RENDER / AN APOCALYPSE: An Interview with Rebecca Gayle Howell
Winner of the Poetry Center’s 2012 First Book Prize, Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse is a sparse and incantatory meditation on humanity and the earth that continues to delight and confound readers ten years on. Render / An Apocalypse is a book of poems marked by an unsettling precision of language and sharpness of feeling, a clarity of image coupled with cryptic iconography, homed in truncated lines and embedded sonics that give shape to a singular, moving voice. In attempting to describe this work, one is quickly compelled to speak in opposing terms. Dichotomies melt. We are returned to an essential beginning.
The Poetry Center is honoring Howell’s singular debut collection with a week of new reflections, responses, revisitations, and celebrations of Render / An Apocalypse here at Exclamation’s Gauntlet. To get us started, our own Joee Goheen spoke with Rebecca Gayle Howell about the book; about land, place, apocrypha, destruction, hope, creation, and care. Welcome to Render Week.
Joee Goheen: The poems in the book are presented as instructions or a manual of survival (or a manual on how to bring about apocalypse, depending on how you read them). I wondered whether these poems always existed in this format? How were these poems conceived?
Rebecca Gayle Howell: You’re absolutely right. Render is built like a kind of farmer’s almanac, but one that turns expectations. The book has two primary characters: 1) the “you” who has woken up on a subsistence farm and has absolutely no idea how to live there 2) the narrator who is ostensibly issuing instructions to help him learn subsistence—but she is a trickster narrator. Sometimes she is giving him instructions for how to learn what he needs to know to live there well—and sometimes she is giving instructions that will teach us about how to survive—not the farm—but ourselves. The voice that drives the poems is multidimensional, in order to awaken the reader's attention.
But this was not a strategy. Render was not a concept. The poems just started to come, in my dreams and during meditation, and I followed them. And they came in this form. “Listen and dictate,” an old mentor of mine used to say, and I’ve found that to be the most joyful part of my practice. If I don’t come to my desk with a preconceived idea about what I’m there to write, if I maintain a receptive state, the work that comes surprises me, teaches me. And I want a life of learning. Joan Didion famously said she writes ‘to know what [she] thinks.” I guess I’m saying I write to discover what I haven’t yet thought; I write to change my own mind.
JG: I think the sense of place in these poems is one of the reasons they’re so immersive and powerfully strange. The reader really enters the landscape of this world and traverses it with every page. While we know we’re on a farm somewhere, it’s not totally clear where. Subsistence farming is not just a practice in the American South, but in many places around the world, therefore the place of these poems has a universality to it which I think is brilliant. Each reader can see this place in their own way, but shaded in a dark hue of loneliness, hostility, and isolation. I know you’re from Kentucky and this might be the landscape you had in mind when writing these poems, but can you talk about this decision to keep exact location vague? I also write a lot about place, and Appalachia in particular, and it feels like I am always in that landscape even when I’m writing from two-hundred and some miles north. What challenges do you feel when trying to render a place? What challenges (if any) did you face while trying to render this place in the book?
RGH: I recognize that feeling of land-grief that you’re describing. It’s like the land lives inside you somewhere, like the trees, the hills are in your bones. I, like you, am never very far from the place that made me. It is something like the Welsh idea of “hiraeth”—a longing kind of love for the particulars of a place. I’ve lived in Kentucky, West Texas, Provincetown: all extreme, and extremely different, landscapes. I miss all of these places in ways I can’t really explain—but it is physical, and it reminds of the feeling of loss I have when I miss my now-gone dog. It’s a loss that I feel in my body.
But I don’t regret this grief. I want to truly inhabit where I live, and I want to write from within that intimacy. We talk about “nature poetry” or “eco-poetry” but I don’t love those phrases—as they seem to imply that any one landscape can be written about in a way that can be exchanged with another. I don’t think that can be. The intelligence that we generically call the natural world is specific to its own place. Believe me, a storm in West Texas is quite, quite different from a storm in Knott County, Kentucky. What grows, grows differently. This is true for flora and fauna, and I think it is also true for the human imagination. Or, can be. I want to tune my thoughts, my ear, my being to the land I am in, learn from it. I’m not interested in place as ‘setting.’ I’m interested in place as ‘teacher.’
