Chris
Rice Cooper
*The
images in this specific piece are granted copyright privilege by : Public Domain, CCSAL, GNU Free Documentation
Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law, or given copyright privilege
by the copyright holder which is identified beneath the individual photo.
Kim Garcia’s The Brighter House:
“The Power
of the Poetic Trinity”
Copyright granted by Kim Garcia
Experiencing The Brighter House
A book of poetry being read is a living thing like a plant, an
insect, an animal, a human, or a spiritual being. Then there are those books of poetry where
the poet’s life is just as powerful. It matters what the poet was thinking when
she wrote the poems. It matters what the
poet went through and how the poet conquered to come to a new world of
spiritual renewal without having to deny an abusive past.
Sunlight by Frank Benson. Public Domain
The Brighter House by
Kim Garcia is a poetry collection written by the poetic Trinity: Poet Kim Garcia, The Speaker of the Poem, and
the Poetry Collection itself The Brighter House.
Photoshopped by Christal Rice Cooper
The Brighter House is a book of autobiographical, biographical, and spiritual
experiences where the speaker of the poem and the writer of the poems seem to
be synonymous. It is in this identity of
speaker and writer that a different lens at looking at a narrative is adapted
which enables speaker/writer to create a new narrative and a new life- that of
forgiveness into a spiritual renewal all taking place within a safe dwelling
called The Brighter House.
Log Cabin in the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History in Bygdoy, Olso. Image Attributed to Kyjetil Bjorn. GNU
Better yet, another way to define Trinity is that The Speaker of
the Poem finds tiny crumbs (the individual poems) and in eating/reading each
crumb she finds her way to the safe spiritual place called The Brighter House
The Brighter House can provide vindication for those whose stories of abuse have
been swept aside; a voice for the voiceless; and more importantly a safe place
for the lost and homeless to lodge.
The Crying Woman attributed to Gustav Klimt P.D.
It seems contradictory at best – able to create a new
narrative without having to deny your past – but the two can be conclusive –
thus the power of poetry.
Copyright granted by Kim Garcia
Scripted Interview with Kim Garcia
In the scripted interview, Kim Garcia, who resides in Boston
with her husband and son and daughter, talks about the background of the poems,
the deeper meaning the poems had on her during different stages of her life;
and more importantly how she created a more positive uplifting narrative than
the one she had as a child, which enabled her to embrace the child she once was
while embracing the new woman she has become.
Girl In The Woman Attributed to Christal Ann Rice Cooper
What is The Brighter House?
I think of The Brighter House as a set of meditations about a necessary spiritual reconstruction around joy and thriving rather than survival. It sets a particular problem and then seeks to enact that desire for transformation.
I think of The Brighter House as a set of meditations about a necessary spiritual reconstruction around joy and thriving rather than survival. It sets a particular problem and then seeks to enact that desire for transformation.
There is a soft fold in
my belly
Let me tell the world the
way I did
when I had small
children. If I were dying
tomorrow I would be
bitter. I would
buy a brighter
house. I would leave bad
memories. I would be the brighter house.
--Excerpt “Aubade”
The Dawn Serenade 1912 Picasso. P.D.
How much of The Brighter House is biographical and autobiographical?
The autobiography is the source material, but I
worked with that material in whatever way served the poems, without any of the
limitations a journalist, or even a memoirist might have. It allowed me to go
at certain truths with great freedom of expression.
Kim Garcia. Copyright granted by Kim Garcia.
When you say “It allowed
me to go at certain truths with great freedom of expression.” What
“certain truths” are you speaking of?
An example would be
allowing my experience and my sisters’ experiences to blend, arriving at a more
complete picture of the effect of my father’s behavior.
End
times. Cancer spreads from prostate to
bone. It could look like a judg-
ment
on him
From
a table by the diner window I see him walk in, moving slowly, painfully,
like
a diver through water, bloated, papery, head stretched out like a tortoise’s.
I’m
poleaxed with pity – Look what you’ve
done. How could you do that to him?
I’m
sick on tenderness. All I want to do is
forgive.
