Interview by Beth McDermott
I’ve been lucky enough to know Virginia Bell as a writer and editor since my first summer working for RHINO Poetry in 2015 in what is now called the Helen Degen Cohen Summer Reading Fellowship. Having listened to Virginia discuss poems with care and intellectual curiosity, it wasn’t a surprise to discover that her second full-length collection of poems, Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around, invited me to think deeply about relationships, ekphrasis, genre and poetic form. One day this past spring, I interviewed Virginia over Zoom; we caught up with one another, and I swooned over the book after having taught one of Virginia’s poems in a poetry tutorial with an undergraduate student. But there was much more to say about the craft of the book, its author’s obsession with invention, and the “hybridization” of literary tradition because form is such an important question.
Beth McDermott: Tell me about the epigraph from Rebecca Solnit that prefaces your new collection of poems from Glass Lyre Press: Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around. The epigraph reads: “He had captured aspects of motion whose speed had made them as invisible as the moons of Jupiter before the telescope, and he had found a way to set them back in motion.”
Virginia Bell: The Solnit quote refers to the 19th Century American photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, who was one of the inventors of stop-motion technology, which paved the way for the invention of motion-pictures or film. The epigraph also refers to a famous debate about whether a horse’s hooves are ever all in the air at once while a horse is galloping. From Solnit and other sources, I became interested in Muybridge’s troubled relationship with his wife Flora, as well, and with the figure of Leland Stanford, the patron for Muybridge’s experimentation. Stanford was a robber baron who made his wealth from railroads and banking during the Gold Rush, and then was the founder of Stanford University and an early Governor of California. Based on Solnit’s biography of Muybridge, I think of Stanford as sort of a Trumpian figure of his time. He had a bet with his wealthy friends about what they would see when Muybridge managed to freeze frame a horse’s hooves in mid-gallop. They couldn’t see this with the naked eye, and they couldn’t settle their bet until Muybridge invented the technology to let us see differently.
The opening poem, “A Blackout & A Meltdown,” introduces the reader to oddities, and other poems contain variables, mutations. These moments stand in stark contrast to the poetic speaker’s mother’s religiousness. But there are oddities in the intimacy of caretaking. How did the push and pull between poetry and prayer, intimacy and rift, unfold over the course of writing this book?
I was and was not aware that I was producing tension between poetry and prayer. But now that you say it, I can see it, especially in the early poems in the collection about being raised by a devout mother and caregiver. And then, in the poem titled “The Ultimate End-of-Life Checklist,” there is a section that describes my act of reading poetry to my mother, as my form of secular prayer, as a kind of talking back.
My husband, Ben, in fact, calls RHINO Poetry my “church” because I spend so much time devoted to it and finding community with fellow editors. I’m a little bit allergic to words like “sacred” and “spiritual” but there is something vital and mysterious that I get from reading, writing, and editing poetry. That is probably what my mother got from her deep attachment to a sacred text. Even though I think that she followed the text with less agency, or she followed a patriarchal institution telling her how to interpret that text. At least, that’s what I observed. So, I don’t know if that answers the question. But, yes, “intimacy and rift.” In some poems, there is clearly a rift between the speaker and her mother. I think the whole collection is about rifts in a variety of relationships, including the rift between Muybridge and his wife Flora, at least in my fictional invention of them as characters. There is also sometimes rift between the poetic speaker and her brother. And then, in the last section of the book, the speaker’s relationship with her own children, or other people in the family orbit. It’s not always specified in those poems who the tension is with, and even good relationships involve rift and the negotiation of difference. So, it’s not to say that all the relationships depicted in the book are toxic or terrible at the end of the day. It’s not as simple as good or bad, or healthy or unhealthy, but that they take work. Intimacy requires effort. I guess for me poetry is a place to do some of that work for myself.
You make good use of the sonnet form in two sonnet sequences. The form works well to frame quoted lines of poetry, facts in parentheticals, or literary references in the books the speaker is reading. What does literary tradition do for the speaker who also wrote poems as a little girl? How do these historical texts talk back to inventions, if they do?
I’m using something sonnet-ish, right? Something in the neighborhood of the sonnet. That didn’t happen intentionally, at first, but I became conscious of wanting to work inside and outside of the sonnet tradition at the same time, which a lot of writers are doing these days. I was reading and learning from those writers—such as Diane Seuss—and began writing in the sonnet sequence form but without adhering to all the rules and conventions.
In “The Ultimate End-of-Life Checklist,” I let myself hybridize something like a crown sonnet with a lyric personal essay/creative nonfiction. There are figurative layers to the sequence as well as very literal reporting from memory. The other thing, which might help us connect the confessional poem about my mother to the Muybridge poems, is that a sonnet sequence is a series of takes, much like a plate of stop-motion images. When I look at the Muybridge plates, I’m fascinated by all the discrete boxes, 8, 12, or more. In some reproductions, they are postage stamp size, or you can enlarge them electronically. You are seeing discrete moments in time but also seeing them all at once on a plate, and later, this technology led to the invention of the spinning zoetrope, and then to film. You can also choose to look at one box at a time and notice differences in each. This is a similar experience to reading or hearing linked sonnets. One sonnet is one take. It’s a look. It’s not the take. It’s not the definitive look. It doesn’t represent all reality, all perspectives, all moods, all feelings.
