Beautiful Seeds
by Julia Griffin
Interviewing Nicole Caruso Garcia is both a delight and a challenge. She is an unusual subject for a Light interview, not so much because she is very well known as a non-light (dark? heavy?) poet—other Light stars also write on both sides of that divide—but because her non-light poetry tends to be very non-light indeed. Her prize-winning volume Oxblood is a devastating exploration of the experience of sexual assault; she has also written with immense power about gun violence in schools. When I point this out, she immediately quotes Chesterton at me, then Frida Kahlo: “Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else”; “Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.”
Both these aphorisms meld comedy with its reverse. One of Nicole’s best-known poems has the wonderful title “Is This Your Cow?”—explained by the subtitle, “After 100 days learning German on Duolingo.com.” All the phrases come from Duolingo; the resulting narrative is nothing that useful website can have imagined. The poem starts off cheerfully absurd, with some glorious questions:
How many children do you have? How much wine do they drink?
Are these your pants? Either yes or no.
But even here, as I type them out, I start to feel a certain unease. How old are these wine-drinking children supposed to be? And the tone continues, in the friendliest sort of way, to darken:
I do not wear any clothes. I am not wearing anything.
I am normal. I have many fans.
I am drinking and you are paying.
Many fans? Only fans? “I am normal” has something of a heart-wrenching sound.
You are not funny. Nobody likes that.
The cat is funny. He runs as soon as he sees you.
You are weak. You are heavy. You are slow. You learn nothing.
And finally:
The wind is cold.
We have no bread.
The sky is falling.
Chicken Little! you might think, hopefully. But it’s apparent, by now, that the poem has taken us somewhere we did not expect to end up. Nicole herself says this about it: “Comedy and tragedy are linked.” (You are probably eager to read the whole poem by now. Here is a link.)
The same elements reappear, differently arranged in “My Dirty Bedroom Secret”:
It wasn’t always a taboo,
But now is cause for shame.
And oh, you know the thing I mean,
And oh, it has a name.
The repeated “And oh”s recall Wordsworth, mourning tragic loss among the “Untrodden Ways.”.” However, it quickly becomes clear that the name will not be any of those we might have feared:
I’d like to praise it openly;
It’s healthy, not exotic.
In my defense, it didn’t use to
Be unpatriotic.
All of which leads to the triumphantly apologetic conclusion:
So rest assured, I feel some guilt
About this peccadillo.
I don’t know how I sleep at night
On Mike Lindell’s MyPillow®.
Well, who does? But she certainly atones for it here.
Guilt, on still harder topics than Lindell’s bedding, is a ready subject for Nicole, whose Catholic background provides the subject of some of the most painful and the most comically daring poems in Oxblood. Riffing on Sharon Olds’s already daring “The Pope’s Penis,” Nicole comes up with “The Pope’s Vagina”:
It relaxes beneath her cassock, muscular
walls of a city state.
It has unknotted the last beads of cardinal blood.
A grotto in a patch of dandelion white,
a hooded figure oversees its almond-shaped gate,
a pink cowrie shell retaining
the tang of Eden.
The outrageous funniness of the concept does not negate the fineness of the verse here: the rosary, “cardinal” red, that is “unknotted” by menopause; the “hooded,” or cowled, figure in a cloistered space, which is both comical, in context, and moving—an unexpected discovery of a divine gift. Nicole associates with Jesuit practice her ability to present an argument for a controversial position; it’s clear from our conversation that she grew up in a lively, argumentative family, which may also have something to do with it. And, of course, she was reading, more widely than her parents knew. Along with the Catholic texts prescribed by school, she was also absorbing The Godfather and thrilling stories of the mafia, gleaned from her grandfather’s bookshelves. “Straight from Catholic school!” she told me, gleefully. “Zero to 100 in five seconds!” Her poems are too good to read in five seconds, but the experience of moving from one state to its opposite in a few lines is one her readers will recognize.
I had assumed that Nicole had been writing poetry from childhood: not so, she told me. In fact, she won the Dissection Award in her sophomore year at high school, and her high school aptitude test had her down for a forensic scientist. She credits her move into poetry to Kim Bridgford, the much-missed founder of the Poetry by the Sea conference and mentor to so many fine poets. Having signed on for a poetry class “because I thought the reading and the writing would be short, and I’m a slow reader,” Nicole found it changed her life. Her gratitude and love for Kim reflect not only Kim’s generosity of spirit but her own: she dedicated Oxblood to Kim’s memory, and has taken up her mantle at Poetry by the Sea.
Her skills at dissection, however, have not deserted her. She revels masterfully in poetic technique. Oxblood includes a shape-poem (the shape is a Cross), a poem half sous-râture, bifurcating as it goes along, and poems in the little-known cinquain form developed by Adelaide Crapsey (two syllables—four syllables—six syllables—eight syllables—two syllables). Of the poems Light has chosen for her feature in this issue, we have: a relatively recent form called the “Basic Me” devised by Mary Meriam (rules here); “Throuple’s Clerihew,” a wonderful twiddle with “couple’s therapy”; heroic couplet epigrams; and a tour de force collection of “Alla Barnen” poems—a Swedish form, little known in English, where “All the Children” prove to have some disconcerting exception:
All the children jumped off a cliff
Except for Blaise
He hates clichés
There is nothing arid or preening about her use of form: as she told me, her pleasure does not lie in the opportunity to show off: “With form, it’s not the challenge I like as much as the game of it, the play.” Like me, she is an admirer of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), the mid-20th-century French poets who pushed formal constraints to extremes; “Oulipian forms,” she remarked, “feel like riding a unicycle,” and clearly she loves the ride.
Her poetic high spirits are not limited to the silent page. The first time I met her, in a poetry workshop at her beloved Poetry by the Sea, she amazed and rather intimidated me by delivering a rap number she had written on the subject of plagiarism. Characteristically, she gives credit for her skill as a performer to a workshop with David Yezzi, but as she talks it becomes clear that music and rhythm were part of her life from the beginning. “My early life,” she told me, “included dance lessons, 10 years of classical piano study, a few years of jazz piano study, some guitar lessons, listening to a wide range of music, and a meaty character role in the high school musical. I was comfortable on stage.” Her rap number “Wonder Woman as Rap Star” is online; it is, appropriately, a wonder, and everyone should click here.
Recently, her sharp, inventive wit has provided her with some defense against an increasingly oppressive political atmosphere. From Mike Lindell’s MyPillow to Melania/Titania, Nicole has helped us to laugh a way through; in her own words, “It has been my conscious attempt to rip out the mental weeds of the 24-hour news cycle and instead, sow beautiful seeds.”
Whether as reader or writer, there is comfort in defiance, so brilliantly phrased. Frida Kahlo is surely cheering her on.