So, I get pretty practical about it. I was first a documentarian, and I bring those skills to my poetry practice. Before I wrote Render, I had spent three years in the coal fields documenting communities that were surviving mountaintop removal coal mining. During those same years, I also carried out a series of interviews with Appalachian families about their foodways practices. Once the poems in Render really started to come, I realized that those two tributaries were activated inside me. I also realized I needed to keep learning. USDA manuals from the early 20th century. Agrarian oral history archives. bell hooks. A friend of mine who is a novelist once said to me: “Take it all in. All of it is research. Take it in, and sleep on it. Let it compost inside you. Something new will grow.” I have found that to be true in my work as a poet.
Thank you for reading that Render is of a specific place—in my heart, it is of my grandmother’s subsistence farm in East Kentucky. However, I am very interested in how women-identified persons want to write about their land work, and I am interested in how these stories emerge in transnational contexts. For the last few years, I’ve been working with US women writers who are farmers—teaching and editing books, etc. At the same time, I’ve been working on an English version of Claudia Prado’s El interior de la ballena, which will be out next spring. El interior de la ballena is part family history, part novel-in-verse, and its story is of the Patagonia Plateau, where Claudia’s ascendants were subsistence farmers. I have also had some conversations about translations of Render, and I hope that it can happen. Neither women or farmers are a monolith group. They are not interchangeable, and neither are their stories. But I love the idea of different communities having access to each other’s stories, especially as land work becomes even more stressful during climate change.
JG: The images which serve to separate the three sections of the collection are so poignant and unsettling—I might describe them as “witchy” almost, or macabre in a very fairytale way, like illustrations from a Brother’s Grimm story. They’re incredibly effective in communicating a sense of place, mood, and subject matter in a way that section headings couldn’t on their own. They also go well with the idea of a manual, where pictures are used to supplement text instruction. Pictures are the safer or more logical option for a manual that might be in the hands of someone hundreds of years from now. Can you talk about this choice? Did the book originally have section titles? What was your vision for these images?
RGH: I come from a part of Kentucky that enjoys a deep and long tradition of book arts. When I was coming up as a poet, book arts were just in the atmosphere, like humidity. Letterpress, binding, typography, paper types; the thoughtfulness of the practice shaped my understanding of books, yes, but also poetry. Still today, my sense of a ‘poetry book’ begins with thinking about the object itself, how the act of poetry can in fact begin when the reader picks the book up off the shelf. If the reader has a tactile experience with a book, they develop a kind of intimacy with it, and in so doing, I believe, become a co-creator with the work. I want to give my readers that experience whenever I can.
Cleveland State University Poetry Center gets it. And when it came time for what would normally just be a conversation about picking the front cover art, we went further, together. We started to ask questions about how the poems might be able to do more work for their reader, if the reader was holding a book that felt like an almanac. That’s why we chose the narrow trim size, the cardstock covers, the thick, soft page stock—and that’s why we commissioned the line drawings, for exactly the reasons you’ve intuited. An old farmer’s almanac has those wonderful encyclopedia-like drawings, fine line details to support the understanding of the work ahead. In Render the drawings appear at first glance to be this kind of illustration, but then one quickly realizes they are not demonstrations of what is, but portals of what is to come—that’s why they feel like a haunting I think.
JG: I really appreciate the unflinchingly clear, precise writing and imagery in this book. We’re in this lonesome landscape with the speaker, acting on and witnessing the consequences of fulfilling our desires and needs. While these poems are clear in their action and the particular violences of husbandry, there is a cryptic nature to the book and the poems within that leaves the reader uncertain if this is survival manual or a manual on how to bring about destruction—not just personal, but societal. Has the apocalypse already begun, or rather being rendered as we read? This question remains open and we are left to interpret it with foreboding either way. While there might be clear instructions on how to milk a cow or prepare a pig for slaughter, it’s not so clear who and when the reader is—am I to be instructed now, as the apocalypse has already occurred, or later in the future? Or rather am I being warned of the impending apocalypse to come, as a result of insatiable human greed and an anthropocentrism which insists on dissociation from other animals and the natural world? Could you speak on this a little bit and whether this ambiguity is your own experience of the poems and their intent, or if there is indeed a specific message about the apocalypse Render is trying to communicate?
RGH: Here the word “apocalypse” is working in a couple of ways.