That makes me think of an early poem where you have the phrase “the box of the mind.” And not only does it speak to what you’re saying here about the sonnet form being “a look”; it also speaks to the idea that the mind is like a theater with the film screen and the scene being displayed.
Well, that first poem is after Maggie Nelson, and I have to credit her with the phrase “the loop of the mind,” which I re-wrote as “the box of the mind” for my purposes. Nelson’s original poem is called “Two Eclipses,” which suggests that the word “eclipse” doesn’t have just one referent. You can look at an eclipse one way, and then again in an entirely different way, whether we’re talking of literal eclipses or metaphoric ones. Although my poem is called “A Blackout & A Meltdown,” I’m working on something similar: to tell a story or share a memory twice and differently.
One of my favorite poems in your book is “The Invention of Suspension,” after Sallie Gardner. The voice is so compelling. How did you approach this work of ekphrasis, especially from the point of view of the horse?
I appreciate that you like this poem because it’s one of my favorites, too, it may be the heart of the collection, and I just noticed, as I was opening it, that that it is smack dab in the middle of the book.
I didn’t do that intentionally, but it makes sense that it belongs there. I considered calling the book either The Invention of Suspension or All in the Air at Once. When this poem was first published in Kettle Blue Review, I just called it “Sallie Gardner,” the name of Leland Stanford’s horse who was being photographed in Muybridge’s experiments. Initially, all the poems in the “Invention” section had different individual titles, and then, as I was putting together this section for the book, I realized, oh, they’re all “invention” poems so I changed all the titles.
Was the poem always in the horse’s point of view? Or was there a point when you experimented with a different perspective?
It was from the point of view of the horse right from the get-go. When I started trying to write Muybridge related poems, I wanted to play with persona. Not all the poems ended up being in persona, but I sometimes wish I had pushed farther and used this device more. Sallie’s voice came to me early on and felt strong and clear. Speaking in Sallie’s voice allows me to contrast trying to know something by looking at it from the outside with self-knowledge or the interiority of the thing (person, horse, etc.) being looked at. Both ways of looking or knowing are difficult projects, and forever incomplete and imperfect.
There’s a question of power dynamics at play here. There’s a rift between the inventor and the financial patron and his cronies, on the one hand, and the horse or photographed object on the other. There’s a political tension between the two, and I’m aware that I gave the horse a feminist voice. After I read Solnit’s history of this experiment, and the financial bet, I just couldn’t get out of my mind the picture of robber barons standing around throwing their money down as entertainment while they watched Muybridge work. I’m not saying that the horse was abused in an animal rights way. I don’t really know. I don’t know how the horse was treated, but the scene just feels pornographic, right?
I can see that with regard to your earlier point that the robber barons couldn’t see all four hooves suspended just with their own eyes. In fact, I love how the book has these different angles of looking, and to quote the end of “The Invention of Suspension,” which reads “feigning / I am free,” what does it mean to be free, and be in relationships at the same time?
I don’t know if it comes across to the reader, and I didn’t think about this in a premeditated way, but I realized that I liked the double entendre or paradox in these lines. “Feigning / I am free” may mean that the speaking “I” has enough agency to pretend to go along with something but is not truly controlled by another’s actions. Or “feigning / I am free” could mean that the speaking “I” is deceiving herself into thinking she has agency when she does not. Now that we’re talking about it, this duality reminds me of Louis Althusser’s theory of the “interpellation of the subject.”
I’m intrigued by your use of the asterisk as a section break, sometimes mid-sentence. Were you inspired by another writer?
You might be describing the poem “The Invention of Autobiography,” which uses the persona or voice of Flora Muybridge. I use the asterisk as section break in other poems as well. In terms of forms, it’s another way of getting at the boxes we were talking about earlier, or a way of creating multiple windows. Each section is both discrete and not; some end with an enjambed line that carries over into the next section. This is like the connectedness of incremental movements that create motion. Or maybe the asterisk allows me to pace the speed of the poem. I can’t remember if Anne Carson uses the asterisks in this way, but I learned a lot about sectional work that’s both connected and disconnected at the same time from reading Carson’s work.
Well, I can see how. And I remember from working with you in the past that you admire Carson quite a bit. I can see how her work is influential on your new collection, not only in the sense of the section break, but also in the lyric, the braiding.
Yes, the braiding.
Which makes sense. You’re also a nonfiction writer.
