Carina Finn is an MFA student at the University of Notre Dame. Her work has won two Academy of American Poets Prizes,
the Boley Prize for short fiction, the Breadcrumb Scabs Editor’s Choice Award, and has appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, Breadcrumb Scabs, and Shoots & Vines. She has written for Central Virginia Guides, the non-profit organization No Water – No Life, and is a Senior Contributing Writer for Alive! Magazine.
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Carina Finn Interview, with Nicelle Davis
In your poems, you use the page beautifully by taking full advantage of the possibilities found in line breaks and spacing; it is almost as if you are carving a statue with words. Could you please tell us about your process in creating word statues?
It’s funny, because “word statues” is exactly the term I’d use to describe my process when writing these kinds of poems. I remember hearing Michelangelo’s quote about carving until the angel was set free from the marble in an art history class, and that concept really stuck with me.
A lot of times, I’ll conceive of the visual form and metrical pattern of a poem before the words or even the subject matter becomes apparent – I carve, in a manner, those elements from the page, using text as both a tool and a medium. Once the text is there, the poem goes through a sort of tailoring process, during which form and content are incrementally adjusted until I am satisfied by some sense of balance.
I’m really fascinated with translating the methodologies of other art forms into ones that can be used in the making of poems. “skeleton clothes” came right at the tail-end of a phase during which I was working really intensely with cubism and the very beginning of one during which I was looking at a lot of Renaissance sculpture and Edward Weston photographs to figure out how to articulate natural forms more precisely. “contextualize me with a spoon” happened when I first started working with film as a medium, and was thinking a lot about performance and artifice.
Your poems have a strong sense of music (I would even say a kinship with the wordplay found in smart hip-hop and pop lyrics); is this intentional? Do you hear language as though it were a song? Do you listen to music while writing?
When I was really young, probably around five or six, I developed this habit of tapping out the metrical patterns (although I wasn’t aware that that was what I was doing at the time) of song lyrics and later, of speech, with my fingers, pens/pencils, utensils – anything available, really. It drove my family insane; they were always yelling at me to stop tapping! So on a rhythmic level, I do treat language very much like a song. I have notebook pages covered in nothing but scansion marks that function as scores or sheet music of sorts for future poems.
I very rarely write without music playing. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of repetitive instrumental music – Phillip Glass, Aphex Twin, and Sigur Ros are all on my “writing” playlist – but I also listen to a lot of what you’d call “smart” hip hop and pop (The Notorious B.I.G. and L’il Kim have been major influences of late) and possibly even more “bad” (especially 80s/90s) pop music; also lots of big band/jazz/swing and lots folk and bluegrass, some opera, some awesome(/ly awful) classic rock…
There are definitely poems in which the pop-song kinship is intentional – “contextualize me with a spoon” is one of them. That poem was actually written as part of a performance-art piece, so the sense of pop-culture-influenced sound was purposefully stylized.
What poets do you turn to for inspiration?
When I want pure technical mastery I go for Stein, Bishop (particularly the poem “At the Fishhouses,” which is the first poem that made me take the craft aspect of poetry really seriously), Larkin, Eliot, and Plath – which may seem like a ragtag bunch but they’re quite similar in my mind. Rachel Zucker is my go-to girl when I’m struggling with narrative. I adore Chelsey Minnis and Ariana Reines but I can’t read them too much or too often because I become enchanted. Right now I’m reading Hiromi Ito’s Killing Kanoko, which is an amazing book; it’s extravagant and restrained and completely self-interested/uninterested and vulgar and proper all at once.
I think it’s really important to have a broad range of influences, and for some of those influences to come from places outside of poetry because it can get kind of incestuous. I turn to outside sources for inspiration probably more often than not. Film and theatre have really strong influences on my work; I especially love animated short films, because I think the basic form/function are so closely related to those of poetry. Vogue is always a great source of inspiration because it’s visually decadent and smart. Cooking is also really important for me. I get a lot of images from taste/texture, and I like that there are rules, forms and techniques one must master before being able to bend them and produce something amazing and unexpected – it’s just like poetry!
I was very drawn to your mixing of soft images with dark context in your poems, such as with the poem “skeleton clothes” when you write “ragdoll bones cracked open with scissors. a pile of stitches.” Do you often use unexpected pairings in your poems? What do you hope readers will gain from these delightful (yet unsettling) surprises?
This is the wrong answer, but at first I wasn’t even fully aware of the fact that the pairings in a lot of my poems would be characterized as “unexpected” – I’ve always seen the world in terms of these kinds of dynamics. Maybe it’s because I watched a lot of 80s cartoons like Rainbow Brite when I was a kid, which are pretty much all about the soft image in the dark context. Cuteness in general, which is an aesthetic I’m really into, is very much about the passive, helpless, adorable object taking on a kind of agency through deformity/enduring violence and/or contextualization in a dark/horrific landscape. Sianne Ngai wrote an amazing article about it called “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde.”
So the ragdolls in “skeleton clothes” are cute, hyper-feminine, positively darling objects, and they’re dealing with this disjunction of reality/physicality and the not-unpleasant aestheticization of being a doll – but they’re not entirely doll or human; they are adorable monsters. This makes them even cuter and it also gives them agency, even if it’s artificial. A lot of my poems deal with this kind of struggle for agency, and I think jarring juxtapositions are a particularly apt way of illustrating that struggle.
What creative projects are you currently working on?
Right now, I’m very interested in exploring new mediums. I think the next step for poets who are struggling with the confines of the page is to take the poem off of the page entirely or to reimagine the page in such a way that it is no longer limiting, so I’ve started composing poems on leaves and ribbons and in Illustrator, Flash, iMovie – pretty much anything other than Word and Paper, although I still use them about half of the time. I’m currently focusing on a multimedia poem that riffs on B-grade horror movies, 1950s-60s gender roles, and atrocity kitsch as well as a fractured fairytale-esque narrative of the female experience in academia.
What would you write if commissioned by Webster’s Dictionary to create a definition for the word “poetry?”
I might refuse the commission, actually. I think a definition of poetry exists but it should be unsayable, like the real name of Old-Testament god.
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