In a month-long act of resistance, poets remind us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices, erase stories, and impose control over how we live and imagine.
An interview with poet Tegan Zimmerman
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe Chimeras to someone picking it up for the first time?
TEGAN ZIMMERMAN: The collection resurrects the Greek mythic creature of the chimera as a feminist symbol through which mothers-daughters can articulate their experiences of violation, loss, and separation. As monstrous voices, chimeras are inherently and necessarily disobedient, disjointed, and disruptive.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
TEGAN: Poetry is the medium through which the repressed speaks. Non-linear, cyclical rhythmic lines and fragmented syntax refuses, diffuses, and fuses. As such, grand master narratives, symbolic and/or political, are an anathema to poetry; fractured narratives instead transgress and destabilize finality, authority, and binary logic. That is, poetry, and its undeniable affinities with the body, actively resists the prohibitions and censorships—linguistics, systems, and structures of patriarchal word-world orders.
ALU: What does poetry allow you to say or refuse that other forms don’t?
TEGAN: Poetry permits the unspeakable. It’s a palimpsestic medium for which apologies are nonsensical. It sneaks in through cracks and corridors, obscenities, deviant bodies, and archaicism; you can find it buried or dwelling in swamps and caves too—in seeking to give expression to repression, poetry constitutes the continual search for traces of the mother and the desire to be reunited with the ever-elusive, chimeral maternal-feminine.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
TEGAN: “The owl of Minerva always flies at midnight.”- Hegel
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
TEGAN: You have to carve out a space within yourself that you refuse to allow to be stripped away or seized by something or someone else; it’s especially difficult, and yet vitally important, to maintain this separateness or other-worldliness in politically challenging times. The turn inward, or backward, if we, as feminists, are reworking myth or recuperating figures from history, should not be viewed as escapism or apoliticism but rather as the complete opposite: there is nothing more radical than interrogating the fantastical foundations of one’s inheritance.
Read an excerpt from Chimeras
the girl remembers differently:
an altar
whispers
yearning
queen of everything that lives and moves about
she gives the vestals the slip
disappears into another reverie
—wheat and barley—loaf of bread
our ash marked mother
dark-robed like the loose-limbed crone
drawing a galaxias kyklos
moon-calves littering the walls
for our sake,
she has to pretend
that she isn’t
mastering a constellation
that confession will come
many broken headbands,
the ones we were so fond of wearing,
later.
no one is more hated than she
who tells the truth.
proposition:
if a chimera enceinte dreams
of indigence and of wars
then she will have a great craving,
for a daughter
in every direction
wandering
a restless creature
an animal
inside another animal
an elenchus –
correcting and corrupting
Reprinted with permission from Inanna Publications.
Watch Tegan read from Chimeras
* * *
Tegan Zimmerman (PhD) holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia; her writing centralizes contemporary gender theory and women’s writing that focuses on the maternal and mother-daughter relations. She has two beloved Pugs named Kosmo and Canto.
* * *
Thanks to Tegan for answering our questions, and to Inanna Publications for the text excerpt from Chimeras, which is available to purchase here on All Lit Up (and get 15% off + FREE shipping Canada-wide with the code POETSRESIST until April 30!).
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
