Allison Titus: What Resilience Is
Poet Allison Titus on fostering pugs, veganism, and writing with conviction.
Friends, I'm honored to share this conversation with Allison Titus in loving memory of her pug Elly who died shortly after we started this interview. Allison's devotion to her dogs and animals is palpable both in her life and in her poetry. I don't say this lightly: she is a force of love and goodness.
A little about Allison: she is the author of three chapbooks: Instructions from the Narwhal, Topography of Tears, and the forthcoming Sob Story; two books of poems: Sum of every lost ship, The True Book of Animal Homes; and a novel, The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing to Do with Fire. She is the recipient of an NEA literature fellowship, and her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, Boston Review, Blackbird, and Typo, among other journals. A proofreader / copy editor by day, she also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at New England College. Along with the poet Ashley Capps, she is editing an anthology called The New Sent(i)ence which explores the creative agency of non-human animals in 21st-century poetry.
Before we talk about your pugs Eleanor (Elly) and Daisy, can you tell us a little about your background with fostering and rescuing pugs? What made you start, and how has it affected you?
Ruben, the pug who inspired Allison to start rescuing.
I started fostering pugs because I adopted Ruben, a pug who came from a goat farm. Pugs are weird! They are ancient foot warmers, and all they want is to lounge. This is the dog that is after my own heart: we are lazy, and we like to sprawl. When I discovered that there was a Mid-Atlantic Pug Rescue, I volunteered because I figured, if all it took for a dog to get a new permanent home was a temporary stay with me, or something as simple as a transport need, at the very least I could provide those things. The endless population of stray and homeless dogs—I mean all homeless animals, but dogs have wedged themselves the deepest in my life—is one systemic problem (of many!) that breaks my heart on a daily (hourly) basis. I also believe very strongly in adopting animals rather than buying them, while understanding that a person might want a particular breed of dog for a variety of legitimate reasons, and that’s where rescue groups dedicated to certain breeds come in: they remove a fraction of animals from already over-populated shelters and offer an alternative to purchasing a purebred dog from a breeder or pet store.
You mentioned Elly and Daisy helped you through some difficult times, something I can really relate to. I feel like I’m always trying to explain why dog companionship is such soul salve, and I’m curious about your take.
It’s so hard to explain to someone who doesn’t already get it, isn’t it? And if you get it, you get it, absolutely. There was a period of time, of about three years, when I moved from apartment to apartment by myself with Elly and Daisy. At that point, I’d never lived alone, and I had one understanding of what home was—the house I had lived in for 14 years when I was married. And so all of a sudden, the only thing that made me understand what home was became: wherever Elly and Daisy were. Even if it was a temporary place, as long as those guys were with me, we were OK/we were home.
I guess that was the first time in my life that I really understood “home” as a concept that could be embodied emotionally rather than as something that was primarily represented as a physical place. And they were just such great companions during a time in my life when I was the saddest and the loneliest: I don’t know what I would have done without them; they made the hours bearable and hilarious. Also they taught me what resilience is.
Daisy and Elly
"They taught me what resilience is."
As you may have gathered from my fangirling on social media, your latest book The True Book of Animal Homes (Saturnalia, 2017) absolutely floored me. (I read the entire collection out loud to my husband because I needed to talk about it with someone immediately.) It has such a concrete and expansive vision of its world. For those who haven’t read it yet, it’s divided into three sections: the office poems, the animal homes poem, and the essay poems. I love how the collection uses habitat as a way to emphasize how close the human and animal worlds are, all the overlap. How did the arc of this book take shape for you?
Piper
Oh my gosh: thank you! That is actually the most amazing compliment I think I’ve ever been given: that you would have read my poems aloud. I am so lucky my book found you and your heart.
The book took shape over several long years, and the office poems were written first. I spent a lot of my post-grad years working temp jobs that were pretty corporate, and I was extremely out of my element in those environments. I am basically always disheveled. I spent eight hours a day feeling like an alien, and at some point, I had to make those days into something that felt worthwhile, that wasn’t just lost beige time, or I would have died. OK, that’s dramatic, but I would have gone crazy.
