Alum Claire Marie Stancek: "For as long as I can remember, I’ve been bewitched by the sound of language, rhythm, repetition, and an unnameable something that’s akin to prayer."

December 4, 2024

Chauncey Walker

Claire Marie Stancek, L&S alum and English professor, speaks about her book, wyrd] bird.

In this interview, Claire Marie Stancek shares the inspirations behind wyrd] bird, a deeply personal and experimental work that blends a diverse range of genres, including lyric essay, dream journal, poetry, and scrapbook. Written during a period of profound personal upheaval, the book engages with themes of grief, political turmoil, and the climate crisis, using hybrid forms to reflect the raw, open receptivity Stancek experienced during that time. Stancek reflects on her creative process, the role of embodiment in her work, and her evolving relationship with poetry, offering an intimate glimpse into the heart of her literary journey.

I slept with my book open, woke into strange thoughts, pen in hand. Like a portal, the notebook opened to me—and I opened to the notebook. And actually, in many ways, this book is about receptivity.

Claire Marie Stancek

What inspired you to write wyrd] bird, and what prompted you to uniquely blend a diverse range of genres—from lyric essay and dream journal to poetry and scrapbook—into a single, cohesive work?

I wrote wyrd] bird several years ago at a time of profound personal upheaval. During this time, I carried a notebook around with me everywhere. Reaching into my bag to touch the soft pages of the book, anchoring myself in the wave of a tumultuous feeling by pausing to write a line, even sleeping with the book in bed with me, I coped during that period of pain and confusion.

The first line in wyrd] bird is, “I slept with my book open, woke into strange thoughts, pen in hand.” Like a portal, the notebook opened to me—and I opened to the notebook. And actually, in many ways, this book is about receptivity. The simultaneity of the various forms you mention—lyric essay, dream journal, poetry, scrapbook—is emblematic of the receptivity I felt at this time. At vulnerable, raw, open times, perceptions rush together, colors blur with smells, a street sign appears as though in a dream, with a traffic direction that also responds to a private thought. Generic hybridity is the medium through which I connect with themes of grief, climate crisis, and political turmoil. And hybridity itself becomes an expression of this subject matter: shard-like, echoic, unmoored.

Generic hybridity is the medium through which I connect with themes of grief, climate crisis, and political turmoil. And hybridity itself becomes an expression of this subject matter: shard-like, echoic, unmoored.

Claire Marie Stancek

The book engages with the figure of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century mystic. What drew you to her, and how does she function within the larger framework of wyrd] bird?

I “met” Hildegard of Bingen at the library. I was walking through the open shelving, and randomly noticed one of her books. The book looked at me and I looked back at the book. That moment held all the intensity, randomness, and erotic charge of a meet-cute. We bumped into one another and started a conversation that’s still going on. An enormous volume of sumptuously produced reproductions of Hildegard’s illuminated visions was where I began, but soon I became obsessed with Hildegard—with her art and writings and letters and music—and I wrote wyrd] bird in conversation with her. She is the book’s inspiration and guiding force.

One of the refrains in wyrd] bird is the injunction, “listen again,” which Hildegard writes in a letter to another mystic. For Hildegard, this notion of listening again involves a spiritual sense of attunement. But it’s also a poetic idea, one that involves returning to the same sound again and again, and holding that resonance in suspension across iterations.

wyrd] bird explores the susceptibility of reading. The intimate permeability or suffusion of this text with Hildegard’s visions asks how the encounter with another being, another text, another voice, can profoundly shake, change, reconstitute the subject.

On the cover is one of Hildegard’s artworks, called “The Zeal or Jealousy of God.” The main figure in this image is a three-winged creature, and I like to imagine that the cover depicts a wyrd or weird three-winged bird. This image is important in so many ways. Hildegard writes that wisdom has three wings. The third wing “flies all about,” which I read as exceeding or offsetting balance. The third wing, we see in this image, bursts out of the frame, whether the frame of the page or of logic or reason or binary thinking or acceptability.

