A Conversation with Rachel Zucker

Rachel Zucker is a mother, a poet, a teacher, a woman, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a person. Each iteration of herself is a gleam of the other; there is no separation whatsoever between her exterior, her interior, and the work which she engenders. Spend an hour or so speaking with her, as I was fortunate enough to, and you will discover this for yourself—the complex, inquisitive, acutely self-aware, boundless mind of an extraordinary thinker. I had the pleasure of talking with Rachel on an unseasonably warm afternoon in early fall, over delicious kale and salmon salads, while sitting near a charming little wishing fountain in Lafayette, CA.

–Melissa Burke

Melissa Burke: Your most recent book of poetry, The Pedestrians, is in two parts: “Fables” and “The Pedestrians.” I understand that you had originally written them as two separate books. I learned this after I read the book and I was so surprised because both parts occur to me as vitally symbiotic to one another! In fact, I don’t think I could have read “The Pedestrians” the way that I did had I not read “Fables.” Moreover, although “Fables” comes first in the book, it really benefits from the subsequent reading of “The Pedestrians.” And then upon one’s next read of “Fables,” it reads differently. It’s a cyclical reading experience. I’m curious about your thought process when deciding to combine them, and further, how you feel they read now as opposed to how they read independently.

Rachel Zucker: I think that the books work well together and my hope was that readers would have the experience you are talking about, where “Fables” and “The Pedestrians” inform one another. One way of answering this question which is sincere, but also a little self-deprecating, is that I think I’m just writing the same damn thing over and over again. So the idea that I wrote these “two books” and that they are “different books” which were put together after the fact, yet speak to one another and are symbiotic…well, I think you could stick any of my books together and they would have a similar conversation with each other. Whether writing the same thing over and over again is good or bad is kind of a different question.

MB: What do you mean by “writing the same thing over and over again”?

RZ: While I was working on “Fables” I was simultaneously working on the poems that later became “The Pedestrians” and my memoir MOTHERs. I wasn’t even aware that they were all their own “projects” at the time—they overlap chronologically. MOTHERs takes a more straightforward, memoiristic, prose approach to this time period and the kinds of questions that I was asking. “Fables” is also written in somewhat of a forthright, prose manner but also swerves away from that. I talk in third person and work within a compressed voice, or compressed form. I am really pushing the language down into this space, this little box. Meanwhile, “The Pedestrians” is written in mixed forms. The same concerns come up in all three books, in all three investigations; some of the same questions, the same images, the same disquiets. A part of what was interesting to me [in “Fables” and “The Pedestrians”] was how writing in different levels of consciousness or about different modes of thinking, but basically asking the same kinds of questions, would work together. I was interested in the pieces, and how the pieces worked together and made a whole. In some ways since The Pedestrians itself is a bunch of pieces that I think don’t necessarily work on their own, but work together, it made sense that maybe there would be another part [“Fables”] whose pieces also don’t really work on their own but work together. So now with all of those pieces, we have two parts. It’s like a mosaic.

I do think that MOTHERs is another part that, while physically separate from “Fables” and “The Pedestrians,” is another way of telling the same story, or asking the same questions. How do I live my life on a daily basis? What is it to be a mother, to be a daughter? What is the relationship between dreams and waking life? What is it to write stories of myself or stories of domesticity? Who are these other people in the world and how do I interact with them? How do I write about others or write about the self? What is real life anyhow and what is writing and how do those things slip and slide in and out of each other? In MOTHERs I’m examining how the memoir voice, or the memoir mindset, processes those same kinds of questions. The Pedestrians asks how the poet mindset processes those questions; how the prose mindset processes those questions. Initially I really wanted “Fables” to be published separately because I really wanted it to be illustrated. I wanted it to be received as a book of prose. That felt important to me. After some time, though, I realized I can only publish so many books. Normal human beings should only buy so many books by one person, otherwise it’s economically obnoxious. Eventually it became clear that putting them together was the way to go.

