Candace Walsh on Queer Poetry
A discussion about her new book 'Iridescent Pigeons'
This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends. Upgrade your subscription for more, including weekly dispatches from the lesbian internet, monthly playlists, and a free sticker.
This week I had the pleasure of chatting with Candace Walsh, a writer, teacher, and editor whose poetry book Iridescent Pigeons is out now. I asked Candace about her process and perspective on writing poetry, her inspirations, her thoughts on style and form, Virginia Woolf, and why poetry has historically resonated with queer women so much. If you like this interview, check out Iridescent Pigeons, and support independent publishing.
What would you say is the origin story of this collection?
I began pulling my poems together into a collection while I was procrastinating finishing my dissertation in the summer of 2023. By this time, many of my recent poems had been published by different journals, which encouraged me to attempt the next step. I floated the idea to my dear friend and fellow multi-genre creative writer Anna Chotlos, and she was very encouraging. She offered to help me identify the main themes and choose the order of the poems. That was so valuable. It’s amazing how unaware we can be as creative people to patterns that are quite salient to others. A few months later, Yellow Arrow Publishing selected my manuscript for publication. I was ecstatic!
To go deeper into the origin story, I wrote a lot of poems in high school and college, and wanted to center poetry in my life. I applied to Brooklyn College’s MFA program during my senior undergraduate year, got in, but didn’t finish all my required credits so I deferred. As a working-class person who had been supporting myself since age 19, it soon became clear that I needed to keep working because I couldn’t afford grad school. Poetry dropped away for many years, apart from the occasional breakthrough poem. Being back in a poetry workshop many years later opened the floodgates.
I also had to give myself room to be a poet in a culture that remains very binary. I studied fiction in my MFA and PhD programs, and so claiming my poet identity in conjunction with my prose-writing identity blew up that false binary, and supported me in showing up in liberated, unlimited ways. Embodying being a poet and a prose writer is in conversation with other complex truths I hold dear: intersectionality, coming out later in life, queer motherhood, and pursuing graduate education in my early 40s (I received my doctorate in May 2024).
You play with several different forms of poetry in the book. What drew you to the sapphic stanza as a poetic form to explore? What does Sappho mean to you as a queer poet and writer?
Sappho’s line “Sweet mother, I cannot weave—slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl” remains a hard relate for queer women everywhere.
The sapphic stanza is amazing, and similar to queer history, it’s undeservedly obscure. Like a haiku, it has a limited number of lines and syllables: the first three lines have 11 syllables and the fourth line has 5 syllables. It also involves a particular poetic meter. Engaging with the form is challenging but also approachable.
I sought out a queer poetic ancestor in Sappho, but was stymied by how much of her work was lost and the fragmented nature of what remains. Composing sapphic stanzas felt like a way to converse with and be mentored by Sappho across time. I loved the discipline of it, as well as its brevity.
Virginia Woolf is another queer writer you invoke in these poems, which often revolve around unexpected or unacknowledged expressions of love. What strikes you about Woolf’s work (and perhaps life) in terms of expressing those private moments or feelings, particularly as a queer woman herself?
On the one hand, I acknowledge that Virginia Woolf is often centered as a Modernist woman writer in ways that exclude so many fine writers of the time. For example, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Lolly Willowes is stunning, and should be more well-known. But that doesn’t take away from Woolf’s brilliance.
Mainly, I was inspired by letters Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West wrote to each other. These letters expressed desire, longing, jealousy, fondness, pique, and things they noticed while apart. Their idiom is specific, warm, randy, ardent, and playful, and captures the enjoyment they experienced turning their literary talent and skill on each other. It aroused responses in me: continuations, celebrations. “I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds” is so erotic. This line Woolf wrote in a letter to Sackville-West in 1927 became the title of one of my poems. I also love this passage in To the Lighthouse, which elucidates the fraught, salubrious experience of a woman wondering at the sexual attraction she feels for another woman. This is so often an inarticulate experience, especially given the lack of clarity around the possibility of same-sex desire at the time--and sometimes even today. Yet Woolf paints the sky of our minds with Lily’s explorations of how to capture this phenomenon, her desire to become “one with the object one adored” “like waters poured into one jar”!
