Welcome to the second stop on the virtual tour for Blameless Mouth, a new book by poet Jessica Fox-Wilson.

The basics: This is Jessica’s first book, a collection of 47 poems over 87 pages. It’s a well-presented paperback with a beautiful custom designed color cover.

The poems are organized in five sections and are of varying length, the longest 51 lines (if I can count) and the shortest 15. The poems are all free verse, save for a two-paragraph prose piece (which may be a long line poem, in a nearly blocked layout, though it reads like a prose poem to me). Some are written in one stanza, others have inventive line breaks, stanza breaks or other interesting organizational forms. Some titles/poems are written in conventional “Title Case” with “Sentence case line structure,” a handful are entirely lowercase. None of Merwin’s “each looks like the other” structure here. (This is not criticism, but an observation of the physicality of the collection.) Each section takes its name from one of the poem titles within it.

Now for the emotional center. Jessica has nerve. In spades. She takes on critical issues of what it means to be a woman (both as an unique individual located in a specific time and place and as woman), in a way that pulls me in to collaborate her story: a kid growing up without, a girl trying to fit in, a woman doing all that – and then some – to figure out how to inhabit a society that elevates physical beauty ahead of all else and that uses tales/stories/myths to make/teach us how to fit into that society. Jessica rewrites those stories. Her poetry takes archetypal characters and myths and puts them in a recognizable modern world and makes us admit inequality still exists.

Several of the collection’s recurring themes have a special appeal to me. One theme takes God/society to task for manipulating how creation stories have been told, patriarchal stories that force a subservient woman. Jessica begins her book with “Echlialia,” from the “Eviction” section:

…He ripped me out of Adam, feet,

then curled arms, flattened head. Now it’s been said
that I was made from his rib. This is wrong:

No, I was made from that initial song
of emptiness, the first words he said

that were not names, were not repetitions
of His words. He spoke me into being,

with words of complete sorrow, freeing
his body from their weight. I was the one

made to free him, not made to be his mate.
Though, in my telling, I still came too late.

Jessica lays the poet’s truth flat out on the table, no apologies, and no nuanced references. A clear voiced “This is wrong” sets us straight, and prepares us for many such moments, both in this poem and throughout the collection.

“Zero,” portrays Creation less than a wondrous event as much as the Creator’s insatiable need for more. This is an unkind portrayal of God, but an accurate one if we are indeed created in his image. It also references the sociological meta-theme that humans need novelty, a curious and intriguing subject that I would like to see explored more, in Jessica’s work and elsewhere.

Enough of this dim, placid, empty pace.
I want to see. It was always about Him,
His flighty wants. A freezing bright light skimmed
the waters. Cold, brilliant, silver rays raced

God is as calculating as he is curious. Jessica’s modern rendering of an old God fits with humanity’s greed and creativity, with the incessant need for novelty, an insatiable desire. Eve becomes a major character in this collection, a woman with hard desire and a sharp sense of reality:

… . He shouted and white daisies, doves
erupted from his lips. He talked to head
His voice, watch petals, feathers appear
at whim. He almost never stopped, in love

with novelty. But work had to be done.
He knew he could not do this all alone.

In “What I Thought / Never Said” Eve is stinging with new understanding, after “we emerged from our coccons” while Adam cowers nearby, blames her for wanting more, for taking it. She says “The Lord could only sputter-spit/ You sinned/ against my perfect world.”And Eve throws blame back at His feet:

We were alone and hungry,
not from want of food. You made us,
just like You.
We’re pure and perfect,
hollow through and through.

How bright “forbidden knowledge” burned is beautifully written and described. If I were Eve (I am Eve, aren’t I?), I would have eaten, too. From “Learning to Love the Taste of Apples”:

That first, sweet terrible bite tasted like
the sun’s last light, setting on my green tongue,
like my first hearth fire, filling my small lungs,
like stars devouring blue fumes, burning bright,
like whispering words, wider than my mouth,
like thinking every thought at once.

