An Interview with poet Candice Reffe
Candice Reffe's poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Poetry Daily, Riddle Fence, Verse Daily, and Witness, among other publications. Candice spent many years in New York City working as an executive in the fashion industry, which informs her debut poetry collection, Live From The Mood Board. Her book won the Antivenom Poetry Award in 2018 and was published by Elixir Press. She graduated from the New College of Florida with a B.A. in Social Sciences, and later earned an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She received Fine Arts Work Center First and Second year fellowships and a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Candice currently lives in Northampton, MA, where she runs a virtual coaching practice. She took the time this October to read some poems from her collection at UNH and answer some questions for Emily Gore, one of the poetry readers for Barnstorm.
Emily: While reading your book, I sensed the speaker in the poems discovering the realities around them in real time. This is especially true of the poems about the workplace. I'm wondering what it was like for you as a writer to be present in the corporate fashion world and in your writing. It feels like you were taking notes in moments like "Pills white as snow, potent enough / to parry an avalanche of panic. My boss / stashes a mirror that magnifies & red lipstick / so her nine-to-five mouth speaks the same / dialect as the other mouths." in "The Executive Assistant's Astral Existence." My question is about process: how did you go about collecting information and turning it into poems? Were sticky notes involved?
Candice: I was living and writing in parallel universes I moved between. Living in a corporation is like living on a rung of the Tower of Babble—you can see someone’s idea of heaven from there, but you’ll never reach it (or if you did it likely it wouldn’t be your idea of heaven, but your boss’s). No one is speaking in the same tongue, let alone in English. I grabbed snippets here and there, penciled them in the margins of a work doc—likely at some point a post-it was involved—but I wasn’t trying to catch detail live. I carried a slim notebook—portable, lightweight—which commuted with me from Western Massachusetts where I live to New York City. Many of the poems in Live from the Mood Board began in the notebook. I was working crazy hours most days, reading poems before work and bed—a poetry GPS that helped me maintain a sense of direction, an orientation to art making. I wrote three mornings a week—less some weeks, more others. I’d report into work. I’d report into my writing desk. Discipline—showing up consistently without expectation invites the unexpected to appear—so does attention to craft, including attention to the day’s detail. Associations formed between the office and the city, the workday and the world outside work; they seeped into my imagination and collided when I wasn’t looking—a negative and positive charge that attracted a line, an image, a phrase I’d jot in the notebook, something I could work with later and develop into a poem.
E: Like in "The Executive Assistant's Astral Existence," many of the poems involve the people around you, from your boss to your husband. I find it difficult at times to balance truth-telling and gentleness when writing about people in my life, but your poems seem to find this balance expertly. How do you think about this issue, or navigate it, in your writing?
C: I don’t think about the other people in the poems, including my husband, as themselves. Once they appear, make their presence known, they alchemically alter through the writing process. I try to discern what they’re offering—not as themselves but as emissaries to art (not to sound too high-falutin about it). My job is to capture what they’re offering through language, tone, voice, form, follow where it leads.
Of course, I have an occasional flare of feeling: what will the real person think, will their feelings be hurt, will they feel their story has been co-opted by the poem? But that falls away—or I kick the feeling out of the writing room, so it doesn’t interfere. The poem isn’t about them or about what I might project onto them. I don’t think of the speaker as myself, but as a narrator I inhabit who’s in service of the poem. She has access to material that’s hanging around my consciousness (and below it) and uses it at her own discretion. She feels free to make things up. Her perceptions and observations are different from mine. Since writing isn’t about the writer, but the writing, if I sense it’s me speaking, I pause, examine the underlying beliefs and assumptions in a line, a sentence, and consider how else the poem could shake out. What if I wrote the exact opposite of the capital T truth appearing on the page? (If it presents as capital T, I know it’s suspect.) What if a line I wrote as an open-ended question is really a statement brimful with conviction? What if the situation I’m writing about were a practical joke not a tragedy?
E: Your role in the fashion world was one related to sustainability. I'm curious as to how your training in poetry may have informed your presence in the workplace, or your ways of thinking about sustainability there. They seem connected somehow, even if only tangentially. Would you agree?
