An Interview with Taneum Bambrick
Kayla Ziefle, a student in the creative writing program at the University of Central Missouri and Assistant Poetry Editor for Pleiades, interviews Taneum Bambrick, who will be reading with Jos Charles at the UCM on Thursday, Sept. 26, at 3:30pm in Union 237B as part of the Pleiades Visiting Writers Series.
Taneum Bambrick is the author of VANTAGE, which was selected by Sharon Olds for the 2019 American Poetry Review/Honickman first book award (Copper Canyon Press). Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Prize. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, she is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, an Environmental Writing Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, PENAmerica, Narrative, West Branch, The Missouri Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
KZ: Your new book Vantage appears to be an extension of your previous poetry in your chapbook Reservoir, winner of the 2017 Yemassee Journal Chapbook Contest, judged by Ocean Vuong. I think our readers would be curious to know about the overall process of putting together or creating a collection of poetry such as this. Could you elaborate on this process?
TB: Yes, Vantage is an extension of the chapbook. I wrote this book very slowly. The poems have been culminating since I was about 20 years old right up until I submitted them last fall (2018). It took me five [to] six years to decide how I wanted to organize this collection. The poems felt like they wanted to tell a story, but, because I am only trained in poetry, I wasn’t sure how to create tension within a longer narrative. Character development and other aspects of prose have always fascinated me, and I wanted to borrow those tools while also paying attention to the line and white space. Writing this, I was very interested in hybridity and experimental work.
KZ: With each poem, readers find themselves being swallowed deeper into this massive hole of destructive waste–not just due to the mere landscape that is all but ruined, but also due to the toxic people your speaker encounters. At what moment did you decide that this topic was important to write about? Did you do any outside research beyond your job?
TB: Toxicity is not something I think of when I think of that landscape or the people who inhabit it. I grew up in that place, and despite my negative experiences there—with assault, with homophobia, with sexism, etc.—I never felt like it was uniquely oppressive. I was also complicit and active in various forms of violence while growing up and working there. The environment, as it is currently determined and run by power structures such as massive dams, reflects a deeply American problem. Initially, in poetry courses, I was trying to write a different kind of poem that mirrored what I read as a teenager. I had a very limited idea of women’s poetry, and for that reason learned not to write ugly, or anything that extended over the length of a page. In a poetry course with Bruce Beasley at Western Washington University, we wrote down words that you can “sense”—microwave, fern, coffee, for example—and tossed them into a bowl at the center of the class that we mixed up and drew from. The words I pulled from that were “blue” “condom” and “garbage,” and from that exercise, in one sitting, I wrote the poem “Litter” that is the first in Vantage. I think of this often. It took using the language other people in my class had access to for me to write something that felt honest and true to my life. My professor sensed a book-length project after reading this poem, and that catapulted me into trying to remember everything I’d seen while working summers at the reservoirs.
Research only enters the book when I write about the threats to the white sturgeon population, and when I talk about the dam’s responsibility to prove that it has utility. Otherwise, most of what is there stems from memory.
KZ: The pieces in Vantage center around your experience being the only women working on a garbage crew around the reservoirs of two massive dams. You chose to tell this story through lyric non-fiction and poetry. How or why did you make this choice of writing style? Did writing this way come naturally or did it take some heavy lifting (no pun intended)?
TB: These poems are based primarily off the first year when I worked on a seasonal garbage crew. That year, I was the only woman in that space, and I was with a group of men who had (almost all of them) never worked alongside a woman before. “Invitation” and “New Hire” sort of imagine another woman in the space but draw from real interactions I had the second year while working there. The prose poems and longer lyric pieces were my solution to how I might tell a story, in a poetry collection, that requires a great deal of exposition. When talking about something as intricate and intentionally concealed as the structures that maintain and defend the operation of a massive dam, I felt I had to unpack jargon, histories, and processes. I wanted those specific elements of that place to be explicitly clear, which resulted in forms that look more like non-fiction, although I am not sure that is the appropriate term. Because I don’t have a background in prose, writing “Sturgeon” was especially difficult for me, but I was and am very interested in that fish and its preservation, so I tried repeatedly to get that piece right. Amber Flora Thomas, in her workshop at Environmental Bread Loaf, challenged me to examine the connection between the fish and my relationship with my father. Without her help that essay would have been much shorter, and I think less interesting. Again, I was always afraid of taking up space in writing, or, I always felt pressured to keep the reader listening. All of the longer pieces in my book developed quickly after I realized how problematic my own ideas of using space on the page are, and how those ideas cull from rarely being in institutions where I felt validated or heard.