MB: “Fables” is a really intriguing title for this section. I of course think of the traditional Aesop’s Fables, which I grew up reading—the characters that represent one way of being and then another way of being; the natural world as a canvas; the storyline enacting some form of conflict, some conundrum of sorts; and the inevitable moral that will come to pass. But “Fables” feels as though it almost works against the traditional concept of “a fable” and definitely works against the traditional concept of “a moral.”

RZ: “Fables” started in a couple of ways. We were in Maine, and we were frequently visiting this great library. We were taking books out about twenty at a time for my younger son, and I was often picking them by size, which led me to all of these little books of fables. I don’t especially like fables. In particular, I have a big problem with the moral and the way that the stories move towards that moral. Concurrently, I had found and purchased a new notebook at a stationary store which had these weird little cross-hatch boxes located in different places on the pages of the notebook, which I thought was really cool. While I was reading these fables to my son—disliking the morals, but intrigued by the form—I also became interested in the animals and the way that animals were coming in and out of the fable form. So I started to write the title of the fable at the top of the notebook page, like “The Fox and the Stork,” then I would write the moral in the little box, and then I would use the rest of the space on the page to write something entirely different than that fable. I would draw from whatever was happening around me at that moment in time—“the storm that’s coming” or “sitting in the house during the rain” or “going to the store for dinner groceries”—but it would be jammed together with the fable title and the moral. For example, the part of “Fables” that has the copper wire came from the title “The Goose that lays the Golden Egg.” I just started going: the goose, the IUD, the egg, conception, etc. I ended up publishing a lot of those with the fable title and moral. I liked the way that the moral was not fitting with the story. But eventually the morals were still so annoying to me, so I took them out.

When The Pedestrians started to get put together as a book, and especially then getting put together with the poems in the section “The Pedestrians,” it became so complicated! I had the titles of the fables, sections with place names, and then within each section there were titles—so there were too many levels of titles. It became clear that the right decision was to remove the titles of the pieces in the “Fables” section. It’s funny because the fables came from a much more explicit connection [to Aesop’s Fables] and then they came into their own, sort of like they went through their adolescence after which they were less related to their parent. But it was still very important to me that they keep their overall title of “Fables,” because they were working both towards and in avoidance of that construct.

MB: That construct is so clear and leads me to my next question which also has to do with poetic constructs. I’m thinking particularly of the poem “please Alice Notley tell me how to be old” and specifically the line which reads…

…“how could a woman write an
epic?” you wrote “How could she now if she
were to decide the times called for one?” but you
did even though you wrote: women are more
likely to write something “lyrical (/elegiac) or
polemical, rather than epic or near-epic” so I’m
asking you not just how to be old but how
to be a woman as my girlhood if I ever had one
is over now really gone & the sharp fear I feel
when my son does not call when he said he would
—how can I write an epic when—my
fear receding behind his small-voiced apology (a
little nodule in my right breast) safe—when I’m
so terribly interruptible

It occurs to me that less than resembling the concept of a fable, “Fables” is actually much closer to the paradigm of an epic. Have you heard that before, that “Fables” reads as an epic?

RZ: Well no, but that makes me really happy!

MB: I really do feel that “Fables” is an epic, or a near-epic. I’m thinking about specific aspects of an epic that I see in “Fables”: the discussion of a serious, important subject—in this case gender politics, or female-ness, self-identity; the narrative takes place in a vast setting—locales shift from the faraway city to mountains to the home; the narrative starts en medias res and subsequently, the earlier events are recounted in the characters’ narratives or in flashbacks—the repeated scenes fade out and then are brought back into focus; the attention to the exploits of a heroine who represents the values of a group—I see this as the overarching gender of “woman”; the heroine’s success or failure which will determine the fate of that group—the fate of the family in this case, and there is something that I felt in a broader sense, that the journey of the “she” somehow determines my fate as a female reader (it certainly felt like that as I was reading); the heroine is arming herself—throughout “Fables” the “she” is arming herself—sometimes in ironic ways with sleeping pills, sometimes in subtle ways with mountains/nature, and perhaps in the most essential way with literature, with self-knowledge. So I’m fascinated with this idea of the female epic that comes up in “please Alice Notley tell me how to be old” because the relation is so clear to me!

