“Exhibits of Industry”: An Interview with Rachel Lebowitz
Rachel Lebowitz is the author of Cottonopolis (Pedlar Press, 2013), a sequence of prose and found poems about the Industrial Revolution, and of Hannus (Pedlar Press, 2006), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional BC Book Prize and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She is also the co-author, with Zachariah Wells, of the children’s picture book Anything But Hank! (Biblioasis, 2008, illustrated by Eric Orchard). She lives in Halifax.
The following interview was conducted via e-mail in April 2013.
ML: First of all, I should say I’m having a bit of a hard time classifying your new book, Cottonopolis. It’s a collection of poems, yet each piece is a part of a broader story, that of the cotton industry during the Industrial Revolution. The back cover of the book identifies it as a long poem, yet it is structured as a museum exhibit of sorts, and even has what one might call characters. How would you describe the book? How did you discover the form with which you wanted to tell this story?
RL: That you have a hard time classifying Cottonopolis actually makes me really happy. One of my favourite writers, Geoff Dyer, writes books that are very hard to classify: there’s his fiction (my least favourite of his, generally), and then there are his books about jazz and D.H. Lawrence (in part) and travel and photography and WWI—really you just kind of want a Geoff Dyer section in the bookstore. Sometimes I feel frustrated that I can’t adequately categorize my writing either, but then I love it when I can’t figure out where other people’s books will be shelved in bookstores. I find mixed genre (W.G. Sebald, Uwe Timm) really exciting and it’s great to feel that other people can’t pin down my work, either.
That said, I don’t think I’ve consciously set out to write something uncategorizable. This is just how I write; it’s what comes most naturally to me. I used to write short lyric poems but they felt too thin to me—there’s always something more I want to say (I’m reminded here of an interview with Alice Munro in which she talks about how in her stories the details need to be there, too—I’m really not a minimalist). I can write short, lineated poems in the context of a larger work, but they don’t stand on their own; they are informed by what comes before and they inform what comes next. My work is definitely stronger in context and I see the work as a whole; I don’t see them as separate pieces at all. A friend of mine recently commented that Cottonopolis is like a novel, and while I’m not sure I agree, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising, as I’m drawn more to reading novels and short stories than I am to poetry. Even the poems I get excited about are often ones with stories—ballads, for instance.
So whatever it is I write, no, it’s not a collection of poems, which would suggest that they can be taken on their own. Certainly you can excerpt pieces from this book more easily than you could with my first book, Hannus, but still they aren’t separate poems, as you’d find in a “collection.” “Long poem” feels more accurate and really was the best way I could figure out how to describe it, but that’s not it either, as I have a couple pieces in here that are dramatic monologues and others that feel like essays. Can we go with just “literature?” That would be lovely.
As for the museum structure, it started with my writing “Exhibit 1: Photograph, Boy” after staring at a photograph. Calling it an exhibit seemed natural to me—I ended up using the "exhibit" material far more loosely for other pieces (in some I really describe the object, in others I don’t) but it seemed to work, so I just kept going with it.
ML: Cottonopolis contains many found poems whose texts originate from letters and journals as well as The Slave Narratives from the W.P.A. Could you speak to your process of working with these found texts?
RL: There are 10 found poems in the book. I’d arranged other ones but ultimately didn’t think they were saying anything that hadn’t already been said elsewhere. I loved doing these. There’s so much poetry in these already—especially in The Slave Narratives, which are taken from Depression-era interviews of ex-slaves. For all of the found texts, I simply found them in the course of my research, mainly in history books. Usually there would be a line or two that would grab me—the slave who’d escaped in the dark night with no moon and nothing “to see but god” or the repetition of “dear Wife” in a letter that a Luddite sent to his wife while on a penal ship to Australia. Partly, of course, I’ve included found poems because I think it’s vital that the voices of real people be there. But mostly it’s that the language is just so damn good—how can you not use it?
After I found something exciting, I’d take out what seemed extraneous and fine tune it a bit (ie: changing “Long Tripeish Breasts wch ye Spaniards mortally hate” to just “Tripeish Breasts”). But often it didn’t require much work. For example, the original excerpt of the letter describing which defects to avoid when buying slaves (which I found in Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship) has 15 things listed whereas mine has 11, but I didn’t change the order of any of the ones I used, and the natural rhyme at the end of “Lunaticks/Idiots/Lethargicks” is just the same as the original.