There’s a very moving transition between two poems—the end of “Take-Off on a Love Poem” and “I Walk Into Every Room and Look for My Mother.” The first poem ends “I refuse to go home. To empty my mother’s house.” The second poem begins with the words “I know she exists.” For me, this transition contains the child’s defiance as well as the mother’s god-like power. But the poems in the collection are careful not to associate mothering with the kind of attention required to be an inventor. What is the role of poetry in a world where invention is so fast, we can hardly keep up?
Well, first, I’ll respond to the beginning of your question. I appreciate your noticing the juxtaposition of the end of “Take-Off on a Love Poem” with the beginning of “I Walk Into Every Room and Look for My Mother.” It’s that rift again. There’s tension between truth and fraud, between detachment and attachment. We somehow want both in all our relationships. You want the freedom of detachment, and you want the security of attachment. I think this applies to your question about technology as well. My hope is that the book doesn’t come across a Luddite anti-technology rant. I had a mentor in graduate school named Katie King who taught at the University of Maryland when I was there getting my Ph.D in Comparative Literature, with a Concentration in Women’s & Gender Studies. King is the author of Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in US Women’s Movements (Indiana University Press, 1994) and Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplnary Knowledges Tell (Duke University Press, 2011). King graduated from the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz and worked with Donna Haraway. It was Katie who first talked to me about “technology” meaning more than the inventions of the 21st century, or the information age, or even the industrial revolution much earlier. A wooden stick is “technology” if you use it to dig something out of the ground. Language is technology. I’m remembering that George Saunders calls fictional novels “compassion-generating machines.”
I find it interesting to think about “tech” this way rather than to inherently demonize it. We love making things, right? We love tools, and that’s a wonderful thing to love. But any tool can have multiple effects. I became fascinated with Muybridge, first from reading Rebecca Solnit’s biography, but then immersing myself in the images I found in a compendious volume of the plates in the bookstore at the Art Institute of Chicago (Taschen Press). I flipped through the images for years. Part of me wants to write a hundred more poems about them, so I’m very grateful for the tech that brought them into being. At the same time, I often resist the gazes that they represent. I have an obsession at the same time as having a resistance to Muybridge’s authority and to the authority of and interests of his financial patrons in Palo Alto in the 1870s. This ambivalence intensified when I learned more about Muybridge’s biography, violence, and misogyny. Technology is not void of the context of history and sociology.
Yes. And that conflictual attitude towards images, I think, is very present in the collection. Tell me about the title of the book. It reminds me of a title of a painting or a photograph or like a caption of some sort.
It literally is a caption I stole, revised, and radically appropriated from one of the Muybridge plates. He captioned all of his plates very literally, almost always using a gerund. I was worried about overusing gerunds throughout the collection, because the “ing” sound can really water down the music of a poem. He captioned all of his plates to catalog the different acts of motion in each. Many of the captions sound archaic, vintage, and strange to our 21st Century ears, like “man ascending stair, full demi-john on shoulder.” What is a “demi-john”?? I had to look that up! What’s interesting to me about the plate labeled “Woman Lifting Child from the Ground, and Turning Around,” is that you’re seeing a “woman” stoop down to lift a child and then, as she’s standing back up with the child in her arms, she’s turning around to look back at the camera. She seems to be realizing that the camera is watching her, studying her. Presumably she would have known from the start, because she was there as a volunteer, or a paid subject for Muybridge’s experiment, but it’s compelling to see her moving, as if unawares, and then suddenly show that she is aware of being looked at and of the artifice of the scene.
Virginia Bell’s latest poetry collection is Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around (Glass Lyre Press 2025). She is Co-Editor of the forthcoming anthology The Overturning (Erratics Books, an imprint of Hypertext, 2025), and Co-Editor of RHINO Poetry. Bell’s previous work includes From the Belly (Sibling Rivalry Press 2012), NELLE Magazine’s Nonfiction Prize in 2020 for the personal essay, “Chicken,” and Honorable Mention in the 2019 RiverSedge Poetry Prize, judged by José Antonio Rodríguez. Her work has appeared in Mid-Atlantic Review, New City Magazine, Five Points, Denver Quarterly, SWWIM, EAP: The Magazine, Hypertext, The Night Heron Barks, Kettle Blue Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Rogue Agent, Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Nervous Breakdown, The Keats Letters Project, Blue Fifth Review, Voltage Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. Bell has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and teaches at Loyola University Chicago and DePaul University.
Beth McDermott is the author of Figure 1 (Pine Row Press), a 2022 finalist for the Foreword Indies and a 2023 finalist for the da Vinci Eye/Eric Hoffer Award; and a chapbook titled How to Leave a Farmhouse (Porkbelly Press). Her poetry appears in journals such as After Hours, Memorious, Terrain.org and Jet Fuel Review. Reviews and interviews appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online and The Adroit Journal, among other places. She is Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL, and serves as a preliminary reader for Tupelo Press.