RZ: I have so many thoughts swirling around in my head! First of all, I just re-read (for the fourth time) Mid-Winter Day by Bernadette Mayer, because I’m teaching it in a class on the long poem. When I re-read it, I realized how much of that book was on my mind [when writing The Pedestrians] and I didn’t even know it. She wrote this 120-page book all in one day and it is really epic in some ways. She leaves the house with her children to go to the grocery store, into town and the library, and then they just come home. But the course of this one day has an epic quality. Many of the long poems I like have an epic feeling, but they are also anti-epics in some ways. “Tape for the Turn of the Year” by Ammons is another great book that I just re-read. In 1963, Ammons went to the store and got this adding machine tape, which is this long roll of paper that is only 2 ¼˝ inches wide. He put it into his typewriter and began to type on it, deciding that when he reached the end of the paper roll, the poem would be done. In that poem he talks a lot about The Odyssey and the epic, but there is something so funny about his process—he never left home when he was working on it! I’m interested in the ways in which the epic can be reimagined, or subverted and then reengaged. I’ve always been interested in dailiness and expansiveness; domesticity and the way in which the domestic is also the site of the journey, the transformative. To what extent can I re-envision those big stories from the female perspective, and also to what extend can I start with the female perspective and see what kind of form it would organically take—maybe it is not going to take the form of The Odyssey or Gilgamesh. Maybe it will be inherently different because it begins from femaleness.

MB: It’s interesting that you talk about these two binaries: the finite and the expansive. This book does read very much as a tale of evolution, but it also is the documentation of the fixed in life—the unchanging. It is an exploration of the static—the ordinary—and yet evolution is palpable; it just happens in these extremely subtle ways.

RZ: I think there is a false assumption that if you “stay”—whatever that means—if you stay in one place; if you stay with the family; if you stay the course; if you don’t go off to war; if you don’t have some sort of break with reality; if you don’t have an epic journey; if you’re not Jack Kerouac on the road ever-changing; if you DON’T do all of those things then I think the cultural fantasy is that nothing has happened to you. The fantasy is that nothing IS happening to you; there is no personal change; no political change; there is the absence of anything; there is a blankness; there is nothing to see here. And I think that’s ridiculous. To say that is to say that my whole experience over the past 20 years essentially doesn’t exist! So the question for me then becomes how do I, how will I, write about the staying?

MB: Right, yes! I think that this is something that goes undiscussed, you know? The evolution of the interior when the exterior stays the same, or changes only a little. I agree that evolution happens also, or perhaps even more so, in those less insistent ways. You mentioned “change” and that came to mind frequently when I read The Pedestrians: change and evolution. It seems that after “Fables,” the “she” goes through some type of evolution that then leads her to “The Pedestrians.” That is assuming that the “she” and the speaker are the same in both sections, but that was how they operated in my mind. I’m curious about this evolution and how you feel that maybe the agency of the “she” changes or evolves?

RZ: I think I’m going to have to go back a bit to answer that. When I was working on my MFA manuscript at Iowa, I was writing mostly autobiographical poems. Some were more or less autobiographical than others, but that was not in fashion at the time. You weren’t supposed to write about things—you were supposed to write out of things. There was a lot of space to do what you wanted, but still, the aesthetic direction was toward the experimental, even though I didn’t really understand what exactly that meant. When I left Iowa I had all of these poems that were kind of about me but they kind of weren’t, and I was sort of stuck in this weird space. I kept sending out my manuscript and it kept getting rejected, over and over again, and finally I thought “Oh what if it’s not just really hard to get a book published, but what if this is just a really bad manuscript…?”