……………………………………………Back home,
my life was still the same. I was alone.
He brought home a butterfly, I longed to shout
its Latin name, its wingspan, its genus,
how long it slept in its cocoon, how long
until it died. Instead, I bit my tongue,

stayed inside. I longed to be like he was
that last night, as I watched him soundly sleep:
an animal with eyes closed, dreaming deep.

Many other substantive themes are braided throughout this collection, including the heritage of female subservience, enforced not only by society but by the family unit. It’s also enforced materially through consumerism. Some of the most potent poems describe the transformation from sweet soft flesh to a manufactured heart, and soul. This is a book to read through once, then back again, to discover more from the layers.

A bit of Q & A:

DS: Your collection is comprised of many narrative voices including myths, tales and “personal” stories. It was easy to recognize the myths and tales and admire them for their fresh and powerful revelations. Your versions, where archetypes have a unique “attitude” — such as a god who is petulant, or Eve who is put-upon, gave the stories new meaning. I could reenter a well-worn tale and recognize myself and my world.

Yet when I got to personal stories I had to work hard to remember that the poet is not necessarily the narrator. I found “My Life In Fear” so startling that I had to put the book away for a week. (It’s a terrific poem, and well-constructed. Matter of fact, yet woven with recurring themes, much like your collection.)

I recently read an interview with Keetje Kuipers (hat tip to Carolee Sherwood who pointed out Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s interview) where she considered the question of if her poems are “real” or not, and what value or difficulties that placed on both the poet and the audience.

How do you grapple with personal truths or lies in poetry, especially your own poetry? Does the power of a poem diminish as soon as the reader thinks its not the truth? How do you want your readers to approach the narrator’s stories?

JFW: I write in a lot of persona, so I would never want the reader to assume that the “I” in the poem is me. I would say that my poems are pretty evenly split, between persona and personal poems. While many of my persona poems are easy to identify, because they are written in the voice of familiar characters, many are not easy to identify because they are written from a modern perspective.

I personally associate truth in poetry with emotional truth. My hope is that when I write, I reveal an emotional truth, something that can be felt in my core and the reader’s core, even if I am writing in another’s voice. By putting on the mask of persona, I want to reveal something that I would not be able to reveal through my own experience. I hope that the reader is evaluating whether I am being emotionally honest more than whether I am being literally honest.

In Blameless Mouth, there are many personal poems. My strategy in these personal poems does not change from my strategy in persona poems. I still want to disclose an emotional truth, which is more important and more valuable than the literal truth. Several of these personal poems are about my relationship with my parents. When they read the book, I don’t know if they would see the situations I write about in the same way that I did. The details may not be exactly right, from their perspective. However, I think that they would agree upon the emotional tenor of the situations and their impact on my adult life.

The poem “My Life in Fear” is a deeply personal poem. Each of the stanzas describes a fear that I have had in my life. It doesn’t mean that I have experienced each one, because we don’t have to experience something to be afraid of it. For instance, I have never been raped, although I describe my fear of rape in one of the stanzas. When I was nineteen, several of my close female friends were raped and I witnessed the devastating effect that these rapes had on their lives. I was deathly afraid of it happening to me, as many women are. I think that fear needs to be talked about and it’s emotional veracity needs to be acknowledged. I take a lot of direction from Muriel Rukeyser’s famous quote: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” I don’t reveal my own fear of rape to be salacious or to capitalize on another person’s experiences. I reveal it because I hope that the poem can serve as a starting point for a larger discussion of the many ways that rape terrorizes women, both individually and systemically.

* * *

Find out more: If you’d like to sample some of Jessica’s other poems, try these, all found on her blog, each with an audio recording. Jessica also made  ”Echolalia”  into an illustrated poem.

• Echolalia
• Hunger
• Snapshot of Our Father: Swap Meet
• Maenads

To find out more about how Jessica created Blameless Mouth, including her decision to self-publish, go to her blog, Everything Feed Process.

Other stops on the tour:

January 30-February 5 – John Hayes, Robert Frost’s Banjo
February 20-February 26 – James Brush, Coyote Mercury
February 27-March 5- Laurel Klein, Simple Spoonful
March 27-April 2 –  Catherine, Still Standing on her Head

Related posts:

1. coming soon … a stop on the Blameless Mouth tour
2. reading Flap