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| Whitney Rio-Ross |
Whitney and I met at Union University, the small Baptist university where we both got our undergraduate degrees in English. We ran in a lot of the same circles there, and not just with our English classes: we were paired up several years in a row for a mentoring program called Life Groups (hey, as I said, it was a Baptist university), and we both were staff members on The Torch, the school's literary magazine.
But I think anyone who knew both of us back then probably now remembers Whitney much better, and that's not false modesty—as much as this can be true of someone with extremely academic interests in the humanities, Whitney was a star. She went on to become the editor in chief of The Torch and part of the leadership of Life Groups, in addition to completing a whole second major (in philosophy—ya know, easy stuff); when we graduated, she was then accepted to Yale Divinity School, where she got a dual degree in religion and literature. She's now teaching literature at Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville. All of this is a long way of saying that Whitney is one of the smartest people I know (in addition to being thoughtful and kind and just an all-around great person).
Somewhere along the line, she also became a great writer, too, which is why I'm interviewing her here. In college, I remember her crafting some sharp pieces of creative nonfiction, and since then, she's really jumped head-first into writing; Whitney's a poet and a darn good one at that. In fact, her first chapbook of poetry, Birthmarks, just came out in the midst of all our COVID-19 pandemonium. At the time I conducted this interview, I hadn't yet read Birthmarks, but I have now—it's good stuff, folks! You can buy it here, if you're interested.
Anyway, you can read the interview below. We talk about teaching, faith, Evangelicalism, poetry in general, and her poetry in particular; as you'd expect, she has smart things to say, and I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Interview
Michael: What’s your history with poetry? I know that you and I in
college both got degrees in literature—did it start there?
Whitney: I really started writing poetry mostly after graduate
school. In college, I always said I was never going to write poetry because I
liked it too much and didn’t want to screw it up. But then I took some prose
writing classes in grad school and realized that I was drawn more and more
toward writing poetry.
M: Was there any particular reason for your shift?
W: Well, a teacher at Union was teaching an advanced poetry
class, and she asked me and a couple others who had graduated a few years
before to participate because it was such a small class. And she said, “So you
will bring in some poems.” And I thought, “Oh. I don’t have any of those,
really.”
M: Is this when you were currently a master’s student?
W: After. I had just written a few poems before that, not
anything really serious, so that literally forced me to write poetry.
M: Obviously you had read poetry before for your bachelor’s
degree, but was poetry something that you were always drawn to to read? I feel
like now poetry isn’t something that people tend to casually get into as much
as in centuries gone by.
W: I started reading poetry pretty intensely during my
freshman year of college. I got really into contemporary poetry as I learned
that there are poets out there who are living who are doing awesome stuff, so I
read a lot in college, and that continued through grad school.
M: Let’s pivot to your own poetry. I’ve read several of your
poems over the years, and then you sent me six prior to this interview, so
those are the ones I’m most familiar with at this point. Probably the most
surface-level observation you could make about these poems is that a lot of
them are centered around the Christian faith, which makes sense; your degree
from Yale was a combined theology and literature degree, right?
W: Yeah, it was a dual degree in religion and literature.
M: Okay, so biographically, it makes sense that you’d write
about faith. Can you could explain how you conceive of the relationship between
your poetry and your faith?
W: I think anybody’s writing or art is going to reflect the
mythology that they have working in their lives. So whatever your faith is (or
lack of faith), what your beliefs are—it’s going to show up in anything that
you make. And I think we all have beliefs, even if we don’t believe in a god.
That’s been such a big part of my life that it’s actually hard to avoid in
writing. I’ve tried, and it’s really hard.
M: Specifically, at least in the ones you sent me, you have
this presence of biblical matriarchs like Eve and Esther. Is there anything
about those figures as opposed to others that you’re drawn to? The Christian
mythology is huge, as far as what you can draw on, but at least in the poems
you sent me, Eve is mentioned twice, and you’ve got Proverbs 31 and Esther and
a few others.
