Photo by Erin Flegg
Interview by David Ly
After a successful debut with If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood Editions, 2016), Adèle Barclay has reached out to us again with yet another stellar collection of poems in Renaissance Normcore (Nightwood Editions, 2019). Intimacy and power, anguish and joy, Adèle has outdone herself to push the limits of what a poem can hold and she does so with nuanced poignancy.
What follows is an interview between David Ly and Adèle about the experience of writing a second book, open relationship poems, and how many feelings Adèle feels in a day.
David Ly: Can you tell us a bit about Renaissance Normcore and how it came to be? Where did you first see it going and how does the finished book differ from what you first perceived it to be?
Adèle Barclay: Renaissance Normcore is my sophomore collection, which I suppose lends to a looser, more emboldened vibe. I began writing it slowly just as my first book If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You was released in October 2016. When I wrote the first few poems I thought Oh no—I don’t write pretty things anymore, but I was probably responding to the shift in tone from a surreal, mysterious lyric to a stripped down, conversational style. I was startled but intrigued by this direct lyric. As I wrote I felt more at home opening up my vocal chords and weaving in music, pop culture, films, anecdotes, and stretching to see where I could take the poems. Initially, I knew I was playing with themes of intimacy and power, but as I finished I could see the collection as responding to larger cultural conversations around gendered violence and trauma and how our current vocabulary on these topics fails. Finally I could see the poems as the need to carve out space for a range of responses and emotions and to validate the nuance of queer femme desire and experiences. There’s also a surprising amount of joy and humour in the collection, which I believe emerged not merely to temper, but as a result of the vulnerability.
DL: It’s interesting that you felt more at home opening up and weaving in music and pop culture in the poems! This is done really beautifully, by the way. Where exactly do you think you took your poems when you would weave in singers like Lana Del Rey and Ariana Grande?
AB: Weaving music and pop culture into poetry can get at a long of things—the weather and material of everyday life; those transcendent communal moments when a song unites a group of queers dancing on a cement floor at a venue that’s about to close down; when you hum a few bars of an Ariana Grande melody to give a sad day a sweet pause. Music and poetry are innately entwined for me and so allowing myself to really dig into the pop music that entertains, soothes and frustrates me felt like giving myself permission to grant these poems realistic depths. Music and pop culture genuinely excite me to think and feel deeply. There are a lot of levels packed into an allusion to Lana Del Rey—you can channel certain personae and emotions, moods, atmospheres as well as gestures to fandom, identities, communities, biography, critique, cultural trends, industry. I feel Lana and Ariana bring the poems simultaneously to more earthly yet transcendent places and signify both personal and collective experiences.
DL: Speaking of personal experiences, what was something about writing this sophomore collection that was challenging, which you didn’t find in writing your first book, and how do you think and feel you overcame it?
AB: Renaissance Normcore called for some real moments of vulnerability that pushed me and felt precarious. Choosing to address trauma, abuse, and kinky queer sexuality with a direct, plain voice rather than a super surreal and opaque lyric definitely challenged me. I did have a moment, however, when I realized I had already been writing about these experiences in my previous writing—just in a more mysterious way—and so I began to feel empowered and more curious about recasting these topics with more openness.
DL: As you were writing with more openness, what do you think is a central question this poetry collection asks, and how does it go about exploring answers for it? How do you know when a poem holds all you need it to?
AB: I think my poems are prone to asking more questions than they resolve! While I was writing these poems, a public dialogue around sexual assault and gendered violence began to take shape in the wake of the #MeToo movement (2016-18). As a queer femme survivor, I found myself deeply numb upon facing these cultural conversations. I was desiring a more complex engagement with the ways in which power and intimacy entwine and how personal and cultural traumas structure daily shared and lived realities in ways that are not easy to explain or define with our current vocabulary and paradigms.
I was also curious about this cultural shift from repressing trauma to articulating it and the ramifications for both our bodies and language. I am hesitant to characterize this book as solely about trauma and/or survivorship because it’s about a lot of things—kinship, desire, joy, being in an open relationship with the ocean, Fiona Apple. But if there are central questions lurking I think there’s something here about the relationship between desire and fear and how to wield poetry as a way to transform what trauma has rendered indelible yet ineffable.
I went about writing these poems with a lot of curiosity about how these cultural moments and moods intersected with my own emotional landscapes.
I feel like I know the poem is a worthy container when it hits several emotional registers or offers multiple interpretations or stumbles upon an entirely different question than it originally set out to examine. I need my poem to diverge from whatever vantage point I began with.
DL: You certainly hit many emotional registers with the “Open Relationship” poems, which act as great anchors for the book. What do you mean by titling these poems as “open relationships”?
AB: I love thinking of the “Open Relationship” poems as anchors, especially since they articulate a lot of feelings of uncertainty—thank you! Those poems began a little tongue-in-cheek with “Open Relationship with the Sun,” which I wrote during a late spring snowstorm in Banff. But then I found myself returning to the trope to poke at even more relationship dynamics with the moon, ocean, earth, and fire (anxiety). The poems wonder how all relationships—platonic, sexual, romantic—require tending to, negotiation and boundaries. With these poems I wanted to honour the ways our relationships to each other, ourselves and our environments are deeply intentional and often in states of flux whether or not we acknowledge or know what to do with that. We often talk about attachment theory (are you secure, anxious, avoidant?) and how it informs our romantic relationships—but what about our attachments to this world?
DL: I love those poem titles so much. How did you land on the collection’s title?
AB: The title of the collection sprang from a conversation I had with a dear poet-friend Kayla Czaga where we were discussing sartorial styles and we landed on the term Renaissance Normcore to describe my fashion and look at that time—a mixture of super plain thrifted items with a femme, floral flourish, i.e. grungy button-ups, black mini-skirts, t-shirts with cleavage, and long, wavy Botticelli hair. I then started to apply this term to my writing as I experimented with a more direct, confessional mode with dreamy lyric flairs. It was a fun way to channel my poetic energy by thinking of poetic voice and persona in terms of clothing style and reminding myself how things that are so tangible and material disclose and conjure so much identity and meaning. The term and its relationship to fashion seemed to importantly encapsulate for me how we (queer folks) forge our identities out of concepts and clothing we’ve inherited. We play with and remix these materials to create new meanings and ways to be—it’s powerful stuff to repurpose what doesn’t fit.
DL: My last question may seem a bit strange, since it comes from two of my favourite poems in Renaissance Normcore, but I thought it would be fun to ask you. If “Coyotes Howl While Circling Their Prey” then “How Many Feelings Do You Feel In A Day”, Adèle?
AB: HA! Sexy fear under a quiet blood moon x 1000!
David Ly David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020) and the chapbook Stubble Burn (Anstruther Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The /temz/ Review, PRISM and others. He is the Poetry Editor of This Magazine and sits on the Editorial Collective of Anstruther Press. Twitter: @dlylyly.
Adèle Barclay’s poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, Matrix, The Pinch and others. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, published by Nightwood Editions in 2016, was the winner of the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was also shortlisted for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She received the Walrus Poetry Prize Reader’s Choice Award in 2016, and was the winner of the 2016 LitPop Award for Poetry. She is the Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque. Her most recent title is Renaissance Normcore, also published by Nightwood Editions (2019).