Danielle Ryle was fostered in floodplain and found refuge in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, writing poetry as survival. Her work has appeared in Seneca Review, Appalachian Review, and Cordella among others, as well as her chapbook Fetching My Sister.
Angela Williamson Emmert: This is an amazing collection, Danielle. You have created a stunning piece of work. Spending time with this book has felt like a piece of good fortune!
As excited as I am, isolating individual lines for interview questions proved to be quite difficult. What struck me is the astonishing complexity of this collection. Figures, voices, the ancient world, mythologies, contemporary life in Kentucky, nature, mental health care—each of these aspects, and probably others I haven’t yet discovered, are so tightly woven, and each line so inextricably bound to both the individual poem and to the collection as a whole, that separating out a single line, or even single idea was very difficult!
That said, we have an entry point to this collection in Philomel. Sometimes known as Philomela, she is a figure of Greek mythology with a horrifying story. Both the narrative structure—disrupted and somewhat fragmented—and the polyphonic poems that defy strict borders contribute to the collection’s unfolding by inviting readers in, making them intimate guests or even co-conspirators to the events and underlying narrative of the collection.
Because of this intimacy, and especially for readers who come to your work with only an outline of Philomel’s story, I’m loath to give away too many details. We can say, I think, that Philomel is a weaver, and that in at least some versions of her story, she and her sister were transformed into birds.
Those two aspects are key to your collection because they become part of your implementation of form. Certainly, the woven nature of the collection and the poems’ interlacing are examples of thematic elements influencing form. You go even further, though, by inventing your own form. Each of these poems is one stanza made up of nine long lines. In your introduction, you call these poems “relentlessly repetitive” (although for the record, I did not feel this way as a reader!), and you say that the lines “parallel the repetition of birds.”
There are so many things we could talk about, but I wonder if you might discuss your use, and creation, of form. Were you conscious, as you were writing, of weaving or of woven cloth as providing a more hidden form in this work? If so, how did that awareness affect your writing? How did the birdsong form develop or evolve? Could you could speak about how you see form as an aspect of poetry, both as a poet and a reader of poetry?
Danielle Ryle: Thank you for such a warm and careful reading, Angela. In the opening poem of the book, I make my first gesture towards the idea of form and how form and process can appear differently to the creator of a text (or of a memory) and the reader or receiver of the final version: “It’s like the transverse of a tapestry, to suddenly see.” I hope all the threads—of Classical myth, of contemporary rural landscape, of psychic recovery—are by turns both the back and the front of a weaving: the intended image and the seemingly impossible connections.
Fiber arts were my first form of measured artistic expression. When I write about thread, I write from the tactile memories of my hands. I played at embroidery for as long as I can remember, and I completed my first counted cross-stich when I was 10 years old. Needlework is still a favorite weekend hobby. But I’ve often resisted domestic craft because it was the appropriate outlet for a woman’s creativity where and when I grew up. I didn’t make my first (and only) quilt until I was in my 30s, actually during the process of first revising Philomel. Fiber arts were both the starting point and the ending point for this book. It was my doubt that such forms could express rebellion that made me more intrigued by Philomela’s story.
As for the 9-line stanza that creates the main formal coherence of Philomel, it was first accidental, then purposeful, then in my blood. I knew when I was first composing these poems that I wanted to take up space, but I had also always been a believer that the poem is the page, the page is the canvas, so growth had to be horizontal. The longer lines were an intentional filling out: How far can I extend a line before it collapses under its own weight? The lines got longer, but the poems became fewer lines, and soon I found they were naturally coming in at 7-10 lines each. Most of the way through the composition period, I decided on 9 lines for each poem, contained in a single stanza. I’m much too invested in tradition (I have a PhD in Renaissance literature), so I’m alluding to Edmund Spencer’s epic stanza but also stripping it down. By the time I was writing the final poems that would be in Philomel, they were coming in at 9 lines from the first draft, like an instinct. “Form follows function” continually proves itself to be true. I feel these poems are kin with the “pretty rooms” of John Donne’s sonnets.
Line has always been the operative formal constraint for me, in my writing and in how I read. I’m indebted to James Longenbach’s Art of the Poetic Line for much of my foundational aesthetic of the line: the rhetoric of parsed and annotated lines clarified from the general concept of enjambment. I read and love lines as radically different as the susurrus waves of Jorie Graham and the corkscrew cores of Rae Armantrout. I was also reading a lot of metrical verse when composing Philomel, particularly 17th-century women’s poetry. When you’re reading an un-canonized poet, one of the methods for judging the poet’s ability is by how many “dead” syllables (exclamations like “O,” “ah,” etc.) they include to meet the metrical requirements of the form they’re chosen to work within. I often fall in love with another poet’s work because of how they use line.
