MECHANICAL BULL: An Interview with Rennie Ament
Marlowe Jones: A lot of poems in this collection really focus on wordplay and the sonic quality of the poem. I’m really interested in your writing process for these. How do these more sonic poems like “Post Hoc (So Long Crows)” and “A Fact Can Warm and Mama” come about? Is the process different from writing more image-heavy poems?
Rennie Ament: Before making a univocalic (which is apparently what those single-vowel poems you’re talking about are called), I create a list of words to cherry-pick from. Generating the list often takes longer than writing the poem itself. Sometimes I’ll cheat and plug letters into a Scrabble word generator, which gives me a starter clump of words to work with, words I might not otherwise find in my own head.
I’m into using formal constraints. They’re freeing. Getting lost in a game prevents me from striving after profundity. If I become self-aware and start trying to say something overtly meaningful (about surveillance capitalism, my dad, you name it), the poem will inevitably be trite, twee: it’s basically going to land on some pseudo-epiphany.
There’s a McSweeney’s anthology edited/translated by Ian Monk and Daniel Levin Becker called All That is Evident is Suspect that I recommend to anyone looking for an Oulipian sampler of constrained writing techniques. Other books that play in a serious way include Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire, which was a model for me when I initially read it a decade ago. The first two sequences in that book (“Ballad of Our Jim” and “Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!”) are full of vowel ballads that woke the sonically-driven beast in me. Matthea Harvey’s “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” series from her collection Modern Life did something similar; I think she wrote those poems after culling a list of words between “future” and “terror” in the dictionary. Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary is also, start to finish, full of brilliant games-cum-poems.
Even when I’m working without a constraint, there’s a lot of cud-chewing. I’ll use a word then chew it up and break it down throughout a poem. I’m almost always playing with sound, plus cannibalizing stanzas from failed poems and dropping them into whatever I’m working on. It’s all just a way to keep the writing rolling. I’m stretching and stressing out the language to see what it can do.
MJ: This collection has a few poems that seem within a self-contained series with each other. One of these is the “Murderer” poems. Can you talk a bit about how those came about, and what it’s like to work on poems that are directly interrelated?
RA: Those murderer poems are some of the oldest in the book. For a while, the so-called plot revolved around that character. Vague, metaphorical weight accumulated in him. He got unwieldy, he was a conflation of too many things: the Cluster B men I had dated, a minor-league sexual assault I experienced (which is a disgusting way to phrase that—I was stalked, chased, and groped on the street one night in Brooklyn, but I think of the greater horror as the weeks and months spent with the NYPD after the incident), what else, a burgeoning interest in and understanding of various abolition movements paired with my eternal rage at the misogynistic garbage women have to deal with daily, etc. I don’t know… the more I try to describe the why of him, the further I get from the truth. But the question I finally came up against was, Why write a book with a violent man at its center? The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. He was taking up so much space: my space, in my book. I didn’t want to hypothesize about his motivations anymore. Suddenly, he bored me. I moved him to the periphery, although the book is still swirling around everything he nebulously represents.
In answer to the second part of that question, I write poems quickly, in bursts, and when they’re written in close proximity, they talk. Five to ten poems in direct communication with each other is about as far as I can go before I veer off. It starts to feel forced, and I’m unwilling to actively write towards an overarching narrative. Right now, that’s the opposite of everything that interests me about poetry.
MJ: The collection is split into two distinct halves, the latter half having more formal experimentation than the former. What was behind your decision to split the book in this way?
RA: My editors. The version I originally submitted to the press had four sections. The organizing principle at the time of submission was “like with like,” i.e. self-contained series of poems were clumped together. But the advice I got was to mix the poems up. Both Hilary Plum and Caryl Pagel sent me separate reordering suggestions and I did approximately 87% of what they told me to do. I love writing poems, but ordering poems to construct a path for a reader to walk is not my strength. It feels like the options are endless. And I’m someone who doesn’t typically read poetry collections in order anyway, or I rarely do. Some books are truly meant to be read in the order the author intended. But again, I’m not a project poet (so far); I’m someone with a daily practice who gets into flow states and generates many poems of varying quality, whatever quality means. Then I cycle poems in and of a book until it gets accepted for publication. Or that’s how it worked out this time around. I believe I submitted this book to five different presses and all five versions were different. After the book got accepted, I sent HP and CP thirty additional poems and asked them if they thought any of them were also meant for the book. I think maybe ten of them ended up being added?
MJ: You seem to have put a lot of research into these poems, both historical and contemporary. There’s the mention of the 1939 British Pet Massacre in “Annual Human Events,” the real 2019 case of a woman in Taiwan having sweat bees in her eyes in “Total Wonder,” the mundane facts of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s diet coupled with the horrific details of his actions in “Glass Tables” for some examples. Can you talk a bit about how you put research into your poetry? Do you go into a poem knowing what you want to research for it, or do the poems come out of research you are already doing? Or, put more simply: does the poem come from the research or does the research come from the poem?