I know that sounds ridiculous, but discovering that the book was bad was actually incredibly helpful! I spread [the manuscript] all over the floor and I looked at the poems, looked at them as if I hadn’t written them. I saw a long poem about a winter in Iowa, and another poem about the death of a friend of mine in college, a lot of poems about my mother, poems about my relationships, and fear, and desire, and then I realized “Oh! It’s the story of Persephone! I just didn’t know it!” As an experiment, I decided to extract the thirty poems that were really about the seasons and the powerful mother and the mysterious male figure, and to write into those as a project that retells the myth of Persephone. I was teaching Prose Composition at the time and the students were required to keep process logs on their research projects, so I did that too. I kept a process log on the research that I was doing about the myth of Persephone, I read all the myth poems I could find, I read everything I could about Persephone, and I wrote into this book. After all that, I finally came up with this manuscript that I called Eating in the Underworld, which ended up being my first book.

At the same time, I had the poems that I had taken out of the original thesis, which were more explicitly autobiographical and included “I,” and the “I” was not Persephone. I continued to write other poems in that style. I felt, in a way, that I needed to speak through the narrative arc of this myth first before I could go back to a more overtly autobiographical relationship to the poems. It took a very long time for that book to be published and by the time it was published I had finished my second book: The Last Clear Narrative. There were many things that needed to happen in order for that book to come together on its own, in particular I think the birth of my 2nd son and trying to write about that, and seeing the ways in which the “I” was so severely disrupted by the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood—those aren’t the only ways that disruption could have happened to the “I” but for me, that’s how it happened. I came into a more experimental relationship to language through those experiences, not from an aesthetic or poetic framework. The poems felt more experimental formally and also more autobiographical because they didn’t work within the form of the myth.

After that, I had another book in which I was really interested in expanding into a long form. I had three long poems—one was a series of poems and the other two were just long poems. I had no clue what to do with them, but while I was trying to put them together I read a few at KGB in New York. Matthew Zapruder was there that night and afterwards he said he loved the poems and that he wanted to publish the book. As I was working on putting those poems together, it seemed that some of the poems belonged more with each other than with the rest. I pulled out those poems and then pulled out the others, and once again I was left with two books: one was The Bad Wife Handbook which I published with Wesleyan, the other was Museum of Accidents which I published with Wave Books. Museum of Accidents was the first book I wrote that I knew someone wanted, and it gave me a sense of permission. It was less formally driven, it was just “here you go, these are the poems…” and the “I” was really unapologetic. When I finished Museum of Accidents and published it, I had nothing left—I had no other books, no other ideas, no poems in the waiting—which was really scary but also felt really good. It felt like the end of something, and I didn’t know what was going to come next but I knew that I didn’t want to do “that” anymore. The journey from my MFA thesis to Museum of Accidents, where I had worked up the courage and the skill to write what I was trying to write at Iowa all those years ago, was complete.

MB: I think that a lot of writers can relate to that journey of discovery that has to take place in order to establish one’s own relationship to the “I.” With that in mind, it is even more interesting to me that “Fables” is written in third person! It makes a great deal of sense after what you just said, that somehow in writing as “she” instead of “I” there was a level of permission, another layer of authenticity revealed through a sort of removal of attachment.

RZ: Yes, definitely. There were a lot of things I was sick of. I was sick of the “I.” I was sick of the line. I was sick of what I felt were my own poetry tricks, although I’m not even sure I could have articulated what those tricks were. After Museum of Accidents I felt ready to move away from those things. And of course, now that The Pedestrians is there, I’m realizing that it’s just the same thing as before, but what was important was that it started from a place of distancing from the previous work; it started from a different level of intimacy. There is something about the compression, the prose, and the “she” that enabled me to go in what I felt was a different direction.