How did your writing process differ for wyrd] bird compared to your previous works, including Oil Spell and Mouths?

My writing process for all my books involves keeping a notebook, but wyrd] bird was distinct from Oil Spell and Mouths in the way the notebook becomes a character in the book. The notebook takes on a heft and a weight—in a way it even mirrors the body.

One of wyrd] bird’s motivating questions is “What would it mean to write an utterly embodied book?” wyrd] bird is inseparable from embodied experience. And I think that’s one of its points of departure from Oil Spell, which is a little more cerebral. I think of wyrd] bird as being more intimate than Oil Spell and Mouths were. Its experimentation is one that is constantly and consciously rooted in experience.

When you’re keeping a notebook, you’re allowing the world to speak through you, keeping yourself open to chance encounters, coincidences. You’re also carrying around a physical thing—it’s not as heavy or demanding as, say, a baby, but still it’s an object with whose touch and smell and shape and weight you’re intimately familiar. You touch the notebook and immediately that sensation enters the thought, grounds it, but also defines it. In this way, one answer to the question of embodiment that drives wyrd] bird is the notebook.

As the author of three poetry collections, can you reflect on your first encounter with poetry or the experience that sparked your initial connection to the art form?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been bewitched by the sound of language, rhythm, repetition, and an unnameable something that’s akin to prayer—all elements that are central to the poetry that preoccupies me. Whether as a very young child, transfixed by the voices of my caregivers, or growing up into literacy and a growing awareness of the connections from moment to moment—from sun to that shape on the wall, from earth to finger to song—poetry has been the name I’ve held for mystery, question, supplication, memory, connection, resistance, invocation, power.

There’s a story I’ve told before about seeing in front of a store a chalk sign that read, “Welcome friends.” I was a young child, maybe eight years old, full of impishness and play, and I erased the “r” so the sign said, “Welcome fiends.” At that moment, I felt language shift under my fingers. A sound recurred in repetition that upended the original sound. At that moment, I was pushing back against and overturning the conventional. I even felt, in my childlike way, that I was recasting an insipid address to customers into an invocation to a diabolical host, a company of ghouls. I was creating a secret aperture through which an unknown force could rush: welcome, fiends. And I’ve often located in that moment my first feeling of being a poet.

At Berkeley, poetry felt like a social orientation toward community, conversation, conviviality, and collaboration in a way I’ve never seen before or since.

Claire Marie Stancek

You earned a Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley. As an alum, how did your experience here influence or shape your writing?

I am profoundly shaped by my experiences in the English department at Berkeley. I had the excitement and privilege to talk and write and drink and read and dance and collaborate and argue and forge friendships and fall in love with brilliant people, I was immersed in classes and conferences as a student and teacher and participant and organizer, I attended incredible readings and lectures practically every day of the week, and it all happened in Berkeley—maybe the most beautiful place on earth.

My academic work with my dissertation advisor, Kevis Goodman, and my dissertation committee, disciplined my thought and trained me in the bracing, exhilarating rigors of academic prose and research.

My teaching mentors, Ian Duncan and Steve Goldsmith, created whole words of generous attention for their students in a way that I’ve emulated as an educator ever since, both in academic settings and beyond.

In my first year, I took a seminar on everyday life with Lyn Hejinian. It changed my life. The dazzling poet, Jane Gregory, was in the Ph.D. program with me at the time. Lyn proposed starting a chapbook press with me and Jane, and that’s how Nion Editions began. We would hold our meetings at Beta Lounge, a little bar south of campus, and together we published experimental, uncategorizable work by poets such as Cody-Rose Clevidence, Paolo Javier, Roberto Harrison, Noah Ross, Alli Warren, Matthew Rana, Ed Roberson, Mia You, Terry Taplin. Now in our fourth season, Jane and I have been doing our best to continue the work that was so joyous before Lyn’s death earlier this year. In loving memory of Lyn, and in honor of her endlessly exuberant commitment to poetry, we are putting out amazing books by Jean Day, Sylee Gore, and Lisa Robertson and sabrina soyer.