W: Well, my chapbook is all based on biblical matriarchs. I
think I was most drawn to that because, especially growing up in the
Evangelical South, I heard a lot of terrible takes on women in the Bible and
women in theology. As a part of a Christian Studies program at a pretty sexist
university, I had to deal with a lot of crap about what females meant in the
study of theology and what females in the Bible represented, so I needed to
explore those ideas for myself during and after college. I think they show up
in my poetry because that’s kind of what I was thinking about for a few years.
M: You mentioned Evangelicalism, which was something I was
going to pivot to. You have at least a couple of the poems among the ones I
read that deal with Evangelicalism. I’m thinking specifically of “The Seminarian Translates Proverbs 31” and also “Our Mothers Spoke of Apocalypses.”
Both of those, to at least some degree, seem to be making a criticism of
certain ideologies or habits of Evangelicalism. Do you feel bitter about
Evangelicalism? I sometimes find that I get bitter if I write about
Evangelicalism. What’s your stance toward that history?
W: I definitely do feel some bitterness. It took a lot of
healing to get past some of the damage that a lot of those teachings created
for both me and my friends who also came out of very harsh Evangelicalism. I’ve
seen that writing about it has actually helped me work through some of that
bitterness, so that’s been weirdly therapeutic. I didn’t start writing those
poems because of that; it just somehow happened while I was looking at those
topics.
M: Would you consider yourself outside of Evangelicalism now?
W: Yeah.
M: Is there anything you’ve held onto from that upbringing?
We’ve talked about feeling bitter, but are there any positive things you’ve
kept from it?
W: I love that I know so much about the Bible. Even though
some of the ways that it was taught and some of the takes people had on it were
really bad, it’s really cool to know so much of that story and to engage with
so much of it, artistically or not artistically.
M: Is poetry pretty much your main artistic engagement with
the Bible?
W: It is. I started out more just writing essays, but I’ve
gone more to poetry. I still write some essays, though.
M: Going back to your poems themselves, what can you tell me
about that chapbook?
W: It is thematically unified in terms of focusing on female
characters who I think get either the worst reputations or the smallest roles
in the Bible. They’re all put into contemporary situations in the poems;
sometimes those have to do with the biblical narrative, sometimes they don’t—so
for example my Esther poem is more about a girl growing up with these strict
gender roles rather than the whole biblical story.
M: In a case like that, where it’s not directly connected to
the narrative in the Bible, what’s drawing you to Esther?
W: Well, when I was thinking about writing an Esther poem, I
was honestly thinking about writing a gay Esther because I was thinking about
how awful that whole situation was [for Esther], but also: what if she didn’t
want to be with a man, period? What if she was a lesbian or asexual and just
would have no interest in men at all? So I was thinking about that and realized
that so much of those ideas start happening when we’re kids, especially for
girls. You’re told that you’re going to marry your prince one day, and for some
girls, that sounds terrible. So that’s what I had in mind when I was just
thinking about Esther, and that’s what happened with the poem.
M: I think that if we think about any Evangelical audience,
you’ve really given them an invitation to find the exit by saying that Esther
could possibly be conceptualized as non-heterosexual [laughs]. I think that’s
great. Do you have any Evangelicals reading your poems, and if so, how do they
respond?
W: I have a lot of Evangelicals reading my poems. I dedicated
the chapbook to my mom, and my mom’s still pretty Evangelical. She says she
likes it, though. With poems like the Esther poem, I don’t come out and say,
“Hey, by the way, Esther is gay.” It’s interesting because I actually wrote it
for a friend of mine who’s gay, and I had her in mind when I was writing it; I
was like, “Oh, this sounds like this friend of mine.” But I think that that
poem can apply to all kinds of girls. I hated being told that I was going to
get married one day when I was younger. I think a lot of these poems might open
up possibilities for these women that Evangelicals might read, and they might
just not pick up on any of that. People from other perspectives might read them
and get a little bit more of the criticism or limited viewpoint of
Evangelicalism from them.