So I started writing poems about real and invented offices. I thought a lot about the spaces and stations I occupied in those roles, physically and philosophically. And then as the years went on, I started writing more overtly about animals, and it was just such a natural overlap, to combine those two impulses, considering the space and stations humans and non-human animals are relegated to. We’re all just roaming around the same planet, trying to stay alive, hoping to match our desires with whatever kindred external force is compatible and game. And then the final gesture, the essay poems—naming them “essays” allowed them to exist for me in a space that felt more...sanctioned to hold a stance but not subvert or sacrifice the craft of the poem. I wanted those poems to do what essays aim to do: try to establish an argument by exploring an idea or a series of ideas that accumulate to some larger question or inquiry.
"We’re all just roaming around the same planet, trying to stay alive, hoping to match our desires with whatever kindred external force is compatible and game."
I see the offices in the first section as a symbol of both the human disconnect from and intersection with animal world. How our fates are yoked to the fate of animals. Has caring for your dogs contributed to this outlook in your poems?
I think living with dogs for my whole life, and being the kind of person who considers my dogs to absolutely be family, and being aware that not everyone feels that way, and that not everyone has had a bonded relationship with an animal, and that actually so many animals suffer such terrible abuse and neglect at the hand of humans…I think my awareness of that disparity and disconnect, and my awareness of the extreme variability in our human experience with non-human animals informs the poems, and the book in general.
I can’t help reading animal rights philosophy into a lot of these poems, but especially “The True Book of Animal Homes,” which you noted is dedicated to your rescue pugs:
Some are sold by the road like jam like chairs like bonnets
What’s invisible
the cages or the shreds or the barns,
how their callused bellies drag
whelp-heavy & freckled
And this incredible line, too: “Here they come, the mongrel ghosts of my heart.”
And this from “Essay on Economies of Scale”:
This morning on the kill floor
the piglet tried to nuzzle the worker Like a puppy,
the worker says, It happens all the time.
How did your veganism help inform this collection? And what were the specific challenges of writing about a subject both so personal and (usually) divisive?
I became vegan in 2009, and I think as I became more informed about veganism and about animal rights initiatives, the lifestyle became more political for me than I expected it to. And it just grew harder to avoid having that fundamental layer of my life not become a texture in my poems—basically, veganism is my one conviction; I have no religion, have never had a religion. I believe in kindness and in generosity and in doing no harm. I want to try to get close to what I feel are the essential things, in my poems, but I don’t want to just write polemics that sacrifice artfulness for pronouncement. I care too much about poems to not worry that there’s a tricky balance to strike between idea and image and experience. More than I care about creating anything defined, I want to create something felt.
"More than I care about creating anything defined, I want to create something felt."
I want to talk about “Essay on the New Year,” namely that ending:
Who’s to say
how we go on or don’t
go on, despairing
unspecifically.
That thy misery be
known for what it is:
vernacular, of
an interior sea.
I think this is a good reminder that despair can be neutral, that it doesn’t need to be cured, that maybe what we need is a better language for our inner worlds. Can you talk about what prompted this poem?
Honestly, it was written so many years ago, I don’t remember what the exact impetus was, beyond creating a specific texture and intensity: but yes, it seems at some point, maybe the desire is not to repress the darkness, but to embrace it. Life is hard and sad and strange, and also miraculous: why pretend it’s anything else?
Which is more necessary to you right now: poems about grief or poems about joy?
For now: poems about grief.
A metaphor or simile for Elly and Daisy?
Well, Elly is (was—she passed away in July) my shadow. Daisy … is the Fear of Missing Out, embodied. Also, Daisy came with her name. She would be the perfect Betty.
Raena Shirali: When the Looking Hurts
Raena Shirali on her beloved pit Harley, the impetus behind her (must-read) debut book, and why she believes poetry should do the hard work of looking, of validating those who feel unseen.
