A Conversation with Frances Justine Post
interviewed by Ines Pujos

PicturePhoto Credit: Cecelia Post
Frances Justine Post is the author of Beast (Augury Books, 2014). She is currently earning her PhD in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. She is the recipient of the Inprint Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize from the University of Houston, the “Discovery”/ Boston Review Poetry Prize, and others. Her poems have recently appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, and others.

Senior Editor Ines Pujos had the pleasure of meeting Frances Justine Post at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop in Dumbo for her poetry collection reading and release party earlier this year. After rereading the collection, Pujos wanted to know a bit more about Justine and her lovely Beast. The following interview was composed via email, bringing Houston and New York City a bit closer together. 


Ines Pujos: First, I would like to note that it’s always exciting to read Beast and to wander in your world for a few hours. I feel as if my vision changes, my teeth get longer, and my nails sharper. Undeniably there’s a real feral-ness to the poems in Beast, yet with that, you brilliantly balance intricate language to deliver an ornate and hauntingly beautiful narrative.

Frances Justine Post: That’s wonderful to hear! Writing the poems, I definitely felt like I was inhabiting different bodies. I love knowing that you as a reader can inhabit these feral bodies as well.

Pujos: The opening poem, “Self-Portrait as Beast,” really encapsulates this vision. I’ve noticed that you have several other poems in this collection that use the “Self-Portrait” frame. What is it about this particular mode that draws you to it?

Post: “Self-Portrait as Beast” was the first self-portrait poem I’d ever written. Though it was new to me, there is a long tradition of self-portrait poems (Lucie Brock-Broido and John Ashbery come to mind). I found myself most drawn to writing “Self Portrait as…” poems. Rather than writing straight-up self-portrait poems about my actual self, I started treating them as almost-persona poems. In these poems, I’m not really trying to speak in the voice of someone else. I am still the speaker; I just try on different skins for a little while.  
            Something about that strange remove allowed me to really look at myself and what I was trying to say without feeling utterly exposed.  I had the armor of someone or something else’s body. This gave me license to really delve into the inner thoughts I might have normally censored for being too embarrassingly vulnerable and honest. Speaking through someone else’s mouth gave me protection, if that makes sense.
            This collection is still very vulnerable, and I express all sorts of things that shouldn’t really be expressed in polite society. But in poetry, as in any kind of art, my essential belief is that if you can’t express the inexpressible, the things that shouldn’t be expressed, then what’s the point?   

Pujos: While reading the first section of the collection, I got a strong sense of a creator figure looming above—especially in the poems like “Abandon,” “Self-Portrait as Equestrian,” and “Marionette”: “Press down my lungs and they empty / like bellows, outing a rudimentary / language. Let go, / and I gasp as if swallowing // the whole world. I wanted to swallow it, / so I wrote it. And I wrote you here, / in front of the window / out of which the leaves are turning red // and then losing it.” Could you expand on whether or not there was an intent behind that? Were you drawing from a certain mythology?

Post: In these opening poems, I am primarily exploring the push and pull of intimate relationships, the power struggles, the way a beloved can take on God-like stature in one’s life. Losing oneself in another person is a lot of what Beast is about. I’ve always played around with the use of the second person in my poems. In the first section, the speaker is mostly addressing an archetypal beloved, but, as the book goes on, the interrogation turns to the speaker’s self or even the reader. The resulting loss of self is not only in response to the interpersonal, but many other kinds of loss: family, sanity, home, and the bigger, never-ending worldwide losses and disasters, human or otherwise. My main interest is what happens to the self when everything drops out from beneath you. How do you reconstruct your world when it no longer looks the same?  


