“We can return to the poem, but we don’t live there”: An Interview with Margo LaPierre

All Lit Up: Congratulations on your new book, Ajar. The collection navigates the physical and psychological realities of womanhood, bipolar psychosis, gendered trauma, and how they intersect. How did you think about weaving these experiences together in the book?

Margo LaPierre: Going on hormonal birth control in high school to try to cure my acne and instead experiencing suicidal ideation; that’s the girl version of bipolar. Wanting to wear my dancing heels to die; that’s the girl version of bipolar. Receiving traumatic and contradictory fertility care because specialists disagreed whether lithium is safe for pregnancy (PSA: it is); that’s the girl version of bipolar. Delusionally believing I’d killed, with my psychic powers, the guy who raped teenage me; that’s the girl version of bipolar. (He did die, but I didn’t do it, I swear.) Feeling like my love for women was too much for this world; that’s the (queer) girl version of bipolar. Using the Hot/Crazy scale as a survival tool; that’s the girl version of bipolar. Knowing that love is the biggest, realest, deadliest danger out there; that’s the girl version of bipolar.

ALU: What’s your approach to writing poetry? When you sit down to write, what tends to come first for you: the image, the emotion, a combination, or something else?

ML: The image comes first, but what if it carries all these jangly sounds like tin cans on the back of a marriage car and then the whole poem is clanking and the gulls overhead start squawking. I like to write cumulatively, as though each utterance is a fractal in communion with its unfolding sonic self. But then also sometimes a poem needs to be plain and say what it means, lest dear reader misses the point. If there is a point to be had. Poems are meant to be experienced, stepped out of, and then maybe forgotten until the next read. Like a hotel room and its calm. Or an emergency room and its chaos. We can return to the poem, but we don’t live there. What is my approach to making those rooms? I don’t know, I forget. Every time I write a poem, I have to try some new backflip into it—surprise and discovery—to trick myself into believing I still know how.

ALU: The poems in Ajar seem to have a raw, physical energy. Do you think of poetic form as containing it, releasing it, or something else entirely?

ML: I like that I’m getting the word “raw” from early readers. It suggests an unfiltered quality, no secret-keeping. And in fact, these poems and this book have gone through so much revisioning that they are far from their original drafts. As Dolly Parton famously reminded us: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” But I do my best, in this book, not to keep my own secrets, to let myself be ugly on the page. Doing so is a way of airing out shame, for myself and hopefully also for readers who have struggled with suicidality or a fear of being perceived, to give our future selves the best chance at more life.

I think of poetic form as constraint, a membrane. It needs to hold in meaning and matter but not be so rigid that it can’t receive or shed meaning in the reading of it. I wanted Ajar to feel porous.

ALU: Grapefruits appear multiple times in the book, from halved fruit at the breakfast table to images pressed against a screen door. Your grapefruit imagery situates the reader in domestic spaces while also evoking surreal or psychological experiences. What drew you to use this particular fruit as a bridge between the ordinary and the uncanny?

ML: I needed a morning scene. Morning is when I’m most closely connected to the psychic surgings of my nightmares, which is where the bad guys live. A bad dream can affect my mood all day, if it’s the kind of dream to cast an odd light into waking life. That said, I haven’t been having nightmares recently. I think being pregnant blocked my dream recall. And now that my baby is here, my sleep, though interrupted, is restful. Or maybe the nightmares fell off earlier than that. I was on Wellbutrin for depression while writing this book. Wellbutrin nightmares are something else—horrific and weird. On our original note, grapefruit was my breakfast of choice for this poetic suite because of its circular shape, and because it is sliced in half, eaten like that, with a spoon. It illustrates the graphic I’d come up with as a model for time: a life seen from the perspective of death. The now-moment and the past form the middle (the columella) in a halved grapefruit, and the future is the encircling rind. I’ll show you, here:

ALU: In “Chatoyant,” the speaker experiences past, present, and future simultaneously, flattening time into something both intimate and immense. How does Ajar engage with this idea of time—not just as a theme, but as a structure for the collection?

ML: Intimate and immense, thank you! That’s what I was going for. The book is structured much like a memoir, with a narrating speaker—the one who gets up from her bad dreams and has grapefruit for breakfast, the one who self-haunts—and a subject whose two suicide attempts in 2008 and 2009 she overcomes as she begins the rest of her life with a new diagnosis. Time doesn’t just flow in one direction. Time doesn’t flow at all. We see retrocausality happening: the future influencing the past. The block universe theory, also known as eternalism, is a deterministic theory of time that supports this temporal structure. What if when we write about ourselves, beholding our earlier turbulence, this is a form of love, care, and accompaniment bestowed on our younger selves? What if the ghosts watching us, the ones that slip away into the corners when we try to look, are future me and future you, remembering—ensuring our survival?

ALU: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

ML: I hope they’ll discover that bipolar disorder is more than just “highs and lows”…and that heaviness, even years of heaviness, can lift into lightness. Also, look at the centos,  poems composed of borrowed lines. In the years since my suicide attempts, I’ve found community, I’ve enjoyed art and made art, I’ve developed a deeper devotion to poetry through others’ work, something outside myself. Art is transformative. The Margo in her teens and early twenties who was either trying to survive or self-destructing wouldn’t have guessed at my current stability and fulfillment. My family, my daughter, my friendships, my creative work. This is the life of an artist, of a book lover. Torment and drama—who are they? (Thank you, lithium, therapy, and sobriety.) But you know what wouldn’t surprise that young woman if she were to get a peek into my life this year? The poetry. It was there all along.

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Margo LaPierre is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, and PRISM, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection. Find her on Instagram @Margo_LaPierre.

Find a copy of Ajar here on All Lit Up.