I'm going to keep this introduction short because goddamn. We are lucky to live in a world with Raena Shirali, and this interview is proof of that. We talk about her beloved pit Harley; how reckoning her identity and history informed themes of survival, race, assimilation, and trauma in her debut book (which you must read); and why she hopes this collection helps readers look "especially when the looking hurts."
A little about Raena: she's the author of GILT (YesYes Books, 2017). Her honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, & a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. Raised in Charleston, South Carolina, the Indian American poet currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where she is the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry, & serves as a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine. You can read her poems online at Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, and Tupelo Quarterly.
TW: sexual assault
Tell us a little about your dog Harley. How did he come into your life?
Harley is an incredibly energetic pit mix puppy, though his crazy comes in bouts—right now, he’s curled up next to me on the couch, snoring and apparently dreaming about squirrels.
I imagine origin stories like Harley’s are common, especially because of the stigma that comes with rescuing a pit. About a year ago, I found myself saying to a prospective roommate—without having planned to at all—that I was looking for pet-friendly housing (which was maybe a bit preemptive on my part, considering I had no pets and no pet prospects). Before I even moved in, my soon-to-be-roomie sent me Harley’s info, and I really just could not handle how adorable he was. Fast forward through a winding a series of Facebook posts & meetings with Harley at his foster home, to the adoption event at our local Petco, where Harley was crated on the bottom row (because he is huge) of stacks and stacks of perturbed animals. He had apparently just shredded a comforter out of stress. Bits of stuffing were scattered around his cage, and an event employee—a self-proclaimed “pit expert”—told my partner and I what a huge mistake we might be making by rescuing him, regaling us with tales of pits gone wrong, none of which were about Harley. We very awkwardly paid for and took him home anyway, and I’m happy to report that he has not shredded a comforter to date (R.I.P to the two shoes he’s chewed up, though). Haters gonna hate.
What impact has Harley had on your writing? I know in the thank-you notes for your book Gilt (YesYes Books, 2017), you thank Harley for “making every day possible.” (Oh, my heart!) Other than the general force field of love and support dogs offer, does Harley help make the actual process of writing possible?
Perhaps this has more to do with the nature of my projects, but writing can be extremely traumatic for me. There are certain poems whose generation I find cathartic, but for the most part, my writing either seeks to reconcile aspects of my identity as a woman of color and survivor of sexual assault, or seeks to interrogate cultural and national systems related to the treatment of women. And I love doing that work, but that’s not to say it isn’t painful. Harley really helps me write by helping me not write—by making me look up & around & see something that’s alive & not human & that has, I think, a good soul.
It’s worth mentioning, too, that I have struggled with depression and anorexia in the past, and those struggles are ongoing simply by virtue of my having to be vigilant about, say, feeding myself enough, or making myself get out of bed. Having a 68-pound dog-son to take care of every day means I have to get up. I have to eat. I have to take care of myself in order to take care of him, in order to not be bothered constantly so that I can then have the space to write. As a Virgo, the joy of having a pet has come largely from daily regimen—regimen that necessitates that I be mindful about making space and time for writing, for cooking, for exercise. Especially now that I’m on a writing residency, where every day opens before me like a blank page, caring for Harley is indispensable to caring for my work and myself.
"Harley really helps me write by helping me not write—by making me look up & around & see something that’s alive & not human & that has, I think, a good soul."
Speaking of Gilt, I have to say this book took me by surprise in the best way. It turned out to be everything I wanted to read about grappling with first-gen identity and being a woman of color in America and the added complexities that brings to the romantic realm. How did the vision for this book come about? And what is your hope for this book?