--Excerpt, “Tales of the Sisters: Judgment”
This also seems to allow
readers more points of entry. I didn’t plan this. I just made the decision not to edit as I
would have for a traditional nonfiction work. Poetry deals in metaphor, which I
think allows for a strange kind of precision that works by pattern and dream
logic.
echo echo
he fills my eye beautiful
boy in the pool wash of cataract
cloud circling crystal palace pleasure dome chasm
snow globe of delicate
petals returning to their source
with the scent of ice
and fire then vanilla pin feathers
dropped vowel by vowel uncut by consonant simply
shuttlecock simply snow simply cloud
pool boy again
boy
You describe The Brighter House as turning a pure
trauma narrative into a work of art. Can
you explain the difference between pure trauma narrative and a work of art?
When
I say pure trauma narrative, I mean a kind of testimony or witness that stays
pretty consistent telling by telling. It’s a sort of recitation of the facts
that is key to concepts of justice and good laws, so I respect it. But it only
does one thing. That’s what makes it important in one context, but can be
limiting outside the courtroom once your life experience starts to make the
proportions change in terms of importance. The story wants to shift, the frame
gets larger.
It is still a survival story, but now it might be something
more too. Many trauma survivors have this experience, and it can take gentle
work to trust that you’re not doing the wrong thing to stop witnessing in the
same way that was so necessary at an earlier point in time. If you are also a
writer or filmmaker or artist of any stripe (and in the broadest sense I
consider human beings as a species as artists and makers, if only of their own
memories), then you know that the form you work in will immediately push and
pull that narrative. It will want to be a multiplicity of cross currents, each
suggesting a different view.
This tension between views, rather than a single message or
witness, is art’s strength. It’s part of its authority and power. It contains
many.
But
you can see how wrong that would be in a courtroom or when considering rape
laws. So, we have these two powerful ways of speaking as human beings, and we
need both—language that is relatively fixed and mechanical to do the hard work
of clarity and justice, and language that invites the four winds. Then we enter
long-time and music, the buffeting of the tradition and quicksilver dreams.
I think metaphor balances all of this so skillfully. I find
that it grows with you and allows your story to change while keeping the
essential witness true. I’m grateful to poetry for this, but of course our
dream lives offer it to each of us every night.
What I hope is that metaphor and music allow people whose
experience differs from mine, to enter my individual witness, transformed by
the requirements of the poem, and get whatever they need, something I could
never have planned or expected.
That
is my experience when I read poets I love—the poem feels as if it were reading
me and my life, even though on another level it is clearly telling their
stories. I want to welcome that kind of reading everywhere I can. The poems
told my story, my sisters’ stories, when I wrote them, now they can tell the
stories you most need them to. Poets have given me that gift, and much more
that I can’t precisely explain. It’s only right that I try to pass that on to
my readers.
The Three Sisters attributed to Jeffrey Scott Thomas.
Copyright granted by Jeffrey Scott
Thomas
The ancient Native American technique of
growing Corn, Beans, and Squash together in an arrangement called the
Three Sisters is the ultimate in companion planting and helps increase
harvests, naturally!
Corn acts as a support for climbing bean
vines, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the high feeding requirements of
corn and squash, and the squash provides mulch and root protection for the corn
and beans! After cooperating beautifully in the garden, corn and beans
form a complete protein when eaten together!
How did religion play a role in your life as a
child?
I
think I had the natural religious impulses most children have, (which is) a
mind open to a sense of belonging to Life in some way. At its most fearless, it
was a sort of trust. Later I think it became something closer to magical
thinking and bargaining as I became more afraid of the adults around me, but I
didn’t forget my original impressions.
Little Girls In Church. Attributed to Gwen John. P.D.
The
religion that was imposed by my mother was a different thing. Luckily I could
sense the difference.
Prayer on the Feast of the Assumption
A dead mother stirs, sits
up, rubs her knees, puts on
the heavy wig, the burka,
the whole body bag
that contains her
radiance. Steps down and rests
her hands on my
shoulders. I ask not to be given
away, to stay under her
palms, to be over. But she
is already unzipping the
river, already rising. Swim.