ML: In the acknowledgments section of the book, you cite dozens of writers as influences, ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Douglass to Jean Rhys and Dr. Seuss. I’m curious about how some of these particular writers have “crept into [the] poems,” as you put it. Moreover, how aware are you of these influences while you are writing, or is it something you see after the fact, hence the “creeping”? Do you do anything to embrace or curb outside influences during your creative process?
RL: A lot of the writers I list used images that I loved and borrowed. Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, wrote about how in Manchester the sun is seen through the darkness as “a disc without rays” and in “Exhibit A: Photograph, Boy” I write, “The sun’s a rayless disc.” Frederick Douglass spoke about how we’d filled our land “with the mere stumps of men,” and so in my poem about the American Civil War, “Exhibit 36: Nursery Rhyme II,” I wrote that “we walk upon the stumps of men.” I thought it would get pretty tedious to list every specific instance when I borrowed a couple of words, so I contented myself with mostly listing their names instead, unless it was a longer excerpt.
The authors I list in my acknowledgments were different. Those ones really did creep in more—Jean Rhys has a sentence or two in Voyage in the Dark about how everything in Dominica is green, including the road, and when I was writing about slave ship sailors in the West Indies, that image just appeared. Dr. Seuss has some rhymes that I echo in one of my poems. I was aware of both of these at the time but it wasn’t part of my “research” work—I wasn’t putting them in my notes and then finding them later as I was with de Tocqueville or Douglass. It just came from other things I was reading or in some cases had read years ago (like kids’ books).
When I’m working on a book, I tend to avoid other creative takes on the same material. For instance, when I was writing my first book about the life of my great-grandmother, I deliberately avoided any works on family memoir or on Vancouver during the same period. Obviously, in the very early stages I was initially influenced by other writers’ family histories—but when I’m really immersed in my writing, I don’t want to see how others do it. Partly it’s that I’d be concerned that my writing would seem derivative in some way. But non-fiction or books that don’t seem to have much to do with the subject (like Hop on Pop) are fair game. I’m constantly surprised by what makes its way in.
ML: Could you talk a bit about your research process for this book?
RL: Pretty simple, really. I read lots of history books, wrote notes on post-it notes, eventually transferred the notes onto my computer, and did more research online. I highlighted the images or quotes that were the most appealing and often copied them onto a new document when I was writing a new poem—so if, for instance, I was writing a poem about slavery, I might first copy various notes about slavery onto the page and then start writing. That said, most of the notes I’d copied out for the poem often just ended up stuck at the bottom of the page, unused.
Sometimes I’d read something in a history book that would spur on a poem. For instance, in E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, he wrote that while it is true that child labour happened before the Industrial Revolution, the proliferation of children’s rhymes and games during the pre-Industrial period suggested that children still had time to play. That led me to do research on children’s rhymes and that spurred me to write the poem, “Lyrics, Children’s Game.” I just let the connections flow—it’s a pretty associative style. I found a description of Dhaka, Bangladesh (then Dacca, India) being overgrown by jungle and that made me think of Birnam Wood, which made me quote Macbeth (and a bit of Hamlet). So it’s not all history books. I really don’t understand it when writers just list contemporaries—often acquaintances or friends—as being their major influences. To me, it’s all necessary and you have no idea when Shakespeare might need to come in, or Joseph Conrad or Christina Rossetti.
ML: In “Exhibit 22: Sheet” you write: “All history is story and so much of it connects.” And later, in “Exhibit 35: Cane:” “History’s a croaking caw: over here, here! We are here, we here, hear!” As a poet, it would seem you have a predilection for writing about history. I’m also thinking, here, of your first collection, Hannus, a poetic biography of your great-grandmother. What is it that draws you to history, particularly a poetic rendering of it? How do you reconcile your own poetic voice with the voice of those whose stories you tell?
RL: I’m glad you point out both of those exhibits, which are what I consider companion essays in the book (in my editing process, under editor Stephanie Bolster’s advice, I highlighted this connection by having the same sentence in both pieces). These are stories but they are also essays about history—and unlike other pieces in the book where the voices are often not “mine” (i.e., poems by the point of view of a handloom weaver or a slave ship sailor), these feel like mine, as a modern-day writer, someone who is interested in history and what history is. There are so many books of historiography and many historians might argue with my take on it, but really, to me history is story.
That’s what is so fascinating about it. I love stories. That they are true just gives them more resonance for me. It’s not that I don’t see a value in “making things up”—there is definitely a truth in fiction, which is another huge discussion, probably for another day—but it was in this case important for me to use real stories as much as I could. I’m not sure how exactly I “reconcile” my voice with the voices of the people whose stories I tell. I do know that it was vital to me to end with someone else’s words, which is why I end the book with a found poem, by ex-slave William Colbert.