Goodness, that’s a wonderful insight, and is a nuance of the book I’m always excited to discuss. GILT was born out of my MFA thesis, and so part the challenge came from having to find a way to explain these seemingly disparate tropes—interracial relationships, anxieties around marriage, sexual violence, heritage, the political body, the personal body—as part of a whole. I think I feel attached to the vision for this book because it developed alongside a true reckoning with myself; my first year of graduate school, I realized I had to stop trying to compartmentalize aspects of my identity for the benefit of the Other—whether that was my family, or the predominantly white spaces I’ve always had to navigate, or as you mention, a string of (also very white) boyfriends. And it’s no coincidence that I was single or heartbroken for much of the generation of this book. Being alone made me reconsider the self not as a limited entity, but as one that is shaped and informed by so many cultural forces. I pictured the self sitting alone in the room with all the book’s various tropes radiating out of her, out of the room, out of the country. That’s when I began to see the book’s arc and questions as inherently connected. My hope is related to your observation about being first-gen, “being a woman of color in America,” being told throughout my life that my experiences weren’t valid; I want GILT to validate the experiences of women of color, victims of violent crime, immigrants—anyone who has been told they won’t be seen. The book’s dedication (which will appear in the version that goes live March 15th) reads: for survival. for your multitudes. I hope this book makes readers look at those multitudes, especially when the looking hurts.
In “camouflage,” a poem that has stuck with me since I read it, you write: “i’m durga, i’m kali, i’m the strange ochre / notch on their bedposts.” Perhaps one of the things I admire most about Gilt is the candid way it addresses the fine line between what makes us feel powerful and what makes us feel othered or mistreated, especially in sexual relationships. This poem is a fine example of how a desire to assimilate further muddies that. Can you talk a little more about these themes in your work?
Thank you for these killer questions, Ruth. In “camouflage” as well as in “if i wrap myself in gold,” I’m thinking about how the desire to approximate a white romance narrative can be an assimilatory trauma in and of itself. While the speaker in “camouflage” struggles to embody white, teenage sexuality and eventually attempts to define her sexuality in the terms of her exoticization, “if i wrap myself in gold” deals with a different aspect of romantic assimilation—in the latter, the speaker considers the pressure to marry as a young Indian woman, alongside the standards of femininity she’s being held to by her lover, her family, and herself. You are, of course, right to say that these dynamics are muddy, and I think that’s because the line in these poems isn’t simply one of consent—that is, POCs are rarely (if ever) exoticized because we want to be, and so our consent is often not even part of the equation. In that sense, to be exoticized, especially by our lovers, is subversively damaging, in that it keeps us at a distance from true intimacy, and has a defamiliarizing effect on our selves.
In my work, I’m trying to resist the desire that we have (that even I have as I’m writing this) to push toward the ultimate empowerment, the ultimate acceptance of oneself and one’s sexuality; because “empowerment” is an easy word to throw around, but is a state of being I’ve found to be so evasive in my life—and that’s precisely because we spend so much of our existence as women of color living in the realm of invisibility, of vulnerability, of trauma. So the speaker in “camouflage” isn’t exactly empowered. She’s using others’ exoticization of her in order to begin to understand her sexuality. I think it’s much more interesting—and worthwhile—to write into those moments of defamiliarization, and I want my poems to provide space for those nuances—the steps between exoticization, objectification, and that lofty goal of “self-actualization.”
"...to be exoticized, especially by our lovers, is subversively damaging, in that it keeps us at a distance from true intimacy, and has a defamiliarizing effect on our selves."
What poem scared you the most to write in this collection? Why?
“CROWD/GIRL” was incredibly difficult to write, and to revise, and I have never once read it in front of an audience—it still scares me that much. It, like “Holi: Equinox Approaches,” was written for the twenty-year-old woman who was gang raped in front of her village, by her fellow villagers, as “punishment” for being perceived as being in a relationship with a Muslim man in India. We were just speaking about interracial relationships and the internal trauma they can instill—I knew I couldn’t write this book without addressing the very real cultural and physical trauma that fear of the Other can entail, too. “CROWD/GIRL” is written, as the title indicates, partially in the collective voice of the villagers (the audience of this unthinkable display), and partially in the voice of the anonymous victim. I was, and am, concerned in this collection about the political function of persona, and I really believe that to do persona well, and to write about violence you aren’t physically connected to, you have to be willing to involve yourself—whether that means recognizing the shortcoming of the project, or being willing to emotionally go there with your speaker(s). I’ve tried my best to do that in GILT, and my new project is one where I delve even further into persona work.
