Contributor Spotlight: Victoria Le
Our poetry editor, Tanya Singh, loved Issue 2 contributor Victoria Le's poem "An Interview with the Dead White Man" and (electronically) sat down to ask her questions about her poetry, writing, and inspirations. You can read "An Interview with the Dead White Man" in Issue 2.
Tanya: How did you come up with the title of the poem? An interesting title makes me fall in love with the piece before I’ve even read it. What are some of your favourite titles?
Victoria: My poems tend to have very stark, workmanlike titles, titles that are generally more informative than interpretive. I don't know whether this is more out of a lack of imagination on my part or a preference for the stripped down. "Interview with the Dead White Man" is titled as such because it is structured as excerpts from an imaginary interview. It was occasioned by an overheard comment from a fellow classmate who mentioned that she was sick of reading books by "dead white men." I guess I thought it would be funny to give one of these dead white men a chance for rebuttal, but to have his voice supplied by a non-dead, non-white woman (me).
As for other poets' titles, I'm very fond of Wallace Stevens's, I suppose because they're so different from mine. I like that many of them sound like the titles of some lost Dutch Renaissance paintings.
Tanya: Do you have a favorite image, or a line in this poem that stands out above the others? In what ways do you think that line/image reflects the overall theme of your work?
Victoria: The line I'm proudest of is certainly the bit about Norman Mailer and cunnilingus. The "And vice-versa" was one of my more inspired moments. I was very happy to have that fall in my lap.
Tanya: What was the idea, the intention behind this piece? What are some of the biggest writing-related fears you have? When writing a piece, is there a point where your ideas/intentions and fears seem to collide?
Victoria: I often start a poem with an idea for a structure first and let the ideas fill in second. The interview format struck me because, very simply, it offered lots of opportunities for one-liners. I do resist interpretations of this poem as strictly satirical. To me, the Dead White Man being interviewed is both a specific, individual character and an avatar for a certain mode of thinking and creating. But I don't think of the Dead White Man as being merely a caricature of either whiteness or the patriarchy. I would like readers to approach this character the way they would approach any fictional character—attuned to the multiple tones and dissonances of personality.
Ultimately, however, my fears about writing are more fundamental than the fear of being misinterpreted. Every time I finish writing a poem, I wonder if it will be the last poem I ever write. Surely every writer experiences this panic. Maybe worse than writing a poem that's really bad is writing a poem that might actually be really good.
Tanya: Every time I read my own work, I learn something new about myself. In what ways do you think reading your own work has allowed you to learn something new about yourself?
Victoria: I’ve changed a lot since I started writing poems in college years ago. I got married. I had a child. My past poems are like a fossil record of these evolutions. I write more love poems now than I did in my college days. I'm more appreciative of traditional lyric structures, although I still believe in wit and irony as aesthetic, political, and even moral principles.
Victoria Le received her poetic education from the University of Michigan and Brown University, where she earned her MFA. She is interested in the ways empiricism and revelation interact with manifested life. Her poems and translations have appeared in publications such as White Whale Review and Transference. She is currently raising a son, a husband, and three cats in Tallahassee, Florida, where she teaches writing to inmates.