AWE: There is an incredible otherworldliness to this collection. This, of course, is partly a function of your form—both the more overt nine-line stanzas and the layered interweaving—but I also feel as if the poems themselves—the descriptions, the voice, the sensibilities—are transportive.
For example, the in opening lines of “Philomel, Who Might Still Want to Get Her Some,” the speaker inhabits Philomel as a bird.
I sat above the small forest for a very long time, the compression and speed
of bird-life rubbered round in my human mind. Every fourth season
the cocks came calling, and my hen-body took this out of my hands…..
Another transportive moment comes in “Philomel, Between Ports of Call.” This poem places the reader solidly in the ancient world:
Some days, the wind whistles against the canvas of my ear like a falcon or a catcall.
For a time there wasn’t coast on either side; we could have been anywhere. At sea means
I’ve come up short for answers. […]
“Philomel and the Problem of Referents While Being Ladylike” is a similarly transportive poem, in which “…almost naked men heaved porpoises / onto the beach, crouched over them and began to gut.”
However, like all aspects of this book, the ancient world your poems conjure does not stand alone and independent. It is instead overlaid by and interwoven with a contemporary Kentucky presumably inhabited by a speaker who identifies herself as the Translator. The Translator’s Acknowledgement includes these transportive lines:
… While Puritanical, the hills also taught me to trust
my gut. The trees just know that it’s autumn: first the crab, then the linden
and the catalpa long gone and grey. It’s like the transverse of a tapestry, to suddenly see
how all the trees fit together to make the small forest. Lesson learned.
Can you tell us about the mythological/ancient world you created (or recreated) in this collection? What drew you there? Where do you see the overlap, or the contrast, between the ancient and mythological world and our own?
DR: When I was in my very early 20s, I fell in love with Homer’s Iliad and never looked back. My first mentor kept asking me why, and the only answer I had at the time was how delightful the language was: the swift black ships, the rose-red fingers of dawn. Only in retrospect did I realize my fixation was about the war. I was in high school on 9/11, and many of my classmates signed up. Everywhere I looked there were yellow ribbons and gaslighting, and here was this ancient poem also bent on glorifying war, but with moments where daughters, wives, and mothers would disrupt, like Andromache upbraiding her husband Hector for choosing glory over their infant son. I might as well have lived down the road from them.
Then I read H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and I knew what I wanted to do aesthetically in response to the tensions around me. Helen opens with the prose sentence, “We all know the story of Helen of Troy but few of us have followed her to Egypt.” H.D.’s epic is looping, multi-vocal, and somehow both static and whirlpool. That opening sentence is spoken by an annotating or editorializing voice, and each section is a mix of prose comment followed by verse image and action. This idea of both uncovering a story and telling a story stayed with me until Philomel. I wrote in many other mythic personas, but Philomela was the spark that sparked back.
The classical and the contemporary in Philomel is more personal. I wrote most of these poems while in the early stages of recovery from anorexia, a disease I have negotiated since my teens. In eating disorder recovery, clinicians emphasize language, including the loadstone anyone in recovery will know: Use your words to ask for what you need. (I quote this idiom in “Give It Here; Let Me Show You How It’s Done.”) I was suddenly in a space that cared about the words I used, believed that the words I used had meaning in and of themselves and could possibly save my life. That year in my personal life overlapped with the groundswell of #MeToo, another crystallizing moment of women speaking up for themselves. That so many of us repeated the same phrase (It’s one of the birdsongs in the final poem, “Philomel, Ornamental.”) felt cheek and jowl with what I was working through with Philomela’s story. In most poetic uses of the nightingale, her song is beautiful and sad but cathartic. I saw something different: entrapment; howling the same witness statement without ever finding closure. “Is this resilience?” Philomela asks in the opening of “Philomel, Who Cannot Take a Compliment.” How relentless do you have to be before something finally happens?
And always, as Sylvia Plath writes in one of her final poems “Edge,” I must remember it’s “the illusion of a Greek necessity.”
AWE: This collection also deals with acts of violence and recovery. Again, I don’t wish to give much away because there is a story that unfolds as readers move through the collection and sift through its many layers. In mind, the violence, and the speakers’ responses to this violence, could have resulted in very rageful poems. However, rage was not the prevailing emotion. Vengeance is part of Philomel’s story, but even that is muted, almost dismissed as a necessary consequence of events. Would you agree with my interpretation, or might other readers, with different experiences and perspectives, find emotions coded into the text that my lens doesn’t show me? What are your thoughts on the emotional landscape of this collection?
