In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: Rob Arnold
Your pair of poems, “Chimera,” speak to growing up, terror, and a cycle of life and death. What was the impetus for these poems? How did they evolve from single poems into a pair?
These two “Chimera” poems are, in fact, part of a longer sequence of poems that interrogate boyhood, cycles of family violence, self-harm, and monstrous expressions of masculinity. The origin is in my personal experience, but, like much of my work, I began writing the poems before knowing quite what I was trying to say. I was going through a very painful period in my life—marked by depression and self-destructive impulse—and I was writing to understand what had brought me there.
At the same time, I became interested in chimeras—amalgamations of unlike creatures—which felt metaphorically significant to my experience both as a biracial adoptee and a young man living what felt like a split life. The poems themselves are chimerical, both narratively and syntactically, with threads of story and imagery conjoined to evoke the messiness of human experience. Sometimes, in fact, individual poems in the sequence were formed from the remains of two or more separate pieces that became combined in the revision process. So, the sequence itself is chimerical, and individual poems in the sequence are chimeras as well.
The titles evoke a mythological monster turned real. How did you land on the title for each piece? Are there different meanings associated with each title?
Fundamentally, the poems are about monstrosity, the monstrous cycle of boyhood violence and toxic manhood in my family as well as the divisions of self that come from sustained trauma. Each poem either tells different pieces of the story or examines different expressions of human monstrosity. The linkages between poems and even different movements within each poem is often intuitive rather than rational or logical, but they’re all part of the same collective monstrosity and using the same title is a way to signal that collectivity.
In the first Chimera, there’s a stream of unanswerable questions that make up the end that feels similar to a Greek chorus in a play. There’s this combined culpability between the characters in the poem and the reader. What led you to end that way?
I’m glad you picked up on the shared culpability. The question is a powerful rhetorical device to me because it requires the reader to become an active participant in the poem. This poem, like many of the poems in the sequence, is also about memory, which is inherently unstable—both unreliable in a narrative sense and our only interface with the personal past. Asking questions without offering answers is my way of acknowledging this ineffability of experience.
Extending the idea of culpability, some of the poems in the sequence (although not this one) use the second person point of view, which acts as both a distancing tool—allowing me to write into very difficult subject matter—and also as a way to further implicate the reader in the violence of the poems.
Chimera the second has color imagery and a steady rhythm throughout its lines. What was the development process of this poem like? How did the beat evolve?
This poem came more intuitively. It began as a meditation on the colors of the American flag alongside the color black which is simultaneously an absence of color in the visible light spectrum and a combination of multiple pigments in basic color theory. Blackness is also the inverse of whiteness, and because we live in a country where color is racialized, there’s also a sub-thread of the poem that interrogates race and belonging, a refraction of my identity as an Indigenous adoptee raised in whiteness. The propulsive rhythm helps pull the reader through the cognitive disjunctions of the poem, which mirror the cognitive disjunctions caused by institutional and personal trauma. Like the previous poem, this piece uses rhetorical tension—in this case the withheld promise of the if/then construction—to extend and deepen the discomfort.
What authors and literature influence your work? Do you have favorite books you return to?
I’m always interested in the interplay between order and chaos, and few writers dance between those constructs better than Denis Johnson. There’s often a moment in his work when the narrative derails and expectations upend. In those moments, it feels like anything might happen, which is thrilling as a reader, and I feel his spiritual influence on this sequence specifically. Reading his novella Train Dreams, for example, helped me learn how to resist the tautness of the lyric narrative form and let the subconscious take over.
More recently, I’ve felt in creative conversation with Thresholes by Lara Mimosa Montes, mother by m.s. Redcherries, and Song of My Softening by Omotara James, all of which are exquisite examples of finding one’s power through difficulty.
What are you writing now?
I’ve just finished a new draft of my first book of poetry, which will include the “Chimera” sequence, and which also examines the larger family story.
I’ve also been working on a long epistolary essay about my father, male violence, and masculinities both inherited and rejected. It’s part of a larger collection of personal essays I’m writing, which I hope will come together in the next couple years.
Finally, I’m working through some poem ideas around maps, portals, confession, Indigeneity, and Oceania. As a project, it still feels quite nascent but I’m excited to explore where it takes me.
Rob Arnold is a CHamoru poet, essayist, and arts leader whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, RED INK, Hyphen, Harpur Palate, The Volta, and Solstice, among others, and has been anthologized in New CHamoru Literature and Na’huyong: An Anthology of CHamoru Literature. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have received support from the Somerville Arts Coundil, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, and Artist Trust. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he serves as executive director of Poets House.
