An Interview with Margaret Ross

I first encountered Margaret Ross through her poem “Macho,” published in The Paris Review. A small snippet of the poem was posted on the magazine’s Instagram. It read, “The dog’s name was Macho. / Each time we walked, I hoped / to see it. He found my hope annoying, then pathetic. / I think you wish you were that dog. / No, I want it, I don’t want to be it. / I think you want to be it.” I returned to those lines again and again. I was fascinated by the turn from annoying to pathetic; how the desire for something, anything, can sometimes be so extreme that it infringes on the ability to embody that thing; and how all of this was encapsulated in a few lines about a dog. I kept reading, continuing to Ross’s book A Timeshare, which won Omnidawn Publishing’s first book contest in 2015. The poems in A Timeshare are, like “Macho,” masterfully crafted. They explore the same subject matter of the quotidian landscape, though they expand it through the use of sensory perception to challenge the reader’s conception of passing time. In the collection’s title poem, “A Timeshare,” she writes, “Yes though / if there’s such a thing as time at all I never saw it / move and if that’s so then what am I / afraid of? I hung a muslin curtain to prove / breeze, a nimble petal, tall fluctuating seraphim / who keeps watch over me.” I spoke to Ross on the phone in mid-April about this transition in her writing, her modes of teaching, and her fascination with landscapes and the time that passes within them. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, and POETRY, and has been recognized by a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright arts grant, and residencies from Yaddo. She currently is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. 


WSR: I picked up A Timeshare earlier this year—I’ve been reading it while I’m in quarantine. I love all the writing about boredom, and I’ve found it very pertinent to my life right now. In a previous interview published in Sampsonia Way, you talked about how your poems have become more narrative. Reading pieces like your poem “Macho,” and “Ceremony,” and others I’ve found online, I definitely agree that they have. I was wondering if you could talk about the transition from the poems in A Timeshare to the ones you’re writing now. What are the advantages of writing in a more narrative style? Alternatively, what are the advantages of obfuscating a bit?

MR: The person who really set me off in this direction was Isaac Babel. I’d been trying and failing to find my way into new work after A Timeshare, and when I started reading his stories, I felt this rush. I remember being sick with the flu when I started reading. I had a fever, and I thought oh I’m just delirious because of the fever—but no, it was the Babel. The velocity and humor and force of those stories changed me. How severe and tender they are in the same breath made me want to write poems that were more emotionally capacious, less hermetic. I thought I could maybe access a different range of feeling by playing with structure, having months or years pass in a poem. And just letting more time in leads to something more narrative, even if there’s nothing resembling plot. The poems in A Timeshare had been written in close-up, trying to track the threads of observation and association and memory that twist through very small pieces of time, like five-minute pieces. They were more about density than duration. I think the new poems sound looser by comparison, there’s less turmoil to the syntax line by line. The tension is in juxtaposition and tone. The charged oppositions of line and sentence that had been so crucial to the emotional life of A Timeshare became less important to me.

WSR: It’s interesting to me because I feel like your work has changed so much, but it’s a different experience of reading A Timeshare compared to your more recent poems. I’m very immersed in A Timeshare, and I enjoy the visceral experience of it more, but I feel like I can meditate on the narrative poems more, in a way. The lines from them will really stick in my head. A lot of your work has similar themes, which brings me to my next question: what draws you to the theme of boredom? The poems themselves aren’t boring, but I feel like they’re fascinated by this passivity, boredom, that’s in the landscape.

MR: It’s funny, I totally know what you mean, but I’ve never phrased it that way before. But I’m probably drawn to boredom because it can be such an oceanic feeling. As a kid it felt vast and mind-altering, mind-extinguishing even. It could be a state of negative capability. It has a lot of spiritual potential, I think. It makes a clearing. I’m also always interested in what appears boring or inconsequential or beside the point because I always want a poem to perceive intricacy and complicity. There’s often submerged or subtle violence in what presents itself as benign, banal. I think a poem can hold a lot, and that has nothing to do with length but with the way a poem can constellate disparate relations. It’s been useful to me to write from the belief that no detail is unrelated. That what seems insignificant might be exactly where a poem gets sensitized to dynamics it didn’t foresee or plan on. 

WSR: Are there any other writers who make a similar move in terms of emphasizing the everyday, and the undercurrents beneath it?

MR: Alice Munro—she’s someone who taught me about attention. She’ll spend paragraphs describing, like, glass panels on a door, that later you realize were completely essential. And not because they added scenery or cast the door as any kind of metaphor, but because they played a part in the central inquiry of the story, the questions it’s asking about perception, distortion. Seeing how the door deals with those forces in the world. Nothing is just background. The story I’m thinking of is “Oh, What Avails.”

WSR: I love writing that does that, so I was partly asking for a personal recommendation. But—it sounds like you’re listing a lot of prose writers as influences. Do you write any prose?

MR: I don’t write prose, I’ve just spent the past couple years reading a lot of it, so those writers are coming to mind. But I’ve learned most deeply from poets and poems’ approaches to description. My class yesterday read Hikmet’s poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” and his faith in detail is exemplary to me, how he moves so sinuously between vision and memory and imagination. Every turn feels fresh and unpredicted in that poem, and it includes so much. I think of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book too, the rigorous sense that nothing is disposable, every shred of experience rewards scrutiny. How to practice sustained attention. Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Backside of the Academy” is another example. Lists of details sharp enough to make arguments.

WSR: I’ve also been reading a lot of prose, and I’m a poet, so I’ve been thinking about the interaction between the two, if that has impacted my poems at all. You’re also teaching now, and you teach multiple genres. I wrote this question in conjunction with what I was asking you earlier about obfuscation and narrative. What are some of the ways you teach your students how to use those tools?

MR: Well I guess, the word obfuscation somehow, I’m not sure if that’s precise—

WSR: Honestly, when I was writing that, I wasn’t sure of it either!

MR: I totally know what you mean by it, but when I hear obfuscation I think of something being deliberately concealed. But I don’t think a poem that isn’t narrative is concealing a narrative. It’s revealing another pattern instead, one that narrative doesn’t account for. A more associative pattern, maybe, or a disjunctive one…

My workshop this winter actually did talk a lot about narrative because many of the students in the class were also taking a fiction class or had recently taken one, and were experimenting with telling some of the stories they’d been working on in poems. Bringing pieces of dialogue into a poem. Thinking about how to portray habitual action vs. unique action, and the consequences each has for the implied scene of the poem, how grounded or floating it is. Right now I’m in the first weeks of a class where we’re focusing on work that combines language with drawing or photography or collage and the questions that come up also seem related to discussions about narrative because they’re involved with sense-making and how to imagine past a given form of logic. We ask ourselves how text and image can interact on a page without just being caption or illustration to each other.

WSR: I’m really interested in what you said about moving the poem beyond narrative scope. How, in the poems, it’s not that you’re trying to conceal a narrative, but reveal an entirely new kind of narrative. 

MR: Or that narrative itself is only one way of structuring a poem, and there are other equally valid ways. A poem structured by music, for example, or by sensory perception.

WSR: That’s definitely something I see in A Timeshare. It’s a very sensory experience. I was going to ask if there’s anything you’re working on now. Are you still doing the Stegner?

MR: I finished the Stegner a couple years ago, and I’ve been a lecturer since. And yeah, I’ve been working on the book the new poems will be part of. 

WSR: I’m excited to read it.

MR: Thank you! I’m excited for it to be done.