I’m not a historian. I’m a writer. There’s all this careful analysis going on and I ignore most of that and just get at the stories, the images of toddlers running near the factories, etc. The stories are what grab me. I get really emotional reading some of these stories, and I want readers to be moved by my work, too. On rare occasions, I was lucky enough to read some really gripping, well-written history books. But to be honest, most of them felt like work and reading them was my job, something I needed to do before getting to the exciting part of creation. The challenge was to find the stories amongst the sometimes dull writing and take them into this genre of no genre so they could be read again, or by different people. I think that a lot of wonderful stories are buried. But by taking them into the extremely popular genre of poetry they will now be read by millions!
Seriously, I’m not sure what draws me to history. Certainly there’s a lot of “history”—certain periods or places that I have no interest in, and I think part of my interest in 19th-century England has to do with my love of some of the literature of that period (my fascination with Industrial Revolution-era Manchester was started in fact by reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton). But I am also drawn to stories people don’t know and that I don’t know. I knew very little about my great-grandmother before starting to work in earnest on Hannus and what I did know was tantalizing. I suppose that although I am a very different writer than Geoff Dyer, we are similar in that we both write about things we want to know more about. For him, it’s been jazz and D.H. Lawrence. For me, it’s my family history, the Industrial Revolution, and lately, passenger pigeons. Keeping stories from the past alive is very important to me. It’s not that by knowing history we will no longer be doomed to repeat it—I think we repeat it, regardless of how well we know it—it’s that they are stories and, in the words of Thomas King, “The truth about stories is that is all we are.”
ML: What was it about Gaskell’s Mary Barton that piqued your interest in Industrial Revolution-era Manchester? Have you ever been to Manchester?
RL: Before I read it, I was already really interested in social history in general, and accounts of how regular people lived, so Gaskell’s descriptions of the slums—down to the flowers on the windowsills of the workers’ houses—fascinated me. I first read the book as part of an undergraduate English class, maybe 16 or so years ago. The Victorian melodrama cracks me up and the plot is pretty strained at times, but the descriptions of Manchester and her use of Lancashire dialect are excellent. Gaskell lived in the city and her descriptions of it have an authority, a realism that many visitors’ descriptions don’t, really. And there are some great lines:
They’n screwed us down to th’ lowest peg, in order to make their great big fortunes, and build their great big houses, and we, why we’re just clemming, many and many of us. Can you say there’s nought wrong in this?
It was enough to make me decide to go to Manchester when I was travelling in the U.K. in 2000 (seems my decisions on where to travel are often influenced by literature—I went to Orkney on that same trip because of another book). While I was there, I went to a couple of museums, including the fabulous Museum of Science and Industry, where there was a great exhibit about sanitation (or lack thereof) in Manchester through the years. There was info there about the cholera epidemic, night-soil men (men who would cart away the “nightsoil” in the wee hours), etc. My mother (who was with me) said later she never saw anyone get so excited about an exhibit on shit. What can I say? How could I resist the night-soil men? (I’m bewildered anyone can.) I found out later that the Mancunian term at the time was “muck-miser,” which is maybe even more awesome.
About five or so years after reading Mary Barton, I took a Directed Studies in grad school where I read wonderfully vivid passages about the slums of Manchester in Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the English Working Class and that piqued my interest further. And then I learned more and more, like that the worst slum was called “Angel Meadow.” I guess it was a combination of the history and also the language (“Muck-misers” and “Angel Meadow,” even the name of one of the rivers, “Irk”) that drew me in.
ML: In the second-to-last piece in the book, you write:
We need something else. Blood would be more honest, something that spreads. Or a mouse’s nest, made up of oh so many things. Or entrails, that you look through for answers and the afterward, the not-ever-knowing what it was you’d held in your hand.
And a few lines later: “We are sorry to inform you there is no end.” The stories you tell in Cottonopolis certainly don’t have clear beginnings or endings; they are stories whose effects are still being lived. Are there any particular stories that didn’t make it into the book that you wish had? How did you know when the book was finished?
