Maggie Nelson has published two collections of poetry, Shiner (2001) and The Latest Winter (2003), both from Hanging Loose Press. She has also taught literature and writing at Wesleyan, the Graduate Writing Program of New School University, and Pratt Institute.

Jane Carr: In the book, you reexamine, and revive the life and death of your aunt, talk about her death in the midst of a notorious killing spree. What drove you to write the collection now? Does it indicate a development in your relationship to Jane's memory, or to your relationship with yourself?

Maggie Nelson: The short answer is that I've been working on it a long time, because actually the first four pieces in the book were written when I was 22. And I had been doing a bunch of different kinds of writing and a lot of it was circulating around these dreams, or hauntings about being shot. Honestly, it sounds disingenuous, but I literally didn't really know that I was writing about my aunt for a long time. It just didn't really quite occur to me. And then when it did, and I realized…then I started doing the research. And I wasn't really writing a lot during the research, I was just researching. I guess you could say I've been working on it, in and out, all through my adult life. And then it was in the past couple of years that I gathered enough that it really made sense to sit down and dig it out.

JC: That really makes sense. The idea of something being present for a long time and then becoming realized.

MN: Yes. And since Jane died when she was 23, it felt like a parameter of a certain kind of adulthood to get over, and even though I'm much older than that now, somehow in my 20s, in my late 20s when I was working on the book it felt like…you know, she had been in graduate school, she had been a law student, she hadn't really gotten a chance to move into the next phase. She was about to move into the next phase of her life. And I think it was probably fairly natural because I was circling around that same time, I started getting more interested in what happened to her.

JC: Of course, like myself, many will be interested in your choice and uses of form in Jane Fanny Howe writes of your book, "Poets who want to write fiction and fiction writers who are sick of their limits, take a good look at this book…it is a model for change." Perhaps can you respond to her quote and talk about your aspirations with form?

MN: The form was a fight, just because for a long time, unlike most things I've written, I really had no idea what I was doing for most of the writing of the book. It was very frustrating at times. Other writing I've done, other poetry, other prose, has come very readily to me. And this book did not. There was kind of a parallel fight between trying to get to Jane and what happened to her and trying to figure out how to contain her story in an unconventional way. And it's not as if I set out to say I want this book to be "experimental" with a capital E, it was more that because of the tabloid quality of her story and because you watch "Law and Order" and pick up any day the New York Post and these stories about women's rape and murder are told so incessantly, it really felt like the book needed a form that would disrupt that kind of narrative. So it was partly that and partly because I'm a poet that it ended up the way that it was.

JC: That touches on an element of Jane that I really want to ask about. In poems like "Demographics" and "Never Walk Alone—Even in the Daytime," you convey the sense of urgency and fear moving outward into the community, and in poems like "Lies," you provide the same insight on a more inward level into a child's method of instinctively internalizing communal unrest or uneasiness. There is something that seems very nostalgic about these renderings…the sense of foreboding that accompanied serial killings in the 1960s and 1970s (Manson, Bundy), and the fear children of the 1970s and 1980s grew up with as a result. I related especially to your other poem, also called "Lies," in which the speaker remembers that in the third grade she "became increasingly convinced that the driver of each passing car was slowing down beside me, about to ask me to get in." It seemed reminiscent of the "safety first" grade school demonstrations where the policeman or social worker teaches you how to scream "no" or "tell a teacher." Kids could really feel the unarticulated fear in the adults around them. Now, today, with Amber Alerts and the domination of the media by Scott Peterson and Robert Blake, even just the rearrangement of what terror means, our culture seems to have a different relationship to fear and to violence. What do you make of this, especially as it pertains to women?

MN: God, what a good question. I don't know about the nostalgia. It's interesting that you would say that. Nostalgia seems more for something you choose to have back. But I think the link you make between terrorism and serial killing is very interesting in terms of fear. The paranoia to me is more in terms of the idea of inside/outside you mention, like the guy they got in Kansas, the BTK guy. In all the articles his neighbors say, "Can you believe he just lived right next door? I let him into my house." It's the same paranoia with terrorism—that people are infiltrating, and they're infiltrating the computers and infiltrating people's minds. I think certainly it really started with things like Patty Hearst, the whole idea of mind control or brainwashing.