RA: Both. If I’m not reading, I’m usually not writing, so research typically leads to poems. But say a frog comes into a poem: now I want to know what they eat, where they sleep, how they mate, how they glue themselves together, where the glue is secreted from, do all frogs make glue, how strong is frog glue compared to Elmer’s? I manage a bookstore, so it’s easy for me to read some funky tidbit online and then order a book at a steep discount and delve deeper. Inevitably, research on any topic takes you somewhere bizarre. Every time. The deeper you go, the stranger it gets. For example, the poem “Day in the Life of a Saint” came out of reading Rudolph Ball’s Holy Anorexia, which is an imperfect book, but includes anecdotes about various saints that haunt me; those women were drinking pus, eating scabs, licking leprosy lesions, wolfing down cobwebs and spiders alike. Research is a huge part of my practice, for my own entertainment if nothing else. Even if the poem is a dud, I get to learn something. Were I more organized and a real scholar, there’d be a gloss in the back of my book listing all the source materials that informed the writing.
MJ: There are several illustrations throughout the book. Can you talk a little about how you feel they relate to the poems?
RA: The press handed my poems over to Angelo Maneage, who I didn’t know and still haven’t met. I was iffy on letting some unfamiliar guy in his twenties insert his art into my book, but when I saw the illustrations, I loved them. They were gross and haunting and beautiful and hilarious. I felt like he had gotten the book, which I think is all the adjectives listed in the previous sentence, hopefully.
MJ: Your poems have such dynamic and engaging titles. “Poem That Used To Have Lines From The Tempest,” “The Betterment Of Human Fate Can Be Effected Only Very Slowly By Means To Down-To-Earth Demands and Cold Calculations,” and “Disclose The Shady Location From Which You Lurk” are some of my favorites. How do you decide on titles for your poems? Does the title come first or the poem, or does each poem require its own unique approach?
RA: I can be oppositional in response to sweeping statements about what poems should or shouldn’t do. Someone once told me that titles should always be short, one word, maybe two. You know, like “Hammer” or “Vernal Pool.” Arbitrary poetry rules presented on stone tablets drive me insane. I’m always on the lookout for dictatorial advice poets have heard from teachers or peers over the years, statements like, “your lines should typically end on nouns: nouns are strong.”
Any poet reading this should email me whatever weirdly definitive instruction you’ve been given re what constitutes a good or bad move in a poem. Go to my website (www.rennieament.com) and email me what you were told! I dream of writing a poem that does the exact opposite of all this accumulated writing advice.
A title will usually pop into my head a few lines into a poem. It can be a placeholder. Sometimes I just need some words to direct me, especially if I’m writing a poem without constraints. The poem usually ends up being at least tangentially related to the title. If not, I’ll change the title. Or leave it. I can have love for a title with no apparent relation to the poem.
Some of the titles come from whatever I was reading the day I wrote said poems. Most of the titles you listed are phrases cribbed from Charles Faurier’s Ode to André Breton trs Kenneth White, one is a line from Catullus. “Poem That Used To Have Lines From The Tempest” refers to the time my laptop crashed and I didn’t have a lot of my work backed up, so I lost many, many drafts. I have no clue what the lines from The Tempest were, I just know they were originally in there.
MJ: What was the biggest challenge you ran into while working on this book?
RA: I’d written too many poems. Sometimes I get stopped up and go half a year without writing much, but if I’m in the zone, I’m writing a poem a day. Poetry is how I think and ask questions. Which means the poems go everywhere and anywhere and they also tend to repeat themselves. I’ve got about 200 pages of writing from the past year in a Google doc. I get obsessed with something (lichen, cowboys, the concept of empathy) for a few weeks or months, but then I’ll move on. Right now, I’m working on a second book and coming up against the same issue I had with the first: obsession and repetition serve as the connective tissue holding everything together, but how to choose poems? Which ones are the “good” ones? I’m open to what other people think. I’ll send a few poet-friends recent work and ask, What do you like best? I trust myself, but sometimes I’m not precious enough with my own stuff. I’ll dismiss something as trash and never look at it again when I should have lingered.
MJ: I always feel like poets don’t get to hype themselves up very much, so whenever I give interviews I like to ask this: what is your favorite poem in the collection and why?
RA: I love this question. It made me look at the book and realize I like most of the poems. What a relief.
I have a soft spot for “Total Wonder.” Sometimes that one strikes me as kind of gimmicky, but today I looked at it and remembered writing it, which is unusual. I was weepy during its production, but when I was done I felt deep relief. I’m lucky to be able to write through profound emotional distress. Thanks, brain.
Rennie Ament is the author of Mechanical Bull (CSU Poetry Center, 2023). Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, Colorado Review, West Branch, and other journals. A nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, she has received support from Millay Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Center for Book Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Maine.
Marlowe Jones is an editorial assistant at the CSU Poetry Center and NEOMFA poetry candidate from Vermillion, Ohio. He received his BA in History at Heidelberg University, and his work has been published in Green Blotter, Sink Hollow, and The Courtship of Winds.