Courtney Bush / Ben Fama
Ben Fama: I wanted to congratulate you on the new book. It’s really accomplished with its consistent tone and formal pacing. Single lines carry the book through its three sections, through its 121 pages. Can you tell me how you evolved this project?
Courtney Bush: Thank you! I started writing in complete sentences because I wanted to write in complete thoughts. I think one of the alluring things about writing poetry is the way it can allow us to move between incomplete thoughts and fragments. I love that, but I think by turning away from some of the poetry-y questions (line, stanza, even sound to a degree, etc.) I could pursue a project of expressing thoughts in language as clearly as I possibly can. And I found that the year I wrote it, there were three stopping places I arrived at naturally, like three seasons.
BF: It comes off very naturally, it’s really readable and addicting. Aside from the question of craft, what were the other (bigger?) questions this book was trying to answer?
CB: “Isn’t this Nice?” came from my divorce and the death of a childhood friend. I can’t articulate the question, but it has to do with the starkness of loss putting the lines of life into heavy relief, so that everything felt like scrambled up components of a joke. “My Hot Girl Summer Was A Spiritual Mistake,” is an attempt to gently but directly approach a neurological event at the apex of a scary manic phase and to find something articulable, possibly even valuable, there. Every Book Is About The Same Thing is about learning to feel better, to course-correct, drawing conclusions from art and from my students at a preschool, who were brilliant role models.
BF: What kinds of things did you learn from your pre-school students?
CB: I learned experientially how different we all are on every level. Loud noise draws one child nearer and terrifies another. It was so literal and urgent. I more fully absorbed the idea that we all need different things, but that having different needs doesn’t preclude us all from finding a harmonic way to be together in a group or world. They straight up made me a better person. In terms of “feeling better,” one day it occurred to me to be my own caretaker. I thought, “What would I do for Samantha if she were feeling this way?” I gave myself what children in distress need, which is a plan, support, clarity, patience, love. Again it felt literal. I never knew what it actually looked like to take care of myself until I took care of them.
BF: That’s really compelling. And to conceptualize how as we age we can respond to the world with those same things–clarity, patience, love—through art works. Are there works which have been formative to you as to how you approach writing?
CB: The first thing to come to mind is the Holy Grail by Jack Spicer, which I do think of as the grail. It has magical properties. And then the Unknown Rilke translated by Franz Wright, a book assigned to me by Marie Howe, a teacher who was formative to me in her unflinching regard for poetry and language as sacred. I wanted to be like that. The poems in the Unknown Rilke tuned me to Rilke’s devotion to attention itself. Poems about looking, not just seeing. On the other hand, Waltzing Matilda by Alice Notley and Talking by David Antin (composed of some of his talk pieces) are important to me for the ways they treat talking, take it seriously as a form, and narrative, and humor.
BF: You’ve mentioned Rilke to me in some of our other conversations, can you articulate a bit about what speaks to you so much in his work?
CB: Everything in a Rilke poem has the potential to be holy. Everything is worthy of this heartbreaking level of attention. Bible stories, broken toys. Everything can be asked a question without being expected to answer. Plus, so many angels. I can’t get enough of angels and questions. And he is a master of scale. One section of the Unknown Rilke is called The Life of Mary. In the poem “Before the Passion” are the lines “why did they bring me up in the women’s house// to sew you the pure white clothes/ without the slightest trace/ of a seam to scratch you–: my whole life was like that.” That pivot kills me. I stole that maneuver, adapted that line on the last page of my book, because it felt true.
BF: Do you think there is a connection between angels and questions? Or perhaps a better question, what is the relationship?
CB: Oh wow, yes. I think that angels represent the embodied fantasy of an answer to our questions. I’m thinking of the Renaissance paintings where the little angels are hovering near the rafters, above the narrative content of the painting, all these little potential answers that are of course, obviously, tauntingly unreachable. When Rilke opens the Duino Elegies by asking what angels might hear him if he cried out, the answer is none of them. They can’t hear us. And he goes on to say if they could, if one held us to its breast, it would crush us on contact just because they’re made of more powerful matter than us. We can’t handle the answer that the angel is the body for. But there they are, hanging around.
Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the author of Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2023) and the forthcoming I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023).