RL: There’s something pretty false about the writing of history, or in my case, the writing of tidy “exhibits” taken from history. You take all this information and you construct a narrative. You act as if things are clear, like there’s a clear cause and effect, which isn’t always so. Or you simplify things: you write about the triangle trade (English manufactured goods sent to Africa to trade for slaves, slaves sent to the Americas, money from the sales used to buy raw goods from the Americas, then sent to be manufactured in England again) as if it was always that tidy, as if there weren’t some places (like the States) that avoided the triangle trade entirely. Or you act like there was this petition and then that didn’t work so then came machine breaking when the truth is, different things (both machine breaking and petitions) were happening simultaneously much of the time. At one point during the very early stages, I tried to get at the cacophony and mess by moving all the poems around so there was no sustained narrative thread, but it didn’t work artistically.
But there is some mess still. The second exhibit in the book is about the Peterloo Massacre, which seems like an odd thing to put in there, right at the beginning. You think you’d want to work up to the workers’ resistance, show more horrors first. And I had my doubts about it being there, but I think it is in some ways more honest, to show the resistance as being there all along. “Exhibit 2: Bonnet, Peterloo” also has a line about “railway ties” which you wouldn’t even have seen until at least post-1830, but then the very next sentence talks about “this field,” (St. Peter’s Field) being strewn with bonnets and “several mounds of human beings,” which happened in 1819. So there’s a lot of that kind of messiness in the book, which isn’t really that evident to someone who doesn’t know the period well. But I needed that mess to be explicit by the end. In the end, all we’re doing is holding entrails and not knowing what any of it means.
In a new piece I just wrote for my next book, I say, “I question wisdom. I question all of it.” And I do. I am very leery of the “wisdom” one finds in so much poetry. I don’t stand in as some sort of authority telling you how to think. I’m not some big philosopher. I don’t have any answers. And so, yes, entrails …
… and no real end either. As the recent collapse of the textile factory in Bangladesh shows us, the story of Cottonopolis didn’t end. It just changed venues and we (in the West) are still complicit.
As for how I knew the book was finished, that also wasn’t a tidy process. I knew for years that I’d be ending with the U.S. Civil War (a natural ending point, for now, for this story of slavery and cotton) and those pieces were some of the very last I wrote. I have two endings, really—it seems to end with Exhibit 37 about Lancashire during the American Civil War, but then we get this untitled piece where the first line is “And is this the end?” and the answer is no. And then we really end with a found poem (and I knew when I read William Colbert’s interview about post-civil war that the book had to end with his powerful words). But after I’d done all that, I ended up writing a few more pieces in the middle, and I think the very last thing I wrote might have been the introduction.
This book really could have gone on forever (a problem of having exhibits made up of infinite numbers—I initially started with “Exhibit A” but I couldn’t confine it to 26 exhibits). I tried to limit myself by mostly focusing on the cotton industry, so a lot of harrowing stories on sugar plantations didn’t make their way in. I never ended up writing anything about The Great Dismal Swamp, an actual place in Virginia. At one point, I started working on a piece about factory accidents and then I realized that really, there’s not much more to say about them than “Factory hands have arms and we have cut his off” which I’d already written. I tried to be conscious of making sure two poems weren’t doing the same work. Sometimes what I needed to say could just be said in a found poem or the notes.
ML: In “Exhibit 7: Clod, Earth,” you write: “There is a generation whose teeth are swords. And their jaw teeth are as knives to devour the poor.” There is a sense that many of the voices in Cottonopolis are telling their stories as a form of retribution, a recompense of some kind; the book seems concerned with justice. Do you find this to be true? Did you feel compelled to give voice to people whose stories might otherwise be unheard?
RL: That’s a quote from the Bible. I can’t find the reference now but I believe I found it being used contextually in quotations by protesters. Are the people in the book telling their stories as a form of retribution? I’m not sure I’d use that word. It’s not revenge. But recompense? A sense of redressing? Yes. Certainly that was part of the pull for me. There’s a line from Psalm 94 right near the end of the book: Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity? This psalm was actually selected by trade unionists to read to new initiates—that doesn’t make it into the poem or the notes, and of course, being a psalm, it ends with how God will save all: And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness; yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off. I find the psalms to be so fascinating—their cries of despair are so moving and subversive and real and their conclusions about God smiting all feel so unconvincing. And who does rise up for the people? It’s not God. It’s the workers themselves. And me. There’s a lot of complicity in what I do, in what clothes I wear, etc., but I did feel, in writing this, that I was standing up—at least for the people of this past.
