RogueAgent

Jessica Abughattas talks about embodiment
and writing Strip

Please describe your journey toward writing poetry that reflects on the experience of living in the body. Have you always written this way, or did you come to it over time?

I kind of think I have always written this way. I'm drawn to images that evoke multiple senses. Poems that use the body to navigate emotions are felt in the body. That's what I want.

As an epigraph for the book, you have Emily Dickenson saying, “Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy...” In the last lines of the poem “What I Want,” the speaker tells us, “My taste is fickle as a tongue / partial to all it encounters, / refusing to choose.” Is this ecstasy? How does the culture around Los Angeles preclude or promote ecstasy for your protagonist?

Real, lived pleasure is so rare in general. To experience it requires that I'm out of autopilot. In awareness you can have an experience of the sublime. I want to at least try. Los Angeles has a built-in sadness and loneliness about it that I love — the freeways, the sprawl, everyone alone in their cars. And it feeds a pervasive sense of disconnection and boredom and impatience that makes a person seek out a container for surrender. And then you like feeling that way. It's an addictive pattern.

The poem that most piques my curiosity in this collection is “Litany for My Father,” with its truncations and interruptions as a counterpart to the layers of repetition. How and/or why did you choose this form to suit your subject matter? Please walk us through the process of writing this poem.

This poem began with both lines that completed a thought, and lines that started out truncated. It lived for a long time that way, with both. The poem survived many revisions, with and without interruptions, and I altered the way it appeared on the page quite a lot. I regard the interruptions as an act of care toward the father. The repetitions parallel the obsessions named in the poem.

LITANY FOR MY FATHER

Because curfews of
Because strip search at the checkpoint into
Because grandmother’s undergarments splayed on
Because two men with guns on the way to
Because grandmother saves plastic Coke liters to
Because the water could without notice be
Because my father learned to drive a tractor at age
Because four families live in one stone    
Because quartz bricks from my grandfather’s
Because after grandfather is buried, dad
Because dad didn’t cry, he buried his face in his hands &
Because the cancer couldn’t be
Because home is too far for the scent of
Because rosary beads hang from
Because my grandfather made a living carving crosses out of
Because my hands ache to make something of
Because my hands are raw from grasping my grandmother’s
Because I pried the lid off with my
Because checking the oven 14 times every
Because sorry dad I’m sorry I
Because penance is for
& upturned shoes means you’re stepping on God

Please share with our readers a list of 5-10 books and/or artists you think we should read right now.

The Twenty Ninth Year by Hala Alyan

Love is an Ex Country by Randa Jarrar

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Emergency Brake by Ruth Madievsky

Love and Other Poems by Alex Dimitrov

Some Rogue Agent fans are just beginning to explore what making art about the body would look like for them. What advice would you give to someone just starting down the path?

My advice would be to cultivate a practice of noticing feelings in the body. Those emotional artifacts in the form of tingles, pangs—are they in your feet? your chest? Mind-body practices are good for this. Make images out of the locations of those feelings. The hands, mouth, and throat come up often for me. This is where poetry has an enormous capacity to be healing, just through noticing and naming what you feel.

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