On a really basic level, this poem was the most difficult to write because I am so fucking angry and no words even BEGIN to form an adequate elegy for that woman. And it disgusted me that Western media reported on it like America doesn’t have its own legacy of rape with which to reckon. So I wanted the poem to make a Western audience look at this shit, and above all, I wanted them to recognize it. I wanted to take the reader right up to the moment of assault and force us all to look, and to recognize ourselves as part of the village that sits by, complacent, while women are mistreated this way. Lastly, writing this poem forced me to write my own assault onto the page and into the book. So the challenges “CROWD/GIRL” brought with it largely inform the project, precisely because they were debilitating to engage with in the moment.
"I wanted to take the reader right up to the moment of assault and force us all to look, and to recognize ourselves as part of the village that sits by, complacent, while women are mistreated this way."
In a recent and magnificent interview with Fox Frazier-Foley, you said, “…at some point growing up, I just stopped explaining what being ‘Indian’ meant. I was always going to be not-quite.” I feel that – I was always told I was either too “exotic” or just a white girl – I never felt like I was enough of either. Does navigating identity on the page help shape how you think about yourself out in the world?
I’ve touched on this in a previous question, but the short answer is: absolutely. GILT is unique in terms of the books I can or will write in my life, because I wrote it essentially as I was learning who I am as a woman of color—as I was starting to own my Otherness as part of my identity. Most writers say in some capacity that writing helps them make sense of the world; that’s no less true for me, though I think part of the process for me was owning experiences I’d spent a long time denying or flat out pretending didn’t exist—like being the subject of racial harassment growing up in the South. Navigating identity in those instances, I always think back to Bishop’s “Write it!” I can’t spend any more time not writing about being chased down in pickup trucks. I can’t spend any more time avoiding the subject of rape because it’s “too close to me.” If we all stayed silent, where would the poems come from? If I’m silent in instances of injustice in the world, who am I?
Back to Harley – have you ever read a poem that reminds you of him? Or that makes you think about or understand your love for him in a new way?
The speaker in Ada Limón’s “Service” connects on an animal level with a pit bull, a breed that is stereotyped as violent, aggressive, uncontrollable—but that is actually highly intelligent, loving, and fierce/ly loyal. Both the pit and the speaker in “Service” are female, so in that way it differs slightly from the way I think about and appreciate Harley, but I love how this poem asks us who can be tamed, and asks us to think about how we train women and animals to act. Harley is most himself when he’s least containable—my partner and I call it his “overdrive”—when we come home and he has to hold a toy in his mouth and wiggle around in circles for a full five minutes to calm down, or when he hurtles without abandon through the yard at a squirrel. I’m in awe of him in those moments (even if they’re accompanied by annoyance at his ignoring my commands), but I also recognize myself in them. I’m most myself when I’m screaming along to Hairspray in my car, which I’ve been told to stop doing by a couple shitty exes. And yeah, that’s a silly example, but I think, as women, we’ve been told that at our least containable, we’re the least desirable, and in that way our selves are shameful. Limón writes, “Girl, no one’s going to tell me / when to take a leak, when to bow down, / when not to bite.” I try to keep those lines with me when Harley acts out, because in some sense, he is acting in line with his internal self; I try to hold that up as a model for my own behavior, while simultaneously, you know, preventing him from actually ever catching a squirrel.
"I love how this poem asks us who can be tamed, and asks us to think about how we train women and animals to act. "
A metaphor or simile for Harley?
Trying to come up with one made me instead want to catalogue the nicknames we have for Har, which I think are their own little metaphors in a way (and also is maybe me copping out of the question, lol, sorry, Ruth). Here they are for your enjoyment / for you to be mildly disturbed by: Angel Butt, Dingle Berry, Dangus, (Sweet, Sweet) Dodo Bird, Honey Bun, Honey Bunches of Harley, Honey Bear, Sweet Prince, Principessa, Mashugana, Pringle Butt, and Shlarp (coined by my partner for the gross slurping sound he makes with his big old tongue).