M: Do you conceive of your poems as subversive? Or do you just
write about people? You mentioned that the Esther one was written with a friend
in mind.
W: There’s definitely a subversive element to that set of
poems, because I kind of wrote it for myself in college or high school—like, I
wish that me in college had some of these different versions of these stories,
or different versions of these women. So it’s definitely subversive. I didn’t
mean to write it in any kind of “Take that, Evangelicalism!” way, though
there’s definitely some of that added to some of the poems, too. But it feels
more personal—like, “Take that, person in my Greek class who belittled me.”
M: As someone who knew you during undergrad and heard stories
about your frustrations in your classes, I find that delightful. Even though I
didn’t know a lot of those people personally, it is nice to imagine that
Whitney, eight years later, is now scribbling away poems that will put those
people in their place. You probably put them in their place at the time anyway.
Anyway, you mentioned the Bible stories that don’t get told, or only get told
in a particular way, and I think that both Esther and Eve are interesting
examples of that—and also Proverbs 31, which we can get to eventually, too,
because it’s one I think is really interesting. But first about Esther. You’re
talking about the traditional Evangelical interpretation that you heard, the
“you’ll one day meet your prince” story, which is interesting because in a
certain way, Esther does conform to the Cinderella-type story—the second half
of Cinderella isn’t too different from Esther in the sense that a royal man
rides around trying to pick up chicks. But there’s also a lot of the context
that I think sometimes people ignore, like the fact that the king… does he
execute his first wife at the beginning of the book? Because she won’t perform
sexual favors? There’s something really egregiously sexist at the beginning.
W: Yeah, his wife is killed for basically not doing what he
tells her to do. Right now, I don’t remember what it was, but it’s super scary.
And so to be in the position of “Will you be the next queen?” should be
terrifying.
M: Plus the added element of the fact that Esther is Jewish,
and the Jewish people are on the verge of being massacred in the book. I think
it’s so interesting that, as a dude, I had never heard the story of Esther told
as something to aspire to, at least in the matrimonial situation; you might
aspire to her faith or her courage, but did people just straight-up tell you
that Esther is a great example of a submissive wife, or something like that?
W: The thing that really got me about how people talked about
Esther was that there was so much focus on her beauty, which is definitely a
factor in the story—she’s chosen because she is so beautiful. But it was talked
about in this sense of awe, and that seems really troubling to me. And then
when it came to Esther saving her people, that’s awesome, but I usually heard
it talked about as just “Wait on the Lord, be faithful, do whatever He tells
you to do,” and, while I’m all about following divine guidance, it was often
tied up in this idea of “Do what the king wants you to do.” I found that very
disturbing.
M: Isn’t Esther famously the only book of the Bible that
doesn’t mention God by name?
W: Yes! And I think that’s so cool.
M: And the king himself in that story is super distant and
scary. Doesn’t she have to prostrate herself before him three times before
he’ll even listen to her request?
W: Yeah, there’s a super scary thing with the way that it’s a
risk of her life for her to come before the king without him calling for her,
and so she takes this huge risk of dying just to invite him to the dinner where
stuff goes down and she saves her people eventually. So that’s a really scary
part to me in that story.
M: You talk about parts of stories that are ignored or the
ways that the Bible is interpreted in certain limited ways, while really, the
Bible and the Christian tradition in general is just so sprawling that I think
any person has to necessarily make some sort of editorial decisions when trying
to figure out how it’s all going to influence their lives. But it’s fascinating
how different ideologies or denominations or what have you choose to make those
edits. What you’re telling me about how Evangelicals view Esther is clearly an
editorializing of the text. I mean, the Jewish people view it completely
different; for them, she’s more of a national hero, right, with the holiday of
Purim. Versus the kind of individualistic view of “She’s so hot she saves the
country, and she serves God.” So speaking of editing, your poem “The SeminarianTranslates Proverbs 31” is interesting. First of all, translation is a work of
editing as well. Those of use who went to Union always knew the different
agendas of the different translations. But then your poem basically has the
text of Proverbs 31, with words omitted or printed in white so that you can’t
see them unless you highlight them. Describe to me what’s behind that poem.
