Rebecca Morgan Frank ’s fourth collection of poems, Oh You Robot Saints!, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2021. She is the author of three previous collections of poems, including Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017) and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry, 2012), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have recently appeared in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Orion. She is the 2019–20 Distinguished Visiting Writer in Poetry at Bowling Green State University. Her poem “Epithalamion Aubade” can be found here. It appears along with another poem in the May/June 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Epithalamion Aubade”?
I wrote this poem in honor of the marriage of two friends whose academic jobs separated them by hundreds of miles. The subject was also close to home: like many academic couples, my spouse and I have faced this same challenge while working in different states for four years. I wanted to mashup the epithalamion (or epithalamium), an occasional poem for a marriage, with the aubade, a poem for lovers parting at dawn, as a form to celebrate a new marriage built amidst regular goodbyes preceding days, or often weeks, of separation. (On a happier note, the couple in the dedication are currently sheltering in place together, as they now have positions at the same university, and I can’t wait to send them a copy of this issue of the Kenyon Review.)
What made you want to incorporate the astronauts and images from space?
Poetry has long been populated with the moon as a figure in depictions of separated lovers. The moon, floating alone there in each of our skies, echoes our solitude, and often our loneliness or longing. The moon can be a bridge between distant lovers, as it is the one view they share, seen from every place on earth. It is also a bridge between poets across centuries and continents; when I look up, I see the same moon as Ono no Komachi, Sappho, Emily Dickinson, and so many other poets who are important to me.
For a poet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the moon comes populated with the idea of astronauts and thus becomes a place to be seen from as well as a place to see. When we imagine someone traveling to the moon, we can connect the concept of unimaginable distances with the desire to transcend them. The astronaut embodies both ambition and longing, both leaving and returning. Who better knows the pain of separation due to a job than an astronaut and their beloved?
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
A poet friend once said to me that a composer provides the closest reading of your poem you may ever receive: this rings true to me. I have the good fortune of working with several different composers; sometimes they use my already published poems, other times we actively collaborate. These creative friendships have been especially important to me during the shutdown. My days have been brightened by listening to draft recordings landing in my inbox. One of my collaborators, Aaron Stepp, and I have been dialoguing about cryptograms in music and poetry, and he is currently composing a piece using my poem “Soggetto Cavato,” which emerged from those conversations. He is even implementing soggetto cavato to embed our names, and our partners’ names, into the composition. Another composer, Anna Rubin, is working on a very playful electroacoustic work using a section of my poem, “Mechanical Monk,” and listening to the first completed part of this has taught me a lot about what I was doing with tone in the poem. My friendships and collaborations with composers not only push me in new directions, but bring me so much joy!
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
Over a decade ago, Linda Gregg gave a wonderful craft talk on sentimentality and poetry at Grub Street in Boston. She said, “The problem isn’t feeling. I want to stand up for the idea of feeling,” and “I would recommend bravery.” She sent us off with a few assignments, including, “Write a poem about your mother and don’t tell us how you feel. Just make us understand.” That sounds so simple, but this was during a period when irony was having an especially good time in poetry, and this assignment bred the first poem I ever wrote about my mother. It was a terrifyingly honest portrait. This became the first poem I published in Ploughshares, which was a big deal to me as an emerging writer. In short, the gift Linda Gregg gave me was permission, and that permission, that call for bravery, greatly impacted my first book, Little Murders Everywhere.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I am currently proofreading galleys for my fourth book, Oh You Robot Saints!, which is due out from Carnegie Mellon University Press in February 2021. This collection is populated with robobees and octobots and an eighteenth century digesting wooden duck, with Medieval automaton Marys and robot priests. I am now writing accompanying essays that explore questions and artifacts that never made it into the book, which engages with the wondrous and peculiar history of the automaton. I am obsessed with the ongoing human desire to imitate life and animate our creations.