DR: I think there is a decent amount of rage in the poems with Philomela’s name in the titles. I hope there’s a swoop from gentle observation to angry no-nonsense across poems and across the collection because this reflects the experience of living with trauma. “Sometimes I let this trauma be everything; sometimes I don’t,” Philomela brashly concludes in “Philomel, Little Good-for-Nothing.” In Helen in Egypt, Helen doesn’t escape, doesn’t prove herself to be outside narrative in any way that benefits her. Like H. D.’s Helen, Philomela is caught in her narrative, an immortal bird declaiming the same song. I do hope the final line of “Philomel, Ornamental” (the final poem in the book) provides a sense of propulsion for the reader, an escape velocity.
What drove me to this material was the erasure of violence and trauma I saw in so many Renaissance and later poems about Philomela. When I bring up the nightingale, people often interrupt with “O, I love that John Keats poem!” but I’ve got beef with Keats: He names Philomela’s act of calling out her rapist an “ecstasy.” Philip Sydney writes that incels are worse off than victims of assault like Philomela. The only sympathetic portrait I found in the early period was William Shakespeare. (You can usually count on Shakespeare to be feminist.) In his early play Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare doubles-down on the violence: the Philomela character is assailed by two men instead of one and her tongue as well as both hands are chopped off. Grisly. Many readers of Titus see it as a failed farce, but I read Titus as a critique of the gilded intelligentsia that was the Renaissance project of modernizing and Christianizing Classical texts. Titus throws you back into the fire of ancient story. I do engage in some elision to fit a modern sensibility too. While I include the violence done to Itys, Philomela’s sister’s son, I restrict her participation in the filicide to a moment after the metamorphosis, “Philomel, Explaining the Lonely Artist Trope.”
But my Philomela doesn’t want to be seen as only a singer of rage and grief. As much as her experiences have defined her, she insists that she has other songs to sing: “The old poets would have you / believe I held my tongue until after” she says in “Philomel, Between Ports of Call.” In the moment of disassociation in “Philomel Learns Her Lesson,” she remembers “lisping a tune” in a scene reminiscent of the chronologically earliest poem “Philomel and the Problem of Referents While Being Ladylike.” There is a wide range of emotions here; Philomela insists we recognize that complexity.
AWE: I loved this work, but I will also admit that my knowledge of antiquity is very limited. If readers say, “I want more!” where would you recommend they start? I find your work reminiscent of Alice Oswald and am wondering about other writers or poets whom you enjoy or with whom you find your work in conversation.
DR: There’s so much worthwhile reading in the originals: Homer, Ovid, Sappho. If you want the influence and not the narrative, esoteric verse translations like Chapman’s Homer and Golding’s Ovid are a delight. Of course, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt. I think a re-read of Plath’s mythic poems like “Edge” and “Medusa” with an attention to the emblematic and not the confessional methods of development. I also love Rachel Zucker’s Eating in the Underworld, Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands, and Molly Bendall’s Ariadne’s Island. Derek Walcott’s Omeros is a modern classic at this point too.
AWE: In a note you sent me, you referred to Philomel by the shorted “Phil,” indicting a very real, and understandable, emotional connection to this figure with whom you’ve spent a great deal of time. What does it feel like now, to have come to the end of this part of your journey with her? Have you given any thought to what comes next for you as an artist, and how Philomel and your experiences writing this collection, may or may not travel with you? Do you see more work with form in your future? Are there other figures from myth or from the ancient world we might encounter in upcoming work?
DR: Yes, Phil; I always call her Phil when I’m just talking. But it does feel a bit like negging a preppy friend. In the poems, I wanted to use Philomel because it shows the absence—of a body part, of her agency inside metrical verse—but I never call her Philomel out loud, always Philomela or Phil. Philomel is what the tradition wanted her to be, Philomela is who she is, Phil is who she is for me.
I’m thinking about form again in my recent new poems, writing some of the first multi-page poems I’m actually pleased with. I’m curious about momentum, about what putting pressure on the vertical axis will do to the horizontal axis, the line. Most of these newer poems are also in an omniscient third person, so I’m being pulled towards another way of developing figures, characters. Reading Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies a few years ago steeped me in early women’s narrative poetry, and now I’m writing back.
And there will probably be returns to Classical myth along the way. I think I have unfinished business with the Venus of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, how aggressive her sexuality is in that poem. I also recently drafted a poem in conversation with W. C. Williams’ and W. H. Auden’s treatments of the famous Bruegel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Using Classical myth provides me the slippery surface to engage poets long dead and long distant. At its best, poetry is a conversation with the past, with the goal of a clarified, rarified future.