First, it’s an acknowledgement of the genre of apocalypse literature that was popular among Biblical-era writers, a form that is influential on my writing. The Book of Daniel. St. John’s Revelation. The Apocryphal Apocalypses. The Gnostic Apocalypses. Many such stories were written, often out of present circumstances that were too difficult for the writer to comprehend—so they surrendered their imaginations to the surreal in order to dream toward a future in which understanding could be achieved.
When I was writing Render, I was asking myself hard questions about how we as a species had reached such a point of dissociation that we have completely endangered our own habitat (climate change). It is, of course, overwhelming to think about. And, of course, it means the apocalypse is already upon us. Once the book was written, I realized that in some ways I had not just been thinking about matters that feel apocalyptic, I had written into the apocalypse genre—about something that was indeed present and terrifying, but instead of writing into the future by surrealism, I was working in exacting realism.
I also saw that it was the animals, not the humans, who were the book’s prophets. They were the keepers of the book’s potential for new understanding. Poem after poem, the animals said: tenderness. In listening to them, I realized that we humans had forgotten tenderness with the earth, we’d forsaken eye contact with our creaturely colleagues, we’d denied our dependency. That’s how we endangered our habitat—and remembering what we’ve forgotten is how we can heal it.
JG: It’s 10 years after the initial publication of this collection and much has happened since, but the book has not lost its timeliness and sense of immediacy. This is testament, of course, to the powerful and haunting verse within its pages, which drops the reader mercilessly into a cold world where they must confront their own wanting and the often gruesome and hypocritical means of obtaining it: “You have to be a blood and guts bulldozer / a scrounge You have to not care / How you get what you get.” The subject matter is immune to time. It seems like we get closer to the apocalypse every day. The state of our environment has only worsened, the gap of economic inequality deepens, the Amazon continues to shrink, it’s been a year now since Russia began its war on Ukraine, in the past month an earthquake in Syria and Turkey has killed tens of thousands and compounded the suffering of an ongoing civil war, and right now as I write these words toxic chemicals from a train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio are leaching into the soil and waterways—where I’m from along the Ohio River, where people are once again breathing contaminated air and buying bottled water because their water is unsafe to drink. I’m curious how you encounter these poems today, ten years after publication, when in my view, the apocalypses they envision seem to be drawing ever closer?
RGH: First, I want to say I’m so sorry your people are now facing the disaster in East Palestine. It is a devastation, and we both know it will take many years to reach anything resembling recovery.
Unfortunately, I think you’re right. Render’s subject is immune to time. The momentum of facism, war refugees, climate refugees, mass violence, civil war, extreme wealth inequalities, the pandemic, failing food systems, at-risk human rights through white supremacy; labor abuses; anti-semitism; homophobic, transphobic, misogynist violence; industrial disasters.
To answer your question—I read Render today, and I learn again about hope. I am a person who believes our thoughts create our actions. So, I try to be alert, to see what is happening and name it, but without giving into despair, denial, or fear. It is even more important to me that I guard my right to imagine, believe in, and articulate an actionable path toward hope. “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,” Wendell Berry writes. If hope does not come from within, if I do not create it through my thoughts and actions, it does not exist in my life.
I understand this priority now far more deeply than I did in 2013. One of the lines in Render reads “These are the blazing days, and you are asked to love.” In many ways—that was me, writing to me. I must, I must learn in new ways every day to love beyond my measure. Care is the counterforce to destruction.
JG: Is there hope in these poems? Or does the hope come from confronting them and engaging with them in a way that plants a seed of reflection—of change? In other words, the idea of confronting the abyss and not being swallowed by it just yet? I find a strange, almost nihilistic kind of hope in the very last part of “As you have been stolen from, steal” in which the speaker says “Walk off Or don’t / Tomorrow comes on its own” and then employs the metaphor of a tick to speak of one’s regrets: “This is your inheritance: / to be a singing blood meal, unaware.” The problem of ticks is one we’ve accelerated in destroying our natural world and is something that comes with the territory of animal husbandry. Is there a satisfaction, almost, in getting our due? But the poem also ends with the idea of “choice” — “Touch! — / that nimbus That choice” which is hopeful, in the sense of having a choice at all, of perhaps being able to change our fate.
