Francesca Bell Fearlessly Tackles the Unsettling in “What Small Sound” [INTERVIEW]

Francesca Bell was raised in Washington and Idaho and settled as an adult in California. She did not complete middle school, high school, or college and holds no degrees. She has worked as a massage therapist, a cleaning lady, a daycare worker, a nanny, a barista, and a server in the kitchen of a retirement home. Bell’s writing appears in many magazines including ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. Her translations appear in Mid-American Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, River Styx, and Waxwing. Her first book, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. In 2023, Red Hen Press published What Small Sound, her second book of poetry, and Whoever Drowned Here, a collection of poems by Max Sessner that she has translated from German. She is translation editor at the Los Angeles Review and the Marin County Poet Laureate. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

James: Your bio hints at a backstory that is unlike what a reader might assume: no MFA or literature degree, no fancy literary arts education, in fact no formal education past middle school. What was your path to a love of poetry and what experiences along the way helped you build poetic skills?

Francesca: “I first came to poetry through my sister. I was four, and she was seven. We used to memorize poems together from books my parents had. We’d memorize them and then perform for each other. I suspect we dragged our parents into the room for these events, too. Then, when I was six and she was nine, I became jealous because she got homework and I didn’t. She had an assignment to write a poem for class. So, out of spite, because I was mad she had homework and I didn’t, I wrote my first poem at the kitchen table.

“My mom noticed my interest and got me a small collection of poetry when I was nine. We also visited the public library a lot, where I started reading more poetry. I’ve had some instruction too. I’ve attended some college; I didn’t graduate, but I did take a few poetry classes. So, I did have some formal learning. I think I’ve learned to write largely by doing it and by reading extensively. I’ve also participated in classes and workshops led by people who have certainly helped me along the way.”

James: “What Small Sound” opens with the unflinching lines:

"Every two minutes, an American woman is raped,
her body forced open in the time it takes me to tear
this organic tomato to its pulpy center and bite in,
letting juice run down my chin, stinging."

There are many gut punch moments in this book, with these opening lines serving as a warning label and wake-up call for the reader. How do you approach capturing such raw emotion while retaining the poetry?

Francesca: “I don’t know. That’s one of those questions, you know, if you could answer that, you could probably make a gazillion dollars somehow. I’m flattered and thankful for the compliment. For me, I’m naturally drawn toward writing about things that make other people uncomfortable. Not always, but often, my poems are about such subjects.

“I think focusing on vivid, physical details and sensory imagery is key. I like to use a lot of metaphors. Using these poetic tools, you can build a container for pretty much anything. Poetry, in particular, demands a visceral response, unlike a novel where there can be elements of backstory that don’t punch you in the same way. With poetry, you have such a small amount of space that everything is heightened.

“I like to think of it like this: with a novel, it’s a bit like sprinkling something with balsamic vinegar. But with poetry, you’re using balsamic glaze, which has been boiled down until it’s really potent. When I revise, I’m trying to hone and boil off the excess so that what you’re left with is the strongest flavor.”

James: Every poet I’ve interviewed talks about the challenge of crafting a book from individual poems. In “What Small Sound” you’ve chosen to group poems into sections. How did you approach the challenge of how to order and group the poems in this collection?

Francesca: “I had no idea how to structure a book when I first tried putting one together for my last collection. I actually hired someone, April Osman, to help me. She has a wonderful essay in Poets & Writers that outlines her professional approach to arranging poetry books. She helped me with my first book, and when I approached this book, I wanted to use the things I really liked about her method.

“The thing I love that she does, and many people do this, is that each poem has something in common with the poems on either side of it. It could be as simple as the color blue or a single word. The subject matter, theme, tone might be different, but there’s a little thread running through.

“When arranging this book, I made a list of themes prevalent in the poems I had collected, like violence against women, mothering, hearing loss, and gun violence. The first poem, ‘Jubilations’, has many of these themes, so it seemed like a good opening. It gives a clue about what the book will be about.

“Connecting the poems, sometimes it’s as simple as a word or a place. For example, the restaurant I talk about in the first poem burns down in the second poem. This wasn’t planned; it was like a gift from the universe.

“I decided on sections because a lot of my poetry deals with difficult topics, like violence. I thought it would be good for readers to have a resting place. I aimed for 12 to 15 poems in a section, looking for the ending poem of one section to feel like a landing place and the starting poem of the next section to have some small thing in common with the ending poem of the previous section, continuing the thread.”