Before she could drown baby number eight her
husband intervened. 1890. P.D.
What was the religion of
your mother that she wanted you to believe in?
My mother believed we should go to church
(Congregationalist or Methodist for most of my early years), and we did so. I’m
grateful for that because I was able to see other adults acting in basically
coherent ways. My mother’s religious belief seemed to be mostly organized around
her desires, often the desire to control others. Of course this didn’t work, so
she saw sinners everywhere and was often very bitter. One good thing about my
mother in church was that she loved to sing, and she had a lovely voice. And of
course having strangers around always made things more stable
He was kinder than I’d imagined he’d be.
Get in here, he
said. Show me the way.
I thought strangers would look hard and eager
like my father, like my mother
when she caught you doing what she knew
you’d do, you were always doing or wanted
to do. He was more like me,
--Excerpt, “How I Learned to
Talk”
Copyright granted by Kim Garcia
In my teenage years, religion, even fairly simplistic,
rule-bound religion, was my avenue towards a broader sense of authority and
truth than the inward-turning violence of my family, so it opened up a larger
world.
Morning Sun in 1952. Attributed to Edward Hopper. FU
How did religion become
your avenue toward a broader sense of authority? What religion was
that? Define “broader sense of authority” Define “truth?”
In a very simple way,
even fundamentalist beliefs were a reminder that there were other beliefs
outside of parental systems of thought—and that can be helpful if you’re living
in a violent home.
One page shows her heart before a God - minus
sign sitting
on a chair.
Pluses and minuses whirl around it like confused bees.
And on the next, her heart after God. There is a cross on the chair now, there
are no minuses, and pluses are crowded up on the
white page like good chil-
dren, waiting in a circle for a story.
“That’s the throne of my heart,” she whispers, so only God and I can hear,
“That’s a place no one can see.”
--Excerpt “Tales
of the Sisters: Bees”
If my parents had been able to get a church to go
along with their agenda—and I know people who had that experience—I think the
only option for me would have been to reject religious belief altogether.
Sometimes rejecting God as you’ve received Him/Her is the only possible
spiritual path. It’s an expression of authentic faith in a paradoxical way.
It was a fundamentalist
church, pre-Moral Majority, but already describing themselves as
fundamentalists—the Christian Church was the official title. It was and is a
Protestant church affiliated with the Church of Christ. (I was only active
there during my teenage years.) If I had been raised in it, I’m not sure it
would have worked as a doorway in my life. It was the choosing for myself and
beginning to understand that there were multiple ways of interpreting my own
experience. Some were more life-giving than others.
I lived in Texas, catching rides
that took longer than I thought.
And death never caught me,
easy as I was to catch.
--Excerpt, “Oil”
Christina's World 1948 attributed to Andrew Wyeth. FU
But when I say broader
sense of authority, I mean it was the beginning of thinking about authority as
empowering those who followed, not ruling them for power’s sake. That desire
for power is always a temptation in any human institution, and it is certainly
there in churches. But I heard parts of the message as empowering, and I took
that up.
A pink magnolia holding up palm after palm of blessing.
--Excerpt, “Early Morning”
I suppose what I mean by truth or the pursuit of
truth is not a thing or set of beliefs and proofs, it’s a willingness to
question how you interpret them. Not a denial of facts, but being aware that
there are many ways to create narratives from those facts, and to be a little
more aware of how I’m doing that. When we talk about conversions and
transformations, I think we’re talking about this willingness to see the
narrative in a new way. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t mean taking one fixed
narrative and replacing it with another one, but being open to something like
wonder—the vast connection to everything that is. That will sound vague, but
the actions that come out of sensing that there is no “other” out there—not
strangers, not species, not even a God separate from that oneness—can lead to
very specific acts of kindness, compassionate intelligence, and social justice.
I want to talk about his health, about his dying, the only reason I
can remem-
ber for being here. His
hands go on squeezing.
--Excerpt, “Tales of the Sisters: Judgment”
I am not speaking of what I do, but on what I’m
aiming for. Most of the time I’m rabbiting from one nervous self-preoccupation
to another, but this is the point on the horizon I aim for.