W: One thing I wanted to highlight was what translation is and
what it means to read a biblical text. The closest I ever got to losing my
faith was in a Greek class when a student answered a question with an
interpretation that I thought was totally untrue and I also knew that he didn’t
believe in, but it showed me that you can make anything mean what you want it
to mean, and especially if you know the original language. That’s just such a
power that can be good but is so often used for evil purposes. So when I was writing
the Proverbs poem, I was thinking about how I’ve had that passage taught to me
before, just all kinds of different things about what I’m supposed to be as a
woman, what I’m supposed to be as a good wife. I wanted to show some of the
freakiness behind the teachings that we get with Proverbs 31. Erasing those
words and having more of a terrifying look at the woman in Proverbs 31—she is
terrified—that’s mostly what I was trying to do.
M: It almost works like found poetry. Have you ever done
anything like that before?
W: I haven’t done found poetry, but I did two other poems like
this in the chapbook, one of the Magnificat and one of Mary Magdalene at the
resurrection. So I’ve realized that I like doing it with Bible passages.
M: What is it about Bible passages?
W: I just love thinking about how reading anything, in any
language, is an act of interpretation, and the place where I’ve heard that
messed up the most is in biblical interpretation. Growing up I often heard,
“Just read the text, don’t interpret it,” and that’s ridiculous, because
reading is interpretation. So I think I’m especially drawn to the erasure of
the biblical passages.
M: Regarding the same poem but in a different gear: I’m
reading these poems online, and on the website where I’m reading “The
Seminarian Translates Proverbs 31,” there’s an element that feels to me
essentially digital, which is what I mentioned earlier where if you click and
drag to highlight across the page, you can see the erased text. What does that
look like in the chapbook, since obviously you can’t click and drag in a
physical book?
W: In the chapbook, on paper, a lot of found or erasure poetry
looks confusing or jumbled, and with the Proverbs one, it’s the longest erasure
poem in the book, and it looks just like a passage scattered or torn apart,
which I think is really cool for what the text is. It kind of looks like a
sprinkling of words here and there. The typesetter was awesome, and it ended up
looking very readable.
M: Does the reader still have access to the erased words?
W: That’s totally gone. But in the notes section, I do say the
exact passage and the translation, so if people want to go read the original,
they can.
M: This is on a completely different subject, but in the case
of the Proverbs 31 poem, that was done on the internet in a way that makes the
technology that renders it on the page essential to how it’s read on the page.
I know in fiction, which is what I’m most familiar with, you have with the
digital era the rise of digital fiction with hypertext novels and that sort of
thing; do you do that much with digital poetry? I don’t even know what poetry
does in the realm of the digital world.
W: There is some interesting stuff going on with digital
poetry. A lot of it technologically I don’t even know how to do, so I haven’t
looked into it much. But also, my eyes can’t read a lot of stuff like that, so
I haven’t been drawn to it because it’s difficult for me to see it while I’m
typing it.
M: So it’s the screen that makes it hard to read?
W: It’s the screen.
M: Gotcha. Yeah, screens suck.
W: They change everything.
M: I don’t know if you also feel this way, but you can go to
Project Gutenberg or something and find the entire text of a novel on a single
webpage, and you read the whole thing just by scrolling down the whole time,
and I find that to be a completely different reading experience from reading
individual pages in a book, in addition to the added difficulty of the screen
itself.
W: Honestly, I find stuff like that really nauseating. It
feels like so much all at once, like cramming a ton of data into something,
like cramming for a test rather than just absorbing the material.
M: Here’s an even broader question: I read a little poetry but
not a ton, and definitely not enough to be able to say what the state of poetry
is today, but as mostly an outsider looking in, it seems to me that poetry is
in an interesting place because even before print media started spiraling, it
was becoming increasingly a niche interest, and it seems like that’s been
compounded by the way that printed journals and such have retreated into
obscurity. How do you feel about poetry as a medium right now?