JC: Of course. I hadn't thought of that.

MN: I guess to me what's most interesting is two things – one, the fact that terrorism and serial killing remain fairly remote threats in the culture we live in, which is so steeped in violence. The abuse that most women experience, sexual and physical, is at home. Not from a serial killer or a terrorist. So in a way, especially now, with the war in Iraq in the news and not the violence around the corner, there's this mask of violence we export and participate in and remain fixated on is remote, distracts us from the violence that we're complicit in or that might be present in our communities. The second thing I was going to say, and I think this is more complicated for women as you mentioned, growing up, that women are always given these mixed messages, especially around when Jane died, in the 1960s, just before the women's movement: be very very afraid, your safety is always endangered. And then also women were told to try to be bold, to take back the streets, to do all these different things. That produced a lot of difficulty for young women in the 1970s, when I was growing up.

JC: As in the 1980s for me.

MN: Yes, absolutely. The same mixed messages.

JC: Jane's lover, father and alleged killer make appearances in the book. What did you intend the reader to make of the figures of men in Jane? If the Poe quotation you use in "A Philosophy of Composition" is true, if "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world," does it take a woman to question that declaration? Is it important that the looking, the note-taking, is done by a woman, independent of the fact that you, the poet, are a woman?

MN: Yes. I think when you say that it's important that a woman is gazing back, that is obviously partly why I chose the cover that I did, which has Jane looking very confrontational and very awkward in early childhood, looking back. And it's also—I see you have Sylvia Plath here—the epigraph that I chose for the book is obviously a woman poet figuring herself as Sherlock Holmes. That's been a cocky move for women to use for a long time. A lot of people have written about the role of women in detective fiction as a field of feminist inquiry. I'm kind of interested in that but I'm more interested in things beyond "women in a man's world, she's vulnerable but tough," and all that. I think as a writer, to become a detective, to write actual detective work, that's what Sylvia Plath is doing her poem.

JC: We have questions about that coming. First, I'm curious, what's the origin of the Poe quotation?

MN: A good question. You may have to check this. I'm pretty sure "A Philosophy of Composition" is his famous description of the poem "The Raven," which links Poe to your last question about men. You know, one has a complicated relationship with men, and I'm a fan of Poe, but Poe was describing glibly and perhaps notoriously facilely how to make the perfect poem. Which is of course part of the fight of my book, is how to find the form for the book. And he's saying, what's the perfect amount of lines? Oh, 100 lines. What's the perfect topic? Dead women. All these things about how he wrote "The Raven" and so he's asking himself what's the most melancholy thing of all. And my including it, it's not just an indictment of him, though it is that, and that attitude about dead women as being a baseline for poetry.

JC: Mute women.

MN: Which is in fact, a literal thing about the myth of Apollo and Daphne. The birth of poetry is when she turns into a laurel tree to avoid rape and becomes mute. He takes the laurels off of the tree and makes bestowing them a poetic rape. That's also what I'm also trying to get at with the Poe—that first poem, the problem there.

JC: You mentioned that you chose the photo of Jane for the cover with a specific purpose. You wanted to step with her outside the parameters of female beauty. Toward the end of the book, you caution the reader that Jane was not conventionally beautiful. Can you elaborate on that idea?

MN: I feel a little guilty—I don't want to overstate the case. It wasn't like Jane was particularly homely or anything. But I think that I've become very unfortunately attuned, you can imagine, to dead women in the papers. Just today, one said, "Blind Woman Raped." Remember that woman who was killed a little while ago on the Lower East Side?

JC: The actress?

