The Monthly interviews American poet, Molly Rice – Part 3 – dealing with the “Southern Groove”

How do you develop your craft?

If you want to be a good writer, I think you must be a good reader and I was always a good reader, as I suggested earlier, from a very young age.

My own writing tends to start with a “rattle in the brain”. I will be doing something, walking the dog, and I will hear something, a thought, or an idea, and I will roll that around in my mind. At that point you are sort of living the poem, thinking about it, working on it internally, it’s annoying in a way. If it annoys me enough, it might become a poem.

I am not a structured, disciplined writer. I think about what picture I am trying to paint, what story I am trying to tell. Most of my work is memory based, or certainly that is what the first stimulus is, and of course you write the words down, you chisel away until something emerges. I wouldn’t think too much about form. I watch the poem take shape. In many ways the poems tend to shape themselves.

I do write things down anywhere there is a space, on the back of a bill for example, or a spare scrap of paper, and sometimes I come back to them, but most of the time once I start, I tend to finish. I work away at it until I have completed the piece. That is what I am like with pretty much everything I do.

How do you go about producing collections?

Both of my books were collections of poems which had already been written. I didn’t really write anything specifically for the collections. I might revisit older works, look at them to see if they still work, maybe give some consideration regarding themes, or ideas, but each book was just pulling together completed works which had spent a lifetime gathering.

I’m not one for playing the poetry game though; coveting collections, seeking out promotional readings, entering literary competitions, that sort of thing. I truly write for the main purpose of archiving my thoughts and my personal journey. I really don’t push myself forward and yet I do get some attention, and I do get asked to do things, which is always nice.

Even regarding my editing process, I tend not even to change very much. I might look around for a punchier word or phrase. I might try to find the word that illuminates a particular feeling, and I do aim to immerse the readers in the words, the story. There is a physicality in my poems, and I am conscious of that. That is the theatre person in me. Getting the story across, giving the characters life, setting the stage for moments.

I have a poem about my dad, and it outlines how it was only at Christmas that he would become this generous, warm person. But the poem must also outline that all was not well and that, “Christmas only comes once a year.” I love writing poems that are laced with contradictions.

You are from the American South. Is there a “southern groove” to your writing?

I do feel that I have a “Southern Groove” in my writing although I don’t try to embellish that, or make it more glamourous than it is, in any way. That southern groove is poverty, drugs, abuse, trying to escape, and I watched everyone around me topple because of that southern groove. You are singing the blues of other people’s lives.

My brother overdosed at just 36; and my mother at 56 was done. My stepfather just passed, and he was still smoking when he was connected to an oxygen tank. My best friend overdosed when she was in her twenties. It is a hard gritty life, truly heart-breaking, and for me I was saved by teachers, and by theatre and poetry.

For me, it was education which wrapped its arms around me. I knew how to grab on to the hand which was reaching down to me, otherwise I too might not have survived.

In some ways it is a terrible beauty, and a lot of my poems are trying to shake the people up that I loved; so yes, the southern sucker punch is definitely a real deep dark underbelly to what I write.

That sounds both, a very difficult situation to navigate, but a deep vein to mine for your work?

I do struggle a little with it. My stepdad was racist, and I was raised in that culture, but I rejected those ideas completely and I educated myself and was educated, and the veil was lifted. I went towards theatre, music, and poetry, and that showed me that things could be different. I looked into other people’s lives and could see a different future, and I gravitated towards that.