Scott Chalupa writes and teaches in Columbia, SC, where he earned an MFA at the University of South Carolina. His debut collection of pomes, Quarantine, was released this year by [PANK] Books. His work has appeared in [PANK], pacificREVIEW, Nimrod Beloit Poetry Journal, The South Atlantic Review, and other venues.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your new poetry collection, Quarantine, was just released by [PANK] Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
Scott Chalupa: The book is an extended love letter to people who died as a result of social neglect and violence practiced towards queer communities. It’s an exploration of what it means to be quarantined, to quarantine one’s self and one’s community, and the cost of that quarantine.
KMD: Quarantine demonstrates impressive stylistic range, with luminous fragments appearing alongside seemingly whole lyric strophes, as well as an array of found and invented forms, like dictionary definitions. What advice do you have for poets who struggle to balance formal shifts with a sense of unity in a book length collection?
SC: That’s a huge question that I’m not sure that I have a satisfying answer. One bit of wisdom that comes to mind is something Tony Hoagland once said to me: All poets need an obsession. To Tony’s truth I would add that a sense of play is necessary. Although Quarantine deals with an episode in US history that can be quickly bogged down in morose and moribund reflection, I had to keep in mind that experimentation and play are key to discovering what each poem wants to become. I’d seen plenty of dictionary-form poems and wanted to push the boundaries and incorporate other ideas about the arrangement and presentation of words into that. The process of asking and reflecting upon, “Can I really get away with this?” is delicious fun, even when the content is deadly serious. Laurence Sterne, in his novel Tristram Shandy, is outright mad in playful experimentation—even using a papal bull to point out the silliness of Dr. Slop and even the pope. To keep that high degree of play and freedom, I had to remember what Mary Ruefle once said in a workshop: All we’re doing is pushing words around on a page; we’re just playing here.
KMD: In what ways is poetic form – whether it’s seemingly arbitrary constraint or an age-old tradition like the lyric – politically charged for you as a writer?
SC: That is a thought that still goes with me into my new obsessions. Claiming traditional forms, even reinventing them, is one method to refashion what belonged to the empowered to speak about oppression and injustice. Claude McKay is an excellent example of using the sonnet to speak to the violent injustices faced by Black communities—transforming its centuries of Whiteness into contemporary witness.
Queering other familiar forms out of their typical context is another method. The obituaries are perhaps the poems that are most politically charged through their form. Because the bodies that pile up through the book are nameless, public obituaries weren’t the best fit. Thus, I turned to the personal obituary, which allowed me to place cutouts for missing photos—speaking even more loudly to the way queer bodies were stripped of their identities. While it wasn’t the explicit goal of those poems, I do feel that they also speak to the ways that many police investigations strip identity from trans bodies when trans murder victims are mis-gendered. In so many ways, living openly and unabashedly queer—whatever form that may take—is a maddening act of sociopolitical, political defiance (and we ought not pretend that all forms of queerness are equally dangerous to the queer person exhibiting it). If you ignore or strip from me that queer presentation—that most authentic presentation of myself—then any previous violence done against me is compounded in a far more insidious way. The obituaries reenact that kind of public identity-stripping while keeping a deeply intimate and knowing approach. Beneath that reenactment is a demonstration of “I see you,” and that dissonance—I hope—is where the form as protest lives the loudest.
KMD: Relatedly, what is the relationship between writing and activism within your artistic practice?
SC: For me, writing is what I can do. I have learned thus far in life that we contribute in the ways we are equipped to do so. As related to my use of obituaries, choosing what and how to engage as an artist is key. A radical revision of traditional or recognizable forms and subjects creates a space to rethink our world from new angles. That’s one of my biggest delights when I read other authors doing similar work. How Paul Monette’s Love Alone makes tetrameter and pentameter feel like a raw, unpolished rant; how Mary Szybist engages the incarnation in modern and sometimes pedestrian contexts; how Natasha Tretheway combines 12-bar blues with a sonnet. These things give me permission to engage in my own experiments, to engage art as an activist practice. David Wojnarowicz was an artist lost to AIDS in the early 90s who has also ben of tremendous inspiration. Even before he and other artists like Keith Haring changed the nature of protest art and posters in their work with ACT UP, Wojnarowicz was an aggressive activist through his work. They gave me permission to be daring and unafraid with the work.
KMD: The poems in Quarantine exist in dialogue with many other texts, which demonstrate a wonderful range in their style and sensibility. Here, biblical allusions appear alongside Erik Satie’s musical oeuvre and Greco-Roman mythology. What does poetry make possible as a vehicle for response, as opposed to prose forms like the short story, the scholarly essay, or the op-ed?
SC: This question brings to mind an idea Peter Balakian has offered in reflecting on a similar question. There are things poetry can do which other forms cannot. Poetry can condense, oppose, contrast, and associate all manner of facts, ideas, images, etc., in ways that are unique to the genre. In Quarantine, my response to/assimilation of myth—and Christian myth is perhaps the most deeply engaged in the book—helps me answer the questions “Where am I in all this? And is this relevant anymore?” I am endlessly fascinated with religion, and Caravaggio’s devotional artwork was my guide in discovering my answer. He was explosively controversial in his use of notable courtesans and anonymous street rabble as models for saints, Madonnas, and Christ figures. Thus, for me it made sense to refashion Quentin Crisp as a Christ figure, or to portray St. Francis of Assisi as an anonymous man on the verge of death from AIDS, or Medusa as an exploration of queer gaze. Satie’s music was (sometimes controversially) playful and showed me much about free-form emergence of form-meets-content. Poetry is also where I live, so it makes sense to do the work from here.
KMD: What readings, events, workshops, and projects do you have in the works? What else can readers look forward to?
SC: Since the official launch of Quarantine at AWP, I’ve been in hibernation mode. My gears are beginning to turn again, and so I’ll certainly be more active going forward. I’m working on an event here in Columbia, SC, so my local peeps should keep an eye out for that. There may be something coming up next spring in my hometown of Houston, too.
I have a new creative obsession leading me into some strange spaces in very old myths. I’m curious about how Christian myth can be queered through its progenitor traditions as well as Hindu and other cyclically-oriented traditions. I’m consuming art and other things and playing with lots of blank verse in the process. No idea where it’s going, but I’m happy to be on the journey.