Engaging with Desire: A Conversation with Terese Mason Pierre // Kate Finegan

Terese Mason Pierre is a writer, editor and organizer whose work has appeared in Canthius, West End Phoenix, The Temz Review, and elsewhere online and in print. She is the poetry editor of Augur Magazine, has volunteered with Shab-e She'r Reading Series, and occasionally reviews for Quill and Quire. She lives and works in Toronto.

Kate Finegan interviewed Pierre on the release of her limited edition chapbook Surface Area from Anstruther Press.

Kate Finegan: I noticed the use of hold and pull quite a bit in this collection. Could you discuss how the dynamics of opposing forces inform your poetry and your thinking about romance and nature?

Terese Mason Pierre: That’s one of those things that I didn't pick upon while I was writing, but I do think that there is a sense of conflict in the poems. I create poems about wanting things but also not wanting them and not liking the fact that you want them. I find that tension and conflict very interesting, not only in its somewhat universal quality, but also because in prose pieces, that's where narrative really happens—in the conflict, in the stakes—so I try to bring that into my poetry whenever I can. I’m not sure if all poems will contain this element of conflict or friction, but certainly the ones that have really resonated with me had some element of the speaker wanting something and engaging with that desire, whether they lean into it or are repulsed by it, or they're trying to excuse it.

KF: I was struck by the poems "Subject" and "Attention,"where there’s a sense of being completely in another person's orbit and longing for attention, but also, in some ways, longing to break free. You’ve said before that the poems are largely fictional. Can fictionalized poetry offer a sort of rehearsal ground for hard choices in life?

TMP: The majority of these poems were written in 2018 when I didn’t have a partner. Now I'm finding that these are real scenarios, but I'm also finding that the resolutions of these poems are not the routes that I take. For example, in "Attention,” there’s this idea that if I get hurt really badly, they'll look at me and give me something I want. While I have felt that, I don't think I would ever be so extreme. In "Pyrite," there's the attempt to force someone into becoming something that they're not. That's never something that would occur to me in these specific situations. I won't ask people to change; I will just change. I have no desire to control other people. It's just myself that I want to control.

KF: In "Pyrite," the speaker says, "I've always wanted to be a sculptor holding possibility in my fingers," speaking about being a sculptor of the other person's experience. I'm wondering how much you feel like a sculptor when you're writing poetry, especially formal poetry, because the whole collection is in couplets.

TMP: The sculpting really comes out in the editing, but there isn't a lot of really complex shaping that I do. I get antsy because when I began my writing journey, it was always about writing for other people. I want to share my work. If I hold onto it for too long, I feel like that's not why I wanted to write in the first place. I'm very happy to have another editor just hack at it. That's fine because there's already that inherent distance that I have from my work, which is another reason why all the poems are fictional. I don't want to write about my own life. If I did, I would be less willing to sort of give it away.

As for the couplets, I read Michael Prior's ModelDisciple, and some of the poems are in couplets. While he's obviously not the first to write that way, it was the first time I starkly remembered loving that form. Since then, a lot of my poems have been in couplets. I try to arrange the couplets so that they could be read indifferent ways. Some couplet poems I've written do not have punctuation because you can read these three lines one way or the one line a different way. You can read it however you like. Do you want to pause here? You go ahead and pause there. I'm not going tell you how to read my poetry. I like playing around with that.

KF: When you're working with deliberately giving readers space to read something in multiple ways, how does that inform how you read that poem in public? Do you explore the different meanings when you're thinking about intonation and how you're going to read it aloud?

TMP: Sometimes I will do little edits two minutes before I go on stage in terms of how I will read, in the sense that I'll add commas and periods. That way, I’m not tripping over words or pausing for too long. I know that means that I shape the way the poem is interpreted by the audience, but depending on the set, I might change that up.One of the poems that's not in the collection is called "Still,"and there's a line that reads, "You are not lost in art, here /the stills are in your cells," so you can read that as, “You are not lost in art here,” like in this place, or, “You are not lost in art. Here the stills are in your cells.” But I want to get as much out of the poetry writing experience as I can, and I feel like I can have fun at the level of it being fictional. I play with punctuation because it's another way of adding fun to that experience.

KF: Do you find enjoyment in learning that other readers have read your poetry differently from how you intended it when you put it on the page? Have they found things that you didn't notice were in there?

TMP: That's the greatest part. I wrote a poem about aliens, and people were like, "Oh, this poem is saying something really interesting about colonialism." And I'm like, "Oh, really? Is it now? I didn't know." I’m not one for telling people how the work has to be interpreted. I think there's this rule in the reader-author relationship that I can't tell you what to think, but you can't tell me what I meant. When people have different interpretations, I think it's fun.

KF: It’s great to see people engaging with your work on a level that you didn't even know was there.

TMP: Even in these questions—“I noticed you use hold and pull.”I didn’t notice that.

KF: You use those words a lot, and it works so well with the motif of the ocean.

TMP: That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to collect my poems into a chapbook. I looked at all these poems from 2018 and I realized there’s a lot of nature. There's a lot of water, ocean, deserts, moon, sun, sky, wind, trees. Part of me felt that in order to be a good poet, because I wasn't writing about anything personal, which is what a lot of poets write about, I had to pick things that poems were often about, which is nature and romance. They’re two very grand concepts that you can manipulate however you like. A lot of the romances in the poems are not happy romances; they're often violent romances. I wanted to call the collection Surface Area because that’s the most positive relationship. It’s not a romance but a friendship. My friend lives in Arizona, and he went to a national park—I think it was White Sands Monument—and he posted all these photos, and his caption was, "I'll keep coming back until we terraform the moon." And I was like, “I'm putting that in the poem. I'm stealing it. Bye.” I wanted it to be at the forefront of the collection because a lot of the other poems are about people being trapped, feeling neglected, or being used. I realized late that these poems are not happy.

KF: But there's something comforting about the presence of nature in poems that are not necessarily happy. There’s something grounding about being at the edge of the ocean as difficult things are happening and knowing that nature will hold you.

TMP: That particular feeling is something that I like. I don’t actively insert it in poems, but when I discover it's there, I'm like, "Oh, that's nice."

KF: It’s interesting to be writing about these timeless themes in a time of climate change, as well as urbanization, where a lot of people are not as close to nature. And the landscape of how people engage in romance is changing. Do you see your work as being shaped in a particular way by the time and place that we're in right now?

TMP: A necessity of being in this space and this time is I have to—not reconcile, but I have to look around and recognize where I am. I think that these romances might be more reflective of today's environment. They're not always happy. They're not always neat.Sometimes you don't get what you want. And you don't want to say that you haven't gotten what you want. You just, sort of, live with it. I think that's also how we think about the ways in which the world is changing—you can't do anything about it. There’s no other earth, so we just have to stay here, just be here and figure out some way to move forward while getting what we need and making sure we fulfill our own obligations to each other, or not. It creates this interesting tension and conflict. But that's more internal, I guess. That's why I like bringing in the "I" as well. Because if there's the "I" you can talk about your feelings in the poem. You can talk about the dreams you have or the desires that you wish were fulfilled but aren't.

Kate Finegan is editor-in-chief of Longleaf Review and author of the chapbook The Size of Texas (Penrose Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Minola Review, PRISM, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, and elsewhere. You can find her at http://katefinegan.ink or on Twitter @kehfinegan.

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