I am concerned with justice, and as a writer, how I concern myself with justice is by telling the stories:
Kids don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don’t have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that. That’s why I sing these songs. That’s why I tell these stories, dammit. No root, no fruit! —Folksinger Utah Phillips
So many stories will never be known and so many stories don’t come until later or can never truly be told. One of the most powerful found poems for me was by Mary Reynolds, an ex-slave who was interviewed during the Depression. She said:
Slavery was the worst days ever seed in this world. They was things past tellin, but I got the scars on my body to show to this day. The niggers better not stop in the fields when they hear them yellin. Niggers mourns now, but in them days they wasn’t no time for mournin.
It was just so matter-of-fact—there was no time to mourn then. But now there is. And time to tell the stories, as best as we can.
ML: In “Exhibit 14: Spoon,” a poem about the boycott of slave-grown sugar, you write: “Sometimes we forget beauty.” I also recall during your book launch you mentioned searching for instances of beauty in the fraught stories found in Cottonopolis. How important was it that you imbue beauty of language and image into these stories? Did you ever feel there was a danger of romanticizing this difficult past?
RL: Beauty is extremely important to me. I don’t shy away from the ugliness in this history—as much as it might pain me to read about it and write about it, these stories need to be told. Sometimes I might cry after or during the writing of it, but so what? That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it. I just wipe the tears away or go for a long walk after and keep writing.
But beauty is just as important. It still exists (in nature and in people) and we need to hold onto it. People who were living tough lives then were still on the lookout for it (by putting flowers in their sills, for instance, or by taking walks to nearby moorland when they could). There’s a line that I borrowed from geologist Hugh Miller where he talks about “all these forms and shades of beauty which once filled all nature, but of which only a few fragments, or faded tints, survive.” In “Exhibit 23: Photograph, Coral,” I wrote, “It could be that in this world now only a few fragments or faded tints of beauty survive. It could be that that’s enough.” In my first draft of this poem, I actually ended it with, “It could be that’s not enough.” I soon changed it though because while focusing on beauty can be to the detriment of combating the horrors it’s also true that this beauty does still exist and that sometimes, it is enough. In “Exhibit 16: Bandage,” there’s a description of a slave woman:
That nigra’s baby was born dead, from a fall she took whilst carrying water. Look at her curled there, sand flies on her neck. Her three weeks are almost up. Near the swamp, the cherry blossoms bloom.
It’s a political statement, to go from this grieving/catatonic woman, whose “confinement” is almost up and who will need to go back to the fields soon, to the cherry blossoms near the swamp. It suggests someone who cares more about the blossoms than the woman—and that’s there of course. But there’s also the fact that cherry blossoms are still beautiful. So it works both ways and this is found throughout. It’s important that the story behind this beauty be interrogated. But it’s also true that the image of burlap sacks against the purple sky (“Leaf”) is damn beautiful. And I think that’s okay to notice that. It’s okay to see the play of light and shadow on someone’s face and notice that beauty, even if it comes after horrors (“Axe”). I think it’s human of us. I think it’s vital.
I don’t think I felt I was in any danger of romanticizing the difficult past. I think there’s a danger of my making everything feel monochromatic in its misery and so I had to make a conscious effort to also write poems where there was hope and beauty—whether that comes from flowers or children or political protest. I didn’t feel up to writing happy slave poems—that’s just something that as a white woman, I didn’t feel I could do in any believable way that wouldn’t somehow feel like I was excusing slavery—but I did make a conscious effort to show the joy, where I could.
As for “beauty of language,” well, quite frankly, if you don’t have that, then none of this amounts to much as art. The craft of it—the image, the right words, the rhythm—is vital.
ML: Could you also tell me a bit more about these passenger pigeons you mentioned earlier? Is it possible this will be the subject of your next book?
RL: It will be part of it, yes. It’s all early days yet, but I’m slowly moving toward writing a collection of essays/poems about, among other things, the year of no summer of 1816 (no summer in the Northern hemisphere as a result of the quantities of ash in the atmosphere after the massive eruption of Mount Tambora the year before), WWI, possibly Australia’s history as a penal colony, and yes, passenger pigeons. I’m not sure yet if all these things I’m interested in will end up needing to be in different books, but right now I’m just letting these odd connections come together as they will.
ML: And lastly, because I want to ask this of every person I meet, what are you reading these days?
RL: For my new book, I’m reading Richard Fortey’s The Earth, which is a geology book for lay readers, and I’m re-reading Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme, about the remembrance of WWI. Both are great. I’m also immersing myself in fairytales more, especially George MacDonald’s. I just finished reading David Thomson’s The People of the Sea (legends of the seal/selchies), which was wonderful. He was an incredible writer.
I’m also reading a new Ian Rankin which will probably not end up appearing in any of my writing, but who knows? And it’s fun.