MB: You mentioned how you had removed the titles and morals from “Fables,” but it seems you also removed a great deal of the specificity. The places are not referred to by name but rather “the faraway city,” “the ocean,” “mountain,” which achieves a kind of openness, a kind of intimacy. This is such a peculiar twist because sometimes that kind of writing has the potential to be quite alienating. I don’t think I’ve ever read something that, being written in the third person, felt closer than the “I” could possibly get. It’s magical, really.

RZ: Take Whitman for example. Whitman’s “I” is so expansive and joyous, and…

MB: There is a kind of levity to it.

RZ: Yes, a levity and an intimacy. Yet in other ways, I sometimes feel like Whitman is screaming at me in a way that is not intimate at all, but rather in a performative, prophetic way, where the distance between the “I” and the reader is really clear. I was trying to get away from that somehow. I was trying to close in on that distance. This is one of the aspects I really like about fiction. When you enter into the fiction there are a lot of places for you to be. There is something that is way less intimate but also way more intimate about that space, and I was trying to get in there. I was trying to figure out how to do that. In “The Pedestrians” I felt like those intimate spaces exist between the different forms—the real poems, the dreams, untitled poems, etc. I had hoped that because it was such a fractured “I,” or because the “I” was speaking through different levels that it would have a similar way of opening up to the reader.

MB: And it’s interesting that you bring that up because “The Pedestrians” has these micro-categories that you just mentioned: the real poems, the dreams, the poems in brackets (which I am particularly interested in), and then the independently titled poems. I’m curious about how they talk to each other? Also I’m wondering if that categorization plays a role in the actual creation of the poems? For example, if I were going to write a sonnet, I would know that I was going to write fourteen lines, a volta, an ending couplet, etc. I write into the form. Do these categories work in that way? Do you write into the form of a dream poem? a real poem? It does feel that they are forms. They feel as intentional as a form.

RZ: Right, that’s such a good question. I had a series of poems called “real poems,” which I mostly wrote at poetry readings about poetry or the poetry world, and they were really meant to be anti-poems in some way. It was unclear to me if it was going to be a series or what. I also had a dream notebook where I would write down all of my dreams. I’ve only been to a writer’s colony once and one of the things that I did when I was there was type up all of my dreams, just to see what would happen. I also had these other one-off poems that I had been writing which had no lines that I also typed up. I had been reading The Red Book by Carl Jung around this time and I had taken a dream workshop, so based on those two things I was working on this other series which I called “Dear Animus,” in which I addressed my animus. I was trying to think about the relationship between psyche, and subconscious and ego, etc.

Around this same time (this was after Museum of Accidents where I gave myself the project of learning how to write sentences), I started a blog called “W(here).” Every day I would take a photo of something outside (because I had been doing so much writing inside) and post it to my blog and write a sentence in present tense, not using “I.” Also the sentence would always start with “where.” They were often, but not always, biting criticism of New York. For example, “where the sexy mom at Super Soccer Stars is berating her child for getting hot chocolate on his shoe” …but better than that—I can’t think of a good one now! Then I would secretly take a photo of the sexy mom. Unfortunately, I lost all of the entries from that past year when I changed my Google login. Somehow losing the photos took the joy out of it for me, so I didn’t keep doing it. But before that happened I had culled what I thought were some of the strongest sentences of that work that all started with “where.”

An early draft of The Pedestrians had the “Dear Animus” series, the dream series, the real poem series, these prose poems, and the W(here) sentences, which I put together in groups of five. The w(here) poems just really weren’t as strong as the others, which was fine because they were really just meant to be a practice, not a product, so ultimately those did not go in. Then [the book] became about the relationship between these different series. Again, there were repeating concerns in the poems, the death of children, the search for self, etc., that would show up in all of these modes. So I would hear about a child of somebody that I knew, or have a dream about an egg falling off the counter, or read something about a child’s death…

MB: Like “real poem (infanticide)”…

RZ: Yes, exactly. I realized they were related to each other and I really wanted to put that together. Initially the thought was to wait until I had enough of just the titled poems to make a book of really good poems. Which makes sense! But the more I worked on the book, the more I realized that I wasn’t interested in that. I was actually totally disinterested in that. I really wanted to see if I could take pieces that didn’t function as poems on their own and organize them in a way that made them function really great as poems together.