James: “Rape Kit” is brutally simple and impactful. A pair of list poems that parallel the justice system’s rape kit with an imagined rapist’s toolkit. Both lists are brutal and moving, in part because both are just lists. Talk about your approach to creating and editing this poem. 

Francesca: “Most of the poems in the book had been published in journals, but nobody ever wanted that one, which didn’t really surprise me. During the course of writing this book, I had a very close encounter with a rapist while out jogging. I had seen a television show that talked about a rape kit that many rapists carry, with the tools of the trade in there. When I saw this man up on a ridge in an isolated area, carrying a bag over his shoulder, I kept having this thought, ‘rape kit, rape kit,’ and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Then, as he got farther from me, he put on latex gloves. It was like my subconscious was giving me a clue that I’d noticed the rape kit.

“So, that kit was very much on my mind. I ran off, and I’m not sure if he came after me or not. I didn’t look around to see. When I was thinking about how interesting it is that we use the term ‘rape kit’ for both the criminal’s tools and the forensic evidence collection kit, I wanted to explore what would be in each kit. They’re not exactly analogous to each other on each side of the lists, but I tried to have as much as I could that one side would play off of the other.

“It was interesting as I looked up what was in each kind of rape kit. I didn’t really know. It was a little hard to imagine what would be in each kind, but the lists matched up fairly well. I’ve always wanted to go back and write a poem titled ‘Police Killing,’ because that could mean the police have killed someone or someone has killed a police officer. Often, we have these terms that float around that have these strange connections to each other, yet are very divergent.”

James:  The poem “Breaking Eggs” is visualized as tight phrases with space between each phrase. The poem begins:

"I cry when I bake    since that boy     slugged you
repeatedly    in the head    knocking the numbers out
so you couldn't count to five   though you were
eight" 

The disjointed form cleverly conveys the disorientation of being struck, the physical effect. Talk about how you approach the visualization of your poems, using this poem as an example.

Francesca: “I tend to be a fairly traditional user of space left to my own devices. I was actually criticized for this when I was trying to place my first book. I tend to write in block form or with stanzas, but I didn’t do a lot of breaking apart poems on the page. It really isn’t something that appeals to me much. I find it powerful but sometimes distracting. However, it is the style currently, especially when I was circulating my first manuscript.

“I actually went through all the poems in that manuscript, and I spent an afternoon remodeling them, trying to make them look more modern. It was like sprucing them up. That poem, ‘Breaking Eggs’, though, I enjoyed doing that because it’s autobiographical. My son had a head injury when he was eight. There was this stuttery way that the head injury progressed, both in his symptoms and in how it moved through our lives.

“One thing I don’t like about arranging poems like that on a page is that it sends a mixed message about how you might want that poem to be read. When I read ‘Breaking Eggs’, I don’t read it in that ‘stuttery’ way because I don’t think that reading it like that is very powerful. I feel a little hypocritical having poems that are very broken on the page because I’m a traditionalist. I think often when you choose your line endings and lengths, you’re giving a reader a clue to how you might like that poem to be read. I don’t envision someone reading it with each of those stuttery breaks. So, I actually have mixed feelings about that.”

James: I think in this particular case the form perfectly matches the subject matter visually, and yes, I did include some of the gaps, but not all of them, because to do all of them would be completely unnatural. I write most of my poems in free verse but I have used some received forms. I’ve written a few Shakespearean sonnets recently where the form works. I wrote a sestina which ended up working perfectly, although I’ll likely never write another one of those, they’re so hard. But I only try to choose the form based on what the poem demands without paying attention to what’s in vogue, although at the same time, I do, especially doing these interviews, see forms where I go, “Hmm, that’s a really cool way of expressing a poem.”

Francesca: “I have to keep that in the back of my mind for when the poem demands it, because I hadn’t really thought of that before. I think in this case the form worked really well, this disorientation of being hit. But I agree with you that to use that where it doesn’t make sense is distracting. So yeah, I’m more in your camp.”

James: “Taking Your Place” and other poems address mental health and suicidal ideation.

"When the nurses didn't watch you
overnight, I called the hospital
to complain. The director sighed

and spoke slowly, as to a dim child.
You know, he said, a determined person will kill
herself no matter what we do."

How did you decide which details to include, and which details to edit out, when approaching subjects that are so sensitive and personal? 

Francesca: “This poem and others in the book are about one of my daughter’s mental illness. Whenever I write any poem, I go for the strongest details. If I feel that a poem won’t be able to be published because it’s too much about someone else’s private life, then I just won’t write it.

