Kendra DeColo
The mother archetype is sacred across cultures. She is both nature and nurture, virginal and sexual, powerful and benign. Meanwhile, we expect perfection from mothers, judge them when they fall short, and fail to value their contributions. Poet Kendra DeColo drops the baggage of these expectations. Her poetry collection I’m Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World, published last month by BOA Editions, rejects the usual tropes of mothering. In their place, she molds a more honest representation of the mother — one that is defiant, joyful and feminist.
DeColo’s first two collections — 2014’s Thieves in the Afterlife and 2016’s My Dinner With Ron Jeremy — use various American landscapes to mine the contents of desire: lust, shame, disgust. In I’m Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World, the body is the landscape. It’s a site of creation, transformed by childbirth in graphic detail, and capable of a more spiritual transformation as well.
The collection is rich with imagery, like that of a woman hand-pumping her own breast milk into the filthy sink of a bar’s restroom, “milky graffiti tagging the spit-clogged drain.” In another poem, she describes menstrual blood on the sheets during sex as “the rasp of stain beneath us / like a bat fluttering its wings.” Other poems take self-righteous aim at foes — some common, like Donald Trump, and some surprising, like Pablo Neruda. Unafraid of a bit of whimsy, she muses about Nicolas Cage’s character Cameron Poe in the movie Con Air.
DeColo is a master at building tension and tricking you down a path you didn’t agree to follow. It’s rollicking good fun, but the crest of the wave in this collection is the title poem, in which she describes first being aware of her pregnancy as she climbed through the mountains. She writes that she wept with joy and grief, adding: “and isn’t it good to know when / life is about to swallow you whole / take you in its arms and say / ‘Live, bitch, live.’ ”
The Scene talked to DeColo about pleasure, humor and the taboos of writing about motherhood.
The epigraph that starts your collection is by Julio Cortázar: “and let the pleasure we invent together be one more sign of freedom.” I feel a striking sense of pleasure when I read your poems — even the more grisly ones. Can you talk about your relationship with pleasure in regard to this project?
Pleasure was such a compass and anchor. … I gave birth to my daughter, and I didn’t write for the first seven months. … When I returned to writing, I felt really desperate, like this was something that I needed to do to feel whole. There was this added pressure to produce because I hadn’t done it for so long, and I felt like I needed to keep up with my peers. … Pleasure was my way of unlearning grind culture to get back to the reason why I write. I went through a phase where I was trying to hustle, like, “I’ve got to produce, I’ve got to write a poem because I only have two hours a week, and this better be good.” My whole body shut down, like, “Fuck you. I’m not gonna write.” … I really had to get back to that sense of play and pleasure.
I started making lists of things that gave me joy, and those lists opened up into the poems that are in the book. It was a gift to feel that kind of invisibility that new mothers feel. I felt like no one really cared what I had to say anymore. First, that was really painful. But then I was like, “No, this is freedom. I can really do whatever I want.” I gave my poet self permission to take my time and do it for my own pleasure. The more that I allowed myself those moments of play, I could really stretch beyond what I was allowing myself to say before.
I see this book as an ode to mothers, giving women permission to create their own sort of archetypes of motherhood and rejecting the ones that don’t work.
When I was in grad school, I was really resistant to reading anything about motherhood. It wasn’t because I had any disdain for mothering … but it felt like it was expected of me to eventually write about domestic life. There was a certain kind of poem that was allowed to be published in the ’80s and ’90s about motherhood — in the confessional mode but grounded in the everyday realities of mothering — that felt really oppressive to me. I had a sense of these male gatekeepers who were curating them. … That is the thing that I caught myself most pushing against — this fear that editors would not want to publish these poems about motherhood.
If pleasure is one vehicle for me, rage and vengeance is another. Like, I want to go even deeper into this. I love people who write from that impulse: “You’re telling me that I can’t do this, so I’m gonna hardcore go for it.” That was part of me wanting to write to expand narratives around motherhood, to expand the way that I can see myself. There’s so much pressure to be perfect. It’s so toxic. That was another thing — being OK in not presenting myself in any kind of way as a mom and just being really honest.
In “I Don’t Like to Have Sex While I’m on My Period,” you write, “if you want to go deep / you better be willing to draw blood.” I think this is great advice for reading this book. To witness a poem’s speaker being “a little bit in love with the abundance of my body,” the reader also has to watch the “flurry of racoons cutting” that is vaginal tearing.
I love hearing those lines together. I’ve never liked an aesthetic that felt sterile or too on-the-surface. For me, I always start there — the safe place where I hover above the surface, just describe, and then go for the blood.
Your poems in the two first collections didn’t shy away from body fluids and sex. But this book is grossly, gloriously bloody. What draws you to this?
That’s more on the narratives of motherhood that are available to us. You might see scenes of painful childbirth or bloody childbirth as comic relief in a sitcom. … But beyond that, the images we have of motherhood are really placid, and we don’t see the dark stuff, which is so much a part of it. It’s so hardcore, so dark, not just the childbirth part but raising an infant and losing yourself and all of the exhaustion that comes with it. It’s doing such harm to mothers to not have that available as something that’s so common, and thinking of women as needing to be angelic and delicate. No. We are hardcore.
There’s also so much humor in the book. Where does this sense of playfulness come from?
I’ve always loved using sexual vaudeville in a way, that kind of burlesque comedy. For me, poetry is so connected to the structure of comedy — how the couplet is connected to the one-liner joke. I really loved Rodney Dangerfield when I was first writing. I learned so much about how to structure an ending. I think comics teach us how to feel tension and then release it — or not release it.
Being in Nashville really pushed me deeper. I worked with Third Man [Records] early on. I’d do these shows opening for Mike Floss or Tobi Vail and Bikini Kill. No one wants to hear the poet before these shows. … I’d get onstage and see the light dim and [see] people’s eyes, and immediately be like, “I’m gonna get these motherfuckers’ attention.” That is part of how I approach the page. “How can I keep some of that tension if I’m gonna read this out loud?” Imagining wanting to say something so insane that it makes my husband laugh or makes my mother laugh, and I love imagining a small audience of people listening to me read.
Read a poem from I’m Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World here.