MB: I’m thinking of “real poem (no elegy).”

You are okay. Still
okay. Stay that way.

This poem comes to mind when you say pieces that don’t function like poems. It’s almost a monostich and it reads similar to one—small but large. The poem is working very hard to hold up on its own on the page, but it can’t really save for the fact that it is being held up within the assemblage of the surrounding poems.

RZ: Yes. What I really cared about was in the end I was getting to do something that felt really different for me. I desperately needed to stay in the space of potential catastrophic failure for a really long time. I think that is a part of “the making”—being in that space. I’ve always been fascinated by the book-making process. It’s sort of like when you do beading and you have a jar full of beads, and you think, “I know I have a jar full of beads, but I’m not sure if they go together,” but then you realize that maybe you want to use the beads that don’t go together but you want them to look good not going together. And then you think you’re making a necklace but then you think, “Well maybe I’m not making a necklace at all, I might be making a belt!” Once I got deeply into the book-making stage the pieces had to change a lot, and I had to come up with a philosophy of how I was putting them together. The “Dear Animus” poems became the poems with bracketed titles. There was some material that was initially written as a real poem that might have switched over to a titled poem. I didn’t have any worry about changing the origin to a different form. Once I realized that I had these four forms, and within these forms they each had to be the best they could be, I began coming up with these mini-groupings.

MB: I definitely noticed those mini groupings, or families of poems, in the book. There were some poems that had such a strong sense of interconnectedness. For example, “Egg Dream” and “Mindful” (which is one of my favorite poems in the book) feel highly related, and “Mindful” then connects in a very eerie way to “real poem (infanticide).” I noticed other groupings, such as “real poem (painting)” and “two kinds of suffering”—they felt very related; as did “[usage]” and “that great diaspora.” I think it’s not just that they relate, it’s that their lives depend on the other’s existence. If we were to see “real poem (happiness)” by itself in the middle of the New Yorker, it would seem a bit…well, a bit off, I suppose. But when it faces the poem “Fridays,” a conversation ensues that is bigger than either of those poems, either by themselves or together. It becomes a conversation of the collective.

RZ: I think so, too. That’s what I was hoping for anyway.

MB: Last night I heard you at City Lights for the Wave Books reading and it was such a fantastic reading! I noticed something in your work that hadn’t quite become clear to me before, which is the humor in your writing. And you are really funny—talking to you now, you’re really funny! That quip came out when you read these poems aloud. Yet when I read them on my own I do feel they are deeply serious, even when, or perhaps especially when, they center on the ordinary or the mundane. I’m wondering how you approach that balance between depth and lightness. That duality is so clear when you read these poems aloud. I nearly teared up when you read “the meanest thing I ever said”; there is a keen wit to that poem, but it is gravely tragic.
Is this something you are conscious of when you’re writing?

RZ: When I was at Virginia Colony of the Arts (that same one week that I was talking about before), I was reading Matthew Rohrer’s Destroyer and Preserver. I was so jealous because I love that book. It has a lot of depth and seriousness, and yet he’s so funny, so light-hearted, so engaging.

MB: Yes, definitely. I’m reminded also of Michael Earl Craig’s work. His very odd, very droll language that tactiles an incredibly severe terrain. It’s seductive really, being in a world that is both charming and frightening.