W: Some people critique poetry as too abstract and too weird.
I hear people say that about what they call “modern poetry,” which is hilarious
because that’s not really modern poetry—that’s contemporary poetry. I think
that the people saying these things probably aren’t that well-read; maybe
they’re seeing what seems like the sexy, cool thing online, but there is so
much going on with poetry that still feels very normal, like stuff that you
might have read in a poetry class. There’s poetry that makes sense. There’s
poetry that’s still narrative. And then you’ve also got stuff that’s a little
more wild and all over the place. I like both. I do hate it when poetry is
trying so hard to be new and sexy that it just ends up being a mess; that’s the
kind that annoys me. One thing that’s really awesome is that the poetry
community has been widening so much to include not just different races or
genders but also people of different socioeconomic classes, and that’s
something that’s cool about the internet. People laugh at the idea of Instagram
poetry sometimes, but for people who don’t have access to the MFA programs or
the connections that can get them published traditionally, I think that’s
really cool that they could share their work on something as simple as Instagram.
It’s a voice that I think is often left out of the typical big publisher world.
M: As a high school teacher, I can say that my students don’t
read a ton generally, and they certainly don’t read a lot of poetry, but the
only poetry I’ve actually seen my students read—and this was especially popular
a couple years ago—was this collection called Milk and Honey. And I think the author started as an Instagram
poet, right?
W: Yeah, it did start as Instagram poetry. I’ll be honest: I
don’t like Milk and Honey. But I was
thrilled that it got my literature class that semester to actually want to read
other poetry. Poetry is so much a matter of taste more than merit, but it was
sad that when my students asked, “Oh, do you like this book?” I said, “No.” But
then some of them were saying, “So is this not real poetry?” and I had to stop
myself and ask myself the question: What is “real” poetry? And I think so much
of that is defined by the people that we find in the canon. So I said, “It is
poetry. It’s real poetry. I just think that there’s better stuff out there.”
M: A lot of people are resistant to poetry, and you mention
the abstraction. But I think in general, even if they don’t consider it
abstract, people will say, “Poetry doesn’t click with me” or “I don’t understand
poetry.” What would you say to those people? I wouldn’t say most people say
that about novels or film or essays. They may say that about some novels or some films, but with poetry, people paint with such a broad brush
that they say that they can’t get into any poetry. What would you say to those
people?
W: One thing that I say to my students who say stuff like that
is, “Yes, exactly. You don’t ‘get’ it. There isn’t a right or wrong
interpretation.” Well, there are wrong interpretations. If you read T. S. Eliot
and say that it’s about your dog… well, no, it’s not.
M: It was probably about his cat, actually.
W: Exactly [laughs]. But I love it when I can get real fights
going in my class about what a poem is doing and finding different ways of
looking at it. The students are all very respectful as they do it, but as
they’re defending their own reading and arguing about it, they realize that
there is so much possibility in the poem. There’s a Billy Collins poem that I
start every one of my Intro to Lit classes with, and it’s called, “Introduction
to Poetry.” It’s fantastic, because it’s about teaching introductory poetry and
the idea of trying to “get” it or understand it. Like you said about people not
saying that about novels or short stories or something, I think that a lot of
the time there still is that idea of room for interpretation in fiction, but we
don’t think of it that way because we walk away thinking, “This is what the story was; this
is what the story meant.” We don’t always even think about how there might be
debates about what’s going on there.
M: Why do you think people are able to do that with fiction
but not with poetry?
W: I think that poetry demands an attention to certain words.
It’s usually much shorter, so there’s an attention to words and syntax that
people might take for granted in fiction. In poetry, we see that we’re supposed
to pay attention to these certain words, and so if we don’t get it
automatically, it can be frustrating, whereas in fiction, we read words in a
sentence and don’t think about whether or not we get it because we can just
move on to the next sentence.
