"Mental illness, memory, and myth are not elements you can solve and walk away from." (An Interview with Melissa Atkinson Mercer)
Melissa Atkinson Mercer is the author of Knock, out March 1st, 2018 from Half Mystic Press. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Moon City Review, Zone 3, Blue Earth Review, and A Portrait in Blues: An Anthology of Identity, Gender and Bodies, among others. She has an MFA from West Virginia University, where she won the Russell MacDonald Creative Writing Award in Poetry. She currently works and teaches at Lees-McRae College.
This is the first stop on the blog tour for Knock. See reviews from 12 more bloggers, interviews with and guest posts by Melissa, and giveaways of the book in L'Éphémère Review, Biblio Nyan, A.D. Aster, The Coil, Parentheses Journal, Books for a Delicate Eternity, Clairefy, Word Drift, Of Wonderland, YA Indulgences, The Adroit Journal, and Utopia State of Mind over the next two weeks. If you haven't picked up your copy of Knock yet, orders are being shipped now, and we'd be honoured to share this creation with you.
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HM: Knock is divided into three parts, all titled with various definitions of the verb "to knock." What, to you, is the significance of the word's many connotations? Why did you narrow in on those three specifically?
MAM: I love the word knock—its single sonorous syllable, the way it functions as both a command and an invitation. You must knock; you should knock; you can knock. Knock is the promise of a door, of a space to be entered, a possibility that exists beyond this one.
The three definitions I focus on—to produce a noise, to gain entry, to collide—are three aspects of knocking that crescendo, that build one on another. First we must make ourselves heard and then we can demand entry, but it doesn’t end there: we collide, we clash, we speak and misspeak, we are misheard, we mishear, others fail us and we fail them, we try poorly and then better and then—hopefully—better still.
To build on that: was each of the three parts conceived separately, or did you see them from the beginning as shifting parts of a whole?
The first two parts were originally written as separate, shorter projects.
Several of the poems in the first section were first published in the micro-chapbook My Own Strange Beast (Porkbelly Press), a nine poem sequence about the matrilineal and the familial and the monstrous.
The second section was originally written as a response to the myth of Ursula. I was fascinated both by the stories of Saint Ursula and by the different incarnations of Ursula the villain, Ursula the sea-witch. I was also fascinated (as I often am) by the tongue as a locus of agency.
When I started to realize that these two parts were really pieces of a whole, I wrote the third section and the three “cures for depression” poems and the book quickly took shape.
Many of the poems in Knock are dynamic, uncatchable prose poems. What, to you, is the appeal of the prose poem as a form? Do you approach prose poems with unique considerations in mind?
To me, prose poems are more immediate in that they lack the white space that gives lineated poems room to breathe. Prose poems are these beautiful, breathless, all-at-once creatures.
I think they do require a different sort of thinking: they have to push back even harder against language, they have to pay an even deeper attention to rhythm and sound.
A line is the unit of meaning in a lineated poem, so without lines, I see a prose poem as a work fundamentally in question with itself. Is a sentence the unit of meaning? A sound cluster? A phrase? A word? All of it at once? I think, at least partly, I’m drawn to the prose poem for the same reasons I’m drawn to the act of questioning, of being in question.
Several poems in the book's first part, "v. to produce a noise," invoke the power of familial bonds among women to define the speakers' histories. How does the lens of matriarchy blur memory—or bring it more clearly into focus?
There is a power to collective memory. History itself is one version of the collective—what we have decided to remember/believe/record. And so, in a sense, the matrilineal helps to create a collective memory that serves as an antidote to male-written history (“his story”).
But, at the same time, whenever we form a collective memory, we are discarding pieces of individual memory. And so there is a fundamental tension there—how do we build a collective memory that we can all embrace without sacrificing our individual memory? How do we choose what we sacrifice and what we retain?
Is this book intended to be dangerous? If so, to whom? To what?
I certainly hope this book is dangerous. There is nothing safe or easy about being willing to deeply question yourself and the world around you. But, of course, to not question can be even more dangerous—so I hope this book offers readers not only danger, but also clarity and compassion.
On the other hand, I hope Knock is whole-heartedly dangerous to the patriarchy, to oppressive societal norms, to the ways people other and reduce those who are not like them, to a history written (again and again) by white men, to the ways women are mythologized and monstered.
The second part of the book, "v. to gain entry," is comprised of a nineteen-poem sequence titled only with Roman numerals. What do you see that sequence as gaining entry to? How does the ordering of the poems here reflect that path?
This poem sequence begins with a question—“which story will you believe”—and everything that follows resonates back against this first line.
I see this section as gaining entry to ourselves, to our own stories, to the myths and histories that we chose to construct, to the doors (both internal and external) that have previously been shut against us.
Different stories and different versions of self build on and contradict each other as the sequence progresses, culminating in the final two poems where the speaker tells us: “I lean toward the difficult/I have something to say.” Ultimately, what matters is not so much which story we believe or what we will say, but simply that we will choose to face the “difficult” and to speak.
Throughout the collection, you engage unflinchingly with depression via seemingly fantastical imagery. In your mind, how do those two ideas inform, interact with, and/or contradict one another?
The fantastical requires us to question what is real and what isn’t, whether we can or should believe what we are shown.
Depression also fractures reality. Depression can feel fantastical—like a dark beast, not always believed or seen by others, but fully, wholly present.
In the final part of the book, "v. to collide," each poem's title is a question to which the poem responds—a collision, so to speak, of two speakers. Why did you choose to explore that friction? Why at the end of the book?
The whole book is about women’s voices—how they collide and intermingle and fight back. The final section brings this push/pull, this question/answer, this tension to the surface. It makes explicit the process that has already been weaving its way through the earlier poems.
I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that what others hear is not necessarily what we say, and vice versa. I think, at least to some degree, speaking and listening always collide. Speech is an imperfect rendering of our thoughts; listening is an imperfect reception of speech. The question is what we do with that—how we can collide carefully and with compassion.
The 'cures for depression' that precede each part in Knock read almost like spells. By whom are such spells meant to be performed? Are they meant to be performed at all?
I like the idea of these poems as spells. I would say the body of these poems function as spells against their titles. The titles are all overly simplistic/impossible cures imposed externally (by “they”) whereas the body of the poems are internal cures/spellwork that present a more complicated/whole truth.
These poems are for anyone fighting to reclaim a sense of self, to push back against the ways they are categorized and labeled and “cured.”
And finally, is there any music that brings you straight back to this book every time you hear it?
I listened to a lot of soft, haunting, aching songs as I wrote the book, so hearing any of these takes me back. In a way, though, I feel like I’m still right there—right with the book; it’s been the most personal/immediate/visceral/difficult book that I’ve written and I don’t really feel like I’m ever far from it. Mental illness, memory, and myth are not elements you can solve and walk away from, so I’m still right with them, and, by extension, right with this book.
Knock is the fiercely musical, highly anticipated debut release from Half Mystic Press. In it, Melissa Atkinson Mercer interrogates the width, weight, and wholeness of depression, calling out to a self reflected back as monster, as myth, as song and water and tongue. Knock asks us to consider the complications of gender and voice: who gets to speak, who gets listened to, whose stories turn to fact and whose to fiction. Unflinching and tender, this book reminds us what it takes to navigate the mind’s dark seas and come out alive. It is available for preorder now.