Romana Iorga :: Kelly R. Samuels & Oblivescence

West Trestler Romana Iorga interviews West Trestler Kelly R. Samuels about her new poetry collection, Oblivescence (Red Sweater Press, 2024), a book carried by a daughter's relationship with her mother as they navigate the latter's struggle with dementia due to Alzheimer's  (from the publisher).

Romana Iorga: Language and memory are intertwined throughout many of your poems in Oblivescence. The poem “What We Think of When the Character in the Novel Says There Should Be a Word for Memories Left Unremembered” begins with the lines, “The word is stubborn. / It does not want to be known.” It seems that the disappearance of memory would necessarily bring about the disappearance of language, and yet, that’s not always the case in this collection. Words often serve as “navigational tools” to anchor experience, to provide a map for the fading memory. The line,  “Here’s the trough to drink from to recall, shallow and bloody” in “My Mother as Anticlea, upon Forgetting” seems to indicate that the poem itself has become a talisman against forgetting. How do you view the interplay between language and memory in your work?

Kelly R. Samuels: Language is one of the first casualties of Alzheimer’s. I wanted to illustrate that loss for my mother in particular poems, either fully, as with “What We Think of…” or briefly as in the poem “Metathesis” when I share that she, not being able to quickly recall my name, would call me “you.” For me, as the speaker, language is being used to process what is happening, and as you write, “provide a map,” to orient myself and try and navigate uncharted territory. Thus, the use of medical terms like “Anomia” and “Alexithymia”; those poems sprang from attempts to further educate myself about dementia. I also wanted to show that we all have lapses, even those of us who are more cognitively healthy—either because we are tired or stressed or distracted. And, so, sometimes I would include my own loss regarding language, as in the title poem, when I use the word “something” and then the ellipses to suggest I have either forgotten or cannot find the words. All of the poems, in sum, serve as a record, because that’s what we do, as poets, right? We try and capture something, fix something to the page, with our words.   

RI: Strong emotions, like fear, are often the ones that stay with us the longest. In “Overwritten (1),” you say, “Fear would have to bring you here— / to what had not been overwritten.” Yet the moments of sadness and violence that follow are, in their turn, followed by moments of joy. Memory seems to be an ally in this instance, rewriting the past to make it bearable. A happier memory, in the titular poem Oblivescence, shows us a mother and daughter canning peaches together. The speaker mourns the fact that she can’t quite remember every detail, “some necessary gestures absent, wiped / away.” Can memory preserve the essence of an experience—either positive or negative—by retelling it in a slightly altered form? By turning it into myth and allegory?

KRS: It certainly can. We know that we rewrite memories and that each time we recall an event, our brain alters it a little, but the essence is still there, and certainly the accompanying feelings. “Overwritten (1)” and “Overwritten (2)” stem from what we understand of fear and memory, and give glimpses of my mother’s two marriages—to my father and then my stepfather—neither of which were what I would call happy. In the last two lines of each poem I wanted to convey something of beauty and happiness as compensation for the violence earlier in the poem—an overwrite or rewrite—as well as work with the idea of how we try and see something good in a terrible situation, perhaps as a survival tactic. So, there is preservation of the negative experience, but also our effort to salvage the positive. And that salvaging could be accurate, or not. I mean, a myth is often defined as something believed to be true, but that isn’t. And, yet, myths matter; they tell us something about ourselves or what we consider to be important. 

RI: The erasure poem “What Rises to the Surface” stands out among other poems in Oblivescence. I was so moved by the source text, particularly the memory of the car trip during which your six-year-old self massages her mother’s shoulders to alleviate the pain of a migraine. And I love the erasure of that text, with its evocative “Everything / is / near/ and / nearly,” and the fact that we can read this poem both by taking it apart (source text, then erasure), or by piecing it together (vice versa). Given the focus of the collection on the process of forgetting, the presence of this poem, and its placement halfway through the text, as an anchor, or a spine, seems meaningful and important. Could you talk a bit about how this poem came into existence and your choice to build the collection around it? 

KRS: I am so pleased to hear you liked “What Rises to the Surface” and its accompanying poem! To be honest, the collection was not built around the creative nonfiction piece; that is to say, in the first iterations of the collection, it was not included. It was this separate piece I had written and which had been published by The Lindenwood Review and then I began thinking about collections that include essays or use erasure, like Traci Brimhall’s Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Katy Didden’s Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland, and I folded it in after creating the erasure poem from it. The title prompted the poem—what rose to the surface, for me: glimpses, fragments. I elected to position it near the middle of the collection to give the reader more information and a different reading experience, as well as to serve as a door into the later half where my mother’s condition deteriorates and we move beyond her death.  
  
RI: The human body is at the forefront of many of your poems, such as “Tending the Body,” with its final heartbreaking stanza: “And, so, how you look at me / with nothing of recognition, trying / to piece it all together. Make it whole.” Is the focus on your mother’s physical presence, the process of remembering what she looked like, an attempt to conjure her more vividly, to make her present and whole? I’m asking because I found myself doing something similar when writing about my mother and grandmother who’ve passed away—I wrote about their specific gestures or looks or ways of expressing themselves, and for a little while they would become more present than absent. 

KRS: I think many of us attempt to recall what a beloved person looked like after they die. It’s why pictures are so important. We find ourselves scrolling through images on our phones or, if older, paging through photo albums or rooting through photo boxes to gaze upon the deceased again. As for gestures, I sometimes find myself making the same as my mother, and in doing so, call up the memory of her. In composing these poems, I hoped to not only illustrate my mother’s struggles with Alzheimer’s, but show something of who she was, as a person—to personalize the experience for the reader, as it was for me as her daughter. Being able to see her or imagine what she looked like, at least somewhat, is part of that. “Tending the Body” is one of those poems that references biographical information—like she broke her nose while sledding as a girl—but, more importantly, tries to draw a picture of what she looked like, or maybe more accurately, the parts of her body I could evoke, the hands being most important to me, largely because when she was hospitalized the last week of her life, I washed and massaged her hands—a moment I could not, in the end, write about.        
​                                                                Romana Iorga & Kelly R. Samuels

---