“Sitting on the floor with her [Lily’s] arms round Mrs. Ramsay's knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?”
It's gorgeous. I see Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body as a continuation of Woolf’s pinning down of the ephemerality of desire in a context of scant or disparaging social acknowledgment.
One of your poems is a cento, composed of lines from Virginia Woolf's novel Jacob's Room (also the source material for the book's title). Jacob's Room centers on the title character, but is told almost entirely through the perspectives of other characters. Do you see all your poems as having a distinct perspective or subject position? Does it vary from poem to poem? Do your poems have an addressee?
My confession is that I haven’t yet read Jacob’s Room; I composed the cento from that novel to choose Woolf’s phrases to create a kind of story without being influenced by the source’s narrative. I tend to be hovering right behind my poems’ personae. I was most inspired by love, limerence, romantic possibility—and that has remained a source of inspiration. That scope has been expanded by the ways my human experiences have expanded. There’s a poem to my son, written while he was attending a free international high school in Austria. There’s another poem from the point of view of two odd socks, looking askance at me for agreeing to let him move with his father (who remarried an Austrian woman) to go to school there for five years. He spent summers and winter holidays with me, but it was still a significant heartache to miss him for most of the year. This heartache coexisted with a heart-happiness that he was receiving an education we never could have afforded in the U.S. How did my subconscious sort that out? It placed the judgmental point of view in two very silly inanimate objects in which I could express those thoughts less devastatingly. And when writing about a ferociously painful friendship breakup, I addressed myself from a distance, in second person. I see in retrospect that it was a way to make the excavations the poem required, and the poem itself, possible.
Sometimes I’m writing to an unknown reader, with the intention of saying, “Hey, you’re not the only person who feels this way or lived through this.” And sometimes I’m telling a story, as in the early paternal rejection I experienced in “S(k)in” that has had a lifelong totemic power. Transmuting it into poetry gives me subjectivity and satisfaction while also being a kind of unburdening.
And although the range of my poetic subject matter has expanded, there are still plenty of romantic love poems in the collection, written over time, mainly to my wife, Laura (who is very midwestern and private, and finds this to be slightly mortifying) but also to women I’ve been intrigued by, infatuated with, or loved since I came out in 2007. It’s safe to say queer women are hungry to see queer love and desire expressed, given the paucity of women’s queer desire represented in poetry’s canon, and the dearth of opportunities for non-creative writing nerds to encounter poetry in general. We, as mammals, are very inter-relative. We physiologically fade out without enough connection and recognition of our selves, love, desire, and affinities reflected in others. Whenever I write a poem I feel good about, it feels like a joy balloon slowly expands in my chest and sticks around for a couple of days. I feel that way when I read queer women’s poetry, too—I relate, I recognize, I feel deeply known. I hope readers of Iridescent Pigeons come away with that sensation as well.
I love what you said about poetry's ability to make the reader feel known. In that vein, do you find poetry to be a particularly useful form for expressing queer or lesbian experiences, embodiments, desires, longings, etc.? Sappho’s influence seems to point to an almost primordial connection or resonance between lesbianism and poetry, so I guess I’m wondering if you see any sort of kinship between style/form and perhaps certain emotional and cultural experiences of queerness.
The Venn diagram of poetry, mysteriousness, and queer womanhood can be a circle. We ask, “How do I know she’s into girls?” and “Does she like me that way?” Poems have inscrutable qualities, too. Unlike writers of other genres, poets have ample permission to be oblique, to include puzzling and coded elements, to create a feeling out of words rather than just a knowing. That said, I use mystery sparingly because I am not trying to frustrate my readers. There is one short poem in my book called “Honey, Nest” that isn’t meant to make sense. It’s meant to be associative and evocative.