MN: Yes. And the headline was something like, "Beauty Slain." It was all about how beautiful she was. And I think that there are many ways in which we make lives more grievable than other lives. One way we make them more grievable is by picking a feature like beauty, or like a being a celebrity or being an American that makes them somehow hold more weight. That's a very ethically unsound way of weighing the value of a life. So I think it that sense, you know, I don't like it. And this happens a lot, even people trying to be nice like about it, in Jane's obituaries, they all say, "she had so much going for her," "she was so smart," "the whole world was in front of her," and to me, someone's death matters, even if that person has no options in front of them or the world isn't their oyster. I wanted to say something about that with the cover. Beauty in a sense stands in for all those other features.

JC: Going back a little bit, I want to return to some of the more formal questions in Jane. Do you see the divisions within the book as episodic or like chapters, or in more of a theatrical way, as acts or scene changes?

MN: They're definitely chronological. I think scene changes is actually a good way to see them, only because there's a way in which—how to say it—there's a way in which if there's a doubling between two people, beyond postulating the doubling between Jane and me, there's other doubling like between me and my sister, my mother and Jane, even that piece called "Jane-Emily." But I think when you put two things together in a doubled way, you kind of fall out of chronology. That doubling is always transpiring in the present. So I think in that sense seeing them as scene changes is probably smarter.

JC: You introduce Jane to the reader through the excerpts from her journals, first as a younger child and then as an adolescent and young adult. What was it like for you to work with those texts? Did it feel like primary source material, or were you shaping the words and the voice, to resuscitate her imagination?

MN: It was great to work with them originally. I feel bad that you lose her handwriting, her hilarious underlining and exclamation points, the way that a typical girl's diary matures, the way you can tell with any source material that someone is getting older by their handwriting. And I felt a little guilty at the start about messing around with her words on the page, but her writing is fairly trite, in terms of not having major revelations about experiences, but at the same time, she has this kind of weird, very Emily Dickinson-esque thing where she leaves off with dashes and she gets distracted a lot. And I tried, while messing with how it looked on the page, I also tried to preserve that a little bit because I got the sense that she really was both a gusher, as my mother had said, and distractible and weirdly spacey at times. I felt that I was being true to her in the way that I was going about using them [her journals].

JC: In truth, I had decided to ask you this before you brought up the doubling and now, I think it's a whole different question, but I'm still going to ask it. Which is, do you see the book as an elegy?

MN: Actually, I used to joke that a less hip publisher than Soft Skull would have made me title the book Jane: An Elegy instead of Jane: A Murder. I see it less an elegy than as reading something to somebody so they can effectively cross over to another side, like from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I always felt that my family, in its Scandinavian Midwestern repression, believed that it somehow hadn't happened, that the subject of Jane was literally dead as soon as she was dead. I just could never understand it, it seemed wrong to erase someone. I felt that there was more to say.

JC: That leads me to another question, about the poem "The Fire," in which your family claims to have burned all of Jane's belongings on the Law Quad at the University of Michigan after her death. When I read it, it felt like such a powerfully constructed metaphor. Is there a pretense of truth to that story?

MN: I don't think so. This is what happens, as I'm sure you've already discovered, when you try to get answers from your family about things, you're just astonished at the woods you get drawn into. In that poem, "The Fire," and in the other poem, "The Call" – my mother remembers Jane making a call for help – they're not true, but the more I press, the more my mom says, "I don't know, I still think there might have been a fire."

JC: I was hoping you could talk a little more about the earliest of the Four Dreams. Did you begin with those because they were first in the writing? You open the book with these dreamlike, often nightmarish poems, which make the reader almost a somnambulist, walking through it. Why did you begin with these dreams?