Pujos: Section II works in different modes than the rest of Beast--both in tone and the actual format as it follows coal miners. What sets it apart is the language, which had a more prose-like quality in both tone and presentation. When you originally wrote this piece, did you have it all on one page? What about those gutters of white space? Were they added after? What was it about this section that inspired this approach?
Picture
Post: I tend to write in short bursts. A line or an image will come to me, and I will jot it down. For this poem, I decided to let the fragmentary way I first write stay the way it was, without trying to make it all be perfect sentences. I have a problem with revising too much sometimes. I often have to hold myself back from editing too much because I end up editing out the wildness of my initial impulse. I think each poem should have a little mistake or weirdness to it to retain the original. 
            So, for “The Miners,” I set out to let it be a bit more fragmentary with incomplete sentences, lines that trail across the page, and no punctuation but the gutters. The gutters come directly from James Dickey. I absolutely love the poems where he uses gutters, like in “Falling” or “Shark’s Parlor.” He writes these poems in one long, overwhelming column, but uses gutters to give the reader breathing room. I know that a lot of my work is fairly dense and complex, so even way back in 2008, I knew if all my poems were to become a book someday, I would need to let the reader’s mind and eyes rest a bit. The fragments and trailing off seemed to fit the subject of miners, particularly those who are trapped and losing air. The breath starts to get shallow and their thoughts get scrambled.  
Pujos: In your afterword, you note that the poem “Beckett Wolf” is composed of found text taken from both Samuel Beckett’s “First Love,” and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.  I was impressed with how lucid the outcome of this collage was. What was it about these two different texts that made you want to choose to appropriate and meld them together in the first place?
     Beast
      by Frances Justine Post
      Augury Books, 2014
      Paperback, 82 pages
Post: Those were two books I was reading at the time during a fiction class at Columbia while I was getting my MFA. The poem actually came from an exercise for Timothy Donnelly’s workshop to write a cento with found language. There might be a couple other poems that had their origins in Timothy Donnelly exercises; he gives the best exercises. Most end up getting pretty obscured, but “Beckett Wolf” stayed pretty much the same. I remember just going through and underlining lines that I liked and I wrote them all out on a sheet of paper. Somehow they all fit together and ended up sounding very much like a Justine Post poem. I probably liked the lines because they sounded like me!  

Pujos: Do your environmental surroundings influence your work—from images to word choices to overall ambience and pulse?

Post: I think it’s the environment of my childhood that influences me the most. I grew up in the South on an island near Charleston, SC. I had a somewhat feral childhood, running around with this amazing pack of kids who were all around my age. We would play on the beach all day or in the woods around the house. It was a wonderful, safe place to grow up. Even when I’m living in a city, I still seem to use the Southern, sort of gothic imagery of my childhood. I like how memory and dreams distort the environment as well. So usually the environment that my poems are set in doesn’t really exist except through the distortion of memory or through dreams. I have a real fascination with animals and wildness, beasts of human and animal origin. In my poems, the animals are not really actual animals; I definitely shape them to my needs. They are totally anthropomorphized; I use them to represent the wild side of the human psyche.

Pujos: Are you currently working on another manuscript/project? Do you find your voice and mode of writing from Beast bleeding into that work? Or are you finding that you have reinvented your style completely?

Post: Now that the book has been out for a little while, I am starting to feel the room to make new poems.  I am definitely done with the self-portrait poems. That project ran its course through Beast. The new poems definitely seem to take place in the aftermath of Beast. The speaker’s self has been reclaimed. She is stronger, more challenging of the status quo, a little more feminist. Whereas the poems in Beast were sometimes vengeful, sometimes needy, sometimes angry, sometimes comical, my new poems have a strength that I am really enjoying exploring. I am not really sure where the project as a whole will lead me, but I am enjoying the discovery of writing individual poems and not really thinking yet about how they will all fit together.

Pujos: I saw on your website that you and your twin sister, Cecelia Post, have collaborated on several projects, including the trailer and book cover of Beast. How has collaborating with different mediums influenced your own work and process? Are you planning of doing any more in the near future?

Post: My sister and I have collaborated for a long time. Even in undergrad, we worked on an artist’s book of my poems and her photographs. It was a natural choice to use her photographs for the cover. In fact, a few years ago when she showed me the photograph that is on the cover, I knew that would have to be on the cover of Beast if and when it was published. It just perfectly illustrates the unsettling human beastliness that appears in the book.
     Cecelia is also a video artist, so that is where the book trailer for Beast came from. Cecelia has a new video that we are itching to put together with “Self-Portrait as Cannibal.” Stay tuned!  


Ines Pujos holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University. She is yet another poet living in Brooklyn and enjoys eating pastries. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry, Phantom Limb, Puerto Del Sol, Cimarron Review and others.