Queer women have historically had to express their desire in coded ways, too, navigating through intersecting mazes of social censure, shame, danger, and marginalization. Desire itself can arise like a code to be broken, as in the case of Therese in The Price of Salt, who spends a lot of time trying to figure what she is feeling, and if it’s possible to be in love with a woman because she wasn’t raised with a frame of reference for queer desire and love. I refer to it in this excerpt from “Dogs and Their Lesbians”:
"It reminds me of queer love,
how they used to try to
cut off or drug-numb what offended,
how we sniffed out the invisible
and guess-read the signals,
pretending to be cats, aloof and skittish
when we felt like dogs, ecstatic and lickish.”
Even though our society is now a lot more accepting than it was pre-Stonewall, people are still attacking queer folks in numerous daily ways, from the extreme—gay-bashing, being cut off from family, discrimination—to the subtle and invisible. Our hard-won legal rights are constantly under attack. That hostile climate impinges on the ways we show up as amorous queer women. Luckily, queer poetry is a delicious mode of communication and representation, happily one that flies under the radar of most homophobes.
What other queer women writers resonate with you?
It’s hard to narrow it down, and I will end up forgetting brilliant writers, but here’s a list of queer women and/or non-binary writers whose work—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, with some being multi-genre—resonates with me: Gabrielle Calvacoressi, Melissa Faliveno, Melissa Febos, Ariel Gore, Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Nomi Stone, Jeanne Thornton, Alexis deVeaux, and Shannon K. Winston. A special shout-out to poet and creative nonfiction writer Anna Chotlos, Iridescent Pigeons cover artist, who just published a banger of an essay in Craft Literary on creating a dating app profile.
What is the optimal writing environment for you? In terms of spaces, objects, sounds, etc.
I love my office at home, where I’m surrounded by art, books, and other talismans by friends, family, and people I admire. When I look up from my laptop, I see an embroidered “Keep Writing!” piece underscored by a stitched chicory flower and stem; the magnificently voluptuous cocoa and cream quatrefoil business card from lesbian-couple-owned restaurant Via Carota in New York City; an embroidered uterus I made during the pandemic that went on to illustrate a one-sentence short story I wrote, inspired by Cate Blanchett; paintings of women’s faces by Ann marie Houghtailing; an assemblage work by Patricia Chapman, a print by Appalachian artist Fiona Avocado, and my two twin Fukien tea bonsai trees. I don’t tend to listen to music but sometimes it helps me to focus or evoke a mood related to memories. I also like working in cafes, amid life, but also apart, occasionally pausing to be inspired by a style detail or overheard conversation.
What are your current obsessions – literary or otherwise?
Literary: counternarratives like Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and James by Percival Everett; rereading Jane Eyre; the essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” by Audre Lorde; the Dreaming Oracle divination deck by Melissa Chianta and Cara Roxanne; the Lesbrary—Sapphic Book Reviews website; the braided essay form; Moomintroll and Tove Jansson; and letterpress broadsides.
Extra-literary or literary-adjacent: I’ve been obsessed since childhood with Hello Kitty, rendered in the primary colors palette. Since adulthood: the painter Hilma af Klint; the intersection of Modernism, queerness, and New Mexico; unique stationery and high-quality journals; maintaining an excessive assortment of postage stamps; the fragrances Silver Mountain Water (Creed) and Harlot by Voyage et Cie. Mushrooms, blue speckled eggs, writing with EnerGel Clena pens, camping equipment and campfire cooking, walks in nature, the island of Crete (where my maternal grandfather was born). I also love watching the wide variety of birds—nuthatches, goldfinches, house finches, starlings, grackles, woodpeckers, bluejays, and let’s not forget tufted titmice—nibble away on Laura’s meticulously stocked bird feeder complex.
Then there are all my favorite femme trappings: liquid eyeliner, boldly patterned suits, chunky platform loafers, vintage-inspired lingerie, RMS makeup, and silk scarves, some inherited from my wife Laura’s mother Lenene, and some collected over the years, my most recent acquisition the Paul Smith Swirl scarf I impulse-bought in the Copenhagen airport as a good luck charm for an academic job interview (I got the job). I am not a minimalist, have you noticed?
Thanks again to Candace for chatting with me. You can purchase Iridescent Pigeons here.