RZ: Right and I felt a strong sense of wanting to write like that. People sometimes said to me, “You’re so funny! But your poems are so sad…” and I wanted to push myself to find a better balance. So when I was working on “Fables” I paid close attention to all of the kooky things that were happening to the “she”—the quirky animals, the jaunty voice—and I thought I was getting closer to that balance. When I was finished and I read it back to myself, I thought “That is the saddest book I have ever written. Nooo! It was not supposed to be sad! It was supposed to be the OPPOSITE of sad! And it’s sadder than ANYTHING!!” (Rachel shakes her fists in the air.) But, oh well, there it was. The other poems were getting more and more conversational, and kind of funnier I guess, but I guess not everyone reads those as funny, some see them as dark. There are poems like that in Museum of Accidents. Someone would mention how dark a particular poem was and I’d think to myself, “You think that’s dark? Well, I think it’s kind of funny when someone throws up on you!”

MB: There definitely is a bizarreness written into these poems. In fact, sometimes it is your most peculiar poems which are really the darkest; they are the most caustic. What’s more, I think, is that they represent real life which, especially in its bleakest of times, has to sometimes be caricatured because it is just so bleak. If you don’t find another way of looking at it, the bleakness is just too great to hold.

RZ: One time I read to an audience of undergraduates who were all very driven, high-level, ambitious creative writing majors. I was reading poems from Museum of Accidents and afterwards one of the undergraduates said “I really need to talk to you. You know your audience is a bunch of undergraduates and you’re talking about motherhood, which none of us are really interested in right now, and secondly, you’re basically saying it’s really bad to have babies. And we don’t want to hear that. So I really think you should rethink what you are doing.” I just marveled at this comment! First of all, apparently I was unknowingly reading to a market test group; and secondly, apparently, I was really screwing up! But I also thought: am I supposed to just say that being a mother is always easy? That nothing in your life is going to change? That you can be exactly who you want to be without any consequences; that your choices won’t affect other people? That it’s really fun to be married every day—every second of every day? That you never fall out of love for even one second? That the person you’re with for twenty years is endlessly amusing to you and lovely and perfect? Is that the poem that I am supposed to write? It’s just not true! It’s not my experience. Maybe it is someone’s, but I don’t know her, and it’s simply not mine.

MB: It’s funny because I find myself being quite skeptical of poetry that is explicitly optimistic. In fact, I’m even skeptical of that word: optimistic. Optimism. What does that even really mean?

RZ: The world is full of doubt and confusion. But that’s not the same as pessimism. Maybe that’s not the way some people are optimistic, but that feels like optimism to me—the uncertainty is optimistic to me. I think the truth of things—my truth of things—I don’t think it’s depressing. I think it’s the opposite of depressing. I think it’s temperamental to some extent. Some people want to have a partnership where they are their best self with that person, that’s what is good about it—they look good for that person, that person looks good for them, that person sees the best in them, that person is the reason why they pull themselves together every day—I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. That is not what my marriage is like. We prioritize authenticity, which sometimes has its drawbacks! I might ask my husband how I did at a reading and he might say “Eh, it was alright.” For some people that might be the worst marriage in the world! Some people might say “I don’t want my husband to say ‘Meh.’ I want him to say each and every day that I’m the most beautiful woman in the world and I’m so great at everything!” That’s not what I signed up for in my marriage and I don’t think that’s the kind of relationship I want with poetry either. Maybe some people are looking for a kind of poetry that is presenting the best of everything, or the most interesting, the most beautiful, perfect way of looking at the world. Sometimes I wish I had that for a little while, and when I do that’s fine because I can read a book where someone is doing that, but ultimately I like the moments in poetry where one is revealing themselves to be not so nice—or that they have a complex, or hypocritical, or unpalatable thought or desire—because that’s what life feels like to me too. I guess it depends on what kind of relationships you want to have with yourself, with others, with art, with poetry. But back to humor, I do wish my poems were funnier!

MB: But they are funny! I think it’s the honesty, really. When a poem is that honest, it is as close to “human” as it can get, and humans are funny creatures. The way we think is just downright absurd sometimes, and that quotient—the absurdity—it is very much alive in these poems.