Yes, I’m
saying yes.
Not to death, which isn’t really my
business, but to heaven.
-Excerpt, “Heaven”
From the Divine Comedy: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest heaven. Gustave Dore. P.D.
How does religion play a role in your life
today?
My beliefs have changed significantly over my
lifetime, but I think that’s what beliefs should do. Doubt should have a
healthy role in plowing up the ground and letting fresh understandings in. I
could probably be equally comfortable and uncomfortable in many churches, but
my family is now half Latin American, so we are Catholic. I am most comfortable
in my Catholicism with the Catholic mystics. I also like the incarnational
aspects of Christianity — the straw, the mud, the spit. I distrust lines of
meaning that suggest it would be great if we could all be more spirit and less
body. I think that’s going to end up smacking of misogyny, even when that’s not
intended. We are bodies that can create bodies. If you don’t honor our
beautiful incarnations, you’re probably going to have a hierarchy that puts
women down the chain. Nothing interesting or life-giving there. No good news.
Saint Hildegard of Bingen was a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary and polymath.
There is one poem in the book “In My City Of Z,
Forgiveness” that I’m not sure what exactly is going on. I’m thinking is
it an abortion – but it can’t be an abortion – could it be a woman going
through surgery to better her chances of having children? Could it be a
violent attack? Or perhaps a war crime since manioc is a starch plant
used as a food staple?
Interesting. I wasn’t thinking about an
abortion, and I’ll have to think more about how that reading might fit with
what I’m doing. It’s interesting. I was thinking about the problem of
forgiveness—trying to will yourself there, trying to earn your way into being a
better, freer person. I think the suggestion of the poem is that you can’t will
your way there, no matter what extreme ways you try. Trying to force your way,
no matter how well-intentioned, is like seeking after the City of Z or El
Dorado—sure to be frustrated. Transformation is not earned. It’s something
else, something received as gift.
In the City of Z, I was
scarred – three lines, sternum to solar plexus.
They wept and festered
and would not heal. How else can you be beautiful?
asked the angels of that
place. I had hoped for something more
than my own body handed
back to me, still barren, still bargaining,
My mouth was stuffed with
manioc. My belly gave up its worms,
still I would not abandon
the pictures hope twisted from my dreams.
-Excerpt, “In My City of Z, Forgiveness”
he offered treasures to the Guatavita goddess in the middle of the
sacred lake. This old Muisca
tradition became the origin of the
El Dorado legend.
Can you go into detail about the environment in
which you wrote the chapbook TALES OF THE
SISTERS, which is included in THE BRIGHTER
HOUSE?
I wrote both books over a long period of time,
so all of these factors varied, but let me say something about my poetic
practice. I do try to maintain a rhythm. I try to write in the morning before
anything happens. I try to read in the afternoons or evenings. I listen to
music, instrumental always, classical often, and I listen to it on repeat. I
try not to read immediately before writing, and I like writing by a window when
I can, but I write everywhere. I fall out of the pattern all the time, but it’s
there for me to fall back into. When I’m not writing, I am not happy, but of
course there is resistance. That’s the job.
Kim Garcia. Copyright granted by Kim Garcia
How did you determine the structure/ order of
the poems in THE BRIGHER HOUSE?
I have the privilege of being part of a coven of
fine poets who help me with that. I come in with some loose structure, and then
we take turns reading them out, one by one, and pinning them to a huge white
board in my house. They discuss changes and make many. We each work on at least
one larger project per year, but many of those end up changing or sitting in a
drawer for a while. For me, books are created glacially.
Copyright granted by Kim Garcia
One of your two sisters is darker than
others. Did you have parents of different races?
No,we’re all Anglo mutts, but they did have
different coloring in personality and feature.
My dark sister is beaten
in that first beautiful, wished for snow.
-Excerpt, “Tales of the Sisters: Snow.”
Aerial view of the Three Sisters volcanoes in Oregon, from the
southeast looking north. Left to right: South Sister, Middle Sister,
and North
Sister. In the left foreground is the 'Newberry' flow of
rhyolite lava, which
is 2200 years old, one of the most recently
erupted units.
