(Not Quite) 10 Questions for Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

- By Marissa Perez

Cigarette smoke wove
into my curls, right through 100%
madras from India, breathed blue-tinged, dizzy blue
through every alveolus,
as my mother lurched the car
down Wisonsin Ave., jamming gas
and brake pedals, tilting—
—from “Osmosis,” Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)

We asked Rebecca Kaiser Gibson the same 10 Questions we ask our other contributors. She responded with the following interview.

First Pieces:
I have no idea what impelled me to write a secret message poem to cinnamon (the scent) and roll it into a scroll I could fit inside the empty spice jar that had contained it. Now I can’t remember the poem at all, only the sudden clarity of intention that guided my unusually unsecond-guessed behavior. And there was one other. Probably I was nine for this one. I remember its title, “A Cat, Three Partridges, A Squirrel”—each of whom had slipped under or fluttered around in our front hedge. Again, it was a response to a demand. The purposeful-seeming sequence of creatures, and the fun of writing and saying the word “partridge.”

When I was Six:
I announced (to myself) that I’d be an opera singer and would live in the Rocky Mountains. I never sang and hadn’t been west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but I’d heard about Rocky Mountain Tick Fever, and was thrilled at the way it felt to say it to myself. Who knows where the opera singer came from or went to.

What other professions?
No other professions. It must seem as if I’ve moved in a straightforward single-minded way: I taught high school English; I worked as an assistant to theatre director Tina Packer; and then as assistant to a new play company under the late Stanley Richardson. I directed plays, I worked as a secretary at MIT, and then I taught college writing and poetry at Tufts. I also got involved early and vigorously in the (successful!) effort to unionize the adjunct faculty at Tufts.

What inspired you to write This Poem?
When I first learned about osmosis, as Google puts it: the “Diffusion of fluid through a semipermeable membrane from a solution with a low solute concentration to a solution with a higher solute concentration until there is an equal solute concentration on both sides of the membrane,” it seemed to describe something I’d wrestled with. Why was I so susceptible to energies and atmospheres, so unable to hold my steering wheel firmly, to proceed in a determined way, in spite of whatever else was going on?

In the course of writing the poem, my attention swerved from the dizzy intensity of the smoke-filled weekend car trips with my mother to a memory of horseback riding with two silent French sisters one snowy day.  By the end of the poem I had at least an inkling of an insight that the tendency to notice and absorb, to be semipermeable could be a gift. “Osmosis” is in my upcoming book, Girl as Birch which in many ways reflects on the tendency to sense and respond to the nutrition at our roots and the winds and weatherings that bend and release us.

How does this “osmosis” phenomenon relate to places that inspire you?
Because the influences around me seem to seep in with equal and non-hierarchical intensity, I’ve often felt pressure to separate and order them to accommodate what I presume is the more usual way of experiencing things.

In other words, for awhile I was fixated on a large glacial erratic, a rock directly outside my study window, and its sudden evocation of empty apartment buildings near my grandmother’s rooms in Brighton NY.  Then I was absorbed by the resemblance of the slicked down and rattling winter rhododendrons, to death-like marionettes in the large ball room of the Spanish stucco house across from ours in suburban Maryland when I was growing up. One place superimposes on another and something else shows through.  I love running to catch up with the way the mind makes connections.

My nine months teaching in India on a Fulbright were indelible, partly and unexpectedly, because I felt such a deep calm there in spite of what I might have experienced as chaos.  I felt strongly that I could not claim to “know anything about India,” its size, its complexity, it’s vast history—only about my own surprised response to those bits of it that swirled past my eyes, and into my mouth.

Rituals?
I sometimes light a little candle in a kneeling angel candle holder Deborah Digges once gave me. It just keeps me here with something faintly glowing.

Another art form?
Cooking maybe. . . in the sense of making a wonderful mess of unexpected connections based on seasonal happenstance: variety, continuity, color (especially,) and surprise.

What am I working on now?
I’ve got a novel just about to look for a publishing home, it’s called The Promise of a Normal Life, a novel of Smudged Windows, Secret Sex and the Comfort of Sand, and another manuscript of poems currently called Watch me as I Sleepwalk.

And I’m working on putting together a fun reading tour for my next book of poetry, coming out April 2022 from Bauhan Publishing.

Really, what am I reading?
Well, really, The Science of Breath by Yogi Ramacharaka; Pol Pot, Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short and I will Not Name it Except to Say by Lee Sharkey.

REBECCA KAISER GIBSON is the author of Girl as Birch (forthcoming from Bauhan Publishing, 2021), Opinel (Bauhan Publishing, 2015), and two chapbooks, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, The Heinrich Böll Cottage in Ireland, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India, in 2011. She is founder and director of The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Agni, Field, The Greensboro Review, Green Mountain Review, The Harvard Review, Ocean State Review, Salamander, Slate, and Verse-Daily, among others. Rebecca lives in Marlborough, New Hampshire, and taught poetry at Tufts University for 23 years.