Joanna C. Valente

“People aren’t comfortable with being proven wrong, or realizing that a great person can say things that aren’t always right,”  Joanna C. Valente  said to me during a warm-up Google chat prior to our interview. The topic of our conversation: the idea of “safe spaces” for marginalized groups or victims of trauma. Such spaces are great in theory but practically impossible, she argued, because they negate the possibility that victims can also make mistakes. I’d found this judicious view of human nature rare, but there it was. “I’m in favor of neutral spaces over safe ones,” Joanna said. “Put people in a room together and allow them to respectfully disagree. The result won’t always be ‘safe,’ but at least people are talking.” I’d like to think of poetry as this kind of room for important conversations, and here is a writer who’s using hers. – HLJ

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As someone who loves the idea of a life before and after this one, I found a lot to appreciate about this section of  Marys of the Sea. But because it's a long/book-length work, could you give us a bit of context, maybe tell us more about the work as a whole? 

The book is based on my sexual assault and subsequent abortion (I became pregnant after it happened). I began writing it about two years afterwards, and so the experience was still fresh in my memory though I’d managed to gain some perspective on it. I wrote it through the personae of Mary, mother of Jesus, and of Mary Magdalene -- partly because I wanted to explore the idea that women are rarely seen both as maternal figures and as sexual beings. But because I’d attended a Catholic school for 14 years, the two women were characters I’d been obsessed with and kept returning to.

The story of mother Mary is strange in that she becomes pregnant without her knowledge or consent, which always troubled me. After going through my experience with the assault, I couldn't help thinking back to the creation story of Jesus, what it says about the denial of women’s ownership over their bodies throughout history. These poems became a way of reclaiming my body and mind through that season of hopelessness and powerlessness. And I should add that the persona helped me write about my experience more objectively, which then made it more enjoyable because I wasn't simply myself, and easier because I didn’t have to be me, if that makes sense.

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MARYS OF THE SEA, PART V

            Looking for voices on paper

            feel red all over his gummy mouth

            starts to take form in my belly

            hunger stops when grief replaces

            my stomach lining two bodies

            in one body sprouting brambles

            & birds in my ears becoming deaf

            to one history becoming two

            histories two souls repeating

            the lives of all the souls before this

            one there was poetry before this

            life lodged between both of us

            without the dead I would lonely

            be in eastern standard time

            when I didn't change my name

            two bodies need two names

            & how does abandon form

            in building how does a human

            form in another human give

            away another human to no one

            sorceress tongue spews

            spells for dead hands to throttle

            what I could not inverting

            empty on its head X-ray of terror

            there were no repeated lives