Can you give a geographical biography of your
life (the places you have lived in chronological order)?
Born
in Washington D.C., Virginia, New Jersey, Boston, San Francisco, Houston/NYC
after my parents divorced, and then in my teenage years I worked for my sister
in Alaska. I went to school in Oregon, backpacked in Europe after graduation,
had my son in Ann Arbor, MI, had my daughter back in Oregon, then we all moved
to Tallahassee, Houston, and back to Boston. We have rented a cottage in Nova
Scotia every summer for the last 12 years or more where I do a great deal of
writing every summer. It shows up in my poems quite a bit.
What is your first memory of poetry?
Margaret Wise Brown, left, and illustrator Garth Williams, right.
Children’s
books—Margaret Wise Brown’s book Wait
Until the Moon is Full was read to me in Sunday School, and I never forgot
it. And of course you get some rhymed verse, mostly doggerel, in school.
The Bible was read in church as well. It’s a
weekly poetry reading if it’s read well. I’m sure all that registered.
But I did not know what poets did. That was a
world away that I was slow to embrace. I thought of myself as a writer, but not
a poet.
I read in an interview where you attended a
Benedictine monastery and was told that Poetry was prayer. Was this what
compelled you to be come a poet?
No, but it was part of the permission and
support I received from unexpected quarters. I have been very fortunate in the
teachers and generous strangers in my life.
I
went to Mt. Angel monastery when I was a very young mother. The guest master
would give me a room with a desk, a bed, and a private bathroom, and I would
have this incredible gift of time. And I could go and hear poetry (the psalms) chanted six times a day. Poet
heaven.
When did you decide that you were a poet?
Not until my forties. I’d been writing poetry
all the way along, but I sheltered in fiction for a long time. I wrote the way
a poet writes—by sound, over character or plot—but I worked the sentence as a
unit rather than the line.
Kim Garcia. Copyright granted by Kim Garcia
What poets affected you and the writing of The Brighter House?
I wrote that book over such a long
stretch of time that the list would be unbearably long. In the Acknowledgments I
tried to thank some of the fine poets I have the privilege of working with, and
of course I was affected in every way by their work: Allison Adair, Ed Hirsch, Adam Zagajewski,,
Sue Roberts, Skye Shirley, Holly Iglesias, Mark Doty, Nick Flynn, Van and Geoff
Brock, Lisa Steinman, Brook Emery, and the poets at Boston College and the
Brookline Poetry Series where I’ve listened to fine poetry for years.
(https://www.brooklinelibrary.org/events/ongoing-events/brookline-poetry-series/)
(https://www.brooklinelibrary.org/events/ongoing-events/brookline-poetry-series/)
But beyond that I certainly have loved
poets who I know only from the page—Tomas Transtromer, Amichai, Rilke, Jean
Valentine, the usual suspects.
And the Biblical writers’ cadences were
deep in my inner ear. And I have a magpie ear. I’ll pick up bits from
eavesdropping. People say such beautiful things without even planning them. I
like the lovely idiomatic collision of everyday conversational and high poetic
passion.
Let me put the last first—Dennis Maloney called
me at home. The news was a total surprise and an honor. I entered many contests
once my fellow poets had vetted the final order. Publishing, in my experience,
is usually a lengthy process of submission and rejection, with many close calls
and encouraging notes along the way. The poetry world is a generous one, but
it’s supported by hardworking publishers, working on a shoestring. It’s a labor
of love, so you have to be patient and resilient.
The Story of The
Brighter House
The speaker of the poem, one of three abused
sisters, reveals how she and her two sisters were conceived in violence in the
poem “1943, How We Got Made.”
My father led her down
into the basement of the Chicago warehouse
took off his shirt
And my mother
tucked up her legs under her skirt
pretending to be scared
as he bludgeoned rats, big as small dogs
and threw their bodies into the furnace.
The stench of burnt fur, blood, coal
chummed the air. What was
hungry in them rose and fed.
Every violence, then, was conceived.
http://www.hannabarczyk.com
Attributed to Hanna Barczyk.
