different ways, are influenced by our lives, whether there are elements of our lived experiences present in our work, or there is a subject that fascinates us as a person that always finds its way into every project, or there is a word, or an image that has gotten a real grip on our brains and makes an appearance no matter what. I find I have to edit out a lot of coin operated pony rides, with no child rider, and the snow falling… So, I know that place has been, and continues to be, an influence on my writing, and class too. Specifics of place and class are often connected. And this may be in some ways adjacent to literary influences, but libraries—for all of my life libraries have given me incredible access to information and educational programs that have helped me immensely both as a writer and as a person. Libraries are such vital community spaces. They provide so many services to enrich people’s lives and are also providing services that truly save people’s lives. I love libraries, and I have so much respect for librarians.
ER: What literary, or non-literary, wisdom, advice, or encouragement would you give your younger self if you had the opportunity?
JI: I would tell my younger self to try her best to move through the world softly. I think there is always more space, and more need, for kindness.