“My daughter was hospitalized more than once during this long, dark phase in our family life. I was struggling not only with her illness but also with my writing, as there was so much I wanted to write about. Not so much her experience of her illness, but the experience of mothering someone with an illness like that. I also personally feel that we talk way too little about mental illness. There’s a cloak of shame around it that keeps it private, which wouldn’t be the case with other illnesses like diabetes or MS.

“When I write a poem, I’m choosing whatever details will best drive the point home. My daughter did come to me twice, out of the blue, and told me that I could write and publish whatever I wanted to about her illness. That was a huge gift. I’m not sure what I would have done if she had never said that. I generally write things from my perspective of something that has happened, and I do feel like I own my own experiences. There’s a chance I may have published even without her permission, but I’m not really sure.”

James: The title poem “What Small Sound”, “After the Hearing Test”, and “Making You Noise” all address hearing loss in different ways. As poets we are hyper aware of the world around us, every sense on alert. In “After the Hearing Test” you wrote,

"I won't mind losing the clamor
of cocktail parties,

high grind
of the dentist's drill,

triggering retch
of other people's vomit"

What makes this poem so impactful is combining both the sounds you won’t miss with those you will miss. How has your poetic perception of the world changed as a result of hearing loss?

Francesca: “Hmm. You know, it’s funny. I’m not sure that my poetic perception of the world has changed. For me, with my level of hearing loss, navigating the physical world is more challenging because, although I have hearing aids in both ears, I still can’t track sound. I’ll hear a sound and think it’s behind me when it’s actually to the other side of me, in front of me. So, when I’m out running or walking, I’m really careful. I either won’t hear something or I’ll hear it in the wrong place.

“But I still can hear well enough when I’m writing. I read my work out loud over and over as I’m constructing it and I’m heavily dependent on hearing myself when I’m revising. I’m not expected to become as deaf as my mother, who became completely deaf, but reaching that point would be a tipping point for me as far as it affects my poetry.

“As for the perception of where sound is coming from and the limitations of hearing aids, I haven’t explored that much yet in my poetry. It’s interesting to me. Like glasses don’t fully restore normal vision, hearing aids don’t fully restore hearing. I still miss a lot, mishear consonant sounds, and mistake words. It’s hugely better with the hearing aids, but without them, I was descending into my own world, which was quite comfortable but not good for mental health.”

James: You write about the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. What advice do you have for poets looking to base poems on current events, and create poetry that will remain relevant years later?

Francesca: “You know, I read a lot from news stories, and when I’m writing a poem, I don’t really think about whether it will have a shelf life or not. I mean, we would all be so lucky to have even one poem about anything that somebody read years later.”

James: Great point.

Francesca: “I do think that what’s important to me when I’m writing a poem about a news story is that the poem isn’t really going to be about the news story. It’s going to be about something that the news story brings up. For example, I wrote a poem in this book about the girlfriend of the Las Vegas gunman saying that her fingerprints would be on his bullets. That was interesting to me on so many levels. Personally, I have known and loved gun enthusiasts. I dated a man for three and a half years who collected guns and was an avid shooter. I have known and loved multiple people who’ve killed others. I have a cousin who spent fifteen years in prison for murder, and I did not stop loving those people because of those things.

“I could relate to what it must have been like for the gunman’s girlfriend, who would have been left with all this love for him despite his horrible actions. He killed almost 50 people, including someone from my town. I could relate to it on all these levels, and so the poem uses the circumstances of the news story as a vehicle to talk about other things. That’s what I think makes a poem potentially last, even if it’s about a ‘current event’.”

James: “After” is a powerful poem yet is so slight. Lines with only a few words, and three line stanzas. The page is mostly empty. The poem begins:

"Once the body
was wrenched whole
from my body

I deflated"

Every word in a poem is important, and amplified further in a poem like this. How did this poem evolve from the earliest drafts? 

Francesca: “You know, this poem, I believe, came almost lifted out of a pre-write that I did in my journal. Sometimes when I do a free write, there will be a poem kind of embedded in it, and you have to be like an archaeologist, just brushing away things from the outside. This poem was fairly straightforward. I don’t think I revised it that much.

“I had been thinking about my life, as I didn’t write it that long ago, and my three children, with the youngest just having gone off to college. I’ve been grappling a lot with this sense of having spent almost 30 years deeply embedded in mothering. I’ve been questioning what I’ve done, or what anyone thinks I’ve done. There’s this way in which, as a woman, at least for me, I felt this great emptiness. Like I’m this vessel through which large things have come, but now I’m empty, the way a vessel is empty. That was what I wanted to write about, and that one, that poem, was easy to write.”

Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to hear Francesca recite selections from the book.