Copyright granted by Hanna Barczykhttp://www.hannabarczyk.com
In “Tales of the Sisters: Snow” the
speaker of the poem is a five-year old little girl witnessing her feather beat
her sister:
My
father beats her with snow chains on her shoulders, her back, through her dark
green winter coat. He beats one sister
and quiets three.
There is evidence that the daughters
experience abuse at the hands of their mother in the poems “Strangers,” and “Rumpelstiltskin.”
Our lawn was dead.
The car was dying.
She wanted grass.
I was useless to her.
A few days later he came with a load.
After he laid the sod, he drank
a glass of lemonade at the kitchen table
with my mother. Then he took
me to the drive-in.
-Excerpt from “Strangers”
What mother promises
her own child to a stranger?
-Excerpt from
“Rumpelstiltskin”
There are tales of sexual abuse from the
father himself in the poems “Tales of the Sisters: The Walrus” and “Tales of the Sisters:
Judgment.”
We are so intimate,” he says spinning his private verse, “We could
be more so.” We must complete the
couplet. We must return the tide.
--Excerpt, “Tales of the Sisters:
The Walrus”
Now maybe French kissing
your sister was bad judgment.”
--Excerpt, “Tales of
the Sisters: Judgment.”
The speaker of the poem tells of the abuse she
and her two sisters experienced at her father’s hands while at the same time
facing her father’s dying:
but what is rest to a man who could not hold
a child on his lap without teasing it,
who into a family of cold anti-Semites
introduced my dark mother as a Jew,
who beat his children so passionately
we had no choice but to love
and fight him doggedly forever?
--Excerpt, “Transfusion”
Photoshopped by Christal Rice Cooper
The speaker of the poems ages as the pages turns
– she is a fetus in “1943, How We Got Made”;
a little girl in “Tales of the Sisters: Snow”; teenager in “Oil”, “Strangers”,
and “Tales of the Sisters: Cherries”;
wife in “Unicorn and Virgin, Cloisters Tapestries”; mother in “Annunciation”;
in present day Boston in “The Dead in Summer”; and finally the daughter facing a father in
need of forgiveness on the cusp of death in “Tales of the Sisters: Judgment”
only to refuse to acknowledge his wrong doings.
Those terrible things my sisters have said about him. Very unfair, a
misunderstanding, worked out, in the past, a pack of damn
lies. I keep
mopping up with a little rag of forgiveness borrowed from
therapy-speak.
“That must have been very hard for you, Dad,” I say, sic with pity
going
cold and my own hypocrisy.
Under the table my legs start to shake.
The Three Ages of Woman by Gustav Klimt PD
The speaker of these poems is engaged in what
could be described as a mythological spiritual warfare: she must forgive the unforgiveable in order
to be free.
In the poem “For
my father and the cancer that killed him” the speaker of the poem describes
her father and the cancer as two Greek gods/animals, the duck and the hawk,
fighting one another to the death, which results in her father, the duck, dying
a painful slow death:
for the hawk
to find the place
between its neck and back, to pierce the artery,
open the blood gate, let out the fight and begin
to feed.
This poem is also a great description of the
inner spiritual torment the speaker of the poem goes through – how to forgive a
father who refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing? How to forgive a father who you don’t know,
and when you do know, he is a monster, while at the same time there is that
little girl in the adult woman who wants to call this monster “Daddy”?
The Crying Little Girl - Unknown
The speaker of the poem doesn’t have one
specific answer but rather numerous memories (usually of her and her two
sisters) and visuals (usually of nature) she describes in her poems help her to
come to the point of forgiveness of her father, never forgetting or even
excusing him for what he has done, but to forgive in order to let it all go in
order to live freely. In fact,
forgiveness is no longer just an action she participates but a place she lives
– a place where there is no bitterness and only joy.
There is a soft fold in my belly,
Let me tell the world the way I did
when I had small children.
If I were dying
tomorrow I would be bitter.
I would
be a brighter house. I would
leave bad
memories. I would be the
brighter house.
--excerpt “Aubade”
Woman Before the Rising Sun attributed to Caspar David Friedrich
