Butterflies & Blood: Finding the Strangeness in Your Poetry & Your Fridge
An Interview with Rita Mookerjee about her new book, False Offering
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Butterflies and Blood:
Finding Strangeness in Your Poetry & Fridge.
An interview with Rita Mookerjee about her new book, False Offering, JackLeg Press
False Offering
Sometimes I look at my altar, all the brass, lavender, and candles, and I worry that it is too crowded, that some gods can’t see their sigils, that the clutter will
confuse the divine. But some gods find beauty in chaos, some enjoy excess like Thoth. His temples were filled with animal mummies sold by priests standing
along the way to the necropolis. There were mummies of cats, dogs, and crocodiles. You could even buy a scarab beetle wrapped taut so it lay flat like a coin. The most
belovèd animal mummy was the ibis, white-plumed emblem of Thoth himself. The ibis was anointed with pine resin, feathers pressed with beeswax. Bowing the dark scythe of beak to breast, the ibis was folded and bound in linen. Many people bought the mummy birds to offer to Thoth, but this pattern inspired greed.
False priests bent lizards, coiled snakes, and wrapped these hollow shapes in linen, dyed ochre and streaked black with tar. Tightly swaddled, no one could see these
chimaera mummies with their faux beaks fashioned from spine. No one except for Thoth who scoffed and flung a curse at those who falsely worshipped which
made sure their descendants would never know true sleep, would never rest like the ibis mummy, folded and serene. Standing at my altar, I do not have
a mummy for Thoth, no scarab beetle, no ibis in linen. I don’t know if I will ever have offerings fit for gods, but I’d rather offer nothing than be caught as a fraud.
Origami In Lieu of Klonopin
I crease my paranoia into dying stars
people write their wishes on paper
I can’t leave them that way
they’ll just become lines on my face
in all of this folding my cursed town swims to the front of my mind
its rows of artillery its collapsing roofs a gentle burning: all celestial horrors
I seal these memories away in each pentagram because the past only reminds me of the many places I can never revisit
how the roads broke when threatened with exits
how my body is a thing to be modified the way monarch butterflies
cover a deer carcass at the roadside
scarlet wing points ablaze.
Interview Summary
Inspiration, mental health struggles and what to make with a giant bag of tapioca starch, this conversation has it all. Rita tells me about her new book, False Offering, and a bit about her upcoming book, Banana Heart. She discusses the way her partner, Dorothy K. Chan helped her get back into writing poetry after taking a haitus and how important it is for her to see people with her background represented in the art. False Offering navigates much of what it means to be the daughter of Indian immigrants growing up in Pennsylvania, exploring a hunger for culture, and interogating religion. We also discuss the possibilities of finding and creating beauty and strangeness in poetry. As Rita says, poets can write about their trauma if they want to, but they don’t owe it to anyone if they don’t want to write about it. While she is interested in “burning it all down” she is also interested in growing something new with her writing. We also had a lot to say to one another about how to find that newness through food. So, poets and epicureans both should have a lot of fun listening to this interview and trying out some of the writing practices and recipes Rita recommends here.
References
Joan Kwon Glass
Dorothy K. Chan
Morgan Parker, There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
“Shoes in My House an Allegory” by Rita Mookerjee, from False Offering
Mindy Khaling
Banana Heart by Rita Mookerjee
Kwame Dawes
Hemmingway “Open a vein and bleed”
Josephine Baker in the Banana Skirt
Atlas Obscura
Kay Ryan
Gastro Obscura
Weird Fruit Explorer
Max Miller
Bianca by Eugenia Leigh
Self Mythology by Saba Keramati
Luya
Take-Away Quotes
“We are all writers. I ask my students, did you text something, did you post something, did you write it down? Then you’re a writer!”
“No one is paying us enough money to withhold art and literature and community from one another… we’re feeling so much more hunger for those connections, especially since quarantine.”
“When I see a poem about something I’ve never read about before, even if I don’t publish it, I’m so jazzed to see it.”
“I want a poem about a biker gang of Monarch butterflies. Nobody realizes what badasses butterflies are. Are we really studying the butterfly enough?”
“I do a lot of repetitive tasks with low stakes as a way to soothe… but behind those soothing rituals, there is a darkness.”
“We have no shortage of poems about butterflies, no shortage of poems about butterflies, but I wanted my reader to find a strangeness in their coupling.”
“I always encourage getting weird in our writing. Maybe that’s my maxim: Be weird and get weird. If there’s something you’re writing about, that you feel moved by, take it to a weird place.”
“As women we are looked to for trauma porn. If that’s what’s on your spirit, absolutely write about it… but you don’t owe anyone that. There’s no rule that says you have to be dark and depressing, but we’re more complex than that. We’re so much more.”
“Research is my happiest happy place. I love the scavenger hunt of it. I see something and then I have ten thousand questions, and I go in to uncover a truth or sometimes a lie.”
“I love shopping for language. See if you can find a word and then put it next to another word nobody would expect to be next to it.”
“One of my most treasured resources as a writer is the Atlas Obscura… for when you are in the mood to read about something very weird that most people don’t know about.”
“I’m all about burning it all down, but I’m also about making things grow.”
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Finding the weird or unsettling in the normal. I’ve tried it a few times and highly recommend it. But, like most everything else in life, don’t overdo it. If you do the weird becomes the normal.