RGH: The book’s end, its meaning, is left in the reader’s hands—and by that I mean actually in their hands. Touch is, or can be, the embodiment of tenderness. We can use touch to bully each other, shove each other out of the way, dominate each other, or not. And when we don’t use it that way, we can create a force of sharing and care that sutures the world by one small softness at a time. In 2007 I heard H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama give a lecture, and during the Q&A that followed, he was asked what a person can do for the world’s many ills, much like you are asking about them above. He thought for a moment, and then said “affection.” Looking back, that’s probably the moment Render wrote itself inside me. Affection, tenderness, hope—we either choose to create them, enact them, or we don’t. And, in that regard, it is up to the reader to leave the book and decide for themselves what kind of animal they want to be.
That line, when the narrator says “As you have been stolen from, steal”—I think she’s being a bit snarky there. For me as a reader, I hear her actually saying: “What are you doing? You know what it feels like to suffer. Why would you ever enact it on someone else?” I hear her also saying something like, “You haven’t had enough? Go ahead, you will see what causing suffering brings upon you.” This line is from the book’s last section, a long poem called “The Calendar of Blazing Days,” where the narrator rapidly moves between her earnest and trickster selves. Here the voice shifts, not just between poems, but now between lines. It is a voice that requires the reader to reawaken their attention.
In the book’s final moments, the “you” is leaving the farm behind, much like we in the US often tell ourselves we did in the early 20th century. Here the book’s “you” is trying to leave to find hope, as if hope is a thing that can live outside of us. The narrator’s perspective is that progress awaits us not in cities or in convenience or in wealth but within our souls, by way of our choices. The fact that life is short—that we are in the end worm-food, as Keating said it, or in this poem’s version, tick-food—should tell us all we need to know about our inability to actually leave behind the natural world. No matter where we are, the blessed choice to recognize our mistakes, our dependency, our responsibility and therefore our freedom, is ours.
Walk off Or don’t
Tomorrow comes on its own
Call instead to your regrets
Your chiggers your ticks Each nail-head body
crawling you, your length a blade of grass
Watch how it labors to bury its biting head
to find the wet night it knows is there
This is your inheritance:
to be the singing blood meal, unaware
—Touch!
That nimbus That choice
JG: Would you be willing to talk a bit about what you're working on now? Perhaps what you're reading as well?
RGH: Sure. Thanks for asking. In recent years, I have been particularly interested in the radical nature of collaboration—I think collaboration is an unsung, relational, and in some ways anti-capitalist, model for art-making that decenters the idea of “ownership” of the art and centers instead creation for its own sake.
This fall I released A Winter Breviary, a collaboration with the classical composer Reena Esmail. A Winter Breviary is a triptych of solstice carols that tell the story of walking through the dark woods on solstice night, looking for the light. The poems track the Christian canonical hours of Evensong, Matins and Lauds, and the music maps onto Hindustani raags for those same hours (Raag Hamsadhwani, Malkauns and Ahir Bhairav). A Winter Breviary was just published by Oxford University Press and performed by choirs like the BBC Singers, Los Angeles Master Chorale, The Sixteen, The Yale Ensemble, Voces8, and The Gesualdo Six, who also recorded it on Choral Music from Oxford with The Gesualdo Six. And, as I said, I’ve also been translating again, a practice in which I work very closely with my source writer. El interior de la ballena / The belly of the whale, poems by Claudia Prado & translations by me, will be published in spring 2024 by Texas Tech University Press. And my newest book—What Things Cost: an anthology for the people—released in March from University Press of Kentucky; it’s an anthology of contemporary labor writing that I co-edited with Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones. Together, we are donating all our royalties to The Poor People’s Campaign.
What am I reading? My favorite question. Gerald Stern. He was one of my most important teachers, and we lost him in the fall. Speaking of poems that want to understand place, truth, and hope, his certainly did. “Lucky life,” he wrote. “Lucky, lucky life.”
Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, and editor. She is the author of Render / An Apocalypse (CSU Poetry Center, 2013). Howell is the long time poetry editor of The Oxford American and an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program. Her most recent release is What Things Cost, co-edited with Ashley M. Jones.
Joee Goheen Joee Goheen is a writer from West Virginia in her third year of the NEOMFA, where she works at the CSU Poetry Center.