Interview with Shira Erlichman
“Who needs it? Eyes rolled back, hand planted thick
in lemon cake. Sure. Let’s call it lemon
cake. She hives and dissolves, an unearthing…”
—from Shira Erlichman’s “Nude IV” (Volume 67, issue 1)
What’s been inspiring you recently?
The On the Calculation of Volume series by Solvej Balle. Reading the first novel was a hallucinogenic experience, except instead of taking me into altered mental territory, it brought me microscopically closer to reality—a feat!
Snail Mail’s latest single and video, “My Maker,” is on repeat and has got me deep-diving into her catalogue. There’s nothing like a dyke floating through the sky, both physically and vocally. I love her.
My wife has been inspiring me, lately and always. Her poems, intelligence, and vulnerability. She is the silliest and wisest person I know. The other day we were out at a restaurant in the early evening eating salmon burgers and she spontaneously asked me for my thoughts on the meaning of life. When I asked for hers afterwards, she refused, “I’m still thinking about yours.” Her concurrent deep listening and goofiness leads the way.
Walk us through the process of writing “Nude IV.” How did it change across drafts?
“Nude IV” is a part of a series. Before the series title was ironed out, this poem was “Nude as Physics.” I keep dates on all my drafts and this poem was worked on in two sessions, a whole year apart.
The drafts were all quite similar. It was just the ending (specifically the last 3-4 lines) that I kept honing in on and trying to unsettle. I tend to have a lot of sprawling “experiments” (I prefer the term to “drafts”) when it comes to my poems, but “Nude IV” had a fairly brief and tidy trajectory from experiment to experiment.
What made you choose the sonnet route for this piece (and the rest of your “Nude” series)?
The “Nude” poems were always sonnets. I wrote them during the isolation of early pandemic; a time when I reclaimed the sonnet from a horrible academic experience where I was embarrassed by a professor for my attempts. Because of that incident, I put the form away for over a decade. But come lockdown, I fell in love with its tight confines and subsequent electricity. I too was confined, so perhaps there’s a link there. I found so much possibility in that charged space, so balled up, so seething, a fist readying for a punch.
Once I find a liberating structure, it’s like a waterfall comes through the tap. Much like the ode freed me to write Odes to Lithium, the sonnet’s solid and immobile body has been a perfect avenue for me to explore laying bare the self in flux. The tension between the enclosure and trappedness of skin (or more widely one’s sense of self) tangoes perfectly with the sonnet’s unflinching body—one that emanates sturdiness and rules while also allowing for a surprising overflow in the compressed space’s rivering enjambment. The sonnet truly has it all. When it comes to writing, it is a technology like none other that I’ve found. Paradoxically, it trains the poet toward concision and expansion all at once. What a gift!
Collage featured in Erlichman’s upcoming book, Is. “Angel in Our Kitchen” (2023, polaroid, astronomy text).
Tell us more about the larger “Nude” series. How does “Nude IV” compare to the rest of the series?
Each of the poems in this series seeks to explore a nude self-portrait from a different angle, physically and existentially. I’ve always been interested in our predicament as humans—how do we embody our human state with even more intentional aliveness? Sure, we’re all here, but what does it mean to really be here? During lockdown I dove more fully into this. I entered a deeper writing practice and, without really knowing it, my next collection, Is, began to come together. I read a lot of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s work; he has a lovely way of making quantum physics digestible.
I saw so much clear overlap in the way quantum physics lays bare our universe’s quirky blurring of borders and Buddhism’s somatic focus on non-self and impermanence. Both fields treat being like a verb. The “Nude” series spans confrontations with the laid bare self from the physical to the emotional to the metaphysical. In “Nude IV” I explicitly wanted to tackle sexuality, pleasure, and the self as witness without need for a camera. I wanted to use Buddhism and quantum physics’ understanding of dissolution of self to highlight peak pleasure in the privacy of touching oneself.
I think of myself as a pretty wholesome gal who is sort of quick to blush, and so I wanted to challenge myself to take on masturbation without shame. I often want to give literature what has been taken away from me. The pleasure of women, especially the pleasure we give ourselves, has long been snatched away from us and spoken about outside of our own agency/gaze. So “Nude IV” (and a lot of Is) is my chance to speak myself into existence, to wrangle the truth back from shamers, to wrap my own language around what’s been silenced. Sexuality is often, not just for me but for many, a territory fraught with taking. My job as a poet is to give myself back to myself. Hopefully, this ignites others to do the same. A world where more of us are coming alive is the world I want. When I look back, Odes to Lithium also centralized this desire: I will speak for myself thank you, and I will be multiple, I will be expansive.
Collage from Is. “Window” (2023, stained grocery store receipt, astronomy text).
What’s your favorite thing about “Nude IV”?
Thank you for asking me about joy! I write to be surprised. To trip myself up. To land somewhere new. So I love that even as “Nude IV”’s literal circumstance is being laid bare with quantum precision—a woman in the throes of boundary-melting self-pleasure—the voice that comes through is unexpectedly playful: I can’t help but smile at that colloquial “Sure,” that cheeky “lemon cake” and the sudden involvement of the reader, “let’s” call it this. While “Nude IV” lets the reader all the way into the bedroom at the speaker’s most private moment and hones the lens microscopically on that speaker’s dissolving body and self, the speaker still resists letting the reader all the way in. I like this. As if to say, “Even as you’re here, even as you are permitted to look, I’m going to call this intimate part of my body what I choose.” Lemon cake, at that! And why not? We poets always have the power to refuse, infuse, rename. It’s as if even in a poem without a camera a part of me knew the reader would remain the interpreting lens. But—what a gift, what power—I can fog, warp, or squeegee that lens with the glorious malleability of language. Language and the self share that improbable attribute: flexibility, invention, expansion. There’s a praxis in there. Or, to put it simply, I believe that in our words and in our core there is always more room.
Writer, visual artist, and musician SHIRA ERLICHMAN is the author of Odes to Lithium, which won the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and is the writer-illustrator of the picture book Be/Hold: A Friendship Book. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Huffington Post, The Nation, and PBS, among others. A finalist for the Lambda award and a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, she runs In Surreal Life: an Online Global Creativity School and is a Visiting Professor in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife.