C: My mind is attracted to complex problems, creating coherence out of chaos—or at least making that chaos visible in its beauty, threat, possibility, heartbreak. I tend to see in patterns—I can’t always make the patterns out in their entirety or communicate them at first. They’re swirly—some parts are distinct, bright and clear, other parts recede into murk. I start with a clear part, a thread end I can pick out and follow to render the pattern visible, elicit its meaning. Poets expose meaning through craft, the process and practice of writing infused with imagination. In the business world the parallel craft is called strategy. I led vision and strategy in my corporate role—that too starts with a speck of an idea that you make real through collaborative processes and organizational structures that give it form.
The problem of sustainability in the apparel industry is complex—even more so when I and others first pioneered it. Nearly impossible to solve within the confines of a profit-driven system (most of the clothes people wear are derived from fossil fuel and even when wearing so-called “natural” fibers, the processes from plant to garment is crashing and burning the planet along with the workers involved in these processes). Given my mind’s predilections to solving the challenge of making clothes sustainably appealed to me, just like the challenge of making art appeals to me.
I’ve also come to think of making art as a spiritual practice that echoes the practice of Tikkun Olam —which translates as repairing or mending the world. It derives from a Rabbinic origin story: When God’s divine light, contracted into vessels scattered across the earth, shattered the vessels, it created the world and returned to the divine source. The light that refused to return, that clung to the broken shards, became the source of evil. Tikkun Olam is a practice meant to heal the brokenness. I think of writing poems in the same way—not that my specific poems do this, but that practicing poetry is a form of repair just as practicing sustainability is.
E: Amid your life change with your job, and then during the pandemic, and all the other political unrest, has your approach to writing changed? Do you think about writing differently in the midst of all this change? Or has it been more of a grounding practice?
C: A few weeks after I left my corporate job of twenty years, a sentence appeared in my mind. I knew it was a prose sentence, not the start of a poem, and that it contained a blueprint for a longer piece, so I followed the sentence. The piece travels from the 1950’s, post-WWII prosperity to the American Dream’s failure as the century advances. In the 21st century the weltanschauung trending in the business world is that corporations can “do good” and make a shit-ton of money, that business will fix everything in the world that needs fixing. (Including the wealth inequality gap?!) “Conscious capitalism” it seems to me is an oxymoron that turns its back on reality. That we (or some of us) fall for the American Dream’s leftovers to tolerate that reality, that we (or some of us) work, get married, have kids inside a dome of self-deception, became an interesting subject to me. If anyone still believed the country’s murderous impulse toward Black Americans had changed in 400 years, that deception was blown apart when George Floyd, choked to death by a police officer, entered the national consciousness.
I thought a lot about power, how and in whom it’s vested, after I left my job. For the first time in decades my life was not defined by an external identity; when I left that identity behind, I realized the authority I had was the role’s, not mine (another form of deception to think power conferred by an institution is yours). I had to get over that. I missed most about the workplace collaborating with others, a sense of a shared purpose even if that purpose was misplaced. I was seeking new structures, rhythms, a life populated by others, which had not yet taken shape when Covid hit. Writing is an anchor as it’s always been—a rhythm, a structure to the day that I can count on, an imagination that vivifies an ordinary morning I can count on—whether the writing is any good or not isn’t exactly beside the point but isn’t the point either. Nothing appeared to be ending, not the police killings, not the raw divisive politics, not the pandemic, not my transition and none of the longer prose pieces I was writing. Last winter, when the vaccine’s release coincided with the eruption of the Delta variant in India, I started writing short fiction—a paragraph, a page or two in length. I missed the sense of ongoing completion writing poems satisfies; I needed to finish something, to place a period, the end, somewhere in my life. I was surprised the subject of office work showed up in these pieces—I didn’t think I’d write about it until it had receded farther into the past. I wasn’t trained as a fiction writer; I don’t know what I’m doing; in this the writing process mirrors my life: I’m learning it, constructing it as I go.
E: Your book found me in an unsurprising manner: my MFA program. Before school, I worked in retail. I felt your book was written just as much for the version of me on the sales floor as it was the poetry student studying syntax and line breaks in a classroom. Do you write with an audience in mind? Who do you hope this book finds?
