West Trestler Kelly R. Samuels interviews West Trestler Romana Iorga about her poetry collection Temporary Skin (Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming). Kelly R. Samuels: Loss figures in the collection, particularly early on, with poems like “Passage.” The speaker seems to feel a futility, a helplessness against that loss, as well as blame and guilt. In many of these poems, nature also figures largely. For example, in “Nothing Left to Do” entering into the forest, among the trees, seems to give the speaker some respite. This is echoed in a later poem, “Her Dark Materials.” But, at other times, nature seems treacherous: the wind hammers, the hail turns to sleet. How do you see nature as working with or against that loss, or, perhaps, both? Romana Iorga: I think nature responds to how the speaker feels in my poems. It echoes the speaker’s inner turmoil; it mirrors her contemplative state of mind. Nature is rarely indifferent, but even indifference can be a response and spur the speaker to action. More often than not, nature is compassionate, all-knowing, revered. A godlike presence. And forests are indeed places where the characters that populate my work are the closest to themselves. This is how I feel, too, about being among trees. In the forest, there are truths that don’t need to be spoken out loud to be heard. The trees seem to know something that we, humans, have forgotten. I always leave a forest replenished and yearning to return. KRS: Words, throughout, often cause pain; they have done damage, they “push and pull” and their “saliva is lethal.” The speaker says in “Mea Culpa…” “Forgive me for sounding rash / & unthoughtful” and later in “I Was Afraid of Opening My Mouth” admits that fear. But there are also times in the collection where fashioning words seems to help manage the pain—that “stringing syllables together” mentioned in the poem “Dictionary.” And with the last poem, there seems to be the idea that a person must reconcile themselves to the fact that words will often do harm. Are you making a distinction between the spoken and the written word? And if so, what is that distinction? RI: Some of my speakers have decried their inability to pin down language on paper, to do it proper justice. Language seems most alive when unwritten, when its potential has not been diminished by trapping it in a mortal, woundable body. Words are transcendent and all-powerful in my poems, they can do things that the much too human speakers cannot. And now I’m becoming aware that I tend to endow both nature and language with divine characteristics. I think I’m OK with that. Language may be a human invention but it has outgrown our imagination, our capability to wrap our mind around it. And, once we’re no longer here, language is doomed to die out in a process reminiscent of all things in nature that die out. It’s a sad and beautiful thing. So yes, words can harm the speaker as well as make her whole—it’s only natural for them to do so when they have their own heartbeat. I’d like so much to believe that words will outlive us, like I’d like to believe that trees will outlive us. KRS: Some of the poems in this collection address a “you.” Some say that it can represent the speaker themselves, i.e. the speaker is talking to themselves. Was that your intent, for example, with poems like “The Snare,” “Infection” and “Nothing Left to Do”? Or are you suggesting there is a companion to the speaker who also suffers? And if so, does that companion also feel guilt and blame as the speaker seems to? RI: The speakers tend to be different versions of the self and sometimes (not very often) other people. “The Snare,” for instance, is a monologue at the end of a relationship, in which the “you” is very much someone else, someone who’s done some harm to the speaker. But in “Infection” and “Nothing Left to Do,” the “you” is an alter ego: a very close one to the real me in the first poem, and a very distant one (I hope! because he’s a murderer!) in the second. I believe the alter ego feels everything the speaker does and more. The alter ego is wiser. Sometimes I think of this “you” as the poem speaking to me, telling me how I feel, what I think. Giving birth to the “I” instead of the other way around. A presence that is both inside and outside of the self, often benevolent, but not always. A trickster character, endlessly elusive and fascinating. KRS: Do your chosen epigraphs with certain poems like “The Riddle” prompt the poem or are they included after, as a complement? RI: All the epigraphs included in the collection came before the poems did. I can’t think of a time when an epigraph came after. I’m often inspired to write when I read other people’s words. It’s not quite like opening a tap, but on the days when I’m in the zone, it’s just like that. Then there are, of course, the normal “slog” days, all three hundred and fifty something of them. On those days, someone else’s line may entice one or two lines of my own that will later find their way into a poem. I love when other poets’ work connects with my own life, bringing back memories I thought long forgotten, reminding me who I am. But I also love when the poetry I read is a terra incognita that I must discover anew for myself, and rediscover myself as I read it. Every new poem is a voyage toward the interior, in one way or another. It’s an amazing feeling when a poem opens a door or a window inside me and that window or door opens another one, and then another—so many doors and windows and air and light and infinite space. It’s as if the body were a house made to read and be read in return. Kelly R Samuels & Romana Iorga
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