RZ: I also think that a part of it is about just accepting who you are. I remember one poet who I used to study with. He’s no longer writing, but I remember that he used to write these heartbreakingly sad but incredibly beautiful poems. When I heard him at a reading, I realized for the first time that he thought he was writing funny poems! He was reading them all as if they were jokes. I couldn’t believe it! He thought he was writing funny poems when he was actually writing the saddest poems in the world. He wanted to be a funny poet, and he wasn’t. Those were tragic, tragic poems. I think about him from time to time. If he would have just accepted that they were tragic and written into that tragedy, everything and everyone would have been better for it.

MB: You mentioned acceptance just now, and that really strikes me as a quality of The Pedestrians. Regardless of whatever you want to say about the individual poems or the book, one thing is crystal clear to me is that they are not coming from a place of longing to be different. Even when they are not pleased with their circumstances, they are in acceptance of them.

RZ: I think that might be a 40-year old thing!

MB: Well it is! It’s life experience, right? That’s what is going on in this book. It’s the post-coming-of-age tale—What happens after the “growing up”? That’s what is in this book.

RZ: Yes definitely. I think The Bad Wife Handbook was about restlessness, and The Pedestrians isn’t. The Pedestrians is after the restlessness.

MB: The Pedestrians. It’s the name of the book; it’s the name of a section; it’s the name of a poem within that section. You also dedicate the section to your mother and father who “made [you] a pedestrian.” Clearly the word is weighted for you. So much so that I thought maybe I was missing something. I knew there were really two definitions of pedestrian: a person travelling on foot, or something that is rather dull and ordinary; but I thought there must be another way in which this word is working. What interests you most about this word so greatly that it is manifested in all of these ways throughout the book? Also I should mention that whenever there is a title poem used multiple times throughout a book, I have a habit of honing in on it that much more, as if it were some kind of key to reading the book, a legend at the bottom of a scrolled map. Does it function in that way at all?

RZ: I was really interested in writing very directly and explicitly about New York City in both “Fables” and “The Pedestrians.” I was born there, I grew up there, and I’ve lived there my whole life except for the four years of college and two years of graduate school. This wasn’t my intention but that’s how it all happened. New York City was always an important part of all of my work, but it was just sort of incidental. It was there all the time and my work was informed by the experience of being there. My relationship to New York, to Manhattan, specifically, is as influential on my work as having children. How could it not be? It was a very, very important part of my entire life experience.

When I was writing [The Pedestrians] I was thinking about what it would be like to go through my whole life in this high-density place where I am walking all the time, where I am with other people all the time, but I am also alone and there is a lot of isolation. How do I relate to other people— physically, psychologically, politically? What is my relationship to the self and the other; the mind and the body; and the environment…what kind of environment do we even live in?

From an even larger perspective, more people in the world now live in cities than elsewhere and that’s a huge change. What does that mean, not just for me and my daily life, and not just for New York City, but for the world? In a way, the world is becoming citified. I was considering how I could take these pieces that are so pedestrian—so daily, so inconsequential—and make them into something that is poetry; rather than how do I write the poetry of something that is intrinsically massive and spectacular—how do I do the opposite of that? When you are actually living in a city, you don’t see “the city,” you see each little block, each piece of trash, and those are the things that make up the city for you.

MB: In reading this book, I almost find myself trying to identify the pedestrians: she’s a pedestrian, and he’s a pedestrian, and maybe this person is too. But the closer attention I pay to the text, and in considering everything we’ve discussed, I am realizing that actually I think it is the book itself which is the city and the poems are the pedestrians of the book. These poems are the pedestrians, living inside this book, right here on the pages.

RZ: Yes, definitely! It’s almost like that eerie thing where you live in an apartment and you can see all of the other people who live in the other apartments—what is our relationship to those people? What is our relationship to everything and everyone around us that we exist with constantly but never interact with? What do you call that….?