MN: They were first in the writing, but what they dramatized to me was the sense of repetitiveness, which has to do with the happiness of waking up from a nightmare and realizing that you indeed have not been shot. And then each dream would then deny that and say no you are in danger, no you have been hurt, and I think that kind of relates back to what we were talking about before, about growing up with that kind of flip-flop from being a bold unimpeded woman making a claim on public space and then being taught to be terrified. So I think I wanted to start with that sense of repetitiveness but also along the lines of my aunt being like a hungry ghost. I had this idea of keeping her walking throughout the whole book. She has journal entries where she says she wants to get out, away, make it exciting or when she talks about going to France, getting on train cars when she doesn't know where they're going. And also because she was murdered en route, in a car, and because she had had a history of doing some hitchhiking, I just felt like there was a real sense of rambling I wanted to start the book with. And at the end, in the last piece of hers, she says she's going home. Of course she never makes it home, so in a sense, I always felt her to always be out there still, walking around.

JC: That's so strong, the idea of being perpetually en route. In the penultimate section, you and your mother travel together to Ann Arbor and experience that. The language, especially in the cemetery poems, is so dark and beautiful and yet there is this force building behind it. I think the reader is left wondering what the ultimate toll or impact that trip has on the relationship between mother and daughter, and the relationship between mother and sister that the daughter is left to observe and wonder about?

MN: Well, it was a really heavy trip, and part of it is precisely for that reason, which is what you very astutely note about witnessing your parents in a life they had before you. It was in a sense very alienating—I didn't ever know my mom with a sister. And in another sense it felt liberating, like women on the road. It felt very, very important to go back to the place where Jane was found and just stand there. And to just stand there with my mom, as two women who are not dead, who were not murdered and who had traveled there alone. Certainly I'm much more independent than my mother was and she has been drastically more independent than her mother was. And for Jane, she was murdered in 1969. For the girls in that community, you were talking about the fear, the best that they did for the women at Michigan back then was give them a curfew. We're not talking about self-defense or even moving in groups. Nothing. Thankfully, things have changed and violence against women of this nature has become a serious issue since then.

JC: What you just said brings up a few of the questions I had about comparative cultural context. The book is steeped in cultural imagery from the end of 1960s, its activism and sense of change. Can you speak to how this interacts with your own relationship with Jane?

MN: I think about that poem that says Jane wants to change the world, and they say that none of us can. I think that probably some of the doubling that my family noted growing up was that I too was very politically engaged and wanted to change the world. I think that activism has taken a beating since that time but it's also stronger than ever since that time. One really heartening thing for me to do is to look online. When Jane died, someone made an award in her name, the Jane Mixer Award for Social Justice, which goes to the person who's done the most social justice work at U of M law school that year. Charting the recipients on their web site is a very interesting and heartening way for me to track what's happened since the late 1960s to the present in terms of what social justice has meant in the world.

JC: You've talked about how Jane really wanted to change the world, but she faced a really turbulent social, cultural, moral and landscape in her early 20s. She has these fierce convictions that really come across. There is a youth to her passion, as if it's a missile looking to find what it's going to lock on. Do you ever imagine what Jane would be like today, either as a 23-year-old or a woman in late middle age?

MN: I really wish she were around. One thing I'll say is about the journal entries I used was that in the last year or so of her life. According to her fiancé Phil, she was really finally losing some of the crippling self-doubt that is so evident throughout the journals, via protesting the war, via working for several candidates, via trying to figure out what kind of civil rights work she wanted to do—her missile was just starting to find its target. I don't have any writing of hers from this time to know what that was like, but it's not so much a cliché of "she would have made a difference," it's more just a feeling that she had the kind of drive that really would have let her stick with whatever kind of activism she wanted to do. I wish I knew more about 23-year-olds. Amazing people do amazing things every day.

JC: And now back to Sylvia Plath. We talked about the quotation from "The Detective," one of my favorite poems. You choose the last three lines. The final pronouncement to "make notes" indicates both a departure but also a legacy. The idea of being left behind with only images and language to redact into knowledge is really active in the book. Was this what you were trying to take away from this poem?