C: As a reader—I’m speaking personally here, not as a poet reading for craft—the poems that have meant the most to me are those that reveal something about life, something I haven’t been able to put my finger on. The poem knows paradox and contradiction are inherent in human experience. Its movement sorts, processes, distills a human conundrum, which can be amorphous at the poem’s start. It doesn’t try to find a neat resolution; by paying attention it changes the nature of a problem, revives a pulse. The act of reading is the act of living out the poem’s movements, finding its shape and pulse within yourself. It frees a part of you, releases you from who you were when you started reading the poem to who you become by the poem’s end. I suppose my audience is someone who wants to engage in that process of discovery through the language and the structure of poetry. Not an audience per se, but fellow humans for whom an encounter with poetry creates a sense of freedom, of being alive and present in our own lives.
I’ve thought a lot about work and the role it plays in western society. I didn’t know if there would be an audience for it. Most of us have to work. As a form it has its upsides—we learn how competent we are and what we’re competent at—often but not always a source of joy; we learn how to deal with other people, we’re surprised by our own primitive reactions that workplace dynamics engender, and if we follow a reaction to its root, we learn something about ourselves and how to navigate life with less suffering involved—in short, work can be a form through which we grow as adults. Work is also the form through which we “earn a living”—we likely wouldn’t subject ourselves to someone else’s authority if we didn’t have to or give a job the largest share of our time and the entire middle chunk of our lives. Writing this book was a way of getting more curious about that, about the paradox “earn a living” coins, since work can feel like the opposite of living—organizations are more interested in their own heartbeat than in the individual’s.
E: What are you reading right now? Who have been your greatest influences?
C: I’m writing prose and teaching myself how to write layers of consciousness into stories by reading Virginia Woolf, Alice Munroe. I’m writing about the American Dream and its illusion—Chekhov’s characters think status, prestige—the right title, the right house, the right things in the house—will convert into a happy life—but when they achieve material success, they become miserable, go crazy, die—the surface of a world made shiny by class shatters. I always have a stack of poetry books at my desk and by my bed. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Fanny Howe, Terrance Hayes occupy the stack. Karen Solie, Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito poems, Louise Gluck, Thomas Transtromer, Yannos Ritsos, along with others rotate in and out. When I’m trying to break up with a conventional train of thought and syntax, I might reach for Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Vallejo. Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich were early influences.
I have another reading track organized around what I’m thinking about, a problem I’m trying to reconcile. When I first left the corporate world, for example, I was thinking about whether the situation that spurred my exit could be described as evil (versus viewing it through a psychoanalytic lens—fck-d up family dynamics erupting/repeating as fck-d up work dynamics). I went through a good-and-evil reading jag as I tried to make sense of it: Hannah Arendt, a micro-dose of Nietzsche, Susan Sontag’s essay on fascism; various creation myths—how evil broke into a world defined by good; Job; Goethe’s Faust; Beowulf (which struck me as an uncanny parallel to corporate America—sub the hero king for a CEO bound to the same the hero-warrior model, incapable of relinquishing that identity, the consequence of which is doom to the citizens). More recently, in making sense of a world that doesn’t make sense, Audre Lorde’s essays, James Baldwin’s The Fire Inside, Ibram X Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, Ayad Ahktar’s Homeland Elegies.
E: Is there anything that's been on your mind lately you'd like to share? Any advice for a student writer?
C: For the artists I know, making art is the core of what makes us feel alive (assuming the tech futurists aren’t right about us humans being merely a simulation!). Given the vicissitudes of daily life—working, commuting, making meals, doing laundry, raising children, anything that occupies our hours—it can be challenging to create the space for reflection and the time for the sheer labor making art requires. I found a specific level of commitment necessary to be a writer not in theory but in practice. While I was working fulltime and raising a child these practices included: showing up at my desk x times a week, y number of minutes at a minimum, even if I was writing badly or little happened, enacting Jung’s instruction: “Quietly do the next necessary thing.”. Before I wrote, I read poems to deepen my craft, expand my writing strategies and capacities. I kept two notebooks: one where I played with ideas, images, stray thoughts that could feed poems and another comprised of a word list I added to and reached for while writing to keep language fresh, surprising—the notebooks were both resources when my mind was spent, which it often was. But once I fell in—at some point while writing I experience a sensation that I’ve left the two-dimensional surface of the page and fallen through the words into a dimension where language accrues color, texture, depth—once I fell in my mind sparked again. If you love language more than you love yourself, you find a way to keep writing.