KZ: Within the world of writing sometimes it is hard to know how honest to be, you never know how the audience will respond. With this in mind, you use a lot of names within your book- Ray, Jim, Grayson, Angela. All of your characters play a key role in describing your overall story even though they are divided into different poetical forms. Are these based on real people you have encountered at the reservoir? If so, does using real names give you any concern for your book?
TB: Like most if not all poetry collections—even in ones that engage with hybridity—what I have written here is not meant to be read as my literal experience, and none of these names are the actual names of the people they represent. Some of the people I worked with have read and talk to me about my poems. One man thinks they are hilarious and sees himself, and what we experienced together, in some of the imagery—the pile of dead elk, eating French fries from someone’s mouth, etc… There would be no way for me, years out of that time, to promise that my memory of it is entirely accurate. What I hoped to create was a place that could feel open enough for people to put their own ideas and histories into it. To see people they know, to recognize specific challenges. So much of what is there is exactly as I remember it. Many of the poems are apologies I never had the opportunity to give or receive. Each of the names I chose relate in some way to the name of a real person, which was an assignment I gave myself. It felt wrong to use initials or a single letter to represent some of the most complex people I have ever met. I spent years thinking up names that didn’t feel like the working-class stereotypes that have upset me in other work, names that felt as close to the emotional truth as possible. I also worked hard to create a space where no one is entirely the villain, where even the most outwardly sexist person is also given the space to hold another man and cry after losing his wife. I don’t want the book to be read as autobiographical, or for it to matter what state it took place in, for example. My intent is for the book to be read as an examination of what happens everywhere that is intentionally erased from dominant narratives. I have been excited after readings when different people have come up to me and said they grew up where the poems took place; one said Massachusetts, another said Kentucky.
KZ: Your book Vantage often leaves the reader feeling rather uncomfortable–whether it’s a man becoming inappropriate and handsy or it’s a horrifying description of what was found digging around in the garbage. Was this level of discomfort intentional? What did you hope it would accomplish or what did you hope your readers would get out of it?
TB: I think discomfort is a really interesting, complicated term. I know that when I present my poems as a relatively small woman, people are often shocked and disturbed—not necessarily because the content is surprising, but because these things happened to me. I don’t think men who write about the difficulty and often grotesque nature of working-class jobs are often asked questions about their intent in this way, because we have narratives like theirs available to us throughout our lives. There is an added danger and discomfort when the threat of sexual violence hangs over the workplace, but that specific kind of discomfort is very familiar to many people. While writing this book, I fought consistently with feeling like I didn’t have permission, as a woman, to describe the layered violence that presented itself throughout every day of my work week. This layeredness felt very challenging, but important to represent. In creating these scenes, I meant to describe an experience in hopes that it could expand our conversations about working class spaces—who is operating in them—and how the brutality of those spaces force people to develop many methods of survival.
KZ: [You’ve gone] from wading through carcasses (both animal and human)…to becoming a well-established writer who has received an Academy of American Poets University Prize and is the recipient of scholarships from both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. What started you on the path of becoming a writer? Did you begin working on these poems during your time at the reservoir or long after?
TB: I’ve been writing in various forms for the majority of my life. These poems started when I would write notes to myself throughout the work day about something I saw, or something that was said to me. I never thought they would become actual work, it just felt therapeutic to document those things. I kept everything from that job—various forms, check-lists, photographs of garbage—because even when it hurt me, I found it fascinating. All of those materials surface some way in the poems in this collection. The poems “Gaps” and “Ray,” especially, are at times almost verbatim what was said in conversations I had.
At this point with my first book coming out, I don’t feel like a well-established writer—you are very kind to say that!—and I feel very much in pursuit of positions where I can learn more about poetry, prose, and teaching.
Taneum Bambrick reads with Jos Charles on Thursday, Sept. 26, at the University of Central Missouri’s Elliot Student Union in Room 237B at 3:30pm as part of the Pleiades Visiting Writers Series.
(511 S. Holden St. Warrensburg, MO 64093)
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