MN: There is so much in that poem. It's a poem I've spent a lot of time with, writing about earlier in my life. That poem is just endless, as are the last three lines. The reason I allowed those to stand alone is first the figuration of Plath as the detective, and also because Plath was not a careless poet at all. I had this imagination that within this carefully constructed poem that she had made the indication to "make notes," and had behind left this missing text with such careless note. My book is not careless but is much more a baggy monster than Plath. And then Jane, of course, her journals are almost notes. In a sense "make notes" was my permission to myself to find a form. That whole poem I think works on a trick, that the body is supposedly missing but the body is everywhere because earlier in that poem, the body has been evaporated, when she says "we walk on air." If you know Plath's work you know that the moon often stands for her speaker and that the crow often stands for Ted Hughes, so there's a sense that the trick is feigning lack of knowledge about what has transpired about the body when in fact the body permeates everything. Which to me was very much related to questions about why men kill women, why men hate women, the kinds of questions that recur later in the book about John Collins [the man convicted in the Michigan serial killings, though his guilt in Jane's case is long questioned]. Is this the answer or not, hidden in plain sight?

JC: Would you consider Plath a big influence? Does she influence your other work as well?

MN: I love Plath, I really do. Which is a surprise perhaps since my other work is much less dark. I think for this book she's important—and this is why people think of her as a bad role model or a non-feminist. I picked the epigraph because it was written in the early 60s when around the same time I'm talking about Jane's childhood. And Plath, in her journals, wanted very much to be a rambler, to be invisible. There's another coded Plath quote in my book, "girls who would be god," which is what Plath infamously said about herself. There was a kind of ferocity Plath had that was very impeded by her times and her psychology, her class, and herself. I don't applaud a lot of those circumstances, nor would I want to be frustrated as Plath was, but I think her position was analogous in the 60s to some of the situations in the book.

JC: Are there other influences you like to talk about, or don't like to talk about?

MN: So many. For this book, I read as many book-length poems as I could find that told stories. There really were very few that helped me. The few I would say helped me were Michael Ondaatje's work, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and also Coming Through Slaughter. They really gave me inspiration for what I wanted to do not only in form but also use of documentary. Both of those books swirl around the dead person and lore and they were important to me. And Muriel Rukeyser has the Book of the Dead, which is about mining disaster in West Virginia in the 1930s and that sense of witness, how poetry could witness disaster, was important to me.

JC: You have influences in your other work?

MN: I have to think about Frank O'Hara, Plath, Robert Creeley, and Paul Celan as people who have taught me a lot about approaching external events via a kind of presence, mindscaping you might say. And when Robert Creeley, who I know, read some of Jane early on, and he said something about it not being inhabited or present enough. And while I don't think I ever quite got it in Jane—it had to be more documentary than that—it taught me how to inhabit the internal mindspace.

JC: What are you working on now?

MN: I'm working on a few things. One is this whole can of worms that I haven't even mentioned yet, but my aunt's case has been reopened. This time, what's happening needs to be addressed in prose, because it's too wild. So there's that. And then, I have another kind of mixed-genre project, centered on the color blue.

JC: It's a good color. My favorite color.

MN: Mine too. Really fantastic.

JC: I don't know where things are with the case, but I hope it progresses well. I don't even know an appropriate way to express that sentiment.

MN: Again, this sounds a little perverse in terms of the normative narrative about justice and the rest of it, but given that it's mostly out of my family's hands, I think the best thing to do is just to hope not for any particular outcome but just that we can continue to deal well with whatever happens, because we're not going to be able to alter what transpires. My family has lived with this as unsolved for a long time, and I think it would be a psychological mistake to suddenly think that the skies will open and there will be a magic closure. I've always wanted to go witness a death sentence bring carried out, and then follow up with the victim's family, who said all they want is closure, all they want is punishment, to see if that really works. I think closure is overrated as a concept.

JC: You've thought of it as open and unsolved for so long, it wouldn't affect the way you see things? It's really outside of that for you?

MN: It's added a new and more literal level to detective writing.

JC: And to poetry.

MN: Yes, I'll have to tell you all about it.

JC: I'll look forward to that. Thanks for speaking with me.

MN: My pleasure!