M: Do you think that that aspect of poetry dooms poetry to a
certain level of obscurity that other literary forms might not face?
W: It might. I think that some of the issue is that we have
kind of marketed fiction as the layman’s literature: anybody can read a novel.
They might not want to read Ulysses,
but anybody can just read a book by itself. I think that part of the reason for
this is that we have moved so much from the oral tradition, where we told long
stories like The Aeneid in verse. I
think another thing that’s contributed to it is film, because so much of film
is just a story from the beginning to the end. I think that’s made people more
prone to think that this is how stories work. And then they don’t find that
thing in a lot of poetry. There are films that feel more like poetry than
fiction to me, and that’s really cool.
M: Do you consider song lyrics poetry?
W: Yeah, I do. In fact—I can’t do this anymore because my
students are too young now and haven’t known a world with this—but I used to
start my poetry section off by having someone read “No Diggity” out loud. We
were talking about if they liked poetry, and a lot of the students would say, “No,
I don’t.” And I’d say, “Well, I want someone to read aloud this famous poem,
and you all can tell me if you like it or not.” And then like halfway through,
they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, it’s that song! I love this song!” It’s a great
song, but it’s really funny to see them notice that suddenly: “Wait, this isn’t
a poem, it’s a song,” and that’s because it’s both. I really admire good
lyricists, because it’s hard enough for me to write a poem; the idea of doing
that and having to think more about the music of it sounds unbelievably
difficult.
M: One of the things I’ve run into trying to teach not just
poetry in the sense of T. S. Eliot or whatever but also in Shakespearean plays,
which of course are often written in verse, is the level of abstraction that
we’ve given poetry that it might not have had originally. Like, I’m trying to
teach about meter and iambic pentameter, and I think for a lot of my students,
it’s completely abstract because when we look at the plays, they don’t sound
like anything because they’re written on the page—it’s the same thing for a lot
of poems, too. There are obviously open mics and things, but if you’re going to
try to find poetry, the most immediate way you’ll find it is written down as
opposed to recited. Do you think that that’s contributed to some of the
distancing from other poetry compared to, let’s say, song lyrics’ poetry?
W: Yeah, I do think that’s contributed to it. I really have to
read a poem aloud, for example, when I’ve gotten a new poetry book. It just
doesn’t sink in for me until I do that. I don’t really know how people just
read poems on a screen or on a page without saying it out loud. But that’s what
most people do, and I think that adds to the disconnect between poetry proper
and lyrics.
M: It’s kind of a teacher cliché to connect Shakespeare to rappers
like Dangerous Minds and all that,
but it is instructive at times, because hip-hop is one of the genres that keeps
a lot of the poetic traditions alive that are hard for students to understand,
like meter. I’ve always found it interesting and frustrating that something
like Shakespeare’s work is so abstract for students because it’s so distanced
from how it was initially experienced.
W: I have such a hard time teaching sound in my classes, and I
think it’s because my students talk so differently—totally different
pronunciations, different cadences. We have a ton of exchange students,
students of every ethnicity, nationality, area of the country. So when I have a
really Deep South student read a poem versus maybe one of my Spanish exchange
students, it just sounds so different. And I can’t say, “You’re reading it
wrong,” because that’s just not how the words might work for those students. So
I find music really is the best way to teach sound.
M: Do you ever read your own poems to your students?
W: No. I don’t [laughs]. They ask me to, and it just feels
weird to teach my own poem in any way, including just reading it out loud. My
students still probably read them, since they can find them in print, but oh
well.
M: Have they ever come back and talked to you about your work
if they’ve gone and read it?
W: Yeah, sometimes. I try to hide a lot of my online life from
my current students because they can just be really stalkery. But with the book
being shipped out right now, it’s out of my hands. Some of my students know
about it already. We’ll see if I get in trouble. And I guess we’ll see if they
like it or if they never want to take my class again.
You can buy Whitney's chapbook, Birthmarks, here.