So many of my experiences in poetry at Berkeley have been formative. I remember talking for hours in the Wheeler lounge with fellow graduate students and professors as part of the contemporary poetry working group. I remember standing-room-only Holloway readings. I remember the dinners after the readings, and the drinks after the dinners, and the conversations that could last all night. I remember going on 30-mile bike rides with Cecil Giscombe, and taking the Amtrak back to Berkeley. I remember parties at the Josephine Miles house. I remember the thrill of teaching serious and smart students, who became friends, and who then went on to become poets and artists and graduate students themselves: Lindsay Choi, Perwana Nazif.

At Berkeley, poetry felt like a social orientation toward community, conversation, conviviality, and collaboration in a way I’ve never seen before or since.

Are you working on any other research or projects?

Yes, I’m actually working on three books at the moment! of care as of this encounter is a poetry book that explores the complicated relationship between our bodies, the institutions we rely on, and our sense of personal agency. Through a collage of lyric fragments, medical jargon, nursery rhymes, and personal invocation, this book interrogates the bureaucratization of care, the alienation of the self, and the violence inherent in modern systems. Here, the personal takes on a powerful political edge.

Feminist, experimental, and activist, of care as of this encounter challenges the silencing and objectification of female-gendered bodies within patriarchal and institutional frameworks. It inverts traditional forms, offering a subversive voice that disrupts the rhythms of both language and power. Sonnets split in two, refrains fracture through permutations, and the entire page activates. Each poem becomes an act of defiance—against prescribed gender roles; against depersonalized, corporate medical authority; against societal expectations around parenthood.

A second project, Rhyme Between, explores the complexities of maternity and a difficult twin pregnancy through the lens of literary theory and rhyme. This book is personal, theoretical, fragmentary, and experimental. Rhyme is a metaphor for embodied experience—experience that, in turn, puts pressure on the category of rhyme itself. But rhyme is also more than a metaphor, in the sense that it constellates rather than subjugates: in rhyme, there is no tenor and no vehicle. Instead, points of relation stand in full-bodied rhythm, conflict, and connection. Rhyme’s ability to hold multiple, at times conflicting, ideas simultaneously makes it an ideal guide into difficult and often overlooked aspects of maternity: ambivalence, difficulty, disability, mental illness.

Each of the book’s six chapters focuses on a different kind of rhyme: slant rhyme, ghost rhyme, feminine rhyme, overdetermined rhyme, identical rhyme, dispersed rhyme. The rhymes I discuss are all a little “off”—whether by creating disharmony instead of closure (slant rhyme), preserving a pronunciation no longer current (ghost rhyme), exceeding the line with a “weak” syllable (feminine rhyme), being clichéd (overdetermined rhyme), problematizing identity (identical rhyme), or testing the limits of distance (dispersed rhyme).

They each qualify, in one way or another, as “bad rhymes,” both in the sense of causing aesthetic displeasure, and in the sense of pressurizing and perhaps exploding the aesthetic category into which they fall (and fail). These are structures of sound that unsettle structure, mechanisms of closure that refuse closure, conventions that challenge expectation. These failed or highly pressurized rhymes are—in their very “badness”—peculiarly suited to function as pathways into the strange realms of dysphoria.

Finally, the third book I’m working on right now is called Double Life. Written in homage to Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, this poetry book is comprised of 36 poems of 36 sections each, written in my 36th year.

What’s currently on your bookshelf or nightstand? (What are you reading for pleasure?)

I always have several books on the go at once—whether on my nightstand, in my purse, or at my desk. Here are a few I’m reading and loving right now:

Bedroom Vowel by Zoe Tuck

Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture by Anaïs Duplan

Everyone and Her Resemblances by Laynie Browne

I Don't Want To Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung

Prescribee by Chia-Lun Chang

Tarta Americana by J. Michael Martinez

Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner