The Necessity of Dangerous Poetry and the Power of Voice
July Westhale visited Kirsten Ogden’s class at Pasadena City College in April 2018 and continued a conversation with students over coffee and sandwiches, followed by a formal reading and talk with a larger group of PCC campus community members. Questions and comments in this roundtable discussion are from Kirsten as well as students and campus community members from PCC and are edited together with Westhale’s responses.
Poet and essayist July Westhale’s book Trailer Trash was selected by Robin Coste Lewis and published by Kore Press. Her essays have been published in McSweeney’s, Autostraddle, Huffington Post, The Establishment, and she’s been nominated for Best American Essays. She is a recipient of support from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Poets & Writers, the Raveel Grant, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Tom and Evelyn Newbury Grant. She’ll be spending her summer at the University of Arizona Poetry Center where she’s just been awarded a fellowship. Her previous books include The Cavalcade (Finishing Line Press), and Occasionally Accurate Science (Nomadic Press). She has an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University.
How do we value the lives of poor people? This question is at the heart of July Westhale’s new book of poems, Trailer Trash. Trailer Trash is a collection that talks about growing up in a trailer park in the 1980s and 1990s in CA–the part of CA that no one talks about “except Erin Brockovich,” she jokes.
The poems in the book evolved after Westhale spent a long time writing what she thought would be a book of poems about Virginia Woolf, and then when she laid her poems out and took stock of her material, she found that she was writing about her childhood and about growing up. After completing poems for the chapbook The Calvalcade, she turned her attention to Trailer Trash. “Early in my process,” she shares, “I’d sit down and say ‘I’m going to write a poem about this,’ but poetry doesn’t like to be bossed around, so I kind of resisted that and the book naturally wrote itself.”
Her family worked for PG&E for a long time and were some of the people both negatively impacted and bought off by PG&E. She says she can’t blame poor people for wanting to improve their lives through money, but that her collection also grapples with the larger concept of how to talk about class, rural poverty, and generational poverty in a place like California. “The poverty in California is quite different from the poverty in a place like Detroit, for example,” she says, “and the wealth of the state can often lead to a dismissiveness in conversation–it’s important to me that those narratives not be swept under the rug.”
Westhale was adopted by her maternal aunt and has two sisters in close age to herself. She grew up in Blythe and later moved with her family to another rural California farm community, Winters, and these landscapes and the experiences of the people are at the heart of her collection. “I always think about my sisters as we’re really strange twins,” she says. “We were so close in age, and that was amazing to grow up with, but it was also pretty tough.”
There are a lot of religious references in her book, and although she doesn’t currently consider herself religious, she sees the value and the importance of this upbringing in her development as a poet.
Westhale’s grandfather is still a Baptist preacher, and she believes there’s something interesting and politically dangerous about how religion is sometimes “hoisted onto poor people and there’s a certain judgment and a frame for how to explain poverty–that God has a plan. I think about my kind, humble, Baptist grandparents–there’s something that is easy about saying “well it’s part of God’s plan” and if you’re systemically trying to keep people poor, saying “well, it’s part of Gold’s plan.” It makes it that much easier to keep people poor.” She believes religion can keep people oppressed, but that “religion can also be a way to give people hope during dark times, just as poetry can give hope to people during dark times. “When you think about ‘the Lord,’ you might have your own ideas and assumptions about what that means,” she says. “And a lot of poetry seeks to enhance those ideas, but there are also poems that challenge these ideas and that use our perceptions of ‘the Lord’ to challenge our preconceptions.”
Growing up religious gave Westhale a cultural context as well. She has a great deal of gratitude for what growing up in the church gave her and how she’s been able to use that in understanding poems and how poems can be a vehicle for empathy and writing to connect; “I received a profound understanding of hymn and sermon–and they’re beautiful–these songs–they have so much in common with poetry. That really helped me.” Several students shared their own religious upbringing in their conversations with Westhale, noting that they, too, don’t consider themselves “religious” but that they see a lot of connection between poetry and scripture and how the two are entwined. “It’s helpful to have a religious background or at least a context in order to be a writer,” she argues, “because using that intertextuality can be an advantage, and it can even feed the composition of poems. We as a people are curious existentially, and that’s something that is reflected in poetry all the time.” She also thinks that these larger questions about life that come out of religious exploration can be very important and meaningful.
“At some point most people have questioned why they’re here, where they’re going, and what permanence means to them. Those are valuable and necessary questions to ask, and poetry is an excellent receptacle for holding all of those ideas.”
For Westhale, ugliness and beauty don’t exist as separate concepts. She shared her experience of recently reading a poem by Japanese poet Li Po, “There’s an understanding in haiku that the more you stare at something, the more you become the same thing–staring erases separateness, and so if you do that with poems it helps you as a writer to build a connection with your reader and to write from a place that engenders empathy-building. Ugliness and beauty are layered on each other if you allow yourself to stare long enough.”
When you seek to make your experience global and accessible to other people you’re saying “come engage with me’” and that can be a revolutionary act.
Her notion is that it’s a radical act to walk in the world and to be the way you want to be–to have the courage to say “this is my story.” She believes that “When we are writing things, when we are creating things, we are opening up the world.” For Westhale, this opening up is the necessary danger of writing and reading poems. Poetry allows a space for empathy in a way that other genres like journalism can’t always offer, but poetry is often seen as inaccessible to the masses.
Despite the oft-heard call that “poetry is dead” or that “poetry doesn’t matter anymore,” society often sees an uptick in poetry consumption and creation during times of strife. Westhale believes that “Art has the capacity to contain politics, but politics does not have the capacity to contain art.” She shares how she recently read an essay by Ben Lerner called “The Hatred of Poetry.” In the essay, the writer investigates this cyclical nature of poetry consumption and creation. “The first person to publicly condemn poets as dangerous was Plato, who argued for the exclusion of poets from the Republic because ‘poets posit imaginative projections as truth, which is dangerous to impressionable youth.’”
She notes how poets are among the first executed in political uprisings, too. “Why is this?” she asks. “It seems the only place poetry exists systemically in this country is in elementary schools. We’re told we are poets and we are creative when we’re younger, but it should be something you’re expected to grow out of, and this doesn’t make sense. Poetry forces you to be present, and that requires thinking and engagement–empathy building with other human beings.” Her idea that poetry is dangerous stems from her belief that poetry has this capacity to enlarge our world and to make it better. “I think that what’s dangerous or frowned upon,” she says, “is that the people who have the most to say are often the most marginalized. We even see this in the publishing industry where you find queer people, people of color, people with disabilities all with work in anthologies but not having their own collections out in the world in large numbers. Why are we so afraid of hearing everyone’s voices?”
When she thinks about her own work and the work of other writers she loves, she thinks about how she and other poets have an opportunity–an obligation–to share their voices and stories and to create relationships that invite readers to empathize with other human beings.
They can see themselves in the work, and this is what is so important in the writing of poems. I really do believe poetry has the capacity to change the world.
In tough times, poetry is more visible–like now, and this is what excites Westhale when she thinks about the dangerous, radical power of poetry. She says “great movements of art are always tied to political or existential crisis.” She wonders if politics and poetry are a way of pushing against the margins. For Westhale, Jeanette Winterson’s notion of art as ‘finding place’ versus being a ‘hiding place’ is an important one. “Finding place is a way of having a greater understanding of what it means to be human. When people are thinking about why the world is possibly terrible, we turn to art, to faith, to music, to poetry. Poetry has the capacity to hold all of these things at the same time–news, politics, art, emotion–because when it’s done really well in its best iteration, it allows us to feel multiple things, even conflicting things, profoundly and in many directions–it says yes, joy exists alongside grief!–yes, beauty exists alongside the ugliness!”
It’s not always easy to maintain this heightened awareness and to consistently work towards this engendering of empathy and connection, though. It can be depleting. As a teacher, Westhale sometimes struggles to balance writing with work, with relationships and with other obligations. “I’ve learned to forgive myself for this struggle,” she says, “because I go through periods where I’m writing all the time, and other times when I’m not–but poetry . . . Poetry also requires us to put down the pen and live sometimes, too.”
After she finished Trailer Trash, she found herself struggling to compose poems again. Lots of writers have faced this kind of “dead time” or “writer’s block.” Westhale says, “I couldn’t write a poem for two years and so I started writing essays and then doing a lot of poetry self help books like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.” Westhale learned to do other things that would feed her creativity and curiosity. “I took a painting class,” she says. “I learned how to podcast. I went to museums.” Breaking out of her comfort zone gave her inspiration again. “I learned how to box! That was an artist’s date that I made with myself. You can do all kinds of things that help to cross-train your creative mind. The more I write the more I realize that poetry is a process of keeping yourself on the razor-thin edge of discomfort. There’s a good deal of knowledge involved in keeping yourself uncomfortable. There’s power in that experience too. We need that today–now, more than ever, we need to embrace that in ourselves, and embrace it in others, too. We each need to work hard to create our own radical archives. Poetry can do that.”
To young poets, she gives this advice: “there are going to be times when you read a lot, write a lot, and sometimes just living life, and all of those periods of time are necessary and valuable for creating your voice. People die to have a voice; having a voice is worth dying for; it is everything to be able to tell a story. The way I like to think about creative writing especially in marginalized groups is that our histories are constantly erased, changed, or ignored, and creative writing can serve as a radical archive–as if to say “this existed–this happened”–and not only am I telling you about it, but I’m inviting you to experience it with me–and poetry really can change the world–voice is everything.”
July Westhale is currently at work on a book of translations of Sor Juana’s lamentations, as well as a second full-length poetry collection. She lives in Oakland, CA.